Side story 1: Red Monologue
Translator: Soafp
[Yuuhi PoV]
“Good morning.”
First day of summer vacation in my sophomore year of high school. I get up and smile at the pictures on the wall. The sight of him smiling in the picture soothes my heart.
There is someone I cannot forget.
He is my childhood friend, my first love, and the person I have still been thinking about since I can remember, even now that I am in my second year of high school —- Sho-chan.
Sho-chan is my prince.
I was born with a complex about my red hair. I was always bullied because of my hair. Whenever I was sad and shed tears, Sho-chan would always run to me, hug me and say kind words. He was not tall, but he had a well-defined face and beautiful eyes.
It was impossible not to fall in love with him. He was good-looking, athletic, and kind, and he was my very ideal.
I always thought that I was in love with him.
Sho-chan was the perfect match for me.
In elementary school, I was always tormented by jealousy and a sense of inferiority. I was neither pretty nor athletic. I had a good face, but because of my hair complex, I was timid and didn’t have many friends.
Sho-chan, on the other hand, had many friends besides me. He had many girl friends, and I always felt a thorn in my heart. That’s why I couldn’t confess my feelings to him.
“Yuuhi is cute, so you should always smile like an idol. If you do that, everyone will become your friend.”
Sho-chan casually said these words to me.
I was so happy that I was soaring. I didn’t need friends as long as I had Sho-chan, but Sho-chan complimented me on my cuteness.
That day, I decided to become like an idol.
I became a junior high school student with my determination and love inside.
Somehow I managed to improve myself to match Sho-chan. Thanks to my efforts, people around me began to tell me that I was cute. I became proud to say that I was good at studying, and I could do sports to a certain extent. Little by little, I began to have confidence in myself.
Then one day.
I was talking with Renji Inuyama, another childhood friend of mine, when I saw Sho-chan with a frustrated look on his face. The expression on his face was similar to the one I had once seen on my own.
–jealousy.
I thought there was no way the prince of my dreams would have such feelings for me, but I decided to find out for sure. I went out of my way to make friendly chats with Renji-kun when Sho-chan was around.
I glanced at Sho-chan.
He was looking at me with an expression that was a mixture of irritation and anxiety. No doubt about it. He is jealous.
It was a revolutionary event. The prince is jealous of me. I felt my whole body fill with a kind of superiority.
I continued. It felt so good to have that feeling directed at me that I became intoxicated with pleasure of dopamine.
Feeling better, I opened the distance between me and Sho-chan for further pleasure.
Sho-chan looked more and more pained. When I changed the way I called him, he looked like a discarded cat, which also aroused my emotions.
The comparison, Renji-kun, was convenient.
For me, he was just a childhood friend with whom I had no special feelings, but Renji-kun is said to have a good face. He is also known for his interesting stories. I know he is smart. He is also good at sports. He was popular with many girls.
But from my point of view, Sho-chan is better than him.
I did not ask him to be that smart, Sho-chan is more handsome when it comes to face, and from my point of view, his stories are the most interesting. If it’s personality, Sho-chan is by far the best. He always praises Renji even though he’s the one he’s jealous of. If he has a bad personality, he would talk about him behind his back, but he always praises Renji-kun.
Do you know that you are a good guy?
Sho-chan is a prince, you know?
In hindsight, this was the turning point in my life.
I should have been honest about my feelings. I should have told him how I felt and what I was thinking and bowed to him and asked him to go out with me.
…… but I took a grand wrong turn.
I couldn’t escape the pleasure of having the prince of my dreams being jealous.
I humiliated Sho-chan to the point where I could clearly see it. Every time I humiliated him, I got excited and was relieved to see Sho-chan waiting for me at the usual place when it was time to go to school. I thought that Sho-chan was interested in me because he always came to school with me.
Those days continued.
However, one day in my second year of junior high school, something happened that brought me back to myself.
A friend of mine had a boyfriend. As I listened to her love story, I began to think that I wanted a boyfriend too, and my body and heart yearned for the love of my life.
What was I doing in the first place? I realized that my actions were too trivial.
By the time I realized it, it was too late.
One morning, Sho-chan did not show up at our usual meeting place. I was anxious and stumbled to school, but Sho-chan was already there. I tried to approach him to see what was wrong, but my friend stopped me.
I had heard that rumor.
“Shota Mukawa is stalking Yuuhi Akazawa.”
I had no memory of it.
“I heard that Shota Mukawa was stalking Yuuhi Akazawa.”
“An ambush is said to be waiting at the school gate after school.”
” I heard he’s been hanging around in front of her house during the night.”
“I heard he’s been taking a lot of spy photos with his phone.”
