[Complete] Ch 2.5 My Quiet Beach Vacation Is Actually a Government Population Initiative, as I Suspected

My Quiet Beach Vacation 

Is Actually a Government Population Initiative, 

as I Suspected

Story Starts

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Chapter 2.5 -

Obviously, All Scientific Progress and Governmental Reproductive Sponsors Are Entirely Above Board

Disclaimer: Everyone here is an adult!

Bliss, satisfaction, peace.

That's what I'd been feeling in this darkness. What had garnered such a feeling? I hadn't the faintest. Perhaps Kami had finally intervened, rescuing me from what could only be described as my sanity slipping through my fingers like sand at a beach resort I never asked to visit. Perhaps I'd developed a case of early-onset dementia where my mind finally snapped under the accumulated weight of romantic comedies, social obligations, and a sister who treated my love life like a municipal infrastructure project.

My libido could only handle so much. Having Yukinoshita, Isshiki, and Yuigahama as close friends was already pushing the boundaries of what any reasonable man's psyche could endure. Three attractive women in constant proximity, and me—Hikigaya Hachiman, professional loner and aspiring househusband—somehow expected to maintain composure through all of it?

Impossible. The human mind wasn't designed for such sustained torture. There were Geneva Convention provisions for less.

Maybe it wasn't the apple a day that broke me. Maybe I should have masturbated more. Otherwise, that dementia-fuelled psychosis where I was enrolled in a government breeding programme wouldn't have manifested in such vivid, horrifying detail. The brain, deprived of its standard maintenance cycle, had simply invented an elaborate scenario to justify the backlog.

Oh god. Was I currently in a padded facility, shouting about B.R.E.E.D.? Had some orderly already sedated me twice this morning? Was there a clipboard somewhere with my name on it, marked with increasingly concerned annotations?

Patient exhibits persistent delusions about government-sponsored reproductive initiatives. Fixates on classmates. Believes male friend is actually female. Constructed elaborate backstory involving android surrogate wombs designed by a woman in rabbit ears. Recommend extended observation.

Please. Please let me not wake up from this darkness. I wouldn't survive the interview with the psychiatrist.

"So, Hikigaya-san, let's start from the beginning. You believe you were enrolled in a government breeding programme. On a private island."

"Yes."

"And your sister orchestrated this?"

"She wore an eyepatch."

"...I see. And you say your classmate—a male classmate—was actually female?"

"She had a B82 bust she'd been binding for three years."

The doctor would peer over his glasses with that look. The one that said he'd seen many troubled young men, but none quite this far gone. He'd glance at his notes. He'd underline something. He'd do that thing where he clicks his pen three times—the universal signal for your insurance is about to get a workout.

"And this classmate who named her personal device after you—"

"Dildo. She named her dildo after me. Specifically, after a nickname she gave me in high school. Can we use the actual word? We're both adults."

"Hikigaya-san, nobody in this scenario is behaving like an adult."

Then he'd turn to the nurse. "Increase the dosage. Double it. And cancel my afternoon—this one's going to take a while."

No, thank you. I'd much rather stay here in the peaceful void. Floating in comfortable nothingness. No responsibilities. No naked women. No government initiatives. No Komachi wearing an eyepatch and gamifying my reproductive output with a twin bonus multiplier.

Just darkness.

Bliss, satisfaction, peace.

I'll gladly remain like this. The darkness asked nothing of me, and I asked nothing of it. We had an understanding. A social contract built on mutual non-interference—the only functional social contract I'd ever maintained.

Bliss, satisfaction, peace...

...and piss.

'Piss?'

Why did it smell like a public toilet that had been criminally neglected? The acrid tang cut through the pleasant emptiness like a rusty knife through wet tissue. Sharp. Invasive. Utterly unwelcome.

'No. No, no, no. The void was supposed to be odourless. That was the whole appeal. Darkness and the absence of sensory input. That was our deal, void. You've breached the contract.'

"Ahhhhhh!"

Pain exploded across my forehead as I slammed into something hard. A scream—feminine, high-pitched—rang out simultaneously with my own grunt of agony. The impact sent shockwaves from my frontal lobe to the back of my skull, the kind of headbutt that would've drawn a yellow card in a Premier League match and a standing ovation in a Zidane highlight reel.

Wait. That scream wasn't mine.

I opened my eyes, still reeling, my head tilted forward from the impact.

