“Oh, it’s a lot of fun, trust me! Wait…Kido?…Wagh!!”
The boy I had just been giving the rules to suddenly began to speak to the empty space by his side.
I had no idea what he was doing at first, but the moment my eyes turned to where the boy’s attention was focused, I was greeted with the fright of my life.
Up until this moment, the only person in front of me was this boy.
But now there was a girl, too—about the same height as the boy and wearing a hoodie.
It was too dark to gauge her expression, but the soft “Yeah” she gave in response indicated she was indeed female.
“W-w-where, where did you…?”
The shock was enough to almost make me lose my balance. There was no way this girl was here before—not here, not in the hallway earlier.
There was no time for her to enter the room, except for the moment I had the door open. Considering that, she had to have gone in with the boy…but from my perspective, it was like she just teleported in, right in front of me.
“You all right, lady? Oh, this girl’s been here the whole time. She doesn’t project much of a presence, though, so people don’t even notice her a lot of the—Oww!”
The girl gave the boy a punch on the side, apparently unappreciative of her companion going on about this…what would you call it? Transparency?
Being a wallflower is one thing. What would it take to be so…unnoticeable? I had never experienced such an odd, disquieting feeling in my life.
—Maybe she was some kind of ghost. The thought seriously crossed my mind for a moment. But that would be even more unrealistic. For someone like me, who steadfastly refused to believe in ghosts or apparitions or the supernatural, the idea that I had just overlooked her seemed far more convincing.
“…Would you mind if we got started?”
“Agh…! Oh, sure, sure! If you could just take this seat here…!”
This girl’s existence presented countless questions to me, but regardless of who she was, it seemed wise to get this over with as soon as possible.
Even if she was a ghost, it didn’t matter as long as she didn’t hurt me or anything. I think.
…She didn’t strike me as the evil curse–giving kind of ghoul.
But if she picks up the controller using telekinesis or something instead of using her hands, I’m definitely getting outta here. That was the conclusion I settled upon as I headed for my chair.
The girl and I each took our seats, but my heart kept beating away at a breakneck clip.
Gingerly, I turned toward the girl. The light from the monitor in front of us just barely illuminated her face.
Her skin was pale but attractive, and her hair was on the long side. Her eyes were a bit too sharp and gloomy, but otherwise her face was well-balanced and worthy of the term “beautiful.”
But the ambient light was making her look like something right out of a ghost story.
I decided to hurry up and get the game started before I lost my nerve.
“Okay, uhhhh…so, like I said before, this is a shooting game where you try to score as much as you can. If you can beat my score, I’ll give you a fantastic prize! So…uh, what difficulty level would you like…?”
“…Normal.”
“Oh! Right! Certainly! Sorry! Okaaaay…right! Time to get starrr -ted!”
My tongue tripped on that final word out of sheer nervousness. The boy behind us tittered in response.
Seeing him made me feel utterly embarrassed.
A whirlpool of thoughts was churning in my mind, but I just focused on getting through this, and fast.
Setting the difficulty to normal, I pushed the “Start” button. Monsters began to well up on-screen.
This mode offered far fewer monsters to shoot than the “Extra” mode last game, meaning that there were nowhere as many points on offer.
In my personal experience, this mode stuck out to me mainly because the game generated a lot more pig enemies here than in any other difficulty.
A minute passed.
The girl’s playing style was utterly normal, with no particular idiosyncrasies. She was just an average girl playing a game.
To me, having just taken on an elite player in the toughest mode the game had to offer, the challenge was lacking. But what should I expect from a regular girl, though?
I occasionally heard her squeak out an “Agh!” or “Whoa!” in response to the menacing monsters, but otherwise she just sat there, quietly playing.
If this pair started going on like “Nngh, this is soooo tough! I’m so terrible at this!” and “Aw, hang in there, girl, you can do it!” that’d be enough to wipe the smile from my face and jump out the window out of pure awkwardness. In that way, things were going far more smoothly than I expected.
But with about thirty seconds left in the game, something strange started happening on my screen.
Suddenly, the pigs in front of me began to disappear, the on-screen gunsight blinking on and off. The game began to bug out in unpredictable fashion.
“Hey…Hey! Is this thing crashing, or…?”
“Don’t get scared, Kido!” said the boy between his giggling. “Stay focused!”
I tried to hold out and keep killing foes, but there wasn’t much way of doing that if my target reticule was gone.
As time went on, the gap between our scores grew narrower and narrower. Who could have guessed that my going easy on her at first would come back to bite me like this…!
Just as I began to think I was in serious trouble, the closing buzzer went off.
Thanks to my frazzled reaction, I had lost track of my point score. I closed my eyes, praying to myself as the game prepared to show the results.
If she defeated me, I’ll have lost our one and only prize to our second visitor.
For the sake of our continued business, we needed to avoid that.
With a musical fanfare, the results screen flashed on. Opening my eyes and forcing myself to read it, I found the WIN mark next to my name. I eked out a victory by a mere one hundred points.
The sweat began to pour out of me. This bug or whatever nearly did me in back there…
But, jeez, Mr. Tateyama! Don’t tell me you didn’t bother beta-testing this stupid game!
