After parting at the corner, Kondo Haruka did not immediately return to her own classroom.
The autumn afternoon sunlight stretched the shadows of the neatly lined sycamores outside the teaching building.
Carrying her tennis bag, Kondo Haruka walked among the tree shadows, her rubber soles making rhythmic pat-pat sounds on the outdoor tiles.
The chestnut-curly-haired girl walked briskly, her short hair bouncing slightly on her shoulders with each step, a crisp aura flowing freely.
However, unlike what her demeanor displayed, Kondo Haruka’s brows were tightly knit, and in her usually sharp, even somewhat aggressive eyes, a troubled emotion spread with her gaze.
Kiyono Arisa— she didn’t know her personally, but they were in the same grade, which meant she was ultimately just an ordinary high school girl of the same age, like herself, Koharu Miura, and everyone else.
Being an idol in extracurricular activities— shouldn’t that be something for her to rejoice in?
Just as she herself loved sports and only found her sense of belonging on the field, was it the same for Kiyono Arisa?
The self she could only feel on stage—no doubt she regarded that double life the same way.
—Who would have thought that behind that double life, she would encounter something like this?
To be honest, if her own athletic career had encountered such bullying, such humiliation, such persecution, she would be incomparably sad, anxious, and unable to cope.
Could she still show up at school as if nothing happened?
That girl she didn’t know was enduring this situation, showing up at school like nothing was wrong, interacting with other students, acquaintances, and teachers, living as normal.
‘—Her own place of belonging was about to collapse.’
The things she heard from Koharu Miura made a nameless fire surge in Kondo Haruka’s chest. At the same time, another thing shocked her.
‘—Koharu Miura kept it from everyone and waded alone so deep into this muddy edge.’
“What excuse… in the end, she just wants to play the hero alone.”
Though she couldn’t resist a jab, in her heart, Kondo Haruka couldn’t help but feel admiration for Koharu Miura.
She too was just the same age, but in their interactions, she always showed a sense of responsibility, duty, and performance beyond her years.
Kondo Haruka pursed her lips, her fingers unconsciously tightening around the strap of her bag.
Although she wanted to dismiss Koharu Miura’s somewhat flattering words as just that girl’s usual tricks to win favor— at the station back then, Koharu Miura’s face as pale as paper and her completely drained, broken-down appearance were not fake.
That wasn’t acting. That girl, who always maintained a harmless facade, was genuinely scared at that moment.
Kondo Haruka did want to prove to Kanzaki Sou that she could solve problems on her own, that she could protect others, instead of just clinging to him like before.
But now, things had developed to this point—she was no longer walking this path just to prove something.
“—Since I’ve said this much, I can’t just watch someone close to me get into trouble right under my nose.”
Kondo Haruka took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing those tangled thoughts.
She came from a sports background and was always more accustomed to straightforward thinking.
She knew she couldn’t compare to Koharu Miura’s seemingly fragile exterior but meticulous interior; compared to someone like that, she was more used to the logic of “find the target, devise a strategy, then strike with a single blow.”
‘—If I’m going to root out the mole in that class, the most direct entry point is still Kobayashi.’
Turning the corner of the corridor, Kondo Haruka effortlessly arrived at the rest area reserved for sports clubs.
It was just before the end of lunch break, and from the soccer club’s prep room came the laughter of members and the sound of water washing shoes.
Kondo Haruka didn’t hesitate. She walked straight to the door and knocked three times with her knuckles.
The sudden knocking silenced the clamor inside.
Soon, a male soccer club member wearing practice clothes stained with grass and drying his hair with a towel opened the door.
Seeing that it wasn’t their own manager, he relaxed a bit—but then he recognized the visitor as the famously hot-tempered Kondo Haruka from the tennis club, and his relaxed posture stiffened even more than before.
“Ah… Kondo, what is it?”
“Is Kobayashi here?”
Kondo Haruka cut to the chase, her gaze sweeping past the boy’s shoulder into the room cluttered with ball racks and tactic boards.
