The train sped through the night.
Inside the carriage, there were only a few scattered, exhausted salarymen and students returning late from their weekend leisure.
The window reflected Koharu Miura’s slender silhouette, the lenses of her glasses illuminated by the glowing screen of the phone she stared at intently.
The girl’s fingertips tapped the screen from time to time.
Since boarding the train, Koharu was still a bit concerned about the comment from Post 49.
She wanted to scroll back and check the replies to that thread again.
However, because she had clicked through too many threads and web pages just now, it would take some time to find the original post where the user had appeared.
“My stop…”
As the broadcast announced the name of the station near her home, Koharu let out a sigh and followed the sparse crowd onto the platform.
The night wind snuck under the hem of her long skirt, sending a shiver down her legs.
She reflexively wrapped her hoodie tighter around herself and walked quickly toward her home.
***
When she arrived home, her parents were rarely not there.
After seeing the note on the table, Koharu went to the kitchen to reheat the dishes her mother had left.
She ate a simple dinner, washed the dishes, and then hurriedly scurried into her bedroom.
Kicking off her indoor shoes, Koharu curled up in the swivel chair in front of her desk.
Picking up from where she had left off on the train, the expression in her eyes became incredibly focused as she resumed her search.
‘Let me see who you really are…’
The fluorescent glow of the screen reflected in her pupils, shifting with subtle colors.
“…”
After a long while, Koharu finally found the familiar and intriguing reply.
She clicked on the user’s homepage.
‘I see… so that’s how it is.’
What Koharu saw was an account with an incredibly clean homepage.
It had a default avatar, the ID was a string of random numbers, and the registration time was shortly before the reply on Post 49… Furthermore, all the reply records pointed to the same topic—they were all so-called “rational discussions” targeting Arisa Kiyono.
There wasn’t even a single record of casual chatting… Every reply was dedicated to that specific topic…
It was a standard forum alt account.
Koharu narrowed her eyes slightly.
It had only been a guess before, but now it was almost confirmed.
The owner of this account was certainly no ordinary passerby; they had a reason to hide their identity.
That was why they could speak with such certainty, and why they did so through an alt account.
The state of the account made Koharu even more convinced that the other person’s identity was special.
‘If an acquaintance recognized the user and saw those comments, it would lead to serious consequences for them, wouldn’t it?’
Koharu rested her chin on her hand, thinking carefully as she tried to narrow down the scope of suspects.
‘This kind of professional stage evaluation… they really do seem like an insider.’
Under the same account’s replies, they hadn’t just mentioned the stage aesthetics, the performance, the acting, and gossip like everyone else.
There were also professional-sounding remarks about various activities on stage.
The person who could say these things should be quite familiar with idol activities.
In that case… was it a teammate who practiced with her every day, or a fanatic fan?
—But solo-fans usually worshipped their idols to an extreme degree. If they were a fan of Arisa Kiyono, it was impossible for them to speak with such a dismissive tone.
Then…
Could it be a solo-fan of one of her teammates?
Koharu kept this possibility in mind for now, though it couldn’t be confirmed yet. She began to examine another possibility in her mind.
‘Is it really a teammate?’
Koharu closed her eyes, trying hard to recall the plot of ‘Brilliant and Shining! The Love Story of Starshine Academy’.
In the original game’s plot, the scenes between Arisa Kiyono and her teammates backstage were quite harmonious.
‘Something’s wrong.’
Koharu opened her eyes.
If at this point in time—several months before Kanzaki Sou met her—the team had already developed this kind of narrative-driving behavior born from jealousy, to the point of opening threads on forums to bash her, then this rift was almost irreversible.
The human heart was not a game script; you couldn’t instantly erase hatred by pressing a “reconcile” button.
With the kind of resentment seeping through the lines, no matter how gentle Kanzaki Sou was several months later, it would be impossible to repair the entire group’s relationship to such a harmonious state in a short period. Unless… the members of Sugar Starlight were all Oscar-level film queens.
Koharu shook her head, ruling out that possibility.
Kanzaki Sou’s ability to capture “true emotions” was top-tier. If the teammates were acting, there was no way he wouldn’t see through it.
“Therefore, the holder of this account most likely isn’t a member of Sugar Starlight at all.”
She reached a conclusion that even surprised her a little.
The scope shifted again.
Since it wasn’t a teammate who spent day and night with her, then who else could it be that knew her movements, her character flaws, and even some “sense of exclusion” that could only be observed in private?
‘A classmate? Or a so-called “friend” in her life?’
Koharu straightened her back, her fingers operating the keyboard again. She began to type the name of the high school Arisa Kiyono attended into the search engine, along with recent social media rumors about the school.
As an idol, Arisa was surely a focal point at school as well. But being the focal point often meant loneliness, because no one dared to truly approach a girl on such a pedestal.
“Arisa Kiyono has always maintained a perfect image at school and has almost no close friends. That’s the setting in the game,” Koharu muttered to herself. “But what if… there is someone who is both her classmate and has some unknown channel to observe her entertainment life up close?”
This “up close” didn’t necessarily have to be physical.
A flash of inspiration suddenly struck Koharu. She began to search for keywords in those hate threads, no longer focusing on stage terminology but on mundane lifestyle details.
Finally, in another thread that was about to get buried, she discovered that the account from Post 49 had once replied: ‘Even though she only eats those pathetic nutritional meals in the cafeteria at noon, she really manages to maintain that fake “Young Lady” aura.’
The moment she saw this sentence, Koharu felt as if the back of her head had been hit by a mild electric shock.
The cafeteria, nutritional meals, the Young Lady aura.
This was content from school life!
Sugar Starlight’s training base and the school were two different places. The teammates wouldn’t know what Arisa ate in the school cafeteria.
‘The scope has narrowed… As I thought, it’s someone in her class, or someone at school who can contact her frequently.’
Koharu’s heart rate quickened slightly.
Why was she investigating to this extent?
To survive.
Although the prompt given by the System earlier was vague, the core meaning was clear: if she didn’t interfere with the protagonist entering other heroines’ personal routes, she, as a background character, would be deleted.
And Arisa Kiyono’s personal route was always the one most likely to lead to a “Game Over” in the original game because it involved heavy topics like idol survival and school bullying. If Kanzaki Sou intervened in Arisa’s crisis as a “Savior,” that emotional bond would be indestructible.
‘If I can dig up this “landmine” in advance, or… use it to steer the meeting between Arisa and Kanzaki Sou in a different direction…’
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