Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 3 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: A New Form Is Revealed

A truly stupendous revelation struck me—something so obvious, I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to realize it. In the half year since our powers had awakened, I’d spent each and every day thinking about them, but somehow, this application had completely slipped my mind.

And I don’t just mean I thought about Dark and Dark. I took all of our powers into consideration, spending sleepless night after sleepless night pondering all of their myriad ramifications...so how? How could this have escaped me for so long? How could the truly fearsome potential slumbering within World Create’s capabilities have sailed so far over my head?

“Today...I have come to realize what a sad and ignorant creature I truly am,” I admitted to my four clubmates. I stood before them in our club room, shoulders slumped with crestfallen resignation.

As I fell silent, the sheer weight of my regret grinding away at my very soul, Tomoyo piped up with a question. “What on earth are you talking about, Andou?”

“Tomoyo...I am a fool. I thought that I’d been facing our powers with more sincerity and dedication than anyone, but in the end, I was just telling myself that. It was self-complacency and nothing more.”

“Wh-What does that mean...? Seriously, what’s wrong with you?”

“Did you realize something about our powers?” asked Sayumi, her tone grave.

I nodded. “I’ve never felt my own stupidity so keenly. Dammit! How?! How did it take me this long to realize?! If only I’d noticed sooner...”

I clenched my fist, slamming it down on the table. Chifuyu, who was sitting nearby with Squirrely clutched in her arms, looked up at me with concern written all over her face.

“Andou...?”

“Chifuyu...I’m so sorry. If only I’d noticed sooner—if only I’d taken more care to consider World Create’s terrible potential...”

“Is this about me?”

“Yes. Yes, it’s about you, Chifuyu,” I replied with a grave nod.

“W-Well, what is it?!” shouted Tomoyo, who looked like she was well on her way to a total panic. “Quit dragging this out and just say it, already!”

“Very well... It’s only a matter of time before one of you realizes it, anyway. Somebody has to say it, and if one of us has to dirty their hands...it might as well be me.”

Tomoyo gulped, and the rest of the club looked just as nervously apprehensive.

“Today, I realized...” I began, then paused for dramatic effect.

“With Chifuyu’s power on our side, we can cosplay as literally anything we want to, right?”

Her power could create anything. That meant she could create whatever clothes and weapons we wanted! Gaaah, how did it take me this long to realize?!

“You spent all that time getting us prepped for something super serious, and that’s it?!” roared Tomoyo, tearing the frigid silence that had fallen over the club room to pieces.

“What’re you talking about, Tomoyo?! Do you have any idea how much of today I spent regretting the fact that I didn’t come up with this sooner?”

“No, and I don’t care!”

Meanwhile, in the background, Hatoko was breathing a sigh of relief, and Sayumi was shaking her head.

“Oh, is that all? Phew! Juu was acting so serious, I thought something really bad had happened!”

“I think it’s better to assume on principle that if Andou sounds serious, he’s about to say something unbelievably stupid.”

I did my best to not let them break my groove and went back to gleefully expounding upon my epiphany. “You remember how Chifuyu made us a bunch of tennis outfits the other day, right? That’s what made me finally put the pieces together! If she can do that, then of course she could make costumes too!”

“That is technically true,” admitted Tomoyo. “Making that sort of thing would be easy for her.”

“Though strictly speaking, what I’m picturing isn’t quite the same thing as cosplay. I’m not looking to get her to make clothes to wear for fun—I’ve been putting some serious thought into a combat-ready outfit to wear when we’re finally dragged into a serious battle!”

“I really don’t care what sort of thought you’ve been putting into this. Anyway, you can cosplay all you want, but I’m out.”

“Why?”

“‘Why’? C-Cause it’s embarrassing, duh,” stammered Tomoyo, her face beet-red. That, of course, wasn’t even close to enough to convince me to back down.

“Hmph! You know, people only feel shame when they know deep down that they have something to be ashamed of!” I, meanwhile, have a heart that’s completely unblemished by such impurities! Day after day, I blaze my own trail at full blast, and nothing can stop me!

“So, anyway—Chifuyu!” I turned to the girl who stood at the center of this whole conversation. “Make me Cloud’s sword from FFVII!”

“How is that anything other than straight-up cosplay?!” snapped Tomoyo, but I couldn’t even hear her anymore.

“And I don’t mean the Buster Sword—I’m talking about the sword from Advent Children! The one that splits up into a bunch of smaller swords!”

“Hey! Dammit, Andou, listen to me!”

“Shut up and stay out of this, Tomoyo! I know you, and I know that you understand perfectly well just how stupidly cool that sword is! I just lent you the Complete edition on Blu-ray, didn’t I?!”

“O-Okay, I’ll admit, that sword is ridiculously cool... And the part where he did an Omnislash with it did give me goose bumps...”

“Please, Chifuyu, do it! Bring that nameless blade into reality!”

I poured my everything into my request...but the Empress of Genesis just shook her head.

“B-But, why?! Why not, Chifuyu?! Are you saying that I’m not worthy of wielding it yet?!”

“Playing with knives is bad, so no.”

“Ugh!” I immediately crumbled in the face of her eminently respectable opinion. Like, literally, to my knees. At the point that your request leads to an elementary schooler scolding you, there’s really no saving it.

Evidently, blades and guns were featured on Chifuyu’s internal list of banned goods. You might recall that this is the same girl who created an impossibly vast array of weaponry during her mock battle with Hatoko, but those were the sort of practice weapons you’d use in training. The guns she’d made back then fired rubber bullets, and the bladed weaponry was all blunt.

