4

The private Umesato Junior High School was on the east side of Tokyo’s Suginami Ward, quite close to the corner of the streets of Oume Kaido and Itsukaichi Kaido. Although the school was small in scale with three classes per grade, the campus was reasonably large. On the north side of the grounds, which featured a three-hundred-meter track, the three-story first classroom wing stretched out east–west, connecting in the center with the north–south sports wing. On the opposite side stood the second wing, also in the east–west direction. In other words, the entire school was in the shape of a sideways H.

The classrooms and the student cafeteria were concentrated in the newer first wing. The fairly older second building held the principal’s, teachers’, and guidance counselor’s offices on the first floor, while the second floor was made up of storerooms and the now barely used special classrooms. Thus, students almost never ventured into this building. Which was why Haruyuki had used the boys’ washroom on the third floor of this wing as his “shelter” when he was in seventh grade.

However, there was one place students went to even less frequently, a place they weren’t even aware of. A long, narrow space enclosed by concrete walls and a high fence even farther north than the second wing. The place Haruyuki had been called as a new member of the Animal Care Club was past this damp gap, a corner in the northwest, the deepest of recesses at Umesato.

“I didn’t even know this place existed…,” Haruyuki murmured, staring at the building.

It was really too small to be called a building. The floor was at best four meters each way, and the ceiling maybe two and a half meters up. The side and interior walls were presently boards of unfinished wood, and the roof was probably straight shingles. The front was entirely made up of chicken wire with a three-centimeter mesh. A cage, in other words. Naturally, it was not used to lock up students who had done bad things; it was a hutch for keeping animals.

However, no matter how close he brought his face to the chicken wire or how he strained his eyes, he could see no animals inside it. There was just a thick pile of leaves that had come in through a hole in the mesh. He had no doubt that plenty of microscopic creatures lived under it, but they couldn’t possibly be the animals he was meant to care for.

“You can have an Animal Care Club and a hutch, but the animals are really the key,” he said to himself, cocking his head to one side. If they were going to be brought in later, he couldn’t understand why the club was being formed now.

At that moment, he heard the crunch of feet behind him. Turning with a start, he saw two students coming toward him from the direction of the front yard. One girl, one boy. Their ribbon and necktie were the same blue as Haruyuki’s, but he didn’t know their faces, which meant they were probably in different classes. Which also meant they had to be his colleagues, newly assigned to the Animal Care Club like him.

He took a step forward, thinking to at least say hello, but before he could, the boy shouted loudly, “Uuuugh! The hell! It’s filthy! And there’s a ton of leaves there!”

“I know, right?!” The girl followed his declaration with an emotional announcement of her own opinion. “What’s even the point of cleaning a mess like this? Seeeeeriously.”

From the way they were talking, neither had come of their own volition; they’d likely been selected by lottery. But Haruyuki was in a similar position. He had stood up with such force entirely by accident.

However this ended up, having come this far, he had no choice now but to amicably work on this club with these two. He took a deep breath and yet called out in a relatively weak voice, “Um…Anyway, let’s decide who does what.”

According to the document he had been sent after being assigned to the club, there were two items of work for that day. One was the selection of a president, and the other was cleaning this hutch. They wouldn’t be able to go home until they completed both and submitted a signed log file to the in-school server.

It was obvious from looking at the disastrous state of the hutch that the cleaning would be fairly tough, so he wanted to at least quickly knock out the job of assigning jobs. Haruyuki waited a few seconds with the faint expectation that one of them would say, I’ll do it. Club activities were an extra bit of grading data and also had an impact on high school entrance, so students generally wanted a positive history of being the president of whatever club.

But they hadn’t volunteered for this, so obviously, no one there cared about any of that. After a full five seconds had passed, he checked that neither of them were going to open their mouths before smiling weakly and saying, “Okay, then I guess I could take it on. Being the president, I mean.”

Annoyed with himself that he couldn’t have phrased it more like he was doing them a favor (which he was), he waited for a reaction. The boy, who was rather tanned for being in the go-home club, and the girl, whose hair was permed so that it curled inward, both got unabashedly relieved looks on their faces and nodded together.

“Great.”

“Thanks.”

All three ran their fingers over their virtual desktops at the same time, opening the newly appearing club activity tab and setting Haruyuki’s name in the position column before touching the SIGN button. And with that, Haruyuki was registered in the school local net as the president of the Animal Care Club.

Taking the opportunity to check the names of the other two, he saw the boy was Hamajima and the girl was Izeki. Since there were only three people in the club, a vice president and any lower positions were not required.

If I knew this was going to happen, I would’ve volunteered for library aide at the beginning of the term.

Grumbling to himself, he wiped the window away with a wave of his right hand. At any rate, that was one job done. But the problem was the other job—cleaning the hutch.

He looked over at it again. It was pretty clear that the layer of leaves would indeed be a difficult task, not to mention the filthy plank walls. The leaf layer was at least five centimeters thick, and there was nothing they could do about it without tools of some kind. According to the document, they had been given permission to use the equipment in the cleaning shed in the courtyard.

“Okay, first we need a broom and dustpan. I’ll go get them. Just wait here, okay?” he said, and trotted off toward the courtyard on the opposite side of the second school wing. He had the thought that this was still way better than having people behind him shouting, Run! Run! Run! and forcing him to go buy bread and things, like they had in seventh grade.

When the three of them actually got to work, the job of cleaning out the hutch was far more difficult than he had expected.

If the matted leaves had been dry, they might have been able to simply sweep them up, but it was the rainy season. And the leaves had apparently been piling up bit by bit for years, so that the ones toward the bottom were basically mulch glued to the floor. With the old-fashioned bamboo brooms—and of course, they were not actually made of bamboo, but hard plastic fibers fashioned to look like bamboo—they were just scraping the surface; they didn’t even make a dent in the sticky layers.

“Aaah!” the girl, Izeki, abruptly cried out, after battling the mess of mulch for twenty minutes or so. “Geeez, my hands and my butt seriously huuuuurt!”

“Heh-heh-heh! You’re like an old woman!” the boy, Hamajima, jeered, and received a fierce glare, a look that would have turned Haruyuki to stone.

“God, you’re seriously annoying. I mean, you’ve been barely sweeping the same place over and over for forever,” Izeki half demanded, half snapped.

“Tsh!” Hamajima clicked his tongue. “Shaddap. All you’re doing is putting outside the leaves that we sweep up, and you’re taking your time at it, too. Taking it easy, huh?”

“What? I don’t get your point, though. Are you seriously talking to me like that?”

The exchange between his fellow club members was growing stormier by the second, and Haruyuki started sweating profusely, moving his broom at top speed. He knew he should interrupt and defuse the situation before it turned into a full-blown fight, but he couldn’t lift his head, much less open his mouth.

No. No matter how it happened, I volunteered for this club. I even went further than that: I volunteered to be president. I can call these two out, be harsh. I have a responsibility here, don’t I?

“Uh, um!” Haruyuki called out, this resolution filling his heart. Izeki and Hamajima, both about to explode, turned their gazes on him together.

“…Uh, um.” He took a deep breath, put some strength into his abdomen, and readied himself for the harsh law he was about to lay down. “At any rate, we’re not going to finish before it’s time to go home, so…if you guys just sign the log, you can go now. I’ll just hang around so we look good.”

