On the day of the Autumn Festival, at seven in the morning, Advanced Nurturing High School's campus awoke in the morning light. Two rows of white tents had already been raised on the field, and dew still clung to the tables and chairs in the club exhibition area. The first floor of the Shopping Center had been converted into an indoor stall area, with each class's signs gleaming freshly beneath the fluorescent lights. The ivy on the Old School Building's exterior walls had turned red at just the right time. Before dawn, Sakura Airi had set up her tripod and taken a series of close-ups of red leaves in the morning mist. In her lens, dewdrops held the reflection of the entire Old School Building.
The joint stall run by Class D and Class C was set beside the main road between the field and the Shopping Center, in a prime location. Sudo Ken and Ishizaki Daichi had gotten up before dawn to put up the tent. As they crouched beneath a folding table to tighten the final screw, the back of Sudo's head bumped into the spirit level Ishizaki was holding. Ishizaki straightened the crooked level and pointed at the trajectory correction chart for Class C's shooting stall on the tabletop. Rubbing the back of his head, Sudo casually taped the chart to a tent pole, then pinned up the hand-drawn target-position guide route he had made the night before beside it. The two sheets sat side by side on the pole, one in messy handwriting and the other neat, covering the same raw data from last semester's Equipment Room shoving incident records.
Karuizawa Kei made final adjustments to the arrangement of desserts at the display counter. Her new creation, which she had stayed up late testing the previous