That’s true. And even now, I don’t consider us pals or anything. We were just in the same class, and he was calling me some kinda paste thing I didn’t understand. None of our friends even overlapped. Or LINE groups. At least, I don’t think they did.
My friends always made fun of Chiba and his friends as gross otaku, and sometimes I laughed too. No, maybe I made fun of them the most. I never knew what was so funny, so I was always thinking what a pain it all was while I just matched the other girls’ mood without caring. I didn’t even know what kind of guy he was. I wasn’t interested in knowing.
But what I learned since ending up in this world together, and talking and sleeping with him, is that he communicates incomprehensibly and his boundaries are all fucked up. It’s creepy how one second he’s timid, the next he’s acting like he knows you inside and out, and then he’s suddenly touching you. I don’t know if he’s smart or not, but for all his obsessive attention to detail, he sure won’t listen to anyone else’s opinions.
But then he gets hurt really easily and is quick to anger. It’s annoying how he plunges into depression whenever someone gets mad at him. He can’t accept anyone saying something different from what he expected. That part of him can be really gross, and it pisses me off.
He’s no relative of mine. Only shame.
But one time Lupe gently told me I was too cold to him, so I do try to pay attention to that. But honestly, if I’m not overly cold, I don’t think my emotions get through to him.
“It’s funny how you know Chiba the best, but you say you’re not interested.”
“Nah, I don’t really know him. I just end up hearing stuff I didn’t even want to find out. It’s just because we’re from the same town.”
He’s an otaku, and a weirdo, and a perv, but that’s all. You can explain him pretty well with just those three words. But in this world there aren’t any smartphones, and even if there are things like newspapers, they just report in a matter-of-fact way, so the only sources of real info are word-of-mouth and gossip. And you only really talk to people whose faces you know.
I don’t know if that’s the reason or not, but for example, they don’t really call people “gross,” here, and there’s no word for “otaku.” They just don’t have those categories. If I say something like “like a virgin” then someone will finally say, Ohh, I getcha, but I think that’s only because we’re sex workers.
They don’t have those shared categories, so they don’t stick labels on people so easily. It’s not as if stereotypes and prejudice don’t exist, but maybe they’re less common. Everyone’s attitude is that you don’t know someone until you talk to them. It might just be because this city is on the front line of the war with the demon lord, so a lot of people come and go. Although if I know one thing for sure, it’s that this world is more misogynistic.
“Let’s talk to him. If you start to go too hard on him, I’ll stop you. And in return, if I go too easy on him, you can stop me. No angry yelling, though. If we keep ourselves in check, I think Chiba will actually tell us why he did it.”
“...Yeah.”
But when it comes to communication, people in this world are more mature, or like, sometimes I’m not really that much better than Chiba, which freaks me out. I was always confident about that kind of stuff before, but it’s like a difference of caliber. In this world it’s about how much you can take, not how much you can dish out. And I’ve always fought my way through by dishing out.
If only we had phones. Chiba might be thinking the same thing as me—maybe it was stress making him act out. If this were a classroom, thanks to Lupe, me and Chiba would be in a common LINE group and be able to maintain a proper distance as classmates. That would have been just right.
We’re two people who couldn’t become friends just by sleeping together. Inviting him in the beginning was a mistake.
That’s what I was thinking with a mix of nostalgia and regret on the nice walk home with Lupe carrying the apology cake.
Then came the shock.
Chiba was dead.
“Whaaaaaaat?!”
I was so freaked out I collapsed, and Lupe’s knees gave out too. The shed was already a mess to begin with, and now Chiba was lying right in the middle of it, in front of some boxes and stuff piled in the back.
He was still wrapped up from my Bind power, lying face down with his feet pointing our way. In the slice of light that shone through the open door, we had a clear view of the blood he had coughed up and his pale face.
“Ch-Chiba!”
“Wait, Lupe! Don’t go near him.”
She tried to run to him, but I grabbed her shoulders. Preserving the crime scene is elementary in a scientific investigation. Right, Ukyo? Rokkaku?
I approached carefully, so as not to step on anything lying on the floor, and touched the nape of his neck. No pulse. I put my ear to his back. His heartbeat...well, I couldn’t hear anything.
I cleared my throat and collected myself as much as possible before informing Lupe in a way that hopefully wouldn’t upset her too much. “He’s gone.”
“Nooooooo!” She crumpled into my arms. The shuddering of her narrow shoulders told me this was just reality, and we had to accept it.
I realized that on some level I had been trying to enjoy the weird little incidents that happened on the regular in this other world. Frankly, I figured today was just another day of messing with Chiba, and hadn’t thought any more of it than that while tying him up and imprisoning him. I never thought he would die. I never thought he would puke blood.
I didn’t know what I could ever tell his parents.
The question was, how did it happen?
“I didn’t think this guy would die a good death, but...I sure didn’t expect it to be this pitiful.” He came to another world, learned his limits, became a panty thief in his despair, and died. Did all the “reborn in another world” stories he always talked about end this sadly? I’d like to read one sometime. “But this is a murder mystery. Someone killed him.”
It certainly wasn’t suicide. For me, this situation would have been so embarrassing I would want to die, but for Chiba it was daily life. And he wasn’t the type to kill himself.
Someone had definitely murdered him.
“Yeah... And the one who tied him up so he couldn’t move was you, Haru.”
“That’s right.”
“And the one who locked him in this shed was you, Haru.”
“Yep.”
“And you have the key, too, right?”
“Hold up. I didn’t do it. I even have an alibi. I was with you the whole time!”
“You said more than once that you wished he would die...”
“Yeah, I did. I said it plenty of times. But look, I didn’t do it, so think for second! Calm down and think about it, okay?”
Me, the culprit?
Nah, there’s no way. And I’m a reliable narrator. Seriously.
“Let’s get our facts straight first. Then we can reason it out with cool heads. We’ll catch the culprit ourselves.”
“U-Uh-huh. But don’t you think we should leave that sort of thing up to the soldie—?”
“We can’t do that. I mean, you know what sort of investigation they’d do. This is a brothel, and the victim is a panty thief. They’ll try to frame one of us as the murderer and get it over with as quickly as possible. They definitely won’t look into it properly. It could actually be more dangerous for us if we don’t track down the perp on our own!”
I will avenge Chiba and clear my name.
’Cause this is a Blue Cat Nocturne murder mystery!
The scene of the crime was a shed at a brothel.
It was next to the laundry hanging area around the back of the building and couldn’t be seen from the street. You either had to go around the building or exit through the back near the kitchen to access it.
At the time of discovery, the door was unlocked. There was no master key. The shed’s walls and door were wood. There weren’t any windows, either. It was a total locked room.
I was the only one with a key. But at the risk of sounding insistent, I was out shopping when...Chiba coughed up blood and died. From the lack of external injuries, it was likely the murder was committed via poison.
It had to have happened sometime between the time Lupe and I went to Sumo’s and the time we returned with the cake. I don’t think it took an hour, but it was definitely more than thirty minutes, so anyone could have done it.