Only the Popular Kids Like the Culture Festival
One of the biggest events in all of high school: the culture festival.
Each class and each club settles on a single attraction, builds it, and puts it on display for a crowd. Whenever a manga, an anime, or a light novel calls itself a story of youth, this is the set piece that never fails to appear.
For a shut-in loser like me, though, the culture festival is an event that wears me out just from the sound of it.
Excitement? Please. As if that were ever going to happen.
Through the whole preparation period I would be saddled with every miserable job, and on the day itself I would be too hopeless at refusing favors to get a minute of rest. Even if I somehow did, I wouldn't have a single friend to walk around with, so I would just kill time in some deserted corner where nobody was. A professional shut-in loser of my caliber doesn't actually mind wandering alone. I simply don't feel any need to.
So the conclusion is this. To a shut-in loser, a culture festival holds no feeling and no happiness. It is merely one school event among the rest. If it has a single merit, it is that there are no classes.
"All right! For the culture festival on October 28th and 29th, what should our class do? If you've got an idea, anyone at all, just say it freely!"
Miyauchi stood at the teacher's desk at the front of the class and raised her voice. The homeroom teacher and the vice president waited quietly beside her, and behind the three of them the board declared, as a matter of course:
"...."
The mood in the classroom was the exact opposite of Miyauchi's invitation to speak freely. Silence. Everyone only watching everyone else.
Well, of course. Offering an opinion in a moment like this is more of a burden than it looks. A professional shut-in loser knows that better than anyone.
"Me! Me! I've got a great idea!"
The one who shattered that atmosphere and spoke first was Tateyama, the reigning popular girl of our class. She was smiling wide, eyes sparkling, as if she could hardly wait for the festival to arrive. So she hadn't gone quiet from the pressure. She had only been hunting for a good idea.
"A gender-swap cosplay café!"
"...What?"
That voice, ringing out in pure disbelief — whose was it, exactly? Probably not just one person's. A glance around the room showed classmates of both sexes staring as if they simply could not process what they had just heard.
"It showed up in that manga Sacchi lent me the other day! A café where the boys wear maid outfits, the girls wear butler uniforms, and they wait on the customers!"
"H-Haru?! I told you that was a secret!"
"Who in the world would want to do something like that?!"
"Making us look at these guys in maid outfits... that's straight-up torture."
Thanks to Tateyama's outburst, the last of the hesitation vanished, and opinions began pouring out one after another. In the end, though, our class's culture-festival plan was settled as the cosplay café she had proposed in the first place. The only change was that everyone could freely choose whether to wear a butler uniform or a maid outfit.
"...."
And what was I doing, you ask? Naturally, I borrowed the power of the alias Time Killer and slaughtered the minutes without a single thought in my head.
Something I learned recently: if you recite the Heart Sutra silently to yourself, time flies at an incredible speed. Isn't that amazing? Master Xuanzang was surely history's first killer of time. So respectable.
"...."
The moment class ended, Kayano was the first out of the room, as if that were the only natural order of things. Among the members of Class 1-A who remained, not one of them so much as thought of stopping her.
A short while later Tateyama rose, opened the back door, and stuck her head outside.
"Yeah. She went down."
She watched Kayano descend the stairs, then came back to her seat.
"So what did you want to talk about, Miyauchi?"
"Ahem. Ahem."
At Tateyama's question, Miyauchi steadied her breath and spoke.
"As you all know, culture-festival prep starts tomorrow. I wanted us to settle this before then. ...What should we do about Kayano?"
No one could answer.
Kayano Mina. In Class 1-A of Shiodome Private High School, she was the girl who drifted farthest from the group and yet always sat at its center. For everyone in 1-A, who had in some sense been keeping their distance from her on purpose, the question was far too cruel.
"It goes without saying that we can't leave only Kayano out of the preparations."
It was the correct argument, and everyone still in the room nodded.
"But Kayano has been acting strange lately, hasn't she? Of course it's already been more than two weeks, but if something truly awful did happen to her, I think we ought to be considerate for a while longer."
"Considerate how?"
The one who asked was the vice president, Ookusa.
"Hmm. Wouldn't the best thing be to give her work she can finish alone, as easily and quickly as possible, so she can go home early?"
