Chapter 3: The Childhood Friend Goes By "Loser No. 8"
.....
Yukari Yakumo sat in the living room with the composed elegance of someone who had not recently been teleported somewhere without warning, her long legs crossed, a cup of hot tea in hand, working through the situation with methodical calm.
"So. You arrived in this world over ten years before me. You have a childhood friend.
You're currently enrolled at Gensokyo High School." A pause. "That's the broad picture?"
"There's still a lot I haven't figured out. But that's the shape of it. The reason I even knew you'd be showing up was that the school's board chairman position suddenly changed to your name."
"Is there anything unusual about this world?"
"On the surface — completely ordinary modern world. Nothing anomalous that I've found. The main issue is that without you coming here, I seem to have no way to use gap travel to get back to Gensokyo myself."
Yukari's brow developed a small furrow. She didn't believe a world with no anomalies was a world with no anomalies. On instinct, she began reaching outward through a gap — a passive sweep, feeling for anything that registered as irregular—
She vanished.
The teacup hit the floor and shattered.
[Yakumo Yukari has violated this world's prohibitions by deploying supernatural ability. Entry to this world is henceforth denied.]
"...??"
Kihara stared at the notification, then at the broken teacup, then at the space where a very tall and sophisticated youkai sage had been sitting approximately two seconds ago. He immediately checked whether he could still gap-travel between this world and Gensokyo himself. The answer was yes — normal function, no restrictions. He filed this under useful data and returned to Gensokyo to assess the damage.
From Kaguya's perspective, the sequence had been: Yukari walked into the gap, and then — immediately, with zero transit time — Yukari reappeared in midair above the room with an expression of pure bewilderment, and fell.
Kaguya spun around and pressed both hands over her mouth.
Don't laugh. Do not laugh. If you laugh right now she will put you somewhere unpleasant for a very long time.
She held it together through sheer force of will.
Kihara reappeared a moment later, took one look at Yukari sitting on the floor looking uncharacteristically non-composed, and laughed without hesitation. "The voyeurism finally caught up with you. The notification on my end said you got banned for deploying supernatural ability."
"You're saying," Kaguya said, in the careful voice of someone choosing their words very precisely, "that Yukari got account suspended?"
"That's actually a pretty accurate description of what happened."
"It's just an ordinary world." Yukari stood, brushed her skirt with two precise pats, and activated the specific dignity mode that people used when they needed the room to understand that whatever had just happened was simply not a topic for further discussion. "If I can't enter it, then I won't enter it. I have things to do."
She stepped into a gap and was gone.
"—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!"
The moment the gap closed, Kaguya's composure collapsed completely. She was laughing hard enough to produce tears, the kind of laugh that required sitting down because standing was no longer structurally viable. She laughed for approximately ten minutes. When she finally crawled back upright and wiped her eyes, she looked at Kihara with the expression of someone who had just experienced something she was going to remember for a very long time.
"Okay. Tell me about this world."
"Sure."
He ran through the highlights. When he got to the childhood friend, Kaguya's expression shifted — the laughter faded, replaced by something more focused, the specific sharpness of someone updating their situational awareness.
"What's her name?"
"Yanami Anna."
Kaguya's eyes went through several stages rapidly. First — recognition. Then amusement. Then something considerably more pointed.
"Loser No. 8 is your childhood friend?"
"She's been doing fake confessions at me since we were kids. Some kind of desensitization therapy, apparently. Whether it's actually fake is honestly unclear at this point."
"Tch. Take me to see her."
"Alright."
He brought Kaguya back through to the modern world and mentioned, as they crossed, "Don't use any abilities here. If you get banned like Yukari I'm not taking responsibility."
Kaguya's expression dropped immediately. "You want me to just... exist? Like a normal person? Do you understand how deeply uncomfortable that sounds?"
"Those are the rules as far as I've mapped them. I can't change them."
Kaguya stood in the living room of this completely ordinary modern apartment and genuinely tried to picture herself navigating daily life without her innate abilities — without Eternity, without the casual immortality that underpinned her entire relationship with time and consequence. The image that formed was of herself slowly grinding through mobile game dailies.
The horror was physical.
She weighed the options. Yanami Anna's status as a romantic rival was, by the evidence, already effectively settled. A childhood friend who had been deploying fake confessions as a long-term strategic operation was not someone operating from a position of confidence — that was the behavior of someone who had already decided she was a loser and was working within those constraints. The outcome was not in doubt.
Which meant there was no particular reason to stay here and roleplay as a commoner when she could go home, run PVP with Hourai active, and dominate the rankings with the comfortable certainty of someone against whom the game was not balanced fairly.
She could always come back later to do targeted reputation damage to the childhood friend once the situation required it.
Decision made. She exited with the smooth efficiency of someone who had fully processed a situation and extracted the relevant conclusion.
Kihara cleaned up the last of the broken teacup and the spilled tea.
The front door opened.
"Morning, Kihara-kun~~"
Yanami Anna came through the door with the specific energy of someone for whom the transition between outside and inside was a social event rather than a threshold. Blue hair, blue eyes that immediately began scanning the room, the remnants of this morning's bread roll still faintly visible at the corner of her mouth.
She radiated what could only be described as loud herbivore energy.
"Morning."
"What are you cleaning up?"
"Dropped a teacup. Accident."
"Didn't think you were the clumsy type." She said it with the easy affection of someone who had logged enough hours around a person to find their imperfections charming rather than surprising.
While Kihara moved the cleaning supplies to the kitchen, Yanami Anna drifted around the living room in the unhurried way of someone who had been in this space enough times that she'd stopped treating it as someone else's territory.
Being the childhood friend of the current season's most talked-about tokusatsu lead actor was, in practical terms, an ongoing management situation.
The girls in their class required active monitoring. There were always three or four running some kind of quiet operation — the casual question about his food preferences, the weekend availability probe, the attempt to extract insider information through friendly conversation. Yanami Anna had become fluent in identifying these approaches the way you became fluent in anything you practiced constantly.
She had a clear-eyed view of the competitive landscape.
The world contained exactly two categories of girl: childhood friends, and poachers.
If she could have said it without creating enemies, she would have looked every one of them in the eye and said: You think a passing comment is going to compete with twelve years of presence? Try harder.
Her self-awareness about her own strategy was complete and unsparing. She had known she liked him since childhood. She had also concluded, somewhere around the same time, that he was the kind of person she might not be good enough for — and that this gap was dangerous. She'd read enough manga and light novels to understand the conventional narrative.
Childhood friends were tagged as losers. The label was cultural, almost structural.
So she had built a countermeasure.
Regular fake confessions. Delivered with enough sincerity to be practice, spaced frequently enough to become background noise. The goal: make him so accustomed to being confessed to by her that when it happened — when it really happened — his reflex would be to classify it as the usual bit, not as a real declaration.
That reflex would protect him from realizing anything.
And it would protect her from having to find out whether the real version would be accepted or declined.
It was, she acknowledged privately, not a noble strategy. When they were actually together — properly together, which was when, not if — she intended to compensate for all of it. Whatever he wanted at that point, the answer would be yes.
"Okay, I'm done. Let's go."
"Yep!"
She jogged two steps to close the distance and looped her hand through his arm with the easy naturalness of long habit.
"Kihara-kun~ I love you the most~!"
He pressed his lips together. Something moved through his eyes — the fond, faintly resigned expression of someone who had been having this particular exchange for over a decade. "Joking again. Got it."
"Hehe~"
She walked beside him toward school, holding his arm, smiling at nothing in particular.
On the honor of every childhood friend who ever existed —
I, Yanami Anna, absolutely refuse to be the loser.
...
Thank you for reading.