Published at 1st of September 2019 7:45 pm

Chapter 20-29

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml



* 20 *

And so I was lost again.

The months to follow were full of surprises. Since my other self was perfectly recreating my college experience, one event after another.

Normally I’d go into more detail about all that, but this time I’ll keep it short. If only because I’d depress myself to explain it all from beginning to end.

In no time at all, he was a central figure in his department, he was respected by lots of people, he got friendly with lots of girls - still, though, he stuck with Tsugumi.

Oh, as an observer, I couldn’t help but remark just how happy I had been in my first life. Again. And yet he wasn’t disagreeable, he was kind to everyone.

I hate to admit it, but him and Tsugumi walking together sure made a good picture. They were a walking fairy tale, you might say.

They were so dazzling, I felt like I wasn’t even in their league. Of course, they were a friendly pair, and if I showed any will to be friends with them they’d readily accept it.

But that wasn’t what I wanted.

Yet it felt strange to think that even this seemingly perfect person could end up like me with the slightest misstep.

If he were given the same chance to relive his life, there was a non- zero chance he’d be ruined too.

When you look at it that way, maybe there aren’t so much good and bad people as there are good and bad environments which people grow up in.

Heredity didn’t seem to have a whole lot of bearing on me, at least.

* 21 *

Around the end of October the following year, something snapped in my head.

After graduating high school, I lived in an apartment near my college. And by then, I had become very much a shut-in.

I rarely went to school, didn’t have a part-time job or anything, didn’t meet with anyone, didn’t eat well, drank all day, and slept the rest of the time.

I didn’t even turn on the TV or radio, nor did I read the news. I isolated myself from the outside world.

Other than going to the convenience store to buy beer, cigarettes, and junk food, I hardly went out there.

All my cellphone inbox had in it was stuff from agencies about finding a part-time job and newsletters. Not a single human name.

Ever since I found out my “replacement” existed, I had to compare myself to him whenever I did anything.

I became very self-conscious about how much better he’d do every little thing.

Thanks to this, even things that were perfectly ordinary before become all of a sudden unbearable.

For example, I’d never had any problem with not attending class in high school, but when I saw Tsugumi and my replacement - it seemed his name was Tokiwa - attending seemingly every day, it made me feel hopelessly alone.

Since then, every day I came and went to school alone, I was overcome with emptiness thinking how Tsugumi wasn’t there next to me.

And this gradually started to happen every waking moment.

When I ate alone. When I watched TV alone. When I lied in bed alone. When I went shopping alone.

I was aware of Tsugumi not being there all the time, and I was stricken with a sense of loss.

When I walked through town and saw couples in high school and whatnot, I was wordless.

Tsugumi and Tokiwa must’ve always been having dates in uniform like that, I thought. I couldn’t get over it.

On days they stayed late for clubs they’d bike home together, on rainy days they’re share an umbrella, on snowy days they’d hold hands through their pockets.

It was too easy for me to imagine.

And perhaps when I saw Tsugumi waiting at the bus stop that day, she was waiting for Tokiwa.

I knew how happy Tsugumi would be able to make me, and I probably knew how happy I would be able to make her.

And so I felt empty.

I was devastatingly wounded. Unfortunately, all I did to try and soothe myself - look at pretty scenery, eat delicious things, watch emotional movies - had the opposite effect.

It just further reminded me that I didn’t have anyone to share those wondrous things with.

I’d given up. There was really nothing I could do. I was only a step away from going mad.

That’s why I distanced myself from the outside world, and numbed my brain with alcohol and cigarettes. Some of humanity’s finest inventions, those.

* 22 *

It was festival day at college, but I didn’t even have the will to leave home. It’s not like I was in any clubs, nor did I have anyone to tour around with.

I knew it would only make me feel more miserable, no doubt about it.

Of course, though, I was made miserable that day even despite my decision not to go.

Because unfortunately, I remembered what this day had been like in my first life.

What an asshole of a memory, coming back to me in perfect condition…

Well, suppose I shouldn’t have expected any less, as it was an important one.

First-life me and Tsugumi were rarely ever apart after fifteen, and would hug and kiss all the time, even when people’s eyes were on us.

