Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 9 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Akutagawa Yanagi

A lack of a solution is an answer

And a lack of a decision is a choice

But a lack of a meaning is never meaningful.

—Excerpt from the Reverse Crux Record

Akutagawa Yanagi was a sensible young man. His thought process sprinted where others’ strolled, his memory and judgment were both outstanding, his IQ was astonishing, his wits were swift, and his creativity knew no bounds. All in all, his intellect was unimpeachable.

Yanagi had never felt challenged in school. A single read-through of a textbook was all it took for him to fully grasp the subject it covered. He’d been given an IQ test in elementary school, and his score had been so unthinkably high it’d sent his school’s staff room into an uproar. When he’d learned to play chess, shogi, and other such board games, he would go from having no understanding of their rules to competing on even terms with top-class players in online matches within a day. Nobody had ever taught him how to use a computer, but he excelled with them anyway, and he’d taught himself the ins and outs of not only legitimate financial affairs—from stocks to the foreign exchange market to affiliate marketing—but also illicit skills like hacking and cracking.

He was, in short, a genius. No other word could do his exceptional powers of intellect justice.

And yet, from the perspective of the world at large, the name “Akutagawa Yanagi” was a complete unknown. None of the students or teachers at his school were aware that he was smart. Not even his own parents had the faintest inkling that he was at all clever. If even a trace of his talent had ever been discovered, he would have found himself revered as a prodigy and a child genius before he knew it, his name praised to the high heavens across all corners of the world...but Yanagi lacked two essential factors that were needed to allow that to happen: a sense of intellectual curiosity and a desire for attention.

For all Yanagi’s exceptional intellect, he was critically lacking in motivation. He felt no drive to learn nor any need to be recognized for his abilities. Sensible though he was, he was by no means sensitive. He didn’t want to stand out, and he had no interest in being complimented. He had no desire to do his best at anything, and he had never felt the need to help others. Whether the people around him lauded him or disavowed him, he would react in the same particular fashion:

...It’s all pointless anyway.

Around the time he’d reached the later years of elementary school, Yanagi had all but entirely lost interest in the world at large. His peers had all had a sense of purpose—some had wanted their parents to praise them, or their classmates to recognize their talents; some had been told to work hard by their parents or teachers; some had simply liked to study, or had enjoyed their sport of choice. Their reasons had been myriad, but one way or another, they had all ended up applying themselves to their chosen fields. Yanagi, meanwhile, had put in the bare minimum of effort to get through to graduation and had brushed off the rest with casual indifference.

It’s strange, really, Yanagi reflected. This wasn’t a matter of him seeing the people around him as idiots—it had long since surpassed that level. In his mind, the people around him might as well have been from a different dimension entirely. How do they do it? How do all of them get by in life, day after day, without a single thought passing through their heads?

Yanagi wasn’t looking down on people, per se—or at least, not intentionally. He was just confused by them. He found the humans that surrounded him, so thoughtlessly driven by the desire to ingratiate themselves with society, as peculiar and incomprehensible as could be. As an inevitable consequence, he found himself living in a state of perpetual isolation—he had no friends, and he didn’t want any either.

“Hey, Akutagawa! Come have lunch with us!” a girl had said to him once in elementary school. There would always be certain people who didn’t know not to meddle where they weren’t welcome, and she’d been one of them.

At first, Yanagi had attempted to display the bare minimum of courtesy. “No thanks. I like being alone,” he’d said.

“Oh, don’t be like that! You’re lonely deep down, aren’t you?” the girl had replied. In that instant, Yanagi had given up on hoping that the people around him would ever understand him. He also wasn’t interested in carrying on the exchange any longer.

“...You know what you’re doing, right? You’re acting like everyone who doesn’t share your sense of values has to be unhappy by default. You might think this makes you look kind, but it actually just seems condescending. A simpleminded girl like you who thinks that acting like she’s some sort of saint makes her superior is a lot worse off than I am, in my opinion. And anyway...”

