Shirase was your childhood friend, you hung out together a lot and his parents knew your parents and from there you knew quite a bit. His pompous self-confidence, which was actually traumatized narcissism, was a nasty gift from his destructive family that dripped on his brain. If you hadn't seen the problem as a child, you now realized that his parents' obsession with wanting Shirase to compete with others even in the smallest things and demanding that he be perfect and confident was just not normal.

Buichiro had kept quiet about it, though his resentment had mostly come out in the form of destructive behavior, but fortunately only destructive to the objects around him. But he too was human, and he too had an end to his patience.

• You allowed Shirase to stay at your house for one night because it was pouring rain outside the window, and he refused to go home. You didn't know what was in that phone dialog that drove your friend to the point where he just put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his palms , but you knew something was clearly not pleasant.*

"How awful..." Shirase squeezed out a laugh, though it sounded so unrealistic that your ears rolled back into a tube. "I don't even have the energy to be mad at them anymore, you know?"