Jaku-chara Tomozaki-kun

ED: Fractal

The plan I made with Hinami during the rest of the meeting can be summarised as follows:

I will need to decide who else to invite, taking into account the relationship between Hinami, Mizusawa and I.

Then, after deciding who to invite, I need to plan how I want to invite them.

Finally, I will need to invite that person the way I planned.

In summary, I\'m picking the person, I\'m deciding the method and the one who\'s inviting them. It\'s a solo performance. Everything will depend on me. Is this really fine? Perhaps this could be that? You know what they say, pushing a baby bird out of its nest so it can learn to fly [1]. Though in this case, instead of a baby bird I\'d probably be a larvae. So, will this really be fine?

But well, since it\'s an assignment given by Life\'s strongest player Hinami-san, it can\'t be helped. Though while it\'s mortifying, it\'s likely that there\'s nothing wrong with this method in the big picture. In that case I, as Tomozaki Fumiya and as AtaFami\'s strongest player Nanashi, cannot cut corners in this.

With this thought, I went home and thought of one person.

The one person I will need to invite.

For this step of the plan, there wasn\'t too much to think about. The only girls I would be able to invite are Mimimi, Tama-chan, Izumi and Kikuchi-san. Working from there, Kikuchi-san is probably not a good pick, based on her character and group of friends. Tama-chan too doesn\'t seem too good with this kind of thing, considering that the events in the Home Economics Room didn\'t go too well. Even though Nakamura\'s not here this time, that would be cutting it too close.

So then it\'s either Mimimi or Izumi. If you ask who is closer to Nakamura, then it would be Izumi. Since the group that Izumi\'s in, Konno Erika\'s group, seems to have a lot of involvements with Nakamura\'s group.

So let\'s go with Izumi for now.

Alright, temporarily considering Izumi, the next thing would be planning how to invite her.

I thought this would be the part that I would get stumped on since it is the most difficult, but unexpectedly I was able to think of a method rather easily.

Within my stocked conversation topics based on intel from Hinami, one of them stood out.

By the way, I had already used that conversation topic with Izumi once. This one.

『Pretty soon it\'ll be Nakamura\'s birthday, right.』

So let\'s use that as a pretext. The strategy shall be named the『You can\'t make up your mind about what to buy for Nakamura\'s birthday, right? Then, shouldn\'t we just ask Mizusawa? I mean they\'re close! And Hinami seems like she\'d be good at planning that kind of thing, so it would be great if she came too!? Wait. Am I not needed? 』grand strategy! I think it\'s a great plan, if I say so myself.

The next morning I told Hinami about the plan, during our meeting in the second Sewing Room. Her response was…

「……Well, it\'s fine as long as you\'re fine with it, I\'m fine with it. So? Are you fine with it?」

Even though those words seemed to be hiding a deeper meaning, I got her approval. However, when I asked her「What do you mean by that?」she wouldn\'t answer. Anyway, I don\'t get it, but let\'s take this as a \'go\'. Regarding the only part I was unsure of,『Would Izumi buy a present in the first place?』, Hinami said that she would almost certainly be buying one and since it\'s still one month away, the likelihood of her having already bought one is low. With this being the case, I\'ve decided to go forward with the plan.

Translator Notes:

[1] Originally 獅子は我が子を千尋の谷に落とす, literally, a lion drops its cubs into a deep valley. It is a Japanese saying with the meaning of putting someone into a difficult situation so they would overcome it and grow up.