Chapter 18 - The Chosen Path of Thorns

When Kai messaged Akane, she replied immediately. It seemed that, as always, the flow of time was hot on the club president’s heels. However, “—Concern, unnecessary. I will free up my schedule in three days,” was her response.

On Saturday, four days after having sent that message, Akane arrived in Niigata.

Kai made his way to the train station shortly after noon and walked up the connecting staircase to the bullet train platform. Then he waited in front of the ticket gate for a moment. When he heard a train arriving from Tokyo, the burning sensation of his anxiety lit up like a fuse, creeping upwards from the bottom of his feet. His heartbeat quickened. Businessmen, some younger adults that seemed like college students, and families with children rode the escalator down from the elevated train platform. Kai strained his eyes to make certain that he wouldn’t miss her, but there was no need for him to do so.

At the very tail end, Akane gently strolled out onto the now-vacant walkway. Her footsteps were light and dry as they slowly drew closer. Despite it being the weekend, she was still wearing the same old Tsukigase High uniform. Her long, straight black hair was the same as he remembered it, and hardly curved as it slipped down her shoulders and fell to her waist.

Kai had worried that the nausea might return when he saw Akane, but thankfully this wasn’t the case. He greeted her, “Long time no see... President.”

She seemed uncharacteristically surprised at his greeting, and her eyes widened the slightest bit. “—Honorifics, unnecessary. You say the strangest things.”

“Strange?” he questioned.

“I am no longer your president, am I?”

“...That’s correct.”

“There’s no need to feel disheartened,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to reprimand you. In fact... Hm. I have been looking forward to this day, where I can speak to you simply as Kurenai Akane.”

Kai couldn’t sense a hint of falsehood in her words. When the two first began speaking to one another, Kai had just been some random user of LW. He sent messages on support tickets detailing his thoughts, analyses, and requests on every little thing until one day, Akane reached out to him. That was how he joined the social game club.

The two left the station and headed to a cafe that Misako recommended to Kai upon his request, where they ordered two coffee blends and sat down. Each table was set up like a private room, with walls blocking off the view of the tables next to them. It seemed like the perfect place to discuss complicated matters, and Kai realized that Misako might have had this in mind when suggesting the place. He hadn’t divulged any details to her, but Misako was mysteriously perceptive in these sorts of situations. It was likely that she’d seen right through him.

Their coffees arrived after a few minutes of waiting, and they took one sip each.

“...Quite good.” Akane exhaled deeply, as if to savor the taste before continuing. “Today, you have come to discuss your own matters,” she said. “I am well aware. However, I, too, have matters I would like to discuss with you. Forgive me, but I would like for you to listen to me first.”

“I... understand,” Kai said slowly. He’d prepared himself for this before coming: after all, the one who’d sent out a letter displaying her intent to talk had been Akane. He knew that, and he knew whatever she was about to say was beyond his control. But nevertheless, his heart was still uneasy.

Surprisingly, Akane gave him a sad smile. “Don’t make such a stiff face,” she said ruefully. “I am the one who is nervous here.” Then her smile disappeared and changed into a calm, serious expression that reminded him of earthen pottery. The unexpected scenario left Kai dumbfounded.

“I am sincerely sorry,” said Akane, her long black hair swaying forward as she bowed her head deeply toward him. Ignoring Kai’s shock, she carried on, “I know the whole of what occurred. I take no issue should you choose to blame me, as the responsibility of your exit from our school was that of the club... of myself.”

“P-Please stop!” he begged. “That wasn’t... I chose to do that myself. I didn’t want for you to come out and apologize like this!”

“My apology does not change what has happened,” she went on. “You may not wish for it, and if that is the case, then this is merely for my own satisfaction. However, I... I do not wish to become the sort of human being that can carelessly live out her days without regret—without apology— knowing that I failed to save an important colleague and friend.”

“President...”

“I told you,” she reminded him, “I am no longer your president.”

Kai found himself scrambling for an appropriate response to her apology. Thank you, he tried out mentally, before realizing that to thank her here would probably be wrong. I’m sorry, he considered next, but to apologize to her would be just as incorrect.