Rumors with tails were spreading. It was nothing but a lie, since Sho-chan does not have a smartphone in the first place.
Moreover, it was extreme.
“I heard that Yuuhi Akazawa admitted to being stalked.’
According to the rumor I admitted him being my stalking.
Sho-chan became the hated person at school.
I tried to clear up the misunderstanding, but Sho-chan would run away from me. The reason is simple: just being around me makes him look bad. It was also because I had been acting like an idol and had become well-liked by many people.
I am the worst.
I am a disgusting woman.
I hated to hear rumors that would bring Sho-chan down, but most of all, I was shocked that Sho-chan thought so.
Even though I tried to explain the situation, I couldn’t meet Sho-chan on campus. I tried to meet him outside of school, but no matter how many times I headed home, he wouldn’t see me.
Impatient, I decided to hurry up and tell people that I and Sho-chan had been childhood friends and had been good friends since we were little. But the rumors didn’t spread well, probably because I had been undermining Sho-chan up to that point.
In the midst of all this, rumors about Tsukiyo Kuromine began to circulate as if to follow up. No matter how much I tried to fix it, the bad reputation that I could not wipe out hit Sho-chan.
Then came Sho-chan’s birthday.
As I was preparing a gift and looking for an opportunity to apologize, I received the news that Sho-chan had fallen down the stairs and injured himself.
After that day, Sho-chan stopped coming to class. I visited his house again and again, but he never came to see me.
During the spring break just before I entered the third year of junior high school, I was unable to apologize. Sho-chan transferred to another school.
He was transferred to a new school without me being informed of anything.
At that time, I did not know the circumstances of Sho-chan’s breakdown and was just grieving. I was tormented by a sense of guilt, thinking that the stupid thing I had done might have contributed to it.
I had committed a crime, and a number of punishments awaited me.
I was unable to recover from the damage of losing someone I loved. I was in shock for a while and couldn’t go to school.
When I finally recovered and went to school for the first time in a while, my classmates welcomed me, but Renji-kun was the only one who looked at me as if he was going to shoot me dead. He knew the whole story.
Since then, until that day in my first year of high school, I never spoke to Renji-kun again.
I lost two childhood friends at the same time.
The punishment was not over yet.
My younger sister, who attended the same junior high school, found out about the rumor. My sister, after filling me with her hate-filled eyes, reported everything to my parents.
I confided in her what I had done.
My mother is best friends with Sho-chan’s mother, Yurie. She strongly condemned my actions.
That was the first time I learned about it. Sho-chan did not like me, but had no choice but to go to school with me because my mother and Yurie-san had asked him to protect me.
I still remember my parents’ stunned eyes and my sister’s mixed look of hatred and disdain. In fact, she stopped thinking of me as her sister after that. We no longer spoke to each other in the house.
For about two years, the relationship between us sisters has been cold.
My mother took me to Yurie to apologize to her as well. Yurie-san, who had been told about the situation by Sho-chan, knew everything. The only thing she didn’t know was that I loved Sho-chan. She accepted my apology, but I don’t know how she felt inside.
When the season turned to summer, I learned another truth.
To atone for my sins, I spread rumors about how nice Sho was. I guess I wanted to recover as much as I could at that time. Kuromine denied the rumors about herself, and steadily Sho-chan’s image was restored.
“……Eh, Yuuhi and Mukawa were childhood friends?”
It was while talking with my best friend, Hazuki Nekoda.
By chance, I learned that Hazuki-chan was the one who spread that rumor. Moreover, Hazuki even lied about me, saying that I had admitted to the stalker rumor and told that to Sho-chan.
“I’m sorry…….. I thought Yuuhi didn’t like him.”
It seemed that my attitude that was fueling his jealousy made her think i hate him and she did that for my sake.
It was my fault to begin with. But still—-
“F**K YOU!”
For the first time in my life, I hit someone.
It’s disgusting to treat someone like a criminal. On top of that, she even lied about me admitting that Sho-chan was a stalker. I wonder how much those words hurt Sho-chan.
I broke off relations with Hazuki.
In doing so, I lost the trust of my family, my best friend, my childhood friend, and my beloved.
…… But the real punishment was still waiting ahead.
Omnefarious
April 1, 2022 at 1:05 amThe worst is up first
I read ahead, but waited to see if Soaf’s translation would be any different. Nope
To reiterate, she got off on mocking, degrading, and humiliating the so-called “love of her life”. Then when it’s too late, karma has caught up with her, and reality has given her five across the face does she try in vain to “fix” things.
And what caused this whole mess in the first place? Her being butthurt that her prince, her well-liked childhood friend that she put on a pedestal, didn’t only have eyes for her. The nerve of him being friendly to kids their age who happened to be girls! He deserves to feel as dejected and insecure as she did on the inside.
