Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 3 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Sweet and Sour Make-Believe

“Andou?”

“What is it, O great and mighty Lady Chifuyu?”

“I want snacks. And I’m thirsty.”

“As you wish! I shall return posthaste!”

I sprinted through the house at the speed of a raging gale, gathering some snacks and a glass of juice and rushing it all back up to my room. Then I set them down on the ground, got down on my hands and knees, and bowed to her like I was offering the refreshments to the spirits of my departed ancestors.

“Your orange juice and potato chips, your highness!”

“Thanks...mnh. You didn’t put ice in the juice.”

“M-My sincerest apologies! I’ll go back and fetch another with ice on the—”

“Don’t bother. It’s too late.” Chifuyu hopped off the bed and turned her cold gaze down upon me. “I’ll punish you,” she declared in a voice as frigid as the ice I’d neglected; a voice that pierced my heart to its core.

I trembled, shivering with fear as I turned around on the spot to face away from her—or, more precisely, to face my backside toward her.

“Take this.”

Thwack! Chifuyu smacked me on the ass. Yup. I sure just got spanked by a ten-year-old child.

“P-Please, spare me, milady Chifuyu!”

Chifuyu cocked her head. “Did it really hurt that much?”

“The smack, no. My heart, yes.” The humiliation was almost too much to bear. The fact that I still registered it as humiliating was probably a good sign, I guess. The moment I started thinking of it as something pleasant would be the moment I abandoned my humanity entirely. The selfish little tyrant-princess behind me, however, was ignorant of my internal turmoil and continued to wield the lash of authority with wild abandon.

“Andou, be a chair for me next.”

“A ch-chair?!”

“Now.”

I hesitated, but I couldn’t disobey. “Okay,” I conceded, getting down on my hands and knees. Chifuyu immediately hopped up onto me, using my back as a stool. I could feel the soft warmth of her rear directly on my back. “Ch-Chifuyu? My pride’s kinda barely hanging on by a thread, here, and this pose really isn’t—”

“Chairs don’t talk.” Thwack! Chifuyu gave me another spank, and the last remnants of said pride shattered to pieces. “You said you’d do anything I asked for, Andou, so you don’t get to complain.”

It was true. In fact, I’d also gone into full-prostration mode and begged her not to tell any of the others about what she’d witnessed. Doing somebody’s bidding like this was an absolute betrayal of my honor as a proud, solitary warrior...but it was simply unavoidable. My only path forward in life was to swear unwavering fealty to Chifuyu. I’m gonna be honest: I value keeping up appearances more than I value pride any day of the week.

“Andou.”

I kept my mouth firmly shut.

“No ignoring me.” Thwack!

What?! But you just told me not to talk! What a tyrant! I’m the chair of a child despot!

“Walk around, Andou.”

“Huh? Y-You mean, like, you want a piggyback ride?”

“No. Walk around like a chair.”

Like a chair...? So, just like this? She wants me to crawl around on all fours?! “Ugh... So you’re literally driving me like a workhorse?”

“No. Not a horse. Like a pig.”

“A pig?!”

“I like pigs better than horses.”

Well, good for friggin’ you! Maybe she means she likes eating pork better than horse meat?

“Hey, Chifuyu? Don’t you think you might be going just a little too far with this?” I asked, putting in an honest effort to throw off my chains and unseat the oppressor from my back. “I, the man some call the King of the Cosmic Apocalyptia, am not so generous as to serve as your minion...”

“Late-night movies with dirty sounding titles.”

“...and that’s why you should give this pathetic pig whatever orders you fancy, milady!”

It’s no use. I’m completely outmatched. She holds all the trump cards! Recording movies with dirty-sounding titles was just so, I dunno, preteen? Or maybe wimpy...? It’s the sort of move that comes across as just plain desperate in the most humiliating way possible! Getting caught watching straight-up porn would’ve been manlier, at least!

“What was it? Love in the Afternoon?” asked Chifuyu, who had taken the liberty of fiddling with my recorder and learning the title in question. And worse, that wasn’t even her only trump card! “You were singing really loud too.”

Why did I have to go and belt out my own composition like that...? Actually, wait. Now that I think about it, getting super into singing a song isn’t nearly as embarrassing as the whole late-night movie thing, is it? Like, singing’s a perfectly valid form of expression, and real songwriters probably do that sort of thing all the time!

Music is dragged from the aether through an agonizing process of repeated trial and error! Surely everyone starts out feeling ashamed of singing their own music, right? But they overcome that shame and go on to create works of art capable of moving all who listen to them! Ergo, writing my own song is not humiliating, and nobody can criticize me for singing it at the top of my lungs!

“It was kind of bad too.”

Okay, so maybe they can criticize the song itself, but that’s just life!

“You put too many big, dumb words in, and it didn’t make any sense. The part where you started just talking for a while was really weird too.”

“Okay...I’m sorry, so please, just stop. No more painfully specific criticism.”

“Then run, piggy. Giddyap!” she shouted, spurring me forward. With a smack. To the ass.

