Chapter 12 - Rain Falls, Rain Stops, Next to You

The improvements moved forward without a hitch; in fact, they progressed at nearly ballistic speeds.

On May 13th, three whole days before the May 16th deadline, all of the improvements were completely implemented. Kai and Nanaka were in charge of debugging, and they finished on the same day.

Horrifyingly—truly, there was no better word—they didn’t encounter a single bug the entire time. The only issues they found were things that emerged from the specifications themselves, and the code had absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Apparently Aya had already been certain of that, because after she’d finished programming, she said, “There’s no way my code would have any bugs, but if you hit that one-in-a-million chance, lemme know!” and then diligently began working on her job in the clubroom.

How they’d gotten there aside, the end result was that the time they’d set aside for debugging had been unnecessary, and they had completed their work early by a significant margin. They were in a situation where they could throw up their hands and celebrate.

However, after their last day of development, Nanaka wore a sullen expression on the way home.

“Is... something wrong?” Kai mustered up the courage to ask as they walked home from Niigata Station.

Nanaka frantically waved her hands at him and pasted a smile on her face. “Ah, s-sorry! I shouldn’t be like this when we managed to finish up so nicely...”

“Is there something we left undone?” he asked.

“...No, that’s not it,” Nanaka denied and hesitated a bit before clenching her fists. “If I worked faster,” she finally said, “then couldn’t we have made more improvements?”

“Well...” Kai trailed off. No matter how skilled Aya was as a programmer, she wouldn’t be able to deliver a finished product without the necessary UI elements. Nanaka had done her best to make them, but ultimately, the majority of Aya’s time was spent waiting on Nanaka.

“That was just because Oushima-san is so amazing,” he told her. “Usually, she’d still have something else to work on while you were drawing up the UI.” Come to think of it, usually the programmer wouldn’t have been able to finish all that work ahead of schedule on their own.

But whether Aya was normal or not didn’t have any bearing on Nanaka, who felt as though she was holding her back. So, Kai said, “Aoi-san, I understand how you feel. Back when I was at Tsukigase, I used to feel the same way.”

“You mean, with the club president who wrote you the letter...?” Nanaka asked.

“...Yes,” Kai admitted. When he’d first joined the club, Akane beat all the fundamentals of being a planner from A to Z into him. After being thoroughly educated, he was assigned to the Rondo team. If she hadn’t spent the time training him, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up when working on the actual development team.

Akane’s regimen was simple; the two of them would both do the same tasks. They’d finalize specifications, draw up plans, and everything in between. Once they were finished with their work, Kai would check his against Akane’s.

Where Kai would spend five days designing a level, Akane would finish in three. Where Kai would take three days to complete a specification document, Akane would take one. If Kai needed a day to finish a handful of small tasks, Akane would be done before he knew it. There wasn’t any task he managed to complete faster than her, up to the very end.

“—Admiration, unneeded,” Akane had told him. “I have meetings and such that take up my day. As a result, I learned to work more quickly. You will be able to do the same, in time.” Kai took an extra layer of damage due to how nonchalant she was about it.

The daily schedule of the club president was worlds apart from that of a mere club member. Kai could wholly devote the time from when classes let out to when he went home to his assignments. However, Akane could not. Most of her day was taken up by meetings, which left her with little time to sit down at a desk and work. In the face of all that, she completed her work with overwhelming speed.

She was like the sun to him.

When you look at something intensely bright, your vision is swallowed up by the light, leaving you unable to see anything. It wasn’t any different from being blind in pitch black darkness.

“...gh,” Kai made a sound of pain, inspired by that last memory.

“...Shiraseki-kun?” Nanaka asked.

I messed up. Whenever Kai thought back on those times, he always found himself feeling terrible soon after. He stood still and waited for the nausea to pass over him. “I’m sorry... I’m okay,” he told her.

I probably don’t look okay, he thought next. It was easy to guess as much from how alarmed Nanaka looked. Kai tried to force himself to start walking to calm her down when he noticed something. Drip. A sound rang out from the top of his head. The little raindrop passed through his hair and slid down his face.