In less than a minute, his comrades were retreating at top speed with smiles of pure joy, leaving only their thanks. Alone in the small yard, Haruyuki heaved a deep sigh.

If he were to confess the truth—

He had to say that somewhere in his heart had been at least a milligram of the hope that the other two club members would turn out to be kindhearted, animal-loving girls, and that the club work would be unexpectedly heartwarming. But now that he thought about it, this Animal Care Club would have been formed long ago if there were actually any students like that at Umesato; disgruntled and reluctant comrades were the only logical outcome of a hastily ordered club. In the worst-case scenario, the other two members could have been the type of outlaw students who had so mercilessly bullied him last year. He should be grateful for his good fortune.

With this consoling thought, Haruyuki looked around the hutch once more.

Half of the leaves on the floor were still untouched. The clock in the lower right of his field of view indicated that it was 4:15 PM. The school closed at six, which was when everyone was kicked out, so he did still have some time, but it was pointless to try and attack with his lone broom that black layer, which had practically turned into dirt. If he seriously wanted to make the hutch clean, at least.

“Well, we don’t need to get it all done in one day. I mean, there aren’t even any animals, so…” Muttering, Haruyuki tossed the broom in his right hand to the ground. He would just kill time with some game app until school closed, put up a show of having tried but still been unable to get it finished, and pick up where he left off the next day. He was about to sit down on the steps at the foot of the exterior wall, when—

Kuroyukihime. Her name flashed through his mind, and he stopped dead.

Kuroyukihime had to be still there, too. In the distant student council office, she was no doubt busy with work for the school festival coming up at the end of the month. And Chiyuri and Takumu, too. They were on the field and in the kendo area, moving their bodies with determined focus.

“So after classes end every day, they’re here doing stuff like this.”

A hoarse sigh of admiration slipped out as he took a hard look at his dirty hands. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to high-five him or give him some kind of reward for working hard now. So then why on earth do extracurricular activities anyway?

Kuroyukihime had told him before that she joined the student council so that she could have a hold on the in-school local net as a Burst Linker, but he had a feeling that wasn’t the only reason. Right: Kuroyukihime, Takumu, and Chiyuri must have been constantly proving something to themselves. And yet Haruyuki was very close to abandoning the resolution he had made not even an hour earlier to actually work hard on things now.

“Honestly. What is with me…” He let out a long breath, stooped over, and picked the broom up off the ground.

After about five minutes of work, when he had gotten rid of as many of the leaves in the hutch as he could sweep up, he stopped and thought for a while. Ditching the whole project to play games wasn’t going to help anything. To take care of the mulch layer before the school closed, he needed to find a better way of doing this. The best thing would likely be to flush it out with a lot of water, but the only thing nearby was the tiny faucet in a corner of the hutch, apparently for drinking water for the animals.

He turned it on to test it, but as expected, the dribbling, unreliable stream of water was basically nothing more than droplets. Filling even one bucket would take far too long. Racking his brain, he finally remembered that club presidents were given the right to higher-level access in the in-school net than regular students were.

He called up a map of the school grounds on his virtual desktop and used the infrastructure information to display an overlay of the water lines. A very thin light blue line stretched up into the hutch, but a thicker pipe and a stopcock were apparently buried in the ground very close by. When he tapped on the position and looked around, his AR displayed an arrow pointing downward in a corner of the campus about three meters away.

“So the water line’s there…Um…,” he murmured, reset the map, and then selected hoses five meters or more in length from the list of school equipment. When he overlaid the positional information on the map, he found there was one in the tool locker in the first-floor boys’ washroom in the second school wing before him. He clicked on a flashing mark and in the window that popped up, requested permission to use the hose. Normally, students were not permitted to touch equipment outside their authorized access, but a second later, his request was approved.

“Ooh,” Haruyuki said unconsciously. “The rights of a club president. And now…”

He scrolled through the equipment list again and pulled up a large shovel. There was one in the tool shed in the courtyard, so using it posed no permission problems. Last, he searched for a deck brush, found one for scrubbing tiles in the tool shed in the front yard, and got permission to use it.

“And that’s everything. So now gotta fight, maaan!”

If a certain someone had heard him, he would’ve cried out angrily, Hey! No imitating my masterful self! Haruyuki set his sights on the front yard and trotted off.

Tackling the leaves on the floor with the water jetting out of the hose connected to the garden spout was unexpectedly fun, and Haruyuki found himself wondering if this was what Reds felt like with their long-distance attacks.

Naturally, however, the strict school system was not allowing him unlimited access, and the bar showing his water allotment dropped before his eyes. He took careful aim and peeled away one glued-on section after another. But he couldn’t very well use up all the water now, given that he would need to scrub the floor with the deck brush later, so he turned the tap off when he still had about 20 percent of his water left.

The floor of the hutch was covered in a muddy soup of old leaves melting in huge puddles, making him think he had only made things worse. He very nearly regretted his choices, but he steadied himself and traded hose for shovel before stepping into the hutch. Fortunately, he was wearing high-cut, water-resistant sneakers to fend off the damp of the rainy season; the dirty water didn’t penetrate into his shoes. He would, of course, have to wash them thoroughly once he got home, but he could think later about things that had to happen later.

“Oookay!” he shouted and thrust his shovel into a mass of dirt. The tip sliced straight through to the floor, encountering no resistance. He started scraping away, shoveling up hunks of the black dirt. He staggered under the weight as he tossed his shovel-load outside through the doorway.

It was just barely twenty by forty centimeters, but a piece of actual floor had been revealed. Haruyuki stared, and a somehow strange sensation came over him. A profound reaction, different from when he finished off some troublesome homework or took down a boss character that had killed him countless times. Involuntarily, he very nearly shed a few thin tears, and he hurriedly shook his head. It was way too early still to be feeling any sense of achievement.

He stuck his shovel back in the dirt and tossed out another shovelful. Then another. He took a step forward, tossed out another. His shoulders and back were starting to hurt already, but Haruyuki kept working as though something were spurring him on. He could feel his strength being consumed each time he threw out a heap of dirt, but at the same time, he was learning how to use the shovel and how to put his back into it, so his efficiency gradually improved.

While he was focused on the repetition of this straightforward task, he abruptly felt a prickling stab in the corner of his memory. He had done work like this before sometime, somewhere, hadn’t he? But even in childhood, he had barely touched real dirt, and cleaning the house was left to a housekeeping service his mother hired to come in once a week.

Forgetting the pain in his back, he dug intently around in his memories and after about five minutes, he finally hit on it. This wasn’t a memory from the real world. It was the Accelerated World—the higher-level Unlimited Neutral Field.

Two months earlier, on their first meeting, Sky Raker had pushed him from the top of the old Tokyo Tower. To climb the sheer face of that three-hundred-meter wall, Haruyuki had undergone serious training. He had held the image of swords in his hands and pierced the wall, hard like steel, thousands, tens of thousands of times. The exact moment when he stood on the threshold of the ultimate power in Brain Burst, the Incarnate System…

“……?” He had the sudden sensation that his thinking had gotten close to something very important for the briefest of moments, and he furrowed his brow. He tried to catch the tail of that thought as he continued to scrape the floor with the shovel.

