🌸Cherry Blossom Palette🎨

☘️Chapter 13: Helpful Words🦉

Written by EmtenDew

Edited by P. serrulata

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Author's note:

ED: Hurray! We've moved past the beginning of the story. Now that it's established, things will move along a little faster, but still look forward to a detailed story. At the suggestion of my editor, I've started using a thesaurus to "come up with more interesting ways" to say "everyday and mundane things". It gets easier the more I do it, and it makes less work for him lol.

I was hoping to release this chapter in two parts, but neither side stood up too well on its own, so it's posted as one. The same thing happened with the sixth chapter. This chapter is also a little exposition heavy, but it serves as a transition moving into the end of the semester for the characters. Combining some chapters put us behind schedule a few weeks, but I don't think we'll have to do a "hiatus week" anytime soon.

Also, Chapter 91 was garbage IMO. My editor specifically warned me not to get too involved with my own story, but I am now convinced Nanashi has no respect for his fans, so it's becoming hard not to. That new chapter SUCKED, and Nagatoro's character has become mostly unlikable. She's been raising red flags the entire series, and Naoto should just run for it. If things don't improve, I may just drop the actual series. The fluff wore out its welcome last year. Maybe that's the point of the series, but there's a line.

Please look at the Q&A section I set up at the end of the chapter. Ask us anything and we'll add another section in the next chapter. I would be happy if you ask questions.

Please enjoy what I wrote.

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July 1, 2018

As the students of Kazehaya High School entered the last three weeks of the semester, they were greeted with another hot day.

The cold weather front that had brought with it the sizeable storm the last weekend had since retreated, and the coolness from early the last week was gone, gone, gone. It was hot. And the heat might've been forgivable if it was a dry heat; their whole world felt like a jungle.

The school's air-conditioning was lackluster as usual, but it was better than nothing, and "better than nothing" still wasn't much.

It was currently lunchtime on Monday, and lively chatter, overlapping and multidimensional, hummed like electricity throughout the cafeteria. The students talked about the same things they always did, but for the last week, one specific thing was on the minds of most.

The school's gossip mill had seemingly been grinding out but a single product:

Nobuo Takata, one of the most eligible bachelors (he was single now, at least) at Kazehaya High, had ended his two-month relationship with the sought-after Sakura Inori.

Nobody seemed to know the details (if they even constituted enough to be called that), other than Takata had said the breakup was "amicable" and that Sakura had proven difficult to question, skillfully avoiding most students and their interrogations.

That wasn't much to go on...

But there was one person who knew. He knew about nearly all of it.

Naoto Hachioji's stomach-butterflies had been pestering him since the previous Tuesday, as he had to listen to the nearly nonstop babble concerning Sakura and Takata. Normally, he didn't give a rat's ass about such blather, but he'd inconveniently fallen in between those two, having a front row view of a real mess that could've ended in ways much worse than it had.