Ordinary

"So why don't you like the Brand?" Kaze asked along the way, effortlessly striding through the light of the scorching sun.

"Well," Runa huffed, her slender legs barely keeping pace. "First, the design was pretty much ripped off of the VR disaster headsets, so they're fairly unstable. Second," She ran up ahead to get a clear look at Kaze's face. "It overheats over time so much that people have been complaining about developing slight lines on their faces."

Runa once again scanned his face, noting his distinctively beautiful amber-like light brown irises. I guess I never got over the habit of checking out people's eyes; after all...

"Yours in particular are very visible." The VR veteran's features widened in amazement. "How much do you use that thing?"

Kaze had never really considered or cared about such a side effect. However, now that Runa'd mentioned it, he started feeling around the cheeks and forehead with his left hand. Sure enough, right where the cheeks met with the slight bags under his eyes and in the middle of his forehead were bumps, barely noticeable to the touch. Semi-permanent marks like those you'd get from wearing a diving mask for too long.

"Don't worry about it." Runa comforted him teasingly and tenderly. "They're just burn marks from the overheating. They'll probably go away after a while once you switch to the Halo."

Kaze took a slow breath, looking at the road full of busy cars. "I already told you, I can't afford to switch even if I want to, so no point telling me about it. I know you're also gonna mention the performance difference. I know the Halo makes it all smoother, and that it's safer, and that the input feels much more accurate. I know."

Noticing the underlying frustration of the words, Runa backed down for a time to think about what she wanted to say.

The boy hung his head, hands still in his pockets. "...Sorry." The words barely escaped his mouth. "I appreciate the thought, though."

 "No-no, that's alright. I mean, what's surprising is how good you are despite the performance issues of the Brand. It often delays your inputs and randomly makes the world stutter, right? I don't quite know how it works... Either way, I'd be very mad if my game kept freezing once in a while for an entire day."

"Yeah, it does occasionally lag out in PDP." Kaze jumped straight to the answer, "Essentially, it can't keep up with the stream of information from the current generation of games, thus, the packet loss occasionally causes stuttering. It's like if your computer's graphics card or processor was outdated."

"Oh?" Runa wowed, "I guess this is what you're studying at Tokyo University, after all."

Her converser chuckled to himself. "Ryuusei told you that?"

"Of course," She smiled curiously. "What was it exactly, some kind of engineering?"

"Electrical and electronics engineering." Kaze's step quickened, and his voice grew more rough. "Can we stop talking about this now? You need to set up your controller. We're almost there."

I'd heard that he was a repeating first-year... I wonder why. Runa pondered, He seems to be pretty dedicated to go out running on a summer day. Doesn't strike me as one to get lost in gaming and ignore his studies...

"Oh yeah, I wanted to ask," She addressed the calm and quiet boy, "Kaze, why didn't you just jump away from the last attack during our Mythril Golem fight?"

The boy barely furrowed his brows in response. "That's been bothering you for that long?"

"Well, I was just curious..." Runa defended herself.