The Incarnate System. A logic to influence the truth of the Accelerated World and overwrite actual phenomena with a strong imagination, the very definition of tremendous power. The Incarnate of a master surpassed the limitations of the rules of the game and cracked the earth, ripped open the sky. Obviously, a supernatural power, not something that actually existed in the real world.

But…

But the real root of it. Cause leads to effect—this simple structure was perhaps…

Crack! The tip of the shovel hit the wall, making the nerves in Haruyuki’s hands sing. “Ow!” He started blowing on his palms. Once the pain had passed, he lifted his face.

At some point, the mass of old leaves, which had been piled so high, had been almost completely removed from the hutch. A small mountain had appeared instead on the other side of the chicken wire, a mountain Haruyuki couldn’t actually believe he’d made himself with a single shovel.

“When you put your mind to it, you can do anything!”

The aggressively positive thought sprang up from nowhere, and he stretched long and hard as he shouted it. His stiff back creaked and cracked, but not only did he not feel pain, he felt almost refreshed. It would be incredible to just collapse into sleep like that, but he still had one thing left to do. He needed to take care of the remaining dirt and leaves on the floor.

Coming out of the hutch, he changed the weapon in his right hand from shovel to deck brush and readied the hose in his left. The place would shine if he brushed the floor now, applying water bit by bit as he went. The hands of the clock were swinging around to five PM, but summer solstice was near, so it was still plenty bright out. It was totally possible for him to finish this job before six, when the school closed.

Returning to the hutch in high spirits, Haruyuki gasped at a sudden realization. To turn the stream of water from the hose on and off, he had to turn the stopcock on and off. But he would have to head back to the water pipe each time he did so, which made the whole enterprise extremely inefficient. But if he just left the water running, he would quickly use up the water the system had allowed him.

“Hmm.” He put his brain to work on the problem, glancing back and forth between the hutch and the spigot. This time, at least, however, no clever solution came to mind. He had the chiding thought that if they were going to go so far as to monitor water usage, they should set it up so that he could open and close the stopcock from a distance, but it was too late for that now. The only thing to do was go back and forth between the hutch and the valve, even if it would take a lot longer that way. He readied himself for this unpleasant end and trudged toward the door.

He had walked a few steps around the mountain of mulch when in the center of his field of view, a yellow radio-wave icon flashed. This was followed by a display below it: AD HOC CONNECTION REQUEST.

An ad hoc connection was used to connect several Neurolinkers wirelessly without passing through a server, but it was almost never used at school. Transmission speed and anonymity were worse than with a wired connection, and more importantly, if you were logged into the in-school local net, it was a fairly pointless function.

Who on earth could be—? Haruyuki whirled his head around to both sides before finally turning and looking directly behind him.

For a while, nothing made sense.

A child was looking at Haruyuki. So far, so good. It was a girl. Well within the realm of possibility. But he had definitely never seen her face before. Not only was she clearly not a student at Umesato, she didn’t even seem to be in junior high; both the top and bottom of her outfit were genuine snow-white gym clothes. Arriving at this stage of understanding, Haruyuki couldn’t help but wonder if his eyes or maybe his brain had malfunctioned. He blinked rapidly and shook his head in sharp, tiny bounces, but the girl before him didn’t disappear, so he had no choice but to raise the hand holding the brush and touch the ad hoc connection icon with an outstretched finger.

Instantly, the radio-wave mark and text disappeared, to be replaced by a large-ish window and a blinking cursor—a text-based chat window to converse, instead of speech.

The moment the connection with Haruyuki’s Neurolinker was established, the girl—clearly younger than Niko, maybe ten, maybe not—raised both hands. Ten small, too-slender fingers stopped, loosely spread out in midair. The home position for a holokeyboard, Haruyuki realized. The following instant, those fingers flashed, blurred with speed, and a row of characters glowing cherry pink flowed across the chat window in his field of view.

UI> HELLO, NICE TO MEET YOU. YOU’RE A MEMBER OF UMESATO JUNIOR HIGH’S ANIMAL CARE CLUB, RIGHT? MY NAME IS UTAI SHINOMIYA. I’M IN FOURTH GRADE AT MATSUNOGI ACADEMY. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ACCEPTING OUR SUDDEN REQUEST. I DO SINCERELY APOLOGIZE FOR ANY BOTHER OR TROUBLE. I’M SOMEWHAT LATE, BUT I’LL ALSO ASSIST IN THE CLEANING.

“……?!” Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot, enormously shocked, but not by the details of her message.

She’s fast!!

Her typing skills were absurd. It hadn’t taken her even a full four seconds to input all those characters. If he hadn’t actually seen her type it out, he would no doubt have thought that she had copied and pasted a message prepared in advance.

Haruyuki was secretly proud that his typing speed was number one, or maybe number two, in the school, just barely losing out to Kuroyukihime. At the very least, he had been at the top of his class by a wide margin when he took the mock typing exam in his information processing class. And although he got no particular respect for this skill, he still held it as a natural virtue. However, the fingers of the small girl before him were obviously twice as fast—or even faster—as Haruyuki’s own. He gaped at her, wondering exactly what kind of practice you had to do for technique like that.

No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t believe that the girl who had called herself Shinomiya wasn’t a master of Linker skills. She was on the small side for fourth grade. The limbs stretching out from the short sleeves of her gym shirt and the shorts that stopped above the knee were almost worryingly thin. Her face was stereotypically Japanese with a crisp structure, as though a master carver had in one quick session chiseled out the single-lidded eyes, the nose, the mouth. A jet-black fringe hung neatly slightly below her eyebrows, and her hair was pulled up in a high position. On her back, a chic brown leather backpack; in her right hand, a fairly large sports bag.

Haruyuki stared vacantly for a while at this figure with an air of refreshment about her—he could almost forget the humid heat of the rainy season just looking at her—before he finally noticed the questioning look she was giving him. He remembered that he hadn’t actually responded to her yet.

He opened his mouth to say hello at any rate, but then thought he should maybe answer her in the chat window, too.

He hurriedly called up his holokeyboard and went to type out a reply, but he was still holding the brush and the hose. He quickly placed them on the ground and had lifted his arms back up when characters began flowing across the window once more.

UI> IT’S PERFECTLY FINE FOR YOU TO SPEAK TO ME.

“Oh…r-right.” His idiotic first words slipped out of him, arms still slightly raised.

The whole situation was full of things he didn’t understand. Why was the girl speaking in chat? What was this “sudden request” she mentioned? And why would a kid from another school—an elementary school to boot—show up there to begin with? About the only thing he could surmise was that the text tagging the beginning of her messages in the chat window was probably a nickname, a shortening of Utai to Ui.

Scratching his head with his right hand, which had nowhere to go now, Haruyuki set his confused thoughts free as vocal output. “Oh, umm. N-nice to meet you. I’m Haruyuki Arita…I’m in grade eight at Umesato. I guess I’m the president of the Animal Care Club…although I just started today…”

Immediately, the sentence UI> YES. I KNOW THAT THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB HERE WAS ESTABLISHED TODAY scrolled out at high speed.

“Huh? Y-you do? How? And…why would you go out of your way to come to some other school and help?”