What greeted me was something quite curious.

'Where's my Hikio?'

There was something surrounding my not-so-little Hikio. Vertical lips, glistening wet, wrapped tight around—

My brain refused to process the image for a full three seconds. It sent the visual data back to my optic nerve with a note that read rejected—please resubmit with context.

'Huh? What is this?'

The lips were currently leaking something clear and something distinctly red. The sensation was tight—overwhelmingly tight—and the body attached to it was writhing in a way that suggested either ecstasy or agony. Possibly both. The Venn diagram of those two states had apparently become a single circle at some point during my unconsciousness.

'Wait. Body attached to it?'

My eyes traced the writhing form upward. A flat stomach, trembling with each breath. The torso leaned backwards at this angle, braced by two pale hands bracketing my knees for support.

Then I continued the trail. A chest that was quite modest, heaving with exertion.

'Breasts?'

They were small. Not that I was an expert on such matters—though the events of the past however-many hours had done more to advance my education than four semesters of university. I'd seen pairs before, of course. I did have my own hidden stash carefully concealed in my room. Behind the bookshelf. Inside a hollowed-out copy of Introduction to Macroeconomics that nobody would ever voluntarily open. A hiding place so secure it relied on the fundamental truth that no human being had ever been curious enough about macroeconomics to investigate further.

Hopefully Komachi had never found—

'Wait. Komachi?!'

And like those times where your brain decides to replay every embarrassing memory you'd rather forget—I can't help but cringe at my middle school poetry phase—the memories came flooding back. Not gently. Not in order. In a deluge, as if someone had opened every file drawer in my mental archive simultaneously and upended them onto the floor.

The naked bodies arranged in a row. The two hosts with their innuendo manzai routine. The bunny outfit that violated multiple laws of physics and at least one of thermodynamics. Robotic tentacle maids promising to gestate my children. Komachi wearing an eyepatch and awarding herself points like life was a gacha game and I was the limited-edition banner unit.

And there was Isshiki—I meant Iroha—and Anna, and the event, and—

Oh.

Oh no.

"SORRY, Yukinon! Looks like the smelling salts woke him too violently!"

A panicked voice cut through my spiralling thoughts. Refined in tone despite the clear fluster—the voice of someone raised in drawing rooms and boardrooms, currently deployed in a context that neither setting had prepared her for. My gaze snapped to my left.

Shinomiya Kaguya knelt beside me, her face a portrait of guilt and horror. Her dark hair cascaded over bare shoulders. Her crimson eyes were wide with the specific flavour of remorse reserved for people who'd meant well and achieved catastrophe.

Did I mention she was naked? Because she was extremely naked. The whole classical beauty package on full display—yamato nadeshiko meets Renaissance painting, minus the strategically placed drapery.

My brain helpfully reminded me that staring was rude. My eyes helpfully ignored the memo.

Then my gaze snapped to the figure above me.

Yukinoshita Yukino. Writhing. I couldn't tell if it was pleasure or pain causing the tremors running through her body—probably pain, judging from the angry red welt blooming on her forehead. The exact same spot where my own head was currently throbbing.

Where I'd presumably slammed into her when I woke up.

We'd headbutted each other. Whilst she was... Whilst I was...

I could feel burning in my nose. The pressure of an impending nosebleed threatening to add yet another bodily fluid to an already complicated situation.

'Do not look at her breasts. Do not look at her breasts. You are currently inside her, you absolute degenerate, and you're worried about looking at her breasts? Priorities, Hachiman. Though to be fair, I'm not sure what the correct priorities are when you wake up to find yourself in this particular arrangement. No guidance counsellor covered this. No self-help book addresses it. "Chapter 7: What to Do When You Regain Consciousness Mid-Coitus—A Practical Guide."'

"Huh? Whuh—was that?" I succinctly asked.

Eloquent as always. Really capturing the moment with my masterful command of the Japanese language. Somewhere, my literature professors wept.

"Looks like that's a record. One thrust and it was an orgasm."

My head snapped towards the entrance of the—magic mirror truck. Right. Truck. The haze of memories was still buffering in the background, loading at the speed of a rural internet connection attempting to stream high-definition content.

Hayasaka Ai stood in the truck's doorway, her expression carrying its standard factory setting of professional detachment. Her maid uniform—what little of it existed—somehow made her look more composed than anyone had any right to be whilst spectating this disaster.

