Chapter 9 — Dodgeball Diplomacy

"Dodgeball," Godai-sensei announced, holding a whistle he had clearly never once used with enthusiasm. "Split into two teams. Winners feel good about themselves. Losers reflect."

"Reflect on what?" someone asked.

"Their choices." He blew the whistle once, short, and walked to the sideline with his coffee like the rest of this was somebody else's problem now.

I ended up on a team with Ren, Sora, and Erika, a girl from my class I mostly knew as "the one who organizes the karaoke trips," currently doing stretches with the focused intensity of someone preparing for the Olympics rather than a gym class.

"Okay, why is Erika stretching like that," Sora whispered, leaning toward me. "Is this the Olympics? Did nobody tell me this was the Olympics?"

"It's gym class."

"Feels very Olympic energy right now."

Shizuka was on the opposing team, standing at the very back, perfectly still, both hands folded like she was waiting for a bus.

"Okay," Ren said, rolling his shoulders. "I've been training for this."

"You've been training for dodgeball."

"I've been training for LIFE, Kazuki, dodgeball is just a subset."

The whistle blew.

Six balls hit the center line at once, and immediately, chaos.

Ren moved like he'd been possessed by something faster than his own body should allow, ducking one ball, sidestepping a second, catching a third out of the air with a professional-sounding slap of his palms. He rolled, came up throwing, and beaned someone clean across the gym without breaking a sweat.

"WHO'S NEXT," he said, quiet, terrifyingly calm.

"He's actually good at this," I said, mostly to myself.

"HE'S SO GOOD AT THIS." Sora was practically bouncing, ducking a ball at the last second without even seeming to notice she'd done it. "Where has this been our whole friendship, why is dodgeball the thing, out of everything, why THIS—"

"No idea. He's bad at literally everything else."

"Everyone's good at ONE thing," Ren called back, dodging another throw with a small, economical lean. "This is mine."

I, meanwhile, discovered my one skill by pure accident somewhere around minute two, which was standing extremely still and hoping nobody noticed me. It worked for a solid thirty seconds.

Then a ball hit me directly in the head.

"OW."

Hina, currently Sora, whipped around so fast her ponytail nearly hit me a second time.

"That was Kenji's! Not me, I swear, I would NEVER—" Sora paused. "Okay I would sometimes. But not that one."

"How do I know which ones are yours."

"You don't! That's the fun part!" She was already scooping up a loose ball, eyes darting across the court like she couldn't decide who to target first. "Okay wait, no, focus, who do I hit, who do I hit, there's too many options, this is a LOT of pressure—"

"You've had the ball for four seconds."

"Four seconds is a LIFETIME in dodgeball, Kazuki."

Across the gym, Shizuka finally moved. A ball came arcing toward her, slow, an easy target. She took a full three seconds calculating the angle, weight shifting, one hand raised in a textbook dodge pose.

The ball hit her directly in the shoulder before she finished calculating.

"That was a very elegant miss," I called over.

"I was optimizing the dodge," she said, retrieving the ball with total calm. "The optimization required more processing time than the ball allowed for."

"The ball doesn't wait for optimization."

"The ball should learn some patience."

Godai-sensei, from the sideline, didn't look up from his coffee. "Aoyama's been hit by every single ball thrown at her so far. Impressive consistency."

"I'm building a dataset, sensei."

"Then build it faster."

The game kept going, Ren racking up hit after hit with unnerving calm, Shizuka calculating her way into getting hit every single time, Erika mostly standing near the back line cheering for whoever seemed to be winning regardless of team.

I caught one ball, badly, more out of self-defense than skill.

"I caught one!"

"You didn't catch it, it hit your stomach and you happened to have your arms out at the time, that's not the same thing as catching—" Sora had appeared at my elbow somehow, still talking, already looking past me for her next target. "Also can we PLEASE gang up on Ren, he's ruining the whole vibe of the game, nobody's supposed to be that good at this, it's dodgeball, not the Olympics—"

"You just said the Olympics thing about yourself earlier."

"That was different, I meant it ironically."

"You did not sound ironic."

"I'm ALWAYS a little bit ironic, you just can't always tell."

A ball came flying from somewhere behind me, and Sora, mid-sentence, reached out without looking and knocked it clean aside with one hand.

"Wait, how did you—"

"Don't ask me, I don't know either, my body just DOES things sometimes." She grinned at me, breathless, cheeks pink from running, hair sticking slightly to her forehead. "It's like my hands have their own whole personality separate from the rest of me."

"That's concerning."

"It's EFFICIENT."

For a second the whole gym noise faded into background static, the whistle, Ren's rampage, Godai-sensei's commentary, all of it dulling under the specific, stupid warmth of watching her laugh at her own joke like it was the funniest thing she'd said all week.

Then someone from the other team threw a ball straight at her.

I didn't think. I just stepped in front of it.

It caught me in the shoulder, hard enough to actually hurt, and I staggered half a step before catching my balance.

Her whole expression shifted, fast, from laughing to something else entirely.

"You didn't have to do that!"

"You weren't looking."

"I WAS looking! I saw it! I saw the whole thing happen, in slow motion, like a movie—"

"You didn't move at all."

"Because I was ADMIRING it! From a safe distance! That's a valid strategy!"

"That's not a strategy, that's just standing there."

"It's a strategy if I commit to it hard enough."

Across the gym, Shizuka, having overheard exactly none of that, got hit by another ball mid-calculation and simply nodded to herself, like the data had confirmed a hypothesis.

The gym door opened.

It wasn't loud, wasn't dramatic, just the ordinary creak of a heavy door swinging inward, but something about the way the noise level dropped told me before I even looked over that something had shifted.

A man stood in the doorway. Gray suit, pressed sharp enough to look uncomfortable, a briefcase held in one hand that he did not set down, glasses with a thin frame catching the gym lights at an angle. A small name tag was pinned neatly to his lapel.

IWATA.

He scanned the gym once, slow, unbothered by the fact that he was standing in the middle of an active dodgeball game, and found what he was looking for without much trouble.

"I need to speak with Sora," he said, voice flat, carrying easily across the sudden quiet. "It's regarding the family."

The temperature of the room dropped about ten degrees that had nothing to do with air conditioning. Beside me, Sora's whole posture had gone rigid, the easy warmth from thirty seconds ago completely gone, replaced by something careful and controlled that looked, for the first time all class, genuinely nervous underneath it.

Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.

Then a stray ball from the other half of the gym, thrown by someone who had clearly not registered the shift in atmosphere at all, sailed clean across the court and caught Mr. Iwata directly in the side of the head.

His glasses shifted half an inch. That was the entire visible reaction.

He reached up, adjusted them back into position with two fingers, and looked down at the ball now rolling gently to a stop against his polished shoe, then back up at the room, expression completely unchanged.

"...I'll wait," he said, to nobody in particular, and did not move from the doorway.