But somewhat strangely, there was one important line we were hesitant to cross.

Why? Well, we were very intimate. We trusted that our feelings for each other would remain the same, so there was no rush.

So we held out as best we could. We managed to put our anticipation aside… for a while.

Until that festival day, when the final remaining line was crossed.

So, yes… that night, Tsugumi and Tokiwa crossed that line.

I felt like I was pissing my own self off. Like never before, I was enraged beyond reason; I wanted to smash things, and on that fervor thought I might just go out and find Tsugumi.

But the action I actually chose to do was the polar opposite. And why I did it, I don’t know myself.

I hid underneath the table. Yeah, like a fire drill. And I started sobbing. For hours and hours, like a kid.

Even though I was still pissed as hell. Even though I still saw the guy as my mortal enemy.

But once you despair, it’s all over. Because that’s at least half- accepting that it’s all worthless.

* 23 *

My room had gotten awfully dim. I heard the chirping of crickets outside the window.

I had settled down considerably. And I felt that a small flame had lit deep in my heart.

Strangely enough, I was calm.

I consented to the fact that I wasn’t the right man for Tsugumi, and that I could never beat Tokiwa.

So then what am I to do?, I asked myself. That’s easy, I replied. “My double just needs to be taken out.”

I readily accepted this answer I’d derived. Wouldn’t say I was at my most sane, no.

Because in short, I considered murdering Tokiwa, this man taking my place.

Then, of course, Tsugumi would be lonely again and move toward me, the next best thing.

No matter how you looked at it, it wasn’t rational, and even if I succeeded in murdering Tokiwa, it was difficult to say it would fundamentally solve everything.

In fact, if Tokiwa were to die at this time in their relationship, it was very possible that Tsugumi would deify him and not even try to look for any other men.

But regardless, in that moment, I was very serious. I even selfishly thought “This is for Tsugumi’s sake, too.” Despite how she would

clearly be happier the way things were now.

Those driven into a corner really don’t tend to have good thoughts. Their outlook is too narrow.

Altogether, I have to admit my second self was a complete and utter dumbass.

Depending on how you looked at it, my mental age could’ve been considered twenty-nine: twenty years of one life plus nine of a second.

But as far as I could tell, it seemed like my mind hadn’t matured any further than twenty.

I think I was experiencing that “tortoise and the hare” phenomenon that tends to happen with precocious kids.

Well, now… It got a little long, but all this has more or less been the introduction.

Tell the truth, what mattered most in my journey back to twenty were those last few months.

So from here on out, I’m gonna start explaining things more thoroughly.

* 24 *

So - that’s how Operation Take Back My Girlfriend began.

Or to put it more bluntly, my plan to murder my doppelganger.

Now, if I were caught after murdering Tokiwa, it would all be for naught.

To ensure this murder would be the perfect crime, I first began to

stalk him.

I tailed him for days on end, believing the perfect moment for me to actually kill him would someday appear.

The method I desired was to push him from somewhere high up, to make it look like an accident.

Yes, I sought a death so believably natural that in a few years’ time, even I who’d carried it out would be thinking “That was an accident, wasn’t it?”

Of course, you always hear about people who do bad things getting arrested because of one little slip-up.

But what I think is, that doesn’t happen because they dropped their guard. It happens because the person actually thinks “I should’ve been arrested.”

That guilty thought consumes them until they feel like “it’d be easier if I were arrested,” and that leads to a slip-up.

So just like I said, it was ideal that I went with a method that weakened the feeling that “I killed him” to keep that from happening.

And at least speaking for my first-life self, I loved spacing out and watching the scenery on bridges, viewing platforms, rooftops, all kinds of high-up places.

So, you know, if he was on a bridge with nobody around and no railing, gazing off ahead of him, I could sneak up and grab his legs, then push him right off.

I didn’t know what kind of equipment the police had those days, but even if by some chance they noticed anything unnatural about his corpse, as long not a single hair, fiber from my clothes, or

fingerprint could be found on the body, I thought I’d be okay.

All I had to do was keep waiting patiently for a fortunate moment. I couldn’t just make an opportunity here, I had to wait for it.