Yanagi droned on and on, shutting the girl down with an exhaustively thorough explanation of what she’d done wrong and how she could do better. As a sidenote, the girl had burst into tears partway through his lecture and their teacher had decided to intervene, making the situation into more of a mess.

After that, Yanagi found that his position in class had shifted from that of a plain and unobtrusive student to one whose teacher would scold him whenever she had even the slightest excuse to do so. Whether she’d thought that she was watching out for him or keeping watch over him was rather hard to say.

“Oh, no you don’t, Akutagawa! Sit back down and finish your food,” she’d said once when Yanagi, who had always been a light eater, had failed to polish off his school lunch. “Don’t you know there are tons of people out there who can’t get the food they need, no matter how much they want to eat? Do you really think it’s okay for you to waste your lunch while they’re starving?”

Yanagi had been so astonished and exasperated by her logic, he’d very nearly fainted on the spot. Her argument had been nothing but fallacies. Perhaps arguing on a level that a child could understand, appealing to his innate sense of right and wrong, had been a sound decision for an educator like her...but to Yanagi, it’d come across as the most tiresome sort of moralizing imaginable.

“...What about diets?”

“Huh?”

“...Have you ever gone on a diet before?”

“W-Well, yes,” Yanagi’s teacher had admitted, looking a touch uncomfortable. She might have thought this was Yanagi’s roundabout way of calling her fat, but whatever had been going through her mind, he’d paid it no attention and carried on without pause.

“All that taking in more energy than you need does for you is build up an excess of body fat that you’ll have to do otherwise pointless exercise to burn later on. I don’t think that’s any different from throwing your food away, aside from it taking more steps... If me not finishing my food is an insult to the people around the world who suffer from starvation, then by extension, wouldn’t the starving be even more offended by the people who stuff themselves until they end up overweight only to waste time and money burning off the fat they’ve built up for no particular purpose? That feels like a worse insult, if you ask me. Don’t you know there are tons of people out there who can’t get fat, no matter how much they want to?”

Yanagi, in his indifferent, emotionless drone, had turned his opponent’s argument back around on her and argued her into submission. She hadn’t been able to come up with a counterpoint, he’d left the remainder of his lunch untouched...and from that day onward, he’d become the target of his peers’ bullying.

The girl he’d made cry some time beforehand was the ringleader. She and her friends started hiding Yanagi’s belongings and defacing his desk and textbooks. They might have also tried to ostracize him, but since Yanagi had never made any effort to interact with his classmates to begin with, any such efforts had gone totally unnoticed. He’d always been isolated, but now, he had finally begun to be persecuted as well. Under normal circumstances, it would have been his teacher’s job to put an end to the bullying, but instead, she’d joined in on it. She’d grown just as frustrated as his classmates at his steadfast refusal to play nice.

Even in the face of all that bullying, though, Yanagi had remained indifferent. I can’t believe they have the patience to keep up with this pointless nonsense was the most he’d ever thought of it. He’d briefly considered trying to figure out why he was being persecuted, but he’d concluded that it would be pointless before he’d put any real effort into it. Such assessments were emblematic of Yanagi’s perspective on the whole: the world, in his eyes, was overflowing with pointless wastes of time.

Beating someone in an argument, it seemed, didn’t mean you were right. “Reading the room”—a skill so vague it was practically undefinable—was respected above all else, and those who couldn’t do it were outcasts. The course of the world was determined by majority rule, and the majority was stupid. Nobody cared about what was actually right. Instead, people at large would find a solution that the majority could be satisfied with and declare it to be right, regardless of whether it was truly just. Anyone who stepped out of line and threw that balance off was considered intolerably evil.

But, honestly...who even cares? Yanagi thought. By the time he’d graduated from elementary school, he’d already considered his life to be over. This world wasn’t made for me, and I wasn’t made for this world either.

