“I see... You were thinking about things seriously too, in your own way, huh?” Toriko murmured, seeming pleased.
It looked like, as I was talking, she’d concluded Benimori-san wasn’t a threat.
“She sounds like an interesting girl. I’d like to meet her some time.”
“Fine with me.”
I figured she was going to switch over to her smiling shy girl mode again even if they did meet, but I had no reason to refuse. Benimori-san would enjoy it, at least.
“So? What happened when you were talking with Benimori-san? Did she say something?”
“Uh, that’s not quite it... I was the one who said something.”
“You, Sorawo?”
I let out a sigh of regret. “So, while I was at the university, Benimori-san comes up to me, and she asks me what happened after that.”
“If she’s the type that likes to gossip about romance, yeah, of course she’d want to ask. So what did you tell her?”
“I had to think really hard about it. Like, how could I explain it so she’d understand?”
It was a much harder task than explaining to Kozakura. Benimori-san didn’t know about the Otherside, or the ups and downs of my relationship with Toriko. There was no way a friend with practically no background information was going to understand me going on about “nue.”
After a whole lot of hemming and hawing, here’s what I finally said to her: “We’re going out now.”
“I mean, come on! I was so frustrated with myself! We found our answer after so much searching for a relationship between us that wasn’t romance. But when people ask me about it, and I try to explain it to them, I’m drawn towards using the context of a romantic relationship! It’s humiliating...”
As I was venting indignantly, Toriko put her hands on the ground, pushed herself up, and then leaned over me.
“What?”
Even as I was asking that, she kissed me.
“What? What?”
She just looked at me without saying a word.
“Hey! You! No getting horny!”
“I can’t?”
“No, you can’t!” I pushed Toriko off me and got up. “Okay, I’m up! I’m up now! Break time’s over! Construction time resumes!”
“Okayyy.”
What was that all about? Was there something arousing about what I said?
I was still perplexed as afternoon construction began.
Toriko didn’t get the true essence of what I was saying, I thought to myself while drilling through the concrete.
It had been a shock to me that, when trying to describe our relationship, the words “going out” had come out of my very own mouth. This was no laughing matter. It scared me—that, against my will, I’d been pulled towards the context of romantic love.
Those words weren’t what I’d intended. They had left my mouth of their own volition. In that moment, I’d had no will of my own. The me who had said “We’re going out” was a bot.
No matter how Toriko and I came to an agreement between ourselves, no matter how we tried to define our special, unique relationship, if we let down our guards for a second, it would get turned into romantic love. Like we were being pulled towards a celestial body with an enormous gravitational pull.
If I explained things in order, I think Toriko would understand. Benimori-san too...probably. But what about other people? Kozakura probably found the whole topic tiresome, but it wasn’t like she was the kind of person who wouldn’t understand even after we had a serious conversation about it. I had a feeling that Natsumi would be a lost cause.
The other thing that scared me was that people who didn’t know me would probably interpret even these worries of mine through the context of romantic love. I was confident of that. In other words, they’d see me as a beginner when it came to romantic love, flailing around like a fool because I didn’t want to accept my love for what it was. Whether they came to that reading benevolently or in a mocking way, they would still be looking at me as if I were immature. After all, those caught in romantic love’s sphere of gravity moved in line with its context automatically, unable to perceive the pull that it exerted on them.
It probably wasn’t even the fault of the individual humans affected, much like it wasn’t humanity’s fault that we were subject to gravity here on Earth.
Well, what was to blame, then? I thought about it. Could it be that the very concept of “romantic love” itself was something incredibly terrifying...?
“There, we made it!”
Toriko’s voice brought me back to my senses. The core drill in her hand had broken through, opening the final hole.
Once we cut the remaining rebar with the disc cutter, the opening was complete. Now we could descend to the seventh floor.
“That was a little over three hours, maybe,” said Toriko. “We’ve gotten a bit faster, wouldn’t you say?”
“Do the same thing four times, and you start to get used to it,” I replied.
We lowered the stepladder, then went to take a look together. Even knowing there was bound to be nothing again, I still got excited with each new floor.
Raising my goggles, the wind felt good blowing across my sweaty face. The sun had begun dipping to the west. Its light felt blinding this time of day. As I looked around, wondering where we should make the next hole...
“Toriko! There’s stairs!” I cried out in surprise.
“Wha... Hey, there are!”
The opening to a downward staircase was near the center of the seventh floor. I rushed over to look down. The stairs turned around before continuing down to the sixth floor, and then even lower from there.
We’d been expecting to have to bust our way through the concrete six more times before we got down to ground level, so this was a happy surprise. We forgot how tired we were as we held hands in delight.
“How far down do you think it goes?” I wondered aloud. “Even if it’s only part of the way, this is going to save us so much effort.”
I was about to start going down immediately, but Toriko hurriedly stopped me.
“Whoa, whoa, Sorawo. Are these stairs safe? They look fine, but this building is practically a ruin.”
I paused and looked at her for a moment. “You sure are smart, Toriko.”
“Thanks. You may be a bit dumber than usual right now, Sorawo.”
“And you aren’t afraid to say so, huh?”
That said, Toriko was absolutely in the right on this. If, after all our careful work to avoid getting injured, the stairs collapsed and we ended up with broken bones or something, that would be the worst.
I sat down at the top of the stairs, carefully testing my weight on them. They felt firm enough under my feet. No signs of collapsing...that I could tell.