No buts about it, I’m not the kind of person who can flex their wits to deceive the police. No matter how tight-lipped I tried to be, it was inevitable I’d make some mistake.

So I just had to count on luck.

And fortunately, I did have plenty of time. Had this been before the festival day, I might have been a little more impatient.

I may have even killed Tokiwa before he crossed that final line. Man, I’m really glad it didn’t come to that.

Tailing him wasn’t particularly hard to do. Since Tokiwa was so remarkably identical to my first self, I could easily predict his actions.

I bet he’ll go here next, he’s probably going to leave soon - I recognized those kinds of things plain as day.

And really, you’re not going to notice you’re being tailed if you’re not someone who looks behind themselves a lot.

Now when you hear me talk about “tailing” my target, you’re probably imagining this to play out like some hard-boiled private detective story. Well, I’m gonna have to let you down there.

In actuality, it was all boredom and inconvenience. Even if my target did have some big secret he was hiding, he was still just a student. Plus, the times I could follow him in assured safety were limited. So my primary job was just… waiting.

Primarily, waiting for Tokiwa to come by and settle himself somewhere. He’d get suspicious if he saw me, obviously.

I’d once had a part-time job counting people who boarded and got off the train, and that felt more worthwhile than this.

The funny thing is, though, I was going out more frequently for the sake of stalking Tokiwa, which soon ended up curing me as a shut- in.

Of course, maybe it wasn’t that severe a case to begin with.

Ironically, my personality brightened for a while after getting the idea of murder.

I went to old clothes stores for changes of clothes to help with stalking, I studied up on tailing techniques from books and the web, I memorized city maps…

It was all just little stuff coming together, but maybe it had a good effect on my brain.

It hadn’t had much in the way of stimuli before, but now it was starting to get a good workout with all that info.

I suppose it was good to have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. Even if my objective was murder, at least I was working toward something - it had a positive effect.

The look of my face even started to gradually improve as a result. I rarely looked in the mirror after getting to college, so I never noticed the change at first.

But when my sister pointed it out, and I took a good look in the mirror, I did notice how I looked a little more cheery…

Ah, that’s right. I’ve completely forgotten to talk about my sister. Maybe I should’ve brought it up earlier.

My sister, she’d undergone changes about as drastic as my own. From a certain perspective, I made her suffer more than anyone else.

* 25 *

My memories of my sister were even clearer to me than those of my girlfriend. She played a rather important role for my first self. The first time around, she was a frighteningly lively girl. She loved sunlight and exercise more than anything else, and would sunbathe all year.

Just a big ball of energy. And merely having her around made me feel more upbeat myself.

I wouldn’t say her figure was all that “feminine”; it might’ve been that she didn’t pay much heed to proper calorie intake.

Still, she always had a smile on her face and not a care in the world, so guys liked her. My friends would always ask me to “introduce them.”

However, when it came to the second time around… She became a gloomy, pale sister who preferred reading and shade, and had no courtesy whatsoever.

It would have seemed like a joke to anyone who knew about the first time. The sheer difference between them seemed even more significant than my own case.

And I think it was my fault that my sister changed to be this way. With her older sibling skipping school and generally demonstrating poor behavior, it’s not surprising that would influence her, the younger.

Perhaps my sister, as she saw her brother leaving the house with a face like death and coming home only to curl up in his room, lost all hope for the future.

With both brother and sister gloomy, our whole house would be up late every night.

It was awful, really. Nobody ever smiled. There was only the sound of cold, hollow laughter from the TV.

Our parents lost confidence in their upbringing skills, even their own genes when they saw us.

They were wonderful people, though I know it sounds weird to say it like that as their son.

But with son looking like it was the end of the world, and daughter always reading and stuck in her shell, there was no chance they alone would remain bright and cheery.

That kind of thing warps people. My mother came to see me as a mistake and had great expectations for my sister, getting her a family tutor and all these other things which put pressure on her.

“Now don’t you fail me,” it felt like she was saying. It was a heavy burden for my sister, of course, and every time I saw it I felt like my whole existence was being denied.