Yanagi’s exasperation with the world had reached its peak, and he’d simply given up on life. At the time he should have been starting middle school, he’d instead shut himself up in his room. He couldn’t see the value in going to school, so he didn’t.

His parents were so ashamed of him that they rented an apartment for him to live in, far away from their home, in order to hide him from their neighbors and relatives. Yanagi didn’t feel anything in particular about how they treated him, though. Whether his family loved or loathed him was, to him, a meaningless distinction. Love and affection, family and friends, hopes and dreams—he saw all of them as pointless, worthless, useless, and needless. Such things were irritating, plain and simple, and he preferred to avoid them whenever possible.

Yanagi spent his days in his one-room apartment, earning the bare minimum he needed to live with his computer and killing the rest of his time with video games. Killing time...or rather, killing himself: for all his god-granted intellect, the boy genius Akutagawa Yanagi had found nothing of meaning in life, and had thus concluded that all he could do was sit around and wait to die.

“Jerk! Freak! Prick! Gloomy-ass loser!” bellowed the voice in Yanagi’s mind. “What the hell’s your deal, anyway? How do you even turn out that friggin’ creepy? I’m you, and you make me wanna lose my lunch! I cringe so hard watching you it makes me wanna curl up and die, you self-centered, bratty little bitch!”

The voice was so absurdly loud it felt like a dagger stabbing repeatedly into Yanagi’s brain, and it had been shouting nonstop for days on end. All he could do was shut himself up in his apartment and writhe on his bed, clutching his head and trying desperately to endure the mental noise.

...If it’s that hard to watch, then stop looking into my memories.

“I’m not looking into them, I’m remembering them!” said the voice. “I’m you, remember?”

...

“Hmm? What, did you actually forget? Guess I should explain it all over again! I’m the embodiment of your sense of guilt. I didn’t just spring up from the depths of your mind naturally, though. One of Hearts’s members, Hamai Haneko, used a power called Two Tool to Too True to plant the seed that grew into me. Her power lets her force people to keep promises, you see, and you promised Habikino Hatsuhiko that you’d kill Kiryuu Hajime, knowing perfectly well that you had no intention of following through. The guilt you feel over that lie is what gave birth to me as a distinct personality!”

As the voice in his head screamed point-blank into Yanagi’s mind, he slowly forced himself into a sitting position. Dark, heavy bags hung under his eyes. Thanks to the unending mental clamor he’d been dealing with, it had been days since he’d gotten a decent night’s sleep.

...You’re giving away an awful lot about how her power works, thought Yanagi. Whose side are you on?

“Hah hah hah! Good question, actually. That’s a toughie. I am you, so I’d love to say I’m on your side...but you know how often people talk about being their own biggest enemy.”

...

“So really, I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m just here to fill my role as your sense of guilt. If you can wipe the knowledge that you did something wrong from your mind, I’ll disappear too. If you can’t pull that off, though, then it’s only a matter of time before I overwhelm you. That’s right—you’ll be crushed by your own sense of guilt,” the voice said, sounding truly delighted by the prospect. “Guess I probably need a name, huh? How about...oh, how’s Nega-Yanagi sound to you?”

...I couldn’t care less, Yanagi replied. Nothing could have been more tiresome to him than having to deal with the voice’s—or rather, Nega-Yanagi’s—attitude. He’d gotten more or less used to the mental conversation aspect by that point. For that matter, talking with Nega-Yanagi was actually a helpful distraction, considering that when Yanagi ignored him, he’d prattle on and on without end. As such, Yanagi had turned the inner dialogue into something of a question and answer session with himself. It was an eternal, compulsory soliloquy.

...I still barely believe it. Who knew I even had the capacity to feel guilt?

Yanagi had indeed broken his promise to Hatsuhiko. He’d planned on agreeing to kill Kiryuu, taking the three million yen, then acting like the deal had never happened. Even now, he didn’t believe on any level that his choice had been inherently mistaken. He’d made the most rational decision available to him. Actually keeping a promise with an enemy would be a far more outlandish thing to do, and above all else, the idea that he’d feel guilty about deceiving that man in particular was inconceivable.

