The school's Ice Princess is in my room.
A six-mat room. Cardboard boxes, and piles of books on the verge of collapse. A futon that never gets put away, unfolded for days. One of the fluorescent tubes is about to die, buzzing faintly.
In the middle of it all, Koyomi Kisaragi was kneeling formally on the floor.
Her silver hair fell to her waist without a single strand out of place. Her white dress had not one wrinkle. Her back was as straight as a line drawn with a ruler, and that alone seemed to shine with an unnatural light in this filthy room. She was hopelessly out of keeping with the air in here, and only with that.
I stood frozen, still gripping the front doorknob. Water dripped from my soaked bangs onto the tatami.
It was a night of pouring rain. I had crawled my way through the worst three days of my life and finally made it back to my own den—so why was the Ice Princess here?
A dream? Had I finally lost it from exhaustion?
No matter how many times I blinked, she did not disappear. If anything, she turned quietly toward me, as though she had been waiting all this time for me to come home.
The moment I thought that, she moved.
She pressed her fingertips to the floor and bowed. Her fingers neatly aligned, her back still straight, she lowered her head deeply, deeply. Her silver hair slid smoothly across the floor.
The sound of the rain seemed to recede.
"Welcome home, my god."
Her voice was trembling.
It sounded as if everything from those three days—no, from a much longer stretch of time—had been poured into it.
—Three days earlier.
That's right. It all started three days ago.
For the record, my name is Ren Akizuki. I'm a second-year at a private high school on the edge of the city, as ordinary as they come. I don't have many friends. I don't have any talent that stands out. If I had to name something, there's just one habit I can't tell anyone about.
I write novels.
By day, just an unremarkable high school student. By night, I put stories into words. My second face, one I can't show anyone, one that's mine alone.
On a free web novel site called Story Tree, under the pen name Fuyuno Yui. Every night, at midnight, when the date changes, I post a new chapter. That alone was the most important time of my day.
I have no readers.
No, let me be precise. Almost none. The view count—the number called PV—is in the single digits. Three on a good day. One, on even the worst day.
I had been writing like that for three years. Stories no one read, without a break, on rainy days, on days I had a cold.
Even I think there's something wrong with me. The numbers stay in the single digits and won't budge an inch. And still I can't stop my fingers, which is the worst part.
So there was no place anywhere in this universe where the Ice Princess's life and mine should have crossed. Koyomi Kisaragi. The only daughter of the Kisaragi Group—yes, that Kisaragi Group. Flawless, peerless ice that no one at school could get near. Silver hair, and a sub-zero gaze. The kind of person the crowd parts for on its own when she walks down the hall. A different species altogether, so different it was strange that bottom-tier people like me breathed the same air.
We had never exchanged a single word at school. She shouldn't even have known I existed.
And yet now, that ice was bowing her head on my futon that never gets put away.
Calling me her god.
Her fingertips, resting on the tatami, were pressing into the floor so hard they had gone white. She would not raise her head. As if, unless she stayed like that, this scene might vanish.
There is nothing of value in my room. Nothing I could show anyone, either. A miserable six-mat room with nothing but trash, books, and half-written manuscripts.
In a place like that, a conglomerate heiress was bowing so low her forehead almost touched the floor.
None of it felt real.
"...Kisaragi. Why are you—"
My voice came out pathetically hoarse.
At last she raised her face. Her blue-gray eyes pierced straight through me. Those sub-zero eyes I saw at school—were wet now.
"Ever since three days ago," she said.
"I had made up my mind. For the moment you came home."
Her plain, unguarded "I." She had not used the formal "I" she never once lets slip at school.
In these three days, my world had been turned upside down.
Top and bottom had swapped places entirely. Even I still haven't managed to sort out what happened.
Why I, the bottom-tier nobody, was being called a god by the Ice Princess. Why she was here. To tell it in order—I have no choice but to go back three days.
To that afternoon after school, before the rain started. When Yuna told me I was "cringe."