Epilogue
“All right, that should do it...or close enough, anyway,” I mumbled to no one in particular since I was all alone in my room. I was oddly amused by the sound of my own voice, but, I mean, pretty much anything can feel amusing when you’ve just finished studying for an exam.
I hadn’t prepared enough to give my efforts the big ol’ “that should do it for real” stamp of approval, but taking into account my own academic ability, my level of motivation, my place in society, and a bunch of other factors, it seemed like as good a place to wrap up as any. At least, that’s what I told myself as I stared blankly at the notebook on my desk.
I mean, studying with a bunch of honor students was all well and good, but when all’s said and done, how you do on a test is at least seventy or eighty percent determined by whether you know the basics and what sort of attitude you went into your actual classes with.
Getting super fired up ’cause you can’t go to your summer training camp if you fail’s pretty standard in manga and stuff, but I wasn’t in a club and didn’t actually have a camp to go to. Besides, if a certain high and mighty homeroom teacher who lived only to bully her students was to be believed, I was already locked in for summer school. It was too late for me to put in the effort anyway, so why bother?
“Uuugh, I’m friggin’ tired.” I tossed my mechanical pencil onto my desk and dove into bed. By “bed,” I mean “my futon,” of course. It wasn’t the bounciest of landings, but it was still nice, soft, and satisfying. A massive wave of drowsiness swept over me the second I touched down, but midway through a yawn, my phone started vibrating. I had a text.
Kiryu: Have you reviewed what you learned today? Knowing the material is important, but putting it into practice is just as vital.
No emojis, actually ending the sentence with a period, cutting straight to the point in the simplest way possible—yeah, this is pretty much how I figured she would text. She couldn’t hold a candle to me when it came to brevity, though.
Kou: sure did
If I were in public I would have to act hyped about getting a text from a girl to the point of literally dancing a jig, but since I was by my lonesome, I could tap out a two-word reply at a rate of approximately one word per minute and send it off.
When I really think about it, Kiryu might’ve changed more than anyone over the past several days. Or rather, more accurately, it’s my relationship with her that’s changed. Saying that we get along now would be both an oversimplification and maybe a little premature, but considering how we used to be around each other, it’s undeniable that we’re doing a lot better these days. She never would’ve sent a fussy, nosy text like this before, that’s for sure.
But yeah, on second thought, she hasn’t really changed at all. Big events that change people’s personalities on a fundamental level don’t just come about every day, and I sure can’t remember anything of the sort happening to her lately. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that this caring, attentive side of her was cultivated by her relationship with her little brother. And, like, she’s kinda cold and snappy with Kotou every once in a while, but she’s never been cruel.
In short: people don’t change that easily, and I’m no exception. I came to this world with magical powers that aren’t supposed to exist, and even now that I’m here, I’m still totally capable of using them. Erasing memories is the one trick I can manage, of course, but it’s still one thing that makes me truly different from the people around me, and it’s an ability I’ve made use of, for better or for worse.
People don’t change that easily. However much I’d hoped and wished to change myself, in the end, I was still doing all the same things I’d done up until that point. My true inner nature might not’ve changed in the slightest since the time I lived in that other world.
“Huh...? She replied already? And ugh, talk about long-winded...” Kiryu’s next text was long enough it didn’t even fit on a single screen. Just looking at it was enough to induce a powerful sense of fatigue.
TL;DR: “‘Did’ in past tense, meaning that you’ve already finished reviewing, meaning that you didn’t study for anywhere close to long enough, you pathetic, pig-like man-child?” That was the gist of it, anyway. I didn’t actually read the whole thing, so there very well might’ve been more to it than that.
“Man, how am I supposed to reply to that?” The little princess was clearly pissed—I could tell from the way she was typing alone. A half-baked reply would probably prompt an even more intense counter-reply.
“Hmm...”
I crossed my arms, sat cross-legged upon my futon, and racked my brain for a solution. Needless to say, all thoughts of studying more had flown completely out the window.
