Author's Note

I think I remember why I wanted to split this chapter into two. Or rather, why I outlined it as two chapters. But I never found a good place to stop it, so I just kinda kept it all together. As such, I'm totally burnt out after writing more than 4000 words of this story.

So yeah, this story clocked at 4500 words. About 2500 of those were written today, post twelve am. Due to my editing style (where every time I pick up something to work on, I edit the already-written content), which rarely has a final edit included, the majority of this chapter is un-edited. So yeah, sorry for any missing words/missing sentence capitalization/other miniscule errors that you may find.

To my SAO followers, the next update will likely be for ALfheim Online: Path to Recollection. It will have a similar setup to this chapter, but likely only encompass about half what this one does. It'll be about 3000-4000 words by the end.

For now, I'll just let you read on! see you at the bottom!


I'd Rather Die

Chapter Three: Track Tryouts and New Dirt

Just a few minutes later, and I found myself staring down a large, white, ornate school building. Students were still filing into it with minutes to spare before the bell, and they all wore the same uniform that Homura and I did.

"This is it…" once again, my pride as a man took the fatal blow. Here I was, about to start attending an all-girls' school. And everybody there would be none the wiser that I had once been a completely different gender… but that was to be expected. By all appearances and functions, I had essentially become a girl.

"Here's to a good school year… Kyouko."

"Why you…!"

Chasing my snickering best friend into an all-girls school, this is how my new life as a female began.


The main thing I learned in class wasn't anything related to the curriculum.

Weird, right? You come to school to learn stuff, but having been raised in an overly-religious family when I was younger, they didn't let me attend schools that valued science more than religion. Seeing as there were no Christian schools in my area, let alone Christian schools that weren't co-ed, that left me with just about zero schooling options. Even after my family died in a fire, I kept up the no-school tradition in order to avoid being the outcast for arriving on the scene years late.

Because of this, everything I saw was a completely new thing to me, and I spent much more time watching the other students than I did paying attention to the teachers. In particular, my raven-haired best friend, and how everyone else interacted with her. Or, more accurately, how everybody kept at an observational distance, as she just ignored their existence.

When did Homura become a zoo exhibit? Was a thought that plagued my mind multiple times in the day.

Let me repeat and clarify: the main thing I learned in class had nothing to do with the curriculum. Instead, I spent the whole time trying to figure out just what kind of attitude everybody kept towards my best friend.

The answer I got mystified me. When I analyzed the rather dazed gazes of those who watched her more often, they seemed to as if the people around her were too nervous to interact with her.

The atmosphere surrounding Homura was so stifling that I almost decided not to sit with her for lunch. Well, almost was the keyword there. I figured out right before lunch began that I could avoid the inevitable snow of questions from my classmates by sitting with the girl that nobody talked to.

So, before the desk of the mysterious new girl (moi) was surrounded by curious students who would ask about everything they thought to ask about, I hightailed it to my best friend's desk three rows back, sitting down in the now-vacant seat next to hers and pulling it closer. Of course, I also brought the lunch that Homura had made me that morning, opening it and starting to eat as soon as our desks connected.

"Yo, Homura," I said between bites as she spared me a glance. "You give off a real 'ice queen' vibe here, you know that?"

"Why do you think that?" she asked with what I could tell was barely-restrained sarcasm. It seemed she knew where she stood, and it also seemed that she didn't want to talk about it much.

"I just couldn't help but notice how half the class was looking at you, but none of them ever talked to you," I replied casually, loving that I had found a new way to get under Homura's skin. They didn't come often, let me tell you. "What, you famous here or something?"

"About as famous as the top-scorer on all the tests can be," she replied without missing a beat. However, the answer she gave me wasn't quite satisfactory.

"I dunno, that doesn't seem like the only reason," I pressed, knowing full well that almost the entire class's attention was directed towards us as we casually spoke. "The look in everyone's eyes didn't look like admiration of a top student when they looked at you."

"Kyouko, can we just talk about this later?" Finally, I knew I'd hit a nerve. "I'll explain it, but at home only. In private."

"Sure, sure," I decided that I should probably stop pushing my luck right about then. "I'm holding you to that, I hope you know."

"Go ahead," she said, finally back to her lax, emotionless self. "By the way, shouldn't you go to the nurse's office soon?"

Crap, the pill!

