As the room was already full with kids pretending to be sick from food poisoning, the nurse had called his mother and sent Vindy home, not because he was injured but because he was visibly traumatised. While the nurse waited to have another useless meeting with his teacher to find a way to deal with the bullying without upsetting rich parents, Vindy walked through the grass edged pathway to the station, expertly avoiding dog excrement while swiping through gaming jobs. He looked over his shoulder, still expecting the bully to be grinning at him, telling him he was a nobody, that he couldn’t do anything, that he never would.
Vindy had thought about summoning the flames of Kusanagi and landing a blow so hard into the bully’s body that “gah!” was all that could be heard as that troublesome teenager was sent into the sun. In reality, the bully picked him up easily and span him around onto his head.
And now the tears were brimming, but he remembered the hero from the manga who cried and cried and yet fought with all his might. Vindy grit his teeth, and kept going through the job ads. They kept asking for experience, or needed the applicant to have a driving licence.
One post read “no experience necessary, but having played a lot of games is a must!”
Having wiped his face (and nose) with his sleeve, he hopped onto a train, in the opposite direction from home, making his merry way onwards to a far more interesting future, rather than laying comfortably immobile, staring at a white ceiling.