As for my father? It seemed like he decided to give up on the family

entirely. He ran off to his own world, started riding motorcycles.

I didn’t much care, and in fact I thought it was a good hobby. But he was hardly ever home on days off, and he neglected to so much as go shopping with my mother.

It was scary to see. Fights broke out every Saturday morning. Nobody could stop them.

When I was seventeen, my father got in a pretty serious accident. He was hospitalized for a month, for which the house was inordinately peaceful.

But the day he was released from the hospital, my parents had a huge, huge fight, and more or less stopped talking to each other afterward.

And I had to say it was all my fault.

When I changed, it changed my sister, and us changing changed our parents. There was no need for those two to fight.

But telling them that wouldn’t get them back together. They’d just think their idiot son had gone nuts to boot.

That got kinda sidetracked onto my parents, but I said this was about my sister, right?

Right, well. Me and my sister used to be amazingly friendly. But in the second round, we didn’t even look at each other, much less talk.

I wondered if my sister hated me. On the rare occasion she did open her mouth, it was usually an insult.

Like “Your face looks like crap,” or “Your hair’s too long.” Rude

things to say to a brother, I thought.

After all, she looked more out of it than me, and she let her hair grow pretty unkempt.

It really was a saddening thing. I imagine a father hated by his daughter might feel the same way.

But it’s also not surprising, I figure. I was just the kind of person it was perfectly natural to despise.

* 26 *

But one night, about a month after I started gleefully plotting my doppelganger murder project and tailing Tokiwa, my sister came alone to my apartment.

Yes, the same little sister who should have hated me.

The first snow of the season had just started to fall that day. Not long after I got out of the bath, I was feeling quite cold, so I turned on the heater for the first time that winter.

Having been ignored for months, it blew out bits of dust for a few minutes after switching it on.

Then gradually the warm air started to flow, and the sweet smell of lamp oil filled the room.

As I huddled in front of the heater to warm up, the doorbell rang. I looked at the clock: 9 PM.

Who could it be at this hour? I didn’t have any friends who would visit me - maybe someone got the wrong room?

The doorbell rang again. Normally, I would ignore it, but I was

feeling a little odd that day.

I fixed myself up in the mirror, hurried to the entryway, and opened the door.

Perhaps I was just longing to see someone. It didn’t matter if it was a mistake or not; just having someone at my door made me happy. So I thought we’d just exchange a few words before they left.

But no, it was my sister at the door.

I was confused. The first thing that came to mind was that something terrible had happened with someone at home.

Like our father died in a bike accident, or our mother came back home. And that she had come to tell me.

When you live a life that has no good things for such a long time, you start to think you’re always going to get bad news.

My sister, in only a uniform with a cardigan over it, let out a chilly breath and spoke, not looking at me.

“Let me stay here for a little while.”

I asked if her something had happened at home, and she just said “Nothing happened” over her shoulder as she barged into the apartment.

She scrunched her face at the foul combined odor from all the empty bottles and cans, the unwashed clothes, and the cigarettes, and began opening all the windows which I’d closed to keep the apartment warm.

The fact she was already cleaning things up around here made it clear she intended to stay for a while.

I knew that unlike my first-life sister, she wasn’t the kind who needed her brother’s help for taking care of herself.

I was sure the largish Boston bag she carried over her shoulder was packed with changes of clothes and all that.

First of all, I got my sister something warm to drink, knowing she’d come through the cold.

While she arranged the clothes I left strewn around the room, I filled a mug with hot water and stirred it with plenty of cocoa powder. She loved sweet drinks like that.

She took the hot cocoa from me with both hands and slowly sipped it. As I watched, I thought about what to say next. She peered into the cup.

To be frank, I didn’t necessarily want to know why my sister had come by. It was sure to be a weary conversation.

Some people might consider it a big brother’s duty to listen to it anyway, but I was in no mood to fulfill that duty.

I was so busy thinking about my own burdens that I had absolutely no desire to stick my nose into those of others.

My sister must have expected I would ask her why she’d come first thing. She seemed dissatisfied by how I hadn’t asked a single question on it.

