I left her office after putting off learning more about supernatural abilities until next time. Though would there even be a next time? I thought that just learning about Erosion-types had already taught me more than enough, but she didn’t seem to feel that way at all. As if there was still more she had to tell me.
When I reached the lobby, I quickly looked around. Several black figures were waiting there fully dressed. Among them, I couldn’t find the Inna I had in mind.
...I didn’t know the way home. Normally, if there was a place I didn’t know how to get to, I’d enter the address into my phone and go, but I didn’t know the address, and I didn’t have a phone either.
That person called my sister had said she’d left someone behind on purpose to take me home, but Inna seemed to have gone somewhere for a bit and was nowhere to be found, so I was about to sit down in an empty spot. If only someone hadn’t come up and tapped me on the shoulder.
The moment I turned my head, my face quickly filled with disappointment. The person left here wasn’t the girl with blackish-green hair, but just a boy with black hair.
“You didn’t leave?”
I didn’t think we were on good enough terms for him to take me home. As if the boy felt the same way, he smiled awkwardly.
“I guess they told me to take you home. Well, I know the way to your house anyway, and I don’t really have anything to do after this, so I agreed. Inna wanted to stay, but it seemed like only one person needed to remain here, so I just sent her off.”
Yu Inna... You should’ve held out as long as you could. I felt a little resentful, but what had happened during the day had been no small thing. After experiencing something that might have killed her, maybe she had gotten a little scared and gone home first.
I could understand Yu Inna’s position. The one I couldn’t understand wasn’t her, but him. The person who had suddenly been destroying an abandoned factory together with the student council president.
I had spoken to my sister, so they had also been able to leave the Association without being questioned, but if Inna and I were the ones who had gotten caught up in the incident, they were clearly different—the ones who had directly participated in it.
They had taken part in an incident while accepting the fear that they might lose their lives. For all I knew, they might have been the real criminals the Association should have arrested.
Putting that aside.
“Where did the student council president go?”
No matter how much I looked, I couldn’t see the president. I had been deliberately stalling in my own way until the president came.
Did she go to the bathroom or something, so I should wait a little longer? But the boy’s awkward smile even took on a slightly bitter taste.
“You can call her by name in front of me. I’m not going to nitpick you over that. ...She left first. She said you might feel burdened if she stayed with you. To be honest, it looked to me like the reason your sister left me behind was to act as a buffer between you and the student council president. And Inna seemed to step back so she wouldn’t get in the way between you and the president.”
They had tried to leave the student council president behind too? While my impression of the sister and Inna I remembered was rising vertically inside me, the boy held out his hand to me.
“Anyway, I’m the only one left, so I’ll escort you home.”
“Can I throw up?”
“...You can, but why all of a sudden?”
“That line was so greasy I wanted to empty my stomach.”
To think I’d hear a guy say he’d escort me. It was such a greasy remark that my stomach really did feel like it was churning.
I did actually think about throwing up once, but the instant he heard that, the boy lightly snatched up my hand.
“If you’re okay doing it into your own hand.”
Naturally, I had no intention of doing it into my own hand, so my plan to punish the greasy boy was completely abolished.
As if he had no intention of waiting any longer, the boy drew my hand with a faint amount of force and looked back.
“Let’s go before it gets late. If we arrive too late, I’ll get an earful later.”
From whom?
Without telling me who would scold him, the boy started walking.
*
Should we wait for the bus that would take thirty minutes to arrive, or should we walk straight home, which was an hour away on foot?
Given the choices the boy offered, I said we should just walk, partly so I could learn the geography, since I didn’t want to sit around and enjoy the awkwardness with him.
The night breeze of a season soon to become summer blew gently. It felt cool, and the scenery around us was nice too. The problem for me was the people I would pass by without even knowing they were there whenever we walked through somewhere a little dark.
“That was where a family was passing through. Why did you go right through the middle?”
“Because I wanted to break them apart.”
It was something a psychopath might say, but I said it because I didn’t want to tell this boy about my weakness.
What are you going to do if I say I wanted to cut between a child holding hands and their parents? I thought the boy would look at me with disgust, but the face he actually turned toward me was one filled with pity for someone.
