The corridor was eerily quiet.
Watching Hasegawa Aoi vanish quickly from sight, Suzuki Yuu felt helpless.
“This deserter…” he muttered under his breath.
Then he faced Shiina Chisa.
She opened her mouth. Her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible, but Yuu understood her from the shape of her lips:
“Come in.”
Right now, he desperately wanted to run away, but thinking about it, even if he ran now, he’d still have to face her during the school trip.
He might as well just go in directly.
But as soon as he sat down across from Shiina Chisa, the girl just stared at him, not saying a word.
“Good evening…”
The atmosphere was unbearably awkward, so Yuu took the initiative to break the silence.
“Good evening, Yuu.”
The reply was short.
Her attitude right now was just like when he first met her in the past—completely giving off no desire to communicate.
He remembered that back then, Shiina Chisa would often just stare at her computer from her seat.
Sure enough, she shifted her gaze away from him, refocusing on the laptop screen in front of her. The glow from the screen reflected on her pale face, and her jet-black pupils mirrored fragments of data and graphs. Her expression quickly turned focused, as if she was ignoring him.
But if she truly ignored him, that would actually be easier. Then they wouldn’t have anything to do with each other.
Unfortunately, the arrangements for the school trip told him that wasn’t the case…
“Do you stay here every night now?”
“Yeah. Since that day, nobody comes looking for me in the evenings anymore, so I stay to look over the family business’s quarterly reports.”
“Uh…”
Yuu knew she was talking about the day she kidnapped him. After that, he’d joined the student council and gotten caught up in all sorts of busy matters, so naturally, he didn’t come by to see Shiina Chisa like before.
But thinking about it, would any normal person go see someone who almost **ed them?
Though, to be fair, he didn’t really count as normal himself.
After a pause, Yuu finally replied:
“Can’t be helped, I’ve been pretty busy lately.”
“Getting along well with President Jinguu?”
Shiina Chisa asked suddenly, as if it was just a casual topic.
But her hand was tightly gripping a mechanical pencil, looking like she cared about this a lot.
“Not bad. It’s busy, but President Jinguu is a pretty nice person.”
Snap—
A crisp sound suddenly rang out in the silent classroom.
Yuu looked over and saw that Shiina Chisa had pressed her mechanical pencil so hard that the lead snapped.
With a blank expression, she swept the broken lead into the trash, then slowly looked up. In those beautiful eyes, a hint of hostility appeared.
But that hostility wasn’t directed at Yuu.
It was clear who it was aimed at.
He’d never seen Shiina Chisa like this before. In all their time together, this girl had never fought over anything.
Even on the day she tied him up in that lab, when she heard the name Jinguu Amane, she let him go.
So why was she suddenly so angry now?
“Uh… is something wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just regretting something.”
“Regretting what?” Yuu swallowed nervously and asked cautiously.
“Regretting letting you go that day. Yuu, you found the perfect person to deceive me.”
Her voice was calm again, but it sent a chill down Yuu’s back.
“Thinking back, even if what you said that day was true, I should’ve just taken you out of Tokyo.”
“Out of Tokyo?” Yuu was stunned. “Where to?”
“The Shiina family has a manor in Hokkaido. It’s remote, not a soul for ten kilometers around.” Shiina Chisa’s fingers tapped the table lightly, as if calculating something. “It has full living facilities, a library, a music hall, a hot spring… You’d like it.”
I think I probably wouldn’t like it… Yuu grumbled inwardly.
Then he remembered what Jinguu Amane had said about her father.
These ojou-samas really do think differently from normal people.
“Let’s not talk about that for now. It’ll just bring back bad memories… More importantly, I’m curious, Shiina-san, why are you afraid of Senpai Jinguu?” Yuu tried to steer the conversation to something that interested him more.
After all, he was going to have to interact with Jinguu Amane for quite a while. It was good to know this kind of information.
“Change the way you address me.”
“Hm?”
“I don’t like the way you address me now.”
“Chisa…”
Yuu almost reflexively obeyed her. When he said the name, the tension in the air seemed to change.
Shiina Chisa’s expression visibly softened for a moment. The sharp hostility in her eyes seemed to find an outlet and gradually faded away.
“I’m not afraid of her. Even when I let you go, I thought you’d really been seduced by her. She’s the type to do something like that.”
“…Why couldn’t it be me seducing her?”
Yuu protested a little, but quickly gave up.
Because the look Shiina Chisa gave him clearly said, “Do you really think that’s possible?”
Alright, not much chance indeed.
“She’s not like me. If you try to approach her, you’ll definitely get played like a fool.”
Shiina Chisa gave a reason Yuu found convincing. He couldn’t deny it—after all, Jinguu Amane had led him by the nose the whole time he’d been in the student council.
