Dense-as-a-Brick Yuika

After Yuzu-neesan’s emotional roller coaster, we settled on a date for my first meeting—or rather, an online meet-and-greet—with Ephir-san, Rion-san, and Snow-san.

That was scheduled for tonight.

So today, I planned to head straight home from school without stopping anywhere.

Final exams were already over, and from here until spring break, school attendance was basically optional.

It was less regular school and more like running out the clock.

Whether we showed up or not was pretty much up to us.

To be honest, even if I skipped every remaining day from now on, I wouldn’t have any problems with my attendance record, and I had plenty of things I wanted to do, like working on my streams, so I hadn’t really planned on going… but Tomo and Yuika were short on attendance because of their training school and work schedules, meaning they had to come in, and I had basically gotten dragged along.

Not that I minded.

If I really wanted to, I could always leave before noon.

Our school was pretty lenient about that kind of thing, or rather, it generally let students decide for themselves.

Anyway, that was why I showed up for school.

They had been warning us about some massive cold wave today, and I saw an absurd number of people nearly slipping and falling.

I got it. Everything was frozen over, so it was slippery everywhere.

Honestly, the day after it snowed was actually more troublesome than the day it was snowing….

“M-m-m-morning, R-Rin….”

“Morning. You look absolutely freezing, Yuika.”

“I-I-I am…!”

“You look like someone stranded in the wilderness about to freeze to death.”

Yuika had greeted me while trembling uncontrollably, bundled up in sneakers, the school tracksuit, her skirt, a blazer, and a jacket—the full defensive loadout.

Meanwhile, I had on the school tracksuit and skirt, with my jacket worn open over my blazer, so I wasn’t nearly as bundled up.

“W-w-why are you dressed so lightly…!? A-aren’t you cold!?”

“Well, I’ve got Northern European blood in me.”

“O-oh, r-right…! Just for today, I wish I had Northern European blood too…!”

“It’s got nothing to do with that.”

“I believed you!?”

“Ahaha, having certain blood doesn’t magically make you immune to the cold. I’m just good with cold weather.”

That was a lie.

If anything, I was actually pretty bad with the cold.

It was just that right now, I was using magic to keep a thin layer about one millimeter above my skin gently heated, almost like wearing invisible central heating.

If I raised the temperature a little more, I could comfortably walk around in shorts and a T-shirt even in this weather. Sorry.

Once we entered the school building, the cold seemed to ease a little, and Yuika let out a sigh with a faintly relieved smile.

“Aaaahhh… just not having the wind blowing on me helps so much….”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Isn’t it way too soon to take off your jacket!?”

“I’m good with the cold.”

“Damn, people who are good with the cold are amazing!”

I was just making things up, but the way she went along with them so easily was one of the reasons I loved Yuika. She was so gullib—cough, pure.

Apparently thinking that if I could take mine off, she could too, Yuika opened the front of her puffy jacket, widened her eyes, and then immediately zipped it closed again at twice the speed she’d opened it while curling into herself.

“Rinne, turns out I’m not good with the cold…!”

“I know… anyone could tell just by looking at what you’re wearing….”

“Wait, it’s that obvious!? I actually held back a lot!”

What had she held back against?

The cold wave?

Tomo and Yuika sometimes came out with these mysterious phrases, and that was part of what made them fun to talk to.

They used words in completely different ways, but somehow you could still kind of understand what they were trying to say, or they’d come up with these strangely unique expressions.

Though I had no idea what she meant by “held back.”

She probably meant she’d compromised for fashion or shown some restraint in what she wore.

Probably. Who knows.

“By the way, is Tomo off today?”

“Hm? Nah, she didn’t say anything, so I think she’s coming.”

“Huh? Don’t you and Tomo live close to each other? I thought you’d come together.”

In my head, the two of them were basically always together, so that was a little surprising.

It wasn’t like they gave off any particularly yuri vibes, but they were clearly best friends and had almost no sense of personal distance between them, plus I’d heard they were both trainees for some kind of idol career.

“Hmm, well, we live close, so we usually do come together, but the time we leave home changes depending on the day. Sometimes your hair just won’t cooperate and stuff, you know?”

“Huh, so that’s how it works. Since you live nearby and you’re close, I figured you usually came together in the mornings.”

“We’ll be like, ‘Go on ahead,’ and then fail to meet up before the train comes, and only catch each other at the school gate all the time. It’s only two train stops anyway, so it’s not like we absolutely have to ride together. We’ve been friends since we were kids, so being together doesn’t bother us, but that doesn’t mean we want to be together every second of the day.”

Hmm. So that was how it worked.

I didn’t have anyone I could really call a childhood friend, so in a way, the whole thing felt kind of novel to me.

“Besides, Tomo’s been pretty busy lately with Valentine’s Day coming up.”

“Wait, Tomo has someone she likes?”

“It’s more like admiration than actually liking him, I think. But you should probably hear the details from Tomo instead of me.”

“—Yuika, if you’d gone any further with that, I would’ve jumped you.”

Yep. Apparently she hadn’t noticed Tomo approaching from behind.

Actually, I’d been directing my question toward Tomo behind her, but Yuika must have assumed I was asking her.

“Wha!? Tomo!?”

“Morning, Tomo.”

“Morning, Rinne. You noticed I was here, right?”

“Yeah. That’s why I thought I was asking you.”

“What!? I was the only one who didn’t notice!?”

“That’s because you’re dense-as-a-brick Yuika. Well, you didn’t say anything weird, so I’ll forgive you. Now then, about my Valentine’s thing… it’s that. Obligatory chocolate. Just obligatory.”

She said that, but Tomo’s cheeks were red for reasons that definitely had nothing to do with coming in from the cold, and her smile looked like she was trying to hide her embarrassment.

…Love. ’Twas love!

Ahem. Dangerous. The Demon Lord part of me was getting way too excited.

Even back when I was the Demon Lord, I hadn’t been interested in romance myself, but I loved hearing stories that sounded romantic when they involved other people.

More than anything, seeing someone smile shyly and look embarrassed because they were in love was heartwarming.

It was adorable.

No dissent allowed. Any objections would be crushed by my fists.

“I’m a trainee, remember? I don’t really want to get involved in romance right now if I can help it. But I started thinking about him anyway, and I feel like it’s going to mess with my concentration. So I’m going to give him obligatory chocolate, and then I’m ending it there. I won’t let it go any further. It’s about drawing a line.”

That was… yeah. If that was what she’d decided, then I thought it was fine.

I didn’t really understand romance, but I imagined that choosing to end it outright was probably more painful than continuing to harbor half-finished feelings or leaving things vague because you couldn’t bring yourself to give up.

But if Tomo herself had decided to end it, and that was the choice she’d made, then maybe it wasn’t anyone else’s place to say anything.

“…Yeah. Romance and stuff like that can cause problems for people like us.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m drawing the line.”

…Giving something up for the sake of your dream, huh.

Somehow, that felt incredibly contradictory to me.

You wanted to become the person you dreamed of becoming.

You wanted to fulfill that dream, that feeling inside you.

And because of that, you had to give up the feelings that came from falling in love.

Maybe the reason I could think, Why not choose both? was only because I didn’t know anything about the industry Tomo and Yuika were trying to enter.

But still.

It left this strange, unsettled feeling inside me.

Why did this world have so many ideas that treated giving things up as though it were automatically the right choice?

People cared about how others saw them, acted only according to the rules, and treated that as the only righteous path, all while suppressing what truly mattered to them and scattering smiles everywhere.

That just felt… suffocating somehow.

Looking at Tomo’s smile, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that.