I gave it a little more thought. “Yeah, okay. You’re right, Chifuyu. We probably shouldn’t be getting our hands on actual weapons like it’s nothing.” Cloud’s sword aside, I was also planning on having her make the Sakabatou Shinuchi and Zabimaru’s Shikai form, but those would have to go on ice as well.

Chifuyu could probably make blunted versions of them easily enough, but that would completely defeat the purpose. Swords are cool because they’re dangerous, and if they can’t cut, there’s no point anymore. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t have a small mountain of homemade replica weapons piled up in my room, of course, but it just felt sort of wrong to have Chifuyu go out of her way to make them if they weren’t even gonna be real.

“All right, if weapons are off the table...” What else could I have her make? I’ve already got like three sets of bandages in my bag, so no point asking for more of those, and I just got myself a new pair of fingerless gloves the other day... Ah, of course! “An eyepatch! Chifuyu, make me an eyepatch!”

“Oh, great. Right back into cliché chuuni territory,” sighed Tomoyo with a roll of her eyes.

Hey, don’t call it cliché! You can’t just override the appeal of eyepatches with a single word and call it a day, especially when it’s that word! Eyepatches grant the wearer an unbalanced aesthetic that just screams corruption! They give your appearance a mysterious edge that implies hidden powers, a past shrouded in secrecy, wounds that will never heal, and so on! They’re shadowy and ominous in so many different ways! Eyepatches: hella cool!

While I took a moment to sit back and reflect upon the intoxicating awesomeness of eyepatches, Chifuyu cocked her head.

“What kind?”

“A cool one!”

“The ones you get at the doctor’s? Or the ones pirates wear?”

Wait, of course! She’s right! Eyepatches are indeed split up into two major categories: black and white!

White eyepatches are the ones you get at the hospital. They’re light, breathable, and are clearly designed with medical purposes in mind. The black ones, on the other hand, are the ones that old-school pirates used to wear. In the modern era, they’re pretty much exclusively used for cosplay purposes. Some really fancy ones are made of leather, some have the string part replaced with a belt, some have silver designs inlaid into them—there are all sorts of varieties, really. There are other types of eyepatches, of course, but those two varieties account for the majority you’ll see on a day-to-day basis.

The question was, though: which type did I want? Gotta go with black, right? Like, if I’m gonna have Chifuyu make something for me, shouldn’t I go all out and get the most stylish one possible? But on the other hand, white has its own appeal too... Should I lean into how they’re so uncool that they wrap all the way around and become cool again?

“Mngggh...” I groaned, caught in a conundrum the likes of which I’d never experienced before. It wasn’t long before a flash of inspiration struck me, though. “I want both!”

Chifuyu nodded, then invoked World Create. Two eyepatches instantly appeared on the table: one black, and one white. I, of course, grabbed them and equipped them both at the same time, covering both eyes!

Wham! Cool factor: massively enhanced! And twice over, at that! “If you chase after two rabbits, you’ll catch neither”? Maybe for lesser mortals, sure, but I’m a man who kicks petty little truisms like that to the curb, right along with “common sense” and “objective reality”!

I turned to face my clubmates, eager to reveal the sealed state of my accursed eyes and revel in their reactions. That’s when it hit me.

“Wait a minute! I can’t see!”

“Of course you can’t!” replied all of my clubmates in unison.

“C-Curses... Who would’ve thought that wearing two eyepatches would render you blind...?”

“Who would’ve thought you’d extend your dual-wielding obsession to eyepatches, of all things... There really are no limits to your stupidity,” sighed Sayumi, sounding as wholeheartedly exasperated as I’d ever heard her. “Andou, I’d like you to take a moment to calm down. You’re irritating enough on a day-to-day basis, but today’s antics are reaching new heights of obnoxiousness.”

That one kind of hurt, honestly, and I hung my head with shame. I also took off the eyepatches. Couldn’t exactly keep myself blindfolded forever.

“That must be so much fun,” Hatoko suddenly mumbled. “It’s not fair if Juu’s the only one who gets to dress up! I wanna wear all sorts of nice clothes too.”

“Wait a second, Hatoko,” I interjected. “I’m not ‘dressing up’ here! This isn’t a game! It’s a simulation, and I’m preparing my combat form in anticipation of the holy war that’s soon to come!”

“Hey, just curious: are you under the impression that anything make-believe-adjacent sounds cool if you call it a ‘simulation’?” asked Tomoyo.

I twitched. Answering that question would be all sorts of inconvenient, so I decided to ignore it instead. “Anyway, that’s a fair point, Hatoko. I don’t wanna monopolize Chifuyu’s power or anything, so we might as well all dress up in whatever outfits we want to!”

“Hey! Don’t go dragging me into this!” snapped Tomoyo. “And for that matter, stop using Chifuyu like she’s some sort of—”

“It’s fine,” Chifuyu blithely interjected, cutting off Tomoyo’s harsh (but, frankly, reasonable) criticism. “It sounds a little fun.”

“Oh...? Well, if you don’t mind, knock yourself out, I guess,” muttered Tomoyo. She still didn’t sound totally satisfied.

Sayumi, on the other hand, heaved a weary sigh. “Well, it would seem the matter’s been decided by majority rule. I can’t say I’m especially enthusiastic, but so it goes.”

And indeed, so it went! The literary club’s very first cospl— Ah, no, scratch that. The literary club’s very first combat form preparedness seminar began!