UI> BECAUSE THE CLUB HERE WAS LAUNCHED DUE TO A REQUEST FOR COOPERATION FROM MATSUNOGI ACADEMY’S ELEMENTARY DIVISION.

“Huh? I-it was?!”

In contrast with the stunned Haruyuki, the elementary school girl was utterly calm as she explained to him why they were there in a way that was easy to understand, keyboard work increasingly brisk.

Umesato Junior High was a private, and at any rate, academic school in Suginami Ward in Tokyo. However, an education-related business, headquartered in Shinjuku, operated the school instead of an incorporated educational institution. This company also owned a girls’ school that went from grade one all the way through to grade twelve in Suginami: Matsunogi Academy, the school Utai Shinomiya attended.

Although Umesato had an almost thirty-year history, this paled beside Matsunogi Academy, in its ninety-fifth year since its founding. Put briefly, it was a rich girls’ school. Nevertheless, unable to avoid the nationwide wave of declining birth rates, the school had, due to management difficulties, been bought up ten years earlier by the current owner. The drastic countermeasures that had been taken to streamline school operations had been insufficient, so that finally, the company had decided to sell a part of the grounds that summer and build a new combined school building to house the elementary and junior high sections with the profits. Given that it was a school with a long tradition, parents naturally raised their voices in opposition, but the parent management organization was a publicly traded company with a bottom line. The decision was not overturned, and the current elementary school building would be demolished at the end of the first term.

However, the majority of the students welcomed the change because of the cutting-edge educational environment—starting with a high-spec VR local net—that was going to be introduced to the new school building, which the same corporation had cultivated at Umesato Junior High. But this move would reduce the total area of the school, and several facilities would not be transferred to the new building. One of these was the old animal hutch standing quietly in a corner of Matsunogi Academy’s elementary school.

UI> NATURALLY, I PROTESTED TO THE TEACHERS AND THE MANAGEMENT COMPANY. THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB HAS AS ITS MEMBERS NOT ONLY THE STUDENTS, BUT ALSO THE ANIMALS WE CARE FOR. THE STUDENTS MIGHT BE ABLE TO MOVE TO ANOTHER CLUB OR TEAM, BUT THE ANIMALS CANNOT. HOWEVER, THE COMPANY SIMPLY KEPT REPLYING THAT “THE ANIMALS BEING CARED FOR WILL BE HANDLED APPROPRIATELY BASED ON THE LAW.” WHICH IS TO SAY, THAT THEY WOULD BE KILLED.

“They wouldn’t!” Haruyuki called out reflexively, the instant he read that far into the smoothly scrolling text. However much profit-chasing was the mission of a publicly traded corporation, killing the animals because there was no longer a place to keep them was just too much. He couldn’t even imagine how great the shock must have been for the children who had been caring for them for such a long time. If they were going to do that, then—then…

Haruyuki’s righteous indignation slammed up against a thick wall and raced emptily.

He could also picture the situation on the management side: Building a new animal hutch would be difficult when the school site shrank to reduce costs. He felt like the students could maybe take the animals into their homes, but keeping animals was impossible unless you had a passion and the appropriate environment for it. That said, releasing them into the wild outside the city or something was out of the question, and more important, it was also a crime.

The girl with the old-style name of Utai looked at Haruyuki biting his lip, sunk into thought, and seemed just the slightest bit troubled. Her fingers started moving once again, and the text flowed quickly before his eyes.

UI> YOU HAVE NO NEED TO WORRY. NONE OF THE ANIMALS HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN DISPOSED OF YET.

“Huh? Th-they haven’t? Good…” Unconsciously, he let out a sigh of relief.

Utai’s fingers continued to dance out their explanation. UI> A FARM FAMILY WHO KEEP FREE-RANGE BIRDS IN THEIR GARDEN OUT TOWARD SAYAMA WERE KIND ENOUGH TO TAKE IN THE SEVEN BANTAMS WE WERE RAISING. WE ALSO FOUND A RELIABLE PERSON WITHIN THE WARD TO ADOPT OUR TWO RABBITS. BUT THERE’S ONE ANIMAL WE CAN’T SEEK OUT A NEW HOME FOR DUE TO CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES.

“You can’t…look for a new home? Not you can’t find one?”

Utai nodded sharply. Her hair, tied up with a white ribbon, swung above her shoulders. The ends were so neatly aligned that rather than a ponytail, her hair looked like that of a girl from a samurai family in some period drama. A thoughtfulness flitted across her similarly traditionally Japanese face before the elementary school student ran her fingers over her holokeyboard. Quite a bit of time had passed since this strange conversation had begun, but she hadn’t made a single typo so far, and her word choice was excessively adult.

UI> HIS SITUATION IS A LITTLE COMPLICATED, AND HE NOW WILL NOT EAT HIS FOOD UNLESS IT COMES FROM MY HAND. ONCE, I TRIED TO FAMILIARIZE HIM WITH ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE CLUB AND ENTRUSTED THE FEEDING TO THAT STUDENT, BUT HE ESSENTIALLY WOULDN’T EAT AT ALL AND QUICKLY LOST WEIGHT. I’LL GO OVER THIS IN DETAIL AGAIN TOMORROW WHEN I BRING HIM HERE, BUT BECAUSE OF THIS SITUATION, THE ABSOLUTE NEED AROSE TO FIND A NEW PLACE TO KEEP HIM WITHIN A RANGE I AM ABLE TO COMMUTE DAILY.

“I—I get it,” Haruyuki said, his physical voice three times more faltering than Utai’s typing, as the situation finally sank in. “So then, Umesato, which is part of the same corporation, has this animal hutch they’re not using, so they offered it to you and started an Animal Care Club here, too. But our main job isn’t to care for any animals, but to clean out the hutch, which is why only three people were recruited…Is that it?”

UI> THAT’S EXACTLY RIGHT. I APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE FOR YOU.

“Oh, no, it’s fine…But I’m kinda surprised our school was so ready to help out. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but our admin’s pretty cold. I got the impression they wouldn’t do even a minute of extra work for anything.”

We might be in the same corporate group, but if they can be nice enough to keep some other school’s animals here, maybe they could’ve taken a little better care of me when I was getting beat up last year. The thought he couldn’t actually say aloud went round and round in his head.

Almost as if reading his mind, Utai said—or rather, wrote, UI> I’M SORRY. THERE ARE ACTUALLY CIRCUMSTANCES AROUND THIS. I KNOW SOMEONE ON THE STUDENT COUNCIL HERE, SO SHE WAS ABLE TO MAKE THE ARRANGEMENTS FOR ME.

“Oh, is that what happened?”

That made sense. The majority of students in the elementary division of Matsunogi Academy went directly on to the junior high and high school divisions, without having to deal with entrance examinations, but he had heard that kids from families that really care about those exams sometimes came to Umesato Junior High. In which case, it wasn’t at all strange that Utai would know someone at this school.

Having heard—or rather read—the explanation this far, Haruyuki finally understood why he had suddenly become a member of the Animal Care Club. The basic reason was that the club at Matsunogi Academy in the same corporate group had been eliminated, and the reason for that was the streamlining of operations. And the reason for that was the declining birth rate, which showed no signs of stopping; in short, it was society’s fault. Although, naturally, ending up president of the Animal Care Club and cleaning the hutch by himself was Haruyuki’s own fault.

