chapter02 · 024-ep21

Episode 21: Entrance Ceremony — Starting Today, a Normal High Schooler

April 8th — today's the entrance ceremony.

The last time I wore a brand-new uniform was my middle school entrance ceremony, so it's been three years.

I was wrestling with my tie in front of the mirror when a voice came from the hallway.

"Big bro, still not done?"

"Wait — I'm doing it right now."

"Slow!"

"Quit nagging. The tie won't do what I tell it."

I checked how to tie it in a video just last night, and by this morning I'd forgotten it squeaky clean. Three attempts, three failures — on the last one, the knot ended up on the side of my neck. How do you even DO that? That's when the door opened.

"Give it here."

Seina reached out and tied it in ten seconds.

"How are YOU able to do that?"

"Learned it at the basketball club seniors' graduation."

"Not bad. You saved me."

"And you, big bro?"

"I watched a video. Last night. Properly."

"You just WATCHED it!"

"I figured watching would be enough."

"It wasn't! You had the knot on the side of your neck!"

Getting bludgeoned by my little sister's flawless logic on entrance-ceremony morning — I'm stumbling before high school life has even started.

When I came downstairs, big sis was waiting in the living room with a camera at the ready.

"Saku. Stand right there."

"We really don't need photos."

"Once in a lifetime."

"You took them for middle school too."

"That was middle school. This is high school."

That is not an argument.

In the end I got three shots taken at the front door, and then Mom came out and added two more.

Before leaving for work, Dad just said "Off you go" and was out the door ahead of me. I thought, that's it? — and then I noticed my back had straightened. One sentence from the least talkative person in our house. What is it about that, I wonder.

My high school is twenty minutes from home by bike.

It's a prefectural school with a fairly big student body. There's a general course and an explorer course, and I'm in the general one.

Honestly, I never planned on making explorer my job. Dungeons are all over Nagoya, and plenty of people dive part-time-job style. But the money you can pull from the shallow floors is peanuts — hourly-wage-wise, a convenience store beats it by a mile. And there's no risk of injury there, either.

So I went general course. Take normal classes, make normal friends, dive a little on weekends. That was the three-year plan. Right up until three weeks ago, when "Chuunibyou" showed up in my Job column!

Through the school gate — so many people. New students in the same uniform, all wandering around with the same lost look on their faces, some kids with parents in tow.

A crowd had formed in front of the bulletin board; checking it, it was the class assignments. I pushed through the bodies and hunted for my name.

There it was. Ichinose Saku, Class 1-3.

Not a single name I knew. Well, figures. The four from middle school all went to different high schools. Osawa to a private school in the next city over, Yamabuki to a school with an explorer course, Miyake by sports recommendation to a powerhouse, Fujidou to one of the top college-prep schools in the prefecture.

If I'd gone to the same school as those guys, today probably would've been easy. But nobody at this school knows the me of back then. The me with the bandages, the me with the eyepatch — nobody here knows him. Which is just the best, honestly.

The ceremony was exactly what I'd imagined. The principal and the guest of honor droned on forever; only the freshman representative's greeting was short. The gym was cold, the chairs were hard, and the guy next to me yawned three times.

When it ended, we moved to our classroom. In Class 1-3, my seat was second from the back, window side. Not a bad seat at all.

Our homeroom teacher was a woman in her thirties whose blackboard writing was insanely neat.

"Alright then, let's do introductions! Your name, and one little something extra."

Here it comes.

Name plus one comment — that doesn't lead anywhere Job-related. This is the general course. High schoolers with explorer registration aren't even rare in the first place; you get treated the same as a kid with a part-time job.

Even so, my heart was hammering. The problem was the name — the Guild's official site lists registrant info by Job. If anyone searched "Ichinose Saku," I'd pop up on the first hit.

My turn came, and I stood. The "one comment" had been decided last night — the most ordinary one I could come up with.

"Ichinose Saku. I'm from Chikusa Ward. Looking forward to the next three years."

"Great, thank you. Normal will do just fine."

I got called normal. Sensei, that is the one thing I wanted most to hear today.

I sat down, and nothing happened. Nobody reacted to my name; after the applause, the next person stood and things rolled on without a hitch.

News stories die in days, and the world's moved on to other topics. Someone might hear my name and go "huh?" — but nobody takes it further than that. ...They don't, right? Please.

By the time introductions wrapped for everyone, I'd finally settled down.

And now the real event begins. If I'm going to be a normal high schooler starting today, first I need friends.

In middle school, before I knew it, Osawa and the others were just there. Same class three years running, and my place in it built itself. But today, there's nobody. Leave things alone and I'll finish three years without speaking to a soul. That, I refuse.

Textbook distribution started, and the classroom filled with a buzz. Now. First, I turned to the guy in the seat in front of me.

"Do these get passed back?"

"Ah, yes. Probably."

"You don't have to be so formal — we're the same age."

"...Oh. Okay."

His name's Horiguchi, and his middle school was out Higashi Ward way, apparently. He seemed a little wound up, so I tossed out safe topics from my side — club plans, how long his commute was.

Next, I helped a girl hauling a stack of textbooks.

"Here, I'll take those."

"Huh? Are you sure?"

"They look heavy, don't they?"

I asked her name and made sure it stuck. After that, every gap in the distribution, I worked down the line — back seats, diagonal front, aisle side — talking to anybody and everybody.

