It's Warm. I Think It's Just Chicken
"I've always—always—only ever been on the receiving end of your consideration, Kayano...!"
"...Huh?"
For some reason, Miyauchi was biting down hard on her lip as she said it.
Consideration? Had I ever been considerate of Miyauchi? If anything, I was sure I had always been the one receiving it. She was the one who spoke to me first when I drifted at the edge of the class, who offered me an invitation every time there was a gathering, who looked out for me at things like the culture festival....
"M-Miyauchi. I've... I've always been gr-grateful to you...."
"No. If I'd only been a little quicker to notice, you never would have been hurt, and you never would have had to be so considerate...!"
Hurt? That kind of consideration? Just listening to her, I sounded like some tragic heroine. What on earth was Miyauchi talking about?
Ah. Dragged out of nowhere into a gathering like this, and now a story I couldn't begin to follow. Had I gone to sleep and woken up hauled into a parallel world?!
"I knew, to some extent. I'd noticed. And still, every time, I came up a little short, and all I did was hurt you...."
No. Letting it wash over me was easier in the moment, but Koga had told me that was a bad habit—one that only made things worse. At a time like this, it was better to ask outright.
"I'm really, truly sorry...."
"Um, M-Miyauchi. I... I don't quite understand, so... what are you talking about right now...."
A miracle.
Someone might have called it making a fuss, but to Miyauchi it was unmistakably a miracle.
It might have begun as admiration. To Miyauchi, one ordinary student among many, the classmate called Kayano Mina—who walked her own path without minding, even if she walked it alone—had shone.
But where there is light, darkness is bound to follow. After their homeroom teacher asked her to look after Kayano, Miyauchi wanted to curse her own narrow sight. What about any of it had been light? All the girl carried were wounds. She only acted as if she shone because she wanted to hide them. And in Class 1-A, Miyauchi was the only one who knew.
Then she herself would have to try, so that Kayano, already bearing so many wounds, might be able to smile. But Miyauchi's efforts never came back as the right answer. Sometimes it was Kayano who ended up being considerate of her instead, and the fact that their roles had reversed only heaped the guilt higher.
Even so, as if the effort had not been wasted, when she suggested a gathering to mark winter break and Christmas, Kayano nodded with a pitiable smile. Surely Kayano was trying, too, to overcome the wounds of her past. And the admiration, the fantasy Miyauchi had never once doubted—
"...Huh?"
—shattered in a single instant.
To get away from the eyes around us, we stepped out of the classroom and moved to the front of the restroom. What I learned there was that an enormous gap lay between the way I saw things and the way Miyauchi did.
Seriously, what? Something about Miyauchi—no, about the image of me living inside our whole class—was incredibly wrong. I had naturally assumed they thought of me as the shut-in-loser communication-disorder pretty girl drifting at the edge of the room. Somehow, instead, they had me down as a pitiable pretty girl keeping her distance because of old wounds. The only part of that which overlapped was pretty girl.
"Th-then it isn't that you had some awful past...."
"I just... get shy around people...."
"Then when Kaname-sensei said there were circumstances...."
"In... in my third year of middle school, this personality of mine caused a p-problem with my homeroom teacher.... That's probably what she meant?"
"...Eh?"
Miyauchi went blank for a moment, as if she simply could not take it in.
"I-is that really true, Kayano?"
"Yes."
The instant she heard my answer, her face flushed scarlet.
"Then all this time, the reason you skipped every gathering...?"
"I was afraid that if a classmate they weren't close with showed up, everyone would get... awkward...."
"That can't be...."
Miyauchi covered her face with her palms. The bright red visible between her fingers made her feelings easy enough to read.
How had a misunderstanding like this even started? I couldn't understand it. It had to be this pretty-girl face of mine, didn't it? Things I did without a single thought behind them grew meanings for other people. Terrifying, lookism!
"All this time, I.... No—what kind of delusion have we been under...."
