It was the morning of the next day, Tuesday.
Mutsuko wasn’t at the Sakaki breakfast table once again, though that was more or less as expected.
It would probably be awkward for her to come back, considering the circumstances...
Yuichi headed for school and met up with Aiko on the way. They arrived at the classroom together as usual.
They got through morning classes without anything unusual happening. Then during lunch break, Yuichi headed for the roof.
There were a few other people there eating lunch. Yuichi headed to one corner where two young women stood waiting for him. One was Furu Shinomiya.
“Yuichi Sakaki! How could you leave your harem master in such peril? And hanging up without warning? Such impudence is unacceptable in a retainer!” The other one was Chiharu Dannoura.
This slender girl, who carried a large instrument case, was the heir to Dannoura Style Archery. She had been quite overweight before, but she had lost it all abruptly and seemed to be keeping it off.
“So, how’d things go after that?” Yuichi asked.
“Ah. I threw the eyeball at them in desperation, and they left. I proceeded to enjoy the rest of my night zoo tour, and then I went home.”
“You should have gone right home... you never know what might happen,” Yuichi said. Chiharu’s confidence made Yuichi think he shouldn’t have worried about her from the start. “Anyway, that means all the Divine Vessels are in the hands of this guy named Rokuhara.”
Yuichi went on to tell Furu everything that had happened yesterday.
“I see,” Furu said. “I’ve already sent word about the Evil God, and they said they’d dispatch their strongest forces, so I think it should work out. I doubt there’s anything else for us to do.”
Furu sounded extremely blasé about it. She must have had absolute faith in these “strongest forces.”
“Any hints about the ‘sacred territory’?” Yuichi said. “He said it was at the school...”
If there were specialists, he should leave it to them; there was a good chance that an amateur like Yuichi getting involved would probably just make things worse. Still, he had his doubts that this would end without his involvement as long as Mutsuko was working with Ende to defeat him.
“Sacred territory, huh?” Furu mused. “I don’t know its location exactly, but there probably is one here... Remember the specter invasion before? They had to be coming from somewhere nearby, which means there’s probably a passage to another dimension somewhere in this school.”
“Oh, so that’s it...” Yuichi had had an inkling that might be it since he’d first heard talk about the so-called sacred territory.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you should leave the rest to us,” Furu said, then left.
Yuichi approached the fence. Chiharu accompanied him, even though he had no further business with her.
Yuichi had previously jumped from here to enter that classroom from the outside. Inside, for some reason, it was like another world, with a classroom made of wood, and burn marks everywhere. You couldn’t get there through normal means. You had to fall and go in through the window.
The classroom within had been full of specters. He had defeated a lot of them, but probably not all of them. When it came right down to it, he wasn’t sure if he could fight specters without Soul Reader.
“Heya, Yuichi!” a cheery voice addressed him from behind.
He turned around to see a translucent image of a girl waving to him cheerfully.
“Why can I see you?” Yuichi asked.
It was the specter Chie Amatsu. She had led the specter invasion of Seishin High, and even after it’d been resolved, she had apparently failed to move on, so now she just hung around the school.
Yuichi had assumed Soul Reader was the reason he could see the ghosts, but it seemed it was unrelated.
“I’m starting to think that losing Soul Reader hasn’t changed anything at all...” Yuichi muttered, beginning to feel extremely depressed about his future.
“Indeed, I can see her, too,” Chiharu declared. “But of course I can! I am who I am!”
If Chiharu could see her too, then it seemed that once you could see them, you couldn’t stop.
“What’s the matter?” Yuichi asked.
“Nothing. Hey, Amatsu, you lived in the world below for a while, right? What were things like in there? I only got to see what was inside the classroom.”
“I couldn’t go in very far in, either... It felt pretty dangerous.”
“I see,” Yuichi said. “I’d like to have a look, but I probably shouldn’t go right this instant.”
He did want to investigate a little bit, but he couldn’t just go jumping off a building in broad daylight.
“Want me to check it out instead?” Chie asked.
“Sure. It would at least be helpful to know if someone else was there.”
Chie climbed up the fence and fell down. After a while, she returned, walking up from the staircase to the roof.
“I guess you can’t fly, huh?” Yuichi asked.
“It looked pretty much the same as usual. I think there would at least be footprints if someone had gone in.”
Yuichi remembered the floor, which had been piled high with dust. Fresh footprints would have been immediately obvious.
Still, it was a strange world with bizarre rules about how you could get into it. There might yet be another entrance somewhere.
“Should I wait until after class?” he wondered.
Perhaps he should go now, regardless. But to do that would probably destroy Yuichi’s daily life. Skipping class to save the world was crazy, in Yuichi’s opinion.
“You leave me no choice,” Chiharu declared. “I shall accompany you!”
“I’d like to say ‘don’t bother,’ but you do tend to be pretty useful...” Yuichi muttered. Chiharu could be annoying in a lot of ways, but she was also pretty capable.
“Indeed I do, indeed I do!”
Still, the way she pushed her luck every time was extremely tiresome.
Yuichi decided to go back to the classroom.
As afternoon classes went by, thoughts drifted through Yuichi’s mind over what to do next.