That Thing Called Tennis

[The main story is complete. Enjoy! ovo] Ever since a killer tennis ball sent her to the ICU at age twelve, Nishijima Mari had suffered from severe tennis-related PTSD. And unfortunately... Mari’s father was a former professional tennis player. Mari’s mother was a tennis fanatic. Mari’s maternal grandmother coached a middle school tennis team. Surrounded by tennis, Mari could barely breathe. To escape this damn tennis world, Mari started dating Echizen, a playboy from another school who opened soda cans one-handed every day and was always going off to yacht parties. He looked exactly like the kind of guy who’d flirt with girls but never play tennis! Just when Mari thought she’d finally escaped the world of tennis, she saw a gorgeous photo of her boyfriend splashed across the front page of the Tennis Daily. Next to it were headlines calling him the most promising prospect on the XX team, an unconventional Prince of Tennis, and more. Nishijima Mari: “...help+me+!!!” *The CP is big brother Tachibana An. *As everyone knows, if they aren’t childhood friends, they’re bound to be childhood friends who showed up later. *Just a little sweet story for the revival era. *This novel will be available to subscribers starting 02.28. Updates come every night at midnight. I’ll do my best to update daily! *It’s a short story, around 200,000 characters in total. Check out my pre-release title [Genshin Impact: How to Raise a Xiao]. You can find it on my author page. Please add it to your collection! Kohira Yukari started playing the game [Genshin Impact Character-Raising Guide] after a friend recommended it. Although the gameplay was completely different from the gacha RPG her friend had described, clueless Kohira Yukari didn’t question it at all. She just assumed it was a spinoff from the same company. A game is a game, after all, and games in the same series must be just as fun! First, adopt a little bird. Yukari: “Wow, so he’s called the Great Demon Golden Roc? So cool!” What? The little bird is being controlled by an unknown boss? Yukari: “Time to spend money! Spend more money! I’ll beat the unknown boss at match-three and free my baby!” What? The little bird is eating snow to stave off hunger? Yukari: “Sob, my poor baby! Time to spend money! Spend more money! I’m buying everything! Nutritious meals for my baby! Kaiseki cuisine! Almond tofu! High-calcium milk! I’ll make sure he eats his fill and grows big and tall!” The little bird has come back with a new friend. Yukari: “...Why is my baby friends with a rock? Sob, my poor baby. I guess he got stupid from eating snow all this time?” After Yukari showered him with love and spent a fortune on him, her baby grew up healthy. Then one day, the System displayed a message: [The chick you raised, the Great Demon Golden Roc, has reached adulthood. Would you like to release him?] Yukari was terribly reluctant, but she knew her child couldn’t stay by her side forever once he’d grown up, so she released him with a heavy heart. * Yukari soon forgot about the game and happily went hiking with Sonoko and the others. Fog rolled in along the way. Their car broke down in the forest, and strange, dense mist rose all around them. Clueless Yukari wasn’t scared at all. She happily drew pictures on the car window. First she drew a heart, then a little baby, and cheerfully wrote his name. When she finished the last stroke of “Xiao,” Yukari looked up and saw figures flickering in the mist. A young yaksha wearing a mask slowly emerged from the fog, his golden eyes fixed on Yukari. “For three hundred years, I’ve waited to hear you call my name again.” “Now, will you tell me yourself why you abandoned me back then?” *A sweet romance. I just started playing the game and got inspired to write about Xiao. The main story will begin at the end of the year. *Set in a Detective Conan-style world. I’ll be changing a few of the canon deaths in the timeline. The heroine won’t travel to the world of Genshin Impact, but other Genshin Impact characters will make guest appearances. *Three content warnings for now. Theme: Face your difficulties and overcome them.