Suguru Geto stood at the rooftop doorway, staring at that person for several seconds before suddenly realizing that staring straight at a stranger like this was actually quite rude.
Back where he attended middle school, doing something like this was very much seen as a provocation.
Eye contact was the most naked form of provocation between living creatures.
He pulled his gaze back, a bit embarrassed, though a gentle smile rested on his face.
That signature, strange bang over his forehead swayed slightly.
“Sorry for staring at you so long.”
He stepped forward and sat down on the concrete ledge beside Yasui, accepting the plastic box Yasui handed over, and took out a piece of tempura.
“Thanks.”
The tempura had long gone cold, yet taking a bite, it remained surprisingly crisp.
Geto chewed twice before remembering he hadn’t introduced himself yet.
Swallowing the food, he turned his head toward Yasui: “I’m Suguru Geto, just graduated middle school.
How about you?”
As he spoke, his eyes involuntarily drifted over to the reddened skin on Yasui’s body.
He hadn’t noticed from a distance earlier, but sitting side by side now, with the lingering light in the sky, he saw it clearly in the dusk.
On Yasui’s neck and wrists, any exposed patch of skin suffered from an abnormal redness, as if breaking out in a rash.
An allergic reaction.
He deduced immediately.
Geto lowered his head to look at the half-eaten piece of tempura in his hand, the shrimp tail still sticking out, fried into a golden, curled shape.
He took a bite; the shrimp meat was fresh and sweet, the batter crispy—the person who made it possessed truly solid skills.
Shrimp.
A seafood allergy.
His brain worked fast, connecting those two pieces of information in almost the exact same instant.
He cast a glance at Yasui’s hand—that hand was preparing to reach back into the plastic container, targeting one of the last two remaining pieces of tempura inside.
Geto: …
What an absolute madman.
Eating despite being allergic—really in a hurry to get re-incarnated, huh?
Geto said nothing, simply swapping the tempura to his left hand while reaching his right hand into the pocket of his black clothes to rummage around.
Out of habit, he always carried something to eat whenever he went out.
Sometimes clearing Cursed Spirits meant staking out a spot for half a day, and going hungry was far too miserable.
As luck would have it, he had bought a piece of bread this afternoon and shoved it in his pocket.
Feeling his fingers touch the corner of a plastic wrapper, he pulled it out.
An ordinary convenience store bread, soft plastic packaging, squished a bit flat from being stuffed in his pocket, but the seal was intact, with no leaks or tears.
Edible.
He just didn’t know whether the guy in front of him would accept being fed this.
He probably would.
After all, if someone could insist on eating tempura even while having an allergic reaction, he shouldn’t be a picky eater.
Midway through reaching out his hand, Yasui felt a squishy object shoved into his palm.
He looked down; it was a piece of bread.
He froze for a second, casting a glance at Geto.
Could he shove it back?
Give me back my tempura.
Why are you hoarding food?
Geto wasn’t looking at him, fully engrossed in biting into the tempura with a thoroughly natural expression, as if handing bread off to someone else was something that required zero explanation, and as if eating someone else’s tempura was also something that required zero explanation.
Yasui looked at him a few times.
Seeing that little Geto didn’t want to pay him any mind, he shifted his gaze back to the bread.
Tearing open the packaging, he took a bite of the bread.
Bland.
Terrible.
The bread was dry and soft, looking far worse to eat than when it was displayed on the convenience store shelf.
Chewing the bread, he pulled back his extended hand and didn’t touch the plastic container again.
Honestly.
Back when he read the manga and watched the anime, he only knew that Suguru Geto loved eating buckwheat noodles and that his parents were ordinary people.
Who would have thought he also loved tempura and possessed such impolite dining manners?
Catching him starting to eat the bread out of the corner of his eye, Geto’s lips twitched almost imperceptibly, curling up slightly into a subtle smile.
Then, naturally—very naturally—he picked up the remaining pieces of tempura from the plastic container one by one, methodically finishing them off.
The whole process flowed like water, without a single “you shouldn’t eat seafood” or “I’ll swap with you.” He said absolutely nothing, completing the handoff entirely in silence.
As if the tempura he ate had belonged to him all along, and the bread had belonged to Yasui from the start.
Yasui took a few bites of the bread, but it tasted so bad he didn’t want to eat any more.
Tying the plastic bag back up, he stuffed it into his pocket.
