The morning sunlight filtering through the crack in the curtains tickled my eyelids and forcibly dragged my consciousness up out of the darkness.
"Ugh..."
The instant I shifted in my hazy state and opened my eyes, afterimages of what had happened in the alley the night before flooded into the center of my frontal lobe like high-definition video measured in nanoseconds.
The wrist I had pinned against the wall. Her lips, wet with tears and trembling. The feel of our breaths tangling thickly together and our hot saliva as I impulsively pressed my lips over hers as though to seal them shut.
"...Ghk?!"
I shot upright in bed like a spring, and for a moment, it felt as though the black inverted-cross piercing in my earlobe were boiling over as it sounded an overheating alarm. I had not even twisted the laws of physics or solved a tensor equation, yet blood throughout my body rushed backward toward the crown of my head, from the tips of my ears to the nape of my neck and my forehead, and my entire skull sizzled as if it were about to explode.
"Am I insane...? I really must be out of my mind."
I scrubbed my face dry and repeatedly banged my head against the wall.
The rationality that had smugly called itself "Tokyo’s top-tier cool beauty" and "genius computational ability" was nowhere to be found. After tens of thousands of simulations in my head, the optimal conclusion I had reached was to suddenly kiss her? That was not computation—it was a total short circuit in my neural circuitry, an instinctual rampage.
...What kind of face am I supposed to show at the agency today?
Clawing at my hair, I picked up the smartphone I had carelessly tossed onto the bedside table. The moment I turned on the screen, I spotted a missed message at the top of my notifications, timestamped 1:23 a.m.
Sender: Nejire
Swallowing hard, I tapped the notification with a trembling thumb.
[Yujin! Did you get home okay? You know tomorrow is our final check-in before the U.A. exam, right?! I’ll be waiting at the agency!! ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶ Come safely! ❤️]
It was a message brimming with her usual assortment of adorable symbols and exuberant energy.
But one red heart emoji, planted as naturally as could be at the very end of the sentence, filled my entire field of vision.
"..."
The fingers holding my phone froze.
This was a period bearing a clear and unmistakable definition of our relationship, on an entirely different level from her usual teasing messages where she called me her "cute youngest" and messed up my hair.
The [3x3 Cube] floating above my shoulder turned with a tick, emitting a red glow as though it had detected its owner’s bursting heartbeat.
I pulled the blanket over my head and swallowed a muffled scream into my pillow. With the U.A. entrance exam just around the corner, every physics formula had evaporated from this examinee’s mind, leaving it dyed crimson by a pink overheating warning.
Even as my head sizzled, the computational circuits in one corner of my brain were identifying a clear fact.
Skipping today because I’m so embarrassed I want to die... would make me a truly irredeemable piece of shit.
I had grabbed the girl who was crying in that alley last night, even tangled tongues with her, and then I was going to disappear the next day just because my face felt hot? That was not the aesthetics of a cool guy. That was simply failing as a human being.
Of course, I did not have even 0.0001 seconds to spare to attend Somei Middle School and listen to Iida Tenya’s right-angle hand-chop lectures, so I casually skipped school without a second thought.
I threw on a shirt, aligned the black inverted-cross piercing in my left earlobe and the matte-black [3x3 Cube] floating above my left shoulder. I lightly pushed up the rimless glasses on the bridge of my nose, but the blazing heat coloring my ears, nape, and cheeks showed no sign whatsoever of subsiding.
With both hands shoved deep into my pockets, I folded space beneath my feet three or four times and threw open the lobby doors of the Ryukyu Hero Agency early that morning.
Hiss—
"...Good morning."
Normally, I would have rattled off all kinds of smug, slick nonsense like, "Tokyo’s finest cool-beauty nephew has arrived," but today, I simply could not make the words come out.
With my head bowed low and only my eyes darting about, my face was red as a freshly steamed octopus, with steam practically rising from around my ears.
My aunt, who had been looking over documents in front of the lobby desk, stared at me blankly.
That uncontrollable nuisance who normally stood with his shoulders thrown back and drove her blood pressure to two hundred with con-man-level rhetoric had, for the first time in his life, crept in with a bright-red face like some awkward little kid.
"...Huh?"
One second of silence.
My aunt’s golden eyes instantly widened, and then tears of emotion began to well up in them as profound realization dawned on her.
It worked...! Nejire finally reeled in that walking natural disaster...!
My aunt strode over and, instead of her usual vicious smack to my back, carefully placed a trembling hand on my shoulder.
Her eyes brimmed with the joy of having a ten-year-old indigestion finally clear, along with one hundred percent pure affection for a nephew she was seeing in a way she never had before.
"Yujin..."
Even her voice trembled with emotion.
"Please... be happy there."
"...Excuse me?"
My aunt brushed away an emotional tear running down her cheek, then drove the point home with an even more solemn, serious expression.
"Hold Nejire’s hand tight, and never again bring your work or anything you might cause trouble with to my agency. Understand? Stay locked up there together, being lovey-dovey for the rest of your lives."
"No, Director, wait a second. Why are you talking as if you’re marrying off your daughter?!"
Faced with my aunt’s tearful declaration that she was legally disposing of her nephew for the first time in my life, my neural circuitry tangled up horribly again before I even had time to cool my burning face.
It was at that very moment, while I stood there stammering beneath my aunt’s hand as she wiped tears of emotion as though sending off a daughter to be married.
Hiss—
The agency lobby’s automatic doors slid wide open, and the morning-shift senior Sidekicks came pouring in.
"Good morning, Director—huh?"
"Wait, isn’t that Yujin?!"
All the seniors’ gazes converged on the center of the lobby.
The sly, black-haired cool beauty who normally wore glasses on the bridge of his nose while radiating smug self-admiration was nowhere to be seen. In his place stood the Director’s nephew, red to the tips of his ears like a boiled octopus, frozen with Ryukyu gripping his shoulder.
And the moment they saw that bizarre, unfamiliar sight, the senior Sidekicks’ expressions split into two extreme camps in a mere 0.1 seconds.
"See?! What did I tell you! I said Yujin would give in one hundred percent after seeing the atmosphere yesterday!!"
"Nice—!! My fifty thousand yen bet on ‘confession succeeds before the exam’ survived!!"
The female Sidekicks cheered, throwing their fists into the air and exchanging loud high fives as they broke into a festive mood.
Meanwhile, the seniors on the other side clawed at their hair with expressions as though the world had ended, then dropped to their knees on the marble floor.
"No way... That kid with the face of steel was conquered in a single day?!"
"My precious thirty thousand yen in emergency savings...! Yujin, why did you fold so easily?! You should’ve held out until at least U.A.’s entrance ceremony!!"
Bundles of bills and receipts changed hands openly in the middle of the lobby.
The [3x3 Cube] floating above my left shoulder rotated with an incredulous tick, and an absurd, hollow laugh escaped through my frozen lips.
"...Seniors."
Forcing my flushed face into a stern expression, I pushed up my glasses with an index finger.
"Did you just open an illegal private betting pool across the entire agency using the heartbeat of someone else’s noble, innocent youth?"
"Oh my, Yujin! Don’t talk about innocent youth when your face hasn’t even cooled down!"
"We were sincerely rooting for your love, you know? Here, I’ll treat you to premium eel rice bowls for lunch today with my winnings!!"
The seniors despairing as they pounded the floor, the women giggling while counting money, and Aunt Ryukyu still patting my shoulder with a pleased look on her face.
With every physics formula entirely evaporated from my head, the lobby that morning—on the eve of the U.A. exam—was being colored by louder, happier chaos than ever before.
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