It was pretty obvious that if we just wore whatever outfits each of us chose for ourselves, the less self-assertive among us—namely, Tomoyo and Sayumi—would end up picking ones that were thoroughly benign and boring. As such, we ended up deciding that we’d choose our outfits by drawing lots! Each of us took turns writing outfits we wanted to wear and cosplays we wanted to try on little scraps of paper that we dropped into a box. In the end, we’d each pull out one piece of paper, and that would be the costume we’d have to wear.

“All right, I’m up first!” I shouted as soon as our preparations were complete. I was way too excited to contain myself and jammed my hand into the box before anyone could object.

Okay, what’s it gonna be?! A Shihakushou? Or maybe a Saint Cloth?

“The time has come! Reveal yourself, my true form!” I shouted, plucking out a single truth from amidst the countless possibilities that spread out before me! I unfolded my chosen scrap of paper for all to see.

maid uniform

Oh god. I forgot to split them up by gender.

“Oh, I wrote that one!” Hatoko piped up nonchalantly. It was, in retrospect, a very Hatoko choice of costume. For a non-nerd like her, a maid uniform is probably the first thing that comes to mind when the subject of cosplay is broached.

“H-Hey, guys? I can try again, right? With the boys’ and girls’ outfits split up this time? Nobody wants to see me in a maid uniform, right...?”

Halfway through my stammering attempt to talk my way out of it, I noticed something: the other members of the literary club were all staring at me with disconcertingly pleasant smiles on their faces.

“You’re the one who said we should do this in the first place, Andou. Remember?”

“I sorta want to see you in a maid uniform, Juu!”

“Quite. I would love to bear witness to your true form, myself.”

“Do you want me to make it with knee socks, or stockings?”

Those four smiles bore down on me. They were not going to take no for an answer.

“D-Damnations! I’ll let you off easy this time, but I’ll be back!”

And so, Guiltia Sin Jurai fled the scene...only to be cut off before he could even make it out the door. Dangit, Tomoyo, stopping time’s cheating!

And so...

“W-Welcome, Master!” I stammered as I pulled back the curtain of the changing room Chifuyu had made for us, my face contorted into a strained, twitching approximation of a smile. My outfit: a frilly, flouncy miniskirt maid uniform. My legs: stuffed into black stockings, for reasons I could not fathom. My head: adorned with one of those frilly maid headbands. The whole ensemble: way too elaborate. Seriously, who on earth would want to see this?

“Pfft! Aha ha ha ha ha! Oh, man, looking good, Andou!”

“Yeah! You look really cute, Juu! Aha ha ha ha!”

Tomoyo and Hatoko, unsurprisingly, burst out laughing without even the slightest regard for my humiliation. Huh? That’s weird. What about Sayumi? Normally, she’d be the first one to roast me at times like these!

That’s when I heard it: the distinctive snap of a camera shutter. I turned to look, and what do you know? Sayumi had pulled out a digital camera and was photographing me!

“Hey, wait a minute, Sayumi! Who told you to take pictures of this?!”

“Yes, good! That’s perfect, Andou! The way you’re writhing in shame is just exceptional!”

“Please try to make it less obvious how much you’re enjoying this! Stop grinning at me like that!”

“He he he! You said that nobody wanted to see you in that outfit, but I assure you, at least one person in this room was very excited for this!”

“Sayumi...”

“You look just adorable, Andou!”

I couldn’t bear it anymore and looked away. Something about getting called adorable by an older girl was just, like...I don’t really know how to describe the sensation that welled up within my chest, but it was complicated, that’s for sure! It was, like, a weird, unsettling mixture of happiness and utter humiliation.

“Perfect!” said Sayumi. “Now, I just have to splice one of these pictures with the one I took of Sagami, and—”

“Wait, what do you mean, Sagami?!”

“Ahem! Pay it no mind. Just some personal business.”

“How is it your business when it’s super obviously about me and Sagami?!”

“But it isn’t! Technically speaking, it’s about Sagami and you.”

“It...huh? Wait, but that’s what I said? Me and Sagami...”

“You have the order reversed, Andou,” replied Sayumi, her tone dropping down a notch and a deathly serious expression crossing her face. Whatever she was trying to say, she was clearly not willing to compromise on it. “It’s Sagami/Andou, not Andou/Sagami.”

I fell silent. This is...I think they call it “shipping”? This is a shipping thing, right? I’m definitely not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that in fujoshi circles, the order of the names in ships is incredibly important for some reason. Like, a character’s name being first means that they’re a top, and a character’s name being second means that they’re...

“...a bottom?! Are you calling me a bottom?!”

“Well, yes. Obviously.”

“How is that obvious?!”

“Frankly, Andou, you practically exude bottom energy.”

“I exude it?! Why am I getting treated like some sorta pent-up mass of slavering bottom-lust?!”

“Incessantly loud and obnoxious idiot characters tend to be bottoms, on the whole.”

“Wow, over-the-top verbal abuse much?!” This is the point where I’d be justified in getting, like, for-real upset, right? We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere, right?!

“A-All right, that’s it, Sayumi! If you’re gonna go that far to make fun of me, then I’m not letting you talk your way out of this!” I declared, thrusting the lottery box out to her. She hesitated for a moment, then seemed to resign herself and accepted it from me.

“Very well then, but I reserve the right to veto anything too risqué.”

“What do you mean, risqué?”

“Like, for instance, one of my contributions: tighty-whities.”

“No crap that’s off the table! Wait, you actually put that in there?!”

“I thought it would be funny if you drew it.”

“It would not! What were you planning on doing if you ended up with that one?!”

“I was operating under the assumption that common sense would rule it out if any of the girls ended up pulling it. You were the only one who would’ve been obligated to go through with it.”

