“Yeoww!”
I fell back toward the classroom, landing on my rear as I marveled at how far I had sent the other guy flying. I groaned in pain as I looked up, only to find a familiar pale-skinned man lying in the hallway, eyes rolling.
“H-Haruka?!”
“Oww…That was pretty rough. What’s up, Takane? You look like you’re in a panic or something.”
“—You idiot…! I was so worried…!”
Filled with relief and concern over knocking him down, I stood up and raced toward Haruka, all but ready to hug him tightly.
—But, noticing the sauce around his lips and the boxes of food that now littered the hallway floor, my emotions converted over to wanting to kick him through the wall.
“…What were you doing?”
I rubbed my rear end as I stopped in front of Haruka, looking down at him.
“What? What do you mean, what? The booths are all closed, so I figured I’d grab whatever food’s left before they threw it out! I mean, check out all this stuff I got! I could practically cater a house party with all of it! Isn’t that awesome?!”
I could feel the anger well uncontrollably within me.
I felt my fists and my cheeks burn. Giving even an ounce of concern for this guy made me feel like such a moron.
“…Takane? Are you mad or something?”
The moment Haruka asked the question, my fist landed directly upon his forehead.
Around the time I hit him, the school speakers reported that our class presentation had been awarded first prize among all the displays in the school festival.
It was sadly drowned out by my angry shouting and Haruka’s plaintive screaming, so it took several more days for us to hear the news.
HEADPHONE ACTOR III
There was no longer anyone around me.
The setting sun, cut off from view by the buildings up to now, was perfectly visible from here.
Its light, bathing the entire world in crimson, seemed like a furious flame, ready to burn everything in sight.
Running up a steep avenue, I made it to the apex of the hill, almost out of breath.
On the other end of the headphones, the voice that had guided me this far muttered something to me. But I couldn’t make it out. I was too focused on catching my breath once more.
I imagine it was just about the time I was told everything would expire, fade off into oblivion. Or maybe that time had already passed long ago.
But, at top of the hill I had clambered up, there was nothing.
To be more accurate, there was a massive sky spread before me, drawn atop an equally massive wall.
“…No. This isn’t it.”
I felt a tremendous sense of discomfort. There was something that should be here, exactly what I couldn’t quite remember—but it wasn’t.
My ragged breath gradually returned to its normal rhythm.
As it did, the cause behind this discomfort faintly began to grow clear.
—It wasn’t that something wasn’t here.
It’s that she wasn’t here.
“And I thought I could finally tell her, too…”
The words unconsciously fell out of my mouth.
My shadow, long and stretched out over the ground, began to dim. The sun was almost completely below the horizon.
“I guess…I guess this was doomed from the start. This was the last place left, the only place I could have ever told her, and now…”
The words coming from my headphones seemed to speak for my own mind, a mind still unable to recall everything.
“Everything’s already over! It’s…it’s just…everything! All over!”
—It’s time to give it up.
I will never have the chance to see her again.
I was already aware of that.
“If…if this is the kind of world I’m doomed to live in, then—!”
You don’t have to say that, do you?
Maybe you weren’t on time,
but at the very end of it all,
—you came to realize where your own emotions lay.
By the time I turned myself around, the city was experiencing its final moments. On the other side from the enclosed sky as it crumbled to the ground, I left my final words to her. “I’m sorry…Takane.”
I gazed at the carcass of the program as it burned itself away, my consciousness growing faint. The words I heard from the other side of the headphones were more than enough to lull me back to sleep.
YUUKEI YESTERDAY III
The height of summer.
The sky out the window was a clear, crisp shade of blue, a giant cumulonimbus cloud looming from afar.
“…I give up. I don’t get any of this at all…”
The austere brutality of summer school was wreaking its full havoc on the classroom.
Haruka smiled briskly as he worked his way through the stack of assignment sheets in front of him, but from my perspective, I was faced with a painful battle, one where I could barely manage to comprehend each individual question.
Weeks had passed since the school festival. We were now both second-year students at the high school.
Which didn’t count for much. Our class still comprised merely the two of us, Haruka and me, and regrettably the school didn’t boot out Mr. Tateyama and replace him with another teacher for us.
The new school year meant a slow, steady rise in difficulty, and since I (to be totally honest here) wasn’t exactly a brainiac, my grades on every test always trended below average.
“Oh, are you stuck on something, Takane? Want me to show it to you again?”
Haruka was already at least twice as many sheets ahead of me, and just a moment ago, I had already tasted the humiliation of having him explain a problem I had no chance of comprehending.
“Sh-shut up! I think I’m gonna have it in a little bit, so just keep quiet!”
I tried my best to focus upon the worksheet, but I frankly had a hard time understanding much of anything written on it.
This was supposed to be a math class, but there was all this English text on it. They were asking me to give not just an answer, but a formula, even. It was ridiculous.
“Ha-ha-ha! Sorry, sorry. Not much point to it unless you figure it out by yourself as much as you can, huh? Well, hang in there!”
