Chapter 27: Volume 1 - CH 3.7

We continuously played the game for the next few hours.

It was the first time I had played a game like this since Yuzu and I had been together, and I felt a little nostalgic. After a few hours of playing, we finally reached the last boss in the evening.

“Heal! Yamato-kun, Heal!” Yuzu asked me for help while running away from the boss’s attack.

“I’m chanting right now, so wait a minute.”

“No, I can’t wait, I have to… oh! I’m dead!

The woodcutter girl, who was blown away by the boss’s attack, fell limp.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can’t maintain the front line if the vanguard is down!” I complained to Yuzu as I hurriedly switched to a resuscitation item.

“Because he’s strong! He didn’t die at all!”

“Of course not, he’s the last boss! In times like this, you have to act as a wall to protect the front line!”

“I don’t want to play like that without exhilaration! I’m the main character!”

“What are you going to do if you, the main character, die?”

While arguing, I revived Yuzu with an item.

“Yes! I’m alive again! Let’s go for it!”

“You’re moving too fast! Where did you throw away your learning ability?” I desperately cast healing magic on Yuzu, who had turned into a warrior, to maintain the front line.

Thanks to my efforts, we finally succeeded in defeating the last boss after several dozen minutes of desperate struggle.

“Haa…that was long…I didn’t know there was a second form…”

“Boss morphing is a standard part of RPGs. They usually end up not being in human form at all.”

Yuzu was exhausted, and I was filled with a sense of fulfillment.

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The two of us watched the ending movie in silence, immersed in the happy ending. Eventually, when it was over and the credits roll began to play, Yuzu finally exhaled heavily to relax her body.

“It…is over! Good work, Yamato-kun!”

“Oh. Good work!”

Yuzu and I shared the true joy of RPGs: a pleasant sense of fatigue and accomplishment. With this excitement in our hearts, we tried to give each other a powerful high five. I heard the sound of a snap and felt a slight pain spreading in my palm. While immersing in all this, I quietly watched the credits roll.

Yuzu, on the other hand, picked up her bag and started looking through it.

“I found it…Yamato-kun, here.”

What Yuzu handed me was the game I had wanted at the beginning, ‘Robot Buster 2R’—my clearance reward for our RPG of being lovers.

It was something I had always wanted, but for some reason, I hesitated to accept it for a moment.

“Yamato-kun?” Yuzu tilted her head, probably wondering why I didn’t accept the game that was offered to me.

So I shook off my strange feelings and took the game.

“Ah. I was a little surprised when it came out of nowhere. Anyway, I guess we’re all done now.”

“Yeah. although it might end up with Aki being too weak to confess,” Yuzu answered jokingly, but indeed, that was totally possible.

“If it ends up like that, we have to rethink the plan from scratch.”

“Haha. You’ve got such a strong sense of duty to still go along with me, even though you’ve already obtained the game now.” Yuzu smiled somewhat happily.

“Well, that’s my promise to you, isn’t it? Call me if that happens.”

“Okay.” Yuzu nodded her head with a respectful bow.

As the credits roll reached the end, silence filled the room.

“Hey. Since it’s the last time, can I ask you something that’s been bothering me for a while?”

“…Sure, what is it?”

I looked at Yuzu and nodded, and she looked me back in the eye and asked.

“Yamato-kun, why don’t you make any friends? I have a lot of fun with Yamato-kun and I’m sure you could make friends easily.”

“You’re asking yet another harsh question to a loner.”

Since the question was shot to me, I only got slightly hurt, but if a common loner were to be asked that by a Riaju, it could be lethal.

Nevertheless, as long as I was asked, I’d answer. This was our last time after all.

“I don’t have any particular reason to be alone. I just prefer to be alone than to hang out with my friends. I’m just an introverted guy by nature.”

Sorry if you were expecting some special drama or trauma related to relationships, but this was just my personality.

Somehow I was just not good at interacting with strangers, or smiling affectionately, or talking to my classmates in April—the most important month for building relationships. When talking to someone close to me on a one-on-one basis, I could usually get a conversation going, but if I were to crosstalk with five or so people, I would naturally fall silent. Communicating was just not my forte.

“Hmmm…is that how it is?” Yuzu, whose communication ability was monster-level, didn’t seem to get my point so she knitted her eyebrows in disgruntlement.

“That’s just the way it is. Well…there was a time when I thought I’d overcome that.”

‘People are highly sociable beings. Therefore, for someone to not be able to get along with others, it would be a drawback.’ So, to overcome this, when it was compulsory to join a club in junior high school, I decided to play basketball—a team sport.