“Ugh! Of all the dirty tricks...” It was a perfect plan to put me in danger without exposing herself to the slightest hint of risk. Curse that woman and her terrible machinations! (Casually dropping “machinations” into a sentence: hella cool.)

“But in the end, you drew the maid uniform instead. I suppose this was entertaining in its own right, so I’ll call it a win overall,” Sayumi chuckled as she pulled a slip of paper from the box and spread it open for all to see.

gym bloomers

The light faded from Sayumi’s eyes. Her cheerful smile was instantly petrified. Gym bloomers...? Impossible! Those were cast out from this world a generation ago!

“Ah, it’s another one that I wrote!”

“You again, Hatoko?” I sighed. I could more or less see how this had happened. Bloomers were another classic cosplay standby. They’d started out as actual, proper girls’ gymwear, way back whenever, but these days, they pretty much only exist for fetish purposes. I guess they’re still extremely popular among a certain subset of the male populace, though.

“Fine, then,” Sayumi said with a resigned nod after a long, hesitant pause. “I can hardly excuse my way out of this after having had so much fun teasing Andou, after all.”

“G-Go on, then. If you want to laugh, then do it,” said Sayumi, blushing distinctly as she stepped out from behind the curtain in her new costume.

Her top was a white short-sleeved shirt, the hems of which were bright blue. The fabric strained noticeably to contain her ample chest, upon which “Sayumi” had been handwritten, courtesy of Chifuyu. Down below, of course, she wore a pair of navy blue gym bloomers that clung to her hips like nothing else. Her long, slender legs were completely bared to the open air, and it was impossible not to notice the elegant line they formed as your eyes traced down from her thighs to her ankles.

All things considered, the outfit struck me as a little small. It was practically bursting at the seams, really. That might explain our reactions—I’d been greeted by uproarious laughter when I’d made my entrance, but this time, we could only descend into dumbfounded silence, me included. The silent consensus seemed to be that we could not allow ourselves to laugh, however much we wanted to.

The whole outfit just looked so...so painfully mismatched on her. She’d always looked deceptively old for her age, and that plus her full figure and exceptional height made the bloomers look just plain wrong on her.

Or, wait—maybe it’s the opposite? Maybe that look works really well for her, actually? Sure, she doesn’t look cute or trigger my must-protect nerd instincts, but she sorta goes beyond those. It’s like she makes them look, I dunno...adultlike, in an erotic sorta way?

Then, in the middle of all that awkward silence, one girl chose to point at Sayumi and speak her mind.

“Sayumi, you look bad in bloomers.”

Chifuyuuu! You can’t just come out and say things like that!

Sayumi let out a quick, quiet sigh. “It’s all right, everyone. You don’t have to worry about offending me. Chifuyu’s right, and I’m fully aware of it,” she admitted, cutting straight to the point. Her cheeks were as red as could be, and her bare legs were shifting around anxiously. “I-I know perfectly well that I look old for my age. It’s only natural that an outfit like this wouldn’t suit me.”

“What’re you talking about?! You don’t look old, you just look a little mature!” I shouted, frantically attempting to help her save face. “Heck, the fact that the bloomers don’t suit you actually makes them better! It comes across as you, like, forcing yourself to wear them even though you know they won’t look right on you, and that wraps around to give the whole thing a weird, backwards sorta appeal!”

There’s gotta be a better way to put the appeal here into words...ah, of course! “It’s just like when actresses who’re obviously well into their thirties wear high school uniforms in porn—”

Then she punched me. A straight-up jab to the face so fast I couldn’t even see it, hit man style.

“Hmph! I assure you, there’s nothing good about not being able to pull off this outfit,” Sayumi indignantly retorted. The sulky way she rattled it off was actually a little cute. A second later, though, every trace of that cuteness vanished, and I felt a chill run down my spine.

“Now then,” said Sayumi, “I believe it’s time for the next participant to join us. And I would like to note that if I, the club president and the eldest member present, had to be subjected to the abject humiliation of this outfit, then by the hierarchical standards of Japanese society, the rest of you have no right to veto anything you draw, no matter what it may be.”

Sayumi held the box out to the three remaining members, chuckling in a way I could only describe as downright menacing. Tomoyo, Hatoko, and Chifuyu gulped in unison.

“O-Okay, then, I’ll draw next!” said Hatoko after taking a moment to muster up her courage. “Hatoko, ready to go!”

Hatoko shoved her hand into the box. Not that it’s super relevant here, but the whole shouting your name followed by “Ready to go!” or “Moving out!” thing actually dates back to the original Gundam. Hatoko probably had no idea about the source material, of course, or even that it was a reference at all. When a reference gets too widespread, it tends to enter the collective consciousness and become its own thing. This might not be quite the same thing, but it’s sort of like how people say stuff like “par for the course” or “down for the count” without even thinking about the sports they’re theoretically referencing.

Hatoko did her best drumroll impression as she rifled around in the box, then she pulled a slip of paper out with a spirited “Ta-da!”

sun

“‘Sun’?!” cried the entire high schooler division in simultaneous shock. That could only mean one thing.

“Oh, that’s mine,” said Chifuyu, as expected. She always had a way of subverting our expectations in a distinctly weird direction.

“Uhh...Chifuyu?” I said. “Does ‘sun’ mean, like, the sun? As in, the sun that shines up in the sky? Not, I dunno, a character named Sun?”

“Yeah. I mean the sun-sun.”

“Gotcha. The big ol’ orb in the sky, huh...?”

“You said to write what I wanted to be, so I wrote the sun.”

“Uh. You...want to be the sun?”

“When I grow up, I wanna be a big, bright, warm presence for everyone.”