“Naaah, I don’t think so! You’re taking all this way too lightly, Yanagi!” said Nega-Yanagi. “There’s no such thing as a person who feels no guilt whatsoever! I mean, you’re one cold-blooded son of a bitch, don’t get me wrong. It takes a real piece of work to look down on companionship and trust the way you do, you sad little brat! You can take my word for that too—trust me, I’d know. But the thing is, that doesn’t change the fact that on an intellectual level, you still know when you’ve done a bad thing, don’t you?”

Evil was evil. Crimes were crimes. Yanagi really did have the capacity to recognize that.

“You don’t have to feel bad about it to know that you’ve done wrong, right? When you do stuff that society thinks of as evil, you know exactly what you’re doing. And that’s all it takes! Hamai Haneko’s power can work on even the slightest hint of guilt, making it grow and develop at an explosive rate until it takes on an ego of its own!”

By that definition, at least, Yanagi did indeed have a sense of guilt. He didn’t regret the things he’d done, and he had no intention of changing his ways, but he was also intellectually aware that he’d done wrong.

“Hah hah hah! Suck it, Akutagawa Yanagi! You thought you were screwing your enemy over, but the truth is, they totally set you up instead! What’s the point of that big brain of yours if you’re not even gonna use it?”

...I couldn’t have said it better myself, Yanagi agreed readily with a bitter chuckle. I completely let my guard down. Three million yen is chump change, and picking it up just because I could was a mistake.

“Chump change, huh? Y’know, there’s a lot of people out there who’d straight-up kill themselves for that sort of money!”

...I screwed up. I screwed up badly. I wish I could go back and do it all over, right now.

“Y’know what’s just like you? The fact that even now, after all this, you’re not even a little bit sorry for selling out your friends. You’re not even pretending to regret it! Hah hah hah!”

Yanagi, in truth, hadn’t even considered that until Nega-Yanagi pointed it out. The fact that he’d sold his friends out just hadn’t been on his mind.

...Those people aren’t my friends, Yanagi thought. I only stick around them because they’re useful. No other reason.

Whether comrades, friends, lovers, or family—any form of human connection whatsoever—Akutagawa Yanagi had given up on them. They were complicated, depressing, and irritating, not to mention tiresome, dubious, and meaningless. They were simply unnecessary for the rational life he strove to live.

“God, you’re one boring guy.”

...Being interesting isn’t a priority for me.

“Yeah, well, what is? You don’t do jack! You sit around playing video games, day in and day out. You get all your food delivered, and even when you’re playing online, you always run solo. Hah hah hah—seriously, how bad at being social can you get?!”

...It’s not that I’m bad at being social. I don’t talk with people because there’s no point.

“There you go again, squandering away those smarts of yours. Talk about pearls before swine! Haven’t you ever thought about spreading your wings and getting out there a little? Like, y’know that big math problem you solved a while back? If you just told someone about that, you’d be famous overnight! Not to mention all the skills you’ve been using to make money online. If you really marketed those, you could make a killing! And hey, you’re not exactly bad-looking—why not find yourself a woman while you’re at it?” said Nega-Yanagi, in spite of the fact that he almost certainly already knew the answers. He was going out of his way to pick the topics that would irritate Yanagi the most. “Honestly, you could do anything! Why’re you sitting around doing nothing?”

...Just because I can do anything doesn’t mean I have to do something, Yanagi mentally droned. I don’t care whether or not people appreciate me. It’s pointless. What do I gain from people liking me, or praising me, or anything like that?

Yanagi could be famous, wealthy, and loved by everyone—but then what? None of those things, the things that normal people strove for, held any value in his eyes. He believed that living one’s life in pursuit of such meaningless goals was irrational, plain and simple.

“Okay, so what are you living for?”