Right? I still didn't think any of it was my fault, but at this point it was a little frightening. Then again, I had benefited from it often enough that maybe I ought to be grateful.
"Haa. Still, I'm glad you didn't actually have some real wound."
"...But, um, do the other classmates th-think the same way you do?"
"...Probably. I think everyone sees it more or less the same way."
"I'd like to clear up that mi-misunderstanding...."
"...I'll try. It won't be easy."
"Th-thank you. I'm counting on you...."
Even so, I didn't think it was good to let a gap in perception like this keep going. I might be blameless, but to other people it could look as if I had been deceiving them. So from now on, I would become Class A's proud shut-in-loser communication-disorder pretty girl...!
"Did you have a good time?"
"Yes...."
All I had actually done was sit in a corner reciting the Heart Sutra and come home first, but I had participated in a Christmas party. Surely that was enough to say I'd had fun?
"The cake and the chicken?"
"Right here."
Hauling my mentally exhausted body out to the shop I had reserved and back again was, as expected, tiring. But if I imagined fried chicken and cola, I could endure. Chicken and cola were invincible. They were god.
"Then go wash up first."
"Okay~."
If I was going to receive a god, I ought to purify the body first.
"T-today was Christmas. How did everyone spend it?"
Before we started Ashen City, the topic of our little chat was, of course, Christmas.
"Ah, th-thank you for waiting...."
"Ah. I brought chicken too. W-want to eat together?"
About half of it was left from when Mom and I had eaten earlier. Thinking about it, in my past life a single chicken wasn't even enough on my own, and now I couldn't finish one by myself. I had eaten the Christmas cake first, of course, but even if I hadn't, I doubted I would have cleaned the plate.
"Yeah. Well, my sister was b-busy, so she wasn't there."
Because of that, I had gotten nearly twenty DMs from my sister saying she wanted to come home. Watching her wail that work had been so busy lately she didn't even have time to rest, I had thought that being a successful reader model must be rough.
"Oh, now that I think about it, today I went to karaoke for a Christmas party with my c-classmates...."
"Wh-wh-what are you talking about? A super-popular vibe-maker JK like me would never just s-sit in a corner, right? I had a b-blast, okay?"
...These people knew me way too well, didn't they? It was getting a little scary.
"S-so something's been on my mind. Singing in front of other people—isn't that embarrassing...?"
You end up fretting over whether you're even hitting the beat and the pitch. And if someone seems to be singing better than you, it feels kind of disappointing, doesn't it?
"Right?! Then I wasn't wrong to sit perfectly still at the Christmas gathering without singing a single song, was I?!"
If anything, those extroverts belting it out like it was nothing were the weird ones!
"...Eh?"
What? In an instant, every ally I had was gone. No—had the Iztomo never been on my side to begin with? So that was it.
"So the Iztomo were all extroverts on the outside, too...."
What was I supposed to say? Realizing this, my will to keep streaming felt ready to vanish. But I couldn't let that happen, so maybe I would wrap the small talk up here. I had said it certain everyone would relate, and instead I had to feel even lonelier. Somehow, it felt like the chicken had gone cold, peko....
"Yeah. We've been at it a pretty long time, and I've t-tried almost all the content."
"...Shut up."
Fortunately, things hadn't gotten awkward with Natsu-chan after that. Among shut-in losers, I was the shut-in loser who didn't get all that immersed in a game.
"For the finale, I'm thinking of b-blowing up the base."
Everyone but me would probably keep enjoying Ashen City in their own steady way, so I had considered just leaving the shared warehouse as it was. Still, at a time like this, an explosive ending was the law of the land. I had learned every last piece of alien tech for this, after all. A beam of light falling out of the sky and blowing the house apart—wouldn't that be incredibly cool? It was a man's dream. Obviously.
"And b-before that, with all the techniques we've gathered so far, I'm thinking we'll do something fun together...."
Heh heh. I had gathered an absurd amount of materials all by myself for this. With it, I would become the god of Ashen City...!