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“Mmm...”
He just wasn’t replying. A sigh tried to slither its way out from my lips, but I swallowed it back and let out a groan instead, staring at my phone as I waited for a notification that just wouldn’t come.
“Maybe my message was a little too long? But what else was I supposed to say...?” I felt unusually timid as I toweled off my hair. Long or not, that message had been necessary—I wrote it that way because it had to be that way.
And besides, he was in the wrong in the first place! He was moaning and groaning all throughout our study session about how his summer lessons were already set in stone, so studying was pointless, but for all he knew, getting good enough grades on his finals could very well overturn that decision. He just wouldn’t take things seriously, no matter what I said.
“Should I send another text to check if he actually read the first one...? Oh, or I could give him a call...? That might come across as too pushy...”
I spent a while longer glaring fruitlessly at my phone, wasting precious time that I could have used to further my own studies. I was so preoccupied that I’d jumped in and out of the bath after a mere five minutes when I’d usually soak for somewhere in the vicinity of a half hour.
“Kotou-san always replies to my texts right away, so why won’t he...? D-Don’t tell me I’ve made him hate me?! N-No, that’s far too negative. Keep yourself together, Kiryu Kyouka!” I tried to talk myself out of it, but unfortunately, once the idea had sprung to mind, it proved difficult to let go of.
I was never the most sociable person to begin with. Ever since I was little, I’ve had to deal with boys constantly clamoring for my attention and girls teasing me relentlessly. I quickly came to the conclusion that people were scary. I only had a few real relationships—with my mother, my father, my little brother, and the boy my brother was so attached to, Kou-kun. Actually, it might be better to say that he depended on Kou-kun.
Eventually, my parents—my father, in particular—decided that they had to do something to remedy my introversion. They made me take Aikido lessons to help me become stronger and had me attend a particularly strict cram school. It goes without saying that neither of those activities were well-suited for me in the slightest, but I knew that they would be upset if I said I didn’t want to go, and that conflict drove a rift between us.
Then on top of it, Kou-kun—the boy I now realize was my first love, albeit a childish and immature one—disappeared from my life without even the slightest of warnings. Then my brother, Daiki, the person dearer to me than anyone else, passed away... I had nobody left to support me.
Losing Daiki was so intense of a shock, I wasn’t sure at the time if I had any reason to live on myself. My parents were hit just as hard, of course, and his passing helped shorten the distance between us to an extent, but admitting that fact felt like acknowledging his death, and I couldn’t stand it...
In the end, I was never able to mature past it. I threw myself into my studies as a means of rebelling, of running away from everything I couldn’t face up to. I’d do anything as long as it meant that I could forget all the awful things in life and gain even the slightest degree of self-affirmation.
But heartlessness is an inherent aspect of human nature. Over the course of time, both my parents and I began to recover from the state that Daiki’s death put us into. We never forgot him, but we learned to accept reality. When an opportunity arose for my father to transfer to a new workplace, we bade farewell to Shusen City, the town I’d lived in for all my life. One might claim that moving was just another means of running away from it all for us.
I’d kept practicing Aikido out of sheer inertia up until that point, but I finally stopped after we moved. I could say the opposite of my studies, though. I threw myself into them with more focus than ever. It was something like a routine for me—a daily ritual that helped me keep myself together.
“I really haven’t changed, huh... Not even after all this time...”
I lay down on my bed and hugged a stuffed animal that’d been my favorite since I was a child. That was another routine of mine...well, more of a habit, really. It’d be humiliating if anyone saw me do this, but that’s part of why it made me feel like I was well and truly alone, which helped calm me down.
“Hah, I wish it did that. I’m not calm in the slightest.”
However hard I tried to make myself relax, it just wasn’t happening this time. All my attention was focused on my phone, and by extension, on Kunugi-kun. If the nickname granted to me by my classmates really rang true, I wouldn’t be swayed by emotions like this. I’d be a cool, aloof ice queen. But the truth was, that was all just a persona that I worked frantically to put on in public.