Haruka raised a fist as he spoke, in a futile attempt at encouragement, before rattling through his sheets once again.
Damn it…He could’ve spent at least a little more time on each of them.
This wasn’t looking good. If this kept up, I’ll wind up being the only one left in the classroom again.
Once he finished up his work, Haruka would no doubt approach me and ask, “Want some help?” like he always did.
He really did just want to give me a helping hand, I assumed, but if I kept letting this happen, I’d lose whatever status I had left in his mind.
So today, just as always, I’ll probably shoo Haruka away, saying something like “Just go home! I want to do this myself!”
Ughh…What am I even doing? Thanks to my lack of academic skills and weird stubborn streak, my precious summer break was being eaten away before my eyes.
If my original plan was still under way, I would have spent today holed up inside my room, preparing for the tournament taking place in a few days. Having my time occupied like this was something I never even dreamed of.
“What am I gonna do? I must be so out of practice by now…I haven’t logged in for two days straight. Maybe I should just skip this championship…”
As I griped to myself, head slapping against the stack of worksheets as I brought it down to the table, Haruka was busily preparing to turn in his own sheets, each one filled to brimming with his handwritten answers.
“Wha?! You got done so quick! N-no way! Are you going home?!”
Without thinking, the words shot out of my mouth, as if the idea of Haruka leaving would fill me with loneliness. In a panic, I tried to correct myself, but Haruka plopp
ed his bag onto his desk, apparently unfazed.
“Oh, guess so, huh…? Well, go stuff your mouth as much as you want then, I guess. I can handle these problems by myself, you know?”
I found myself going overboard trying to act like I didn’t care. But as I crossed my arms to drive the point home, Haruka next to me replied, “Huh? I’m not going anywhere,” as he took a laptop PC from his backpack.
Shortly he turned it on, typing his password into the login screen like he’d done it thousands of times before. Once he wrapped that up, the title screen of a game flashed on, displaying a white-haired character with a black necklace captioned “Konoha” on the bottom.
“W-whoa whoa whoa! What’re you doing?! You’re gonna start playing here? Right next to me?!”
“Sure am! The championship’s coming up, right? Besides, if I play next to you, that oughta inspire you to get through those worksheets and join me, wouldn’t it?”
“No! You’re just gonna distract me, and…ugghhh, I can’t take this anymore! I wanna play, too! Lemme borrow that a sec!”
“Agh! Wait, you can’t! I gotta get you to finish that work first! Hey!!”
Indeed—the game Haruka launched was the game I was trying to qualify for in the upcoming tournament.
Ever since the school festival ended, Haruka began to explore topics he had no business exploring, eventually leading him to the realm of online gaming.
I paid him no mind at first, reasoning that he’d get bored and quit within a few days. But Haruka grew more addicted the more time he invested in them. Then he began to post serious results.
Now, he was a fairly famous player in this game, raising his skills to the point where he was actually one of the favorites to win it all in this next tournament.
…And it all started the night after the school festival came to a close.
“…Well, at the end of the day…it was kinda fun, wasn’t it? The festival.”
“Yeah, well, there were a lot of traumatic experiences for me along the way, but…Ooh! Hey, this steamed bun is crazy good!”
“Ooh, rrrph thinh tha’ looph riuhh goohh, too.”
“Ew! Stop being gross, Haruka! You could at least swallow before you start talking! And Mr. Tateyama, how many drinks have you had? I don’t remember inviting you in here!”
The three of us—myself, Haruka, and Mr. Tateyama—were here enjoying dinner together.
Haruka had polished off all the food he picked up with astonishing speed, and he and I then hurriedly cleaned all the festival gear out of the classroom, marking a final rushed end to our school-festival experience.
I made sure to kick Haruka every time he called me “Ene” during the cleaning work, but he didn’t seem to quite understand that I was angry at him. It served to enrage me even further.
After that, just as we wrapped up the work, Mr. Tateyama appeared as if on cue. “Hey,” he said, “the hero of the day always arrives late, right?” I was just as liberal with the kicks for him as I was with Haruka, and to apologize for his late arrival, he made a dinner reservation for us.
“Boy, that’s really something, though, yeah? Like, ‘Holy Nightmare’ and all that? The way you mow down all those bad guys, Ene?”
“I told you, don’t call me by that name again! Ugghh…I hate this…”
The Chinese restaurant we visited on my suggestion didn’t seem to be housing any of the wrap parties held by other classes, likely because it was a fair distance away from our school.
I placed my elbows in what little space in front of me wasn’t stacked high with plates, burying my face in my hands as I groaned in agony.
“Hah hah hah! You finally got exposed, huh, Takane? Well, you know, it’s not like you’re doing anything bad, so don’t get so worked up about it, Ene—oww !”
I landed a punch on Mr. Tateyama’s upper arm and heaved out a sigh before draining the orange juice in front of me out of sheer abandon.
“Yeah! You don’t have to hide it or anything! But you know, that name…You took ‘Ene’ from your own name, right? Like, the first ‘E’ from ‘Enomoto’ and the last ‘ne’ from ‘Takane.’”
