Chapter 1
“I won’t stand for it.”
“Are you still on about that…?”
It was early in the morning on the day of First High’s entrance ceremony, but still two hours before it began.
The new students’ hearts were all pounding with excitement over their new lives and the landscapes of their futures, but certainly few were as elated as these two.
In front of the auditorium, which would be the location of the entrance ceremony, a male and a female student, both clad in brand-new uniforms, were bickering.
Both were new students, yet their uniforms were slightly—but distinctly—different. It was not just the fact that the female uniform had a skirt and the male one had slacks. The emblem of First High, a design consisting of eight flower petals, was on the female student’s chest. It wasn’t on the male student’s blazer.
“How could they make my brother an alternate? You had the top grades on the entrance exam! You should be the one representing the new students, not me!”
“Leaving aside the question of where you got my entrance exam grades from…this is Magic High School, so they obviously need to prioritize practical magic ability over the written test. You’re well aware of my practical abilities, aren’t you? I may have only reached Course 2, but I’m surprised I even got this far.”
The female student was lashing out in harsh tones, and her male companion was currently trying to pacify her. Purely guessing from the female student calling him her brother, they might have been siblings—he the older, and she the younger. It wasn’t impossible that they were closely related.
However, if they were brother and sister…
…then they were not very alike.
The younger sister was a cute girl who naturally drew stares. Ten out of ten people, even a hundred out of a hundred, wouldn’t deny that she was lovely. The older brother, on the other hand, aside from his straightened back and sharp eyes, looked altogether average, without any features that stood out.
“Why can’t you have more ambition than that? Nobody can beat you when it comes to studies and martial arts! I mean, even with magic, you’re—”
The sister firmly berated the brother’s weak-spirited statement, but…
“Miyuki!”
…he called her name in an even harsher tone of voice, causing Miyuki to catch her breath and close her mouth.
“We’ve been over this before. There’s no point in talking about it.”
“…I apologize.”
“Miyuki…” He rested his hand on her bowed head. As he slowly caressed her glossy, smooth, long hair, the young man considered (rather pathetically) how to get her in a better mood. “…I am grateful you feel that way. You’re always saving me by getting angry on my behalf,” he said.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. All you do is scold me…”
“I’m not lying! It’s just that I feel about you the same way you feel about me.”
…What? For some reason, the girl’s cheeks flushed red.
He got the sense that there was some sort of disconnect he really shouldn’t be ignoring. Nevertheless, he decided to shelve his doubts in order to resolve the problem at hand.
“Even if you refused to make the address, they would never choose me instead. You would lose face for sure if you were to refuse them at the last moment. And you actually know that, don’t you? You’re a smart kid, after all.”
“That’s—”
“Also, Miyuki… I’m looking forward to it. I’m proud to have you as my sister. Go out there and show your useless brother everything you have.”
“You are not a useless brother, or anything of the sort! …But I understand. I apologize for my self-indulgence.”
“There’s nothing to apologize about, and I don’t think it was self-indulgent at all.”
“I’ll be going, then. Make sure you watch.”
“Yeah, you should go. I’ll be looking forward to the main event.”
The young woman bowed to excuse herself and disappeared into the auditorium. After seeing her off, the young man sighed to himself in relief.
So…what am I supposed to do now? He had accompanied the unwilling student representative to school for the rehearsal, but now he was at a loss, worrying about what to do for the two hours until the entrance ceremony began.
The campus had three parts: a main building, a practicum building, and a laboratory building.
There was an auditorium/gymnasium whose inner layout was mechanically alterable. There were libraries on the third floor and the second basement floor. There were two smaller gymnasiums. There was a preparation building used for changing rooms, showers, storage, and club rooms. The dining hall / cafeteria / vending machine area was in another building, and there were various other structures both large and small filling First High’s plot of land—it looked more like a suburban college campus than a high school.
The young man, in search of somewhere to sit while he waited for the entrance ceremony to begin, walked down a road of soft coat pavement made to resemble bricks as he looked back and forth.
The students used ID cards to gain access to the school’s facilities, but those wouldn’t be distributed to them until the ceremony ended. Even the public-facing café for visitors was closed today, perhaps to avoid the chaos.
After five minutes of walking around comparing what he saw to the map of the premises displayed on his portable terminal, he found a courtyard. It was behind the trees lining the path, which were positioned far enough apart not to obstruct the view.
Vaguely grateful it wasn’t raining today, he sat down on a bench for three, then opened his portable terminal and accessed one of his favorite book websites.
This courtyard appeared to be a shortcut leading from the preparation building to the auditorium.
Perhaps they were being made to manage the ceremony—already-enrolled students (to him, upperclassmen) passed in front of him, leaving a little bit of space between them. On each of the students’ left breasts was the eight-petaled emblem.
Their innocent malice scattered behind them as they walked away.
—Hey, isn’t that kid a Weed?
—Here this early? …Pretty enthusiastic for a sub.
—He’s just a spare, anyway.
A conversation he didn’t want to hear drifted to his ears.
Weed was the term used to refer to Course 2 students.
Students with the eight petals on the left breasts of their green blazers were called Blooms from the emblem’s design, and the students who didn’t have them were called Weeds—since they wouldn’t bloom into flowers.
