Adding Friends Can Make Me Stronger - Chapter 54

Within the popular VRMMORPG «New Genesis», there was a ranker by the name of Arthur Holmes, commonly known by his in-game alias «Merlin».

Toradora!’s story begins with the male protagonist Ryuji Takasu who is frustrated at trying to look his best as he enters his second year of high school. Despite his gentle personality, his eyes make him look like an intimidating delinquent so he is utterly hopeless about his chances of getting a girlfriend anytime soon, and does not have many close friends either. After being greeted by his hungover mother in the morning, Ryuji goes to school and is happy to find that he gets to be in the same class as his best friend Yusaku Kitamura and crush Minori Kushieda. However, it is then that he unexpectedly knocks into “the school’s most dangerous animal of the highest risk level” — Taiga Aisaka — who just happens to also be in his class, and is a good friend of Minori.

Taiga has a negative attitude towards others and will not hesitate to snap at people. After meeting Ryuji, she takes an instant dislike of him. Taiga comes from a rich family, though she moved out to live on her own due to family issues, and by coincidence is now living in an apartment next door to Ryuji. After Ryuji discovers that Taiga has a crush on Yusaku, and Taiga finds out about Ryuji’s affections towards Minori, Ryuji suggests that they cooperate so they can win the object of their affections. Ryuji says he will do anything to get closer to Minori, which Taiga exploits, making Ryuji her personal servant, and getting him to do household chores like cooking and cleaning for her. Taiga spends a lot of her time over at his house, so much so that she could almost be considered a member of his family. Since Ryuji spends a lot of time with Taiga, he is opened up to her world and to a side of her that most people do not see. The two also attempt to help each other in order to improve how people view them. Unknown to them, however, people they know from school start to become curious about their strange relationship together and rumors begin to spread about them.

I was the one who boosted your rank. Yet you stabbed me in the back? Fine. Goodbye. I’m taking it back. You’re finished now. Thanks to you, I now have an abundance of skill points for a prosperous hunter life. But… after spending some of those points, the S-Rank is starting to get obsessed with me…?

Senior high school student Dugu Hong was logical autistic and had a very high IQ. Despite his impressive IQ, he was never taken seriously by his teachers or schoolmates. While playing a recently released eastern Wuxia online game called Jiang Hu, three vicious classmates trapped Dugu into a mountain cave in the game with no hope of escape unless he deleted his account and re-register it. Not succumbing to their demands, Dugu decided to stay in the cave and explore the game system, which benefited him greatly. His persistence to obtain massive internal strength aided him in finding a superior way to improve himself, and thus opened the function of inner observation of the main and collateral channels. Meanwhile, in the real world, he discovered he had supernatural powers when he tried to save the girl he secretly loved who had caught the eye of a gangster on the suburban railway.