Even I think I'm being a little desperate. But desperate is fine. I spent half of my three middle school years on dark history. Fun in its own way, but I don't need a second playthrough. This time I'm doing it right.

The longest conversation I got going was with the seat next to mine.

"Hey, hey, Ichinose-kun — you've been taaalking nonstop this whole time, haven't you?"

A small girl whose expressions flip from moment to moment, hair down to about her shoulders. In her intro she'd given her name as Yano Rui.

"Was I too loud?"

"Nope! I was thinking, wow. How many people so far?"

"Huh, I wasn't counting. Do people count?"

"Count! That's totally a counting thing!"

"Then... five, maybe?"

"That many?!"

Yano leaned way in. Close, close, too close.

"How do you just GO like that? I've been staring at my phone this whole time."

"I want friends. Day one is when it's won or lost, right?"

"So direct!"

Yano laughed. Her voice is so big Horiguchi in front turned around.

"I want friends too, you know. Nobody from my middle school's in this class."

"Same here!"

"Then we're friends now. Decided!"

Wait, already? Is "friends" something you decide in one second flat?

"Rui's fine. My friends call me Rui-cchi."

"Then it's Yano."

"WHY?!"

They started explaining school events, and the room quieted a little. In that lull, Yano leaned over and asked in a whisper.

"Ichinose-kun, are you registered as an explorer?"

"Y-yeah. Kind of."

"Oh, so you dive?"

"Sometimes. Really just sometimes."

"Where?"

"Kanadun, mostly."

Not a lie. It's just closed right now.

"Oh, the F-rank one. Honestly, people say a part-time job pays better, right?"

"Right? Same."

"See?"

...The part where my account has close to five million yen in it — I'll keep that to myself.

When the explanations ended and break time came, Yano thrust her phone screen right at me.

"Me, I'm strictly a watcher. Of streams."

What lined the screen was a set of thumbnails I knew all too well. Stellarion's Tono Akari — and the black cloak. Clips.

The blood drained right out of my face.

"You know this one? It's BLOWING UP right now!"

"Ah, yeah. A little."

"A LITTLE?! No way — you haven't watched it?"

"I have. I've watched it."

"Then here — watch THIS part!"

And she played it. At max volume, no less.

『—Thy end is not this day.』

My own voice, playing in the classroom.

Wait — we're IN a classroom!

"Isn't it SO cool? 'I am not one worth naming,' you know? I'd kill to get to say stuff like that."

"I-is it, though? Aren't the lines a little dated? And, like... kind of cringey?"

"That's the best part!"

...I got complimented. What is this situation.

"Seriously though, this person is SOMEBODY. Nobody normal moves like that!"

"Maybe they're just a passerby. Just some guy."

"There's no 'maybe' about it! Somebody out there knows who this is — that's just how it works!"

The one who knows is, at this very moment, sweating buckets directly beside you.

Day one was just textbook handouts and event explanations, and we broke up before noon. Regular classes start tomorrow, apparently.

My contacts grew by five. Yano, Horiguchi, the textbook girl, and the two in the back row. Not bad for day one, right?

Heading out, Yano and I stepped into the hallway — and there was a crowd.

In the middle: three upperclassmen, just walking. But people were swarming around them, and some were even holding their phones up from a distance.

"Eh?"

Beside me, Yano froze.

"Wha— huh— NO WAY?!"

"What?"

"STELLARION!"

Yano nearly dropped her phone and snatched it back in a panic.

"It's Stellarion — they're HERE — the real ones!"

"Your voice — your voice is loud."

"Because it's STELLARION! Hey, did you know? There was a rumor three of them go to this school — it was TRUE."

I did not know. I picked this school because it's close to home, it has a general course, and the uniform isn't weird. I researched exactly none of that.

And I'd frozen too. For a completely different reason than Yano.

One of the three looked familiar. No — familiar doesn't cover it. It's the girl I saved the day before yesterday.

Tono Akari.

She's wearing a uniform. Well, she's a high schooler, of course she wears one. No, that's not the point. Why is she at MY school?!

"Oh man, oh man, do you think I can take a picture?"

"Don't."

"Right, I'll hold back. Ugh, but they're real..."

While Yano buzzed beside me, I sidled quietly over to the wall. And half-hid behind Yano while I was at it. Yano's a full head shorter than me, so it hid exactly none of me.

For one thing, she never saw my face. I was under the hood that day, and the voice is different too. There shouldn't be a single thing that gives me away. So there's no point in hiding — but my body went there on its own anyway.

The three passed right by us. Tono Akari kept her eyes forward; she never once looked this way. Well, naturally.

Only after they'd gone by did I finally breathe out. My back was soaked through.

"Did you see? Tono Akari-chan is SO tiny in person!"

"Ah. Yeah."

"Huh? Ichinose-kun, why are you so low-energy right now?"

"No, I'm not—"

"Get hyped with me! Same school!"

"I-I'm hyped. Totally. Look."

I made a small fist pump at chest height.

"THAT fist pump was TINY!"

I've got a mountain of reasons I can't get hyped — that right there was me at full power.

From now on, I'll be commuting to the same school building as her, every single day. And she apparently wants to thank whoever's in that black cloak — she said so herself, on stream. I'm being hunted inside my own school here.

I walked to the bike rack in silence, and while turning my key, ran the day back through my head. I made friends and gained contacts — and got treated to my own voice in the classroom, and the girl I saved turned out to be an upperclassman at my own school.

Why is being a normal high schooler this hard?