The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village-Volume 5, Longing

“Ahh, ahh. Everything on the news just makes me sigh these days. It’s all so boring.”

“We can’t win. We’re doing our best, but this is all we get. There are so many champion schools here. We’re good enough to get at least to the qualifiers in any other district, so why are we stuck here?”

“Did you see that site? Type in your age, qualifications, and academic history and it’ll calculate out how much income you’ll earn in your lifetime. ...You aren’t laughing? Why can’t you just laugh this off?”

“The election’s next week? It doesn’t matter. That isn’t going to change anything.” f𝔯ℯe𝓌ℯ𝐛𝒏𝐨ѵel.c𝚘𝐦

“I don’t have the courage. I’m not the kind of person who can just talk to any boy. What am I supposed to do? Am I just going to sit here hesitating until someone else takes him?”

“What is this? This is hopeless. What even is a normalized score? If I’m separated from the rest here, how am I supposed to support myself for the next seventy or eighty years?”

“Oh, crap. At my age, you can’t find anyone even on this questionable dating site.”

“Why is it so hard to breathe?”

“Is everything I try a dead end?”

“How should I put it...”

“Can’t something happen to just blow it all away?”

Fine then. If that is what you all truly want, I will provide that thrill, that fear.

But once it begins, there is no turning back.