This school had two hundred freshmen. Out of them, one hundred would be enrolled as students belonging to Course 2.
First High, an educational institution attached to the National Magic University, was a statutory body created to foster magic technicians. It was obligated to show a certain level of results in exchange for government funds. This school’s quota—the number of students it was to supply to the National Magic University, an institution for advanced magical training—was at least one hundred.
Unfortunately, magic education was prone to accidents. Magic failures, whether in exercises or experiments, were directly correlated with accidents that were anything but minor. The students were aware of such dangers—they had staked their own futures on their magical talent and possibilities in striving to become magicians.
They had a rare talent, and when rare talents are highly valued by society, few can abandon them. That was all the more true when it came to emotionally immature young men and women. The only visions of their future left to them were the spectacular ones. That wasn’t itself necessarily a bad thing, but the truth was that more than a few children would be hurt as a result of those ingrained values.
Thankfully, the accumulation of magical understanding had all but eliminated accidents resulting in death or physical handicaps.
But psychological factors could easily spoil magical talent. A significant number of students withdrew from school every year after trauma from an accident left them unable to use magic.
And the ones to make up for those losses were the Course 2 students.
They were permitted to register as students, attend classes, and make use of facilities and resources, but they had no access to the most important thing—individual magic practice with an instructor.
They studied unaided and produced results solely on their own merits. If they couldn’t do that, they would only qualify themselves to graduate as general education students. Without being granted the right to graduate from a magic high school, they wouldn’t be able to advance to the National Magic University.
Currently, the critical shortage of those who could teach magic forced them to prioritize those with talent. The Course 2 students were only allowed to enroll in the first place under the premise that they would not be taught.
It was officially prohibited to call Course 2 students Weeds. But it had established itself among even the Course 2 students themselves as a semipublic derogatory term. Even they thought of themselves as no more than spare parts.
That went for this young man as well. So there was no need to remind him of that fact by purposely speaking poorly of him within earshot. He had been fully aware of that much when he enrolled.
I really didn’t ask for your opinion, he thought, directing his attention to the book data he’d downloaded to his information terminal.
There was a clock displayed on his open terminal, and it pulled his reading-immersed mind back to reality.
Thirty minutes remained until the entrance ceremony.
“Are you a new student? It’s opening time.”
He logged out of his usual book website and closed his terminal, but as he was about to get up from the bench, a voice came down to him.
The first thing that caught his eye was the school uniform skirt. Then, the wide bracelet on her left wrist. It was the latest CAD model, but significantly thinner than the more common types, and with an eye toward fashion.
CAD—a Casting Assistant Device. It was also called simply a device or an assistant. In this country, some used the term broom, which in addition to being a classic magic accessory, was also a shortening of the Japanese word for “magic operator.”
It was an indispensable tool for modern magic technicians, providing activation programs for triggering magic in place of more traditional methods and tools such as incantations, charms, mudra, magic circles, and spell books.
Incantations to use magic properly with a single word or phrase hadn’t been developed yet. Even when using methods in conjunction with one another, like charms and magic circles, actually reciting the spell would take anywhere from ten seconds to more than a minute depending on what it was. The CAD substituted all that for a simpler control scheme that let you do it in less than a second.
You could still perform magic without a CAD, but it had accelerated the casting process by leaps and bounds, to the point where there were virtually no magic technicians who didn’t use one. Even the so-called espers, who could cause supernatural phenomena just by thinking about it, tended to sacrifice their specialization in certain areas in exchange for the speed and stability offered by the activation routine system.
However, not everyone could use magic just by having a CAD. They only provided the activation programs—actually executing the magic required the abilities of the magic technician himself. Therefore, CADs were useless to those who couldn’t use magic. If you saw someone who had one, it was near certain that they were involved with magic.
And if Tatsuya recalled correctly, the only students permitted to carry their CADs around with them on school grounds were those on the student council and members of certain committees.
“Thank you. I’ll be right over.”
At her left breast was, of course, an eight-petaled emblem. The swell of her chest that pushed out her blazer didn’t enter his mind.
He didn’t bother to hide his own left breast. He wasn’t so servile—but that isn’t to say he didn’t feel a sense of inferiority. He had thought a student-council-worthy honors student wouldn’t want to be so proactive in approaching him.
“I’m impressed. That’s the kind with the screen, isn’t it?”
But she apparently didn’t share that opinion. She was smiling as though she were enjoying herself, looking at the film screen of the trifolding portable information terminal in his hands.
It was then that the young man saw her face at last. When he stood up from the bench, her head was about twenty centimeters below his. He was 175 centimeters tall, so even for a girl she was on the shorter side. She was at the perfect eye level to verify that he was a Course 2 student.
But there was absolutely no condescension in her eyes—only a pure, even innocent, admiration.
“Students are prohibited from carrying virtual display terminals inside our school. Unfortunately, that’s the type most students use. But you’ve been using the kind with the screen even before you enrolled here, haven’t you?”
“The virtual kind isn’t suitable for reading, so…”
Anyone could tell at a glance that his terminal was something he was experienced with, so he didn’t ask any unnecessary questions in return.