The rest of lunch was filled with hurried eating and a quick (although still a bit late) visit to the nurse's office.


By the end of the day, I had run out of ways to describe how bored this giant, human-enforced torture device had made me. I had gotten past the 'everything is completely new to me' feeling shortly after lunch (because I had been promised an explanation from the main subject of my interest), and from then on, sleeping seemed the most interesting thing to do. But every time I came close, I felt something sting at the back of my neck, and I turned around just in time to see a folded up piece of paper fall to the ground behind my desk.

Every time I picked it up and unfolded it, a note appeared. 'Don't sleep in class, Kyouko-san.' That's what it always said. I always looked around behind me, but never found the culprit – everyone seemed to be paying perfect attention to the teacher's boring lesson.

I knew it couldn't be Homura. She would never add the –san, though she'd probably still call me 'Kyouko', just to annoy the hell out of me. That narrowed it down by one more person – it always came from behind me, and I was in the second row, so the first row of five was already out. Anybody next to me was out too, because the soft blow of folded paper always came from behind.

Unfortunately, my deductive reasoning only narrowed it down by ten people – eleven, if you count the teacher. There were still fifteen possible suspects. The only other hint I had to go on was that the paper folded up happened to be a vibrant pink in color, with some floral print towards the non-ripped edges of some of the folded notes. However, this didn't help – everybody's notebook was under their hands because the teacher had them taking notes, so I couldn't clearly make out similar details from anyone whose notebook was even slightly visible.

How annoying this day was turning out to be.


By the end of the day, I still hadn't narrowed it down any further. I decided to just go home and sleep it off (this place must have been filled with sleeping gas or something, because I had become ridiculously tired), but Homura redirected me to the running area, where the track club held meets. When I asked her why, I got this goody two shoes crap in response.

"All new first- and second-years have to join a club. And besides, you're really good at running, and you react fast."

Okay, those compliments were partially true. Back when I was a guy, I could run at record speed for short distances to evade pursuers… but that's only because I stole to live, and I would end up in juvenile detention or prison if I got caught. So it was more of a 'life and death' scenario to me. Everybody runs fast when their lives are on the line.

Conveniently (or inconveniently, depending on your outlook) enough, I came on one of their assigned meet days. The field was filled with runners, all sweaty and crap. Not something I wanted to put up with on a daily basis if I could help it.

But, unfortunately, this was all I could do right now. I couldn't think of any other clubs to go to because I didn't know of any other clubs, and Homura wouldn't be home to let me in – she said she had to be somewhere for a while before she could go home. When I asked her what was keeping her, she was less than humanly responsive.

And so, here I was, checking out my first ever club, without anywhere to go (the key to my cheap-ass apartment was inside Homura's living room). At first, I didn't know who to go to, but I figured out who was telling everybody what to do after a few minutes of watching. I went up to that girl, a blonde by the looks of it, and began.

"Hey, I'm a new student here," I lamely informed her after getting her attention. "I'm here to try out for this club."

As she turned around to face me, I almost looked away out of embarrassment. This girl… this blonde had huge assets. Why the hell was she on a track team with those things?! Why didn't she choose something with less time-consuming activities so she could get out onto the town faster?!

After a brief analysis, she spoke in a light, airy voice. "But you're so skinny… you have almost no muscle…"

It was at that moment that I remembered a major part of the operation to turn me female. They actually decreased my muscle mass considerably, because I had been highly bulky before. This also meant that the muscles used for running had decreased greatly as well. Could I even still do it…?

"I get that a lot," I decided to cover up my insecurity with false confidence. "But would you mind holding off on your decision until you've seen me run?"

"Okay, then," the hot blonde with curled, golden pigtails conceded. Her amber eyes looked me over, then she asked, "What standard distance do you usually run?"

Shit.

I had no idea what the hell qualified as 'standard' for track. I knew there were short distance runners and long distance runners. As I was, I decided that long distance was out. I didn't have enough built-up running muscles for that. Short distance was how I used to evade cops when I stole, anyway – just run as fast as humanly possible for a really short amount of time – like, ten, eleven seconds – until you find somewhere to hide, then dive for it. Rinse, repeat, lose cops.

But the problem remained: how short was 'standard' for runners? I had no clue. I could probably run about a hundred-twenty meters at top speed before, but I doubted there would be one that perfectly-fitted to the old me, let alone the new, weaker me.

