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Section 1
## Chapter 1: Saito Fuemi
+Translation: Bild, Xiaoyan, Meme, Paradise, Hermit Fish +Proofreading: Xiaolan +Polish: Mito Yuka +Release: Mito Yuka 1 I have no friends.
That does not mean I hate people, or that I do not trust them. It is not that I am afraid of the trouble, and it is not that I do not want friends. I simply cannot make any.
Mother says it does not matter, that good grades are enough. But good grades are the most useless thing of all. Mother does not know how painful school is for someone who cannot make friends.
Like now, during the break. Everyone else is talking happily, and I have been left in a corner as if I belonged to another dimension. Lunch is worse. While the others push their desks together and eat in groups, I can only eat in silence, alone, like an abandoned island drifting on a boundless sea, chewing the school lunch amid the noise and clamor.
Sometimes I wonder whether everyone but me is an alien. Whether they are only wearing human skins, conspiring together to deceive me, the last surviving person from Earth.
Of course that is impossible. It is impossible, and yet at school I am lonely enough to think it.
Outside of class I have nothing to do. I do not especially like reading, but I have started spending whole days with books anyway. Because of that, the people around me have gradually decided I am someone who is hard to talk to, and they keep even farther away. A vicious cycle. In the end I am mistaken for someone who loves being alone…
## Chapter 2: Kihi Atsushi
1 My heart is pounding so hard it feels as if it might leap out of my throat.
This is an ordinary shopping street in front of the station. For everyone else, it is probably still ordinary. For me, something shocking is playing out before my eyes.
Pedestrians pass one another on the road.
The one I will never forget is mixed in among those strangers, who are nothing more than background.
The blow shatters me and scatters the pieces onto everything around me. From every direction, my fragments glare at “that person.” She must have felt my gaze. She turns her eyes this way and stares at what is left of me, the main body.
Then she smiles at me, bright and gentle.
Seeing that expression, I cannot even fall apart. I can only stand there, stunned. Her smile blows away the very idea of time, let alone my feelings. Those things seem as if they were never here to begin with.
The girl in front of me has already gone beyond common sense. At least as far as I know, she has no ordinary sense of ethics.
I am swallowed by her.
She vanishes from my sight, and at last I can breathe again. I feel, solidly, that I am a living human being, and at the same time I confirm that my feelings exist.
Yes. I—
hate that woman.
I hate the woman who took everything from me.
Even if she is special, even if she is something beyond human, I will never forgive her.
Never. Never. I will never forgive the murderer who killed my family.
I will never forgive Kamisu Reina!
2 “You ran into Kamisu Reina?”
I…
## Chapter 3: Wakui Shizuka
1 A male teacher in his fifties, present in my mind for no more than three seconds, is speaking Japanese-style English. It goes in one ear and out the other while I look up words in the Kōjien on my electronic dictionary.
【Law of Conservation of Mass】 After a chemical change, the total mass of the substances remains unchanged. Discovered in 1774 by the French chemist Lavoisier. The law that mass does not change.
【Law】 ① A rule that must be obeyed. ② A universal, necessary connection that arises under fixed conditions at any time and in any place, and the statement that expresses that connection.
The world is made of accidents fitted together with simple things.
Universal, necessary connections. Things like that are probably everywhere. But if you divide them finely enough and trace them back to the root, the absolute number of those fundamental universal, necessary connections is absolutely small.
Do you know? All sorts of laws are the same at the center. They have only been decorated, and given different names.
So no matter which angle you investigate something from, the place you arrive at in the end is the same. There is a reason why the words summed up by someone who digs deep into one aspect are so often the same as the words summed up by someone who investigates another.
In other words, if you understand even a little of the core of those laws, you can understand how most things in the world are put together.
The core is the pivot of everything. Once you understand what lies at the center, you can apply it to other things and establish a firm grasp. The core draws the things around it the way a magnet does.