He had replied with what was almost an explanation, because he thought being too curt would end up disadvantaging his younger sister more than himself. She was the representative of the newly matriculated students, so there was no doubt she’d be chosen to the student council.
His calculated answer, however, only served to deepen this upperclassman’s admiration.
“So you prefer reading to watching videos. You grow ever more unusual by the second. I appreciate printed materials more than images as well, so I’m rather happy to hear that.”
They did live in an age where virtual materials were preferred to text, but book lovers were still far from exotic. She seemed possessed of an almost unusually sociable personality—even when her tone of voice and word choice were growing more informal by the second.
“Ah, I do apologize. I’m the student council president of First High, Mayumi Saegusa. It’s written with the kanji for seven and grass. Pleased to meet you!”
She threw in a wink at the end, but her tone of voice was far from mysterious. With her gorgeous looks combined with her shapely body (despite her short stature), she had an alluring air that male students who had just entered high school couldn’t help but misunderstand.
And yet, after hearing her introduce herself, he found himself wanting to scowl.
One of the Numbers…and Saegusa, at that?
Ability in magicians varied wildly based on genetic disposition. The family you’re from was deeply important when it came to your merit as a magician. And in this country, it was customary for the families that possess exceptional blood for magic to have numbers in their surnames.
The Numbers were the lineages of magicians who had superior genetic predisposition, and the Saegusa family, with the character for seven in its name, was one of the two in Japan currently considered to be the most powerful. And this girl, who most likely was part of the direct bloodline, was this school’s student council president.
In other words, she was an elite among elites. It might not be a stretch to say that they were polar opposites. He suppressed a bitter murmur at that, somehow managing a friendly smile as he introduced himself.
“I’m—ahem. My name is Tatsuya Shiba.”
“Tatsuya Shiba… Ah, so you’re that one…” Her eyes widened in a show of surprise. Then she nodded somewhat meaningfully.
Well, after all, she probably means “that” dropout who can barely use magic, despite being the older brother of the top new student, Miyuki Shiba. He chose to politely remain silent.
“Rumors about you are the talk of the teachers, you know.” Mayumi giggled, not appearing to be bothered by Tatsuya’s silence.
He figured the rumors were because of how different he and his younger sister were. Strangely enough, though, he didn’t sense any of that sort of negative emotion from her. Her giggling held no nuance of scorn. Her smile only conveyed a positively friendly optimism.
“Your average across all seven subjects on the enrollment exam was 96 out of 100. The particular highlights were magical theory and magical engineering. The average score on those two subjects for those who passed didn’t even come up to 70, and yet you scored perfectly on both, including the essay sections. They say that such a high score is unprecedented.”
That sure sounded like frank praise, but Tatsuya decided he was only imagining it, because, after all—
“Those were my grades on the written test. They only go as far as the information system.”
A Magic High School student’s value was not based on his test grades but on his practical ability scores. Tatsuya indicated his left breast with a pained but friendly smile. There was no way the student council president wouldn’t know what he meant by that.
But in response, Mayumi smiled and shook her head.
Not up and down—but left to right.
“At the very least, I wouldn’t be able to emulate such amazing grades. I score fairly highly on theoretical subjects, too, but I don’t think I could get the amazing score you did on the exam, even if I got the same questions as you!”
“Time is short, so… If you’ll excuse me,” Tatsuya told Mayumi, who still looked like she had things to say. He turned away from her without waiting for a reply.
Somewhere in his mind, he feared her smile, and feared her continuing to talk to him like this.
He wasn’t sure why, though.
Since Tatsuya had spent time talking to the student council president, more than half the seats in the auditorium were already filled by the time he entered.
The seating was not generally assigned—students were free to sit in the front row, the back row, right in the middle, on the sides, or wherever else they wanted.
Even in modern times, schools followed the old tradition of announcing who was in what class before the entrance ceremony, then seating the students by class. In this school, though, you wouldn’t find out what class you were in until you were issued an ID card.
Therefore, the room didn’t naturally split up by class.
There was, however, a clear rule governing the distribution of new students.
The front half was for the Blooms—the Course 1 students. The students with the eight-petaled emblem on their left breast. The new students who could enjoy the full curriculum the school had to offer.
The rear half was for the Weeds—the Course 2 students. The students with unadorned fabric on the pocket on their left breast. The new students who had been allowed to enroll and who would be treated as substitutes.
All the students may have been new freshmen starting school today, but they were evenly split between front and back based on the presence of that emblem—regardless of the fact that nobody was forcing them to do so.
Guess those who feel discrimination the strongest are those on the receiving end…
That was certainly a kind of wisdom to live by. He didn’t feel like daring to go against it, so he found an empty seat near the middle in the back third of the room and sat down.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. Twenty minutes left.
Communications were restricted within the auditorium, so he couldn’t access his literature sites. He’d read through all the data saved to his terminal countless times anyway, and taking out his terminal in a place like this would be a breach of etiquette.
He tried to imagine his sister, who was probably going over her final rehearsal at the moment…and shook his head a little. There was no way she would be struggling right before the event.
In the end, without anything left to do, Tatsuya slid deeper into his cushionless chair and closed his eyes.
He was about to let himself fall asleep like that when somebody addressed him.