"Well, what do you have for short-distance running?" I finally forced out a question of an answer.

The blonde looked at me with a rather odd expression, before pointing to a long, straight stretch of rubbery pavement with lines dividing it the long way. "That's the track for the hundred-meter dash. It's one of the shortest for competitive racing."

I smiled. A hundred meters? I could swing that easy. The only question would be how much slower I would be, after the operations. Probably a few seconds at most, I figured.

"I'll try that," I decided, and for the next few minutes, I spent the whole time trying not to psych myself out of it.


Standing before the track of the hundred-meter dash, I couldn't help but notice that the average time for the others running it seemed about fourteen seconds, maybe a little less. This wouldn't have seemed intimidating at all if it weren't for the fact that the last time I ran, my muscles had built up around running and weight-lifting, and now that extra muscle was all gone.

I stood on the far left side, since most of the hundred-meter runners on the actual team took the right. There were about ten sections on the hundred-meter dash track, so I didn't have to feel cramped. The blonde stood at the other end of the track, a stopwatch in her hand.

"Ready?" she asked me in a loud, light voice.

"Whenever!" I replied, getting into position. I had never really gotten into a position to start running before, so it felt stiff and awkward to bend down so much. But I had seen the other runners do it a lot in the past several minutes, so I just emulated them in hopes it would better my time slightly.

"Three… two… one…" she counted down. I tensed my muscles – well, what was left of them – for a running jump.

"Go!"

The moment that single word left the blonde's mouth, I leapt onto the track and began running at top speed towards the other side. However, this 'top speed' surprised even myself.

I moved even faster than I had before the operations. Almost as if the few muscles I did have were somehow stronger, faster than normal.

I then remembered a secondary effect of the operation to remove most of my muscle mass. They had considerably strengthened the ones that remained, in order for me to still be able to walk and pick stuff up normally like before, without as many muscles as I was used to. An unintended side effect of that seemed to be that those strengthened muscles were ten times more suited to running.

I felt incredibly light as I raced across the track, and the feeling only exhilarated me to push myself even harder, to run even faster. My body responded to my will, and my speed increased more than I thought possible.

All too soon, it was over. I reached the other end of the track before I had even begun to enjoy the feeling of the friction with the light breeze making my long, crimson hair flow behind me. I panted lightly for a few seconds, but I didn't feel all that exhausted. I felt like I could do it again and again. I felt like I could go even faster next time.

Once I caught my breath, I turned to the blonde. "How'd I do?" I asked her tentatively, knowing that the sprint hadn't really been my fastest.

"There's no way… this can't be right…" she said in a hushed tone. Disbelief shone in her amber eyes, and I was tempted to ask if my time was really that bad before she spoke again. "10.76 seconds… I've never seen anything like this before!"

"In a good way, or a bad way?" the way she said my time with wonder in her light voice made me question whether my running really was bad.

"That's barely a quarter second away from the women's world record!" she nearly shouted, her amber eyes suddenly sparkling like pure gold and dazzling the hell out of me. "How did you do that? Who taught you to run?"

Oh, shit.

This was not how I wanted things to go. After what the blonde just shouted, everyone's eyes were on me. Publicity was the last thing a former thief wanted to attract. The more the public eye falls on you, the more it finds out. And I needed my whole life up until a year ago to remain secret.

"I, uh…" I really didn't know how to deal with this kind of attention. The positive kind, where people look at you in awe and shit. I just did not know how to handle it. "Can we, uh…"

"Tomoe-senpai, you're scaring the new recruit!" a shout of defense came from one of the girls around me.

In an instant, the blonde calmed down a notch or two. Everybody else seemed to get the hint and turn back to what they were doing, much to my relief. I almost started to relax a little, when—

A soft pair of hands gripped my small ones and held them up in front of me. It took me a moment to register the incredibly close presence of the blonde, who seemed to have no regard for personal space as she stood within centimeters of me. "Please join our club. It would be an honor to manage someone as fast as you."

I shrunk back a little, then replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'll join this club on one condition."

"And that is…?" The hope shining in her amber eyes almost blinded me. I had to look away, so I looked down, and the unfortunate result was that it made me look like a pervert… wait, did it? To everyone else, I was surely a girl. And girls seem to get touchy-feely really often. So looking at that area… was it normal now? Was it still weird in another way? I couldn't tell.