“Wow, that’s an incredible goal! But, I mean...” Could you not make this sound all nice and optimistic, please? It makes it really hard to make a joke out of the situation!

“Hey, Juu? What should I do now?” asked Hatoko, who seemed to be feeling a little put on the spot.

“I mean, don’t ask me... You just have to go for it, right?”

And so, what I have to assume was the world’s first sun cosplay was a go.

“Wooo, look at me! I’m the suuun!” said Hatoko as she drew the curtain back, making her entrance even weirder than it already would’ve been. I’m sure that she believed she was the spitting image of the sun, but the look and the mannerisms she was affecting were just way too strange.

Hatoko was wearing a huge orange sphere that obscured most of her body, leaving her arms and legs sticking out. It had a face painted on its center, and spikes protruded from its circumference. If you give an orange sphere spikes, arms, legs, and a face, there’s only one thing people like me will associate it with.

“It’s friggin’ Don Patch!”

Turns out that wearing a sun costume makes you look sorta Don Patch-esque! Who knew that putting on a big fake sun could turn a regular human into a Wiggin’ Specialist?

“Wooo, look at me! I’m Don Patch!”

“No, Hatoko, stop! You can’t try to act as the character if you don’t even know who they are! That’s disrespectful to the source material!”

“Ugh... You know, this is actually reeeally heavy! I’m gonna go lean against the wall for a little, okay?” Weighed down by her ridiculously oversized costume, Hatoko tottered precariously over to the corner of the room and lodged herself up into it. “Hey, Juu? What are suns supposed to do, anyway?”

“Good question... Uhh, ah, got it! Y’know that old fable, The North Wind and the Sun? We can use that for reference! It personifies the sun and everything!”

“Oooh, okay!”

“The fable has the north wind and the sun get into a really stupid argument that an innocent traveler gets dragged into. It’s a tragic tale of a mere human being toyed with by the uncaring and malevolent forces of nature, unable to resist as they torment him to kill time!”

“Is that really what the story was about?!”

Well, I sure think it is. In my book, the sun and the wind really gave that traveler hell for no particular reason, what with the wind blowing him around and the sun overheating him and all.

“Actually, no, wait a second,” I backpedaled.

“What is it, Juu?” asked Hatoko. “Why do you look so serious all of a sudden?”

“I’ve been assuming that the traveler was a man this whole time...but isn’t it totally possible they were actually a girl?!”

“Huh?” Hatoko cocked her head. “Would the traveler being a girl change anything?”

“It would, massively! Think about it—that’d turn it into a story about two entities locked in a showdown to see who can make a woman take off her clothes! They’d be nothing but a couple of dirty perverts!”

“Th-That’s true, actually!”

“Could it be that this whole time, The North Wind and the Sun...”

North Wind: “Forcing a girl to take ’em off can’t be beat! If she says no, you just have to pull harder! It’s the best!”

Sun: “What’re you talking about, moron?! Of course it’s better when she takes ’em off herself! That way you get to see her get all shy in the filthiest way possible as she opens herself up to the pleasures of the flesh!”

North Wind: “Huh?! You kidding me?! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Sun: “Oh yeah? As if you do! Okay, look—see the girl walking over there? Let’s use her to make it very clear which of us has the better grasp of eroticism!”

North Wind: “Oh, you’re on! And I’m going first!”

“...has been nothing more than the story of an epic clash between two incompatible fetishes?!”

“N-No way! I don’t want that to be the real story!” Hatoko shouted, blushing brightly.

Hmm. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a good choice of joke for a girl like her. I should try to keep the sex humor in reserve for when Sagami, the unapologetic degenerate, is around.

“I have to say, though,” said Sayumi, sweeping her gaze across the room, “the closest thing to a theme I can ascribe to us right now is ‘chaos.’”

Me in the maid uniform, Sayumi in her gym bloomers, and Hatoko as the sun. Yeah, Sayumi had a point. All of our outfits put together transcended “surreal” and landed squarely in the realm of chaos.

“Incidentally, Sayumi, I’ve been thinking a lot about that word lately. Did you know that the way that most Japanese people pronounce ‘chaos,’ the loanword, doesn’t actually line up with the way it’s said in English? Well, I’ve been pondering pretty seriously about whether the Japanese-style pronunciation or the proper English pronunciation sounds cooler, and—”

“I could not possibly care less.”

“Wow, ouch! And here I was, opening up to you about something that’s been seriously worrying me!”

“I also couldn’t care less about the sort of person who would seriously worry about something like that,” snapped Sayumi. Her criticism felt even more unreserved and scathing than usual. Probably the outfit’s fault. I imagined she didn’t have enough composure left to rein herself in.

In any case, we’d gone far enough that there was no turning back. Our only choice was to see this disaster through to the end!

“Okay, I’m next,” said Chifuyu, drawing a piece of paper from the box and spreading it open.

Straitjacket

“Oh, hey, it’s one of mine!” I noted, only for the girls in the room to simultaneously recoil with disgust.

“A-A-Andou...? What the hell were you trying to make us wear...?”

“What do you mean, Tomoyo...? W-Wait, no, that’s not it! I didn’t want to make you wear one! I wanted to wear one!”

“Why the hell would you want to wear a straitjacket?!”

“I mean, c’mon! They’re sorta cool, right?”

The oversized white garments contrasting sharply with the black belts wrapped all around them! Eyes and mouth sealed, arms bound in place, unable to move an inch! That sense of being completely restrained in every way has a sort of appeal that I can’t really put into words! It’s like your entire being’s been sealed away! That rules! Straitjackets: hella cool!

“Spare us, chuuni-boy,” sighed Tomoyo.

