Chapter 11

And besides, Oukawa is a smart boy. He knows his place. He would never make the mistake of defying me, the head of the family.

Nevertheless, Crazy:B does appear to be of the same odious ilk as Trickstar; we can never truly know what they will do.

Certainly, we cannot expect them to behave the way we want them to.

And so, let’s not expect too much from them, and instead just do what we need to do.

Yep—Doing whatever we can to avoid live showdowns while building up our stash of SSL$ through other jobs…

By the end of the Qualifiers, we should have earned so much money it’s impossible for the other units to turn the tables.

But that’s easier said than done, right? I doubt everything’s just going to go our way all the time.

Right. And that is the second problem we have on our hands.

…Leo and I have other business we absolutely cannot skip out on, and we’ll need to leave in the middle of the Qualifiers.

Yep, it’s an art and music festival back in Europe, and Sena and I have to go.

And this bad boy is massive. Compared to this event, SS is just a little no-name domestic event.

I guess you could say it’s like what the Olympics are for sports?

It’s so big that it’s like, the greatest honor ever, a total miracle, that a couple of Japanese kids like us can even perform in it—It wouldn’t even matter what kinda results we got.

It’s not that well-known in Japan, though. But wasn’t it originally held sometime around March?¹

Yep. That’s why we were so eager to accept their invitation to perform. Said it’s an honor too great for us and everything, with a nice, praiseworthy attitude that didn’t suit us at all.

But for whatever reason, the event was moved up this year all of a sudden~… No one knows why. There was talk about some bigwig in their circle butting in, though.

And thanks to that, we’re screwed big time. We have to choose between the SS Qualifiers and that event ‘cause they’re taking place at the same time, and we have to figure out which one to prioritize.

Double-booking, huh… Happens all the time in this business.

Even so, we’ve been holding out with the hope that the SS Administration Committee will be flexible enough to take the situation into account.

But they just said we can’t go back to Europe to appear in the event, since it would violate the “no traveling to other regions” rule.

Yep yep. Meanies~ Me and Sena were just trying to negotiate with them face-to-face, too.

But they dug their heels in and said they couldn’t bend the rules no matter how much we begged. Even though I’m pretty sure ES would strike gold if Sena and me did something that awesome overseas.

But “rules are rules”—They wouldn’t budge an inch. What, are they rulians from the planet of rules?

Seriously, sooo~ annoying…

Anyway, with all that in mind, there are two options we can pick from:

One: Leo-kun and I leave in the middle of the Qualifiers to participate in the European event.

—But if we do that, we’ll be going against the travel ban and be fined!

Two: We give up on performing at the European event and do our best in the SS Qualifiers.

But if we do that, we might not be able to get work in the future. Inside Europe, at least.

And we’d be bailing last-minute on this one-in-a-million job~ It’d make our client look bad.

A bad rep like that can spread like wildfire—Me and Sena, who’s only just starting out as a model, would be charred to a crisp in no time flat.

We’ll lose all our credibility and our job opportunities…

They’d be sure to think we’re just some cocky, idiot Japanese kids who threw away this prestigious position for something as dumb as “personal reasons.”

We’d be blacklisted by everyone in the industry, and maybe even bashed. Idols and models both need popularity and credibility to survive—Something like this would be fatal.

All the effort I put in up to this point would be completely wasted. The dream I went so far as to ditch this tiny, cramped country just to make a reality would be crushed.

So if it’s up to me, I’d rather choose option one… I’m sorry Kasa-kun, everyone, but we’ve got to leave halfway and go back to Europe.

But if we do that, we’re breaking the travel ban rules, and we’ll probably receive heavy fines.

The only way we can really make a lot of money—live showdowns—is off the table… So it’s possible we won’t make enough SSL$ to get past the Qualifiers.

Mm. Not only is it hard enough as-is, but if our secret order gets exposed at some point, we’re done for.

We’d be picked apart ‘til nothing is left of us; we’d suffer the most miserable, pitiful defeat possible.

Knights, the veteran powerhouse, one of the Big Three—the ones who were supposed to be unbeatable.

I don’t want anything like that either, but it’s not like we can do anything about it… It’s just like what Leo-kun said: this is checkmate for us.

But even still, we must not give up, but rather try to do as much as we can before Sena-senpai and Leo-san leave for Europe. And then all we can do then is pray we don’t receive any more blows…

Yeah, true. There’s a buncha stuff that can happen in this world that are way worse than the “worst-case scenarios” we can come up with in our heads.

But man~ It makes me feel real down in the dumps, yanno~… Music is supposed to be used to make people happy, but lately it’s doing anything but that.