Chapter 2

EPISODE 1 LET’S GO TO THE SACRED BLOOD EMPIRE! Ryouta Asagiri never watched the news. In terms of current events, he really only knew the prime minister’s name. Well, maybe—he wasn’t completely sure. He was in his second year of high school, and his favorite thing to do, bar none, was hiking far away from people. “The mountain’s not that tall, but the slope’s pretty steep…,” Ryouta Asagiri muttered to himself on the empty mountain. It was a lonely hobby, but that was the goal. The moment he stepped onto the path that led up the ridgeline, his cell phone started buzzing. “Let me guess… Yep. Knew it…” TITLE: To Ryouta MESSAGE: Dearest Ryouta, where are you? I am so rather worried because I don’t know where you are. Because I’m your… Oh! Don’t make me say any more! Tomorrow’s Monday, isn’t it? I will make lunch for you with the utmost skill and the care of a loving wife. As the secret ingredient, I will use my bodil a spice that is not sold anywhere in the world. Then I believe you’ll be mine. I had wonderful dreams last night because I fell asleep with my recording of your voice on repeat. Thank you. Yours truly, Kiyomizu Jouryuuji It looked as if she was going to write bodily fluids, but maybe that was just his imagination. “I still have service out here? Phones these days are nuts…” This wasn’t a threatening message, just a text from a classmate, but sometimes those messages wore away at his soul as effectively as a threat would anyway. He was already fed up with that one, and another one came. TITLE: Sorry!!! MESSAGE: You left this morning because you’re mad at what I did, right? I’m so sorry!!! It’s important to remember your manners, even with close relatives! I mean, I get it; anyone would get mad if someone tried to take their underwear off while they were sleeping. But I didn’t mean anything weird, okay? I just remembered I had to do laundry, and that’s why I was trying to take them off you. I don’t feel guilty about it at all. It’s not like…I can’t look at you as my little brother anymore. It’s not like…I can’t handle it. I can’t stand it anymore; just thinking of you makes me hot, Ryo… It’s not like that at all! This is a misunderstanding! It’s nothing! I don’t love you like THAT! That could never happen! Not in a million years! Rei Asagiri “Oh. Just my sister.” It was from a relative with the same last name. “I think I should just throw my phone away…” Ryouta liked his casual hiking. The empty mountainous wilderness was the only place he could find peace. To put it simply, Ryouta was so attractive that it put his life in danger. He knew exactly why that was. Three out of every five people who met his grandfather didn’t recognize the man as human. Of course, that brought up an interesting philosophical question of whether he was really human if more than half of his own kind didn’t recognize him as such, but we’ll skip over that. In his day, it was typical for families to go to matchmakers, but his grandfather was single for a very long time. He only managed to get married just before he turned fifty, and that was with a woman who had an obsession with strange animals, among other odd interests. His grandfather regretted his life, so he hid in the mountains and carried out some esoteric ritual. According to some reports, his request was something along the lines of In exchange for the last thirty years of my life, my grandson will lead a life attractive to women when he is of age! And that was extremely effective on Ryouta. His grandfather, by the way, was still alive at ninety-eight years old. And that was after he’d lost thirty years of his life, supposedly. Maybe he wasn’t human after all. “This is bad. Kiyomizu’s text brought up some dark memories…” For example, on Valentine’s Day in his first year of high school, Ryouta received a total of more than five hundred chocolates. There were only four hundred girls in his high school. You jealous? Go ahead—take my place. Because if this keeps up, I’m not gonna live long, you know. First, he’d been attacked by jealous guys. He remembered feeling his face go pale when both the karate and judo clubs ganged up on him at the same time. There were times when the girls chased him like stalkers, as with Kiyomizu’s text. “Rei, just give me a break… I somehow managed to get out by saying I was off hiking. If I stayed in the house any longer…” A genuine shiver passed through Ryouta when he remembered what had happened that morning. If he had been just a second too late, he really would’ve been stripped. “And my sister’s not the only one. Kiyomizu’s been