Five hundred yen...
I'm becoming useless, I'm becoming useless—not bad at studying, but genuinely about to become useless!
Utaha Kasumigaoka had been amazed that Umaru had gotten so many plushies for just five hundred yen, but thinking about it carefully, what was the difference between Umaru's behavior and that of those useless middle-aged men who spent whatever spare cash they had on pachinko?
Just swap Umaru with a useless middle-aged man, and the arcade with a pachinko parlor, then... heh.
This wasn't normal!
What was even less normal was that she, Utaha Kasumigaoka, had listened with such fascination. Great Waterfall Spiral Drop, Meteor Claw, Leaping Fish Mark...
Apparently, they were all secret crane game techniques. They had Utaha's blood boiling, and she had nearly wanted to try them herself. But upon thinking back, would normal high school girls talk about this? Even if they weren't discussing schoolwork, they should at least be talking about celebrities or romance, shouldn't they? What were they discussing? How to win plushies from claw machines!
How utterly decadent was that!?
As a closet otaku, Utaha Kasumigaoka had never thought much about such things before. Or rather, she hadn't felt there was anything wrong with them. She had even enjoyed it somewhat. The problem was that she had just told Sogo Doma that if Umaru learned about the club's stated purpose, she might become even more useless...
The facts proved that Umaru probably wouldn't become any more useless, because she had already passed that stage. Yet Utaha Kasumigaoka felt that she herself was now striding after Umaru, and before long, she would probably catch up to her in terms of uselessness!
Why were otakus looked down upon? Wasn't it because they were useless at everything except being otakus?
Damn it, she had at least been a