Yuto had run with all his strength straight toward his school. Although he almost tripped a couple of times and bumped into a few people along the way, he managed to arrive early, without any real delay.
Well, except that he was panting and sweating from his forehead, the sweat slowly running down his neck and finally reaching his gakuran. Even though Yuto felt like he could keep running, his body did not seem to agree with his feelings, especially with the constant tingling in his muscles.
He stayed for a moment right at the entrance, catching his breath while leaning on his knees.
Yuto admired Hath Secondary for a moment, a three-story rectangular building of earthy yellow with many windows.
The brick walls, aged and partly overtaken by nature, were covered with vines crawling through its cracks, wrapping around all the school buildings of the institution.
Yuto could only sigh in relief that he belonged to Class 3-C. Although he still had to go up to the third floor, fortunately C was right at the top of the stairs, unlike A, which required walking down a hallway all the way to the back.
Once he had recovered his breath, Yuto began to notice some unsettling details: there were no students, no teachers, no one at all. The school was deserted.
Yuto began to wonder what had happened. Why was no one here? Maybe there had been an announcement that classes were canceled because of an intense snowstorm?
He looked up at the sky for a few moments. It was certainly cloudy and a bit darker than usual, but that could only be attributed to autumn.
Yuto took out his phone to check messages, but quickly put it away again, faster than he had taken it out, remembering at the last moment the incident on the train.
He had no choice but to wait to see if another student or teacher would arrive so he could find out what was going on.
And so he stood there for about fifteen minutes, waiting for someone to come.
No one came.
Meanwhile, Yuto kept making theories and discarding them in quick succession.
Maybe the power went out? No, that couldn't be, he had seen all the streetlamps on the way here.
Maybe today was a holiday? Autumn festivities… some kind of dance… celebration… maybe a solstice… Wait, what day is it today?
With that thought, a memory suddenly appeared in his head.
His mother catching him during one of his attempted escapes and saying, "I see you forgot that today is Saturday, right?"
"…today is Saturday."
"…Saturday."
Yuto held his head as the realization hit him, and with tears in his eyes, whispered to himself, "Today is Sunday… it's Sunday… it's Sunday," repeating it constantly, trying to process the reality that had suddenly appeared before his eyes.
He stayed like that for a couple of minutes until he came back to his senses, only able to sigh at his failed attempts to not start the day off badly.
Trying to refocus his mind, he thought about what he should do with the whole day ahead. He decided between several things, including going to take care of his phone problem. Fortunately, even though he himself no longer had money, his parents had left some savings for cases like this.
When he had no money but needed or wanted something, he could use that money, but he would have to pay it back later, either by doing heavy chores at home or with some part-time job during vacation.
He thought for a moment about going to some relatives on his father's side, but he discarded the idea. They were more engineers and mechanics than technicians or programmers. Besides, his mother did not like that side of the family very much, even though they were motivated, they were also a bit rigid.
So Yuto decided to go to the Okatao Commercial District to see if they could repair his phone, heading back to the train station.
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After half an hour on the train, Yuto left the station and made his way to the commercial district. There he saw many shops of all kinds: food, tools, household goods, and many other things one might not even imagine.
Though they all shared one thing in common: in one way or another, they had some reference to a hero promoting their product.
Some that Yuto noticed included a meat and charcoal store in the food section, which had a life-size figure of Endeavor, the flame hero, turned backward with a speech bubble saying:
"This charcoal really can produce flames" in the most striking and oversized letters possible. But Yuto noticed, at the very edge of the speech bubble, in the smallest possible font:
"…if it weren't charcoal, it wouldn't produce flames."
At that, Yuto could only roll his eyes, wondering if Endeavor had some kind of strange sense of humor, or if the store had simply adapted some random comment from him to gain publicity.
Yuto did not have the best impression of Endeavor. He was a hero with flames all over his body, especially on his face, which honestly did not give the best impression of safety and was even a little scary.
Yuto once wondered if Endeavor liked the smell of burning, considering he had his mustache constantly on fire.
As Yuto drifted into random thoughts about heroes, he kept searching for an electronics store, though at this point he was just wandering around the commercial district.
He stopped for a moment to look at a park beside the district. It seemed that Yuto had unintentionally walked past the area and stepped out of it.
He saw a large crowd of people observing something. Naturally, Yuto knew it was because of a specific fist mark donated to charity by All Might, to support the construction of the park and some schools in Japan.
There were just as many tourists with their cameras as there were regular people leaving money beside the monument or simply showing respect. Yuto remembered going with his family when the monument was unveiled.
The streets around the park had been filled with people for the occasion, all wanting the chance to see All Might in person.
Unfortunately, his family had not been able to make it inside the park itself, but they had been in the surrounding streets.
Fortunately, the government had anticipated the huge crowd that would gather, so they set up several screens around to broadcast the event.
Yuto was lost in thought remembering that scene, until he finally turned his gaze away, having spotted at last an electronics store on the very edge of the district, right next to the park. So he headed that way.
It was a two-story cube-shaped building painted completely black, with neon lights running across most of the facade in symmetrical lines from one side to the other. In some areas, there were neon signs related to technology, from phones and computers to even a robotic hand "painting" a blank canvas, which in reality was a screen constantly changing what it drew.
Yuto entered and saw shelves full of all kinds of tech, including game consoles and some kind of robot dancing in the center, contained by a thin transparent plastic barrier.
Yuto was dazzled for a moment by the display, but he knew that was not what he had come for. He had come for his phone. So he went up to an employee and asked:
"Excuse me, do you have repair services here?" …
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