Editing Rapid Fire King:Volume1 Chapter 1 (section)

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The boy in a navy blue gakuran uniform stepped through the arcade’s automatic door and looked behind him.

The view through the glass showed a road packed with cars and the lit-up stores of the shopping district.

There were people on the sidewalks, but…

“She said she was going to the CD shop, so I guess she wouldn’t be coming this way.”

His shoulders drooped a bit in relief as he brushed a hand through his close-cropped hair.

He reached for the headphones he was wearing.

When he removed them from his ears, their sound escaped into the outside world. It was piano music.

He put the headphones in his pocket and faced forward.

His average-height form was reflected in the smoked glass of the automatic door. His somewhat thick eyebrows were reflected too.

The inside pocket he had opened to put away the headphones had the name Takamura stitched into it.

The boy, Takamura, looked at his own reflected face, and then…

“Okay.”

He stepped forward and into the arcade.

The large cabinets set up near the entrance were the arcade’s only 100-yen games: a racing game and a ray gun game.

He walked between those cabinets to head further in.

He arrived in a space of about 15 square meters that contained the most commonly played games.

The white arcade cabinets shoved into that space were arranged with four each on the three walls and three double rows of three placed back to back in the center. That made for a total of 30.

Their images and sounds greeted Takamura as he approached.

He responded by undoing his uniform’s buttons with a tanned hand.

He undid three buttons to reach the wallet in his inner pocket.

He glanced around the arcade with his hand still in his pocket.

…''This is my first time here as a third year, but it honestly hasn’t changed much.

The building had two stories and the first floor was a lively place with all the new games.

Once the first-floor games were not so new anymore, they were moved to the second floor and had their difficulty lowered.

The stairs to the second floor were to the left of the entrance, so the first floor was larger toward the back.

But after he looked around the first floor…

…''I guess there wouldn’t be that many new games after only two or three weeks.

With all that noise around him, he moved in front of the counter embedded in the wall to the left.

A container similar to a small refrigerator sat on that counter.

He opened the container to find heated yellow cloths like you might receive at a restaurant. They were all contained in translucent plastic wrappers.

He grabbed one and wiped his hands off with it.

“…”

Then he glanced at a nearby cabinet.

The white cabinet’s control panel was almost entirely made of plastic. He could see countless white speckles across the clear parts covering its surface.

They were fingerprints.

People would leave fingerprints when they handled plastic with hands filthy with oils and snacks.

Takamura said nothing about the fingerprints.

But he did thoroughly wipe off his own hands, lightly wipe off the cabinet, and toss the yellow cloth into a trashcan reserved for those cloths.

Then he pulled his wallet from his pocket.

He turned toward the change machine on the left side of the counter, checked his watch, and saw it was 8 on the dot.

“Iwata wanted to catch the next train in 20 minutes from now. Will a single game be enough to kill that time?”

While surrounded by the sounds of the arcade, he opened his wallet and found only a single 100-yen coin.

He sighed.

…''Well, I couldn’t play all that much anyway.

He silently inserted the coin into the change machine.

It immediately spat out two 50-yen coins.

While he was removing those coins, another boy in a school uniform pushed in from the side and inserted a 100-yen coin.

The other boy was not even looking at him, but that happened a lot. Takamura knew it was normal here.

So he did not let it bother him.

He put away his wallet and walked to the cabinets by the wall with his bag and his two coins in hand.

The north and east walls of the first floor were taken up by fighting games.

The west wall had the table games like mahjong.

The central section had a total of 18 machines arranged in three double rows of three lined up back to back.

The six machines bordering the south were competitive fighting games and the six bordering the north were action games.

The remaining six in the center were shoot ‘em up games.

Takamura’s preferred games were the ones on the east wall: the fighting games.