| Author: Resn | Original Source: Kakuyomu |
| Translator: Nomad | English Source: Re:Library |
| Editor(s): Silva | |
It was the morning for Kou’s high school entrance ceremony.
After waking up in their guild house, Kou went to sit down on a chair with eyes closed. Suddenly it felt like Kou was pulled away from the world. Crim’s body was still in Destiny Unchain Online, present in that world, but only halfway, as her mind, that of Mitsuki Kou, was transferred to a different program.
“You’re trying to access registered device NR-AV0589, proceed?”
“Yes please.”
A monotone female voice rings out requesting confirmation. Once given, a sensation like traveling through a dark tunnel fell over Kou before new information and light filled his mind.
“…onder if…he’ll be… Oh, Kou, can you hear me?”
The feed was rather distorted and noisy at first, but eventually the pairing process was complete and the voice cleared up. After a short moment of hesitation, Kou also spoke.
“…Hijiri?”
“Oh, can you hear me? Good morning Kou!”
“Ah…right, good morning.”
Somehow hearing that cheerful voice from a young girl, Kou felt embarrassed before stammering a response.
There had been no other option though. Kou was connected directly to Hijiri’s NLD, with everything she saw and heard being transmitted to the virtual world through a device that looked like a half sphere, mounted onto her shoulder.
It was almost like Kou had turned into a small fairy sitting on Hijiri’s shoulder, watching a cityscape from that perspective. But that also meant that Kou’s viewpoint was right next to Hijiri’s face now.
“S-Say, how does the uniform look? Do I look cute?”
“Y-Yeah… You look really cute, it fits you.”
Hijiri stopped in front of a store with large windows, spinning around a little so Kou could get a better look at her. That made Kou feel even more embarrassed, but he still managed to get a compliment out.
It was very rare for Kou to be so close to Hijiri’s face, letting him examine her very closely. Her face had a beautiful contour, and her slightly droopy eyes gave her a really kind appearance.
Her new uniform had a red plaid skirt and a deep blue blazer with green accents. It was a rather plain design for a uniform, but it suited Hijiri rather well.
In real life, Hijiri had long hair that reached down to her hips, had a light natural color, and she had one braid behind her left ear. Her stature was average for someone her age, but even when wearing a school uniform it was clear she had a strong sense of fashion.
To put it simply, she was really pretty, even without Kou’s personal bias.
But her clear and soft skin was marked with a nasty scar on her neck. Still, she never made any efforts to hide it, leaving it on full display as if to tell everyone she did not care.
“Yayy, Kou just called me cute.”
Hijiri gave a carefree smile as she turned around and began walking in high spirits again.
“I mean, Kou is always calling you cute no matter what. Right, Kou?”
“Sh-Shut up! Also, morning…Subaru.”
“Morning… It’s been a while since we saw each other here.”
Subaru then joined the conversation, poking fun at the two. He was also wearing a blazer of the same colors, and a pair of beige plaid trousers. His hair looked silky and smooth, something many girls envied, though he had it disheveled on purpose. He was quite attractive like Hijiri as well, and stood a head taller than her.
He leaned down to look into Kou’s camera for a bit, before pushing back his glasses and grinning teasingly.
As a bit of an aside, the NLD also has a vision correcting feature, so no one really needed to wear glasses anymore, but for some reason Subaru had turned that feature off and insisted on wearing glasses. He just said they looked good on him, so Kou stopped asking about them eventually.
The twins were Kou’s childhood friends, but somehow it felt like they had not seen each other in a very long time.
“You’re right, it’s been a while…”
Kou was still seeing them through the virtual world, but seeing the twins in real life filled his chest with emotion, making his voice quiver. Hearing that, the twins just looked at Kou with kindness.
◇◇◇
Some time later Kou’s emotions finally calmed down.
“So…this is the station then?”
Looking from Hijiri’s shoulder, Kou looked at a building he had never seen before. Or rather, he had only seen it once, back when he came for an interview.
“Yes, that’s it. You only came here once last year, right? We’re still around ten minutes away from the school from here.”
Kou’s guess had been correct, as Hijiri chuckled as she explained where they were.