Speaking to Akane about the situation at the time would have caused an uproar, and Itou Haruka would have lost her place in the club. Convinced that this was the case, Kai had chosen not to confide in her that day.

However, there was the possibility that upon having discussed the situation with Akane, she would have found a way to neatly clean up the situation. For her, both the incident and Kai’s course of action were in the past-tense; she’d only heard the story after it was over.

Kai had come prepared to be blamed for his choices... He never would have guessed that she would apologize. And... she’d called him a colleague. She acknowledged him. Akane’s words brought him a simple, yet profound feeling of joy.

“However, the reason I contacted you was not merely to apologize,” she said next.

“...It wasn’t?”

“Let me be brief. Won’t you return to us?”

“...What?” Kai asked in surprise.

“Talks with the school have been sorted out,” Akane explained further. “All financial issues and expenses of that sort have been settled for the purposes of this proposal.”

“Does that mean...” As he attempted to sort out the rush of information she was hurling his way, Kai’s brain went into overdrive. Somehow, he managed to move his mouth into words, saying, “I would be able to go back to Tsukigase?”

“Correct,” Akane nodded. “We cannot publicize the truth of matters without your consent; if you do not wish for it, then a public announcement would only do more harm. However, if you do wish for such a thing, then we plan to disclose the whole truth publicly and repair your damaged reputation. Should you have any further conditions, I shall bring them to fruition.”

Can you really do that? was Kai’s first thought, but he then remembered that the girl sitting in front of him was none other than the one in command of the Tsukigase High Social Game Club, Kurenai Akane herself. The fact that she’d made the offer meant that the work behind the scenes was already completed. To readmit a student who’d already quit once must have taken a serious amount of discussion with the people in charge of the school, but it seemed that she had finished that work, too.

The only thing left was Kai’s response. “Earlier...” he said slowly.

“Yes?”

“...You said I was still your colleague—your friend. That made me very happy,” he admitted, while thinking, And that’s why I won’t hesitate. Three faces. Bright, noisy, and curt: their usual expressions floated into his mind. “I, too, have friends that I want to be there for. So... I can’t go back.”

“...I see,” said Akane.

“You don’t... seem that surprised.”

“When I received your message, I sensed that there was not much hope in bringing you back.” Akane’s smile seemed ever so slightly lonely.

Kai’s initial message to Akane contained one favor. That favor was both the largest and only means that he had to strike back against his fate.

“Let me say this now,” Akane said, reaching into her uniform’s breast pocket. Her slender fingers pulled out a single USB memory stick, which made a quiet clacking noise as she laid it onto the table. “I plan to assist you in every way I can.” Before Kai could reach out and grab the USB, her hand cut him off and she added, “But, are you sure about this?”

Her gaze was testing him, and he looked directly back at her. “...A name sullied through game development can only be cleansed by game development,” he said slowly. “That’s why... I’m going to build Rondo back up.”

Earlier, Akane had stated that she would repair Kai’s broken reputation, which was easier said than done. Of course, Kai needed it to happen, but the terrible impression his name now left wouldn’t be wiped clean with just an announcement. No matter how loudly he screamed that he was clean, a dirty name passed around on the internet would stick around like a stain unaffected by the laundry machine.

There was no way to erase the past—no way to make it so that this had never happened. In that case, there was only one thing to do. Rondo had dropped through the rankings after the incident, and Kai would build it back up. Instead of deleting the negative press, he’d overwrite it with overwhelmingly positive buzz. He’d flip the whole thing on its head. The student council wouldn’t be able to say anything about the Shiraseki Kai’s misdeeds then. He was sure that this was the path he had to take.

“Should you fail, your wounds will only grow deeper,” Akane warned him. “Do you understand that?”

Kai nodded deeply. His response acted as a key to the gate, and Akane moved her hands away. She beckoned him to take the USB, and Kai picked it up.

“All the necessary data has been included,” she told him. “If there is anything else you find yourself in need of, contact me. This is obviously confidential data, so make sure to dispose of it properly.”

“Yes... Thank you very much.”

