“I’m a tactician, so actual combat isn’t my forte─but I take an interest in the basics of the art of self-defense.”
“They even teach that kind of thing at this academy?”
“The answer to that is ‘it’s the only kind of thing they teach here’…but, none of that.” Shiogi wrenched harder, and the sharp pain shooting through my shoulder intensified. “We can’t have you taking such a cocky attitude, not when your back’s against the wall. Don’t you even know how to plead for your life?”
An icy voice. An overwhelming icy voice. I once again revised my assessment of this academy. Such tepid terms as training facility and boot camp were thoroughly inadequate. This was─quite literally…
A warzone.
“Now, out of respect for the fact that you seem to be my elder, I will, in my infinite mercy, offer you two choices─one is that you yield to me. The other is that I pull your shoulder out of its socket.”
“…Who died and made you king?”
“I’m no king, even if I have fought my way to the top of my little hill─I’m just a tactician who couldn’t make it on the front lines.”
“Perfect. A fitting opponent for a nonsense user who didn’t have the sense to learn some useful proverbs instead─”
Pain flared in my shoulder. Apparently she only liked jokes if she was the one telling them. Shiogi was self-centered like that. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” she said, loosening her hold on me a little. “And not understanding something─the presence of an uncertain element, in other words─to anathema to a tactician. Uncertainty breeds instability, after all.”
“…”
“Why were you able to infiltrate this academy?”
That was what Shiogi asked me. Not how, but why. Almost like it was a question that rocked the very foundations of her world, as if she wasn’t asking about my methods so much as questioning something much more fundamental.
“Nothing special. I had a fake student ID…and I was wearing a uniform, so no one caught on, that’s all.”
“Are you trying to tell me that was all it took to deceive the students of this academy? That our security system is that low-grade?”
Sure─with what I’d ended up learning about the true nature of Sumiyuri Academy, sorry, “Hang ’Em High,” it was hard to believe my disguise could ever work. Even if I hid my gender by not speaking, it should’ve been child’s play to see that I was an outsider. No wonder Shiogi was incredulous. But I had no answers to offer in the face of that incredulity. It was such a lucky break that I wondered about it myself.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to try and hand me some nonsense about it being a ‘lucky break’…”
With those words, Shiogi wrenched my arm up once again. She seemed to be under the impression that she was regulating the amount of force she was applying, but on the receiving end it was unbearable. My other arm wouldn’t reach her where she stood behind me─and she had my heels off the ground, so I couldn’t counterattack with my legs. It was an impressive pinning technique, unthinkable for a novice.
A pinning technique. Which is exactly why there was a way to reverse it.
“It’s terribly simple,” I said quietly. “You just don’t understand because you’re a colossal moron, Shiogi.”
I thought I could actually hear the blood rushing to her head. In the next instant Shiogi twisted my arm another quarter turn─and with a grrk, the bone in my shoulder came loose.
“What,” a sound of shocked surprise emanated from none other than the person responsible for dislocating my shoulder.
Turning around the arm that she’d accidentally freed up by dislocating it, I faced Shiogi (yet to overcome her confusion at this turn of events), and with my un-dislocated arm I shoved her in the chest as hard as I could. However clever her words, her body was still only that of a teenage girl, and she flew back like a rotten tree, sprawling on the floor of the hallway in an ungainly heap.
“─ch!”
But she’d apparently managed to fall defensively, and sat up right away, glaring at me. I let her look roll off me like water off a duck’s back, and leisurely spread my remaining good arm.
“I really don’t have an answer for you other than ‘luck,’ Shiogi, but as for the other thing I’m sure you’re wondering about─last month I got involved in a certain incident. In the course of it, both my shoulders got dislocated. I forget how I ended up with those injuries, but…anyway, it becomes something of a habit. It’s relatively easy for me, at this point.”
“─nkk,” Shiogi groaned. “Then you provoked me on purpose and made me dislocate your─”
“You called yourself a ‘tactician,’ right? I’m something like that myself, so I get it, I really do. When something you haven’t planned for crops up, it totally throws you off. That shouldn’t have been enough force to dislocate it─I understand that feeling painfully well.”
Nothing compared to the pain in my shoulder, of course, but I didn’t let that show on my face. And while I was delivering this triumphant lecture, I was wondering: what do I do now? I’d somehow managed to escape her hold using an evasive maneuver that basically boiled down to a surprise attack, but it definitely hadn’t defused the situation. In fact, it may have just added fuel to the fire. If I couldn’t use my silver tongue to fast-talk my way out of this while Shiogi was still off balance─
Then I couldn’t go after the four who’d taken Hime-chan away.
“What am I, some kind of hero?” I muttered sarcastically to myself. Me, saving someone─the very idea. I’d never even considered the possibility of such an opportunity presenting itself. Was I just going with the flow? Was I being carried along, not by sentiment but by circumstance, as per the usual?