“The manager—she was called away to help check some forms at noon, I think. She didn’t come to the club during lunch today.”
The boy answered obediently.
“I see—thanks.”
Not caring that the person was still standing there dumbfounded, Kondo Haruka nodded and turned to leave without any further words.
Since she wasn’t there, no point wasting time.
As for Kobayashi not coming at noon, she didn’t think much of it—high school life was full of trivial errands, and it was normal for the homeroom teacher to temporarily grab students to help.
‘Originally I wanted to seriously ask Kobayashi for a favor, and it would be better to say it in person… Since she’s not here, I’ll have to settle for arranging it for next time.’
On her way back upstairs to the classroom, Kondo Haruka pulled out her phone and opened the LIME chat with Kobayashi. Her fingers flew across the screen as she sent the invitation:
[Wait for me by the vending machines behind the first floor of the teaching building after school. I have something to ask you about your class. Thanks.]
Shoving the phone into her jacket pocket, Kondo Haruka happened to reach the doorway of her class.
At that moment, the sharp sound of the preparatory bell swept through the corridor, shattering the last bit of restlessness before the end of lunch break.
Kondo Haruka relaxed her expression and stepped back into her classroom.
……
In the other end of the teaching building, the first afternoon class was steeped in a hypnotic, dull atmosphere.
On the podium, the Japanese language teacher with thick-rimmed glasses was dissecting a contemporary novelist’s work in a flat, monotonous tone, the chalk occasionally scraping against the blackboard with a teeth-gritting screech-screech.
Sitting in her seat, Koharu Miura didn’t take in a single word. Her notebook lay open flat, the pen tip resting in the center of a blank page, where a small blue-black ink blot had already spread.
The afternoon sun was a bit dazzling, shining on her profile and making her unconsciously avoid it.
That warmth could not dispel the stubborn chill that clung to her fingertips from deep within.
Koharu Miura’s gaze was fixed on the blackboard, but her thoughts were lost and circling in an endless dark tunnel.
‘—If Kondo Haruka really gets her friends to find out who the mole is, what should I do next?’
This question had been like a barb jammed in her mind ever since she parted ways with Kondo Haruka at noon.
In fact, under normal circumstances, for this kind of cold bullying in school, the most reasonable procedure would be to gather evidence, bypass the ordinary teachers who might try to smooth things over, and submit it directly to the homeroom teacher, or even the grade head or dean—those administrators with actual disciplinary power. That should work, right?
Koharu Miura felt a bit helpless. In the real world, she was a somewhat marginalized presence; she had almost no social life during her school years, and never experienced such dramatic conflicts.
She had never tattled to a teacher, never been a teacher’s pet, never played the role of a justice-bringer.
It wasn’t until she graduated and joined a company that she encountered similar conflicts of interest—when someone in the department acted against the team’s interests or violated a confidentiality agreement, the most efficient way wasn’t private arguing, but to organize attendance records and transactions directly, letting the person’s direct supervisor handle it.
Termination, notification, salary reduction. Those were immediate solutions based on real-world social rules.
“But… here, in a place already tainted by the malice of the world, would these ordinary measures really work?”
Koharu Miura bit her lower lip.
All the chaos in this world was not essentially because a particular student had a bad personality or misbehaved, but because the world’s malice was materializing.
That group of persecutors, the crowd that drove Mayumi to cry in the alley—they were not entities that could be erased with a dismissal order or a parent-teacher meeting.
Even if she and Kondo Haruka made a big deal of dragging out that mole and hauling them to the dean’s office, what good would it do?
The dean might define the matter as a simple girl’s quarrel due to lack of concrete evidence; or, if the so-called mole was punished, the world, in order to correct the plot where Arisa must leave the group and be destroyed, would instantly materialize a second, third, or even countless eyes in the class or the idol group.
‘—Simply reporting and handing it over won’t solve the root of the problem. Because the opponent might be part of the rules themselves.’
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