Kirishima Rio opened a romance game called Love and Tennis.
On her first playthrough, she chose Rikkai and pursued the beautiful boy she had fallen for at first sight on the list of male leads: Yukimura Seiichi.
The System warned her that the difficulty was high? No problem. She would start as his childhood friend and take her time winning him over.
Rio diligently raised her stats and built his affection.
She felt sad when Yukimura was sad and happy when he was happy. She knew how much sweat lay behind his excellence and never thought he was simply entitled to win every match.
The day his affection reached the romance route, Yukimura asked her out.
Rio happily began a sweet romance.
But it was a game, after all, and games had endings.
In the sixth year after she won the boy of her dreams, the world stopped, frozen at high school graduation, the moment Yukimura handed her his button.
It was a happy ending.
The System automatically returned her to the game's title screen.
Though she felt she hadn't had enough time with him, Rio wanted something fresh on her next playthrough, so she chose Seishun Academy and set out to pursue Tezuka Kunimitsu.
Since Seishun Academy was the default school, she figured the difficulty wouldn't be too high and decided to start in middle school.
Even with just 40 percent of her stats from the first playthrough, she was doing quite well.
The aloof boy gradually began to turn his attention toward her.
Just as the progress bar was slowly moving toward romance, Rio spotted her first playthrough's target at a match.
When they met for the first time, he smiled and asked Rio's name, then suddenly said something astonishing: "This might be a little forward, but would you go out with me?"
Considering how far she'd already gotten in this playthrough, Rio reluctantly turned him down.
After that, Yukimura kept appearing wherever she went.
Rio: ?
Wait, she hadn't carried over any affection stats. Wasn't he so difficult to pursue last time? Why was he practically handing himself to her now?
*
Ever since he was little, Yukimura had always felt that something was missing from his world.
When he did his homework, someone should have been chattering beside him. After playing tennis, there should have been someone to see. When someone confessed to him, there should have been someone who felt unhappy about it.
This sense of wrongness grew stronger after he started studying at Rikkai.
He had lost something.
But he didn't know what.
Until the day he met Tezuka at a match.
A girl was with him.
They seemed to be in that ambiguous stage before a relationship. Their words and actions both carried a special feeling.
Yukimura wasn't particularly interested in other people's love lives, but for some reason he couldn't take his eyes off the girl's back.
Then she turned around.
Yukimura saw her face.
It was unfamiliar.
But the hollow place inside him, empty for so many years, seemed to have suddenly found its owner and began to cry out desperately.
She's mine.
That thought appeared in his heart.
She should be my girlfriend.
No matter what it took, he would make her come back to him.
Reader's Guide:
◇ The heroine loves Yukimura, but his love for her is greater than hers for him. When she loves him, she is completely serious, but after she turns her attention elsewhere, she can be a little heartless.
◇ Yukimura regains his memories in the second playthrough, but very late. He spends a long time trying to steal her away.
◇ The entire story is designed to serve the romance.
Theme: Run toward love.