"But looks like Hachi-kun hasn't cummed yet." Fujiwara Chika's bubble-bright voice chirped from beside Hayasaka. She was consulting some sort of tablet, her pink hair catching the light as she tilted the screen for a better angle. Presumably tracking the statistics of my humiliation in real time. Graphs. Charts. A pie chart of my dignity, showing a single slice labelled "remaining" that was too thin to render at current resolution.

'They're watching. Of course they're watching. Everyone watches everything in this programme. Privacy died somewhere around the second profile card and nobody held a funeral.'

Then the body on top of me slumped forward, collapsing against my chest.

Then sniffling.

Panic. Pure, unadulterated panic flooded my system. I was trapped inside Yukinoshita—literally, physically, mechanically inside her—whilst she sniffled against my chest like I'd just told her that cats were overrated and her favourite author was mid.

'What do I do? What do I do? There's no protocol for this. There's no light novel scenario I can reference. Even the most degenerate isekai protagonist has never woken up mid-act to find his partner crying on his chest from a combination of pain and accidental orgasm induced by a headbutt. This is entirely uncharted territory. I am the Magellan of sexual catastrophe, except Magellan at least had maps.'

"Yukinoshita? Are you—?"

The fist came without warning.

She started bashing at my chest. Small fists. Ineffective fists, objectively speaking—Yukinoshita's combat training had clearly focused on verbal devastation rather than physical force. But each impact nonetheless conveyed profound emotional distress with remarkable precision.

"You stupid. Stupid!!! Stupid!! This was my first time!"

Each word was punctuated by another strike. Her voice cracked on the final syllable.

"Huh? I just woke up. What did I do?"

"What did you— You just— You—!" She couldn't form complete sentences. Her face was flushed crimson, though whether from anger, embarrassment, pain, or the residual effects of whatever had just happened, the proportions were impossible to determine. A pie chart of her current emotional state would have required more slices than the software could handle.

"I was unconscious! I was literally unconscious! How is this my fault?"

"You sat up!"

"Because someone waved smelling salts under my nose! That's what smelling salts do! They wake people up! It's literally their entire function! You don't blame the alarm clock for going off—you blame the person who set it!"

"You didn't have to sit up so violently!"

"Again—unconscious! I had no control over my motor functions! You might as well blame me for breathing!"

Yukinoshita's blue eyes glistened with unshed tears. Her fists paused mid-strike against my chest. The anger drained out of her posture, leaving something more fragile underneath.

"It hurt," she said quietly.

Something in my chest tightened that had nothing to do with the physical impacts.

"I... I'm sorry. I didn't—"

"I know you didn't mean to." She still wasn't looking at me. "But it still hurt. And it was supposed to be... I had imagined..."

She trailed off, unwilling or unable to complete the thought.

'She had imagined what? What had Yukinoshita Yukino imagined her first time would be like? Certainly not this. Certainly not a headbutt followed by accidental full penetration followed by an argument conducted whilst still physically connected. Nobody imagines this. This isn't even in the realm of things people imagine going wrong. This is several dimensions beyond worst-case scenario, in a region of possibility space that probability theorists would classify as "technically nonzero but functionally absurd."'

"I'm really sorry, Yukinon! This was my fault!"

Kaguya's voice cut through the tension. She'd shuffled closer on her knees, her hands wringing together in a gesture of profound guilt. Her usual composure—that Shinomiya poise that could survive boardroom coups and family power struggles—had crumbled entirely. What remained was a twenty-two-year-old woman who'd made a terrible mistake and was confronting the consequences in real time.

"I thought it would be romantic! In the visual novels, when the love interest is sleeping, you wake them with a gentle stimulus and they open their eyes and there's this beautiful moment of connection where—"

"Visual novels?" I couldn't keep the incredulity from my voice. "You based your approach on visual novels?"

"Amakusa-san's company produces very high-quality ones! The narrative design is quite sophisticated!"

"You based your approach on eroge logic?"

Kaguya's face reddened to a shade that rivalled the welt on Yukinoshita's forehead. "The relationship dynamics are surprisingly nuanced!"

"The relationship dynamics in eroge involve a protagonist with the personality of cardboard stumbling into sexual situations through increasingly contrived circumstances! The genre's entire premise is that romantic outcomes happen to the protagonist rather than because of the protagonist!"

A beat.