“Excuse me, is this seat open?”
He opened his eyes to check, and sure enough, it had been directed at him. As her voice had implied, it was a female student.
“Go ahead.”
He was slightly dubious about why she would want to sit next to a male student she’d never seen before when there were plenty of other seats left. The seats themselves were fairly roomy, too, leaving aside how comfortable they were, and the girl in question had a narrow build (note: in terms of width, anyway, if not depth), so it wouldn’t inconvenience Tatsuya at all if she were to sit next to him. In fact, it was a better deal than a sweaty ball of muscle staying there.
With that in mind, Tatsuya nodded amiably. The girl bowed her head, thanked him, and sat down. Three more girls came in one by one and sat next to her.
I see, thought Tatsuya, convinced. It seemed the four of them had been searching for a place where they could all sit together.
Are they friends? Seems unusual that four of them would all pass the exam to get into this difficult school, and that they’d all be Course 2 students, thought Tatsuya. He felt it wouldn’t be as strange if at least one of them had better grades. —Though it didn’t really matter to him.
He didn’t have any further interest regarding his fellow freshmen who had coincidentally sat down next to him, so he redirected his gaze to the front. But then she addressed him once more.
What could it be? She was clearly not someone he knew, and it wasn’t that his elbows or feet were getting in her way. He didn’t want to brag, but he had good posture. He didn’t think he’d done anything to warrant objection. He crooked his head in confusion.
“My name is Mizuki Shibata. Pleased to meet you,” came the unexpected self-introduction. Both her tone and appearance were timid. He knew you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, but she didn’t seem the type to appeal herself to others—so he decided she was probably forcing herself. Maybe someone put a foolish idea in her head. Like Course 2 students needing to help each other out, since we already have a handicap, or something along those lines.
“Tatsuya Shiba. Pleased to meet you too,” he replied, with the softest attitude he could muster. A look of relief passed through her eyes behind her big lenses.
Girls wearing glasses were fairly unusual in this day and age.
As a result of the proliferation of orthoptic therapies starting around the mid-twenty-first century, the myopia condition was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. As long as you didn’t have a fairly severe congenital abnormality in your eyesight, you didn’t need vision-correcting tools. And if your eyesight did need correcting, contact lenses you could wear for years at a time without causing physical harm were also readily available.
Reasons to actually wear glasses came down to simple preference, fashion reasons, or…
…pushion radiation sensitivity.
Just by turning a bit, he could tell that her lenses weren’t angled. At the very least, she wasn’t wearing them to correct her vision. And from the impression he got, she probably didn’t like them for their fashion value—he naturally thought she was wearing them out of some kind of need.
Pushion radiation sensitivity was a predisposition, a condition in which you saw too much. People with it could see pushion emissions without trying to, and they were unable to concentrate and make them go away. It was a type of perception control failure. But it wasn’t an illness, nor was it an impediment.
The person’s senses were just too sharp.
Pushions and psions…
Both were metapsychological phenomena—as was magic itself. They were observable particles that didn’t fall under the category of fermions, particles constructed from matter, nor bosons, which created reciprocal action between matter. They were nonphysical particles. Current science believed that psions were particles that gave form to will and thought, while pushions made up the emotions created by will and thought.
Though unfortunately, that’s all at the hypothetical stage.
Normally, psions were the particles utilized in magic, and modern magic’s systematized techniques placed emphasis on controlling them. Magicians started out by learning psion manipulation techniques.
The light from pushion emissions affected the emotions of those who saw them. One theory said that was why pushions were the particles that made up emotions. Because of that, though, pushion radiation sensitivity tended to easily disrupt a person’s mental balance.
The method of preventing this was, fundamentally, controlling one’s sensitivity to pushions, but those who couldn’t do so were assisted by an alternate, scientific means. One of those means was to wear glasses with special lenses called aura coating lenses.
Pushion radiation sensitivity actually wasn’t an unusual condition for a magician to have. Sensitivity to pushions and sensitivity to psions were generally positively correlated, so it was thought that extreme sensitivity to pushion radiation was just something that many magicians—who consciously controlled psions—needed to deal with.
But symptoms of the level where one needed to block the pushion radiation with glasses at all times were indeed unusual. It would be one thing if she just had less than the normal ability to control them, but if it was because of an extremely strong sensitivity, then that would cause Tatsuya problems.
It’s probably backward for her, though.
Tatsuya had been keeping a secret to himself.
A secret that, if witnessed normally, would be incomprehensible. He didn’t need to worry about it being seen in the first place—but if she had special eyes that could perceive pushions and psions in the same way as visible light, she might notice it by sudden chance.
—He would probably need to act with more caution than normal when around her.
“I’m Erika Chiba. Nice to meet you, Shiba!”
“Same here.”
His thoughts was interrupted by the voice of the girl sitting next to Mizuki.
But the interruption was also a well-timed relief. He had been staring at Mizuki unconsciously the whole time. She looked like she was about to burn out from shyness, but he hadn’t realized it.
“But this is kind of a funny coincidence, isn’t it?” Unlike her friend, this one didn’t seem shy or scared around strangers. Her short hair, bright hair color, and handsome features amplified the impression of her being an energetic, lively person.