Suddenly, as if recalling something fun, he swallowed what was in his mouth, reached up to stroke his chin, and turned his head to look at Geto, his purple eyes dancing with amusement.
“As for me—”
He dragged out his ending tone, the lazy lilt of his Kansai dialect stretching every syllable out soft and long, acting brazenly flirty as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Starting his self-introduction.
“I’m just a tiny bit more impressive than you~”
Geto’s chewing motion paused for a beat.
Yasui held up a single finger, his expression deeply earnest—so earnest it made one feel he was stating some fundamental truth of the universe: “I am Yasui Shigeru.
I’ve already completed high school and was accepted into a top-tier university a while back~”
He paused, leaning his head slightly toward Geto’s direction.
The red dot between his brows looked exceptionally vivid in the sunset, his eyes curving into two crescents, his smile overflowing with smug satisfaction.
“Pretty impressive, right, Geto~?”
Little friend Geto, you’re just a trash scholar—your highest educational attainment in this lifetime is a vocational college degree.
Completing high school at fifteen and getting accepted into a top-tier university—if anyone else said something like that, it would feel more or less like bragging.
Yet coming out of Yasui’s mouth, paired with that face, that expression, and that lazy, infuriating Kansai drawl, it didn’t sound like flexing at all.
It sounded much more like something said specifically to tease people.
Geto: “…”
Staring at Yasui’s face, which practically had “praise me, praise me quick” written all over it, he remained silent for two seconds before nodding quite obligingly.
As someone who would later become friends with the likes of Satoru Gojo, Geto was undeniably gentle and considerate.
However, the way this guy talked was genuinely blood-boiling.
Yet it didn’t seem intentional—or rather, it *was* intentional, but the goal wasn’t to make you feel bad; he just wanted to watch you choke, unsure of how to respond.
In his mind, Geto checked off his own assessment.
Yasui was clearly not quite satisfied with this brief praise, but he didn’t press the topic further.
He couldn’t really tease him with: “Buddy~ you’re gonna be a vocational college student for the rest of your life~”
Otherwise, this “vocational student for life” classmate Geto might just initiate a workout routine of “high damage with the left hand, even higher damage with the right.”
Yasui changed his posture, dangling one leg off the edge of the rooftop while keeping the other crossed.
Leaning his body backward, he propped both hands on the concrete behind him, looking up at the sky.
The posture felt a bit tiring, so he simply pulled his hands back and laid flat on the floor.
“Geto, why do you think the sunset is red?”
Geto hadn’t expected the topic to jump so fast, pausing for a moment: “…Scattering of light, I suppose?”
“Wrong.”
Yasui shook his head, his expression completely resolute.
Geto raised an eyebrow slightly: “Then what is it?”
A new, undiscovered scientific revelation?
He had only just graduated middle school, whereas Yasui was already a university student-to-be.
He respected intellectuals.
He also respected knowledge.
“Because as the sun went down, its face blushed the whole way down, dyeing all the clouds red.”
Yasui said this with a straight face, as if what he had just declared was a rigorously proven scientific conclusion.
For someone who did mathematics in his past life to utter such nonsense was hilarious in itself.
Geto didn’t know that, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to smile either.
He had waited for half a day, only for Yasui to pull out a piece of poetic personification on him.
“…Isn’t that the same thing?
You just personified the light.”
“Not the same.
Light doesn’t get embarrassed, but the sun does.”
“Why would the sun get embarrassed?”
“Because it chased the moon for an entire night and still couldn’t catch up by daybreak, so it felt embarrassed.”
Geto opened his mouth, realizing that for a brief moment he was actually seriously contemplating this logic, before quickly abandoning the thought.
He decided to revoke his respect for Yasui’s knowledge.
He had a feeling that this guy’s claims about “skipping grades” and “entering university” were complete fabrications.
This person didn’t make a lick of sense when he spoke.
Taking him seriously in a debate meant losing from the start.
He was beginning to understand why some people on the internet would suddenly send a string of random gibberish mid-argument.
It was a mental breakdown along the lines of “I can’t talk sense into you, but I can’t just not reply either.”
He chose silence, quietly taking a bite of tempura.
Yasui didn’t mind his silence in the slightest—or rather, he didn’t need anyone to pick up his cues at all, perfectly capable of keeping the conversation going all by himself.