All the cars on the road in front of them began braking one after another in orderly fashion before a crossing. They were all self driving vehicles which the city had started employing recently.
Once all the cars had stopped, the line of red lights across the road in front of Hijiri turned green, showing that pedestrians could cross the street safely.
Most of those lights did not come from LEDs built into the road, but they were part of the NLD’s Augmented Reality display. There were just a few actual lights, placed there in case someone was not wearing a NLD.
There were no traffic lights hung on tall poles outside of old history books now, as they were slowly phased out for landscaping reasons, and none were left by the time Kou and his friends were born.
Instead, cars and other similar vehicles were ordered by law to have HUDs on the front and rear windows, which would display all of the traffic signals. But even those systems had become antiquated with the advent of self-driving cars, and in modern times almost everything was automated in the city.
When the lights turned green, all of the pedestrians began to cross the street.
“Woah…were there always this many people in the city..?”
Kou was quickly overwhelmed as he walked alongside a large crowd of pedestrians.
“Ahahah, you’ve really gotten too used to being over there Kou.”
“I mean, there are a lot more people here than in Nebel.”
“Ah…I see, that makes sense…”
But even then, from the eyes of an older generation like their parents, there were less people out in the streets, thanks to the lowering birth rate and increased popularity of remote work. The younger generation like Kou could not understand what they meant though.
“By the way, Kou, your voice is still the same as Crim’s, right?”
“Huh? W-Wait, are you serious?!”
“Oh yeah, now that you mention it… I can’t imagine Uncle Sora making such a basic mistake though, we’ll have to ask him about it later.”
“Yeah, I’d appreciate that… I guess I’ll have to avoid talking at school as much as possible until that’s fixed.”
Soon, Kou realized that there were more students wearing the same uniform as Hijiri and Subaru, so he lowered his voice.
At this time, Kou was still worried that if he spoke too much people would think of him as a girl, which would cause him trouble once he managed to come back as a boy.1
◇◇◇
They continued walking while chatting for a while.
Eventually, they reached a path lined with cherry trees, which seemed to form a tunnel of flowers, and at the end they reached their destination. The gates of the high school they would be spending the next three years of academic life in.
“Well, we’ve arrived now.”
“Hmm, that’s a really fancy building too. I guess it makes sense for a school for rich kids.”
“Wait, what do you mean rich kids…”
Kou was slightly taken by surprise by the strange comment Hijiri made. Though seeing all the cherry blossoms raining on the garden between the outer gates and the main building’s entrance certainly gave that impression.
That was Morinomiya High. It was a private high school located in the suburbs of the designated city in Honshu where the group of friends live. The main campus had been built recently, equipped with all of the newest technologies, and had gotten rather popular for being a model school. It was also fully equipped to support VR and AR environments, which allowed Kou to attend remotely too, which he greatly appreciated now.
All of that obviously came at a cost, so the tuition fees were higher than what a normal household could afford. But Kou’s parents and the twin’s father all had high positions in NTEC, a company that had just released a highly successful MMORPG, and even before that they had been three out of the five most important people involved with developing and releasing the modern NLD that was so ubiquitous to modern Japanese life, making them extremely famous.
But in the case of Kou, his parents lived for their work and did not have much interest in lavish lifestyles, so they led rather normal lives, and Kou was used to that as well, growing up as a normal kid even though his family was quite affluent.
Then again, a large portion of the Mitsuki family’s fortune had been spent to fund the independent development of the VRMMO as well.
Kou’s mother had often spoken proudly of how their fortune could easily allow them to hire a butler who referred to Kou as Young Master and took care of everything.
Then again, his parents had chosen to invest most of their fortune into their own ventures.
“…Well, we made it into this school, so we’ll have to study hard and make it worth it.”
Kou muttered, mainly saying to himself, but Hijiri and Subaru also nodded earnestly.
Society saw Kou’s parents as hard working and affluent people, so Kou could not afford to start rumors about their child having bad grades for being too addicted to games.
That also made Kou aware that he had been only thinking about games as of late, so he had to start thinking more seriously about studying now that his new school was in front of his eyes.