...I’m living because I don’t have a good reason to die. And believe it or not, I enjoy my life. I have nothing, so I don’t have to worry about anything. I’m comfortable and carefree. It’s nice.

Yanagi whiled his days away playing video games, stopping to make money whenever he needed it and sleeping and waking whenever he felt like it. He’d joined the Spirit War with the same capricious, half-hearted attitude. His lifestyle was as self-indulgent and solitary as could be, and as it so happened, Yanagi actually quite liked that. That, above all else, was why Nega-Yanagi and his sleep-disturbing ways were a problem that Yanagi felt a dire need to deal with.

...The question is...what should I do now? Yanagi wondered. The wild shouting of his new inner voice had left his capacity for thought at an unprecedented low, but at long last, he’d started getting used to the abnormal situation he’d landed himself in. At the very least, his thought process had recovered enough to let him start trying to work out some countermeasures. Hey, Nega-Yanagi.

“Oh? The name stuck already, huh? Nice!”

...If I kill Hamai Haneko, will you disappear?

“Oooh, somebody’s a big, scary killer! Not even a little hesitation to murder a girl, really? But anyway, yeah, that’s right. She’s the source of her power, so if you take her out, I’ll go with her,” Nega-Yanagi freely admitted. His tone and attitude didn’t change in the slightest, in spite of the fact that he was talking about his own erasure. It seemed that the thought of being destroyed didn’t bother him.

...I guess I’m not even sure if he’s really alive to begin with, come to think of it.

“Hah hah hah! Trying to define life? Now that’s a tricky problem if there ever was one!”

...Stop commenting on my inner monologue.

“Hey, not my fault! I can’t help but hear the whole thing, like it or not.”

In any case, a potential solution was clear: if Yanagi could defeat Hamai Haneko, the whole irksome situation would be resolved.

...Next question. What happens if I go kill Kiryuu Hajime?

“Not a doubt in your mind you could do it, huh? Kinda goes without saying, but that’d work just fine too. It’d mean you kept your promise, after all, so it’d do away with your sense of guilt, no issues.”

...Next. Is Hamai Haneko capable of canceling her ability by choice?

“The fact that that wasn’t the first thing you asked says a lot about you, y’know? But no, sorry, no dice there. Once she’s set her power off, she can’t stop it anymore. I’m out of her hands now, basically. I mean, killing her aside. Like I said, that’d totally work.”

...I think I get the picture, Yanagi said, accepting Nega-Yanagi’s story without argument. He knew the information wasn’t completely trustworthy, of course—it was perfectly possible that everything his new personality had said was leading him into another of his enemies’ traps. Last question, then. What if I—

Yanagi explained the plan he’d come up with. He’d taken everything he knew into account, including his current state of affairs, Nega-Yanagi’s claims about Hamai Haneko’s power, and Kiryuu Hajime’s traits as an individual, and he had come up with what he believed was the most efficient means of resolving the problem available to him.

“Hah hah hah... Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah haaah!” Nega-Yanagi laughed. For a moment he’d seemed taken aback, but that had quickly devolved into a full-blown cackle. “Hah hah hah hah hah! Okay, no, but seriously—are you really me? Because I don’t think I could come up with a worse plan than that if I tried! Do you have literally no pride? I knew you were a piece of shit, but I didn’t realize you were this putrid!”

...Would it work, or not?

“It’s possible! Totally depends on the other guy, though.”

Yanagi sank into thought once more.

...Right, he finally responded, then sprang into action. He would seek out the quickest, most rational means to bring his predicament to an end.

☆

In the end, I never got a reply from Toki or Yanagi. Those little punks, I swear! They’re not even pretending to take me seriously!

I was worried about them on a multitude of levels, but for the time being, I decided to interpret no news as good news and assume they were safe at the very least. I just didn’t have the time to be fretting over them at the moment. I shoved my phone into my pocket...then hid myself once again by a nearby utility pole to readjust the mask I was wearing, which had slipped most of the way down my nose, and push up my sunglasses while I was at it.