'Wait. That's exactly what just happened to me. I am the eroge protagonist. I am the cardboard cutout around whom improbable sexual situations arrange themselves through no agency of my own. Kaguya didn't base her approach on eroge logic—she correctly identified that my life already operates on eroge logic and simply acted within the established parameters.'

'This realisation doesn't make me feel better. This realisation makes me feel categorically worse.'

"That's a reductive interpretation of the genre!" Kaguya protested.

"I'm literally living proof of that exact formula right now!"

Yukinoshita's fist connected with my chest again. "Stop arguing about pornographic video games whilst you're still inside me!"

Fair point. Valid criticism. The first constructive feedback I'd received all evening, and it came from a woman sitting on my pelvis.

"Right. Should I... pull out?"

"Don't you dare move."

"But—"

"If you move, I will make what Kawasaki threatened to do to Taishi look merciful by comparison."

"Yukinon, he can't stay inside forever." Kaguya attempted diplomacy, her voice shifting into the measured tone that probably served her well in Shinomiya family negotiations. "Perhaps if we—"

"Shinomiya-san, with all due respect, this is your fault."

"I know! I acknowledged that! I'm trying to help!"

"Your help is what got us into this situation!"

"I was trying to create a romantic moment!"

"By assaulting an unconscious man with industrial-strength ammonia capsules?!"

"It wasn't assault! It was... an awakening! A gentle—"

"There was nothing gentle about it! He launched upward like a ballistic missile and I took the full payload!"

Kaguya flinched. "I... when you phrase it like that..."

"How else would you phrase it?!"

"In the reference material, the awakening scene is accompanied by soft lighting and a string quartet—"

"We are in a TRUCK, Shinomiya-san!"

I watched the two heiresses argue above me—one the scion of the Shinomiya corporate empire, the other the younger daughter of the Yukinoshita political dynasty—and marvelled at the fact that their combined pedigree, education, and social refinement had led them to this exact moment: naked, in a government-sponsored vehicle, debating the romantic applicability of pornographic video games whilst I lay beneath them like a mattress with opinions.

'These people. These people are treating my life like supplementary material for an interactive entertainment product. I have been reduced to a walkthrough. "Chapter 3: The Smelling Salts Route—Bad End."'

"Should we... intervene?" Fujiwara's voice drifted from the corner.

"No." Hayasaka's response was immediate and flat.

"No?"

"This is valuable observational data. Shinomiya-sama's interpersonal conflict resolution under high-stress conditions. I'll include it in my quarterly report."

"You write quarterly reports on Kaguya-sama?"

"I write quarterly reports on everything. It's in my contract."

"What section does this fall under?"

Hayasaka considered this. "Appendix D. Unforeseen Circumstances."

'Appendix D. I'm in someone's appendix. Not even a main chapter. A supplementary document. Filed under "unforeseen circumstances" like a flood or a tax audit. Though to be fair, both of those would be less disruptive than what's currently happening on my lap.'

"I was trying to be thoughtful!" Kaguya's defence was becoming increasingly desperate. "Hikigaya-san was sleeping so peacefully after... after the previous session. And Yukinon said she wanted to be gentle since it was her first time. So I thought, if he woke up naturally whilst she was positioning herself—"

"You thought smelling salts qualified as natural?"

"I thought it would be gradual! A gentle stirring! In Forbidden Dorm: Summer Semester, the love interest wakes from a nap and—"

"I am begging you to stop citing that game."

"The awakening mechanic has a ninety-two per cent player satisfaction rating!"

"Player satisfaction and my satisfaction are not the same metric, Shinomiya-san!"

Kaguya's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Then she did something I hadn't expected from the heir to one of Japan's four largest corporate conglomerates.

She bowed. Full dogeza. Forehead to the floor of the truck.

"I'm sorry. I'm truly, genuinely sorry. I made an error in judgement. I applied fictional parameters to a real situation and the outcome was... suboptimal."

'Suboptimal. A Shinomiya apologises by calling a catastrophe "suboptimal." Somewhere in the Shinomiya Group's corporate headquarters, a PR department just felt a disturbance in the force.'

"Shinomiya-san, please get up," Yukinoshita said, and her voice had softened. The anger was receding, leaving exhaustion in its wake. "You don't need to prostrate yourself."

"I ruined your first time."

"You didn't ruin it. You... redirected it. Violently."

"That's ruining it with extra steps."