Then her twisted desire comes true in middle school. Now he appears to be jealous of her and she can’t help but get off on it (one MTL I read translated her describing enjoying him suffer like masturbating/being sexually gratifying). Even worse, she twists the knife and becomes antagonistic/abusive towards him. The poor sap goes along with it to make his mother happy and out a (dwindling) love for Akazawa, while the whole situation festers and eventually snowballs out of control thanks in part to the other three demons (and Nekoda’s well-meaning yet still nasty attempt to protect her friend).
The sad part is (like Akazawa admits herself in this very chapter!) it all could have been avoided if she had just been honest and confessed her feelings to Shota. They could probably have been a happy couple by now. Instead, she got full of herself and screwed everything up. Like Arthur Fleck famously said, “You get what you f****n’ deserve!”
On the bright side, it seems like we may have finally found a decent girl besides Shota’s stepsis: Akazawa’s little sister! lol
This girl really is Hiragi 2.0
Rrobz
April 1, 2022 at 3:22 amI would disagree – Shirase is by far the worst. At least Akazawa shows some remorse and tries in her own (albeit limited) way to atone for what she had done. Shirase is not only unrepentant, but misuses him again in a similar way.
Meicha
April 1, 2022 at 5:04 amActually her name is Hinagi apparently. But yes everything could have been avoid
M_ZZZ
April 1, 2022 at 1:09 amSo the real b***h of the story is Nekoda huh. And Renji seems to be loyal to the mc.
Omnefarious
April 1, 2022 at 1:23 amBirds of a feather really do flock together, huh?
And thank you for reminding me about Renji; homeboy deserves a shoutout for being the one person (aside from maybe Shota’s mom) who cared about him AND didn’t mess up the MC’s life.
Aoso
April 1, 2022 at 1:12 amDamn this was a spicy chapter. I look forward to seeing how Karma slaps the other 3 color b*tches.
Shimura Faylane
April 1, 2022 at 1:22 amIn my opinions, they doesn’t even deserve Shota Nijitani. They’re even worse compared what happened to Yukito. He got reputations destroyed entirely, more than Yukito got…
JExtra
April 1, 2022 at 3:33 amHaving read ahead all I’ll say is that whether it be Shota, the Goddesses, or Nekoda, too much pain and punishment has already been given out.
They all deserve to be healed, to make up for their mistakes, and move forward.
Hopefully the author’s hiatus is only a temporary one as the latest raw chapter is v2c25.
Omnefarious
April 1, 2022 at 5:00 amI would agree with this sentiment, on the condition that everyone faces reasonable consequences for their actions. A bonus for me is an MC not letting betrayal slide (as I consider it one of if not the worse things you can do to someone, especially a friend or loved one).
After all, I’m not a sadist who wants to see people/characters suffer in eternal damnation. I believe that in all but the most extreme cases, given enough time and effort on the perpetrators’ part, forgiveness and reconciliation can be had…or at the very least folks can leave things in the past and move on. That said, don’t be surprised if the victim(s) decide(s) to do so alone and/or separately from those who have wronged them. Some things, once broken, cannot be restored to how they once, and I would argue that the relationship between Yuuhi and Shota is one such example.
JExtra
April 1, 2022 at 1:13 pmHmm, I’m going to have to agree to disagree with your last opinion there. From what I’ve seen of Shota’s character throughout the story up to the latest chapter in the raws, I’m inclined to believe it’s still possible for him and Yuuhi to get into a relationship.
That belief extends to the other girls as well. Granted, without getting into spoilers for those who haven’t read the raw chapters, it’s totally dependent on how their feelings may or may not change towards him throughout the story.
Ultimately, whether Shota ends up in a relationship in the course of the story is up to the author. It’s certainly possible that he could remain single. But if that happens, I can’t deny that I’ll be disappointed and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard.
Titania
April 1, 2022 at 6:49 amReading this novel make me feel heartache. I know how the protagonist feel since in the past i also get bullied by my friend.
Titania
April 1, 2022 at 6:50 amBut i still like this novel. I hoped you continue translate this novel
Gatts
April 1, 2022 at 5:21 amThank you for the chapter !
ryuukun17
April 1, 2022 at 9:28 amLMAO, suffer. At least Renji is a bro. Bros before demonesses yo.
research
April 1, 2022 at 11:24 amif not renji, who is the antag?
villager A
April 1, 2022 at 8:10 pmStep-sis or Yuuhi sister route please xD
curz0
April 2, 2022 at 3:16 pmThanks for the chapter! Yup, I hate red more than white now, but maybe that will change
Sesria
April 3, 2022 at 4:31 pmI really want to dislike Nekoda for her assumptions, but from her perspective, she was looking out for her friend. To someone who was not aware of them being childhood friends or any of their shared backstory, Shoto was being exceedingly creepy.
