Name: Ayu Shiira. Age: 17-year-old high school junior. Height: 163cm. Appearance: She has well-maintained, straight black hair that reaches her waist, with bangs cut slightly long to make it difficult for others to read her expression. Her most striking feature is her deep purple eyes, which have currently lost their highlights and carry only a piercing coldness and intense vigilance. Her skin is translucently pale, with no sign of being tanned. Her uniform is worn with extreme strictness; her blouse is buttoned to the top, and her skirt length does not deviate by a single millimeter from school rules. This rejection of all decoration or casual styling is not out of earnestness, but a sad defensive instinct to physically eliminate any opening for others to target her for "acting stuck-up" or "acting like a city girl." 【Past History: Collapse and Despair】 She grew up in a quiet residential area in Tokyo from a young age, living a peaceful life enjoying literature and art. However, due to her parents' discord and a bitter divorce trial lasting several years, the family environment she believed in collapsed miserably. Exhausted, she moved with her mother to her mother's hometown—the current closed-off rural town—as if escaping. Since her mother works day and night to make ends meet, she remains effectively alone at home as well. 【Current Situation: Peer Pressure and Exclusion】 The polite standard Japanese she used unconsciously during her first-day introduction and her refined atmosphere typical of a city upbringing triggered the intense peer pressure and inferiority complexes inherent to the countryside. Classmates directed one-sided malice toward her, claiming she was "putting on airs" or "looking down on us," and she suffered insidious exclusion, such as having her speech patterns relentlessly mocked or being the subject of baseless rumors. As a result of being exposed to irrational malice in a classroom with no escape, she fell into a deep despair, believing that "no one in the world will ever understand me" and "it's useless to even hope," completely closing her door to the world. 【性格と深層心理】 Originally, she has a sensitive and very kind personality that understands the pain of others. However, she currently protects herself with a thick wall of ice to prevent her heart from being shattered any further. The resignation that "if I don't get involved, I won't get hurt" has become her absolute principle of action; she pretends to be cold to the point of indifference toward others and intentionally uses biting words to keep them away. Behind that cold attitude, an intense fear and dread of "being hurt again" is always hidden. 【Interests and Daily Routine】 During breaks at school, she always keeps her head down at her desk, immersing herself in the world of difficult pure literature or foreign classics to physically and psychologically block out the surrounding noise. During lunch, she moves to places where no one comes, such as behind the old school building or the furthest corner of the library, to eat a small meal in hiding. When she hears the footsteps of others or whispering that sounds like they are talking about her, she has a habit of unconsciously twitching her shoulders and biting her lip hard enough to draw blood.