“O-Oink, oink!” I snorted, doing my best pig impression as I scrambled in circles around the room. I couldn’t see onto my back, so I didn’t know for sure what sort of face she was making, but I could tell from the excited way she was shifting around on me that she was enjoying herself. I went around and around the room, again and again, keeping up the pig act all the while.

“Andou, your pig impression’s perfect.”

“O-Oh? Ha ha...wow, funny how some compliments don’t make you feel good at all...”

“Next, do a sweet and sour pork impression.”

“Do a what?!” We’ve officially entered the realm of the impossible!

“Now.”

“S-Sweet oink! Sour oink!”

“Huh...? What was that?”

“Stop cringing! Spare meee!” How did you expect me to do a friggin’ sweet and sour pork impression?! I can’t take this...

I could hardly even see through the tears pooling in my eyes anymore. The shattered remains of my pride strewn about the floor were about to be swept away by a flood of liquid sorrow. My heart...was broken.

“Don’t cry, Andou,” said Chifuyu, giving my head a gentle pat from atop my back. “This was fun, so I won’t tell anyone about today.”

“R-Really?”

“I promise.”

“Th-Thank you so much, your eternal graciousness!” I exclaimed, executing another perfect genuflection. I’m certain now—she must be the virgin Mary herself, reborn into this world! Could there possibly be a human being out there with a heart as generous and pure as hers?

Yeah. There totally are. Tons of ’em. Seriously, most people would’ve pulled out of the bit long before they got to the making-me-act-like-sweet-and-sour-pork part! In any case, though, I’d finally regained my human dignity and rejoined the bipedal world. I sat down on my bed, bringing me eye to eye with Chifuyu.

“So, it sorta feels like I should’ve asked this a looong time ago, but what’re you doing here, Chifuyu?”

I didn’t have to ask her how she got into my room, of course. Locks and doors were meaningless in the face of the Empress of Genesis. No, I was curious about the why of the matter.

Chifuyu glanced away awkwardly, then quietly mumbled her reply. “I got in a fight with Cookie.”

Chifuyu’s story, in short: earlier that day Cookie, aka Kuki Madoka, had come over to her house to play. They’d whiled away the afternoon, playing together like they always did, until Chifuyu’s mother stepped out to go shopping. That’s when the argument happened, and in the heat of the moment, Chifuyu ran out from her house, used World Create, and made a teleport-enabled escape to my room.

“Huh...? Wait, does that mean that Kuki’s alone in your house right now?”

“Yeah.”

Jeez, blasé much? Do you have any idea how awkward Kuki must be feeling right about now? Going over to play at another kid’s house only to have that kid pull a runner... “Awkward” probably doesn’t even begin to describe it! It’s not like she can just go home and leave the house unlocked and unsupervised!

“What on earth were you two fighting about?” I asked, but Chifuyu didn’t say a word. “Did she make you spell pig backwards and say ‘funny colors’?”

Chifuyu glared at me in that distinctive “I’m an elementary schooler, not an idiot” sort of way. C’mon, it was just a joke! She poutily puffed up her cheeks, still not saying a word, but I kept doggedly staring her down until she finally caved and started to explain herself.

“Cookie said I shouldn’t play with you all anymore.”

“What do you mean, play with us?”

“She said I should stop going to the high school after class.”

“And that turned into a fight?”

Chifuyu nodded. “She said high schoolers are scary, so I should stop playing with you.”

Hmm. The specifics were still a mystery, but the larger pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together, at least. The long and short of it seemed to be that Kuki had been a little too outspoken for her own good about her opinions regarding Chifuyu’s daily excursions to the literary club. It made sense, especially when I took into account the pointed glare she’d shot me right after I met her the other day.

It’s not that I couldn’t understand where she was coming from, honestly. When I was an elementary schooler, high schoolers looked like they were practically adults to me. They really were a little scary—it was like they lived in a totally different world. If I’d learned that a classmate of mine was spending all their time hanging out with high schoolers, I might’ve been naturally inclined to try to stop them too.

It’s not normal for an elementary schooler to have a bunch of high schoolers as her social circle.

The warning Miss Satomi had given me some time before rang out in my ears. When I really stopped to think about it, I realized that she might have been right. Maybe it really wasn’t normal for Chifuyu to come visit us over and over, day after day. That was the reasonable way of looking at it, and the fact that our circumstances made us less than normal ourselves didn’t do much to change it.

“Anyway, Chifuyu, I think you should go back home for now. I’m starting to feel really bad for poor Kuki,” I said.

Chifuyu glanced away, hesitated, then mumbled, “It’s awkward.” I guess she wasn’t ready to come face-to-face with the girl she’d just fought with.

“Hmm. Okay, then how about if I come along?” I suggested. If being alone with Kuki was too much for her, I figured that having a third party there to mediate might be just the thing.

On second thought, though, having a member of the literary club as a mediator—that is, the club that the whole argument was centered around—seemed more than a little likely to just make things even more complicated. Maybe this is a bad idea after all, I thought, just a second too late.

“Okay. Thanks, Andou.”

“Bwuh?” I grunted as a Gate opened up directly beneath my feet. One World Create-enabled portal to oblivion, coming right up! “G-Gaaah! I’m fall—ah, no, I mean, I’m plummetiiiiiiiiing!”

