Eating Alone Really Is More Comfortable, Isn't It...?
Winter break was over.
Two weeks you could call long if you were feeling generous, and short if you weren't—no. A winter break that had been nothing but damn short had come to an end.
And now she had to stay locked in the prison called school until the end of March. Again.
Was there really no way to skip a grade and just graduate...? She opened the door on that thought, and an empty classroom was there to greet her.
Strange.
In her past life she had thought, more than once, that it would be nice to be a student again. Now that she actually was one, her head was full of nothing but the wish to graduate already.
"Mmm..."
On any other day she would have planted her forehead on the desk without a second's hesitation and pretended to sleep. She couldn't do that now. It wasn't sentiment. The desk was simply too cold, and resting her forehead on it would only make her colder.
...That aside, what had her standing in class actually become?
The verdict she'd picked up at the Christmas party was this: a pitiful young beauty who kept her distance from everyone because of old wounds. But it had all come out that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and Miyauchi had said she would explain as much to the other classmates too.
Over winter break, though, she never once saw that conversation pass through the class group chat.
Had Miyauchi forgotten? Or maybe she had already told everyone at the party that day.
Well, it didn't matter if people found out she wasn't actually some pitiful young beauty holding the world at arm's length over old scars. She still wouldn't have any friends at school. That part wasn't going to change.
Use this as a chance to get closer to your classmates? Please. That was the kind of idiot advice you only got from someone who had never understood a school's ecosystem. The only people who could talk like that were the popular kids, the ones already buried in friends.
Let everyone hear this. Relationships at school are, as a rule, completely settled within three days of the class being assigned. Unless you were some special case—a transfer student, say—an outsider forcing their way into relationships that were already finished was absolutely impossible...!
So all she had to do was spend the remaining two years exactly as she had spent the last one. Alone.
Wow. What a thrilling prospect.
...But did she truly need friends at all?
It wasn't that she disliked Koga or Akabane. The question was whether she really had to wedge herself in among people and work at belonging.
It would be a lie to say she had no regrets about that foolish past life, the one in which she hadn't trusted a single person right up to the end. It was also true that she was already used to living this way. If so, there was no real need to strain herself trying to fit in. Was there?
And yet, even as she thought it, part of her still missed the warmth of other people. There was a her who wanted to say yes if her classmates suggested a class outing. A her who, if someone treated her kindly, wanted to tell them she hoped they could be friends. A her who lit up the moment someone else called her a friend first.
...What did she actually want?
"Kayano!"
"Eep...!"
The voice that called to her from behind, while she was sunk in that reverie, belonged—same as always—to Miyauchi....
"A-ah. T-Tateyama...?"
Not Miyauchi. It was Tateyama, the reigning social queen of their class.
"U-um, y-you're here early...?"
As far as she could remember, Tateyama had never shown up at this hour except during the culture festival.
"Oh, yeah. I know you get here around now, Kayano. There was something I wanted to say before everybody else shows up."
"S-something you wanted to say...?"
"Yeah."
With that, Tateyama slapped her palms together hard enough for the clap to pop, then bowed her head.
"Kayano, I'm r-really sorry...!"
It was the exact pose you only ever saw when an anime protagonist apologized to someone. She had never, in real life, seen a person apologize like this.
Or had she? Maybe she only didn't know because there was no one around her, and this was actually the proper way to do it.
But why was Tateyama apologizing to her out of nowhere...?
"...I heard the whole thing from Miyauchi. That you're really shy around people, Kayano."
"Ah. Yes..."
"So that time, when we ran into each other in Akihabara.... I just followed you without thinking, and I bet that put you in a bad spot.... I'm sorry..."
Right. That had happened. It really had been an awkward mess. She remembered.
Even so, she didn't think an apology this dramatic was necessary....
"I decided your whole image however I wanted.... I even spread that nickname, Ice Princess.... I'm really, really sorry...!"
"T-Tateyama. I—I..."
Huh?
Ice Princess? What was that? She'd had a nickname like that?
"Um, what on earth is..."
"Please don't worry, Kayano. Tateyama's the only one who calls you that..."
"...Miyauchi."
The one who walked into the classroom as if to answer her was Miyauchi. Something about this clearly embarrassed her; she was hiding her flushed face behind her left hand.
