Chapter 3: How to Accept a Changing Form

A few minutes later.

I sat heavily on a park bench, arms crossed, and glared at the silver-haired girl.

"Start talking. How do you know my name—and how do you know about Hikari?"

I thought I’d managed to come off pretty intimidating, enough to make a timid kid cry.

But the girl didn’t look scared at all.

Still standing, she waved her hand casually.

"Of course I know. Like I’ve been saying over and over, I am Hikari."

She just grinned smugly.

The dreamy atmosphere from earlier had completely vanished.

Her mannerisms were sweet and oddly childish—downright ordinary.

That, combined with her words, rubbed me the wrong way.

"Cut the crap already, you…! I don’t know who you are, but even if this is some prank, there are things you just don’t joke about!"

This wasn’t an act. I was genuinely angry.

No matter how I looked at her, this girl wasn’t the Hikari I knew.

Her face, obviously. Her hair and eye color, even her skin tone—

To top it off, even her gender was different. The only thing remotely similar was her height.

To me, everything she was doing felt like a mockery of my missing best friend—an insensitive, thoughtless prank.

"Come on now. You promised, remember? You said you’d hear me out to the end. So let’s just take a breath, okay?"

Unfazed, the girl tried to calm me down.

As if she already knew how I’d react and had practiced handling it ahead of time.

…For the record, yes, I had made that promise.

After she pinned me down earlier, I’d struggled like hell to get away.

The moment she tackled me, the paralysis vanished, and I could move again.

Some guys might think, Lucky him, getting pinned by a cute girl—

But try to recall the overwhelming disgust I felt just moments ago.

How many people could stay calm while some unknown girl straddled them?

Still, no matter how hard I fought, her slender arms didn’t budge an inch.

I’ve got a bad leg, sure, but I’m confident in my upper body strength. With the difference in our builds and gender, I should’ve been able to push her off without much trouble.

But even then, I couldn’t break free—and in the end, with a sigh, she gave me this condition:

『If you’ll just… hear me out to the end… I’ll leave quietly…』

…I never had a choice.

Even if I had refused and tried to run, she would’ve caught me easily with these legs of mine.

So I reluctantly agreed.

After that—

『Your leg’s bothering you, right? Maybe you should sit down.』

She even politely offered me a seat… which brings us to the current situation.

"Then hurry up and talk already."

I snapped, my irritation plain.

I just wanted to listen half-heartedly and get this over with.

That was the plan.

"Hmm… You really don’t believe me at all, huh? What do I have to do to convince you that I’m Hikari, I wonder…"

She tilted her head to the side and muttered softly.

Something about the gesture reminded me of a small animal.

"...Like I could believe something that ridiculous without a shred of proof."

I muttered back, not really aiming my words at anyone.

Still, I couldn’t help but throw in that jab.

Maybe a bit of “Just give up already. I’m never accepting this.” in the tone too.

"Ah! That’s it! I knew you’d get it, Yousuke!"

And yet, rather than being discouraged, the girl suddenly pumped her fist with vigor.

She stared at me with a fearless grin.

…A chill ran down my spine.

"W-What is it now…?"

"Hehehe… Since I’m your childhood friend, it’s only natural I’d know all sorts of things about you…! If I say something only the two of us could know, you won’t be able to help but believe me, right?"

"…Just so you know, there aren’t any secrets about me worth blackmailing with."

So I firmly shut her down as she leaned in until her face was literally inches from mine.

Just now, she’d said something that implied we were super close.

And then she’d clung to me so naturally, without a hint of hesitation, that I couldn’t even think of her as the opposite sex.

With no grasp of the boundaries between us in either sense, I figured I’d better take the initiative and draw the line.

But—

"Oh yeah, oh yeah. Yousuke, you always acted like a little gang leader when we were kids, but you were scared stiff of ghosts and would almost cry in secret, remember?"

"W-Why do you know that…?!"