At my core, I was still the same person I’d been in my childhood: a weak, timid girl without an ounce of self-confidence who always needed someone else to rely on.
People don’t change that easily. I can change my image like I’d change an outfit, but in the end, the person underneath that new outfit will still be the same me as ever.
“Maybe I should call him or send a follow-up text after all... Argh, maybe if I hadn’t spent all that time studying to ignore my problems, I’d know how to deal with things like this...”
If this problem were taken from a textbook I’d have the correct answer ready in the blink of an eye, but of course it couldn’t be that easy. I’ve been doing my best to avoid socializing for what feels like forever, and “my best” was so effective that it earned me the “ice queen” title. Knowing what to do in a situation like this was simply beyond me.
“This is all Kunugi-kun’s fault, anyway! He could at least say something, couldn’t he?! I don’t even care if it’s a good reply or a bad one!”
I knew that lying there and mumbling complaints that nobody would ever hear wasn’t going to resolve anything, but I kept reflexively glancing at my phone regardless. The situation was getting more and more irritating with every passing minute.
Before I knew it, Kunugi-kun and his stupid, obnoxious grin materialized in my mind’s eye. It made me vividly recall everything that had happened between our reunion at Oumei High’s entrance ceremony and now. It made me think about how he always acted like an absolutely clueless dullard, except for the rare moments where his eyes would light up with a sudden intensity or the even rarer moments where he’d allow me a peek at his vulnerable side...
“Aaargh, what is wrong with me?!”
My mind was dominated by a feeling I hadn’t experienced in quite a long time. I didn’t have a name to put to that feeling, though. I’d forgotten it for so long—it felt fresh, like an incomprehensible mixture of happiness and frustration, of irritation and impatience.
I knew that if I let myself indulge in that feeling I might never break out of it, so I mustered up the force of will to grab my phone and open up my contacts list. I barely had any names registered at all, so it only took me an instant to scroll through it, pick out the person I was looking for and tap on her number. She picked up a moment later.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Kotou-san? I have a question for you, if you have a moment.”
In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to call Kunugi-kun directly—at least, not in that particular moment—so I contacted Kotou-san instead.
“A question? A-As long as it’s not about studying, I’ll answer anything!”
“Why do you sound so worked up...? Never mind, it’s fine. So, well, I wanted your opinion on something... Umm, this is something a friend of mine was asking me about earlier.”
“Asking for a friend, huh? Aaah, I see, I see...”
“What?”
“Nothing, don’t worry about it! Go on, ask away!”
I hesitated for just a moment. “All right. So, you see, my friend said...”
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Meanwhile...
“So yeah, that’s about the size of it. How would you reply if somebody sent you a friggin’ essay like that, Kaito?! Just a reminder, by the way, this is all about a friend of mine.”
“Right, a ‘friend’ of yours and the beautiful, coolheaded genius girl who tutored him. We’re talking about you and Kyouka, huh?”
“N-No, we’re not! We’re talking about my friend and a friend of my friend! Man, why would you think this was about me and Kiryu?! How crazy is that?! Ha ha ha ha!”
Kaito let out a long, exasperated sigh. He was just about to review everything he’d learned at the study party held at his house earlier in the day, but then his best friend called him up to ask for advice in the stupidest way possible.
“Let me double-check something. Kou, that coolheaded beauty went way out of her way to tutor you...your friend, and now she’s mad at him because he hasn’t been reviewing the lesson like she wanted him to. Right?”
“I-I dunno if she’s mad, exactly. It’s a little more distant than that? Like, think ‘detective cornering a criminal at the top of a cliff’—that sorta feeling.”
“That’s not any better.”
“But I did actually study, okay?! It just happened that she texted me right around the time I was wrapping up for the night! If I apologize, it’ll make it look like I didn’t do any studying at all!”