Following Akazawa to and from school every day, while she clearly makes it obvious that she’s disgusted by him. It isn’t even a coincidence, since he has waited hours after class, just to go follow her. Akazawa doesn’t invite him to any gatherings, so there’s no visible connection other than her getting followed. Nekoda probably visited Akazawa, and then saw Shoto standing outside her house, waiting, hours after school ended.
From that perspective, Shoto really should have been stopped long before he got to that point. What I truly hate, is that exceedingly shitty way at how she went about it. If she confronted him regarding all those events, and then someone overheard and spread the misunderstanding, I really would have no ill will towards her.
But spreading rumors and doing your absolute best to make someone a pariah is an entirely different beast. To top it all off, she decided that acting like all of the rumors were someone else, and then acting as if she’s just a concerned classmate. That’s a level of two-facedness that’s beyond the pale.
On the bright side, Renji seems to be the best of bros, and I can absolutely see why Shoto extols his virtues so much.
Omnefarious
April 3, 2022 at 10:30 pmYou really hit the nail on with Nekoda; well said. I know I keep beating the “Akazawa sucks!” drum, but Nekoda deserves to be raked over the coals as well.
Like you said, she could have either confronted Shota and/or asked Akazawa what was really going on. Instead, she took it upon herself to go nuclear on the poor guy’s reputation. Nekoda and Akazawa were at the top of the social hierarchy in Junior High; a couple of mean girls who were full of themselves and basking in their perceived superiority. Nekoda likely saw Shota as a creepy pest buzzing around her best friend (and hanging out with her top-tier love interest, Renji), and so schemed up the perfect way to get rid of him.
What she didn’t realize at the time though, is that her best friend was being a sadistic, self-absorbed, idiotic tsundere towards Shota. Thus, when everything came to a head and the truth came out, Nekoda had some humility and empathy swiftly beaten into her; figuratively, by learning that she was at the forefront of ruining an innocent boy’s life, and literally, when her best friend b***h-slapped and then turned her back on Nekoda, because said boy turned out to be Akazawa’s secret crush. The irony is cruel (and potentially delicious to the reader).
In an instant, Nekoda fell from the top caste to rock bottom, alone with nothing but the realization of and guilt over what she had done. It sounds like Akazawa and/or her followers may have actively ensured she was ostracized as well. A fate that lasted for both the last year of Middle School and first year of High School. At that point, she was either unlucky enough to end up in the same school and class as Yuuhi, or purposefully chose the same school with the forlorn hope that their friendship could be rekindled. All-in-all, I’d say it was a fitting punishment for what she did; the coup de grâce would be if Renji knows and mercilessly rejects because of it.
But then, she is saved by none other than the very person she so cruelly harmed in the past. Of course, Nekoda doesn’t recognize Shota, and he doesn’t know that she actually played a big part in his past downfall…for now. We’ll just have to see how things play out. Does Shota learn the truth without the others realizing? If so, does he snap and decide to scheme and manipulate things from the shadows, thinking he can potentially get revenge by taking a page out of Nekoda’s old playbook? Given his intention to abandon his past identity for as long as possible, while simultaneously being unable to resist the urge to be a meddlesome goodie-goody, the most likely scenario is things building up to another climax. Shota will be put on the spot and feel compeled to decide the direction he wants his relationships and life to go; with or without the benefit of knowing the full truth and everyone else’s true intentions.
Gerardo
April 8, 2022 at 9:06 amI can’t believe she’s been written so well that she’s grossed out. It reminds me of Suzurikawa.
Gerardo
April 8, 2022 at 9:07 amI’m starting to think that Reiji is the only decent character, unless there’s a plot twist and he’s the villain, which I see as unlikely
xeredge
April 9, 2022 at 5:10 amSheesh. I knew she was bad but she is so friggin evil. Whew just wow. Absolutely bullied the man just so she could get off.
Hll
April 17, 2022 at 11:05 amDang im saying the girl is not evil they just retarded
ゼロ35
June 5, 2022 at 11:33 amIf all the girl’s situation are similar then it might be better to leave all of them and go out with Renji, bl ? No problem if its wholesome…….
giogiog
June 4, 2023 at 5:41 pmbruh. she blatantly cucked out mc. f**k this beetch. red is the worst.
giogiog
June 4, 2023 at 5:43 pmshe cucked mc and will definitely happen again in the future. hope mc and her won’t get together. i am rooting for her Lil sis though.