“What?”
“I mean, we have Shiba, Shibata, and Chiba, right? It’s kind of like a pun, isn’t it? I mean, not exactly, but still.”
“…I see.”
It certainly was not exactly a pun, but he understood what she was trying to say.
Even so, Chiba…meaning “thousand leaves.” Another one of the Numbers? I don’t think there was a girl named Erika in the Chiba family, but it’s possible she’s part of a branch family…
As he mused about it, the girls talked about how she was right, and how it was funny. Their laughter was somewhat out of place here, but it wasn’t enough to draw any chilly stares.
After the two remaining girls across from Erika gave their introductions, Tatsuya found himself wanting to indulge his trivial curiosity. “Did the four of you go to the same junior high?”
Erika’s answer, however, was unexpected. “No, we all just met a little while ago.” She giggled, as though Tatsuya’s expression of surprise was cute, and continued to explain. “I wasn’t sure where to go, so I was having a staring contest with the directions board. Then Mizuki came up to me and we started talking.”
“…The directions board?”
That’s strange, though, thought Tatsuya. All of the information for the enrollment ceremony, including where it was to take place, had been distributed to every new student. If you used the LPS (local positioning system) that came standard on portable terminals, then even if you hadn’t looked at the directions to the ceremony and even if you didn’t remember anything, you wouldn’t get lost.
“The three of us didn’t bring our terminals, see…”
“Well, it says on the enrollment brochure that the virtual kind isn’t allowed!”
“I barely made it in the first place, and I didn’t want to have people staring at me already during the ceremony, you know?”
“I just happened to forget mine.”
“So that’s what happened…”
Honestly, though, he wasn’t convinced. This is your own entrance ceremony, so you could at least make sure you know where it is happening. Those were his honest thoughts, but he didn’t give voice to them.
No need to create meaningless discord, he thought prudently.
Miyuki’s address was, as predicted, fantastic. Tatsuya didn’t have the faintest belief his sister would stumble over something as insignificant as this, though.
It had contained a handful of fairly risky phrases, like “everyone is equal,” “united as one,” “even outside magic,” and “integral,” but she wrapped them up well. He didn’t feel so much as a hint of accusation in any of it.
Her attitude had been stately, but also fresh and modest. It went well with her uncommonly good looks, and she stole the hearts of all the boys there, freshmen and upperclassmen alike.
It would certainly be lively around her starting tomorrow.
But that, too, would be the same as always.
For one reason or another, Tatsuya’s fondness of Miyuki was enough to be called a sister complex when compared to societal convention. He wanted to go congratulate her right away, but unfortunately, the postceremony time was used for distributing ID cards.
They hadn’t created cards for everyone ahead of time. Instead, they would bring their normal identification there, and their school data would be written to a card on the spot. The process could be completed at any of the windows, but that, like the seating in the auditorium, created a natural wall.
Miyuki would probably—no, definitely—ignore that part, but as the representative of the incoming freshmen, she had already been conferred with a card anyway. And now there were tons of guests and student council members crowding around her.
“Shiba, what class are you in?” Erika asked him, unable to conceal her excitement. They had all moved to the windows as a group, with Tatsuya receiving his ID card last. (In other words, he was pretending to care about the “ladies first” thing.)
“Class E.”
“Yes! We’re in the same class!” She jumped for joy at his response. It was a bit of an exaggerated gesture, but…
“I’m in the same class, too.” Mizuki looked excited, too, but she didn’t make the same over-the-top movement. Maybe this was normal for new high school students.
“I’m in F class.”
“I got G class, huh?”
But that wasn’t to say that the light responses of the other two were any less enthusiastic. The important part was that they were in high spirits from this event—entering high school.
This school had eight classes per grade, and twenty-five students per class. And up until that point, it was equal.
But then, the Weeds, who weren’t anticipated to bloom, were placed in classes E through H—separate from the “greenhouses” the Blooms would be placed in, since they were expected to blossom into huge flowers.
They naturally split up with the two female students who ended up in another class. They seemed to be going toward their respective homerooms. The homerooms were different just because they were split between A through D and E through H, but that didn’t seem to put a damper on their excitement at all.
It wasn’t as though every Course 2 student was hung up on it. There were plenty of kids who thought, Wow, I managed to get into an elite school that was a little out of my reach, too. The school was rated as one of the top in the country even for subjects other than magic, after all. The two of them had probably gone looking for friends in their classes that they’d be spending the next year with.
“What do you want to do? Should we drop by our classroom, too?” asked Erika, looking up at Tatsuya’s face. Mizuki didn’t ask, probably because she was also looking up at him.
Aside from schools that preserved old traditions, high schools didn’t use homeroom teachers these days. They didn’t need people to call students to the office—and the luxury of wasting personnel expenses on something like that was rare. Everything was handled by communications among terminals connected to the school network.
The norm for decades now had been to give each student a personal terminal to use in school. These information terminals were even used for personal teaching, as long as it wasn’t for skill coaching or other large-scale activities. If a student needed further care, schools always had multiple professionally qualified counselors of many different fields of expertise on staff.
