# 17 Takahashi I never liked studying since I was a kid, and from middle school on, I couldn't understand the lessons at all and couldn't keep up. What I'm bad at, I'm bad at, and I hate being forced to do things. To begin with, I never liked the idea of working hard at something. I was often late or absent, caused problems several times, and my conduct grades were the worst. But I got into a high school that had unfilled enrollment quotas, so I could pass just by writing my name. Even that kind of high school became too much of a hassle to attend, so I quit right away. My educational background is high school dropout. My parents were similar, so I never got scolded. "You can live without studying. But if you're not going to school, then work." That was the attitude. At first I worked part-time at convenience stores and supermarkets, but wherever I went, I was scolded for being "irresponsible." So I never lasted long anywhere and kept moving arou...

24: Sakurako 1 At that moment, my life changed. A red car came speeding toward the crosswalk just as the light had changed, and the woman driver had a startled expression on her face with a cell phone in one hand. Rin rolled over the top of the car, fell with a thud behind it, and didn't move a muscle. That scene appeared before my eyes like slow motion, but I couldn't do anything. There was nothing I could do with magic either. After all, it wasn't something that could be useful for anything to begin with. But even though I had worked so hard to learn it, the fact that I couldn't do anything when it really mattered seemed incredibly unreasonable. I don't remember well what happened after that. The woman who had been driving while distracted was properly arrested, but that didn't mean Rin would come back. Rin's funeral also passed in a daze. My friends from elementary and middle school probably said encouraging things to me, but they just passed by like the ...

16. Rin My seemingly endless university life finally came to an end, and I officially became a working adult. In the end, I never found anything I truly wanted to do while in school, so on a whim, I applied for a job that vaguely interested me. Somehow, I ended up in the marketing department of an IT company. Technically, I had majored in economics, so it wasn’t completely unrelated. I patched together what little I’d learned in my marketing classes, scoured the internet, and even asked a few friends who seemed knowledgeable—somehow, I managed to scrape through the interviews. Marketing sounded intimidating, and I was a little worried whether I could actually do it. But once I started, I realized the job wasn’t an extension of university studies—it was more like an extension of the social skills I’d picked up in college. The key was getting along with people and being able to pitch ideas to unfamiliar companies and clients. Of course, the actual marketing strategies mattered too, but t...