As I thought over this, I heard the boy’s now-familiar giggling rev up again.
“Ha-ha-ha! Guess you narrowly lost that one, huh, Kido? Wouldn’t be very nice if you won by cheating, though, right? I think you probably owe her an apology.”
The boy’s face was illuminated by the computer screens as he spoke. It looked like he was trying to hold back tears as he continued to titter to himself.
“…Sorry.”
The girl’s voice wavered a bit as she spoke. She stood up and calmly walked toward the door.
“Wait, cheating…? I-I think that was just a program bug. She didn’t do anything wrong, did she?”
Indeed, there was no way anyone could have called that anything apart from a bug.
It’s not like she was hacking into the program or trying to mentally distract me. The girl never even had a chance to break the rules.
The boy continued to beam brightly at me, unfazed by my denial.
“Aw, I’m sorry to confuse you. This is, like, maybe kind of hard to believe, but that girl was actually using her psychic powers there. You can check it out it yourself if you like, but I’m sure the computer’s, like, fine and stuff. It’ll be back to normal now, so don’t worry about that happening again later.”
Having said his piece, the boy followed the girl toward the door and disappeared into the hallway without even turning his back to me.
The exaggerated “Aaaaiggh!” I heard from Haruka the moment the pair left no doubt indicated that he hadn’t seen the girl before, either.
I put down the controller and listlessly stared at the door they had just left through.
I felt like some kind of fox spirit had just played a trick on me.
That psychic ghost-girl, and that boy who kept smiling at me the whole time…
I’ve just had this experience which, if I ever told anyone about it, would make then say, “Ah, you’ve been watching too much anime.”
Haruka (as expected) came running through the door immediately afterward. “Was that girl there from the start?!” he asked (as expected). “I didn’t notice her at all!”
“Wasn’t she there…? I mean, look…”
The display I pointed at showed the score tallies from our pitched battle, the sole evidence I had that she even existed.
As the noon hour rolled around, the school began to grow more fragrant.
To the classes running cafés or food stalls, this was the high season. For those of us running attraction-type displays, it was time for a break.
Exiting the dark storage room and hanging a RETURNING 1:00 P.M. sign on the doorknob, Haruka and I set off for lunch.
I played against a dozen or so competitors in the morning, but after that wacky pair, I was blessed with refreshingly normal opponents the whole time, finally making it to lunch without further incident.
“I was really worried for a little while…Like, at first, I thought you were deliberately trying to find the weirdest people possible to play against me.”
“Whaa? Oh, come on, Takane! All I did was talk with anyone who passed by the door, so…”
The open space in front of the main entrance, a morass of blue plastic sheets and cardboard a little while ago, was now bustling with stalls and shops run by the school’s assorted classes.
From yakitori to hot dogs, from French fries to yakisoba noodles, the colorful signs that lined the area were enough to whet anyone’s appetite.
Wandering around as we reflected on the morning’s events, Haruka and I spotted an area just to the right of the entry gate where we could sit down and consume our purchases.
“Hey, how ’bout we head there to eat? I eat lunch in the prep room every single day, so this’ll be a nice change of—Hey!!”
“Mmh? Whuh?”
I realized that Haruka was already chowing down on some grilled squid, both arms already groaning with food.
“…You could have worked with me a little, you know. I thought we were gonna go shopping around together…Like, when did you even buy all that stuff?!”
“Mngh…Oof! There we go! Uh, sorry about that. It all looked so good, I couldn’t help myself…! You wanna have some, Takane? Here, take whatever you like!”
The bag Haruka was holding contained a vast variety of main dishes—boxes of yakisoba, okonomiyaki pancakes, and so forth.
“Wow…You made some good choices. Okay, how ’bout we go sit down and eat? There oughta be some empty seats at the far end.”
I turned around to point out an uncrowded table to Haruka, only to find his mouth already full of the hot dog that was his latest conquest. He nodded emphatically, unable to verbalize a response.
We took seats facing each other in a shady spot of the eating area. The weather outside couldn’t have been more perfect for the school festival.
If anything, it was almost a touch too warm outside. Many of the visitors were dressed in little more than T-shirts and jeans.
Haruka and I were lightly dressed as well, since we figured we’d be on our feet for most of the day.
The moment we settled down, Haruka, apparently unable to contain his bearlike appetite any longer, cracked an enormous smile as he laid his purchases out on the table.
The food he showed me earlier was apparently just the appetizer. One after the other, he arranged all the boxes neatly on the table—easily enough food for five or six people.
“Is that, like, a Bag of Holding or something…?”
Haruka looked over his personal smorgasbord, the sheer quantity of which made me wonder how on earth it all fit in his bag. After a few moments of uncertainty, he opted for the okonomiyaki first.
I was pretty hungry myself, so I grabbed a plastic box of yakisoba with sauce and brought it in front of me.
“Well, thanks very much…Oh, right, I haven’t paid you yet. How much was this?”
I would’ve felt bad eating on his dime, so I took my wallet out of my skirt pocket.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. You know, Mr. Tateyama this morning, he gave me some money and told me to eat whatever we wanted. Like, ten thousand yen or so. So go thank him, not me!”
“Ten thousand? That much?! Ugh…Our teacher basically embezzled our festival budget, but now he’s being crazy generous to us, huh?”
“Yeah, well, I guess he went to a pachinko parlor to take a break from working on the game, and he said he kinda hit the jackpot over there. He ordered takeout from some fancy sushi restaurant for us that night.”
Hearing that brought my recently improving opinion of Mr. Tateyama zooming back down into the abyss. The feast before me now seemed like nothing more than the by-products of a degenerative gambling habit, filling me with an odd sense of sympathetic sorrow.
“Hmm? Aren’t you gonna eat, Takane? ’Cause if not…”
“I’m eating, I’m eating! Like, how much of this are you actually gonna eat, anyway? You’re gonna gain so much weight!”
The stalls at school festivals are virtual odes to the art of high-calorie fast food. The sight of the fried-chicken booth was enough to make me start to smack my lips, but if I lost myself in the festival atmosphere today, I knew my body would make me pay tomorrow.
The calories I’d gleefully consume would definitely come back to haunt me in the days to come. That much was obvious.
And meanwhile, here was Haruka, plowing through the plates of boneless fried chicken, hot dogs, crepes, pizza sticks, fries, and chocolate-covered bananas with astonishing speed. The sheer quantities were out of this world, but picturing the churning slurry of grease and bread crumbs in his stomach was enough to give me heartburn.
“Well, so? It’s delicious. All of it. Oh, and you know, I pretty much never gain weight, no matter how much I eat. I don’t pack too big a lunch for school, but this is about what I eat at home, usually.”
Listening to Haruka while silently comparing the size of his lunch with his compact frame genuinely irked me.
Even going a little overboard with meals for a day had drastic effects on my weight. It just wasn’t fair.
“Ugghhh,” I groaned. “I wish I could go without a meal or two and not feel so hungry all the time…That, and I wish I didn’t have to sleep, either.”
“Well, that’d be kind of boring, don’t you think? ’Cause me, I really like to eat. And sleep, too.”
Haruka stuck another dagger in me as he expectantly eyed a burger he was in the process of unwrapping.
“…Well, I’m glad you’re happy, anyway.”
“Mm? What was that?”
Something about the way he responded, a spot of ketchup on one of his cheeks, made it impossible to hate him. I prayed to no one in particular for Haruka to gain twenty pounds overnight and rip all of his pant seams.
One thirty in the afternoon.
After reopening our shooting gallery on time, we were surprised to find our steady stream of visitors from the morning suddenly go dry.
“Weird, huh? I wonder what’s going on. It wasn’t anywhere near this dead in the morning. You think someone’s spreading bad rumors about us or something?”
I peeked out the door and checked the hallway. Haruka was still standing guard outside, waiting for visitors, but there weren’t many people roaming the halls at all, much less near our classroom.
As I experienced a sudden pang of anxiety, Haruka reached into his pocket, as if suddenly remembering something, and pulled out a piece of folded paper.
“Oh yeahhh…I think it’s probably because of this, Takane.”
The paper had a printout of the class presentation schedule for the day.
I lost my copy almost immediately after it was passed out, but I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to subject myself to as
king Haruka to show me his. Thanks to that, I didn’t have much of a grasp of the other classes’ plans.
“Oh…? So which of these would keep people from coming here?”
“Well, apparently the student council’s holding this thing from one to two over in the gymnasium. I guess most people are over there, checking it out.”
The entry Haruka pointed out read “Student Council Project: 1–2 p.m.” It was boxed in with heavy lines, giving it higher visibility on the schedule grid.
“Huh. You’re right. Man, the student council sure likes to stick out of the crowd, huh? They could’ve waited until the rest of the class booths were closed up, at least…I bet all the other classes are pretty pissed about this, too.”
The exhibitionist streak so clearly presented in the schedule’s design was certainly not giving me a very good impression of our student government, anyway.
And here I made sure to have a decent lunch and get myself mentally prepped for the afternoon’s combat session. Not much point to that if no one’s gonna show up.
“Ah, it’s no big deal. We’ll probably have a big rush in half an hour once it’s over. How ’bout we just take it easy until then?”
Haruka folded the printout back up, opened the door I stuck my head out of, and entered the room.
“Yeah, I guess so. Man, I wish we could get a real flood of visitors sooner or later. I’m ready to take on the world here.”
Just as I was about to stop whining and bring my head back into the room, I spied a figure at the edge of my vision.
It was on the left side of the hallway, near the front student entrance. There wasn’t a soul there earlier, but now I saw three men, all sporting the same getup.
They were wearing military-camo pants, headbands, and goggles, as if they had just returned from a rousing game of airsoft and stopped by the festival without changing.
“Whoa…Who’re those dudes? Are they in costume or something? I guess they’re visiting the festival, but is that what they normally wear…?”
It was all a little too perfectly done up to be their everyday outfits. The clothing was one thing, but there even appeared to be walkie-talkies Velcroed to the shoulder straps on the bags they carried.
A Headphone Actor Page 6