“Is she your friend?” Catherine asked. I nodded at her question while staring blankly at the butterflies hovering around the place where Natsumi had been standing. With a simple touch, I tapped one of the butterflies, and they dispersed into nothingness, the same way as how Natsumi disappeared. “I’m sorry, she left because of me.”
“No, you didn’t do anything wrong, Catherine,” I muttered while giving her a half hearted smile. There was a block of light floating above next to Catherine’s witch hat that shone the forest. Without realizing it, there were some slimes that had been creeping up on me.
Perhaps some of them were taken off guard by the sudden appearance of the light from Catherine, as I could see two slimes falling down from a quite large tree. I used my identification skill and saw them both at 13 health. With a swift strike, I slashed both of them and took the gems they dropped as I walked towards Catherine.
[+20 EXP]
[+10 Weapon EXP]
[+2 Luminous Gem]
I glanced at the text bubbles after defeating the slimes, and with a quick mental calculation, I figured that I would need 70 more exp to level up. However, I couldn’t care less at the moment since the drowsiness of the night attacked me as I yawned. “Let’s go home and sleep, Mentor.”
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I took a deep sigh as I watched the person I didn’t want to see sitting on my favorite swing. Although I expected it, the presence of that silver haired beauty still gave me a chill every time I saw her. After experiencing this ‘dream’ once, I stopped questioning the logic of it and simply took a deep breath to calm myself down.
“Do you want me to give you a push?” I said, as I walked towards behind her. I hid my murderous intent as I gave a half-hearted smile to her.
She turned towards me and smiled after hearing my initiative. The orange sun that illuminated her silver hair was glowing with beauty as her mouth spoke, “that would be lovely, thank you.”
With her permission, I used all of my strength to push her. It was enough to flung her around three metres into the air. However, my plan of scaring her from swinging too high didn’t work as she only giggled playfully while swinging. Not wanting to admit defeat, I kept pushing even harder, but she didn’t budge.
“More, more!” The young college girl said in her uniform as she kept laughing on the swing. If there were outsiders looking at us, they would probably think of us as two close friends playing together in a chill afternoon.
While letting her have fun swinging around, I glanced around me. It wasn’t that familiar bedroom I expected, but the scenery of the playground park I used to love. The orange sky gave a nostalgic feeling, which was enhanced by the fact that there was no one else besides the two of us.
“Can you stop killing me please?!” I yelled with an annoyed look as I glared at her meanly while still pushing her as hard as I could.
My question was met by silence and the occasional whoosh sound of her swinging in the park. Feeling annoyed, I stopped pushing her. She reacted by turning her head around and pouted adorably.
I ignored her pout and walked away slowly, admiring the slides, seesaw, sandboxes and reminiscing about the day when I was happy without a care in the world. I heard the footsteps of her behind me, but I paid her no attention as I sat down on the park bench.
I let the breeze hit my long black hair that I didn’t consider I would miss. I dropped my gaze below to see my casual outfit, the one I used to college the most. It had only been two days since I reincarnated into Mashiro, but I still haven’t gotten used to that rich and frilly dress with flashy design. This kind of plain clothing still fits me the best, I thought.
Without any delay, she forced her way to sit next to me and put her head beside my shoulder. Some part of her long silver hair touched my neck. I could feel her breathing being super close for my comfort.
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“I didn’t say you could do that, you know.” She seemed to ignore everything I said and kept her head still on my shoulder, even though I tried to convey it in the most irritating tone. I clicked my tongue in the most annoyed, and exasperated voice I could muster, “Tch. Fine, do whatever you want.”
I took a quick glimpse next to me, and there was just a slight movement on the corner of her lips. I didn’t say anything more and simply watched the sun slowly going down and the empty road across the playground as I reminisced the day of when my next door neighbour was coming to pick me up with tears in her eyes.
She turned her head towards me, “hey, Mikan. Did you know? Natsumi was such a crybaby.”
“Of course I know. I watched the entire anime of Luminous Dream after all,” I replied with a dry voice. This was something that even the most casual player of Luminous Dream would know. My mind shuffled its way to remember the things from the game and anime. “There was also a flashback of her crying alone in the park because her mother didn’t pick her up.”
“Were you also like that?” Furukawa asked with a small volume. There wasn’t a trace of playfulness in her tone. Her voice was similar to the one I heard when we were simply classmates.
Whether it was her teasing attitude, or her actually being curious, I couldn’t tell. Nevertheless, she kept letting her head slouching on my shoulder. I took a deep breath before answering her question.
“No, I didn’t cry when my mother didn’t pick me up, and I definitely didn’t have such an airhead personality like her.” I answered truthfully. I took a glance to see her reaction, but I could only see her snuggling her head at my shoulder. With Furukawa putting me in an awkward position, I noticed something from my pocket. I pulled it out to see the familiar Redshift ticket in my hand.
She smiled at me, “well, that airhead personality of hers helped you, didn’t it?”
I said nothing and started ripping off the ticket on my hand. After doing that, Furukawa finally let go of my shoulder as the ticket turned into a beam of light and floated around wildly. As if gaining sentience, the light that kept rapidly switching colors of white, green, blue, purple, gold and rainbow flew everywhere in the park.
I left the park bench and chased the light as it slowly settled in front of an ice cream truck without. After rapidly switching the color for a while, it was starting to settle between white, blue or purple until it ultimately stayed as blue. That blue light turned into a small butterfly with a wall of text beside it.
[SKILLS]
Swallowtail Butterfly Lv. 1 (Rare)
EXP: 0/100
Cooldown: 0.5 seconds.
Description: Summon a swallowtail butterfly to deal 2 physical attacks to an enemy every time a successful attack landed.
P. S. The butterfly would also appear during your sleep to comfort you!
“It’s… a nice skill,” I muttered as I was reading the skill description. It’s a rare class, which is two tier better than the training sword I had, following the basic formula of the usual gacha rarity rank with common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary and mythic. Or at least, that’s what I would imagine.
Even though I used the redshift ticket which was the gacha currency from the game Luminous Dream, the game itself didn’t use the same rarity level, but used the number of stars instead, with 1 star being the least rare and 5 stars being the best at the latest update.
Since the game was just a simple rhythm game, there were no items, just characters to pull. Right before I was transported to another world, I could vividly remember that I was trying so hard to get the new 5 stars of Mashiro. However, I wasn’t able to pull a 5 star Mashiro. I got 5 star Natsumi and other 5 star characters though.
“Did you finally remember now?” Furukawa asked as she walked slowly towards the ice cream truck.
I watched her take two ice cream cones without any shame and offered one to me. I took it from her hand as I glanced at the butterfly next to me. She licked and even bit the ice cream without any hesitation as some of the cream clinged on her cheek.
“Right, the 5 star Natsumi included a banner of her eating Ice cream together with Mashiro while a butterfly was sitting on top of Mashiro’s head,” I answered as I tried to recall the memory of me desperately pulling gacha for Mashiro and right before the girl in front of me stabbed me.
With a gorgeous grin, and the shine from the orange sky that created a beautiful composite of a perfect picture, Furukawa smiled, “That’s right!”
Looking at her, I couldn’t help but to also smile. I licked the ice cream I was holding and tasted a vanilla flavor with a hint of mint that would attack my throat, making it harder to breathe. I coughed with an obnoxious loud sound.
“Oh right, I forgot to mention, that ice cream is poisonous.”