“I guess one second in the tunnel is equivalent to about forty minutes outside…” Anzu whispered under her breath, having come to the same conclusion. Then she quickly dug into her book bag, whipped out a pen and a notebook, opened it to a blank page, and started scribbling some calculations. I was amazed at how quickly she did all of the math in her head—I knew she was smart, but not necessarily that smart. When her pen finally came to a stop, I looked down at the page and examined her work. It was a list of different hypothetical periods of tunnel time, followed by their real-time equivalents.
1 sec = 40 mins
1 min = 40 hrs
1 hr = 100 days
1 day = 6.5 yrs
Thus read her calculations. Anzu turned to look up at me, her eyes wide and twinkling with excitement. “Six and a half years in one day! Are you kidding me?! That’s crazy! You could literally use this place like a cold sleep pod and skip ahead to the distant future!”
It was like she’d entirely forgotten the past two hours of boredom in an instant.
“Y-yeah, that’s pretty crazy, all right. At the same time…”
While Anzu was gushing as though we’d stumbled upon the discovery of the century, a dark cloud of doubt grew bigger and bigger in my chest. Six and a half years in a day—two decades in three. You really could use it for bona fide time travel, no doubt about that. However, that would also mean leaving everything in the “past” behind. All our classmates would go on to graduate and get jobs without us, and everyone we ever knew would continue to grow older while we stayed the same. Kozaki High might not even be around anymore when we came back out, let alone my little house.
These were the sorts of changes Anzu would have to deal with in order to have her wish granted by the Urashima Tunnel, and I wondered if she was truly prepared. Or, hell, on the off chance that the tunnel might grant her wish, since we still had no proof that it actually possessed that ability. On top of that, there could be all sorts of other dangers associated with using the tunnel that were lying in wait for gullible idiots like us. Maybe once you went in beyond a certain distance, there was no coming back out. Granted, these were all risks I was prepared to take if it meant even the slightest chance of getting to see my little sister again, but in Anzu’s case, I had no idea what she was after. No notion where her motivations lay.
I shot a quick glance over at her. Her face was still flushed and ecstatic from the exciting implications of our new discovery. Even in the face of such dire possible consequences, she wasn’t shrinking in the slightest. She was still clearly one hundred percent determined to conquer the Urashima Tunnel, even if she obviously knew it was a bad idea to dive in without doing our due diligence first.
Hey, Hanashiro. Why are you so dead set on this? What are you hoping to gain here?
I was this close to saying the words, but I choked them back down at the last second. The last thing I wanted to do was rain on her parade when she was obviously having a total blast. Besides, there’d be plenty of other opportunities for me to ask about her motives and end goals. One thing I could definitely say for sure, though, was that we should wait until another day to start the investigation proper—both to make the necessary preparations and to give Anzu some time to come down from this emotional high and start thinking rationally again. But for tonight, a little celebration in honor of an experiment gone well certainly wasn’t going to hurt anyone.
It was two days after we nailed down the precise time ratio of the Urashima Tunnel. I was sitting across from Shohei making mindless small talk as we ate our lunches when all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of Anzu out of the corner of my eye. She gave off a frigid, unapproachable aura as she ate her sandwich alone—and it was almost enough to make me think the more candid side of her I’d witnessed a couple days prior had been nothing more than a figment of my imagination. The giant welt on her face was now gone, thankfully, as was the wad of gauze.
“You’re looking at the new girl again, dude,” Shohei grumbled.
“Mm?” I said, finishing the current sip of my canned coffee milk and pulling the straw from my lips. “What’s wrong with that? You got a thing for her? Possessive much?”
“Oh, shut up. I’m gonna beat your ass.”
“Heh. Easy, man. I’m just messing with you.”
“Seriously, dude—if you’re that curious about her, you should go say something to her. You’re never gonna be her friend by watching her from afar like a creep.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I hadn’t told a single person about my new working relationship with Anzu—mainly because I figured it’d only draw unwanted attention to the both of us. I could only assume she’d been avoiding talking to me at school for the same reason.
“It’s not that I really wanna be friends with her or anything, though,” I went on. “I find her behavior kinda interesting, is all. You never know what she’s gonna do next.”
“Hrm… Well, she is a bit of an enigma, I’ll give you that. Hell, I heard someone saw her climbing over the fence onto the train tracks the other day. Who even does that kind of crap?”
“…Yeah, good question.”
So she was seen, huh…? Would have expected her to be more cautious than that.
“Oh yeah, that reminds me!” Shohei blurted out. “I also heard a little rumor about Kawasaki’s punk-ass boyfriend. They’re saying he fully dropped out of school.”
“Wait, what? Seriously?”
“Yep. Somethin’ about having to take over the family fishing business, apparently. But if you ask me, I’m guessing he was too embarrassed to come back to school after getting his ass handed to him by a girl.”
“Heh. Well, good for him. Hopefully it helps him build a little character.”
“For real,” said Shohei, stuffing his cheeks with a huge rice ball.
Come to think of it, Koharu hadn’t been back to school since that day either. I wondered if she would end up dropping out too.
Finally, classes were over for the day. As I closed my textbook and shoved it in my book bag, an announcement rang out over the intercom.
“Kaoru Tono from Class 2-A, please report to the faculty room. I repeat: Kaoru Tono…”
It was Ms. H’s voice.
“Uh-oh, bro. What’d you do this time?” Shohei teased.