“‘I’?”
“...Is what I would say if I were my friend, who I’m not. Did you say something? Train was passing by, couldn’t hear a thing for a minute there.”
“That train showed up and passed by awfully quickly.”
“F-Forget about the train, okay?! Just help me out here! How would you fix this?”
Kaito sighed again. He couldn’t tell if Kou was even trying to tell a decent lie or not. It would be all too easy to tell him, “Don’t know, don’t care, figure it out on your own,” and he’d been tempted to do so at many times over the course of the conversation, but in the end, he just wasn’t heartless enough to refuse a request from his best friend.
“I think the big question here, Kou, is how your ‘friend’ actually wants to resolve this. Like, what specifically do you mean by ‘fixing’ it?”
“Hell if I know!” He’d completely given up on thinking it through himself. Kaito sighed for the umpteenth time that evening, but Kou didn’t seem even slightly inclined to back down.
Kou was always running off on his own initiative, leading Kaito and his other friends around by the nose, but whenever they ended up interacting one-on-one like this, it felt like he lost even more of his capacity for common sense than usual.
If you wanted to make it sound good, you could say that it meant Kou felt comfortable acting like himself around Kaito, but that didn’t change the fact that it was exhausting to put up with sometimes. That evening was most definitely one of those times, and it was even worse than usual, as if he was making up for the relatively subdued period he’d been through recently.
“Anyway, c’mon, just help me out here, Kaito-mon!”
“Not happening, Kunuta-kun.”
“Kunuta... Kunukunuta... Is it just me, or does that sound like the sorta name a tanuki might have?”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about, and are you just gonna ignore the ‘not happening’ part?” Kaito had finally let his actual feelings about the matter slip out, and he decided that with that cat out of the bag, he might as well follow through with it. His tone had progressed past the point of exasperation and had taken on a certain serious edge, which made Kou gulp loudly enough for Kaito to hear it through the phone.
“All right, Kou, here’s what you should tell your friend: If he can think up the perfect solution to his problem or come up with a clever excuse to get him out of it on his own, then fine, go for it. But if he can’t, then he should just be honest about it and admit that he was in the wrong. Even if he really did study, like you said, he still barely kept at it for any time at all before he gave up, right?”
“W-Well, I mean, yeah, but—”
“Then of course she’d be mad! Even Kyouka would get pissed off about that. She was pretty much keeping constant watch over you for the second half of our study party. Imagine putting off your own work to help somebody study, only for them to forget all of it by the next morning... I don’t even wanna think about what she’d do.”
“Eek! S-Stop trying to scare me...”
“I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just describing what I imagine is most likely to happen.” Apparently, Kou’s imagination was producing a pretty vivid image of the scene. He’d totally forgotten about the pretense that the story was about his friend. “Get it? Just be honest, okay? Whether or not she gets mad at you for it is totally up to her. All you can do at this point is...I dunno, pray, I guess?”
“You’re heartless!”
“Yeah, good luck with that.” Kaito ignored his best friend’s anguished wail and hung up his phone. He waited for a moment, but since Kou didn’t immediately call back, Kaito assumed that he’d been convinced to get a grip, so he put his phone down on his desk.
Whether or not Kou would actually put that advice into action, of course, was anyone’s guess. There was a chance he’d take Kaito’s advice to heart and be honest, but there was an even larger chance that he’d lose his nerve right before going through with it.
“Sheesh... C’mon, get it together, Kou. Summer break’s coming up, y’know?”
He knew there was no way his words would get through to Kou, but Kaito muttered to himself anyway as he sat down and got back to studying.
The summer of one’s second year in high school has a special significance. Being as Oumei High was a college prep school, every single one of its students was aware of that fact. The summer of their third year, after all, they’d be working themselves half to death studying for their college entrance exams.
