Chapter 84: Chapter 84
Chapter 84
The two siblings had been training themselves to be apart for quite some time now. They'd started doing so ever since Sora had talked about the idea of him joining the student council.
It seemed that Sora had made more progress than Shiro had, however. While Sora just seemed uncomfortable with the idea, Shiro was clearly terrified of the prospect. She was pale, and trembled timidly in place.
"You'll be fine, Shiro." Sora interlocked his fingers with hers and reassured her like that, before turning to be with a serious look in his eyes. "Ayanokōji, can I leave Shiro with you while I have to go?"
I could ascertain that, unlike Sora's usual attitude of a smug slyness, right now he was in an utmost serious mood.
This boy, even though he was frightened by the prospect of having to function without the person he'd depended on his whole life by his side, still thought of his sister first, disregarding concern for himself.
This must be what true love looks like. The ability to throw your anxieties and concerns about yourself out the window and instead worry about somebody else... it was a wonderful thing, I thought.
I wonder if I'll ever be capable of such a thing.
I gave Sora a firm and resolved nod. "While I can't imagine coming anywhere close to the level of support you give to Shiro, I'll try my best to comfort her in your absence."
Shiro, for whatever reason, was deeply affected by something in her past, so much so that she couldn't continue without her brother. This extreme level of dependence was not something that could happen without some form of trauma – it wasn't natural at all.
As a result, it seemed that she had trouble trusting others, and would not feel safe in their presence if her brother was not by her side. Even her classmates, like me, Light and Lelouch, did nothing to ease her worries, and she likely didn't feel any glimmer of comfort due to our existences whatsoever.
This girl was wounded by something, and by lending her my support today, it may cause her to begin to heal, no matter how slowly.
Yes. If I can do something to help this person grow, and be free from the past that binds her, then that is what I'll do.
"Nii is going to leave me?"
"It won't be for long. You'll be safe with Ayanokōji. I can trust him."
I was glad that Sora could place some level in trust in me as his friend. It was the sort of friendship that I'd sought ever since I enrolled at this school.
"But why? Can't we just... not go?"
"Shiro. We can't hide from this forever. We can't be next to each other 24/7. One day, we will have to operate independently. And it looks like that day is now. You read the mail, right? Any student that is absent for the meeting will receive harsh penalties, and we won't be allowed to enter a gathering other than the one we were allocated by the school. There is no way around it."
"T-there's got to be a way around it!" Shiro protested with teary eyes, but Sora simply shook his head.
"If there was, your brother would've thought of it by now."
"Then, there's no reason why we should do as this school tells us! This is just an exam, after all! It's not a big problem if we forfeit attendance and endure the penalty!"
"You want to lose? To accept defeat? You want Blank to give up? This isn't like my sister at all. I believe that you are capable of doing this – if I didn't, I wouldn't be saying all this right now."
Shiro fell silent and looked down, facing the truth of the situation before her. Not only did she have to spend some time with me, waiting for her brother's return, but she also had to go to a meeting where there would likely be strangers without him. Such a challenge was clearly monumental to her.
"Besides, no two people can live like this forever. It isn't realistic for us to still need to be beside one another all the time when we're like, 40 years old. Up 'til now, we've just been running from reality."
Sora appeared to have resolved himself now. No, actually, he'd probably known that this was coming for quite some time now – to him, it was likely more a matter of when than if.
Sora had explained that the two of them were shut-ins. To what extent that was is unknown to me, but, there was a good chance that they were complete shut-ins. Nowadays, there are services online that one can use to do everything from the comfort of their home.
You can have food and other necessities delivered to your door with one simple click of a button, and you can order from the incomprehensibly huge pool of products available on the internet of today's world.
In other words, it was entirely possible to live your entire life never leaving your home, so long as you had a source of income to survive off of.
Sora and Shiro were masters of all games, and there are a countless amount of tournaments held online every day with money as the prize pools – for most people, this would never provide a stable income, but if there existed people who could consistently win the prize money of gaming competitions of all genres... it was not unthinkable.
And, if you were a duo that had never lost together even once before in your lives... you may even call the task of surviving purely off of tournament prize pools a trivial one.
It was certainly possible, then, to live a life of complete isolation forever – never once leaving your room, even well into your adult years. However, Sora had deemed that it was impossible for Blank to continue such a lifestyle forever.
What is 'life?' What does it mean to 'live?'
If you go by the biological definition, the state of being 'alive' means that you have the capacity to grow, reproduce, respond to stimuli, adapt, and endure continual change until your eventual death. It is the condition that differentiates living organisms from inorganic matter.
From a physics perspective, a living being is a thermodynamic system which has an organised molecular structure with the ability to reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates. 'Life' can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its environment to create imperfect copies of itself.
However, from a more spiritual or sociological point of view, the meaning of 'life' is vastly different. The purpose of 'life' can be described as involving growth, contribution to society, connection with others and creativity.
Living 'a life' in modern terms means to grow up as a child, raised by your loving family, and then go to school where you meet new friends and make acquaintances. Once you graduate, you enter the workforce, where you will contribute to society. At some point, you will meet the person that becomes special to you, you love them dearly and start a family of your own, settling down and starting the cycle anew for the next generation.
