“To be fair, I think it’s just Myusel, Her Majesty, and Elvia that Shinichi-kun is terrified of, so if we really have to get in touch with him, I could do it. But I don’t think I could manage much just arguing with him through the door.”
“And you can’t just stand outside that door forever.”
“It would be nice if we could at least phone him, but there are no phones around h— oh.” Minori-sama clapped her hands as if she had just thought of something. “There’s no phone lines, but there is wireless LAN.”
“That’s right, an experimental network was introduced for this house and the school, wasn’t it? Although we’ve only been using it to back up the computers.”
“We could use a messenger program on there to fill in for a telephone.”
“That just might work...”
Minori-sama and Hikaru-sama were nodding at each other. I could only understand that they were talking about some sort of device from Ja-pan. “Wy-erless” and “meszenjers” didn’t mean much to me. Or any of the other locals in the room with me. All we could do was blink at each other.
The sky above was rosy, and the girl’s eyes were moist as she looked at me.
“Uh... Um...” She seemed to be getting up her nerve. Was it the twilight that made her cheeks look so red, or...? “This might be my last chance to say anything. So I’m gonna say it. For real.”
Oh ho! And what might she have to say to me? I proceeded delicately, aware of the pounding of my heart.
She glanced down ever so slightly. “I... You know, Shinichi-kun, I’ve always...”
“Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn straight! Here it comes!!” I pounded the fist of my left hand into the open palm of my right. The shy voice I could hear through my speakers, that flushing face I could see on my display. There was nothing more touching than the sweet befuddlement of a girl about to confess.
Ahh, the route is complete!
I had worked my way through one obnoxious branch after another, save-scumming along, and now all my effort would finally bear fruit...! I had effectively cleared this game’s transfer-student path. The old-friend and kouhai routes were the first things I took care of; all that was left was the sempai path, notorious for being the most difficult in the game. I guess to end up with Sempai, you had to clear the transfer-student path first, then shoot her down on your next playthrough.
Meaning, in short, that this game didn’t allow a harem ending. Sure. Fair enough. Harem play, that was no good, right? No loyalty to your girl. Yep, uh-huh.
Pretty sure I feel a whole bunch of prickling in my heart right now, but I’m gonna ignore it!
“Ah, being a shut-in is great... And 2D is perfect...!” I clenched my fists in front of my chest, giving a rapturous sigh.
I’d been so busy with so many things recently that I hadn’t had time to just sit down and really play through a gal game. It led to a pile of about a dozen games in my room that I had managed to import from Japan, which was great and all, but which I hadn’t even cracked open the packaging on. Since I finally had a few minutes, I had opened one up and started in on it, only to be reminded how much fun it was.
“And they don’t hit you! And since it’s all branching paths, there’s never a moment where the main girls look at each other and turn the place into a battlefield!”
What a wonderful thing, two dimensions!
I was up to my neck in moe at the prospect of the confession by the girl on the other side of the screen, but as a battle-tested “gal gamer,” I knew that the first thing to do was keep a cool head. We were probably about to get into an avalanche of kiss scenes, but in order to be able to come back and enjoy this delicious moment in “memory mode” any time I wanted, it was imperative that I create a save.
Call up main menu. Click Save.
And that was when I noticed the flashing icon off to one side, outside the game window. Some kind of alert.
“What’s this thing?”
I really doubted it was a virus or anything. I clicked on the icon.
A new window opened—an oblong chat window from a messenger application. This app let you talk one-on-one with people. It came preloaded on the machine, so it was no surprise it was there, but I had never paid it much mind. Messenger apps don’t do a lot of good with no internet.
So why was I seeing it now?
The window indicated somebody was inviting me to chat.
“Oh,” I said when I saw the username: Minori_K. “Minori-san?”
That’s right—we’d had wireless LAN installed in the mansion as well as at the school not too long ago. There was too much interference trying to run a wire through the hyperspace wormhole, not to mention the risk of virus infection and information leakage, so there was no direct network connection between this world and Japan. Matoba-san—the bureaucrat who served as go-between for our company, Amutech, on this side of the hole and the Japanese government on the other—had to travel back and forth frequently because it was the surest and safest way to do things.
But that was only a problem where hyperspace wormholes were involved. On the assumption that something with a far more limited scope—something purely within the territory of the Eldant Empire, for example—would work just fine, we had recently laid some test wire. It was great for forwarding school papers and keeping records, and best of all, it finally let us indulge students’ demands to try the networking functions on systems like the 3TS.
At the moment, our “network” only really consisted of three places: this mansion,