We met eyes. Hers said “Come on, ask me something.” Unable to bear the pressure, I reluctantly asked.

“Honoka, you aren’t on winter break yet, right?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to be in that house,” she answered.

Aha. In other words, you’re running away from home, I thought - but I didn’t say it. I had this feeling that calling it that would just make her angry.

My second-life sister really hated having idiotic phrases like that used to describe her.

But it was surprising. It wasn’t something I would have expected her to do.

Even if things weren’t happy at home, she didn’t seem the kind to do something as pointless as run away.

Just putting distance between her and the bad things, waiting for the worst to pass - that wasn’t my sister.

Something really terrible must have happened, I thought anxiously, then quickly put away in the back of my mind.

Nothing to do with me, I told myself.

Of course, that wasn’t true, but I was absorbed with my own troubles.

“How did you get here, anyway?”, I asked. She replied typically, “Does that matter?”

She was right, though. It really didn’t matter. I just asked it to dance around the heart of the matter.

“Dirty room,” she said, looking around. She was an expert in judging her brother. “And your taste sucks.”

“Leave if you don’t like it.” I replied just as typically. “I didn’t say that.”

“So it’s dirty and my taste sucks, but you don’t hate it?” “Right. Smelly, dirty, ugly, but I didn’t say I hate it.”

My first sister would have cleaned it up without a word and cooked up some tasty food for us both.

But this sister of mine didn’t really want to come to my place. Like me, she probably didn’t have many friends, so this was her only option for running away to.

Winter vacation hadn’t started yet, so I figured she wouldn’t stay long. Even so, she was a nuisance and I wondered if I could get her to leave any sooner.

But I didn’t have the guts to be harsh with her. The second time around, I was an utter coward.

And my second-time sister was pretty scary to boot. She always had a sharp, quiet anger in her.

It was like a balloon I had to be very careful not to pop, and it made my stomach churn.

I was powerless to stop my sister from tampering with things in my apartment, so I got a futon out of the closet for her.

Just then, she came out of the bath, put on her pajamas, and dried her hair. When she saw the futon and the bed, she unhesitatingly chose the bed after two seconds.

She was already convinced it was her room.

I reluctantly got in the futon and asked, “How long you planning to stay here?”

“I dunno,” she said, pulling up the covers.

And so we began living together, in a very strained kind of way.

* 27 *

At about eight the next morning, my sister shook me awake.

Since we’re talking about me, I had completely forgotten about my sister while I slept. One would thus expect I’d be startled to see a girl in my room, but surprisingly I wasn’t very.

With a level head, I recalled the circumstances of my sister being there.

Before my waking eyes were even a third of the way open, my sister said “Take me to the library.”

After a brief pause, she added “Right now.”

She seemed quite prepared for an outing. I hadn’t seen her dressed casually in a long time.

She sat on the bed, her hands thrust in the pockets of a gray cardigan, her legs wavering out of her navy-blue short pants, and her soft shoulder-length hair swaying along with that movement.

They were particularly skinny legs, almost seeming artificial with the black tights pulled over them.

I reluctantly got out of bed, took some unfolded dry clothes off a hanger and stuck them under my arm, headed for the bathroom. The sink water was cold enough to kill a guy from shock, but it’d take a few minutes to get warm water. So I washed my face with that frigid water and quickly changed clothes.

Geez, it was my own apartment. Why did I have to change in secret like this?

I let out a few big sighs. I’d gotten into the futon last night not long after my sister, but ended up not getting much sleep.

Like many shut-ins, I was a night owl, so a constructive “sleep at 1, wake up at 8” schedule was exhausting for me.

Besides, for the past few years, I’d slept much more than I did in my first life. If I didn’t get about ten hours of sleep, I was a mess.

Well, maybe it’s more probable that I unconsciously slept more not so much for health reasons, but because my time awake was so harsh.

I wonder. Maybe humans can only wake up early when they have TV shows they want to watch, dates to go out on.

It’s said that waking up early makes for a better life, but if you ask me, it’s having a good life that allows you to wake up early.

Yet of course, even though I could tune out three alarm clocks at once, having a girl shake me awake will wake me up just fine.