getting worse and worse, too…” Kiyomizu Jouryuuji was the only daughter of a family that owned a temple, and Ryouta’s classmate. She was rather rich, so she often had bronze statues of Ryouta installed around school. Just last week, the number of Ryoutas rose to thirty-eight, more than all the statues of past principals combined. Not only that, but it seemed as if she had been more active recently. The other day, he’d found a letter from her in their postbox that said “I’m always watching, <3” along with a photo of him in the bath. Once he started thinking about how she could have managed to take the picture, it would be all over for him. To make matters worse, Kiyomizu was beautiful enough that there was a secret society of dubious origin called “Protectors of Kiyomizu and Her Small Tits,” and their members would come after him, too. “I mean, I’m glad I’m attractive, okay? But I might end up dead one of these days because of it… And I haven’t even found where my first crush has gone yet, either…” Because of his somber mood, the hike took longer than he planned, but he finally made it off the mountain and into the city of Akinomiya. This time, he’d taken the five-hour trail that went from the city Ryouta lived in, Oshiro, to the neighboring city. Akinomiya was a rural city in the valley with a population of roughly thirty thousand. The freeway cut straight through the mountain, and a local train line that headed to the Sanin Region in the west came by every twenty minutes. It was a lesser-known path, so there weren’t any other climbers, but he noticed the Self-Defense Force was roaming around the entrance to the mountain. “I wonder if there was an accident. There weren’t any landslides or anything.” But— “It’s awfully quiet for being back in civilization.” —even after coming down the hill and entering the residential area, it was eerily empty. After five minutes of walking, still not a single car had passed by. “I wish there were a few more people around…” Finally, he saw a passerby approaching him. But it wasn’t the kind of person he was hoping for—it was a girl around middle school age. Her blonde hair was tied back into two pigtails. Even Ryouta, who had had more than enough of girls, found his heart skipping a beat at her beautiful face. She was perfectly balanced on the line between cute and beautiful. Man, she’s cute… No, wait, girls are my enemy… He had a bad feeling about this. It would only spell trouble for him if she suddenly told him she had fallen in love at first sight. Of course, it wasn’t as if every woman he met fell in love with him upon seeing him; he was just being excessively self-conscious. Easy, Ryouta, calm down. He just needed to keep a straight face and walk right past her. Just keep a straight face. She was getting closer and closer. Easy, calm down. “Um, excuse me!” But the girl suddenly stepped right in Ryouta’s path. Uh-oh, I feel a confession coming on… This just happened last week… She was a middle school girl, too, and when I turned her down, she started crying. She wouldn’t stop, and for some reason, it ended up being my fault. But he didn’t yet know for sure that she was going to do the same thing. “Y-yeah…? What do you need…?” “Erm, are you…Japanese?” That was a weird question, but the girl seemed very serious. Her lips were even quivering. Maybe she lost a bet? “Yeah. My parents, my grandmother, and my grandfather—well, probably—are all Japanese.” “Is that so? Excellent! I am so glad to hear it! I feel like I’ve encountered a yeti or a snake cryptid in the mountains!” That was an oddly rude comparison. Ryouta wasn’t a cryptid. He was starting to get a little nervous. “Erm, what was I supposed to ask next…? Um…?” The girl, still standing in front of him, opened a book to check something. The book was called My First Minion. Her first what? He sure hoped he misread that. “Um, do you have any urgent business? Do you have any sick relatives you must go see right away? A lover who’s being transferred overseas whom you have to see off tonight? Or must you return quickly to a tyrant lest your friend Selinuntius be executed? Do you need to defeat a monster in the next three minutes in order to stay on this planet?” “I don’t have any sick parents or any kind of lover, I’m not the main character of Run, Melos, and I’m not from Nebula M78, so I’m good.” Maybe this girl was the one who wasn’t Japanese, and she was practicing to see if her language skills were good enough for conversation. She had blonde hair anyway. But her Japanese was flawless. The girl looked back down to her book.