"That aside, what are you doing talking loud enough for the whole hallway to hear, Tateyama? It's a good thing nobody happened to be walking by..."
"Huh? But you're the one who said practically nobody comes in this early, Miyauchi. So it's fine, right?"
"You still never know..."
And from there the two of them slipped into conversation, easy as anything.
"...U-um, just a second. I—I'll step out and come right back..."
She fled to her sanctuary, the Old Science Room.
Lunchtime.
For an ordinary high school student, lunch was the rest that arrived after grueling study, and the hour for growing closer with friends. For her, lunchtime was literally nothing but the time she ate lunch.
Before summer break, when she still hadn't fully read the mood of the class, she had taken her lunch out to the schoolyard and eaten alone. Once she had a decent sense of things, she sat by herself in the classroom and ate there instead. After that, the rest of the routine was to sit in a vacant daze, or steal a short nap.
Today, a crack ran through that routine.
"First of all, I made sure to tell the whole class. That everything until now was just a misunderstanding on our part..."
"I-is that so."
Why now, of all times? Thanks to what she had heard from Tateyama that morning, she already had the whole picture. She didn't need to hear it again. Miyauchi kept going anyway, and the taste went out of lunch entirely. Still, she knew it came from kindness, and so—as always—getting a refusal out of her mouth was impossible.
If there was any mercy in it, the other classmates were keeping their distance, same as usual. She felt a glance here and there, but at least they weren't staring outright. She would take what she could get.
"Ah—is me doing this right now too much for you...?"
"N-no. I-it's fine..."
A lie, of course. She was holding down the roll in her stomach. But she couldn't very well say this was uncomfortable and ask her to move. The moment she did, she would become someone with no place left in this class.
"I'm glad..."
She was not glad. Not even a little.
"Y-you know how you get those times, right? When how you see someone, and how they see you, are a l-little different..."
"I told you I went to that Christmas p-party last time, right?"
...Why did these people remember every last bit of that?
But she had grown. She no longer rose to every little jab. She knew that if she reacted, they would only tease her harder.
"I t-talked with a classmate there, and it turned out there was this h-huge misunderstanding..."
"Ah, it wasn't a someone-did-something-wrong kind of story. Just a m-misunderstanding, that level.... I m-met them today for the first time in a while and we talked, you know? And that's when it hit me... eating really is more comfortable when you do it qu-quietly, by yourself, isn't it...? Talking while you eat—wow. Completely impossible..."
She usually ate at home without a word of conversation, too. Put other people at the table and her brain simply could not keep up.
"Hah? I've got t-tons of friends, okay? I'm super popular, okay? I just want to eat alone when I'm eating. If anything, wanting to eat with other people because you're embarrassed to eat alone is way more loner, isn't it? You're the ones without f-friends..."
"Hehe.... Well, anyway, that's what I was thinking today.... And today's game, just like I said it would be, is SkyTravel..."
"TLQ is a g-god-tier game, okay..."
SkyTravel. A third-person action RPG about hunting the remnants of gods in a world the gods had already left behind. Released last November, its charm was wandering a vast world until you found an ending.
Its biggest feature, if she had to name one, was that there was no set order you had to follow to see that ending. Past the tutorial, you could play any way you liked—completely however you wanted—and it didn't matter.
In any case, she had bought ST, SkyTravel, the moment it launched, and she had not played it once. The only footage she had seen was a handful of highlight clips. Playing alone would have been fine. But if she was going to play, she wanted the stream on while she did.
Right after release, though, the company had not cleared it for broadcast. Only now, two months later, had permission finally come through.
She felt it every time. Having to get the company's approval just to play a game was a genuine pain. She couldn't jump into the ones she wanted, and more often than not she only got to them after the trend had already died. There simply weren't many games like TLQ, where the developers themselves handed down streaming permission.
Yeah. Look at it that way, and TLQ really was a god-tier game.
"All right, shall we g-get started...!"
The moment the words left her, she hit Game Start. The screen dropped to black under a swell of grand music, and when the light returned—
A monster trailing that long HP bar stood face to face with her character.
The system's command followed at once. There was no hesitation. She had already decided, back when she bought ST, which weapon she was going to use.
The one best suited to her—whose inner self was, say what you like, a man's man among men. The tachi.
"Hehehe..."