“Right…You’re pretty amazing, Shinomiya. I mean, you go up against a big company, find adoptive homes, and even come all the way to another school for the sake of these homeless animals. When I was in fourth grade, the only things I ever thought about were video games, manga, anime, and snacks,” Haruyuki murmured, heartfelt.

Utai shook her head quickly, a serious expression on her face. Slipping her backpack off her shoulders, she dexterously tapped away at the keyboard. UI> I PLAY GAMES, TOO. AND NOW THAT I’VE BEEN ABLE TO GO OVER WITH YOU THE CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING UP TO THIS SITUATION, I’D LIKE TO HELP CLEAN THE HUTCH, A RITA-SAN.

“Oh! R-right.” He finally remembered that he had been in the middle of the club work and hurried to pick up the hose and deck brush at his feet.

He couldn’t see the point of it when he had been cleaning by himself, but now all these bits and pieces had been explained to him—and, more important, now that he knew there was actually an animal moving in here—he had to put some real elbow grease into the work. “All right! Let’s do this!” he cried out with new resolve in his heart, and turned his eyes to the hutch.

The cleaning would be done once he rinsed away the remaining slush and leaves stuck to the floor, but he had been struggling with how to turn the water valve on and off. He was actually grateful someone had shown up to help him at such a perfect time.

“Okay, then, maybe I could get you to turn that valve on and off for me?” Haruyuki pointed to the base of the hose.

Utai cocked her head, confused. UI> IS THAT THE ONLY TASK YOU NEED ME TO DO? I DID COME IN MY GYM CLOTHES, PREPARED TO GET DIRTY.

Reading this, Haruyuki stared at Utai again—white short-sleeved shirt with the school emblem on the chest, similarly white shorts covering skinny legs—and quickly averted his eyes. The gym clothes at Umesato were navy blue, but basically the same style otherwise, and he should have been accustomed to seeing girls wearing this outfit at school every day. But when he thought about the fact that the girl before him was one of Matsunogi’s princesses, he got the feeling he shouldn’t be looking at her. If Chiyuri found out thoughts like this had even crossed his mind, she would totally shoot endless super-firepower beams from both eyes.

“Y-yeah. Just gotta scrub the floor with the brush, and it’s all done! So, uh, when I give the signal, please open the valve about three-quarters!” he told her, voice slightly raised, before trotting back over to the animal hutch. He decided to rinse it out from the far side and readied the hose and brush before shouting, “G-go ahead!”

UI> I’M TURNING IT ON NOW.

He got an instantaneous reply via text, followed by a fairly modest stream of water coming from the end of the hose. Keeping a careful eye on the water gauge in the edge of his vision, he thoroughly rinsed an area about one square meter and then instructed, “Turn it off!” In lieu of a reply, the valve squealed shut.

Putting his strength into scrubbing, he easily peeled away the last of the leaves and dirt stuck to the floor to reveal the ceramic tile beneath. Fortunately, it appeared to have been given a solid weather- and dirt-resistant coating, and there were relatively few depressions or cracks for how many years it had sat there covered in wet leaves. If they just let it dry out for a day, it would likely return to its original appearance.

Haruyuki deftly shifted between watering an area and brushing it out. If he had had to turn the valve on and off himself, his efficiency would have no doubt dropped significantly. But more than that, just thinking that he had someone working seriously alongside him had the strange effect of strengthening his desire to get the job done, despite the fact that he had been incredibly listless working with Hamajima and Izeki, both of whom made their annoyance plain with their entire bodies.

Twenty minutes later, he was done brushing the entire floor. “All right! Now we just need to put on the finishing touches,” he said, stretching hard. He turned around to call out to Utai Shinomiya crouching down by the stopcock. “Okay, I’m going to rinse the whole floor now, so open it all way!”

Instead of nodding, Utai tapped her fingers in space. Pink text rolled into his field of view, somewhat coldly, perhaps not wanting to intrude. UI> IF I WOULDN’T BE IN THE WAY, WOULD YOU ALLOW ME TO HELP AS WELL? IT WOULD BE MORE EFFECTIVE TO USE THE BRUSH AT THE SAME TIME AS THE WATER COMES OUT, AND I WOULD LIKE TO WORK A LITTLE.

“Oh! No, you’re working plenty already. But if that’s what you want,” Haruyuki mumbled and held the deck brush up. Utai got the smallest expression of delight on her face, and then nodded sharply before resting her right hand on the valve and typing adroitly with her left.

UI> ALL RIGHT. I’M COMING, THEN.

“Great!”

The valve squeaked all the way open, and the hose shook forcefully from the base. Utai started running earnestly as if trying to overtake the water racing along inside the hose.

Springing into the hutch a few seconds after the high-pressure water began to gush out, the girl took the brush from Haruyuki and turned her focus on pushing the water flooding the floor out through the mesh. She matched her breathing with this movement, and Haruyuki showered the hutch from front to back with the stream of water, clutching the hose with both hands because it threatened to fly away. The remaining 20 percent in the water meter approached zero before his eyes, but each time the deck brush moved with a forceful scrape, the ceramic tiles beneath took on their original attractive light brown.

Utai’s brushwork was actually impressive, the way she put her back into it. She was probably used to this sort of large-scale cleaning. Feeling a curious admiration for the princess school, Haruyuki stayed steadfast with the hose and pushed the garbage floating on the floor to the outside. In mere minutes, the floor was sparkling like an entirely different floor, and at the same time, they had almost used up all of the water allotted to them by the system.

Perfect rationing, if I do say so myself! Feeling a certain satisfaction in his heart, Haruyuki looked at Utai with a smile and started, “Okay, now the valve…” before stopping in his tracks.

His partner had been in charge of the valve but was now inside the hutch, and so couldn’t reach the spigot. And that valve wasn’t automatic, so the water wasn’t going to stop when they reached their limit. Which meant they would be over their allotment in a minute or two if the water kept flowing like this. Naturally, he wouldn’t be arrested and sent to jail or anything, but a “minor infraction” would be noted on his record in the local net, and that would lead to a teacher having words with him at some later date, words he very much did not want to have.

“Crap.” Haruyuki instantly gripped the hose as hard as he could. The dammed water flow shuddered in protest, but the meter essentially stopped. Astutely guessing the situation from Haruyuki’s actions, Utai stopped her typing, threw the brush down, whirled around, and ran for the stopcock. And then it happened. Catastrophe.

Haruyuki’s thumb applying firm pressure to the hose slipped, and the superpowered water surged out with overwhelming force, a fully charged long-distance attack and—

Splash! A direct hit on the gym-clothing-clad Utai from her right shoulder down to her stomach.

His brain overflowed at the magnitude of the disaster he had himself wrought; he froze. In contrast, although the much younger elementary school student did stop dead for a moment, a look of surprise on her face, she quickly started running again. She crouched down by the stopcock in the corner of the school building about three meters away and quickly shut the valve off. The water meter in the right corner of his vision was at 0.2 percent; they had narrowly avoided overusage.

But, unaware of this, Haruyuki remained frozen, the hose in his right hand hanging in the air. He watched Utai trot back over to him, typing as a tiny ocean of water drops trickled down from her torso.

