Kuroha Akira watched the shameless display of feline affection, grinding his teeth in silent betrayal.
I swear, I am never feeding that traitorous furball again!
Meanwhile, Shinomiya finished pouring the milk, neatly screwed the cap back onto the empty bottle, and straightened up.
And then…
Grrrrrumble~
A low, resonant sound broke the evening quiet.
The source of the sound became clear a moment later. Shinomiya's eyes widened imperceptibly. She looked down, one hand coming to rest lightly on her stomach as a faint, full-body shiver ran through her. For a girl who carried herself with such icy, untouchable grace, the audible protest of her own hunger was a devastating blow to her dignity.
Kuroha Akira found it unexpectedly… humanizing. No matter how stunning the exterior, biology was a great equalizer. A stomach empty at dinnertime would always announce itself.
"Well," he said, the corner of his mouth twitching upward, "looks like we've solved the cat's dinner. Time to solve the human's. We should head back. If we hurry, we can probably still make it."
"At this hour… there's still dinner?" It was nearly 8 PM. In her experience, family meals were long concluded by now.
"Yeah. I usually get back pretty late, so Granny Kobayashi is used to cooking on the later side. Though if we push it past this, she'll just wrap everything up and go to bed. We'd have to reheat leftovers, which is always a bit of a hassle."
"I see…"
'Granny Kobayashi'… was that his mother? The term 'obaa-chan' was informal, even blunt, but the casual fondness in his tone suggested a comfortable, understanding relationship.
A small, sharp pang of envy pricked at her. In contrast, her own mother… The shadow that crossed her features was impossible to fully suppress, dimming the light in her eyes for a second. The irreconcilable rift with her mother was, after all, the core reason she stood here in this abandoned shrine.
The thought brought another, more immediate anxiety to the forefront.
"Akira-kun," she began, her voice hesitant. "Are you… really taking me to your home?"
"What else? I made my opening line pretty clear, didn't I?"
"Ah…"
She remembered. His very first words to her, delivered with that strange mix of appraisal and intent:"Beautiful girl, do you want to come home with me?"He had been planning this from the very first moment.
"That's not what I meant. I meant… will the people you live with agree to take in a stranger like me?"
"Don't worry about that," he said, waving a dismissive hand. "I don't have family."
"Eh?" Shinomiya's composure cracked, revealing genuine surprise. "But you just said 'Granny'…"
"Granny isn't family. She's my landlady. Kobayashi Mika. I call her Granny Kobayashi. Or sometimes just 'the old lady.'" His explanation was matter-of-fact.
"...I'm sorry." Shinomiya dipped her head immediately, her voice soft with contrition. "I shouldn't have brought it up."
This world is full of hidden sorrows, she thought, her heart clenching. His earlier comment about being 'picked up' took on a new, painful meaning. She had mistakenly assumed he was an orphan who had lost his parents, and she felt a sharp stab of remorse for prying.
Kuroha Akira understood her assumption. In a very real sense, he had lost his original family, becoming a solitary soul in another world.
"It's fine," he said, his tone lighter than he felt. "I don't mind."
Truthfully, he had wondered about the family of this body. Partly out of a strange curiosity—did the parents here share the faces of the ones he remembered?—and partly for far more practical reasons. Contacting them could potentially solve his most pressing issue: his complete lack of funds. Surely, they'd have the bank card PIN.
Yet, his current situation was proof enough he hadn't managed to make contact. The main problem was the 'how.' The phones in this parallel world were still stuck in the flip-phone era—clunky bricks more suited for self-defense than smart communication. The tech level felt a full generation behind.
More frustratingly, the contact list on his phone was a pristine, empty void. Not a single number saved. It was possible the original Kuroha Akira had memorized his home number, but that knowledge had not transferred during the transmigration. He was locked out.
It was also… strange. Even if he hadn't called home, shouldn't they have called him? In the half-year since he'd awakened in this world, his phone had served faithfully as an alarm clock and a cheap MP3 player for listening exercises. Its core function—receiving calls—had never once been utilized. Not a single ring.
Were they that frugal with long-distance charges? The more he thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. Sending your child to study in Tokyo alone and then not checking in for nearly half a year… that implied either boundless trust or a profound lack of interest.
