"Tch, feels like I miscalculated a bit..." Jhin clicked his tongue in annoyance, snatched the candied apple from Kyaru's hand, and took a big bite. Speaking with his mouth full, he said, "I should've... gone and played that game earlier just as the competition was about to end."
Kyaru stared at the bite mark on the candied apple, her face flushing as she rotated it and ate from the other side, the part his mouth hadn't touched. "Didn't we still get forty medals? Isn't that good enough?"
"That arena game, each team can only join once, and you have to wager all your medals. If we'd gone and beaten down that Kendo Club captain right as the event was ending, we could've walked away with a hundred, no?"
"That does make sense."
"Say, Kyaru... what did they mean, 'a kid abandoned by a mermaid'?"
"Ahaha... so you heard it after all." Kyaru gave a self-mocking little laugh. "A kid abandoned by a mermaid means an orphan. They say I was abandoned by my parents the moment I was born, and it was the Principal who picked me up and raised me."
"That Principal who announced the start of the competition?"
"Yeah."
Jhin hoped his earlier hunch—that the Principal wasn't a good person—was wrong. Otherwise, there was no telling how many tragic orphan scripts she might be holding in her hands.
After finishing the candied apple, Kyaru's low mood recovered as well. She suggested they go check out the overall scoreboard at the central plaza, but Jhin shot the idea down.
"If we've got time to worry about stuff like that, we're better off entering more games and grabbing medals."
Just then he spotted a stall running a competitive-eating contest. Rolling up his sleeves, he strode over menacingly and told Kyaru to show her student ID.
"Are you sure you're okay? Just now I... we've already eaten quite a lot, haven't we?" She remembered how, all along the way, Jhin had been snatching her food in what practically amounted to indirect kisses. Her words came out a little stuttery, and her earlobes had turned pink.
"I'm fine. Barely counts as an appetizer." Jhin casually grabbed a drink from beside him to wet his throat. Food had already begun streaming endlessly in front of him. He glanced up at the ten-minute countdown overhead, seized a slab of meat, and tore off a huge bite.
A professional competitive eater would surely follow the basic method—chew little, swallow much, and wash it all down with water—and of course would induce vomiting after the contest was over.
But Jhin could genuinely eat, and he wasn't willing to waste food. His mouth was like a never-resting grinder; no matter how much came his way, he could put it all away. A bite of meat, a gulp of drink, then a mouthful of fried chicken—so satisfying it hit the spot.
Feeling that drinking normally wasn't satisfying enough, he simply had the stall owner bring him a soup bowl and pour the drink into it. All he was missing was shouting, "Waiter, four pounds of beef and three bottles of wine over here!"
Even though much of his memory was hazy, Jhin could judge by instinct which things he was good at. To his surprise, there was hardly a single stall game he found difficult—the only difference was between taking first place and not taking first place.
So all along he'd been choosing the stalls where he could take first, doing his best to guarantee the largest possible haul of medals.
The eating contest, too, was claimed by him without a hint of suspense—in fact, this stall had to temporarily shut down to restock ingredients because of his ferocious feeding frenzy.
Kyaru curiously reached out and poked Jhin's belly, which looked completely unchanged, as if wondering where on earth all that food had actually gone. "Say, you didn't really cheat, did you?"
Jhin shot her a speechless glance. "Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I'm just a one-in-a-million genius, and it's not some spirit tool helping me out?"
"Whose fault is it that you ate a whole stall into a temporary shutdown?"
"Only an idiot would genuinely treat cheating as their own skill."
"Why'd you suddenly get so aggressive? Did somebody say something to you again just now?"
"Mm... just talking off the top of my head, don't mind it. So, do you have a plan for what game to enter next?"
Kyaru took a look around at the nearby stalls but couldn't find any game she was good at. She didn't know what Jhin was good at either—she just got the sense that this guy seemed to know a little bit of everything. If he could recover his memories, he'd probably only become even more formidable.
Thinking this, she suddenly felt a bit inferior. Gently tugging at Jhin's sleeve, she stopped in her tracks, lowered her head, and stared at her toes pressed together. "Um... becoming teammates with someone like me—you really don't mind?"
"What would I mind?"
"Because... a kid abandoned by a mermaid basically can never become a champion. It's like being cursed." Having said this, Kyaru had already braced herself to face his interrogation.
Things like "Why didn't you tell me something like this sooner?", "Then there was no need for us to work so hard to earn medals," "What a waste of all the effort I put in to take first place." She'd already run through these lines in her heart. But when the moment came to lay her cards on the table before him, she realized just how afraid she was of hearing them from Jhin's mouth.
It had only been a chance encounter, yet he'd stirred an inexplicable fondness in her. Then he'd become her companion, and had even stepped forward to stand up for her against the classmates who mocked her with malice.
If you went by the mermaid legend, he was surely that prince who hacked through the thorns and brambles to rescue the mermaid princess.
She let go of Jhin's sleeve and, like a child afraid of being scolded, lowered her head and clutched the hem of her clothes in silence.
A large hand gently patted the top of Kyaru's head. When she raised her face, what met her eyes was Jhin's heart-warming smile. "Hey, I'm a guy who's half-lost his memory. You tell me all this stuff... I don't even understand it, you know? Have you picked the next stall yet?"
Kyaru sniffled hard through her stinging nose and turned her head aside so he wouldn't see the misty film welling up in her eyes. "Do you have any good suggestions?"
"You're really tossing the question back at me... Let me see, then let's go... uh, right, I just remembered I still need to go find my homeroom teacher to get a nighttime outing permission slip. How about you wander around nearby for now, and we'll keep going once I'm back?"
"Mm... then I'll wait for you."
Jhin hurried off, because in the corridor of the academic building he'd spotted a girl who felt familiar to him, like a silver-haired porcelain doll. Unsure whether she also belonged to that category of "them" whose names he wasn't allowed to know, he had no choice but to find an excuse to leave.
He'd said he was going to get the permission slip, and he really did intend to—only he'd originally planned to go find his homeroom teacher sometime around the afternoon.
Following the location he'd asked about, Jhin quickly arrived at the office. There was no one inside who gave him that familiar feeling, which let him relax a little. "I'm a student from Class A of the first year. Excuse me, is our homeroom teacher here?"
A female teacher stood up to answer him. "You're looking for Ms. Kazama, right? She just went to the infirmary."
Those three words—"Ms. Kazama"—made Jhin's heart give a violent jolt. It was just like the situation when he'd met Sachi. He inwardly cried out that this was bad; getting the permission slip through the normal channels was apparently going to be impossible.
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