“Hitomi... Would you please explain to me why we are wearing such peculiar outfits and undertaking such an inexplicable set of actions?”

“Shhh! Keep quiet, Umeko! He’ll notice us!” I shouted—but, you know, in a whisper, which was actually really hard when it came down to it—at the very confused little girl who was accompanying me. From an outsider’s perspective, of course, that little girl probably looked like a little boy, on account of her outfit: a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers, with her long hair bundled up and hidden away in a baseball cap. I’d also had her carry a bug net and a cage as accessories. She looked like an elementary school kid on his way into the mountains to catch some bugs over summer break, nothing more and nothing less.

“Your notions about this attire appear to overlook a glaring flaw: it is less than likely that any child would wander into the mountains in this weather,” Umeko noted dryly as she gestured toward the sky. It was, unfortunately, deeply overcast. Thick, heavy clouds clogged up the sky, and according to the weather forecast we were due for rain starting in the evening.

“N-Nah, I’m sure people will still buy it,” I said. “Keep in mind that elementary school boys are basically all idiots! We’re talking about the sort of creatures who wear shorts and T-shirts every single day, all year round!”

“A remarkable display of petty prejudice.”

“And hey, I bet there are types of bugs that only come out in this sort of weather, most likely!”

“For the sake of argument, I shall concede that my garb may, perhaps, escape suspicion. Yours, however, is outlandish by even the most lenient of standards.”

“Ugh!” I grunted for lack of anything I could say in my defense. I was wearing a relatively unobtrusive coat, Hajime’s spare sunglasses, and a face mask, along with a knitted hat of the sort you usually only saw in wintertime. I have to admit...I looked like a total creeper. Stalker-chic, if you will.

“W-Well, what was I supposed to do?! You have to wear this sort of disguise when you’re tailing someone! It’s...I mean, it’s a rule, you could say?”

“If you wished to know where First was going, you need only have asked.”

I sighed. Imagine how much easier my life would be if that were actually an option...

At the present moment, Umeko and I were engaged in a high-stakes covert operation. Our mission: tail Kiryuu Hajime. He was strutting his way through the cloud-shrouded city streets, clad in his trademark all-black attire in spite of it being the middle of summer. He was also carrying an umbrella—one of the ones modeled after the classic Japanese design—so apparently, he’d bothered to check the forecast...and while I thought that an umbrella like that was hopelessly mismatched with his outfit, he was really fond of the thing, and I’d had no intention of calling it out. He’d gotten it into his head to modify it to work as the sheath for a hidden sword at one point, and he had worked really hard on it until technical setbacks had put the project permanently on ice.

Anyway, Kiryuu was walking along like always, seemingly unaware that we were following him. As to why we were following him to begin with... Well, that traced back to the start of the whole affair, beginning with him leaving my apartment just after lunch.

Being the freeloader he was, Hajime had no compunctions about leaving the house without notice. Up until a half year beforehand—that is, until I was pulled into the Spirit War—most of his unannounced outings were on account of War-related circumstances. You’d think that my participation in the War, then, would have changed things for us, but no, he still up and vanished on a semiregular basis.

Now, I didn’t have the right to tell him not to go off on his own, of course! What he did was his own business, and I respected his privacy. Meddling in his affairs could only end poorly. Today, though, something about him had seemed...a little off. Normally he would’ve said something like “My evil eye...it throbs!” or “The wind is calling me” or “This presence...!” or something to that effect. Today, however, he’d told me “I’ve got something to take care of” and left, as simple as that. I actually had asked where he was going, but he’d stubbornly refused to explain himself.

It’d felt weird. Hajime not being weird was as weird as he could possibly be. It’d bothered me so much that I’d immediately pulled out my phone, brought up Line, and gotten into contact with Aki and Fan. We had our own private group chat there, just for the girls in our team.

Hitomin: Hajime just went out and wouldn’t tell me where he was going. Where do you think he’s headed?

Kiki: idk to see a girl?

