Volume 2 - Top-Tier Character Ayanokōji-kun [DISCONTINUED] [READ THE REVISION]

Chapter 39 - Sickly Searching For A Secret Second

The farmer continued to create more scarecrows, each one standing tall and proud in the field, protecting the crops with their outstretched arms.

But as the number of scarecrows grew, something strange began to happen.

The crows that had once been scared away by the single scarecrow now seemed to be more attracted to the field.

They descended in flocks, pecking at the crops and tearing the scarecrows apart.

The farmer was confused and frustrated. He had thought that more scarecrows would mean better protection for his crops, but it seemed to have the opposite effect.

It wasn't until he remembered the original scarecrow, with its tattered clothes and worn-out body, that he realized what he had been missing.

Something crucial to every single scarecrow.

The farmer had been so focused on the quantity of scarecrows that he had forgotten why he was growing his crops in the first place.

And so, he set to work repairing the original scarecrow, giving it the attention and care it deserved.

When that scarecrow died again, the cycle repeated itself.

More scarecrows were created.

The original one was repaired.

Again and again and again.

Until the farmer themselves become part of the soil.

THE END

Written by Matsuo Tatsuya

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The piggyback race came next. It was like the 1200-meter relay race in that it was based on speed. However, that wasn't all there was to it. You also needed to be mindful of the other person with you. It didn't matter if you wished for the impossible—you couldn't compete in a piggyback race with just one person. If you somehow fell onto the ground, or the person you were carrying on your back lost their grip, you'd be penalized. Thus, you couldn't rush; you had to be careful and pay attention to your partner to win. Slow and steady won the race.

If you pondered the technicalities of a piggyback ride, the issue of weight distribution would inevitably come up.

Since dead weight was a lot heavier than if someone was conscious, it was much easier to carry someone who was awake. However, unconscious people didn't weigh more than conscious people—it was just that they couldn't help you carry them, not even a little bit, and carrying a person could be really cumbersome. When you gave a conscious person a piggyback ride, you'd be carrying their whole weight and they would weigh just as much as if they were unconscious, but they would make it easy for you to carry them and distribute their weight across parts of your body that were good at carrying weight such as your hips, shoulders and back rather than hanging limply in your arms.

But weight distribution mattered less the more the weight of each partner differed.

For example, let's say you wanted to drag a tiger across the ground. 

Assuming that you were always on a perfectly level surface, the average human could pull about thirty percent of their own body weight, but that percentage didn't refer to how heavy the pulled object was—it was about how hard you could pull. Because pulling at a better angle or on a smooth surface made the task considerably easier. It wasn't hard to imagine that dragging a sled across grass was easier than dragging a body on rough ground such as pavement. The force required to drag an object was the product of the coefficient of friction, mass and the acceleration of gravity. A realistic weight for a tiger would be about 170 kilograms, and the acceleration of gravity didn't require further elaboration. The coefficient of friction was much more difficult. For demonstrative purposes, you could set it at .36, which was the static coefficient for rubber on grass.