The reason, then, that homeroom itself was necessary was because it was convenient for practice and experiments. They needed to preserve a certain number of people so practice and labs would end both on time and without any extra time. Though leftovers still spring up every day… Plus, having your own assigned terminal was also highly convenient for many reasons.
It didn’t matter what the scenery was like—spending a long time in a single room meant that you would naturally deepen exchanges with others. The removal of homeroom teachers actually tended to strengthen relationships between students.
In any case, going to homeroom would be the quickest option if they wanted to make new friends. Tatsuya, however, shook his head at Erika’s request.
“Sorry. I’m supposed to meet up with my younger sister.”
He knew there would be no classes or announcements today. He had promised Miyuki to return home with her right after he’d finished up with her formalities.
“Wow… She must be pretty cute if she’s your sister, Shiba, huh?” murmured Erika. It sounded like both an impression and a question, and left him without quite knowing how to answer her. What does she mean by “if she’s your sister”? he thought. He felt like her conclusion wasn’t following from her logic.
Fortunately, there was no reason to force himself to answer, because Mizuki asked him a more fundamental question. “A younger sister… Could she be Miyuki Shiba, the new student representative?”
This time, he didn’t need to worry. He answered the question with a single nod to strongly imply affirmation.
“Wait, really? Are you twins?” asked Erika.
It was understandable question, and one Tatsuya was pretty used to. “We get asked that a lot, but we’re not twins. I was born in April, and she was born in March. If I had been born a month earlier, or my sister a month later, we wouldn’t have been in the same grade.”
“Huh… That sounds kind of complicated.”
It was certainly complicated being in the same grade as his younger sister—an honors student—but Erika didn’t mean any harm by the question.
Tatsuya smiled and passed over it. “But I’m surprised you figured it out. Shiba isn’t that unusual a last name.”
The two girls smiled a little at his response. There was a notable difference in shade between them, though.
“No, no, it’s pretty unusual!” Erika smiled painfully.
“Your faces look alike…” Mizuki, though, smiled in a reserved, insecure way for some reason.
“Do they?” Tatsuya couldn’t help but be a little confused. It probably indicated that Mizuki’s words came from the same foundation as Erika’s, but he just didn’t feel it was true.
Or rather, he couldn’t believe it.
Even if he removed himself from the favorable light he cast on her as a family member, Miyuki was an uncommonly pretty girl. Even without her exorbitant abilities, she couldn’t help but attract attention wherever she went. She was a natural-born idol—no, a star.
When he looked at her, he was always reminded of the proverb that God never grants gifts to a person—and how much of a lie that was.
Tatsuya’s own measurement of self-worth was, upon reflection, a bit above average, or maybe in the upper-middle zone.
During junior high, he would see his sister getting love letters practically on a daily basis (though Tatsuya saw them more as fan mail than anything else). He’d never received anything like that even once, though. They should share the same genetic code—well, some of it, anyway—but that didn’t stop Tatsuya from doubting their blood relationship time and time again.
However, Erika nodded readily at Tatsuya’s response—or rather what Mizuki had said. “Now that you mention it… Yeah, they do look alike! I mean, Shiba is a cutie himself. And it’s not just how his face looks. It’s like, the kind of air around him, or something.”
“A cutie? How many decades ago did that term go out of style…? Besides, if you disregard our faces, we don’t look anything alike, do we?”
What Erika had said was probably unintuitive and a little difficult to understand, but apparently she wasn’t trying to say their faces were similar. That was how Tatsuya translated it, at least, which was why he couldn’t help but make that retort.
“That’s not it. It’s like… How do I put it…?” Erika didn’t seem to be able to express it well herself. She might have stood there groaning for a while had Mizuki not come to her rescue.
“It’s your aura. It makes your expressions seem really dignified. It’s what I would expect from siblings.”
“That’s it! Your auras!” Erika’s head bobbed up and down vigorously and she nearly slapped her knees.
Now it was Tatsuya’s turn to give her a dry smile. “Chiba… You’re actually kind of a clown, you know?”
“A clown?” In typical fashion, he only half-listened to her cry of “How rude!” From her tone of voice, Erika didn’t sound like she was very bothered by it, either.
“Still, Shibata, you’re good at reading the auras in people’s expressions… You really have good eyes.” Those words, on the other hand, were spoken meaningfully.
“Huh? But Mizuki wears glasses,” wondered Erika aloud.
“That’s not what I mean. Besides, her lenses aren’t curved at all, are they?”
Confused, Erika peered into Mizuki’s glasses. On the other side of her lenses, her eyes had frozen in surprise.
Was she surprised someone had noticed it, or disappointed that she hadn’t hidden it? Whichever the case was, Tatsuya didn’t think it was as big a deal as she was making it out to be.
He didn’t have a chance to investigate why she was making that kind of face, though. He was out of time, and that was probably the only reason the conversation ended on a good note.
“I’m sorry I made you wait, Tatsuya.”
As Tatsuya and the others conversed in a corner near the auditorium exit, he heard the voice of the one he was waiting for from behind them.
Miyuki had broken out of the crowd surrounding her.
That was quick was his first thought, but he corrected himself—considering her temperament, it was probably the right time.
She was far from nonsocial, but her fussiness toward flattery and niceties couldn’t be denied. It wasn’t quite childlike, but she’d certainly never been spared any praise when she was young. In return, though, she had plenty of the superficial kind, mixed with envy and gossip.
