Chapter 129: Cultural Festival Live Performance ②

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Translator: Soafp

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In short, because of a strange superstition that had taken root regardless of how it started, the light music club president had ended up wearing revealing underwear every time she performed live.

And without spats.

“…What would happen if you wore normal underwear and put on spats?”

“That’s the thing… You might not believe me, but the live performance goes horribly. I start making mistake after mistake, and everything falls apart.”

It really was hard to believe.

Then again, I’d heard that some athletes wear the same underwear or other items for good luck, so perhaps it wasn’t entirely strange.

Maybe the tension of performing live while wearing revealing underwear had become ingrained in her body, and wearing ordinary underwear made her anxious instead.

Perhaps that was the psychology behind it.

(There’s no way I can make her overcome this superstition right now.)

I never imagined there would be a reason like this.

There were probably very few people in the club who knew about it.

Even I had only heard about it secondhand from Takagi, so there was no way I could have figured all of this out from the fragments of my nightmare.

“President, just to make sure… you’re not willing to wear normal underwear and put on spats?”

At my question, the president’s body flinched.

She lowered her head slightly and fell silent before eventually shaking it.

“I don’t want to ruin the live performance we’ve worked so hard to prepare for.”

Her expression was completely serious.

None of the light music club members, myself included, were seriously aiming to become professionals.

To outsiders, this might just be a school festival performance worthy of a dismissive, “It’s only a school festival.”

But Takagi and the girl standing before me were genuinely passionate about this live performance.

“A-And besides…”

The president’s cheeks turned faintly red as she continued.

“If everyone found out what I’m wearing here, I’d socially die. That thrill is kind of… addictive, I guess…”

“…”

I’d seen a future where she was actually discovered, fell into despair, and was driven to drop out of school.

That was precisely why I was desperately trying to stop this.

Maybe this woman was even more unusual than I’d thought.

“But President, has there actually been a time when you didn’t wear revealing underwear and the live performance went badly?”

“Various things happened. For example, a guitar string suddenly broke, there were equipment problems, or my mind went completely blank and I forgot everything I’d memorized…”

If the president’s underwear superstition was real, I had two choices.

Either make her wear spats even if it meant ruining the live performance and prevent an accidental exposure.

Or accept the future where she successfully performed but was forced to drop out of school.

Obviously, I had to choose the former.

Compared to having a video of the incident spread around and forcing the president to leave school, the success of a cultural festival live performance was secondary.

(But is this really the only choice I have?)

Was there no way to prevent the president’s underwear from being exposed without ruining the live performance?

If I had a few days—or even just one more day—I might have been able to come up with a better solution.

I’d been so focused on preparing spare spats that I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the president actually preferred dressing that way.

As I stood there, unable to decide what to do—

Bzz, bzz.

My pants pocket vibrated.

“Ah, sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

I pulled out my phone and looked at the screen.

I had received a LINE message from Airi.

Ren-kun, you’ve been behind the gymnasium for quite a while now, so something must have gone wrong, right? Is it probably about the president?

…How did she know?

This wasn’t even on the level of intuition anymore.

Was there seriously some kind of transmitter implanted somewhere in my body?

While I was typing a reply, another message arrived with a ping.

I don’t know what kind of problem you’re dealing with, but I’ll tell you what I’m thinking for now. I have another hypothesis about your ability, Ren-kun.

Another hypothesis?

Was it different from the criteria and range of my precognition that we’d discussed before?

You talk about avoiding the predictions, but I don’t think what you’re actually doing is technically “avoiding” them. Of course, if you only look at the outcome, it does appear that way.

What did she mean?

It was avoiding them, but it wasn’t?

Airi was being even more cryptic than usual today.

To begin with, I don’t think the target of the prediction is fixed. For example, when you were hit by a car instead of Nodoka-san. Couldn’t that also be considered the prediction coming true, if you only look at the result? A car ignored a stop sign and hit a student who happened to be passing by.

So the target of the prediction wasn’t fixed.

I had simply rewritten it and, as a result, prevented the worst-case scenario.

In other words, the phenomenon itself that you saw in your nightmare will always happen. What you’re doing isn’t eliminating the phenomenon itself. You’re switching the target or reducing the impact.

A female student jumping from the school’s rooftop had happened, but the target had been switched from Airi to the president of the photography club.

The lightning strike that hit Kokoa-san’s outdoor stage had happened, but its damage was minimized by avoiding a direct hit.

During the training camp, Ito-san did indeed slip and fall, but Yuzuki caught her and prevented her from actually falling.

In Nagasawa-senpai’s case, the target had changed from Yuzuki to another first-year girl who already had a boyfriend, meaning Yuzuki avoided being cheated on.

Airi’s hypothesis explained almost everything that had happened so far.

But there was one point I couldn’t accept.

I typed it out and sent it.

But doesn’t Kokoa-san’s drug incident contradict that? The phenomenon where the yakuza would target other members of the group after Ayano-san never happened. They never reached out to the others.

Actually, that’s the one point I’m not completely certain about either. But couldn’t we look at it this way? They did have a plan to target the others, right? That plan became impossible because you bought the entire group and completely severed their connection with the yakuza. It’s also possible that another idol became their target without us knowing.

In the end, the things I could predict were limited to what I could observe.

If I thought about it that way, then Kokoa-san’s drug incident didn’t necessarily contradict the theory at all.

Airi sent another message.

Anyway, Ren-kun, I’m not certain, but if this hypothesis is correct, I think we might be able to do something about this revealing-underwear problem too.

I thought about it carefully.

If I removed the target from this particular nightmare and extracted only the phenomenon itself—

(A student falls onstage during the cultural festival live performance, causing her underwear to be exposed.)

Maybe the underwear exposure was simply the result of the fall.

In other words, just like with Ito-san, the core phenomenon was that someone would fall onstage.

If so, there was a way to preserve the president’s underwear superstition while preventing her from being forced to drop out of school—

(I see. That’s one way to do it.)