“But yeah,” I mumbled, “making Chifuyu wear a straitjacket’s sorta off the table, right? From, like, an ethical perspective, y’know? Like, having a kid do that sorta thing’s gotta be illegal, right?”

Chifuyu, however, shook her head. “It’s okay. I’ll try wearing it.”

I hesitated. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. I drew it, so fair’s fair.”

So, the thing about straitjackets is that you pretty much can’t put one on by yourself. As such, Sayumi accompanied Chifuyu into the improvised dressing room to give her a hand.

Some time later, Sayumi emerged from behind the curtain, her face distinctly pale. What had her looking so apprehensive? I couldn’t say, on account of the fact that I was too scared to ask. The moment the curtain slid open, though, a pretty good guess came to mind.

“Mmph! Mnhh, mph!”

Chifuyu stepped onto the scene wearing the full set: a straitjacket, a blindfold, and even a gag. Her oversized white clothes were bound by belts, restricting her movement in all the places where it really mattered. Her arms were fixed in front of her, one crossed over the other, and the blindfold was made out of what looked like some sort of drab, black leather.

“Mggh, mnph, mhhgh!” Chifuyu grunted. The gag was made from what looked like a white towel, wrapped all the way around her head, and the only noise she could make was a sort of pained, feverish moan.

She’d been completely robbed of her freedom, and her dignity as a human being was barely hanging on by a thread. There was only one appropriate reaction to seeing an innocent ten-year-old girl in a situation like that.

“Noooooooooooope!”

This is out, out, out of the question! And there we go, three outs, game’s over! Hell, one false move and we’d be over!

So, yeah, I dashed across the room and yanked off the blindfold and gag without a moment to spare. Hoooly crap, that was nearly really bad! We were about to venture into fetish territories that are definitely best left untouched!

“Bwah! I’m alive again,” said Chifuyu, looking completely nonchalant about the whole experience. Her being alive was definitely a good thing, though part of me had to note that I was the one who’d just nearly dropped dead out of sheer panic.

“Y-You okay, Chifuyu?” I nervously asked.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” she replied with a nod. It seemed that she had no idea how dangerous the waters we’d almost sailed into really were.

“Andou?” said Sayumi. “Is it just me, or does all of this reek of criminal activity?”

“It sure does... ’Course, the way you look in your outfit’s criminal in a whole different—actually, never mind, forget I said anything.” I course-corrected halfway through my thought on account of an overwhelmingly intense sensation of impending doom.

Just then, Chifuyu walked over to me. She’d gone with the sort of straitjacket that leaves your legs mostly unbound, so walking wasn’t an issue. “Mnh. Andou, my back itches. Scratch it.”

“Uh.”

“I can’t move my hands,” she explained, straining her arms against the belts that bound them.

“R-Right, yeah. Makes sense. Sure.” Chifuyu turned her back to me, and I knelt down to scratch it.

“A-Andou!” Tomoyo screamed out of nowhere. I looked over to find her blushing furiously, though I couldn’t even begin to guess why.

“What? Something wrong?”

“I-I can, umm... I can s-see up your skirt.”

“Huh...? G-Gaaah?!” Right! I forgot! I’m wearing a miniskirt maid outfit! Kneeling like that means giving the entire room a full-on panty shot! “T-Tomoyo, you perv!”

“I didn’t want to see them!”

I quickly shot back upright and smoothed down my skirt, making sure everything down there was nice and covered again. Man. I guess girls have to worry about all this stuff every time they bend their legs, huh? Must be rough.

“Andou, hurry. It’s really itchy,” said Chifuyu, squirming uncomfortably and ignoring everything that wasn’t taking place in her own little world.

“Right, okay! Uh, where? Here-ish?”

“A little to the right.”

“Like, here?”

“Too far. More to the left.”

“Okay, so, here?”

“Yeah. There, right there. Harder.”

“Can do!”

“Mnh. Andou...t-too hard... Do it softer.”

“Ah, my bad.”

“Mnh. This tickles a little...”

Okay...is it just me, or does this feel weirdly suggestive to anyone else? I was starting to get the feeling that spending any longer on Chifuyu and her straitjacket would put me at risk of awakening to something best left dormant, so I decided to try to move things along.

“All right, that just leaves Tomoyo.”

Tomoyo grunted with displeasure. “Yeah, I know already.”

“And just so you know, the fact that you’re last means that the bar’s gonna be set really high for you!”

Things had ended up following quite a logical progression for the four of us that had already gone, after all. Starting with a maid outfit, hyping things up with gym bloomers, veering off on a surprise tangent with the sun, then going for an even more intense plot twist with a straitjacket! It might’ve just been a coincidence, but we’d done a spectacular job of escalating things one costume after another.

“Nobody’s gonna be satisfied if you draw some super boring cosplay, for the record! Pulling ‘a nurse uniform’ or whatever after all that lead-up would totally kill the mood!”

“St-Stop putting so much pressure on me,” muttered Tomoyo as she timidly pulled a slip of paper out of the box.

Bikini armor

Yet again, a moment of silence fell over the room.

Okay, come on. Really? Which one of us is responsible for this half-assed attempt at fetish bait?

“Hey, Juu? What’s bikini armor?” asked Hatoko.

“It’s literally exactly what it sounds like,” I replied. “Armor that’s shaped like a bikini.”

That is, armor designed to prioritize mobility above all else...if you want to make it sound reasonable and are talking to somebody who’s extremely gullible. Realistically speaking, that sort of design is nothing more or less than a costume designed for exhibitionists who laugh in the face of the actual dangers of a battlefield.