Sometimes referred to as ‘interpersonal skill’, being able to converse well with others is not a personality trait, but simply a technical skill. It’s just a skill of giving the right response at the right time, smiling with the right intensity, and providing the right topic in conversations; yes, just a skill.

There are some geniuses like Yuzu who have mastered it from the start, but even if you don’t, with the right training and experience, anyone can acquire these skills.

“When I joined the basketball team, I overcame that for a while. I thought I had become a brighter person. And I became the commanding point guard.”

So I believed if you could pretend to be something you’re not, you could still make friends. It was just that I didn’t see the point in making friends that way.

“You thought?” Yuzu seemed to be caught by my words in the past tense.

I nodded in response to her question.

“Yeah. In the summer of my sophomore year, I became the captain of the basketball team. The people around me congratulated me, saying that they had no complaints if it was me…I was so happy about it. I was in high spirits and tried to bring the club together.”

From figuring out tactics in matches and basketball practices to solving relationship problems. I enjoyed being relied upon by those around me and felt fulfilled by the realization that I was supporting those around me.

…It was totally out of character for me to do such things, yet I was so drowned in them that I was muddled.

“I tried doing my best, but…it was getting harder and harder to breathe. The more people around me depended on me, the more I felt like I had no way out.”

It was the shackles of responsibility.

‘Some things can’t be done without me. So I must never run away from it.’ The moment I had that awareness, the place I had been enjoying felt like a prison.

“I wish I could’ve enjoyed that kind of thing as Yuzu does.”

“Yamato-kun…” Yuzu called out my name in a caring manner.

I replied with a wry smile.

Everyone worked together to accomplish something. Sometimes we fought with each other, sometimes we helped each other, and sometimes we worked hard to overcome difficulties together. It was definitely a wonderful thing—but I was tired of those wonders.

“When I retired from the basketball team and no longer had time to hang out with my friends and juniors, it wasn’t loneliness that I felt—it was a sense of liberation. I was surprised at that time, because I had always thought of myself as someone who puts friends first. Frankly, I didn’t want to admit it.”

Again, ‘People are highly social beings’. Humans find happiness by satisfying their need for approval based on how much they are acknowledged by others.

And yet, I could not find any meaning in that value. I chose basketball because I thought it was a good sport where you play with your teammates; but did that mean tennis and golf, which are individual sports, inferior to basketball? Is listening to your favorite music by yourself in a relaxed atmosphere inferior to karaoke with your friends?

When I asked myself that question, I couldn’t nod in affirmation.

“It may sound like I’m a sore loser, but I think I’ve fallen victim to the ‘Communication curse’.”

Yes, a curse; that was the perfect word to describe it.

“I made friends just to show off how many friends I had. It wasn’t like I wanted to get along with the person in front of me, I just wanted the status of having friends. I wanted to escape being labeled as a loner, no, I wanted to escape the class caste. That was it.”

Between someone who had communication ability and someone who lacked it, it was unmistakably better to be the former. Regardless of how I construed myself, as long as I lived in a community, I couldn’t escape this fact.  However, communication could be considered as only one of our skills.

For example: it is better to be able to cook than not be able to cook, but if you ask me if someone who can’t cook is unhappier than someone who can, it’s not true. It’s just one of the many factors that shape our happiness.

“So, I decided to throw it all away at once. I reached the conclusion that a person who enjoys being alone, might be just okay staying alone.” That was my answer to Yuzu’s question.

Anywhere, that was just a common loner’s way to live.

“I see.” Yuzu heard that and just nodded.

“…So, did you find it a little hard to breathe around me?”

I couldn’t help but smile at Yuzu’s words as if she was trying to probe me.

“Hey, I was simply searching for a way for me to be leisurely, so it naturally led me to be a loner; but it’s not that I don’t like people or that I’m obsessed with being alone. It’s fun to talk to people when I have someone to talk to.”

When Yuzu heard that, her expression brightened.

“That’s right! If you think about it, there’s no way you’d feel bad about being with a beautiful girl with perfect communication skills like me!”

“Wait. Wait, I just said it’s fun to talk to people I hit it off with, I didn’t say it was fun with you.”

“What’s that? Which is it in the end?!”

I was amused by the panicked look on Yuzu’s face, so I turned my head down and tried to hold back the urge to erupt.

“You teased me! Darn you!” Yuzu, who hit me with her bag in protest, was kind of cute.

──Like this, we spent our last day together.