As such, to Kaito and his friends, the upcoming summer vacation would be both the perfect chance to make some high school memories and also one of the last chances left to do so. Having that precious period eaten up by remedial lessons would be a tragedy that they simply couldn’t let happen... Though the fact that Kou was already scheduled to be subjected to those lessons threw a bit of a wrench into the works.
That’s why Kaito was prepared to throw himself into his studies with unusual enthusiasm...until his phone started vibrating once again.
“Dammit, Kou...wait, it’s not him?” As he picked up, his phone’s display informed him that the call was, in fact, from Kotou Tsumugi. “Hello?”
“Kaito! Help me! Actually, no, help Kyouka! I think everything’s about to get all stupid and complicated again!”
“...Huh?”
Just a little over a week remains until finals begin.
Summer is just around the corner.
Afterword
It’s been getting pretty cold lately, hasn’t it? I hope you’ve all been holding up well!
Thank you very much for purchasing the second volume of The Sidekick Never Gets the Girl, Let Alone the Protag’s Sister! This is the author who can never seem to remember their own titles, Toshizo, speaking.
This second volume opens with an aside regarding what happened to our protagonist (as in the protagonist of the actual book, not in the meta sense) Kunugi Kou in the other world. Our world’s absolutely overflowing with stories about folks getting reincarnated or dragged into other worlds these days, isn’t it? The ones that dig into how the protagonist uses modern knowledge and tools to enact sweeping reforms are particularly interesting, in my book.
But really, if you were actually thrown into an uncivilized world or a world that’s developed using some totally different form of technology—say, by using magic instead of using the science we rely on in the real world—there’s no guarantee that you’d actually be able to successfully play the hero like all those protagonists do. At the very least, I don’t think I’d stand a chance. Sadly, I just don’t have the right sort of brain for it.
I’m afraid to say that the same was probably true for young Kunugi Kou. Even after getting granted all sorts of special powers, I’m sure he screwed up, ran away, and suffered time and time again. Being a Hero who’s fated to save the world would be way too heavy a burden for a child like him to bear on his own—no, actually, I think it’d be too much even for an adult.
The moment of recollection I wrote for him in this volume portrays a brief period of peace in his life, as well as the beginning of the seemingly eternal cycle of suffering he’d be wrapped up in from then onward. After returning to the modern world, the powers and experience that he attained in the other world are both akin to a curse and yet also the one thing that he knows for sure he can rely on.
As for why I made the backstory so darn dark... Well, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think, “Why not have him succeed in the other world, then go back to the real world and use his powers to succeed there too?!” and honestly, same. Like, don’t I feel sorry for poor Kunugi-kun?! Not to mention Hikari-chan, who went through all sorts of awful stuff too, thanks to all that nonsense! (Witness me, the self-flagellating author.)
But I’m afraid to say that this train’s already running wild, and there’s no stopping it now. I believe that the things you gain by overcoming hardship are all the more precious because of the tough times you went through to get to them. As one of this story’s writers, I’d like to keep guiding it in that direction. Not that this story has more than one writer to begin with! Hah!
Once again, I’d like to extend my sincerest thanks to the many parties who helped make this novel a reality. In particular to U35, who was in charge of the illustrations. Personally speaking, the drawings of the other world’s characters were so incredible I seriously couldn’t deal with it. This was true of volume one as well, but putting illustrations in a book really takes it to the next level in an instant. Really makes me think, “Holy crap, books are incredible!” I’d also like to thank all the kind individuals at the publishing house and my editor as well. The oranges you sent to help me through the summer were super tasty.
Finally, more than anyone else, I’d like to thank all the readers who’ve been following my work since I first posted it on Shosetsuka ni Naro. I truly can’t thank you enough for continuing to buy my novels. It’s thanks to you that Sidekick was born as a published work, and it’s thanks to you that I was born as an author. I intend to do my absolute best to not let down everyone who’s cheered me on for all this time.
Once again, to all of you who purchased this book, thank you very much! I hope you’ll keep enjoying Sidekick in the future!
—Toshizo (November 2019)