In time, I realized I had to tell her my condition. I looked her in the eyes again, squinting to avoid blindness, and spoke in as level a tone as I could muster, given my current mental state.

"None of what I do goes public. I don't enter into competitions. If I break any records, nobody in the club says a word. We have a deal?"

That was quite possibly the longest I had spoken at once since becoming a girl in body. I watched her face as I spoke, and it almost seemed like she didn't care about any of those things. It kinda felt hard to believe, but I guess a lot of things had been that way lately.

"No problem!"


That club (or team, whatever) had people that were easy to get along with, I had to give 'em credit. The one that timed me, a third year named Tomoe Mami, was really like the club's mother. Apparently, her seniors decided to make her team captain, whatever that meant, because she had been such a motherly character.

There were a few others of merit, but the only one I went away remembering the name and appearance of was Mami. Somehow, she just really… really left an impression. Possibly because my real mom had been dead for more than half my life, and this was the closest somebody had come to replacing her. But for Christ's sake, she was only a year older than me! Stupidity, it comes in all shapes, sizes and hair colors. Personally, I always assumed it was a redhead.

Well, after I finished formalizing all the club forms and stuff, I figured I should head on back to Homura's place, where I had spent my past two weeks – only to realize that I forgot my bag in the classroom.

Which brings us to the here and now. I found my way to my class with moderate speed for my second time in the building, and I made my way into the now-empty room in a calm saunter.

I marveled for a second at how different the room seemed when nobody else was in it. The sun had just begun to turn red in preparation for the sunset about five minutes prior, casting an orange-gold glow onto everything through the empty room's open windows. The glow of the soon-to-be-setting sun bathed everything in an ethereal presence, and the overwhelming sense of serenity I felt almost made me think of—

"What the hell am I doing?!"

No. No, no, no, no freaking way in hell. My body may have become female, but my mind was still a guy's mind! I couldn't have thoughts like this, not in a million years! I needed to get my bag and leave before things got any worse!

I quickly made my way to my desk in the middle of the second row. My bag was there. I kept reminding myself to get it and go home (well, to Homura's home) before enjoying a sunset turned to freaking flower viewing.

I picked it up, but I couldn't resist taking one, final look around the golden-orange-dyed room. I tried to tell myself that the place didn't have any interesting points, and failed via my own mind coming up with counter-arguments, before—

"Huh? What's that?" Something in a desk two rows behind me and one to the left caught my eye.

I walked closer, abandoning the thought of leaving so soon. The item on that desk, left there by its owner, appeared to be…

"A notebook?"

Not just a notebook. A pink notebook. With floral patterns on the cover.

Instantly, remembrance flashed through my mind. Earlier that day, I had received a dozen neck blows minimum from the same-colored paper, with the same floral designs. That was it! I had found my enemy, the destroyer of dreamland herself!

I rushed over the remaining distance, grabbing the accursed book in my hands. From the feel alone, I could tell that several pages were torn out.

Yes! I had found her! From what I remembered, the girl sitting at this desk was a girl with pig-tailed strawberry blonde hair. Only, there was so little blonde added that you'd think she had pink hair at first glance. How weird of the studious dream-destroyer to leave something so important here.

I couldn't resist. Even though I knew that the thing probably had academic notes in it, it just somehow gave off the 'reading forbidden' air of… a diary, or something. I had to read it, if only to confirm my suspicions.

I flipped that sucker open, going through page after page of writing without reading it. I wanted to find the most recent entry into this thing. As I page-flipped, however, I couldn't help but catch the occasional word here and there. Among the words that were repeated a lot, but would never be used in any class but sex education, were words like, 'cute', 'sexy', 'easily-flustered', and others that I'd rather not repeat. I also noted with great interest how often the name 'Homura' came up.

"Homura, how far have you fallen…?" I absentmindedly wondered aloud how my best friend had started associating with people who loved to desecrate trips to dreamland.

Then, finally, I arrived at the most recent entry. Marked with today's date, a whole page of words lay before me, each paragraph marked with a different time of day. I began invading this person's privacy at once, with no regard for the sketchy morals of my actions. I started at the time closest after I introduced myself to the class, trying to get right to any parts relevant to me.

8:15: The new transfer student is so cute! She came in as calm as I had ever seen a transfer student, wrote her name, introduced herself, and then gave a dazzling smile to everyone! I swear I saw a fang in her smile, it was so adorable!

