Bluntgre 2 (Continues at Ch 154)

229

Today was the day I turned 13 years old after entering middle school.

I woke up on my birthday and was filled with terrible anxiety.

(...headache?)

The first discomfort I felt was such a trivial thing.

My body is not built as sturdy as Nana's. Actually, scratch that, my constitution is so poor that it is laughable to compare it to that of an ordinary person.

It was not unusual for me to collapse with a fever, and I had experienced more kinds of illnesses than most people.

In addition to that, I've been up late every night recently because I've been spending an inordinate amount of time considering the optimal chart for the Kurokuro RTA.

So there is a great possibility that the headache is caused by a lack of sleep.

But I still felt strange because the headache had come in the form of a pain I had never experienced before. It was a sharp, cutting pain.

The headache I felt when I woke up made me feel dizzy, but I felt the warmth of human skin in my back, supporting me.

It was Nana.

"What's wrong?"

Nana gently supported my back and said anxiously.

How long has she been awake?

Sorry, that was stupid thought, of course she had been awake for a long time.

She hardly needs to sleep at all.

I felt the gentle heat of Nana's arm around my back. That was the only thing that made the headache go away.

"I have a slight headache. It's gone now. I'm fine."

"No good, go back to sleep. You have been pulling all-nighter lately."

She pulled me down and forced me to go back to sleep.

I was honest when I said the pain had subsided, but Nana would not allow it.

She is puffing her cheeks, pretending to be angry with me. And she won't yield no matter what I said. But yeah, it was my fault for showing weakness.

"I can't help it... Let's take it easy today."

"un."

Recently I kind of neglected her. Still, I couldn't help but stroke Nana's head when I saw her happy smile.

In the end, I dismissed that headache as a sign of a cold since it was gone the next day after I had slept so much.

Unaware that was the beginning of the countdown that had started.

☆

After that, the peculiar headaches came and went on a whim.

When I was 13, it would come at least once a month.

Gradually, the intervals became narrower, and by the time I turned 14, it will happen once a week.

And after I turned 15, the headaches became so frequent that I didn't know when they would strike, and they had become so bad that I felt great stress just by being alive.

Sister Ron forced me to go to the hospital for a checkup when I was bedridden at the age of 13 with a headache for the third time to confirm my condition.

I wasn't that wary of it, but I still remember Ron's worried face.

"The most common cause of headaches is overuse of the brain. It becomes overworked because it keeps concentrating for a long time. And in Rinne's case, it's because the software inside your brain is special. The burden on your brain as hardware is tens of thousands of times greater than that of a normal person. Your one second of concentrated thought equals the same amount of fatigue that a normal person would experience after three hours of concentrating."