People say everyone’s born equal, but honestly, I have my doubts. Looks are a stat with massive influence over your life — and the fact that you can’t change it after your initial spawn into this world is way too unfair, isn’t it?
Take, for example, my classmate over there. Six feet tall, pretty face, popular. Then take Yagami Ryouya — yours truly. Five foot six, mediocre face. Compare the two of us and it’s obvious who’s got the advantage.
That handsome guy sits comfortably in the top tier of the class hierarchy, and wherever he goes from here, he’s going to keep being the protagonist of his own normie main-character life.
Meanwhile, I’m probably going to spend the rest of forever as “Mob Character B,” lurking somewhere in the shadow of someone else’s bland main character.
Maybe it’s because I’ve already resigned myself to all that, but I can’t muster the slightest motivation for life. Wake up, eat breakfast, drag myself to school at the last possible second, sit through classes on autopilot, go home. That’s it. That’s the hollow, empty everyday I live.
I have zero friends in class, I’m in no clubs, and there’s nowhere in school that feels like mine. That probably has a lot to do with the warped, jaded attitude I’ve cultivated. And needless to say — needless to say — I don’t have a girlfriend.
”…If I had friends, or a girlfriend, would life be a little more fun, I wonder?”
I mutter it on my way to the shoe lockers after homeroom. Not that I’d know how to get friends or a girlfriend. Up through elementary school, friends just kind of appeared on their own; by middle school, that stopped working entirely.
I can hold a normal conversation, so it’s not like my communication skills are in the basement — somehow I just cannot make friends. Everyone around me does it casually, the “normal” thing, and the fact that I can’t do the normal thing makes me feel genuinely pathetic.
A guy who can’t even manage friends has zero shot at a girlfriend. Anyone I’ve ever liked has been a one-sided, doomed-before-it-started kind of thing.
I sometimes daydream that one day, out of nowhere, I’ll get mobbed by girls like in some anime. But I’m well aware reality doesn’t work that way.
I’m thinking all this while walking down the hallway when a girl ahead of me drops something out of the gap in her backpack.
Looks like a pencil case. She doesn’t notice and keeps walking, so I scoop it up and hurry to call out.
“Hey, hold up a sec. You dropped something.”
”…You mean me?”
She stops at my voice and slowly turns around. And the second I see her face, I realize I’ve just called out to one of the most famous girls in the entire school.
The girl in front of me is Tsurugi Riona — one half of the beautiful quarter-English twin sisters that everyone here knows about.
Tsurugi-san is the younger of an identical pair. She has an older sister with the exact same face: Tsurugi Reona, who, technically, happens to be in my class — though “technically” is doing all the heavy lifting in that sentence, because I’ve barely spoken to her.
The Tsurugi sisters are apparently identical in face but total opposites in everything else. The older one has long hair and a bright personality. The younger one has short hair and a cool, expressionless one.
“Here. This is yours, right?”
“Thanks for picking it up.”
Tsurugi-san accepts the pencil case with a perfectly blank expression, then sets her backpack down on the floor.
In an anime or a manga this would be the moment my springtime rom-com kicks off — but unfortunately this is real life. After tucking the pencil case away, she thanks me one more time and walks off.
”…A thing that doesn’t usually happen, happened. Maybe today’s, like, that kind of day.”
Maybe the gods finally cut me a break. Maybe today’s the day I finally pull the SSR I’ve been chasing.
I pull out my phone, fire up the gacha, dump every last gem I’ve been hoarding, and pull.
The result is a magnificent, spectacular, pity-wall faceplant. Goes without saying that the brief good mood I had evaporates on the spot. Deflated, I leave school and start walking toward the shopping mall.
The mission: hit the bookstore for a light novel. Today’s release day for the latest volume of The Fiancée with Five Personalities, a hugely popular school rom-com. I arrive at the mall and beeline straight to the LN section.
“Oh — this one’s the one I used to read on ‘Become an Author.’ Huh, didn’t know it’d gotten picked up.”
I’m a big LN reader, so I spend a lot of time trawling Become-an-Author, the web novel platform. Anything that climbs the rankings there apparently gets offers from publishers and turns into an actual printed book.
I once tried posting something of my own with that same dream — got basically zero readers and quietly killed it a week later.
“The bar for getting picked up is thirty thousand points. That’s a hopeless grind…”
For the record, my fic accumulated four points in its first week. So yeah, never happening. While thinking about all that, I pick up another LN I’d been reading earlier — Apparently I’m Being Given Twisted Affection by My Modern Yankee Younger Childhood Friend.
Might as well grab this too. I pay at the register and wander the mall a bit. Tomorrow’s the long-awaited Saturday and school’s off, so getting home late is fine.
“Not like I’ve got anything to do at home besides reading LNs and watching anime anyway.”