“Rain,” Nanaka muttered as the shower suddenly ramped up in intensity. What began as a dripping sound progressed into a dull pitter-patter, and finally into the loud constant sloshing of a harsh storm that pounded the asphalt around them.

They looked around for somewhere to take cover, but since they were in a residential area, couldn’t find a good spot. They tried raising their bags over their heads, too, but it did nothing against the relentless downpour. Nanaka’s soaked hair began clumping together in front of her eyes, and the portions of her blouse that were uncovered by her blazer began sticking to her fair skin.

The terrible feeling in Kai’s gut was washed away by the rain. “Let’s run for it...!” he yelled, taking the lead. He tried to think of places where they could hide from the rain, but the only spot he could think of was his own home.

The two of them dashed forward as soon as the crosswalk signal changed. Kai could hear the splashing of Nanaka’s footsteps as she followed behind him. They had been running for less than five minutes, but by the time they reached the eaves of his apartment, they were soaked to the bone.

“Ahaha, wow, this is some crazy rain,” Nanaka observed.

The first thing Kai noticed when he moved from Tokyo to Niigata was the volatility of the weather. It wasn’t as if it were always raining; rather, there were a lot of cloudy days on which you could expect sudden showers that began and ended unpredictably.

“The storms in Niigata sure do start and stop abru—” Kai began to say. He’d wanted to say so to Nanaka, but his train of thought had completely stopped in its tracks when he’d turned toward her so they could talk. He hadn’t meant to look.

Nanaka had taken off her ribbon because it felt gross when her wet collar clung to her neck. Now her white blouse was peeking out through the gap of her unbuttoned blazer. Soaked with rainwater, the blouse was clinging to her shapely chest, which was not-quite-large, and yet not-quite-small. When he caught a glimpse of Nanaka’s sky-blue undergarment through the transparent shirt, he froze mid-sentence, still staring directly at her. The scene from his bathroom flashed back into his mind.

Not even Nanaka would fail to realize what happened with a reaction like that. She frantically crossed her arms in front of her with a set of rosy cheeks.

Her movement brought Kai back to reality.

“W-Wait here for a second!” he stammered, unlocking his front door to run inside. He grabbed a bath towel and rushed back to the entrance. “H-Here,” he offered awkwardly.

“...Thanks.” Nanaka accepted the towel with a bewildered expression as Kai nearly busted down the door with his momentum.

“Um... Would you like to come inside?” Kai didn’t have any ulterior motives when he said that. Even though there was a roof above her, the eaves of his apartment were still outdoors; one small gust of wind could easily blow the rain her way. That being the case, drying herself off with a towel would be akin to using a bucket to scoop water out of a sinking ship, which was why Kai had offered to let her come inside.

It wasn’t until the words had already left his mouth that he realized Nanaka might not want to enter a boy’s house in this particular situation, but it was too late now.

Kai knew himself to be on the slow side already, but it was especially bad today. The cause had probably been the faint, light blue color he’d seen earlier. Plus, his memories of the bathroom were paying him a vivid visit. He desperately waved away those thoughts in an attempt to keep a straight face.

“...Then, just until I can dry off... Can I come in?”

Kai figured she would say no. That’s why, despite being the one who suggested she come in, it took him a moment to process her response. “Y-Yes! Of course...!” His answer was a beat behind the conversation as he opened the door for her.

Watching as Nanaka struggled to take off her soggy shoes, Kai began to wonder if his home was presentable for a visitor. Last time, when Nanaka came over to work on the specification document, he’d spent the entire day prior to her arrival cleaning every nook and cranny, and had even done a final check on the day of before welcoming her in. He wasn’t ready for a pop-quiz like this. Ahh, geez, he thought. Kai had been on the back foot for a while now. He felt like he was stuck in an awful loop where he’d fix a bug only for another to pop up, and yet another while he was working on the new one.

There was no use in worrying now, though. It was too late; Nanaka had already finished the battle with her shoes. It’s not as if he had the leeway to rush ahead and clean up now. It would be fine, he told himself. There wasn’t anything he needed to hide. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. For once, he felt grateful that Misako always barged into his room unannounced to try and uncover some kind of porno mag.