“One more thing,” Akane continued. “Your time limit is two weeks.”

“...Two weeks,” Kai echoed.

“To begin with, we planned on using our weekly meeting to discuss the future direction of Rondo in two weeks’ time. This is a serious issue for all of us at Tsukigase. I cannot shift the schedule for you... I hope you understand.”

“I do,” he said simply.

“—Will, immovable. A good response, Shiraseki. I look forward to your proposal.” With those words, Akane left him and returned to Tokyo.

◇

“K-Kai-kun, are you sure this is okay...?” Kai nodded his affirmation as Nanaka looked him over. She took a big gulp and said, “Here I go...!”

Nanaka had a hammer in her right hand, and exuded a sense of nervousness. Her full attention was on the clubroom’s table, which was covered in newspapers and had a plastic bag in the middle that contained a single USB memory stick.

“Hyahhh!” she cried. The thud of her strike and the dry shattering of plastic and metal accompanied Nanaka’s shout and reverberated throughout the room. The dull vibration made its way to Kai’s fingertips, as he sat with his laptop at the very same table.

“Oh,” he reminded her, “make sure to break the part with the black chip.”

“I got it!” she declared.

“A lowly non-officer member of the club has no right to be ordering Nanaka around like this,” Eru sneered.

“Eru, it’s fine!” said Nanaka reassuringly. “Don’t worry about her, Kai-kun!”

Kai thought he heard Eru click her tongue just quietly enough so that Nanaka wouldn’t hear it, but he would. He decided not to hear it, either, and returned his attention to the laptop in front of him.

He was looking at the data extracted from the USB that Nanaka was now destroying; insider information on the state of Girls’ Symphonic Rondo. These files contained all the data on Rondo’s current state of affairs: the KPI values spanned both the time after he left and the time before it, and there were documents that had been written up by Tsukigase’s data analysis team.

Considering that it was confidential information of the highest degree, Kai needed to be extremely cautious of its spread. He couldn’t bear the thought of carrying it around with him and having something go wrong, so he’d decided to move all the data to his computer and quickly destroy the USB. There were methods to restore data even after wiping the stick, so the fastest way of taking care of accomplishing this task was to physically break the USB. Kai was pretty sure that was what Akane meant by, ‘Make sure to dispose of it properly.’

Thud, thud, thump, thump, crunch, crunch. Kai listened to the sound of Nanaka’s diligent efforts as he ran through the documents and let out a subconscious sigh.

“Wheeeew. That’s a deep sigh,” Aya pointed out.

“...My bad.”

“It’s not something you gotta say sorry for, but I didn’t expect you to go for broke without a plan like this.”

“Oh dear, you truly are a giga-masochist,” Eru observed again.

“That’s worse than before...” Kai noted.

“...And? Senpai? You still don’t have anything you wanna discuss with us?” Aya suggested pointedly.

“There’s...” so much I want to discuss, he thought, but the data he was currently confronting had paralyzed his brain.

Ever since the information leak, Rondo had tumbled through the rankings day by day. It was finally at a point where its ranking stabilized—which sounded great, until you realized that it had reached the bottom of the rankings.

Looking at the KPI, the issue stemmed from a massive drop in sales, which had dropped instantly on the day of the incident. There wasn’t any trace of earnings to look at now. They didn’t have zero sales, but it seemed that their only income was from users who were new to the game spending money, and that the long-standing core users had long since stopped making purchases.

The users stopped spending, and their earnings went down: anyone could understand that much. The problem was what came next. Usually, the underlying reason for that would be something like: ‘Users stopped playing the game and thus our active user count is lower,’ or ‘We haven’t put out attractive events, thus our purchase rate per user is dragging behind.’ Then, from there, they’d be able to break down and analyze why people stopped playing, or why people didn’t enjoy an event.

Kai couldn’t do that for Rondo. Despite a lack of earnings, Rondo’s user base had not gone down. In fact, the user count had increased, perhaps due to the massive storm of media coverage that came with the leak. Retention wasn’t an issue, as many users continued to play even after the incident. And yet, the gacha alone simply had not been touched.