UI> PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT THIS. I CHANGED INTO MY GYM CLOTHES BEFORE I CAME, READY FOR JUST SUCH AN EVENTUALITY. Then, the look on her face not changing, she pulled up a large chunk of the hem of the shirt plastered to her skin and wrung it out with both hands.

The paleness of the bare skin he saw whether he wanted to or not due to this innocent gesture crashed into the transmission of Haruyuki’s idling thoughts and got things in gear. The speedometer plunged into the red zone at once. When Haruyuki had finally recovered to the point of his normal reaction to stress and/or embarrassment—increased sweating, redness of the face, heart palpitations—he snapped to attention.

“I-I’m—I’m sorry!!” he shouted in an inside-out voice. “R-r-really sorry! Th-that totally wasn’t on purpose. M-m-m-my hand slipped a-a-and the water—the water splashed…”

Utai blinked a few times as she cocked her small head before her fingers flashed along once more. UI> IT’S FINE! I ALSO BROUGHT A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, SO THERE’S REALLY NO PROBLEM.

“B-b-b-but getting hit by water with that kind of power, your N-N…”

Your Neurolinker will get wet, he tried to say, looking at Utai’s slender neck.

Every model of Neurolinker, an everyday wearable device, was water-resistant to the extent that the wearer could wash or bathe with it on. However, the direct connection terminals and the camera lens were weak points, and there was the risk of water getting in and causing a malfunction if these areas were immersed in water or hit with a high-pressure jet. This was what Haruyuki was worried about. But.

He kept looking at the nape of Utai’s neck, covered by the broad-based ponytail, and he kept seeing nothing there. Just the tips of the fine hairs there glistening with tiny water drops; there was absolutely nothing in the way of a device.

“What…” The word slipped out of Haruyuki, struck by a new kind of surprise.

Utai Shinomiya was not wearing a Neurolinker. But that wasn’t possible. Less than an hour ago, she had made an ad hoc connection with his own Neurolinker. She’d been talking with him through the chat tool this whole time.

Thinking about it, Haruyuki finally stumbled on the question he should have hit a lot sooner: Why chat? He had just accepted it because they could have a conversation without any lag thanks to her incredible typing speed, but now that he was really thinking about it, Utai hadn’t said anything in her physical voice since she showed up. And naturally, there had to be some kind of reason for that.

Utai seemed to intuit the meaning of Haruyuki’s gaze. The irises of her eyes seemed to have a bit of red mixed in as she turned them on him directly. She slid the fingertips of her right hand, and instantly, a long vertical rectangle popped up in his field of view.

A name tag. Displayed in the center was UTAI SHINOMIYA and then in a slightly smaller font, SUMIRE CLASS, GRADE FOUR, MATSUNOGI ACADEMY. BORN: SEPTEMBER 15, 2037.” However, a resident net-certified name tag was generally horizontal; this one was vertical for an unexpected reason: An unfamiliar certificate was attached below the name display field. The text, in a severe Mincho font, read, CERTIFICATE OF PERMISSION FOR USE OF A DURA-CONTAINED TRANSMISSION DEVICE FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES, and then below that to the right, a stamp of authentication from the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare.

Haruyuki stared at the row of kanji characters, the meaning of which was difficult to grasp at first glance. He went backward and forward, trying to pull out the meaning. Contained transmission device was a microchip implanted in the body. And dura was probably inside the skull—the membrane surrounding the brain. So a transmission chip implanted in the brain…Then that meant—

A brain implant chip. BIC for short.

“Ngh!” Haruyuki fiercely resisted his body’s impulse to jump back in shock.

A mere two months earlier, a seventh-grade student had appeared before him soon after the start of the new school year, a boy with terrifying plans who tried to steal a great number of things from Haruyuki. He, too, had had a BIC. At the end of a long and difficult battle, he—Dusk Taker—had left the Accelerated World forever, but the organization he belonged to was still going strong. In fact, a second assassin, Rust Jigsaw, had jumped into the Hermes’ Cord race event the previous week and released a wide-range Incarnate attack forcefully boosted by his BIC, destroying the race itself.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine the Acceleration Research Society, the organization both Linkers belonged to, ramping up their attacks on the Accelerated World, so Haruyuki couldn’t help but be reflexively on guard against Utai Shinomiya, a BIC user he was meeting for the first time. But before all of this showed up on his face, his eyes finally fell on the last of the words inscribed on the certificate.

Medical purposes.

The members of the Acceleration Research Society—Dusk Taker, Rust Jigsaw, and Black Vise—had all had their BICs implanted illegally through black-market surgeries. Naturally, they would not have certificates of approved use from the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. Even if it was a fake, the complex stamp of authentication glittering on the surface of the tag at least could not be re-created, no matter what kind of hacker you were. Kuroyukihime had once presented a name tag with a revised name, but the tag itself hadn’t been created from zero. She had simply rewritten the encrypted name data. Although even that, no doubt, required a seriously high level of skill.

In other words, according to the certificate Utai was showing him, she had a legal BIC for medical treatment. In which case, what on earth was the medical problem?

Seeming to read these thoughts in his eyes with her sharp insight, Utai stroked her holokeyboard with a calm look. UI> I APOLOGIZE FOR NOT EXPLAINING SOONER. YOU WERE CHATTING SO NATURALLY WITH ME, ARITA, THAT I SIMPLY MISSED THE OPPORTUNITY TO MENTION IT. DUE TO EXPRESSIVE APHASIA, I’M NOT ABLE TO CONVERSE WITH MY PHYSICAL VOICE. SO I SPEAK WITH PEOPLE LIKE THIS IN CHAT, USING MY BIC.

“Ex…pressive?” Haruyuki said. He had a rough idea of what aphasia was, but was unable to dig out the meaning of the word attached before it.

Naturally, the explanation scrolled out from Utai, who was likely used to typing it. UI> BROADLY SPEAKING, APHASIA IS DIVIDED INTO THE TWO CATEGORIES OF EXPRESSIVE AND RECEPTIVE. RECEPTIVE APHASIA IS A SYNDROME WHERE THE SUFFERER HAS DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING WORDS THEMSELVES, AND IN THAT SITUATION, A MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING CANNOT BE REACHED VIA CHAT. IN CONTRAST, EXPRESSIVE APHASIA IS A SYNDROME IN WHICH THE FUNCTION TO MOVE THE VOCAL ORGANS AND SPEAK IN WORDS IS INHIBITED. WE CAN UNDERSTAND WORDS, HOWEVER, SO READING AND WRITING IS POSSIBLE.

Haruyuki read the text displayed over and over until he finally digested the difference between the two, and then timidly gave voice to the question that popped into his head. “Umm…So then what about neurospeak with a directly connected Neurolinker instead of a BIC?”

Almost as if she had been expecting the question, Utai promptly typed out a reply. UI> NEUROSPEAK VIA THE NEUROLINKER IS NOT ACTUALLY THINKING, BUT A VOICE THAT IS RE-CREATED BY READING THE MOVEMENT SIGNALS OF THE SPEAKER ATTEMPTING TO MOVE THEIR MOUTH, TONGUE, AND CHEEKS. SOME PEOPLE WITH A MILD FORM OF EXPRESSIVE APHASIA ARE ABLE TO DO THIS, BUT THE SIGNALS TO PRODUCE A VOICE ARE COMPLETELY BLOCKED BY NEURONS SOMEWHERE IN MY BRAIN. LIKE THIS.