“Excuse me,” Nanaka sang as she walked inside slowly, with her shoes and socks in hand. Kai noticed she had taken off her dripping socks at the same time as her loafers. She probably did so to make sure she wouldn’t get the floor wet.

“This might be a little too warm, but...” After directing Nanaka to take a seat in the living room, Kai brought in a fan heater that he hadn’t cleaned up since winter. It was a gift he’d received from Misako upon moving in. He didn’t use it at all anymore, but putting it away was so troublesome that it ended up staying out. Every now and again he’d use it when he needed to dry his clothes quickly, and that was exactly what they needed now.

Kai handed her a dryer from the powder room as well, and then headed toward the kitchen, where he filled his electric kettle with water and flicked the switch to get it boiling. While doing so, he noticed that his own hair was just as soaked as Nanaka’s and went to grab another bath towel.

On his way, he saw that Nanaka was sitting directly facing the fan heater, and had laid out her socks and ribbon to dry in front of her. Kai wanted to say something, but he couldn’t think of anything and ended up quietly walking back to the kitchen while wiping his head down.

His plan was to fill the two cups he’d taken out with coffee before he remembered that Misako drank a ton of it a few days ago, and that he was now out of instant coffee. The only alternative he had was hojicha—a green tea, made unique by the slow roasting of the leaves—so he made some of that and brought it out to the living room.

“Thanks, Shiraseki-kun,” said Nanaka gratefully.

“We’re out of coffee... Sorry, I wish I could give you something better.” As soon as he’d said that, Kai put his hand to his mouth. ‘Something better’? Does that mean, basically, I, essentially, want to show her my good side? Did I want to look cool?

Kai hadn’t intended to say anything of the sort, but even he was able to read between his own lines. He must have subconsciously thought that the hojicha wouldn’t be impressive enough.

“...It’s so warm and tasty,” sighed Nanaka, who seemed oblivious to Kai’s internal confusion as she took a moment to relax. Seeing her like that, in turn, was Kai’s saving grace.

“......Shiraseki-kun,” she said suddenly.

“Y-Yes?”

“This goes back... to what we were saying earlier... Are you sure we didn’t need to do more?”

Kai finally understood why she was being so harsh on her own shortcomings: Nanaka was worried. What she was really asking was, Will this many improvements be enough to win the competition?

“It’ll be fine,” Kai said, although he hadn’t said it in order to console her, because it was almost guaranteed that they’d be winning the upcoming routine competition. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say their biggest obstacle was getting their programmer to work with them. Now, seeing Aya go beyond his wildest expectations solidified his confidence in the outcome of the match.

“For a routine competition, our opponent is chosen based on our rankings,” Kai explained. “It’s not exactly something to be proud of, but our game, MiSt, is near rock bottom. Therefore, our opponent’s social game should also be near the bottom of the rankings.”

“So you’re saying... we shouldn’t be worried because our opponents aren’t a big deal?” Nanaka wondered.

“To put it bluntly, yes. There’s a reason why the bottom ranking social games are where they are,” he answered. “Around the very bottom... most of them don’t really manage their games. In the event that they do implement some improvements, I predict that they’d implement three at most.”

Kai had already taken a look at all the social games near MiSt in the ranking boards. Of course, that included their opponent’s game. There weren’t any schools that had zero updates, but the updates were usually limited to once a month; the games could hardly be called social games.

Kai could empathize; managing a social game was most definitely not easy. It wasn’t as if your hard work would automatically raise your rank or receive praise from your users. To implement a single time-limited event required planning, specifications, material design, programming, debugging, etc. It brought down an avalanche of things onto your to-do list. For a club that only sort of wanted to create a game, it was hard to force yourself to continue with management.

The social games at the bottom of the rankings were often those who saw that reality and burned out, so it was unthinkable for a club in that position to suddenly implement seventy improvements. That wasn’t to say that numbers guaranteed victory, but against a school that had given up, it was safe to say they’d win. It was only natural.

“...I see,” Nanaka muttered.