Oh, right. I had momentarily forgotten that I was stuck in a room full of people of the same physical gender as me, and had given them all the same smug smile I used to pick up chicks as a guy. Total failure, I told myself afterward, but apparently the smile still worked, somehow. Unfortunately, it still worked on the gender I now matched. Talk about failure of failures…

Then again, I still had the mind of a straight guy. Which meant I liked girls still. So wouldn't that mean things played out in my favor? After all, I don't think I could have stomached a guy hitting on me right then, so maybe this made me a… no. Not going to ponder that one just yet.

Just continue reading… I told myself before things went too far south in my head. I skipped ahead a few, to around lunch time.

12:00: When did Homura and Kyouko become friends?! That redhead just walked over to Homura with zero hesitation at the start of lunch and started talking to her… I've never seen anybody do that after realizing Homura's position in this class, and Kyouko has been looking over in her direction all day long! And then they just started talking as if they were best friends… I need to investigate this further.

Hah! So Pinkie didn't see that one coming, eh? Somehow, I felt like I had outsmarted someone really clever. I quickly shrugged the feeling off and read the next note.

1:00: Kyouko totally almost fell asleep in class! I tore a paper from the back of this journal and wrote a message on it, then folded it and threw it at her to see if it'd wake her up. And man, was that a bull's-eye! I hit her right in the neck! But wow, she reacts fast. That girl shot up like lightning, found the paper and read it, and looked around everywhere behind her in just two seconds! I almost didn't have time to make myself look like I was paying attention to the teacher! In the end, it was a solid victory, though. Madoka one, Kyouko zero.

The rest of the notes were all about the various times she pulled the neck-shot stunt, and my 'lightning-fast' reactions each time. She started calling it kinda cute after the fourth time, and adorable after the seventh. And each time, she put a score of wins for each of us. Mine stayed consistently at zero, whereas hers kept increasing.

By the eighth note about neck-shooting, I decided to just close the book and go home. I had a new plan in mind: this time, I would skip the floundering about the paper and look directly at her the moment it hit my neck. I might suffer some form of whiplash from fast neck movements, but it would be a small price to pay for a score-evening.

As I left the classroom's now-fully orange glow, I heard the sound of quiet footsteps coming from behind me and moving into the room I just exited. It didn't take a genius to figure out that the pink-haired girl – Madoka, was it? She said that name in the diary – had just gone back in to retrieve her diary. I wondered if she had been loud enough for me to hear on purpose, as if wanting me to confront her about things – I got the feeling that she was a lot more clever than she let on.

In the end, I decided not to go for that option and to just head home. This was the last thing on my list of desired actions to take – the first being to get some chow – and I figured that it would be better to let Homura know I was fine. And maybe ask her about a girl named Madoka, because that pinkette sure seemed to know Homura pretty well.

Wait a minute… was this the same 'Madoka' that Sayaka had mentioned two weeks prior, right before she forced me to buy women's clothing of all kinds? She had said something about that name to tease Homura, though my stoic best friend didn't respond with any aggravation – in fact, I was angrier than Homura because it involved me, too.

Well, whatever. I just need to get to Homura's, get some food, and go to bed. That'll make things easier for now.

I chose not to think about the fact that this whole incredibly weird process of going to school would repeat again the next day.


Author's Note

So, what do you think of this? I think I did all right. Not bad, not great. Kyouko almost broke a world record after a year without running practice, which means her speed is OP as shit. I actually did research on average times and world records for the hundred meter dash just to make this chapter a bit more accurate in that department.

Oh, and all five of the main characters have now made appearances! We have the ice-cold-appearing Homura, the tomboyish Sayaka, the cunning Madoka (I know this is OOC as crap, but I wanted the have fun with this slight alteration. Consider it use of my creative license), and the motherly Mami. Oh, and of course, the gender-bent, re-gender-bent, and severely gender-confused Kyouya/ko. I'm gonna have fun with this cast.

Yeah, so shit's gonna go down next chapter. Homura will reveal her past mistakes! Madoka will be uncharacteristically clever! Mami will still be like a 'mommy'! Kyouya/ko will become even more confused about the way his mind and body are so different!

There's your predictions. As for how much of that will really happen next chapter, I'll leave you to speculate.

See you next time!