Here, Utai stopped typing and turned the index finger of her right hand toward her mouth. As Haruyuki stared intently, the small lips the color of cherry blossoms gently opened. He could just barely see the tip of her tongue between her droplet teeth shining like pearls. She took a deep breath and went to expel it as sound. Before she could, there was a hard, sharp clacking sound, and her top and bottom teeth were biting down forcefully. The tendons around her throat popped up thinly, trembling, showing the great effort in her jaw. He heard the creak of her teeth clamped down against her will, and a hint of pain crossed Utai’s neat face.

“I-I’m sorry! That’s good, that’s enough!!” Haruyuki cried out unconsciously, and took a step forward. He stretched a hand out toward a slim, rigid shoulder, but he hesitated to actually touch her and froze in a halfway position.

Fortunately, the tension in her was released a few seconds later. She tottered for a moment and, expelling a deep breath, she lifted her face and began typing only the slightest bit awkwardly. UI> I APOLOGIZE FOR WORRYING YOU. I WASN’T INITIALLY INTENDING TO REALLY TRY AND USE MY VOICE, BUT I GOT THE FEELING THAT PERHAPS I MIGHT BE ABLE TO SPEAK, AND I JUST…THERE’S NO REASON I WOULD BE ABLE TO, AND YET I DID SOMETHING SO STUPID. I DO APOLOGIZE.

“You don’t need to apologize.” Haruyuki shook his head fiercely. Deeply regretting that a mere minute before he had been alarmed by Utai’s BIC, he spoke urgently. “I-I’m the one who’s sorry, asking you about all this just to satisfy my own curiosity. I should know better; I know how neurospeak works…If I had just thought about it a little more…I’m the stupid one.”

Unable to look at her anymore, he dropped his head, and cherry-colored text scrolled slowly against the backdrop of the hutch’s floor tiles shining in the evening light that leaked in.

UI> THANK YOU SO MUCH. I’M NOT BOTHERED BY ANY OF THIS, SO PLEASE, ARITA, I HOPE YOU WON’T BE, EITHER. NOW THEN, SHALL WE PUT AWAY THE TOOLS? THE HUTCH IS SO NICE NOW. THAT’S MORE THAN ENOUGH CLEANING. I’M SURE MY LITTLE ONE WILL BE VERY HAPPY.

Haruyuki timidly raised his eyes and looked at Utai’s small face. Just as she had said—or rather written—there was not the slightest hint of ill humor there, and he finally relaxed his shoulders, nodding. “Right. I’ll put everything away. You should hurry and change. There’s an emergency exit on that side of the school building, and there’s a washroom on the left side a little ways in down the hallway there.” He spoke at high speed and had picked up the brush when a fairly forceful objection appeared in his field of view.

UI> I’M FINE. PLEASE LET ME FINISH THIS WITH YOU. I’LL TAKE THE HOS Her words stopped abruptly as she took a sharp breath.

Choo! she sneezed, somewhat adorably.

That was the first time Haruyuki heard Utai Shinomiya’s real voice.

5:45 PM. Having completed the mission to clean the animal hutch and return the cleaning tools, Haruyuki opened the Animal Care Club activity log file, added his name after the authentications already saved for the other two members, and sent it to the school system.

“Phew.” He let out a deep breath and once again looked around the now-clean space.

Although there were still little puddles of water here and there, the ceramic tiles, original light-brown color reinstated, were like a whole different floor from the mulch layer that was there before he started working. The stainless steel chicken wire and the plank walls were dusty, but they would clean up nicely if he took a brush to them the next day.

Of course, the emptiness inside was balanced out by the little mountain of dead leaves and dirt he had made in front of the hutch, but he should be able to stuff that into a garbage bag and throw it away once it dried. Fortunately, the weather forecast was predicting no real rainfall over the next few days, so it wouldn’t take too long for it to dry out.

“When you put your mind to it, you really can do it,” Haruyuki murmured.

Utai Shinomiya had finished changing and quickly typed out, UI> YESTERDAY, I ACTUALLY WAS ALLOWED TO TAKE A PRELIMINARY LOOK AT THE HUTCH. AT THE TIME, I EXPECTED THAT IT WOULD TAKE THREE OR FOUR DAYS BEFORE IT BECAME USABLE. BUT THE WORK’S GONE SO MUCH MORE QUICKLY THAN I ANTICIPATED. IT SEEMS I’LL BE ABLE TO BRING THE ANIMAL WHO’LL BE LIVING HERE TOMORROW. THE ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN QUITE INSISTENT ABOUT MOVING THINGS ALONG, SO THIS HELPS ME IMMENSELY. THANK YOU SO MUCH, ARITA.

“Oh, uh…If I had just been a little more together,” Haruyuki mumbled, omitting the words if I hadn’t sent the other two club members home early, “we could’ve finished a bit sooner. And…now I’m really curious. What kind of animal are you going to keep here?”

He glanced at Utai standing there next to him, and her large eyes with their red-tinged irises sparkled. She tapped just the index finger of her right hand rhythmically. UI> NOT. TELLING.

“O-oh. Then I guess I get to find out tomorrow,” he fumbled out in reply and once more turned his gaze directly to his side.

The summer uniform at Matsunogi Academy elementary was a straight-line dress with a white sailor collar and two wide darts running down from fairly high up on the waist. The whole silhouette was somehow reminiscent of old-style hakama pants.

Haruyuki’s eyes stopped unconsciously for a few seconds on this unfamiliar uniform before he brought his eyes hurriedly forward again. “Th-the school closes in ten minutes, so we should get going. Thanks for your help today.”

UI> THANK YOU. I LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AGAIN TOMORROW. Utai then typed something unexpected. I’M GOING TO GIVE MY GREETINGS TO THE STUDENT COUNCIL OFFICE, SO PLEASE GO ON AHEAD OF ME, ARITA.

“Huh?” He whirled his whole body to the right to stare at Utai.

She had indeed said before that she knew someone on the student council, but even still, it took surprising nerve for a fourth grader to march into the student council office of some junior high school.

She met his wide-open stare with a strange look and then dipped her head, typing coolly, UI> WELL THEN, IF YOU’LL PLEASE EXCUSE ME. HAVE A GOOD DAY, ARITA. She spun around and started walking briskly toward the main gate.

“O-oh, I’ll come, too!” Haruyuki called out to her back, half reflexively. “I know someone in the student council, too, so…”

He didn’t know how many people would still be in the student council office on the first floor of the first wing, but there was a pretty high probability that Kuroyukihime was among them. Kuroyukihime might very well react with the same feelings of alarm as Haruyuki at Utai’s BIC. He needed to tell her as soon as possible that there was no way that Utai, who wasn’t even wearing a Neurolinker, could be an assassin from the Acceleration Research Society or anything like that.

Utai looked at him trotting up alongside her, a curious expression on her face, but she simply nodded without saying—writing—anything.

They entered the campus through the main gates, and just as he had changed out of his filthy sneakers, a warning announcement from the school system played in his vision and hearing. He frowned at the synthetic voice, rambling on about how anyone who did not leave the school within five minutes would have a third-level infraction of school rules noted on their personal record. Even with the privileges of a club president, this was a rule he could not disobey. The only ones who could request permission to stay after the school closing time were the members of the student council.