“Hmm… I guess I did misunderstand you, but a lot of people are intimidated by Senpai Jinguu.”
“That’s because they’re both afraid of and dependent on the Jinguu family. Most people don’t matter to her—she only pays attention to exceptional individuals.”
“Like you? I heard you used to beat her all the time.”
“Yeah, that’s also something I regret. When I first entered middle school, my family wanted me to participate in some competitions. By chance, I won against President Jinguu once… Ever since then, I felt like she kept coming after me.”
“Huh?”
Yuu was surprised to hear that.
He pictured Jinguu Amane sticking to someone like some obsessive girl.
Yeah, that really didn’t sound likely.
“What are you imagining?”
Shiina Chisa saw Yuu frowning and shaking his head, then smirking to himself, and found it strange.
“Nothing like what you’re thinking. It’s just that after that, every competition I entered, I’d always run into her.”
“So she was challenging you?”
“Pretty much. Back in middle school, she put a lot of pressure on me, all because of her.”
“But didn’t you win more?”
Yuu asked, but Shiina Chisa shook her head.
“That’s only because I started learning those things from a young age and put in a lot of effort. As for President Jinguu, she just picked them up on a whim, maybe had some basic knowledge at most.”
“So, in other words, she could threaten you with just a little bit of study?”
“Yeah. At the time, I put all my energy into those competitions. It made me really tired.”
Hearing that, Yuu thought of Hasegawa Aoi. Maybe that’s why she decided to slack off?
But Jinguu Amane had been studying music since she was a child, so maybe it wasn’t so strange for her to lose sometimes?
Yuu wondered, then asked the girl another question:
“So you two became rivals in middle school?”
“No, I just gave up. If she wants to enter those competitions, let her. I didn’t have the energy to keep up with all that.”
Shiina Chisa spoke nonchalantly, as if it had nothing to do with her.
If only you could give up on me so decisively too…
Yuu complained silently in his heart.
“Of course, President Jinguu wouldn’t let me off that easily. Even if I stopped competing with her, she’d come up with new ways to trouble me.
“Like in the archery tournament. Later on, I basically stopped participating, so she had the student council organize some inter-school competitions, trying to get the school to force me to join.”
“And did you go?”
“No. That whole period, I just stayed home and slept.”
Shiina Chisa said, then looked up at Yuu and added:
“I thought by now she’d finally let it go, but she’s still finding ways to trouble me. I never thought your lie would actually get her to go along with it.”
Suddenly, the topic was back on him, and Yuu felt a twinge of unease.
“It really does suit Senpai’s personality…”
“In any case, that day, after weighing everything, I let you go, but it made me incredibly anxious.”
Shiina Chisa paused for a moment, then suddenly seemed relieved.
“So I thought a lot about it then, and looked into a lot of things. Until I confirmed that you two really didn’t know each other before, and that she only suddenly decided to give me trouble, I finally felt a little at ease.”
At this point, Shiina Chisa’s eyes dimmed a bit.
What others didn’t know was that, at this moment, thinking about these things, the girl once again felt regret.
She never should’ve let the boy in front of her get away. Even if Jinguu Amane lost interest, surely someone else would be after him.
How could she be so foolish?
The more she thought about it, the more she shook her head.
Of course, Shiina Chisa’s thoughts were not apparent to Yuu. Right now, he just felt a little annoyed by the way these ojou-samas handled things.
They really didn’t treat him like a person at all.
Sure, he was a bit of a scoundrel, a bit of a flirt, always eyeing what he didn’t have, but still—treating him as a test subject, a bargaining chip, or an object of competition was a bit too disrespectful, wasn’t it?
Of course, these complaints only stayed in his heart. After all, these two ojou-samas really did have the right not to see him as a person.
Survival comes first—not shameful at all.
“But this time, I’m not giving up.”
Suddenly, Shiina Chisa’s words snapped Yuu back to reality.
“Uh, I think you should just stick to your personality.”
“I’m very clear on what I want. Even if I know Jinguu Amane might’ve only made that agreement with you because of me, whenever I think about the two of you spending time together, I get irritated.”
“Irritated?”
“I’ve imagined a thousand ways of getting rid of her in my mind, though that’s impossible.”
Yuu was starting to feel a little scared, as if she was about to enter that mode she was in when she tied him up before.
“There’s no rules for this competition, no time limit, not even any standards for victory—and maybe there isn’t just one opponent.
“But I’ll still give it my all, because the prize at the end is something that will be with me for life.”
Shiina Chisa stood up, then bent down and leaned close to Yuu’s ear, her voice as soft as a vow:
“So this time, I won’t let go again.”