Even if she was my sister who I wasn’t on good terms with, who was skipping school, who was running away from home, that didn’t make a difference.

I felt like it was the first time in a while I’d woken up in a human-ish way. It was common that I’d fall back asleep once or twice before actually getting up.

And even after that, I often stayed on my bed reading or messing with my phone, so if you wanna be accurate, it usually took about ten steps to get from me waking up to getting out of bed.

So yeah, my sister waking me up and me getting straight out of bed was a pretty big deal.

It wasn’t even December, but the air had a chill to it like it was already the middle of winter.

As we were about to leave, I realized how lightly-dressed my sister was and went to get a Mods coat for her.

…When I put it like that, it sounds like I’m one caring big brother, huh? But to be blunt, I was just doing the bare minimum to look less terrible.

My biggest motivator was that I was scared of being blamed later, basically.

My sister looked at me holding the coat out as if to say “Wear it yourself,” then snatched it from me.

The sleeves were a little long for her, but it was a pretty slender coat, so it didn’t look too odd.

I put on a pea coat I’d worn since high school, lazily tied the shoelaces on my boots, and opened the door.

The cold wind hit my skin, and in seconds I was shivering. We got in the car, I turned the heat all the way up, and we sat together until we were warm.

* 28 *

My sister’s first words once in the passenger seat of the Mini Cooper were “Stinks like tobacco.”

That wasn’t my fault, though. My dad used to drive it, and ever since it was passed to me it’d smelled like that.

Looking in the back seat, though, her fourth was “Dirty.” And that was one hundred percent on me.

The back seat was a mess: textbooks and materials for my classes, convenience store bags of water bottles and empty bento boxes, even tossed-off jackets and shoes.

There were times I did sit in the car for long periods as part of tailing my double, but the real problem was that no one but me ever rode in the car.

If I had someone who I was consistently driving around in it, even I’d make an effort to keep it clean, probably.

It’s the same kind of thing as how if you want to be fashionable, you take a job that puts you in front of people.

“It stinks and it’s dirty,” my sister repeated.

“Tells you a lot about the owner” was the implication. She was something, alright.

But I’d say she’s right, that the disarray of an apartment or a car reflected the mentality of the owner.

If you had a “+50 life,” you’d likely fuss over little things to get it up to +51. But if you’re at -50, it doesn’t seem all that worth it to shoot for -49.

The 9 AM sky was cloudy, and everything was shrouded in a light fog.

My sister continued to complain on the way to the library.

Saying that my coat smelled like cigarettes too, and that wasn’t I going to play some music or something?

But if I popped in some of my CDs, I knew it’d just open up a new wave of complaints.

If I wanted my sister’s approval, I’d need to play music in the vein of Sigur Rós or Múm. But unfortunately, I didn’t have any of that.

I continued to ignore her, and she hit me with a tissue box. “Listen to what people say,” she said.

I swear, the only time she was ever this arrogant was when she was alone with me. A braggart only to her bro. A broggert?

We arrived at the municipal library. She muttered “So small” when she saw it, but at least it wasn’t a complaint directed at me.

I’d gone there to research things for my college homework once before, so I already had a library card.

I told her “Pick out whatever books you like,” and for once, she obediently nodded “okay” before vanishing into the bookshelves. Myself, I went looking for some books too. I went up narrow stairs to the second floor, where with each step the floor creaked.

There was a young girl sitting on a chair between the bookshelves along the wall, reading a bulky book.

At first, I mistook her for a sculpture and stared for an unfortunately long time. When she glanced my way, I finally realized she was a person and hurried away,

When I went to check out my books and saw the return-by-date calendar, I realized for the first time that it was Wednesday. Indeed, when you don’t make any plans in your life, your sense of days leaves you, even blurring the line between normal days and

holidays.

So when it gets bad enough, you forget what day of the week it is.

If it’s Wednesday, I thought, then that class must be starting about now… It was my fifth time skipping it. Oh well.

Regardless, it was a strange thing, a college student and his high school sister visiting the library early in the morning on a school day.

Most of the people in the library were elderly, so I wonder how they must have seen us?

