"Booyah! A thirteen-hit combo with a Super-Finisher! Who is whopping whose ass now, big guy?"

Josh continued pumping his fist while I rolled my eyes with an annoyed smirk. I am not going to lie, Josh's face looked eminently punchable at this moment.

"Would you stop bragging? You're just picking cheap characters," I grumbled out a retort with thinly veiled exasperation.

"Wrong. You just suck at playing zoner characters. You just need to strategize better."

"Says the button-masher."

"I am not a button smasher, I just use burst characters."

I let out a sigh and put down the controller in my hands.

"One of these days you really have to explain to me how these different types of fighting game characters work."

Instead of answering Josh only eyed the controller on the table, then he faced me with a shit-eating grin.

"Haha! No rematch this time?"

"Nah."

"So you admit defeat?"

"Yah."

Josh raised his hand without the grin wavering even for a moment.

"Awesome! High five?"

"... Why would I give you a high five for beating me in Street Kombat?"

"Because there's no one else in the house I could ask for one?"

I looked at his outstretched arm and rolled my eyes once again. It didn't stop me from complying with the gesture, it was just so he knew I wasn't doing so happily. Not that he cared, as he let out a decidedly childish laugh before he put his controller down as well and stood up to stretch his back.

"I think I have some leftover pizza in the fridge. Do you want some?"

"I would rather have something to drink."

"Ice tea?"

"Good enough."

My friend gave me an enthusiastic nod and left, leaving me alone in the living room of the Bernstein household. I stared at the open doorway for a few seconds before I let out a pent-up breath and sank into the comfy couch in front of the television.

To be honest, I didn't really have my heart in the game. My last week was uneventful, but tiring nonetheless. Between the optimization of the Celestial Hub, Judy's constant stream of reports about the contents of the Dracis library, and the continued tribulations of my personal life, I had my hands full all the time. On the bright side, my triangular relationship affair with the girls finally stopped interfering with my work. My groundwork was also proceeding fairly well, and by this point Judy and Elly could be mistaken for friends if I wasn't around to rile them up, which also helped with reducing the drama levels at school.

Unfortunately, while I've gathered a lot of data in a short time thanks to having access to two vast treasure troves of information, there were some things I couldn't achieve. First and foremost, even after employing every trick of persuasion in the book, I still couldn't get Angie to share her background with the others. Though to be fair, I was fairly certain the princess and the class rep both had their suspicions about her due to a few unfortunate word choices on my part in the past. I also tried and failed to draw any information related to magic theory out of Ammy, though this one was more due to the fact that I didn't want to pester her too much. She was obviously stressed out in the past couple of days. What I could glean from some of our frustratingly short conversations said it had something to do with the school's security being compromised.

Now, if you ask me, I had no idea whether that was the school in the ‘place where mandatory education is taking place' or the ‘local Magi headquarters' sense of the word, but it ultimately didn't matter, as neither of those should've been the responsibility of a seventeen years old girl. I wanted to lend her a hand, but she categorically refused on the first occasion and I never really had the chance to pester her afterward.

I was still lost in my thoughts when Josh came back from the kitchen with a tray full of snacks and a pair of tall glasses filled with beverages. He put it down in front of me, and after quickly thanking him, I grabbed hold of my glass and emptied it in pretty much one gulp. By the time I put it down back onto the tray, Josh already sat down beside me with a controller in hand.

"What?" I asked while gesturing towards his hands. "Haven't you beaten me enough times yet?"

"No," he answered with a grin, but then added, "You wanted me to tell you about the different character types, didn't you?"

"So you want to explain them while you beat me a few more times?"

"That's the plan," he declared with smiling eyes.

I dropped my shoulders in resignation and retrieved the second controller.

"Fair enough," I told him, and we entered into the character selection screen.

I suppose this was as good an opportunity as any to explain what I was doing, right? To put it bluntly, after several days of constant pestering and being exposed to the sulking of the guy, I freed up a weekend afternoon in my busy schedule to accommodate his need for recreational activities.

He came over to pick me up after lunchtime with his moped (and forced me to dust off my own bike, which I didn't even know I could ride until he told me about it), and our program included visiting the local retro arcade, hanging out in the shopping district, visiting ‘guy-stores' (whatever the hell he meant by that was lost on me, as we did the same kind of window-shopping as always), and finally watching a brand new and absolutely terrible horror movie in a small cinema specializing in independent flicks before we headed to his place.

It wasn't a particularly bad way to spend a day, but I just couldn't get it off my mind that if I was doing the same with a girl instead of a guy, it would have been a date. I tried to refer to it as an ‘outing' then, but then that started to feel weird because I only associated the word with dates before. In conclusion, I decided that I positively hated language drift and left it at that.

"Come on, Leo! Stop stalling!"

I gave my friend a quizzical look, then realized that I was so lost in thought I forgot to actually attack and only had my character dash around the screen.

"Sorry, just give me a second to prepare myself," I told him with an apologetic smirk.

"How much more time could you need? Just do a low-sweep, combo it into a mid-uppercut, and then combo that into a super. It's easy."

"I literally have no idea what you just said."

"Argh, that's it! Practice is the best way to learn this. I will teach you through actual combat!"

"Don't you mean simulated virtual combat?"

"Shut up and try to dodge this!"