I couldn't help it. A laugh escaped—short, involuntary, immediately regretted because the motion caused both Yukinoshita and me to inhale sharply.

"Don't. Laugh." Yukinoshita's voice went dangerously quiet. "Don't you dare laugh."

"I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at the situation."

"The situation is your body inside mine, Hachiman. If you laugh at the situation, you're laughing at me by extension."

'She used my first name again.'

"...Does it still hurt?" I asked quietly.

The argument had drained the room of its manic energy. Yukinoshita remained slumped against my chest, her weight slight and warm. Kaguya had risen from her dogeza but stayed kneeling, hands folded in her lap, the picture of penitent aristocracy.

"...Yes."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"Should I—"

"Don't move."

"Okay."

Another pause.

"I had imagined it differently," she admitted, her voice muffled against my chest.

"How?"

"Slower. More... deliberate. I wanted to watch your face when—" She stopped herself. "It doesn't matter now."

But it did matter. It mattered enormously.

'Yukinoshita Yukino, the Ice Queen of Sobu High, had imagined her first time with me. Had thought about it enough to have specific expectations. Had wanted to see my face. The woman who communicated feelings through subtext so dense it required a PhD to parse had been imagining something tender, something measured, something worthy of the years of hesitation and careful distance that had preceded it. And instead she got a headbutt and a involuntary orgasm.'

My chest felt tight again. The guilt variety this time, not the cardiac variety.

"We could... try again?" The words left my mouth before my brain had approved them.

Yukinoshita went very still.

"What?"

"I mean—not right now. Obviously. But later. When you're... when it doesn't hurt anymore. We could do it properly. The way you imagined."

'What am I saying? What am I saying? Who authorised this? My mouth is conducting foreign policy without consulting the executive branch and the diplomatic consequences could be catastrophic.'

The silence stretched. Kaguya had frozen mid-apology, her mouth hanging open. Even Hayasaka and Fujiwara had stopped their corner commentary.

"You'd do that?" Yukinoshita's voice was small.

"I'd—yes. If you wanted."

"Even though I hit you?"

"You didn't hit me that hard."

"I called you stupid."

"I am stupid. That's been well-established by multiple independent sources, including a government presentation with visual aids."

A sound escaped Yukinoshita's throat. It took me a moment to recognise it as a laugh—watery and weak, but genuine. The first genuine laugh in this truck.

"You're an idiot, Hachiman."

'She used it again. Third time. The intimate form. The first-name basis that, in Japanese social convention, means something specific. Something she's choosing. Something she keeps choosing.'

"That's what I just said."

She raised her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her forehead still bearing the mark of our collision, but she was smiling. Small and hesitant, but real.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Later. When it doesn't hurt. We'll try again."

Something warm bloomed in my chest. Something that felt dangerously close to hope. The kind of feeling I'd spent years training myself to suppress on sight, because hope was the prelude to disappointment, and disappointment was the only consistent feature of—

Then Fujiwara's voice shattered the moment like a brick through a greenhouse.

"That's so sweet! But the counter still says one! And the timer's already past fifteen minutes!"

Yukinoshita's smile vanished. "What?"

Hayasaka consulted her tablet. "Technically, Yukinoshita-san achieved one orgasm from penetration, which counts toward her personal metrics—but that particular statistic isn't the basis of the current task parameters."

'Task parameters. My sexual encounters have task parameters. There are KPIs for this. Somewhere on that tablet, there's a dashboard. A dashboard with my name on it. Graphs trending in directions I don't want to think about. Performance metrics for an activity that should not, under any civilised interpretation of the word, have performance metrics.'

I could feel Yukinoshita's body tensing above me. Her embarrassment radiated off her in waves.

"I'm not—we can't just—"

"You could continue." Kaguya offered hesitantly, having apparently recovered enough from her dogeza to resume her advisory role. "Once the initial discomfort subsides, the second attempt is typically more pleasurable. At least, according to the source materials I've consulted."

"Stop. Referencing. Your. Pornographic. Video. Games."

"They're not all pornographic! Some of them have very compelling narratives! Forbidden Dorm won three industry awards for—"

"SHINOMIYA-SAN."

"Right. Sorry. Shutting up."

"Well—" Fujiwara's voice floated from the corner, carrying the quiet Cheshire quality of someone about to drop a suggestion that would restructure the entire conversation. "Kaguya-sama could take over first, while Yukinoshita-san recovers. And then when Hiki-kun is about to—"

Both Fujiwara and Hayasaka mimed an explosion with their hands. Fingers splayed outward from clenched fists. Sound effects included. Fujiwara even added a whispered boom.