That blow landed fast and clean—like a body shot with no wind-up.

She smiled even wider as the impact drove deep into my heart.

…Because it was the absolute truth, with no way to deny it.

As a child, I used to think things like:

"What if something I can’t see is chasing me through the night?"
"What if a monster’s hiding in the gap under the bed, just waiting to do something awful?"

Once those thoughts started, I couldn’t sleep.

I especially couldn’t handle horror spots like graveyards or abandoned tunnels. On nights after visiting one, I’d get so overwhelmed with fear I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone.

Still, that was way back when.

Everyone goes through something like that—it was just childish stuff, long past.

"Hmm… Are you sure? I mean, even during the haunted house on the grade school trip, you hadn’t gotten over it. You said, all desperate, 'Mi-Hikari, go ahead without me…!' Yousuke, you never asked for help back then, so it really stuck with me."

"Ghhghghgh!"

There would be no dodging the follow-up. She landed that one mercilessly too.

I reeled back, unable to argue.

Apparently satisfied with my reaction, the girl snorted and gave a smug little smirk.

Even now, at this age, I still get a bit uneasy walking through dark places alone. It’s pathetic, and I know it.

But being mocked for it by her just felt… off.

Could it be… was she really—?

…For a second, my thoughts wavered.

"…Wait. That was something all the boys in the same group would’ve known during that haunted house thing, right? That’s not something only Hikari would know."

It was a small-town school.

There weren’t that many students, and most of us hung out together from elementary through middle school.

I’d told them not to blab, sure, but if one loudmouth had let it slip, it wouldn’t be that surprising.

I snapped out of it before I got drawn in any deeper and shook my head.

"Tch… Well, yeah. I mean, that was the time I went to help a friend more scared than me and ended up freaking out myself. The mummy-saves-mummy situation."

"So you know that story… What are you then, someone’s little sister or something? Just spill it. I’ll let it go if you come clean now."

I couldn’t remember any of my classmates having a half-Japanese sister, but some of them had moved away for high school in the city. Maybe she’d come through one of them.

In the end, it was just one of those stories that could be explained away however you liked. I dismissed her so-called “secret” with a cold snip.

"…I see. So you really won’t believe me, huh."

The girl lowered her gaze and murmured softly.

With the shadows around us, I couldn’t make out the expression on her tilted face.

And that made me wonder if I’d gone too far.

"I just… wanted to apologize to you, Yousuke."

"…Apologize for what?"

What came at me next was a sudden confession.

"You know... about your left leg that doesn't work properly."

I had no idea what she was talking about.

A girl I’d supposedly just met—and my left leg.

What could those two things possibly have in common?

I was about to press her for answers when something occurred to me.

She had mentioned my leg earlier too.

Even though I’d made every effort to hide the pain, showing no signs of it out of caution.

"It’s connected, obviously. Because your injury... it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t done what I did that day, at that time—then you wouldn’t have ended up never being able to touch a ball again."

Her words stabbed through me, like they were piercing the swelling sense of wrongness building inside.

"…No. That was just an accident. I told you a dozen times back then—it wasn’t your fault."

Before I realized it, I had instinctively denied it.

—And then I froze.

"Wh-Why do you even know about that…?"

The accident that left my leg in this condition.

I’d told even my parents it was the result of carelessness—no one else knew the truth, aside from those directly involved.

And there were only two of us.

In other words: just me, and Hikari.

My heart started pounding loud enough to echo in my ears.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the girl.

She slowly lifted her head, and our gazes locked.

Strangely, her red eyes no longer carried that ominous, chilling malice from before.

"This is my trump card. Hey, Yousuke—was the Hikari Mikoto you knew the kind of person who’d go blabbing a secret only the two of you shared?"

Finally, she narrowed her eyes slightly as she asked, a faint smile curling at her lips.

It was a smile like that of a mischievous kitten—one that, though on a different face, looked exactly like the one worn by the childhood friend I knew so well.