Chapter 2 - Ami's First Love

First printed in RunRun magazine and later gathered into Volume 13, this chapter is the middle installment of the three Exam Battle stories and was adapted into an animated short that opened for the Sailor Moon SuperS movie in theaters. The plot follows Ami as she fixates on an unseen rival, Mercurius, throwing herself into beating him before eventually mistaking an attacking spirit for that rival and destroying it with Mercury Aqua Mirage.

After a love letter turns up in her locker and leaves her breaking out in itchy hives, Ami discovers that a student going by the pen name Mercurius keeps matching her for the top exam score. Determined to pull ahead, she skips outings, piles on extra practice tests, and grows so worn down that her friends assume she is either in love or working herself into the ground. When Minako teases her about romance and asks her ideal type, Ami names Einstein, deflating everyone, though the remark only convinces the group that they ought to track Mercurius down. Usagi turns to Umino, who admits he actually knows the mystery student.

Studying at a prep school, Ami keeps nodding off and decides Mercurius must be sabotaging her, unaware that a genius loci named Bonnon has awoken there, offended that humans have soiled her sacred ground. Meanwhile Usagi and the others trail Umino to that same school and come face to face with Mercurius, leaving them stunned.

Dizzy and feverish the following day, Ami faints and is sent to rest in the infirmary, where Bonnon pelts her with love letters that paralyze her and begin draining her intellect. Tearing the paper from her face, Ami mistakes the spirit for Mercurius, transforms into Sailor Mercury, and wipes her out with Mercury Aqua Mirage, her blurred sight leaving her convinced the rival must be wonderful. Later she overhears Usagi and Minako discussing the boy and begs to know more; they show her a poster of an idol she adores for resembling a young Einstein, while privately admitting to the reader that the real Mercurius is a bespectacled nerd much like Umino, his alias simply the syllables of his name, Kurume Suri, reversed. The next results arrive, and Ami fumes that Mercurius has tied her once more. The chapter debuts both Kurume Suri and Bonnon.