That is what the general population would describe as a fulfilling life in today's world.
And that is also something that cannot be achieved when living in isolation, shutting yourself off from the rest of the world.
Without the ability to make connections, contribute to the growth of the world and create a family of your own... could that really be considered a life?
Sora must have deemed that no, it couldn't. Remaining alone in solitude, only ever interacting with his sister and spending each and every day repeating the same cycle with no ambition or goals... Sora had decided that was not the path he wanted to walk.
"Come on, let's go back. I'd better walk with you back to our room, where I'll leave you there with Ayanokōji. You'll feel safer if there aren't people everywhere, right? I promise I'll come back as soon as I can."
Sora grasped his sister's hand tightly, and began leading the way towards the room the three of us shared with each other.
Just then, all of our phones buzzed once more. At first, I thought that it was another mail from the school, but it was actually a message in our Class D group chat, that read:
Lelouch: [Sora, Shiro, Ayanokōji. What'd you get in your mails?]
I glanced at Sora for a second. "I'll answer it on our behalf."
He nodded at me in response, so I began to type a message back in the group.
Ayanokōji: [Mine is room 201, 19:40. Sora's is room 204 at 18:00, and Shiro's is room 207 at 21:00.]
I recalled the numbers and times that Sora had said earlier and sent them to the group chat in response to Lelouch's query. Before soon, a message buzzed back to me.
Lelouch: [Ok. Here are the times for the rest of us:]
Under that was a 4-line list of the rooms and times of the other Class D students, that read the following:
Lelouch – Room 206, 20:40
Light – Room 203, 18:20
Ryuzaki – Room 210, 21:40
Kururugi – Room 208, 20:00
It seemed that every single student in our class was allocated to a different room and time slot. In other words, we'd be alone.
I theorised that the school wouldn't hold separate meetings for every student individually. That meant that we'd likely be mixed in with the other classes – while every other class would probably have multiple students in each grouping, students of our class would be completely isolated.
This was yet another disadvantage we faced for being a class of only seven.
If the strength of your class in this exam depended on how dominant your class was in a grouping with students of the other classes, then we were in serious bad luck here. Even if we are all geniuses, with just one of us in a group it would be difficult to get a solid foothold there.
Another message buzzed through to my phone from the Class D group.
Light: [What do the three of you make of this?]
Ayanokōji: [We are probably even more disadvantaged here than the last exam, at least.]
Ryuzaki: [Sora's meeting is the one that takes place first out of all of ours, and then Light's is 20 minutes later. The meetings appear to be in 20-minute blocks, but we have some free time between Light's meeting which should end at 18:40 and the start of the next one which is Ayanokōji's at 19:40, where none of us are required to be in a meeting. I say we should all meet up then to discuss the contents of Sora's and Light's meetings.]
Ryuzaki put forth a reasonable proposal. I glanced at Sora for confirmation, who was also reading the messages on his phone. He gave me a brief nod, as if to signal 'fine by me,' so I texted a response back.
Ayanokōji: [That's fine by the three of us.]
Lelouch: [Alright. Meet us at our room at 18:40.]
With that, I clicked off my phone's screen and returned it to my pocket, conveniently just as we reached our room.
"Alright. Ayanokōji, I'm entrusting Shiro to you for this half an hour or so."
"Right. I'll do my best to calm her nerves. And I'll try to show you that there are people out there other than each other that you can trust."
Blank, especially Shiro, had developed a mentality of putting up an airtight steel guard around everyone other than each other. While it was a good way to avoid getting hurt, it was unhealthy in the long run.
Their trust must've been broken once in the past, or something to that effect must've happened.
I genuinely wanted to help these two overcome the past that chained them down.
I wonder if that's because I myself long to be freed from the chains of my past, too.
"Well, I'd better get going. Wouldn't want to be late and incur the penalty." Sora said, turning to leave us.
"Will you be okay? Sora?" I asked.
He took a deep inhale.
"I can't say with certainty. However, this is what I've been readying myself for recently, and even mentally preparing for since quite a bit ago. I'm going to do my very best not to crumble here, not just for Shiro or the class' sake... but for my own, too."
Leaving us with those words, Sora walked away, slowly yet resolutely down the corridor.
"Let's go inside," I suggested to the quivering sister, who nodded timidly and followed me through the door.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School, huh?
A school that claimed to be preparing people for real society, such that they would be able to lead Japan into the future.
It seemed that, even for the top of the top students like Sora and Shiro, there were things that they could learn at this school. Ways in which they could improve themselves, even among other students of lesser ability.
If it weren't for this school's existence, Blank would probably still be living in isolation, and this development for Sora to take initiative to break his extreme dependence on Shiro would not have occurred.
The place in which I'd grown up was probably the best place in the world you could raise a human being, but this situation made it all to clear to me – there were things that such an environment would never be able to teach me.
There were things that I too could learn at this school. Sora and Shiro are proof of that.
Just one more reason why I must do anything to protect my life here as a student, no matter the cost.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone