Taisho Sweet Shop Mystery

They were fast friends

Found something interesting. This happens in volume 6 while Nukkun is training for his race with Lemon. He called Ayano to talk about the situation.

After being freed from the training, I hobbled like a newborn Thomson's gazelle, taking about 15 minutes on foot from the stadium to a venerable Japanese sweet shop named Taisho.

The shop's exterior, while historic, exuded a sense of cleanliness.

Mitarashi dango is their specialty, and at the storefront, a dango grill machine is continuously turning.

This machine dips the dango in sauce twice while it completes one rotation, creating a fragrant and delicious flavor. It’s hard to describe the tastiness with words.

A tall guy came out of the shop as I watched the machine through the glass.

Tsuwabuki High School first-year student, Mitsuki Ayano. He’s my secret meeting partner.

Nukumizu is standing outside the sweet shop, watching the dango dipping machine through the window, when Ayano comes out. We know this shop is close to Nukkun's house. Thanks to bad training with Anna, he's moving even slower than before. It took him only 15 to slowly hobble there, from the stadium, which is also close to his house. The shop, and its dango machine have been there for many years, which means Nukkun watched that exact same machine as a kid.

After talking for a bit Ayano says:

"...This shop. Remon brought me here several times when we were in elementary school."

Like a substitute for a candy store, huh? Ah, but-

"You both went to Aoki, right? Isn't this area outside of your school district?"

“Yeah, we crossed the district lines.”

Ayano laughed.

Well this is a small mystery, not too hard to solve. Why would Lemon break the rules and leave her school district to come stand outside this shop? Ayano doesn't have to guess, of course, he already knows. And thanks to the question Nukkun just asked about leaving the Aoki school district, Ayano now knows that Nukkun doesn't remember.

"She only invited me when she had a fight with a friend or got scolded by her parents. Eating dango and staring at this machine, she would tell me all kinds of stories that I couldn’t understand."

From what Ayano just said, we know he was her second choice, and only when she had a fight with her friend. Do you need more than one guess to realize who it was? How about the clueless guy who lives in the neighborhood, who even today is staring at that same dango machine?

While not conclusive, this is a strong indication that Nukkun and Lemon were childhood friends, and during elementary school, Lemon considered Nukkun a closer friend than Ayano was.

If I had to guess, at some point they had a really big fight, and never made up, so they stopped seeing each other.

By the time they met up again in Momozono middle school, Ayano was Lemon's favorite, and Nukkun has no memory of their meeting before. Neither does Lemon. Yet something unconscious ties them together. Something must have happened. Still, Nukkun will always come running when Lemon calls, and Lemon says "it has to be Nukkun".

If this is true about them, it is kinda sad. It also means that long before we met the Losing Heroines, Nukumizu was a Losing Hero.