“Are you worried?”

“Nope,” she said, and flashed him a light smile. “If you say we’ll win, then I can rest easy... I think.”

“...Right.” Kai couldn’t think of a way to continue their conversation, and he felt something swelling up in his body, so he hid his mouth with his right hand and turned away. What is this? He wondered. What is this feeling? Kai never knew that being trusted could feel this way; that there would be a little, squeamish feeling in his stomach that’d make him want to run off somewhere. But... when he saw Nanaka smile that way, he couldn’t help but remember a certain scene.

On that day in front of the station, lit by the evening sun, why had she cried? Kai thought about it every time he saw Nanaka. He wanted to ask, but never found the courage to do so, and had dragged his feet to the present moment. When they were writing the specification document together, he kept thinking that he’d ask at some point, but never managed to take the plunge. Now, they happened to be alone. If he missed this opportunity, he might never get another chance.

“Ah!” Suddenly, Nanaka raised her voice. She shouted in the very instant that Kai resolved himself to ask about the reason behind her tears, so that his heart practically jumped out through his mouth.

Nanaka rose up to her feet and hurried over to Kai’s bag, which had been casually tossed onto the floor.

“What’s wrong?” he wondered.

“Your bag!” she exclaimed. “Shiraseki-kun, you left your laptop in your bag! Won’t it break?!”

Oh, I did, Kai thought to himself. Out loud, he said, “That’s not an issue.” After picking up his bag, he noticed that the handle, the front, and pretty much the entire thing was soaked with rain. The laptop aside, his notebooks and other papers might have been ruined.

However, it wasn’t as if he’d simply left his laptop in the bag as-is; it was carefully tucked away in a waterproof case. The computer might not have stood up if he’d dropped it in a river, but should have been fine with a little rain.

Kai presented it to Nanaka as if to say, “See?” but she was crouched over with an envelope in her hands. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to look through it or to leave it in his room, but neither could he bring himself to throw it away, so he’d left it in his bag. It was the letter from his former president—from Kurenai Akane.

“Is this... the letter from before?” Nanaka asked wonderingly. “You still haven’t read it?”

“I’m sorry!” Kai blurted out an apology devoid of meaning before snatching the letter out of her hands.

“Ah, hey, don’t do that!” she protested. “It’s wet, so you have to be careful with it!”

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “I can lay it out in front of the heater and—”

“You can’t do that either! If it gets all stuck together inside you won’t be able to read it! I’ll get you some scissors!” Nanaka quickly pulled out a pair of scissors and handed it to Kai.

“...Shiraseki-kun?” she asked uncertainly. Her thought process was that he could use them to carefully open the envelope and confirm that it was still okay, so Nanaka seemed puzzled as Kai froze with the scissors in hand.

Of course, she would be, Kai thought. To her, it was but a simple letter. It was important to make sure it was okay so it wouldn’t become jumbled and illegible. She hadn’t meant anything more than that, and Kai would only worry her if he stopped now.

He took a long look at the scissors and envelope in his hands to calm his restless heart. This is nothing, he told himself. No matter what’s written in here, it has nothing to do with me now. I quit the club. I left the school. We’re strangers now. So, no matter what is written in this letter, I don’t need to worry about it. That was how it was meant to be.

Kai began cutting into the paper. A straight line across the top cut nicely, but the middle portion was wet, and just as Nanaka said, it stuck together too much for him to pull out the letter. He carefully resumed his scissor work and cut around the edge of the envelope, opening it like a book from the side to remove the letter. Gently, to ensure it didn’t fall apart, he opened it.

“If you should wish to, I plead that you might speak with me.” There was only a single line written there, which ended quite abruptly. The tail of the letter contained Akane’s signature and what seemed to be her personal email address. She probably wanted him to contact her through that.

The loud, nearly explosive thumping sound of Kai’s heart began to settle down. She... pleads? To speak with me? he wondered, and that was indeed the case. After all, the letter had been sent to Kai, so there was no one else she could be addressing.

