My Anime Game Life! - Sword Art Offline

Chapter 12: For A Friend

8th January 2019—Mall

Airi Mikasa would admit, she wasn't someone who was all that good with boys, for all her teasing and supposed information on them.

Not like she didn't know how to handle them, not at all. Boys were arrogant sometimes, and you made an offer that struck them as right, then they were more than up for it. Give them the right treat and they'll obey, just like a puppy.

But boys were still a strange thing. Not only were their emotions technically harder to read sometimes, not all boys were similar. While girls shared some similarities in this field or anothee, boys were completely different. They weren't something you could just figure out like a jigsaw puzzle. And even if you could, it would take a lot of time to figure someone out.

And that just annoyed her because, for as good as a person reader she is, she just can't seem to understand boys.

And today, she's taken by surprise yet again.

Seeing her friend Rika and Keiko running into a restaurant wasn't exactly how she expected to see them at the mall, but the terrified state her friend had been in at that moment worried her, hence why she gave chase.

Then the other girls accompanying her friends gave a short explanation about what happened, getting her to frown.

Her father showed up and she got scared? Odd.

"Rika, come on, tell me what happened," Airi tried to help, really wanted to. To just see her friend absolutely shaking was a sight she never wanted to see ever again. "Look, I can't help you if you don't—"

"Excuse me... Rika, can you hear me?" If anyone ever told her that a boy could be gentle, she would have just scoffed it off and called it a pile of bull. And yet, it worked, as his soft voice and hold over her hand caught her attention, shocking Airi. "Listen, I won't ask you to trust me, but I can assure you that I've sent your father away. He's not here. You don't have to tell me anything, you don't have to do anything either. But can I look at your body?"

Okay, what?!

"What?!" Airi was pretty certain that she was one of them who screamed, something in her screaming that it didn't need logic to know that that was just messed up!

But his next words were so nothing like she expected. "Please. I promise you, I won't act out of line."

And it's made even more shocking, "...O-Okay..." When Rika accepted it.

What?!

But all the initial worry about how a boy wanted to cop a look or feel at a girl's body, which was illegal beyond all measures, dissolved immediately when she saw the ugly batches of black and blue on her skin.

"W-What is that..?" The girl with the tea-coloured hair ask.

Airi watched as he gently rubbed his fingers across the surface. His brows furrowed, eyes showing... understanding?

"He used his belt, and struck you a number of times, didn't he?" Everyone there, Airi included, couldn't have expected Rika to actually nod at that, confirming the boy's deduction (from just that, no less). "I see... F*ck... That bastard..!"