“Well, I suppose you’d have reason to think that... No. If you tell me, I’ll just cut in for you.”
“No thanks. ...It’s just that my night vision is bad.”
It was no different from revealing one of my weaknesses. I wouldn’t have said it if that boy hadn’t pitied me so much, but I also said it because even if that boy himself knew my weakness, he wouldn’t be able to make use of it.
Even though he had black hair, strangely enough, the boy’s presence seemed to shine even in places without streetlights.
How should I put it? Anyone could see he was loved by the world. The black people were literally dark as people, so of course they weren’t visible at night, which made them completely different from this boy.
“It wasn’t so dark you couldn’t see them, but if that wasn’t it, then I guess it’s fine. If you want to tell me, tell me. I can cut in for you instead. It was a family smiling warmly with a child who had a pretty cute face, so if you didn’t do it because they looked nice together, then that’s a relief.”
They were smiling warmly? I was walking while thinking that I hadn’t been able to see anything at all, when my steps stopped in an instant.
This world was a dating sim. Naturally, I had thought that extras’ faces weren’t set, so I could understand not being able to see their faces.
But if I couldn’t see them, then the protagonist shouldn’t be able to see them either.
Within the dating sim, extras were perceived as all having faces, but I had thought those who came from “outside” saw their true forms as “undefined black people.”
‘Don’t tell me this guy wasn’t a player like me? If not—’
The protagonists could see the extras’ faces, and I was the only one seeing them as black people?
Then to the protagonists, I must look like a heroine with a mental illness.
In a dating sim, it was basic to provide at least one method for capturing a heroine. There were heroines in dating sims who were completely impossible to capture, but if a heroine had an open “route,” that meant there had to be at least one way for the protagonist to win her heart.
I hadn’t seen the other protagonists yet, so I didn’t know, but what if even he, someone I couldn’t help feeling repulsed by because he was male, had been given at least one way to capture me?
And what if that hadn’t been given directly to the boy, but had been placed on me like a penalty? The people I had thought were wandering around as black figures might actually have had real faces of their own.
The wind I had thought was pleasantly cool suddenly felt cold. My walking speed slowed until I was barely moving.
“Why did your face suddenly look like that? Are you okay?”
Of course I wasn’t okay. I guess I could say I had figured out why the system would release a certain amount of information when I threw a tantrum.
I felt like collapsing right here, sleeping deeply, and waking up later, but if I collapsed here, the boy would carry me on his back and take me home, and when the system appeared again and evaluated it, my affection for the boy would only go up.
This dirty bastard. I had thought we were in the same boat, suffering penalties together, but the protagonist wasn’t even suffering a penalty?
It was unfair. So unfair that I felt like I was going to go mad because I couldn’t even figure out how to vent this resentment.
There was a possibility that the boy had lied about the expressions of the family we had already passed, but I had a feeling that wasn’t it.
The boy probably didn’t even know I was a player, and it seemed like he had mentioned their expressions without thinking anything of it.
I had thought it was strange somehow. The families of heroines were likely to appear as extras too, and if you couldn’t read their facial expressions in detail, there was the question of how you were supposed to persuade that heroine’s family.
“I’m fine. Instead, don’t come within a ten-meter radius of me.”
I couldn’t stand being with this dirty bastard. It was too unfair.
“Okay. You hate me because you think the memory of happily smiling together with the president grew distant because of me, right?”
...I had only said it to try it, but perhaps the boy felt guilty about having separated me from the president, because he obediently did as I said.
The boy’s back ahead of me was no different from a shining path, so he maintained a distance I could keep following, but for a protagonist loved by the world, he somehow looked fragile.
“I understand that you hate me. ...Actually, there was something I wanted to talk about while we walked together, but I guess I shouldn’t.”
“Something you wanted to talk about?”
As if he no longer wanted to speak, the boy did not answer me. —With an air of having been deeply hurt, for some reason.
I had no desire to concern myself with that, though.
Together with the boy, who had begun to enjoy silence, I walked through the night streets.
—In order to return to my house again.