Fanfan: To a d-dirty store, maybe...?

Hitomin: ?!

...Teens these days sure are precocious, huh? I have to admit, I was a little ashamed that I hadn’t even begun to consider that sort of adultlike explanation for his behavior. If he really had left to do something like that, in any case, then it would have been down right inexcusable on his part! An unreliable bum like him—a guy who couldn’t even be bothered to chip in for rent—had no right to be buying the services of a sex worker...not to mention that him seeing some other woman was just outrageous on a basic level.

I mean, I’m not his girlfriend, of course, and I know I have no right to have such expectations of him... But, I mean... I just... I just don’t like it, okay?!

And that, in a nutshell, is how Umeko and I ended up following after him in secret.

“Hmm. It seems First intends to take a bus,” Umeko murmured.

Hajime had just come to a halt by a bus stop ahead of us, and he was now waiting there alone. I wanted to get on the same bus as him, of course, but if we went up to the stop now, then it would have been incredibly easy for him to notice us. We ended up waiting for a few more people to arrive at the stop first, watching from a safe distance as Hajime reversed his grip on his umbrella and started swinging it repeatedly.

“What is he doing?” asked Umeko.

“He’s practicing his golf swing,” I explained.

It was one of those image training things, basically, using the umbrella in place of a golf club. It would’ve been a huge nuisance if he’d done it when other people were around, but considering he was alone, I was willing to give him a pass.

Really, though, that’s such an old man sort of thing to do! I wouldn’t have expected it from Hajime, that’s for sure. Actually, does he even know how to play golf? I guess he read Rising Impact, I’m pretty sure? I thought idly as I watched him swing away. He was doing the full motion, following through with his swing in a complete arc...then releasing his right hand, moving it up to support the upper portion of the umbrella...

“Ryuushousen!”

...and shouting at the top of his lungs.

“...”

It was a Ryuushousen! He wasn’t practicing his golf swing—he was practicing the freaking Ryuushousen!

“Is that a commonly used technique in golf, Hitomi?”

“Uh...no, that wasn’t so much golf as it was a Hiten Mitsurugi-ryuu technique,” I uncomfortably clarified as Hajime moved on to perform several more Ryuushousens, followed by a few Gatotsu San Shikis—another upward-striking move. Apparently, he was on an antiair kick that particular day. Maybe he was lashing out at the bad weather?

Meanwhile, people were beginning to gradually gather up at the bus stop. Once a crowd of around ten or so had formed, I decided it was our time to make a move and led Umeko to the back of the line. The bus arrived moments later, and thankfully, Hajime chose to move up and take one of the seats in the front of the bus, near the exit door. That meant that Umeko and I could sit in the back without having to pass by him or risking being spotted.

I guess Umeko and I probably look like sisters when we sit like this...? Actually, no, probably not. Not with how we’re dressed right now, anyway. We might look more like an elementary schooler who’s enjoying his summer and the kidnapper who swooped in to spoil it, actually...

“So this is a bus,” Umeko muttered with an air of keen interest as I writhed in suddenly renewed shame beside her. She was firmly clasping the ticket she’d been given when she’d boarded. “I must admit, I’m surprised by how comfortable it is to ride...and the seats are fluffy too.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I guess this would be your first time riding a bus, wouldn’t it?”

“Indeed.”

“Well, be careful not to lose that ticket! You give it to the driver when you pay your fare as you’re getting off.”

“Noted,” Umeko replied, as steadfastly expressionless as ever.

For all her interest in the bus, I couldn’t quite tell if she was enjoying the outing or not. I, at the very least, enjoyed giving her the chance to experience all sorts of new things, especially considering how few opportunities she’d had to get out in the world so far. It felt a little fulfilling, I guess? I had to wonder if it was some sort of maternal instinct at work, though given I was just a little over twenty and childless, I felt a little silly for even considering the possibility.

“Hey, Umeko,” I said.

“What is it?”