Perhaps this world's Kuroha Akira was one of many siblings, an unimportant extra politely exiled to Tokyo?
Then again… he considered, judging by the high school I'm attending, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe they scrimped and saved to send their prized child to the capital for a better education, a bet on a brilliant future they couldn't afford to follow. For an ordinary family, that bittersweet narrative would fit.
Until he could actually confirm anything, the truth of his origins—his hometown, his parents' faces, their circumstances—remained a locked box. One thing seemed clear, though: a family that could send a child to study in Tokyo, especially to this school, likely wasn't destitute.
Hibiya High School. The name might evoke certain literary associations, but it had no relation to a certain service club in Chiba. With a standardized deviation value of 72, it ranked firmly within the top thirty metropolitan high schools in Tokyo—a genuine joushikou, a prestigious school where the corridors practically hummed with academic pressure and future promise.
The deviation value could be thought of as a school's academic prestige ranking; the higher the number, the more elite the institution and the sharper its students. Akira recalled a statistic from a past life: a minimum deviation of 70 was needed to aim for Keio University, putting a student in the top 2% nationwide. A score of 30, meanwhile, landed you in the bottom 2%.
Keio University itself was a titan, roughly analogous to a top-ten university like Nanjing University back home. Its name might not ring immediate bells for everyone, but mention its founder—the man whose portrait graced the 10,000-yen note, Fukuzawa Yukichi—and the 'ohhh' of recognition was universal.
Come to think of it, Akira mused, back in my world, there was talk of replacing him with Shibusawa Eiichi on the bill. No such chatter here.
The school's caliber only amplified the sheer, terrifying brilliance of the class representative, Asato Hitomi, who maintained her undisputed reign at the top of this mountain of overachievers. She was, without exaggeration, an academic goddess.
And because of this elite environment, Kuroha Akira's school life lacked the classic Japanese high school tropes of dramatic delinquency or overt, cartoonish bullying. At worst, it manifested as quiet ostracization—like the invisible bubble of space that surrounded him. Though, to be fair, that was largely self-inflicted. Had he not opened his mouth on that fateful first day, he could have likely drifted through a perfectly normal, uneventful high school existence.
I do feel a little bad for the original Kuroha Akira, he admitted to himself. The kid must have studied his heart out to barely squeak into this school, only to have his entire high school social life implode during a single, catastrophic self-introduction. But then, he couldn't shoulder all the blame. The original occupant of this body had vanished completely, leaving behind no memories, no lingering will—just an empty vessel.
Unless… Akira's thoughts took a more chuunibyou turn. What if my situation is like a certain self-proclaimed mad scientist? Possessing a passive skill like 'Mystic Eyes of Death Perception'? No matter how the worldline shifts, my memories remain immutable, unable to be overwritten by the new reality's past.
That seemed oddly plausible.
His unchanged appearance suggested his fundamental data—his DNA—was the same. Like Hououin Kyouma arriving in a new worldline, he simply couldn't download the local save file.
Huh? Wait. So maybe it wasn't me who transmigrated… but this entire worldline that changed around a fixed point—me?
Whoa, okay, sudden sci-fi genre shift. Abort. Abort! Better not to think too deeply about this. It's a rabbit hole that leads to existential terror.
His internal monologue had stretched into a lengthy silence. To Shinomiya, watching him, this quiet contemplation looked like the heavy weight of a painful past settling over him—a past her own questioning had inadvertently stirred.
Her heart tightened. Just as his words had pulled her from her own despair, she wanted to offer him some comfort in return.
We're partners now, for life, right? So… you don't have to be sad anymore.
I'll be by your side from now on.
Gathering a quiet surge of courage, Shinomiya took a small step closer to him. Then, with deliberate slowness, she reached out her left hand and gently took hold of his right.
"Uh…!"
Kuroha Akira's reaction was instantaneous and decisive. He pulled his hand back as if shocked.
It wasn't that he disliked the idea of holding hands with a beautiful girl—far from it. The problem was his right hand in this precise moment…
He quickly glanced down at his palm.
There, the faint, shimmering text [A-Rank Academic Aptitude]—meticulously copied from the class representative—was fading, dissipating into the air like mist under morning sun.
NO! Don't go!
I'm going to turn back into an idiot!!