Motivated to be lazy

SS The dragons empty victory

"Sudo-kun is going to meet us there?" Ichinose asked me.

"Yeah, he said he'd be waiting. I told him not to go in without us so he's meeting us nearby though," I said grimly.

We had roughly fifteen minutes before the scheduled meeting with Ryuen. I have to admit I'm a little nervous, I've never had to negotiate or anything like this and quite frankly I'm a little scared. From everything that I've heard from everyone, this Ryuen guy isn't someone to mess with. Sudo isn't even someone I want to mess with and to think that someone else could be worse than him...

But I have to do this, it's the path I committed myself to take when I decided to become the leader of our class. Kiyotaka is depending on me and I can't let him down. Ichinose has been really supportive and I've committed to myself that this ends today. No matter what, this is all going to be done with today and then I get to spend time with Kiyotaka. It's been a long time coming for us to just hang out together.

I'm surprised at everyones changes, including my own. Everyone seems to be doing better than they were a month ago, even Kiyotaka. He really surprised me, apparently he's going to be doing some Student Council work today. I swear I thought that I was in the twilight zone or something when he said it. I wanted to try and peel his face off to see which imposter was in my best friend's place. It was like a Spy x Family moment or something. Maybe Twilight managed to infiltrate the school or something.

He seemed serious and I can't help but think the one next to me is one of the reasons for the change.

I normally wouldn't think so but it's the only explanation. Kiyotaka seems to spend the most time with her so if there were any changes to his behavior it'd have something to do with her. I can't help but wonder why though, it doesn't make sense. I have a reason for doing this for Kiyotaka, he's my best friend. I know he's had a hard life so for me it seems natural that I want to protect him.

Ichinose doesn't have that reason but she's really kind hearted and very charitable. I can only think that that's the reason why, it's not like she's in love with that stubborn lazy dumbass. I got a good eye for people's feelings so I'm positive that's not it.

Still, there's a change and a positive one so I'm grateful to her. Everytime I felt like all of this wasn't worth it, I'd see her pushing through and keeping me company trying to make sure I wouldn't give up. She'd give me words of encouragement but I knew it was just a pep talk. She was getting frustrated and it was rough but she didn't show it, she doesn't get annoyed easily so I felt kinda bad for her.

Ichinose didn't have any skin in the game and had all the risk. She did as much as she could without sticking her neck out too far with almost no benefit. I was kinda worried at one point that maybe she had a thing for me, I didn't want to have to reject her.

Right now we were heading to the meeting place, she came with me so that she could play witness. Just in case things went down, at least we had someone to cover our story. It wasn't like she was playing favorites and she's smart. Anything that Ryuen guy tried to corner her with I was positive that she had a way to get out of it. She made me promise that I wouldn't tell Kiyotaka that she was coming though, it was a bizarre request but I agreed.

We walked along in comfortable silence before Sudo came into view, waving at us enthusiastically and jogged over.

"Hey Matsuo, Ichinose," Sudo greeted enthusiastically. Ichinose gave a strained smile and looked at me.

"Sudo, look when we go in there you can't lose your temper okay? You really need to stay calm no matter what," I explained carefully.

"Yeah, yeah. It's fine, we got this. So, what's the plan?," Sudo waved nonchalantly.