“The fact is, Hime-chan─doesn’t really know neither.”
Retracing our steps would’ve been the quickest way to get back downstairs, but it would’ve been imprudent, to say the least. Which is why the first step was to find a different stairwell from the one we’d taken to get there─this proved difficult, however. Come on, such an impressively large structure couldn’t possibly have only one stairwell.
I hadn’t realized this before because when I was alone, I’d been following the route laid out on the map, but this building was like a maze─a three-dimensional labyrinth. Was it why the place felt so strange? The construction itself wasn’t actually that complicated, but the building was oddly distorted. It was warped. To the point that walking around in it was starting to make me feel uneasy. In such a squeaky-clean, brand-new building─what could this composition possibly mean?
“See, from the inside, it’s almost impossible to determine what kind of place this is, right? Good or bad, superior or inferior, fortunate or unfortunate, they’re all things you judge in comparison to something else, which is why Hime-chan has a hard time saying much of anything about this school. Why I can’t explain its properly.”
“I don’t think you need to make it so complicated.” At long last we discovered a stairwell, and I kept an eye on our surroundings as I said this to Hime-chan. “What that might be is irrelevant in reality. The only question is whether it suits you or not, whether it’s a good fit. If you want to get out of this school, then that’s all that matters. It’s anyone who tries to stop you that’s messed up.”
Because the one thing everyone should be allowed is the freedom to run away─though I didn’t actually say that out loud.
“But listen, Hime-chan─I get the impression this school doesn’t teach the normal subjects, but in that case, what’ve you been learning this past year?”
“I told you. Stuff like, ‘When you see someone you don’t know, conceal your presence and sneak up from behind.’”
That wasn’t just a joke to break the ice?
Hmm. I had somehow failed to really consider it, but she’d pretty much held my life in her hands at that moment. Not that you can kill someone with a recorder.
In other words─this Sumiyuri Academy had a fairly specialized curriculum─and was like a training facility─or a boot camp? Never mind the questionable legality of the situation.
The ER3 System’s Fully Integrated Unified Studies Research Center, which I had once had the honor of attending, was similar in a certain sense. That organization very much rode the line between legal and illegal, and in their MS-2 Division, both mind and body were strengthened to the limit of their respective capacities─that division in fact specialized in the production of “The Orange Seed.” But every division was involved in testing the limits of this thing we call a “person” in one way or another, if not to the same extreme. Even an exchange student like myself underwent the same special training. Washout though I was.
If this was that kind of place, however─then what the hell was behind this academy? To maintain this kind of facility, this level of secrecy, it’d have to be something on the order of the Kunagisa Organ. In which case opposing them at all was a big mistake. Yeah, the only possible course of action was to turn tail and run.
Dammit, Aikawa had really flimflammed me. What a snake oil salesman. Not that I’d had any illusions about sneaking into an all-girls’ school and having a dazzling, all-smiles escapade with a high-society naïf, but the revelation that this school was like that wartime military something or other, that was a bridge too far. Though, I hear snake oil is actually good for you.
“Strange…” After descending one flight of stairs, I realized something. “I made that huge ruckus, but nobody seems to be bothered about it at all─I don’t sense anyone’s presence in the building.”
“Can you usually?”
“Uh huh. Because I’m a coward, I’m very sensitive to people’s gazes and presences and so forth…but there’s been nothing for a while now. I’m not looking to be found, but I was expecting to have to use a little bit of force to break out of here. And those two girls definitely recognized you…”
I may not have had a precise handle on our position, but we could’ve done with a little more of a reaction from the other side, no?
“If no one’s after us, then isn’t it okay to relax? It’s like manga from heaven.”
“…? Oh, manna from heaven, yeah… I mean, that’s all well and good, but just traipsing down the stairs seems too risky… Let’s make a lateral move.”
“On a hunch? How geometric of you.”
“I’m not sure it involves any metric whatsoever, but oh well.” I looked at Hime-chan. “You weren’t by any chance raised in America or something, were you?”
“Wow! How did you know?!”
“Just a hunch.”
Be that as it may.
In this situation there was a good chance of an ambush. Upon consideration, if they knew that Hime-chan’s goal was to escape from the academy, then there was no need for them to go to the trouble of chasing her. That would also plausibly explain why those two had given up their pursuit.
Which made it all the more imperative that I outsmart them, huh?
“Uh oh.”
I was starting to enjoy this a little too much. Even though it’d turned into such a hassle. I, who hate hassle more than anything, who do everything in his power to avoid making waves.
Must be Hime-chan’s fault, I thought as we turned down the hallway. Trying to blame it on someone else was typical of me, and pretty unfair, but when I looked at Hime-chan, so boundlessly cheerful in spite of the fact that we had our backs against the wall, getting all gloomy and worried and depressed about it started to seem foolish. I didn’t even need to bust out the nonsense.