Thinking from that perspective, she would have naturally gotten quite used to being fawned over. He would say that she’d actually endured quite a bit today.
He’d planned to turn around and remark, “That was fast,” and while he managed to speak the words, his intonation ended up being rather interrogative, because there was someone with Miyuki he hadn’t expected to see.
“Hello, Shiba. We meet again.”
Tatsuya silently bowed to her amiable smile; her words seemed to be trying to patch things up with him. Despite his response lacking friendliness, the student council president, Mayumi Saegusa, didn’t break her smile. Perhaps that was her poker face, or maybe she was just comfortable in her own territory. Tatsuya had just met her, so he couldn’t tell one way or the other.
But his sister seemed to be more interested in the girls cozying up next to him (?) than in his odd reply to the student council president.
“Tatsuya, who are these people…?”
Before explaining why she wasn’t by herself, she asked Tatsuya to explain why he wasn’t by himself. It felt a little abrupt, but there was no reason to hide it. He answered without skipping a beat. “This is Mizuki Shibata. And this is Erika Chiba. We’re in the same class.”
“I see… On a date with your classmates already?” she asked, making a cute face and tilting her head. Her expression said And I certainly don’t mean anything by that. A ladylike smile was on her lips—but her eyes weren’t smiling.
Oh my, thought Tatsuya. She’d been under concentrated fire from the grating flattery ever since the ceremony ended, and it seemed like she’d accumulated quite a bit of stress.
“Of course not, Miyuki… I was just talking to them while waiting for you. Saying that was rude to them, you know.”
Personally, he thought her sulking face was cute, too, but not naming yourself when introduced to someone wouldn’t look good in front of the upperclassmen and other new students. Tatsuya let a twinge of criticism creep into his eyes. Miyuki looked surprised, then gave a much more graceful smile.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Shibata, Miss Chiba. I am Miyuki Shiba. I am a new student here as well, so I look forward to getting along with you as my brother is.”
“I’m Mizuki Shibata. Pleased to meet you as well.”
“Nice to meetcha. You can just call me Erika. Would it be okay for me to just call you Miyuki, too?”
“Yes, go right ahead. Using my last name would make it hard to distinguish between my brother and me, after all.”
The three girls exchanged introductions again.
Miyuki and Mizuki’s introduction was appropriate for a first meeting. But Erika, on the other hand, was already acting very friendly to her (to put it nicely). However, Tatsuya was the one who found himself hesitating at her friendly language. Miyuki instead nodded, not showing a hint of dislike for her familiar tone and slightly more affable attitude.
“Ah-ha, Miyuki, you actually seem easy to get along with, despite how you look!”
“And you have a very open personality, just as you look. Nice to meet you, Erika.”
Miyuki, who was sick of all the flattery and niceties, probably appreciated Erika’s candid attitude more than she might have otherwise. There did seem to be something more than that being communicated between them, though. They exchanged frank, unreserved smiles.
Tatsuya couldn’t help but feel left out, but they couldn’t just keep standing here. They were with the student council president’s party that came with his sister, so they wouldn’t be seen as nuisances, but doing this for much longer would make them into a traffic obstruction.
“Miyuki. Did you finish up with the student council? If you’re not, then maybe we shouldn’t be standing around.”
“It’s all right.” Someone else answered his question and proposition. “We were just meeting each other today. Miyuki—may I also call you that?” addressed Mayumi.
“Oh, yes.” Miyuki changed her candid smile into a docile expression and nodded.
“Then, Miyuki, we will discuss further details another day.”
Mayumi gave a slight bow with a smile and went to leave the auditorium. But the male student who had been waiting right behind her called out to her. On his chest, just as expected, was the eight-petaled emblem.
“But, President, our plans—”
“We did not promise anything beforehand. If she has her own plans, we should prioritize that, right?”
Controlling the male student, who showed signs of not backing down, with her eyes, Mayumi turned a meaningful smile on Miyuki and Tatsuya.
“Then I will take my leave, Miyuki. Shiba—another time, I hope.”
Mayumi bowed a second time and left. The male student following her turned around and glared at Tatsuya with an expression that was none too friendly.
“…Should we go home, then?”
Right off the bat, he seemed to have fallen out of an upperclassman’s grace, and one who was a student council member at that. But it had been almost inevitable. His life had never gone so smoothly and easily that he’d need to worry over something like this. That life hadn’t lasted even sixteen years yet, but he had plenty of experience with such negativity.
“I’m sorry, Tatsuya. I gave them a bad impression of you—” Miyuki started, her expression clouded.
“It’s nothing for you to apologize about,” Tatsuya interrupted her sentence, shaking his head and putting his hand on her head. He stroked her hair as though his hand were a comb, and her sullen expression changed to one tinged with intoxication. Those watching them couldn’t deny that they were acting questionably for siblings, but neither Mizuki nor Erika said anything about it, perhaps out of restraint since this was their first meeting.
“Since we’re here, why not go have some tea?”
“That sounds great! I’m in! Apparently there’s a delicious cake shop around here.”
Instead, the girls tossed them an invitation to a tea party.