“So, umm... I know that today ended up going kind of wrong in a bunch of ways—like, with the tailing Hajime thing, and our outfits, and all...”

“A question, on that note: would our behavior not be better described as ‘stalking’ rather than ‘tailing’?”

“Let’s try not to think about that part, okay?” I said, then I made to move the conversation along before she could protest. “What I’m getting at is that I know it’s been a sort of awful outing, but next time, we should make a real plan and go somewhere for fun! It can be just the two of us, or we can invite everyone else along too if you want!”

“If you should so order it, then I shall follow you wherever you wish.”

“No, no, it’s not an order! It’s an offer—I want you to decide for yourself,” I explained. “I’ll take you anywhere you want me to, and if you’d rather not go anywhere at all, then that’s okay too. I want you to try living the way you want to live a little more, Umeko.”

I tried to make my position as clear as I could, and Umeko fell into silence.

Tanaka Umeko, aka White Rulebook, had been brought into being for the sole purpose of defeating every other participant in the Spirit War. She was the ultimate Player, and a single use of her power was all it would take to bury the vast majority of those who would think to challenge her.

When we met her, she was the greatest enemy we’d ever faced—and she’d also tried to kill me, by the way—but that was all in the past now. Over the past month, Umeko had changed so much she was almost unrecognizable from her former self. Hajime had taken to grumbling about her shift in character for his usual incomprehensible reasons, but in my opinion, the fact that she had become more humanlike in demeanor was without question a good thing. I didn’t want her to go back to being the way she’d seemed before, an emotionless machine who only knew how to follow orders. I wanted to treat her like the person—the girl—that she was.

“A place I would like to go, you say...?” Umeko muttered. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then she quickly gave me a nod. “I shall consider the matter.”

“Sounds good! Give it some thought, yeah.”

“If that is your order, then I shall obey.”

“I-I didn’t mean it like that!”

“I jest,” Umeko said in a nonchalant deadpan.

Sheesh! Somebody’s been getting awfully glib lately.

We kept chatting as the bus drove on. Eventually, I noticed Hajime reach up and press the button to request a stop.

“Hitomi,” said Umeko.

“Yeah, I saw. Looks like the next stop is, umm... Huh?” I grunted as I read the electronic stop display, taken aback by what I’d read. A moment later, the stop announcement confirmed that I wasn’t just seeing things...but what did it mean? Why would he have business there?

I shook my head. No, it’s still too soon to say for sure. Maybe he’s going somewhere else, and this just happens to be the closest stop! While I sat there in bewilderment, the bus trundled along to the stop, and Hajime got off alongside a small cluster of other riders. Umeko and I waited until the very last second to follow them.

When we finally disembarked, we found ourselves at a sort of fancy bus stop, complete with a roof and barriers to block the wind. We waited there for a moment longer, hiding while Hajime went ahead of us. As we stood there, practically holding our breaths while the other riders went on their way, I double-checked the stop’s sign just to be absolutely sure I wasn’t mistaken. Sure enough, it read:

General Hospital

I could see a large white building just a short walk away from the bus stop—one I’d heard about before. It was supposed to be the biggest hospital in the local area, featuring all the facilities you could need, plus state-of-the-art medical equipment. It looked relatively modern, judging by the design of its exterior, and somehow you could tell how cleanly the place was just by looking at it. A number of trees planted nearby gave the area a verdant feel, enhancing the immaculate impression and lending the facility a rather pleasant atmosphere.

Hajime, meanwhile, walked right down the path between those vibrantly green trees—a man in black bearing straight toward a building of white. The first thought that crossed my mind was that he was going to see an ophthalmologist, but I ruled that out just as quickly. I knew for a fact that he frequented a place by the station called Sasaki Ophthalmology. He would’ve gone there if this was about his contacts.

So then, why? Why had he chosen to go to a hospital that was so far out of his way? Was there some reason he needed to visit such a particularly huge facility? Just what on earth was the “something” he had to take care of here?