Equestrian Club and Summer Vacation

Hachiken settles into the equestrian club, rises to a position of responsibility, and spends his summer vacation working on Aki Mikage's family farm rather than going home. The hard physical labor, the dairy routine, and the warmth of the Mikage household teach him the texture of agricultural life from the inside, while his feelings for Aki deepen and his sense of belonging at Ezo grows.

With the initial culture shock behind him, Hachiken begins to find his footing. In the equestrian club he proves diligent and reliable, learning to ride and care for horses, and he is soon entrusted with real responsibility, eventually taking on the role of vice president despite being a first-year newcomer. His competence here is significant: it is the first arena where the farm kids look to him, rather than the other way around, and his organizational instincts, honed by years of competitive schooling, finally find a constructive outlet. The summer vacation sequence is the emotional heart of this stretch. Rather than return to the tense atmosphere of his Sapporo home, Hachiken takes a part-time job at the Mikage family dairy farm. There he experiences the unglamorous, exhausting, ceaseless rhythm of real agricultural work: early milking, equipment maintenance, manure management, and the constant low-margin economic pressure that defines small Japanese farms. He sees firsthand the precariousness beneath the idyllic countryside surface, and he witnesses the quiet strength of families who shoulder it. His relationship with Aki develops gradually and naturally, built on shared work rather than romance-novel drama. The arc also deepens the running theme of vocation: while his classmates already know they want to inherit farms, become veterinarians, or play professional baseball, Hachiken still has no dream of his own, and the summer forces him to confront that absence with growing urgency.