Tatsuya didn’t intend to ask if their families would get worried—even mentioning something like that would be needless consideration. And in this regard, Tatsuya and Miyuki were the same.
Above all, Tatsuya had something he wanted to ask. It was something that was honestly no big deal, but it had been bothering him to the point where he couldn’t let it go.
“You didn’t check where the entrance ceremony was going to be, but you know where a cake shop is?”
Maybe the question was a little mean, but Erika nodded confidently, without a shred of hesitation. “Of course! Isn’t it important?”
“Of course…” he repeated. His words came out as a groan, but he didn’t care who got mad at him for it.
But it seemed like he was the only one shocked by Erika’s “outburst.”
“Tatsuya, what shall we do?” Miyuki wasn’t acting as though she cared at all about Erika’s senseless prioritization of the location of a sweets shop over that of the ceremony venue. —Of course, Miyuki didn’t know how that came about in the first place.
However, he didn’t have to think too hard about agreeing with them. “Why not? You made acquaintances, you know? You can’t have too many friends of the same gender and grade level.” There was no particular reason they had to hurry back home. Tatsuya had originally planned to spend the afternoon somewhere to celebrate his sister enrolling, anyway.
The fact that he hadn’t thought very deeply about what he said let his truly unconcerned feelings about it come to the surface.
Erika and Mizuki also understood what he really thought of it, which was probably why they responded how they did.
“When it comes to Miyuki, Shiba leaves himself out, huh…”
“He’s very considerate toward his sister…”
Their stares each had its own mixture of praise and bewilderment. Tatsuya could only come back with a silent, uncomfortable smile.
The “cake shop” that Erika brought them too had actually been a French-style cafeteria with good desserts, so they ate lunch there and made merry with long conversation (though since there were three girls present, Tatsuya mostly just listened). Evening was already upon them when they got back home.
No one came out to greet them.
Tatsuya and Miyuki lived mostly by themselves in this house, which was much larger than the average home.
He went to his room and took off his uniform first.
They seemed to have gone to great lengths to make the difference stand out on his blazer. He didn’t want to believe that something so silly was affecting him emotionally, but when he took it off, he did feel his mood improve a bit. He scoffed at his own feelings, then quickly finished getting change.
Shortly afterward, as he was unwinding in the living room, Miyuki came downstairs. She had changed into her house clothes. Though materials engineering had advanced by leaps and bounds, clothing designs hadn’t changed much since a hundred years ago. The fetching lines of her legs stretched from her short skirt, which was reminiscent of early twenty-first-century styles.
For whatever reason, his sister’s sense of fashion featured more exposure when in the house. He should have gotten used to it by now, but lately she had gotten a lot more girly, and Tatsuya frequently found himself unsure of where to look.
“Tatsuya, shall I get you something to drink?”
“Hmm. I’ll have coffee, thanks.”
“I will be right back.”
Her hair, loosely tied in a single clump, swayed across her slim back as she moved toward the kitchen. She tied it back so it wouldn’t get in the way when she was working in the kitchen. Because of that, though, the white nape of her neck, normally hidden behind her long hair, was going in and out of sight because of her sweater with a wide neckline, producing an indescribable allure.
In developed nations, where the use of a home automation robot (HAR, or “Haru” for short) was widespread, women standing in the kitchen—and men, too, of course—were becoming something of a rarity. Full-fledged cooking was one thing, but only those who were interested did minor things like make toast or coffee on their own.
And Miyuki belonged to that rare group of people.
She didn’t particularly have any mechanical ineptitude. Whenever friends came over, she mostly left it to their HAR. But when it was just the two of them, she never spared the trouble.
The crunching sound of the beans being ground and the bubbly sound of the hot water boiling tickled Tatsuya’s ears. It was the simplest of paper drip bags, but the fact that she wouldn’t even use an older coffeemaker meant that it must have been some kind of fixation.
He had asked her about it once, and she’d answered, “Because I like it,” so it was probably something like a hobby. When he asked if it was, he remembered her giving him a sullen look, though.
Whatever the case, the coffee Miyuki made matched his palate the best.
“Here you are, Tatsuya.”
She placed the cup on the side table, then went around to the other side and sat down next to him. The coffee she had put on the table was black, and the coffee in the cup in her hand had milk in it.
“It’s good.”
There was no need to eulogize it. Miyuki smiled, happy with just those two words.
She watched her brother take a second sip, his face satisfied. Then, with an expression of relief, she put her own cup to her mouth. That was what she always did.
The two of them enjoyed their coffee like that for a while.
Neither of them tried to force conversation.
They didn’t care that they had someone to talk to right next to them.
It had been an extremely long time since the two of them felt awkward at long periods of silence between them.
There were plenty of things to talk about. Today was the entrance ceremony. They had made new friends, and a somewhat concerning upperclassman had appeared. Miyuki had, as expected, been invited to join the student council. They could be up all night recalling the day’s events and talking about them.
But the siblings sat next to each other in their house, alone, silently sipping their coffee.
“—I’ll go get dinner started.”
Miyuki stood up with her now-empty cup. Tatsuya gave his cup of coffee to her outstretched hand and got up as well.
Night fell on the siblings, the same as it always did.