"Yeah. That much doesn't sound bad."
Objectively speaking, of course, it was absurd. A culture festival is something everyone builds together into a result worth showing off, and here they were offering special treatment to a single person merely because it looked as if she might have some private trouble — trouble no one had even confirmed. For a class president, it was a choice that should never have been made, and in any ordinary class someone would have objected.
But that sort of logic only holds in an ordinary situation, and Kayano's place in Class 1-A was anything but ordinary. She was a beautiful girl striking enough that classmates turned their heads without meaning to when they passed her, and that same girl always gave off a cold air, as if refusing anyone who tried to come closer. Overwhelmed by it, no one had ever approached her privately first, and that state of affairs had already lasted half a year.
Then, at some point, everyone in 1-A began to feel guilty. Kayano ended up isolated because we never thought to reach out first. Isn't that our fault? However cold her atmosphere is, that doesn't give us the right to shut a classmate out. We have to spend three years in the same class — is this really all right? We could have grown a little closer to her. Before they knew it, that thought had taken root in every heart. And that guilt was exactly what had produced the present scene.
"Giving her no work at all would still be too much, right?"
"Yes. And even if it were possible, I wouldn't want to. Kayano is a member of 1-A too. If we don't give her anything at all, I think that would only be lonelier. I want her to have at least a memory of enjoying the culture festival with us, even a little."
"Yeah. That's true."
"All right. Then we'll ask Kayano to handle the flyers and some simple decorations!"
"Yeah!"
"Konzumi.... I'm the a-atmosphere maker, Kaino Izumi...."
"S-something came up, so I've been busy...."
Starting tomorrow, culture-festival prep would keep her at school much later. Longer than usual, stranded among terrifying popular kids. Just picturing it, her spirit was already wearing thin.
"Mmm. Starting tomorrow, I th-think the stream's probably gonna be l-later...."
"Coke, th-thanks for the Hyperchat. I'll probably turn it on around nine at night, and two hours at the l-longest, m-maybe...?"
She usually got home at four-thirty. Even on cleaning duty she was never out past five, which put a normal weekday stream somewhere around six in the evening. Once festival prep began, though, she would be stuck at school until five at the earliest, and even a rushed trip home would push her past six. Wash up, eat dinner, and it would naturally be around eight. No matter how fast she started, the stream would begin after eight-thirty. And if she kept accepting favors from the people around her, the work would only pile higher. She might end up staying behind alone until seven.
"E-even so, I'll still stream as much as I c-can...."
In exchange, there would be almost no chatting. Game streams, mostly. After suffering wedged in among the popular kids, there was no way she would have the energy to make small talk once she got home. Not that she meant she would keep her mouth completely shut.
"Then... should we s-start reading the M-Mycarongs soon...?"
"...Is this a qu-question for m-me, or are you p-picking a fight?"
And just how far was that string of modifiers in front supposed to stretch? It wasn't so much that she felt insulted. It was so absurd she nearly laughed.
"Th-that feels even worse...."
Still, she was used to this much by now. Mean words packed the thing from end to end, but it was a Mycarong sent because they liked her. That was what mattered.
"I already finished the f-final ascension and the skill upgrades, all of them. I t-tried it in a farming dungeon and it was seriously c-crazy strong...."
Heracles had been so overwhelming in the recent event's high-difficulty mission that she caught herself thinking, Is it really okay to clear this so easily? She had taken the limit break to the maximum, so it would have been stranger if the character were weak, but even accounting for that the performance was absurd. The illustration was one for the ages, too.
"I f-feel sorry for the people who c-couldn't pull it, hehe...."
"Eek. I-I'm sorry...."
She had tried a little bait because she thought it would be funny, and the reaction was fiercer than she had imagined. She never knew she had this many Fate's Battle players among her viewers.
"A-anyway, I'll m-move on to the next one...."
"Part 2, Chapter 6's s-story being better is the truth, though...?"
On this, she would not yield. The greatest story in Fate's Battle is Part 2, Chapter 6.
"No!"
That was all it took. From there she talked with the Iztomo about nothing but the story of Fate's Battle, on and on, until she finally ended the stream.
She thought that was the right call too. But they were the ones who touched her pride first, so as far as she was concerned, she was not in the wrong.