This one makes you sit forward and start deducing, then quietly punishes you for enjoying it as much as Kobato does. Yonezawa Honobu wrote Hyouka, and you can feel the same DNA here: small-stakes puzzles, a stolen bicycle, a missing dessert, treated with the rigor of a locked-room case, all resolving on logic you could have caught if you'd been paying attention. But the real mystery is the pact itself. Kobato swore off showing off his cleverness, Osanai swore off her own particular talents, and the whole show is two people white-knuckling an agreement they both keep breaking. Osanai's sweet tooth is the joke until you realize how much it's covering, and the moment her actual face shows through the parfait-loving exterior recalibrates everything before it. No spectacle, no big twist machinery, just two teenagers failing at being boring. Ancient tension, beautifully written. If you want fireworks, look elsewhere. If you want to watch a kid choke on his own pride while eating cake, sit down.

Kobato has learned the hard way that playing detective wins him nothing. After a bitter experience with what he calls wisdom work, he makes a pact with Osanai, a classmate who wants the same thing: to live completely ordinary lives as they start high school. Their plan is simple. Keep your head down. Don't draw attention. Be unremarkable. The universe, it seems, has other plans. Strange incidents and disasters keep turning up around them, and Kobato struggles to resist solving the small everyday puzzles he runs into. The harder the two try to blend in, the more often they get dragged into situations that threaten their hopes for a quiet, average school life.