His only choice was to get Kuroyukihime to let him stay longer, but he wasn’t sure she would approve of mixing business and personal like this. Heart racing, Haruyuki walked down the hallway of the first school wing, while Utai Shinomiya next to him looked as calm as she always did.

When I was in fourth grade, there’s a good chance I would’ve passed out just taking one step onto the campus of a junior high school I didn’t know. Pathetic thoughts racing through his head, he caught sight of the dead end on the west side. The door in the wall on the right led to the student council office. Now that he was thinking about it, in the year and three months since he’d started school here, he had never once been inside.

When Haruyuki hung back before the closed white sliding door, Utai raised her right hand without a hint of hesitation and knocked at a single point in the air. A holowindow was displayed, and she pressed the entry button.

Two seconds later, he heard the sharp click of the door being unlocked. Her expression unchanging, Utai slid the door open and stepped inside after bowing lightly.

Uh, umm, what should I…Haruyuki stood still in the hallway, agonizing even now, although he had already made his choice, until a familiar voice reached his ears.

“Sorry, Utai. My work here took longer than I expected. I suppose you’re not done cleaning the hutch yet? I’ll come and help right away.”

Huh?

There was no doubt that the voice he had just heard was Kuroyukihime’s. And she had called Utai by her first name, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which meant the person Utai Shinomiya said she knew on the student council was, in fact, the vice president, Kuroyukihime. Was that it? But what on earth could those two have in common?!

He stopped in his tracks, head reeling in confusion, and a new line of text scrolled across the chat tool still displayed in his field of view.

UI> THE CLEANING’S FINISHED. THIS GENTLEMAN HERE WORKED VERY HARD ALL BY HIMSELF TO FINISH IT FOR ME.

“This gentleman? Where?”

Hearing the suspicion in Kuroyukihime’s voice, Haruyuki realized he couldn’t lurk in the hallway any longer and so stepped awkwardly out of the shadows to cross the threshold. Head still hanging, he reached a hand behind him to close the door before nervously lifting his gaze.

Seeing the Umesato Junior High student council office for the first time, he found it much larger than he had expected. In the middle of the room was an elliptical meeting table, while a long office desk had been placed farther in by the window, and grid-like wooden racks had been set up on the walls to the left and right. All the furniture was a relaxed, dark-brown natural wood, a thick beige carpet was laid out on the floor, and there was even a large sofa set to the immediate left of the doorway, making it hard to believe that this was a room in a junior high school. The space was conceivably more luxurious than the principal’s office (which he had peeked into just once before).

Utai stood by the edge of the conference table in front of him, and Kuroyukihime was on one side of the sofa set. There was no one else in the room. Apparently, Kuroyukihime had been working overtime by herself, but what he hadn’t been expecting was her outfit.

“K-Kuroyukihime, why are you wearing that?” Haruyuki asked, instantly forgetting his questions about her relationship with Utai.

Kuroyukihime briskly brought her arms up to hide the formfitting black T-shirt and the navy shorts—her gym clothes. She pursed her lips, cheeks reddening slightly. “N-no, this is, er,” she said somewhat shrilly. “I simply thought I should be dressed to get dirty if I was going to clean that hutch. Anyway, more important, what are you doing here, Haruyuki?”

“Me? Oh…umm…Why am I here again?” Haruyuki mumbled, honestly not knowing for a moment, and Utai’s words marched across the chat window, exasperated somehow.

UI> ARITA IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE ANIMAL CARE CLUB. HE CLEANED OUT THE HUTCH FOR ME. WHEN I SAID THAT I WAS COMING TO THE STUDENT COUNCIL OFFICE TO SAY HELLO, HE CAME WITH ME, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHY.

Seriously, what was it…

At almost the same time he sank into belated thought, he heard Kuroyukihime sounding equally surprised and exasperated. “Y-you’re the club president?! How did…Oh, I see, the result of a lotto, then? Honestly, at such a difficult time, you do get pulled along with the currents, Haruyuki.”

If he said here that he’d volunteered through a misunderstanding, the whole situation would probably get more complicated, so he simply flashed an embarrassed smile. “No, it’s not that bad.”

Shifting his gaze, he was overwhelmed by the charm of Kuroyukihime in her gym clothes, a different appeal than her usual tidy, uniformed self. Maybe because she had her hair pulled back in a ponytail like Utai, the way she looked made him feel a bursting energy.

He stared vacantly until he stumbled upon the obvious question. “A-anyway, why were you going to clean the hutch out? You can’t be on both the student council and in the Animal Care Club…can you?”

“Oh, that. Well…” Kuroyukihime cut herself off as if having realized something and briskly moved her fingers over her virtual desktop. In Haruyuki’s field of view, a message scrolled by to the effect that he had been given permission to stay past school closing. Looking at his clock, he saw it was only seven seconds before six. He started to thank her, but she brushed his words away with a wave of her hand and continued.

“I assumed that just three people—all of whom would no doubt be decided by lottery—would be unable to clean that hutch in a short time. I promised Utai to make the hutch usable as soon as possible, you see. And I thought I would help clean until they kicked us out. I never dreamed you would be in the Animal Care Club, or that you’d be able to clean up that mess in a mere two hours. You did well, Haruyuki.”

She nodded deeply at him with a gentle smile, and an invisible hand squeezed his heart tightly. He simply stood there and stared into her eyes, not knowing how to respond.

The truth is, I was gonna skip out. But then I thought about how you were probably working hard at your own stuff, which gave me the strength to work hard, too. And yet you…Once your own work was finished, you were planning to go over and clean out that hutch…

He didn’t know how far this inner voice of his reached, but Kuroyukihime nodded slowly once more.

Interrupting this magical moment was the cherry-colored font scrolling across the chat window at super-high speed. UI> I APOLOGIZE FOR BOTHERING YOU WHEN YOU’RE STARING AT EACH OTHER, BUT I WOULD APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD TELL ME ALREADY. ARE YOU AND ARITA FRIENDS, SACCHI?

Blinking rapidly, Kuroyukihime looked at Utai to the right of Haruyuki. “Oh, right,” she said. “No, I’m sorry. That’s right, you don’t know, do you, Uiui? My mistake.”

Sacchi? Uiui? Dumfounded, Haruyuki looked back and forth between the two girls as he listened to Kuroyukihime’s concise explanation.

“He—Haruyuki Arita—is the vanguard of my Legion, my ‘child,’ Uiui.”

“Hng…?! Unh?!!”

Wh-wh-what are you sayiiiiiing?! Haruyuki shrieked in his heart.

Utai’s clear response flowed before his eyes. UI> OH, IS THAT HOW YOU KNOW EACH OTHER? IS ARITA THAT SILVER CROW?

“???!!!??!!?!?!”

I-I’ve been outed in the real before my own eyyyyyyes!

Reflexively, he started to flee, but the door was locked, and no matter how he pulled and it clattered, it wouldn’t open.

“Look, Haruyuki,” Kuroyukihime called to his back, utterly stunned. “I think you should be able to figure out just how this all came about. It’s obvious she—Utai Shinomiya—is a Burst Linker like us, and that she was a member of the first Nega Nebulus, all right?”