Kai wondered what would happen if he contacted Akane. Was there something she wanted to discuss? After declaring that he’d quit, he’d avoided the clubroom and never saw her again at school, either. He’d ended up transferring without having spoken to her a single time. Thus, there was a reasonable chance that Akane had something she needed to talk to him about. There was also a chance that this wasn’t the case. Kai was the one who’d bit the hand that fed him. Who could assure that she wouldn’t simply denounce him, asking, “Why did you do it?”

“What’s wrong...?” Nanaka wanted to know.

“Oh, um, no, it’s... it’s nothing... at all,” Kai managed to tell her.

“...Really?”

Kai noticed that he could no longer hear the sound of rain pounding on his window. It seemed the storm was over.

“Shiraseki-kun, why... did you do something like that?” Nanaka’s voice wavered with a slightly pained expression as she asked.

Her question wicked away at Kai’s body heat, and he felt chilled.

“Um, I’m sorry,” she went on. “I got curious about the ‘big lie’ Eru was talking about... So, I looked it up. The stuff with your old school... B-But! I don’t think you’d do something like that without a good reason—”

“...I’m sorry. I can’t... tell you.” Kai was surprised at how low and cold his tone of voice was as he shut her down.

Nanaka attempted to continue, but ultimately tightened her lips. Then, she shot up with vigor. “Our promise!” she declared.

“...P-Promise?” As he peered into her determined expression, Kai had no idea what she meant. Then, immediately afterwards, he realized that she was talking about the promise he’d made that he’d ‘do anything she said’ for peeking in on her shower.

“I’m using that,” Nanaka declared, “right now!”

◇

What happened at Tsukigase? Tell the whole story, the whole truth, down to every detail. That was the order Kai expected to receive.

However, that wasn’t to be, as Nanaka simply said, “Come with me.” She put on her socks and immediately went outside, so Kai followed suit and headed for the front door.

The rain had already stopped. But the cloudy sky remained unlit by the sun and had filled with a mass of black and gray rain clouds, which were floating in place.

Nanaka was waiting a short space away from his door and continued walking once Kai caught up to her. She headed to a bus terminal near Niigata Station. The two hopped onto the Route C22 bus that happened to pull in as they arrived. Kai hadn’t ridden a bus since he moved to Niigata, so despite knowing which route the bus was running, he didn’t know where they were going. Nanaka gestured him to a seat and the two sat down, side by side.

After a bit of waiting, the bus set off along the street and crossed a large bridge. Through the window on his right, Kai could see the dark gray of the clouded sky reflected in the river. He snuck a glance to his left, where Nanaka sat in the aisle seat facing straight forward.

The bus rocked them back and forth for twenty minutes before they got off. Kai noted that they were near the aquarium, but it didn’t seem to be Nanaka’s intended destination. He followed behind her as she took the lead.

He had a feeling that he knew where she was headed by now as they continued down a path overflowing with greenery, with a windbreak made up of trees on either side of them. As the two walked in a line together, eventually the scenery opened up all at once.

The ocean.

Thinking back on it, Kai hadn’t come to visit the ocean after moving.

While Nanaka kept walking forward, Kai spaced out, surrendering himself to the sea breeze until she turned to wave him over. He hurried down the path and dropped down to the shore. It wasn’t quite the right season for a beach trip, and there wasn’t a single soul in sight. There was a seaside clubhouse in view that was, naturally, closed for business as Nanaka strolled through the quiet atmosphere with an air of familiarity. She stumbled her way across the soft sand to the water’s edge and then jumped up onto a concrete block that was laid out in a way that made it look like it was sticking out of the beach. Nanaka walked up to the edge of the concrete and finally came to a stop.

Once Kai caught up to her, she said, “After you,” and gestured with her hand toward the ocean.

“...Huh?” he asked in confusion.

“Well, we’ve come this far,” Nanaka told him. “So there’s only one thing to do, right?”

“...I-I’m not sure if we should jump in,” Kai said uneasily.

“Huh?!” Nanaka exclaimed. “Isn’t it still a bit cold for that? You’d get sick.”

Thank god. Kai was happy to hear that she didn’t intend to make him throw himself into the ocean for his brooding attitude.

