Though it was all the same to me, I'd searched for a particularly large one because, to judge from her earlier comment about her Senjogahara, being a girl after all, might not want her uniform to fray.
“Let me hold on to your stationery or whatever.“
"Take it out. I'll hold on to it."
“Huh? Huh?"
From her expression, you might think that I'd made an outrageous demand, seemed to ask if something was wrong with my head.
"Oshino is, well, he's a weird dude, but he did technically save
Not only that.
He'd saved Hanekawa’s, too.
"—and I can't have the man who did face a dangerous person. So I'll hold on to your stationery."
'"You only tell me after we've come this far?" Senjogahara glared at me. "It seems I've stepped into a trap.
“…..”
Nah, that was way overboard.
But Senjogahara struggled silently with the matter for a while. She scowled at me now and then or stared at a point by her feet.
I wondered if she was going to turn around and leave, but at last, like someone prepared for the worst, she said, "Understood. Take them.”
Then, taking out a myriad of stationery from across her body like it was some magic show, she began handing them to me. What I'd seen earlier on the landing was only the tip of her badness and madness. You could've told me her pockets stretched into the fourth dimension; it could've been twenty-second-century science. I'd told her I'd hold on to it, but she was producing so much materiel I was starting to doubt if my bag was up to it.
...Someone like her strolling around in public unrestricted surely amounted to negligence on the part of the authorities…
"Don't get me wrong," Senjogahara warned after she'd finished giving everything to me. "It's not like I'm letting my guard down around you."
"You might as well..."
"If you're trying to get back at me for scabbing you with a staple by tricking me into entering these desolate ruins, you'll be making the wrong party pay.”
No, as far as which party, J would be right on.
"Understand?" she said. “I have five thousand of my rowdiest pals ready to attack your family if they don't hear from me at least once every minute.”
"It's fine... Stop worrying:
"You mean you won't even need a whole minute?!”
"I am not that boxer."
And hold on. She didn't think twice about targeting my family.
I couldn't believe her.
On top of that, five thousand pals? What a lie.
A bold lie for someone who had no friends.
"Say, I hear your two little sisters are still in middle school."
She knew my family's makeup.
She might've lied, but she wasn't joking.
In any case, displaying a modicum of my "immortality" hadn't made her trust me one bit. Oshino always said that relationships of trust were important in these things, and my current situation wasn't a good one from that perspective.
But what can you do.
From here, the problem was Senjogahara's alone.
I was merely a guide.
We passed through a tear in the chain-link fence onto the grounds, and into the building. It was still evening, but it was fairly dark inside.
There was a lot of clutter on the floor after days and months of neglect, and you could trip on something if you weren't careful.
That's when I realized.
An empty can lying around was nothing more than an empty can to me, but it had ten times the mass for Senjogahara.
Relatively speaking, that was the case.
It wasn't like in old comics where you spoke of "ten times the gravity" or "a tenth of the gravity" and left it there. The simple take that "lighter equals more athletic" didn't work, Worse, it was this dark' in a place she didn't know, Maybe Senjogahara couldn't be blamed for parading a wild animal's level of caution.
Even if she were ten times faster.
She'd only be a tenth as strong.
Her reluctance to surrender her stationery also began to make sense in that regard.
And—why she didn't carry a bag.
Why she couldn't carry one, either.
“…This way."
Clasping Senjogahara's wrist, I led her forward from the entrance where she'd been standing uncertainly. She was taken aback because I was a bit sudden, but while she gave me a "What?" she followed without resisting.
"Don't expect any thanks," she said.
"I know."
"In fact, you should be thanking me."
"I don't understand?!"
"I put that stapler around your mouth so that it'd hit the inside of your cheek, not the outside. I didn't want to leave a visible wound."
“……”
I couldn't hear that as anything other than an abuser's "It'll show on the face, so punch in the belly" thinking.
"It wouldn't have mattered if it had penetrated," I pointed out.
"I judged that you'd quite likely be fine, going by how thick-skinned
your face looks."
"If you're trying to comfort me, it's not working. And 'quite likely'? "
"My intuition is right about a tenth of the time."
"That's all?!"
"Well—" Senjogahara paused before continuing, "It was all wasted consideration in the end."
“Seems that way."
"If I said that immortality seems convenient, would you feel hurt?"
she followed up with a question.
I answered, "Not so much, now.“
Not so much—now.
But during spring break?
If someone had said that to me then—the words may have killed me, May have dealt a fatal wound.
"You could say it's convenient—but you could also say it's inconvenient, that's about it."
"How wishy-washy. I don't get it," Senjogahara shrugged. "Is it like when people talk about a 'devil may care' attitude? Satan probably doesn't, but just might?"
"Nothing wishy-washy there. He absolutely doesn't,"
"And anyway, I'm not immortal anymore. I just heal a tad faster than normal. Otherwise I'm a regular human.