“Huh? Would that even work as armor?” Hatoko followed up, cocking her head. “Wouldn’t your belly button be totally exposed?”

“I mean, I guess it’s technically better than going into battle in a set of robust lingerie, defense-wise.” As best as I could tell, though, armor like that would really only be useful to practitioners of the Sexy Commando style of martial arts. “But seriously, though, who wrote this?”

I glanced around the room, and finally, one of the club’s members timidly raised her hand. That member being Tomoyo.

“Wait, you?!”

“Wh-What?! Got a problem with that?! It was the first thing that came to mind when I heard the word cosplay, okay?!”

The fact that bikini armor was her first association with the word really exposed how much of a nerd she was deep down. “Well, you reap what you sow, then. Have fun with that.”

“W-Wait a second! A-Are you serious?!”

“I mean, I might’ve given you a pass if somebody else had written it, but you really brought this upon yourself. Right, Sayumi?”

“Indeed. And from a public decency perspective, bikini armor is within the realm of reason. Wouldn’t you agree, Hatoko?”

“Hmm... I still don’t think I really understand this whole bikini armor concept, but I kinda want to see it now! Don’t you, Chifuyu?”

“Do you want the chest part to be metal, Tomoyo? Or should it be cloth?”

The literary club was in a state of chaos. Tomoyo had no way to get herself out of her predicament.

“Grr—I’ll get you for this!”

Kanzaki Tomoyo fled! By which I mean, she invoked Closed Clock and poofed out of there like an Abra that’d just used Teleport. Chasing her down would be completely impossible...or so I thought, but then Tomoyo reappeared in her usual chair a second later.

Sayumi, no! You can’t use Route of Origin: Ouroboros’s Circle now! This is not an appropriate moment to pull out your awakened ability!

“U-Ugggh...” Tomoyo groaned as she emerged from behind the curtain, her face as red as an apple, or a tomato, or something. Not even just her face—her whole body was flushed red.

In terms of total skin coverage, her bikini armor was definitely on the lower end of the spectrum. It was a suit of armor so poorly considered, it was like whoever had designed it didn’t even care if her vitals were exposed. She’d apparently chosen to go with fabric for the chest area rather than actual armor, by the way.

“Oh, wow, bikini armor’s way cuter than I thought it’d be!” exclaimed Hatoko. “Looking sexy, Tomoyo!”

“It suits you better than I expected, I must admit,” added Sayumi.

Their praise seemed totally genuine, but it didn’t help un-flush Tomoyo’s face. She was busy covering her chest with one arm and her groin with another.

“Tomoyo...” I began, then hesitated.

“Wh-What?”

“The, uh... The way you’re covering yourself sorta makes it look like you’re posing? It, err, actually makes the whole thing look more suggestive, so I think you’d probably be better off not doing that.”

Tomoyo let out a strangled gasp and tore her hands away, flailing them about in the air for a while until finally clasping them together behind her back.

“C-Come on, say something...” she bashfully demanded.

“Uh, I mean... W-Well, honestly, it looks good on you.”

Bikini armor merges two very disparate styles: girly fashion and fighting fashion. That fusion, as it turned out, suited Tomoyo shockingly well. I vaguely remembered having learned somewhere along the way that Tomoyo was self-conscious about the size of her chest, but seeing her dressed like this made me realize that she really didn’t have anything to worry about. She wasn’t stacked, sure, but she was far from flat as a board. She had all the girl-bits you’d expect from, well, a girl.

Of course, actually saying any of that wouldn’t have made her feel better and would’ve counted as sexual harassment, so I kept my mouth shut.

“All right,” I said. “With that, our lineup’s complete! We’re all clad in our combat forms!”

Those being a maid outfit, gym bloomers, the sun, a straitjacket, and bikini armor. Yup. Chaos, properly pronounced and everything.

“S-So, what should we do now, guys?” I asked. “Wanna take a group photo or something?”

“Hell no!” shouted Tomoyo.

“Absolutely not,” stated Sayumi in a slightly quieter, but no less emphatic, tone. Those two already seemed set on writing their cosplay experience off as an unseemly stain upon their personal histories. To be fair, I was at least somewhat in the same boat.

“I’d like to take one!” piped up Hatoko. “Hey, Juu, let’s take a picture together!”

“Ugh... I think I’ll pass, thanks. I mean, look at me. I’m a maid.”

“Andou?” said Chifuyu. “I want to take one too.”

I hesitated. “Seriously?”

“As a keepsake.”

Is this really a good idea? Isn’t possessing a photo of a little girl in a straitjacket the sort of thing that gets people brought in for questioning by the police?

In any case, we wouldn’t be taking any pictures at all without borrowing Sayumi’s camera first. But just as I was about to ask her for it, a sleepy-sounding voice rang out from just outside our door.

“Heeey, open up! It’s me.”

A series of pounding knocks followed. It was the literary club’s advisor—in other words, Chifuyu’s aunt, Satomi Shiharu.

The five of us froze in our tracks. This was not good. Miss Satomi didn’t know about our powers, and she would put the pieces together that something was going on for sure if she saw us dressed like this. And even if we managed to keep the superpowers thing under wraps, nobody could walk in on this state of utter chaos and not think we were at least a little crazy.

What were we thinking, seriously? I’m wearing a maid uniform, for crying out loud! Before anything else, we had to change back into our uniforms on the double!

“Chifuyu! Deactivate your power!” I barked. Chifuyu, who was clearly a little panicked for once, nodded and immediately did just that. World Create’s effect ended, and everything that it had brought into the world disappeared in the blink of an eye. That’s all it took—Chifuyu had complete freedom to unmake the things she made at will.