Even when a character who was popular with their core users was released, there wasn’t the slightest sliver of movement in Rondo’s sales. Before the scandal, they could’ve expected a huge uptick in earnings from such an event.

Kai would have understood it if maybe the user base didn’t find the gacha appealing, but that clearly wasn’t the case: the users were still there, playing Rondo. But due to mistrust in regards to the gacha—or rather, the game’s management—they had simply stopped spending money.

That was Rondo’s current state of affairs.

“Hmm... this really is a toughie to figure out,” Aya muttered.

“...What fools. If they don’t like the game, they should uninstall,” Eru said, mocking Rondo’s fickle player base.

“Don’t say that,” Kai told her. “If they delete the app, that’s our death blow...” he had to be glad that there were any users left at all.

“Is that whole attitude of mistrust directed at the gacha?” Nanaka asked curiously as she continued to hammer away at the USB stick.

“I think it’s fair to assume so,” Kai said in agreement.

“Well, Rondo’s gacha was hella infamous for how brutal it was to begin with,” Aya added.

“Right... yeah.” Viewed through a cynical lens, that infamy could be considered Ginjou’s crowning achievement as Rondo’s lead director. He had implemented one new money-making system after the next in order to take Tsukigase’s number one spot as his own. Kai had been stuck in a grueling work cycle of attempting to implement events and campaigns in order to balance out Ginjou’s user-unfriendly management philosophy.

Aya tapped her fist into her palm. “How ’bout that one thing? ‘Guaranteed Gacha,’” she suggested. “They’re pretty common, right? The ones where you have to pay real money, but a ten-pull guarantees one of the rarest units. If it’s guaranteed, then trust has nothing to do with it, y’know? It’s not really my style, though.”

“That can be one of our ideas, but... I think it’d be tough to make it work.” Kai explained. “It wouldn’t mean anything if the rare unit you got was still random. Plus, that’s more of a band-aid fix. It would only boost sales for the event period in which we release it... And we can’t have them that often.”

“Welp, that’s fair. It’s not what we need right now,” Aya admitted.

“Gachas are simple, my dear,” Eru said, putting in her two cents. “If the characters are cute, then people will pull. I say, the perfect plan would be to commission a new illustration that’s so cute, it knocks people out cold. Then throw that into the game.”

“Pffffft,” said Aya, pretending to snicker. “If they’re out cold, then they can’t roll the gacha. Geez, this is why gacha noobs are a pain in the ass!”

“I didn’t ask for the opinion of someone whose skull is home to empty space,” Eru snapped back.

“That’s true,” Kai mused, pretending not to hear the two of them fight. “Appealing to our users with a beautiful drawing isn’t a mistake... but apparently, they tried that and failed already.”

It wasn’t as if the current management team behind Rondo was goofing off. In their desperate attempt to overcome their current situation, they’d had a period where they commissioned an excessive number of artists to draw characters for the gacha. Still, the sales hadn’t picked up.

“Then I am out of ideas,” Eru proclaimed. “If you’re going to sit here and nitpick at our suggestions, then I’m sure you have one of your own?”

“Eru, don’t say that,” Nanaka warned.

“No...” She’s right, Kai thought. To be honest, his initial estimates had been naive, much too naive. He didn’t expect to have to rack his brain over this sort of undecipherable KPI. But had he thought about it deeply, then he should’ve anticipated this. The talent of Tsukigase’s development team had thought through the issue thoroughly and were still at a dead end. He should have expected to face off against a massive wall like this one.

A lesson Kai once learned from Akane rose up in his mind. —Misconduct, prohibited. Under no circumstance should you betray the users’ trust, Shiraseki. What you built up can crumble to dust with horrifying ease, and will never return to what it once was. A social game that has lost its users’ trust is no more than a gilded husk.

Up until this very moment, he had never truly considered how difficult it would be to manage a social game that users had lost faith in. Social games didn’t have physical form; literally speaking—and this was often a term used to make light of the items that users obtained in social games—they were purely digital data. There wasn’t anything that you could hold in your hands, and one day, the service would come to an end and it would all disappear without a trace of the ones and zeros which had once built it up. The reason users played social games in spite of this was because—perhaps unconsciously—on some level, they trusted the management. To get people to believe in the worth of something they can’t see could be said to be the fundamental principle behind social games.