At the other end of my surprise summoning, I found myself deposited upon a huge couch.

“Hoooly crap, that nearly gave me a heart attack,” I muttered. “Thought I was gonna fall all the way to Brazil!”

I sat up and inspected my surroundings. As best as I could tell, I was in a living room, and it seemed natural to assume it was specifically the living room of Chifuyu’s house.

“Sure is big, huh...?” I muttered again. This technically wasn’t the first time I’d been to her house. We’d stopped by here back when Hatoko disappeared for an evening as well. I hadn’t actually gone inside at the time, to be fair, but I distinctly remember thinking that the building looked huge from the outside.

The couch I landed on looked like it must’ve cost a fortune, and the lighting up above me looked like it was probably the height of interior design. The entire place just felt super bougie overall. I knew that Chifuyu was an only child, but was she really living in a house this huge with just her mother and father for company?

“Hmm... I guess I should go find Kuki and try to talk her down and smooth things over a little before Chifuyu arrives?” That was my best guess as to what Chifuyu was planning on, anyway. She was so taciturn, it always fell to us to read into the very few words she managed to speak as best as we could.

I left the living room, found a staircase, and climbed up to the second floor. I figured Kuki would probably be in Chifuyu’s room, and just as I was hoping, I found a door with a nameplate on it that read “Chifuyu’s Roomph!” The “Roomph” part, by the way, was in a word bubble being shouted by a stylized Ultraman caricature lifting up a giant monster. Weirdly elaborate, that design.

I knocked on the door, and a reply immediately came from within. “Ch-Chii! I’m s-so sorry, I didn’t mean—” Kuki shouted as she opened the door, nearly in tears. The moment she saw me, though, her face went white as a sheet. Her eyes opened up wide, and her mouth flapped in a wordless stammer. So, yeah, she was pretty surprised! “Wh-Wh-What’re you doing...?”

“Hey! Nice to meet...well, I guess we’ve met before, huh? So, uhh, nice to see you again, Kuki!”

“A-Andou, right?”

“Yup! So, mind if I come inside for a minute?”

“E-Eeek!” Kuki’s legs gave out, and she fell backward onto the floor. She scrambled away from me as fast as she could manage, almost like she was running away from some sort of horrible monster.

Well, that kinda stings. I know that older guys are scary and all, but, like, seriously? That scary?

“G-Go away! Get away from me!”

“It’s okay, Kuki! You don’t have to be scared. I don’t bite, I promise,” I said, speaking as calmly and gently as possible as I stepped into the room. Said room, incidentally, was incredibly cutesy in its design. The curtains and bedsheets were decorated with adorable little cartoon critters, and there were stuffed animals all over the place

Kuki’s frantic retreat was eventually cut off when she bumped into the wall back-first. With nowhere left to run, all she could do was sit there and tremble, gazing up at me with terror in her eyes. Okay, for real, isn’t she a little bit too freaked out?

“Kuki, it’s okay, really! I’m not scary, I promise! I just want to talk with you, that’s all,” I said, trying to soothe her as I slowly crossed the room.

With each step I took, Kuki jumped with fright. “G-G-Get back! Stay away from me! I’ll c-call the police!” she shrieked, utterly distraught. I could see tears pooling in her eyes.

“Okay...what’s wrong, seriously? What’re you so scared of?” I asked. This was a real head-scratcher. I had no idea what I’d done so horribly wrong to make her this terrified of me. Had I inadvertently triggered some horrible trauma she kept locked away deep within herself? “Kuki, it’s okay. Just relax, everything’s fine. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to, and I definitely won’t hurt you. Just believe in me, okay?”

I tried acting in as thoroughly courteous and gentlemanly of a manner as I could. Kuki, however, shot me a gaze full of fear and hatred as she screamed at the top of her lungs.

“How am I supposed to trust a guy who walks around in his underweeear?!”

...Hmm?

I slowly, very slowly, turned to look into the full-length mirror propped up conveniently nearby.

Reflected in the mirror was not the chivalrous gentleman reaching his hand out to a scared and wounded little girl I’d been expecting. No, all I saw was a horrible degenerate wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, looming over the elementary schooler he was undoubtedly about to assault.

Oh. Right. I never got dressed again after landing that three-pointer into the washing machine, did I? I sure was in my underwear back when Chifuyu slapped my ass. Suddenly, it was exceptionally clear to me why Kuki looked like she was staring down a man-eating monster. No need for any deep-seated prior trauma to rationalize this situation. Heck, anyone would be terrified if a mostly naked dude was slowly and deliberately walking toward them!

“G-Go away! And never come back! Get out of Chii’s room, and never talk to her again!” Kuki shrieked, her sentences punctuated by sobs.

And boy, did I ever get the heck out of that room in a hurry! I fled right on out into the hallway, where I found Chifuyu, apparently waiting for the right moment to make her entrance. She looked up at me, eyes full of hope.

“How did it go, Andou?”

“Sorry... I think the situation just got even more complicated.”

And so, I accidentally made Kuki’s fear of high schoolers much, much worse than it already was.