“Ah,” I grunted, glancing downward as a sudden thought struck me just a moment too late. I was greeted by the sight of my lower body clothed only in a single pair of boxers. The maid outfit Chifuyu had given me had vanished like dust in the wind.

Wait. That means...the others are in the same predicament? They’re in their underwear too—no, wait a second. Setting aside Hatoko and Sayumi, was Chifuyu even wearing a bra? Considering her age, it’s a toss-up! I don’t think I felt anything when I was scratching her back a minute ago, right? A-And wait... Did Tomoyo have underwear on under her bikini armor...?

I heard a very short, very quiet noise, like the beginning of an ear-piercing shriek cut off a second before it could ring out. I looked up reflexively to see what was going on—and then Closed Clock intervened, and my field of vision blacked out.

“H-Huh?!” What, am I out of usable Pokémon? Or did I get hit with a Cord-Cut? Did someone just sever my optic nerve?!

“Th-That was close,” said Tomoyo. I couldn’t see her, of course, but her tone of voice told me she was deeply relieved about something.

“H-Huh?!” exclaimed Hatoko. “Tomoyo, how do you have your uniform on already?!”

“I see. You used Closed Clock, didn’t you? Well done, Tomoyo,” added Sayumi.

I raised a hand to my face to find some sort of slightly stiff fabric wrapped around my head. A few pokes and prods later, I realized that it was my own jacket.

“D-Don’t take it off yet, Andou!” said Tomoyo. “I’m finished changing, but the others need a minute!”

I’d more or less put the pieces together by that point. In the split second after Chifuyu released her power, Tomoyo activated hers, blindfolded me, then got dressed. Thanks to her efficient use of the power to stop time, any chance of me getting a sneak peek had been sealed away.

“...Killjoy.”

“You say something?”

“Nope, nothing at all!”

There wasn’t much I could do other than stand there quietly while the others got dressed. Stand there quietly, with only a pair of underwear to cover me up...but that’s just how it goes, I guess. Guys just have to take the loss when it comes to this sorta stuff.

“Hurry up, Chifuyu!”

“Tomoyooo, help me put this on.”

“Oh, for the—fine! Arms up!”

“Okaaay.”

“Ah, Hatoko, I believe that’s my skirt.”

“Huh?! Ah, you’re right. B-But then, where’s mine?!”

As the girls got changed in a flustered panic, I just sat there, listening and worrying. It was stupid Closed Clock’s fault that—I mean, thanks to Closed Clock, I hadn’t had to get smacked around or held in disdain for getting an eyeful of them, so I figured I should probably thank Tomoyo for that later.

...I should take the fact that I actually did get the tiniest of glimpses with me to the grave.

“Come on, people... What were you even doing in here?” Miss Satomi asked as she sat down at the table.

“We apologize, Miss Satomi. The room was a mess, and we were cleaning up all the books we’d left lying around so you wouldn’t have to see it,” Sayumi lied without batting an eyelash. Her poker face was really something. “In any case, it’s quite unusual for you to make your way to our club room. Did you have some business with us today?” she continued, changing the subject without missing a beat.

It was true—Miss Satomi almost never bothered stopping by our room. She was our club advisor on paper, at least, but she was critically lacking in motivation and let Sayumi handle the majority of the club’s actual administrative affairs.

“Oh. Not exactly... I mean, I don’t need something from you, per se,” Miss Satomi replied listlessly, then every so slightly narrowed her eyes. “I’ve got business with my niece today.”

With Chifuyu?

Miss Satomi turned her gaze to me, then to the girl sitting next to me. She frowned and continued in an unusually severe tone. “My sister called me just a moment ago. You didn’t go to school today, huh, Chifuyu?”

Chifuyu didn’t say a word, so I spoke up instead. “Huh...? What do you mean, she didn’t go to school?”

“What else could I mean? She stayed at home. She said she felt nauseous and feverish, supposedly, and wasn’t up to going.”

“Huh...? But, Chifuyu’s here now...”

“Right, and that’s the problem.”

Chifuyu had arrived at our club at the same time she always did. We’d all naturally assumed that she’d come over after she got out of school, but it would seem that wasn’t the case. She’d taken a sick day then shown up to hang out with us anyway.

“Did your fever break, Chifuyu?” asked Miss Satomi. She didn’t sound like she was accusing Chifuyu of anything, exactly, but her tone was very serious.

“It did,” replied Chifuyu after a moment of hesitation, her head hanging all the while.

“And you thought that since your fever broke, it’d be all right for you to come over?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, be honest with me, Chifuyu. Did you really have a fever this morning?”

Once again, Chifuyu didn’t reply, and an uncomfortable silence fell over the room. Miss Satomi stayed quiet as well, her face contorted into a surly scowl, until finally she let out a long, weary sigh.

“Mnhh. Well, whatever. Just go to school tomorrow, okay? My sister will tell me if you don’t.” Having said her piece, she stood up from her chair. “’Kay, that’s all from me today. Don’t stick around too late. Bye.”

With that halfhearted farewell, Miss Satomi left the room.

“Chifuyu...you didn’t go to school today?” I asked. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. She’d seemed fit as a fiddle all throughout our cosplay—I mean, combat form rehearsal, after all. It was really hard to imagine that she’d been that sick earlier that same morning.

“Hey, Chifuyu? Why?”

Chifuyu hesitated, then simply replied, “I’ll go tomorrow,” and hopped out of her chair. Then she generated a Gate in front of herself and jumped through, fleeing the room before any of us could get a word in edgewise and leaving a deep, heavy silence in her wake.