Now, for Rondo, that foundation was wavering.

“I did it!” said Nanaka, and her voice brought Kai back from his deep thoughts. She brought over the plastic bag, inside of which was the obliterated remains of a USB memory stick. There was no mistaking it—no one could extract data out of this.

“Can I have a look at that, too?” Nanaka asked.

“Oh, sure.” Kai slid the laptop toward Nanaka, who had taken the seat next to him.

“Nana-sen, can you understand some of the KPI now?” Aya questioned.

“J-Just a bit!”

“No,” Kai disagreed. “Nanaka-san knows more than enough when it comes to the basics now.” At the very least, the girl who saw DAU (Daily Active Users) and read it as DAU (Dragon and Uncle) was no more. Besides, Kai would accept help from anyone at this point so long as they helped him with a breakthrough.

Click, click. The sounds of Nanaka browsing through the laptop rang out. After taking her time to loosely check through the documents, her eyes were... shining, for whatever reason.

“This is amazing!” she exclaimed. “There’s so many people playing!”

“Y-Yeah,” Kai agreed. Her response was so straightforward that he simply couldn’t find anything else to say.

“If they’re playing, they have to be having fun, right?” she questioned. “But there still aren’t any sales...”

“I think that... would be the natural conclusion,” Kai agreed once more. If the game weren’t fun, then the user count would be just as devastating as the sales. That was the whole reason their situation was such a mess, though.

“Hmm...” Nanaka tilted her head back and forth as she looked at the screen. “...Do you think everyone would pay if it were ten yen at a time?”

“Nanaka...”

“Nana-sen...”

Eru and Aya’s eyes sank perfectly in sync. The two of them often clashed with each other, but in these situations their reactions were the same.

“B-But hear me out,” Nanaka said defensively. “Didn’t you have this thought when you were a kid: ‘If everyone in Japan gave me ten yen each, then I’d be a multimillionaire!’ Right?”

“Nanaka...”

“Nana-sen...”

“Geez! You two are so mean!” Nanaka puffed up her cheeks in a fit and suddenly turned to Kai. “Kai-kun, you’ve thought that before, right?!”

“...Umm......”

“Ah man, that’s looking like a no,” Aya said.

“That’s the face of someone who was too pessimistic to think anyone would ever give him money,” Eru accused.

What kind of face would that be? Kai wondered. That being said, Eru’s observation was otherwise spot on, so he couldn’t exactly say anything in his own defense.

“Millionaire aside, as Nanaka-san said, the fact that we have a lot of active users is amazing, and in fact, that’s...” not... wrong... at all. That was correct, he realized. It was amazing.

Before he could put it into words, Kai felt something burst and flash throughout his mind. That’s it, he thought. They already had a ton of active users. A lot of people were playing their game. In and of itself, that was something worth praising without reserve. On top of that, the users weren’t quitting right away; most of them had stuck around.

...Maybe he had thought too hard and tunneled his vision again.

“...Kai-kun? W-Was my suggestion that bad...?”

He shook his head to disagree with Nanaka’s worrying. “Nanaka-san, because of you... I think I’ve got it,” he said. “It’s a really big scale idea, so I’m sure it’ll be a huge pain, and it’ll take a lot of time... but if you all don’t mind—”

“Kai-kun.” Nanaka puffed up her cheeks on purpose as she cut him off. “This is the Meikun High School Social Game Club.”

“R-Right,” he agreed.

“We are friends,” she said firmly.

“...We are.”

“So, don’t hesitate to ask when you need our help. Right?” She turned back to reaffirm her statement with the others, and the two tired girls had, ‘Oh dear/Ah man, your personality is a pain in the ass,’ written all over their faces.

“...Sorry,” he said. They had until next Friday: whether or not he could convert his breakthrough idea into a convincing plan was only a matter of time.

“I’ve only just thought of this,” he began to explain next, “but hear me out...”