But no one realizes this, so most…
## Chapter 4: Toyoshina Kazuki
1 The memorial photograph of Wakui Shizuka was one I provided.
I have more photos of Shizuka than anyone, even more than she herself had. Her smiling face, her crying face, the way she looked when she was angry… I kept all of it with care, as if each one were a treasure.
I lift my head and look at this photograph.
In the picture, Shizuka is smiling sweetly.
Ah. Now that I think of it, Shizuka has not smiled like this in more than a year.
Since that incident a year ago, Shizuka never again showed a smile this free of care. Her eyes grew cloudy, and all she would offer was a faint lift at the corners of her mouth.
Even so, I could bear it. I could keep waiting, waiting until Shizuka began to smile the way she does in the photograph. I never once thought of looking for someone else.
The smell of burning incense winds through my nose.
The scent seeps into my body. I feel as if I am slowly becoming a hollow shell, as if, without noticing, I am being stripped away. What remains of me must be empty and transparent, something you could not touch even if you tried.
The clothes of the people around me are black and white. Our uniforms are only green. Even color is being taken from before my eyes.
Ah. Yes. In a world this out of place, I will surely be left behind, little by little.
“Kazuki.”
I look toward the person who called me. It is Kiichi, wearing a face full of pain.
“…You’re here.”
“Of course. The whole class came.”
Just as Kiichi said, the whole class is here. Friends from other classes who used to be close to Shizuka came too, and…
## Epilogue
They say there is a custom of this sort: to send your feelings to a particular person, you put a letter in a glass bottle and throw it into the sea, and let the current carry it away. The chance of that letter reaching another person at all is already vanishingly small. For it to reach one specific someone, it is no exaggeration to say it is absolutely impossible.
My love is like that drifting bottle. Helpless, fruitless, despairing.
That person already has someone they love. That alone would be enough to make a person despair, and on top of it my close friend Hozumi has become a rival standing in the way.
Honestly, I have been out of options for a long time.
In my heart I keep telling myself, “Do your best!” But no matter how I think about it, it is too much of a stretch. The chance of this love bearing fruit is, I think, lower than the chance of me single-handedly overthrowing Japan. I have never been able to talk properly to the opposite sex. I am not beautiful the way Wakui-senpai and Hozumi are. I am always spacing out, and my grades are only average. A good family? That is not my charm at all.
Yes. I have nothing. I am only a kid.
I, who am only close to Hozumi—how could I betray her, step over the shadow of Wakui-senpai, and at last arrive at Senpai’s side? It would be like runners about to reach the finish, each of them passed by me, who has been running a full lap behind.
But even if this love is this hopeless, my feelings are real.
I am confident that I love Senpai more than anyone. Truly. I am confident that what I feel is stronger than Wakui-senpai’s, stronger than Hozumi’s.
Love at first sight. Mother says, “…”
## Afterword
Hello to new readers and old. I am Mikage Eiro.
Like my debut work, this book has no illustrations. I am truly sorry for letting the writing take the stage alone like this. I have always been the sort of introvert who prefers to be a shadow—you can tell from the name—and I mean that. The day after my debut went on sale, I was on the train and the person in the next seat was reading my novel. I could not help turning my face away. That is how shy I am.
So let me say a little about this work.
Like the debut, this story was written, at heart, for my own interest. The details differ in many ways, of course, but one look is enough to tell that the same writer made it. If I had to name the greatest difference, it would be that I put more work into the structure.
The protagonists who appear are, for the most part, clumsy people. I wrote while thinking, “If I put clumsy people into this story, would it turn out like this?” I also hope readers will not treat the protagonists merely as characters who appear in a work of fiction. That is only a small selfish wish on the author’s part.
I cannot quite say what genre this is. I do not personally like writing stories that have been narrowed down that way. Of course that approach carries a fair amount of risk… But a novel has many sides. Deciding which sides to value and which to set aside, and keeping the balance of the work as a whole, is necessary.
This work is *Kamisu Reina Is Here*. Next month, *Kamisu Reina Is Scattered Here* will be published. The new book and this one will each stand alone. They are not a two-volume set…