“Well…yeah, but…but what’s that matter?”
“What’s it matter? I dunno, it just seemed kinda neat. Like, it seems sort of cool, having another name that isn’t your real one. I wanna come up with one, too!”
Haruka’s voice was sprinkled with excitement as he eagerly awaited the next round of food. He’d easily eaten enough to feed an entire family and more, and yet he showed no ill effects. In fact, the mysterious forces lurking within his stomach had allowed him to keep his eating pace steady the entire night. It was downright creepy.
“So what about the other one? ‘Dancing Flash’? Does that have something to do with you—whoa! Wait, wait! I’m sorry! Just put your fist down!”
I silenced the overly talkative Mr. Tateyama with the threat of coercive force. The clock was already nearing eight p.m., but with tomorrow the last day of a three-day weekend, we still had ample time on our hands.
“Handle names are just something you make up on the fly, okay? You don’t have to analyze them like that. It’s just embarrassing.”
I griped at the apparent abuse they were throwing at me, rapidly pecking away at the chili-infused shrimp put on my plate before Haruka ate it all up.
“Hey, I wanna come up with one, too! I’m Haruka Kokonose, so…how about ‘Konoha’?”
“Sure. Whatever. Great to meet you, Konoha.”
I gave him as pat a response as I could, but Haruka was unexpectedly and very oddly impassioned by it. “Oooooh!” he chirped. “I really like the sound of that…! I think I’ll start spreading my name around tonight!”
—Which leads us to today.
“But that’s not fair! You can’t just play by yourself and boost your skills without me…I wanna play, too!”
“Well, that’s kinda your fault, isn’t it, Takane? I already got all my worksheets done, so…I’ll play together with you once you’re done, so get cracking, okay?”
Haruka was right, no matter how you sliced it, and all I could do was whine like a child with my “but’s” and “come onnnn’s.”
It was another stark reminder of the difference between myself, a below-average student out of sheer laziness, and Haruka, who fully devoted himself to studying but still had to attend summer school with me.
No, Haruka wasn’t here in school for remedial classes. Anyone who could finish up those worksheets with that kind of speed would be considered near the top of his class—grade-wise, anyway.
His behavior in class was impeccable, of course, and he certainly wasn’t special-needs in terms of the course work he could tackle. But Haruka lagged far behind his peers in one important field: attendance.
In December of last year, Haruka organized an impromptu Christmas party, fielding myself and Mr. Tateyama to help out.
It was right around Haruka’s birthday, too, so I remember making a serious effort to pick out a present for him, in hopes of giving him the surprise of his life. I saved up what little allowance I could, forcing myself to go through the heartbreaking task of spending it on someone else. But whenever the image of a grateful Haruka flashed into my mind, I felt an odd sense of excitement about it all.
—But on the day of the party, Haruka had an attack of some sort and collapsed.
Luckily, he was immediately taken to a hospital, preventing any serious consequences from happening.
By the time Mr. Tateyama and I reached him, Haruka was already in the middle of eating his fifth tray of hospital food. Despite this obvious sign of good health, the clinic decided to admit him anyway.
Haruka was discharged after about a week and was back to his usual healthy self at school after winter break, but a month later, he was readmitted to the hospital after another attack.
This time around, he faced a much more arduous recovery, requiring him to remain under hospital treatment for about a month.
But Haruka was concerned far less about his health than he was about the online game he was heavily into at the time. “I have to get outta here and start practicing again,” he’d tell me upon every visit.
We both went up to the next class year soon afterward, but Haruka continued to have small episodes of poor health—not enough for a hospital stay, but enough to keep him out of class more and more over time.
Now Haruka was stuck in summer school, making up for enough sick days to ensure he met the minimum attendance requirement.
He never complained about it—“It’s actually a lot of fun,” he’d say, “as long as you’re in class with me”—but I couldn’t guess what he really thought about it, inside.
—As for myself…I didn’t really know.
“Ooh, hey, there’s a new weapon available! Must be some kinda pre-tournament bonus. Oh, man, should I buy it or what?”
There was nothing that indicated Haruka was depressed, at least, as he excitedly stared at the screen in front of him.
Though, looking back, I had never seen him anything even close to depressed. Not even once.
Even when I was the only classmate he had left, even when we were benched from the sports meet he was looking forward to for lack of team members, even when he was forced out of class and into the hospital, he was always smiling.
And watching him smile would always enrage me, exasperate me…and, gradually, enrapture me.
“Hey, Haruka…?”
“Hmm? What’s up? Uh, give me one sec, okay? I got a match starting up!”
Haruka was devoted heart and soul to the fight, not taking his eyes off the screen for a moment.
Watching him as he played, muttering to himself in a soft voice, was like watching an innocent child.
…He really doesn’t have a care in the world, does he? But if he’s gonna stay late like this, it wouldn’t hurt him to pay at least a little more attention to me.
With a sharp intake of breath, I affixed my gaze back to my worksheet, but the gunfire from the seat next to me made it frankly impossible to concentrate.
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