Part-1 Ch-06 Ep-03

 “You could have just gone home ahead of me.”

“No way.”

Wearing a sulky expression, Maki walks beside me. When I returned to the classroom after finishing my conversation with Seishuku-san, I found Maki sitting in my seat. Kagami-kun had apparently already left. On my phone was a message from him saying, “Sorry!! Please take care of the rest,” along with a dogeza sticker.

It felt strange as if he had committed some crime.

“Sorry for making you wait. Shall we go home?” I called out to her, and with a short “Nn,” Maki quietly packed her things. And that brings us to now. It might have been a long time since we walked home together in such silence.

“…Did Asahina-kun call you out?”

Maki asked without turning toward me, her gaze fixed straight ahead. Her voice had a faint tension to it that made me feel slightly unsettled.

“Well, yeah. He dragged me behind the school building, so I was kind of surprised, wondering what it was about.”

Strictly speaking, Asahina-kun was only the messenger, but I decided to go along with that explanation. Maki’s shoulders twitched while she still faced forward.

“What did he want? He didn’t do anything to you, did he?”

Questions came one after another.

Her usual crisp tone was gone; she almost sounded flustered, even anxious.

As for me, I still hadn’t decided how to explain what had just happened.

To summarize in a single sentence: Seishuku-san said she wanted to create a fan club for Maki and me, and I agreed.

I also asked, “Do you normally asks someone’s permission to make a fan club?” but after hearing her troubled explanation beginning with “I’m well aware of that, but…,” I could sort of understand.

In short, Seishuku-san and Asahina-kun had been planning to create a fan club, and when they discreetly asked around, there turned out to be more secret supporters than expected.

I don’t know exactly what Seishuku-san and the others intend to do, but if a large group is sneaking around, it will eventually be discovered.

So they decided to ask directly. If we told them to stop, they would stop completely. If we allowed it, they would simply watch over us without causing trouble.

At this point, it already felt like a fairly organized group, but I pretended not to notice.

More than anything, I wanted to establish a connection with Seishuku-san.

In the game she doesn’t appear much in the main story, but her fortune-telling accuracy in the “Today’s Horoscope” feature was dependable.

That alone was enough to make me trust her.

If possible, I would love for her to read Maki’s fortune every day. Once the fan club is formed, it might be nice to have her send me Maki’s daily horoscope results. Well, I had all sorts of thoughts, but to be honest, being liked doesn’t feel bad at all. So I gave permission under the condition, “Sure, as long as you don’t bother Maki.”

I still wasn’t entirely sure my permission was even required.

She was probably just very earnest. She was like that in the game too.

Having agreed to the creation of the fan club, I glanced at Maki and thought, But still…

“Hey, Mari. What exactly did Asahina-kun want with you…?”

Perhaps sensing my hesitation, she asked again, her voice uneasy. If I tell her I approved a fan club, won’t she explode at me with a “Who told you you could decide that?”

To be honest, I am terrible at identifying where Maki’s landmines are buried. She doesn’t seem like someone who hates attention.

Yet for some reason she sometimes gets inexplicably furious.

Like the time in elementary school when I hung out after class with a boy we had just become friends with, or in middle school when a junior girl gave me a handmade chocolate cake and I treated her to fast food as thanks.

Thinking back, she almost always scolds me when I am spending time with someone other than her. Maybe that is the landmine.

…Is she really my guardian or something?

If that is the case, I have a bad feeling I am going to get yelled at again.

“Um, so. To be precise, Asahina-kun only came to call me. The person who actually wanted to talk was a girl from his class. Her name is, uh, Seishuku Kokoa-san, and, well, she was really cute.”

“Eh?”

People say you should start with the conclusion, then explain the main points afterward, but I am terrible at summarizing.

So if I am forced to start with the conclusion, I can only state the conclusion itself. The lead-up gets stuck.

I have to explain things from the beginning or I cannot organize my thoughts.

So I first said that Asahina-kun was only the go-between and that the real one who wanted to speak was Seishuku-san, but saying that she was cute (and had a surprisingly nice figure) was unnecessary.

That wasn’t the point at all.

“N-no, that’s not what I meant. I mean, she really was pretty voluptuous and my eyes sort of went there… No, that’s not important. Apparently Seishuku-san has been close with Asahina-kun for a while and they’ve been talking about various things.”

“Heh… heh…?”

“And she already knew about you and me from before, but she didn’t want to bother us, so she had been quietly watching from the shadows. But this time she couldn’t hold back anymore, so she decided to call me out first.”

“…Call Mari out?”

Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “fan club,” so I ended up skipping the most important part. Naturally, nothing was conveyed clearly. In fact, I could almost hear sparks crackling; the air around Maki had grown tense.

I might have stepped on another landmine. Or was just about to.

“Um… so… Mari… likes… voluptuous girls…?”

“No, what are you talking about!?”

“I mean, I’m pretty big myself…”

“No, why are you seriously trying to compete with that!?”

This is bad. She has completely misunderstood.

And all because I’m terrible at explaining.

“Hey, Maki, this is going to take a while to explain properly… Do you want to come to my house right now?”

I need a little time to figure out how to tell her. Come to think of it, what even is a fan club?

Fans of what, exactly? Of me and Maki, but…

What part of us are they cheering for? I should catch Seishuku-san later and ask for details. 

Normally, Maki comes over even when I don’t ask, but today she answered in a small voice, “I think… I’ll pass today. I need a little time to think of countermeasures,” and hurried away.

Before I realized it, we had reached the fork between my house and hers.

“Countermeasures… against what?”

Watching her back as she left, it occurred to me that the person who messed up this time wasn’t Kagami-kun.

It was me.