After about thirty minutes, I went to look for my sister, and found her deliberating in front of a bookcase.

I asked “Done yet?”, and she hit me with a book. “No talking in the library!”

That was my second-time sister in a nutshell, I suppose. First time it would’ve been “Oh, please, hold on a little longer!”

About twenty minutes later, we were finally able to leave the library.

All she seemed to want to do was spend the whole day reading in my apartment.

As soon as we returned, she plopped on the bed, sat against the wall, and engrossed herself in a book as thick as some dictionaries. She had really changed, I thought. But it wasn’t so surprising anymore.

I figured it’d be fine to leave her be, so I quietly went to leave.

She looked up and asked “Where you going, big brother? School?” I couldn’t very well say “I’m going to stalk this guy I want to murder so I can learn his habits,” so I said “Yeah, that. I’ll be back at seven.”

“Hmph,” she mumbled suspiciously. “Still… sounds sorta fun. Gonna see anyone you know there?”

Honestly, that was exactly what I didn’t want her to ask about.

“A college friend. I got to know them on the festival day last month,” I said while thinking it up.

At times like these, it was best to lie with hints of the truth.

“Never hit it off with somebody so well before. It’s just like, we know what the other’s thinking, just like that. It’s great to have at least somebody like that. Yeah, they’re a close friend.”

“Huh. Or at least… that’s what you think about them, huh, big brother?”

Man, there was something just so disagreeable about how she said that.

“Yeah, I guess. At least I think of him as a close friend.”

Still, it was odd. I hadn’t thought she would care in the least where I was going, what I was doing.

Was she starved for conversation, maybe? Or maybe while I was gone, she was planning on doing things she wouldn’t tell anyone.

I didn’t know, at any rate, and I didn’t care.

She could do what she liked. I had my own things to attend to.

* 29 *

I wanted to settle this doppelganger problem within the year. The longer I let it go on, the harder it would be to execute.

In addition, if I could kill Tokiwa before December, they wouldn’t get to spend Christmas and New Year’s together.

No doubt, if those joyful days came along and I was reminded of how my first-life self and Tsugumi spent them, I would be hit with the worst depression of all.

I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.

And it was hardly an impossible proposition. By now, with my daily tailing, I had a very good grasp on Tokiwa’s daily rituals.

To be honest, I had long been in stellar condition to execute the plan. But a minimum of three times, I passed up a chance to kill him that had very little risk.

Just as I predicted, Tokiwa’s habits were extremely similar to mine. He liked to look down from high places, so there were many times he stood on the bridge gazing at the river, or on steep roads down at the residential district at night.

In my opinion, it was almost like he was just asking to be killed. Maybe God was on my side at this point, I thought.

And yet I was simply unable to carry out the plan. Probably I couldn’t make up my mind to take the plunge.

The thing is, there was one other thing I was after in tailing him. I wanted to see Tokiwa’s faults.

I was waiting for him to show me some kind of defect.

To justify my actions, I wanted him to give me some reason, any reason to believe that he was someone who deserved to die.

If only I could find just the slightest reason why killing him was worth it.

But the trouble was, I went a whole month looking and looking, but he didn’t show me a thing. Didn’t even get haughty about his lack of faults.

I dunno if he was even conscious of it, but Tokiwa appeared to be very careful about how he presented himself.

Tokiwa’s greatest weapons were a polished smile that immediately took down anyone’s defenses and a harmonic voice that everyone wanted to listen to, yet he dared to keep them in check most of the time.

And at critical moments, he would bring them out in a very targeted way, leaving a deep impression on those around him.

Naturally, people took notice. But he never gave them time to get accustomed to that charm; he pulled it back before they did.

By doing this, he let people’s imaginations swell, and they began to think that he had even more charm than he really had.

It was magnificent, honestly. It taught me that when you have visible charms, it’s better to show them off from time to time like a reminder, rather than keep them on at full blast.

A useless technique for someone who doesn’t have any charms, hidden or otherwise, though.

I hate to admit it, but he was one hell of a guy. Even with all my

hate, I still held some esteem for him.

No doubt everyone else saw Tokiwa as a very charming individual.

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