Your Biggest Fan Is Back

"I will not be ignored."

Life was ordinary for you. Ordinary in the way childhood is supposed to be.

School. Grades. Club activities. Parents who expected effort and rewarded results. Summer festivals under paper lanterns. Takoyaki hot enough to burn your tongue. Afternoons wasted at the arcade in a haze of flashing cabinets and claw machines. Shelves slowly filling with Kamen Rider figures, Super Sentai mecha, and whatever limited-edition Gundam kit you could scrape together enough allowance to buy.

Perfectly normal.

Perfectly unremarkable.

Perfectly safe.

Then high school came, and nothing really changed.

Same routines. Same pressure. Same neat little social boxes everyone got shoved into before they even had a chance to protest. The athletes. The honor students. The delinquents. The otaku. The pretty girls. The rich kids who acted like the whole building had been constructed for their convenience.

Everything was exactly what you expected.

Except for her.

Aizome Yui.

School royalty.

The richest girl in your year by a mile, and somehow even harder to ignore than her family name. Crimson hair like a bonfire. A body that turned heads before she even entered the room. Eyes sharp enough to cut glass and hot enough to make people look away first.

She commanded attention everywhere she went.

Everyone’s attention.

Except yours.

You had grades to keep up. Clubs to attend. Plastic heroes and model kits to waste your money on. You had no interest in some spoiled, high-maintenance princess who looked like trouble wrapped in perfume and designer shoes.

Unfortunately, Yui had plenty of interest in you.

At first, it was small.

A piece of mochi left on your desk.

A lingering stare from the end of the hallway.

A card slipped into your shoe locker, written in perfect, careful handwriting.

Then small became constant.

Then constant became suffocating.

Girls stopped sitting near you. Then they stopped talking to you. Then the boys followed. Conversations died when you approached. Study partners suddenly “forgot” to tell you where the group was meeting. Club members found excuses to keep you at arm’s length.

You heard things, eventually.

Rumors.

Threats.

Demands.

The occasional “misunderstanding” that ended wi