“Okay, fine... Here, can you hold this?” Nanaka handed him her bag. Then she planted her newly freed hands on her waist, stretched out her back, and took in a huge breath, before expelling it all at once. “Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”

The harsh, breaking waves of the Sea of Japan, the shattering sea spray of water colliding with concrete, and her voice, wrung out for everything she had, all blended together and echoed beyond the ends of the ocean. “Pfwah!” She coughed, and then turned towards Kai. “Okay, Shiraseki-kun, your turn!”

“What?! Me too?”

“That’s right!”

Beckoned by Nanaka’s powerful gaze, Kai couldn’t bring himself to refuse. He didn’t know what the proper form was for screaming into the ocean—there probably wasn’t one, he figured—but just in case, he copied Nanaka’s actions from earlier. He stretched out his back, took in a massive breath, and expelled it with all his force. “Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!” Kai screamed out all the air in his lungs.

When he looked over to Nanaka, she was standing beside him with the most shocked face he’d ever seen. “Sh-Shiraseki-kun,” she said, “I didn’t know you could yell that loudly...”

Hey, you’re the one who told me to, Kai thought. Despite that thought, he himself couldn’t remember raising his voice this much before. It might even have been the first time he’d ever done it.

“You know,” Nanaka mused, “that wasn’t as refreshing as I thought it’d be.”

“No, it wasn— Wait, what?” Kai paused for a moment. “Aoi-san, you’ve never done this before?” To himself he thought, Then why did she think to do this? Why did she think to make me do this?

“No,” admitted Nanaka, crouching down to stare out at the sea and waving her left hand up and down to get Kai to join her. “Why do you ask?”

The ground was still wet from the earlier rainstorm, so he squatted down carefully. The sound of the crashing waves found its way to his ears more clearly than before, Kai realized. As he gazed far out into the ocean, he caught a glimpse of the setting sun through a faraway gap in the clouds. The light of sundown grew stronger as the clouds drifted along. The sky above him was the same dull gray, but off in the distance, a beautiful scarlet light created a stairway to the heavens.

“You see,” Nanaka explained, “whenever I’m feeling bottled up, I come here.”

“Bottled up?” Kai questioned.

“Like with rumors, or love, or my future... or my dreams. There’s so much, you know? So, when I feel bottled up, I come out here and just stare off into the ocean,” Nanaka told him. “The ocean is actually really expressive. Sometimes the waves are high, or the ripples are especially white, or if it’s sunny I can see distant islands... Days like these where it’s sunny, but only far away, might be kinda rare. And, well, when I sit here and stare for a while, eventually all that stuff stops mattering. I take that as my sign that I’m better again and go home.”

“I... see,” Kai said neutrally. His first impression of Nanaka had been that she lived in the sun, that she was different from him, that she lived in a world without shadows. That was “Nanaka” to Kai. Even when he saw her in class, she was always talking to her friends with a smile on her face. He didn’t think she would be someone who would worry, feel anxious, or bottle up her emotions.

“I won’t ask,” she announced. By the time Kai noticed, Nanaka’s eyes had moved from the ocean to him. “There are things I don’t want to tell people. Shiraseki-kun, I’m sure you have some too. So, I won’t force you to tell me.”

“Aoi-san, you have things like that too?” he wondered.

“...Yup. But if you keep it bottled up like that, it’s really stressful,” she told him. “When you said, ‘I can’t tell you,’ earlier, your face was... something. I wanted to show you that when I feel that way, this is how I deal with it.” Then, she suddenly raised her voice like she remembered something. “Ah, I’ve never told this to anyone before! So, it’s a secret! Okay?!”

“O-Okay.” Kai nodded, and Nanaka’s expression changed into a bashful smile.

They stared off into the sea for a little while longer until Nanaka got up and said, “Let’s go home.” The two of them got off the concrete block and went back to the beach the way they’d come.

Kai wanted to just tell her everything already. Yet, in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to call out to her as she walked on ahead of him. Nanaka turned around after passing the concrete and peered at him curiously while he stood still.

Feeling rushed by the sound of the breaking waves, he started after her without saying a word.