"…"

"…"

"…"

The silence that followed was the most eloquent piece of communication the evening had produced. Three people, staring at two others, processing a suggestion that was simultaneously logical, mortifying, and—within the operational framework of this programme—entirely practical.

Another fist hit my chest—lighter this time, more resigned than angry—as Yukinoshita gently, carefully, and with an intake of breath that I felt through my entire body, lifted herself from me. The separation was slow. Deliberate. Each centimetre was accompanied by a wince, she was trying very hard to hide and failing completely.

Then I was completely exposed.

'Cold.'

It was the first time since waking up that Hikio had felt the room's temperature. The air conditioning hit the moisture on my skin with the thermal shock of jumping into an unheated pool in January.

'Wait. When did I start calling it Hikio? When did Miura's drunk nickname for her personal device become my internal designation for my own anatomy? At what point in this evening did that particular piece of nomenclature migrate from "deeply concerning trivia about a former classmate" to "my default reference term"? Is this Stockholm syndrome? Can you develop Stockholm syndrome for a nickname? Has the programme broken me so thoroughly that I've adopted the vocabulary of my captors?'

'Miura would be horrified. Or flattered. Possibly both.'

Yukinoshita, still flushed, still wincing, composed herself with the rigid discipline of someone reassembling their dignity from scattered components. She turned to Kaguya. Drew a breath.

Then she bowed.

Not a casual nod. Not a perfunctory dip. A full, formal bow—the kind you'd see at a business meeting or a martial arts dojo. Her back straight. Her arms pressed to her sides. Every angle precise despite the fact that she was naked, recently deflowered, and sporting a forehead welt the size of a five-hundred-yen coin.

"Yoroshiku onegaishimasu."

Please take care of the rest.

The words were textbook keigo. Formal. Polished. The exact phrase you'd use when greeting a new colleague, meeting a business partner, or beginning a professional engagement. The same words printed on every company's onboarding documents. The same phrase every new hire utters on their first day, standing before their department with a crisp suit and a nervous smile.

Kaguya, to her credit, responded in kind. She straightened her spine, pressed her hands against her thighs, and returned the bow with equal formality. Her crimson eyes carried the sober gravity of someone accepting a mandate.

"Kochira koso."

Likewise.

They held the bow for a full beat. Two women. Naked. In a government breeding truck. Exchanging the ritual pleasantries of a corporate handoff with the precision and solemnity of executives transferring a high-value account.

'What am I witnessing? Is this a government breeding programme or a black company orientation? Did I just get onboarded? Is there a welcome packet? Will someone hand me a laminated badge and show me where the break room is? Do I get a desk? Is the desk my pelvis?'

'The desk is absolutely my pelvis.'

'"Welcome to Hikigaya Reproductive Services. Our corporate culture values punctuality, diligence, and the complete obliteration of personal boundaries. Please note that overtime is mandatory and unpaid. Your direct supervisor is a nineteen-year-old in an eyepatch. The employee handbook is forty-seven pages. Please read all of them. There will be a test."'

'Japan's work culture has infiltrated even this. Even here—in the most intimate, most personal act two human beings can share—we have defaulted to business etiquette. We have formalised copulation. We have turned sex into a departmental handover, complete with keigo and a bow. Somewhere, a sociologist is weeping. Somewhere else, a different sociologist is taking notes for a paper that will win every award their field has to offer.'

'"The Corporatisation of Intimacy: Keigo Usage in Government Reproductive Programmes and Its Implications for Late-Stage Capitalist Sexuality." Published in the Journal of Japanese Social Studies. Cited fourteen thousand times. Required reading for every undergraduate in the country.'

'I am the case study. I am always the case study.'

Kaguya rose from her bow. Turned to me. Her cheeks were still flushed, but her eyes had found something—resolve, maybe, or the Shinomiya family's genetic inability to back down from a challenge once formally accepted.

She knelt beside me.

I stared at the ceiling of the truck.

The ceiling stared back.

'I should probably say something. Something encouraging. Something romantic. Something that acknowledges the absurdity of this situation whilst also demonstrating emotional maturity and—'

"Please don't use smelling salts this time."

'Nailed it.'

-=&&=-

End

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