W-Wait a second! Not only am I not wearing my bulletproof uniform, I’m naked here! “T-T-This is what happens when I leave her to you for just a few minutes?! Y-You sexual deviant! Die!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Aria shot at my feet with the same rhythm at with she yelled disparaging remarks at me.
“W-Wait! If we just talk about this, I can explain!” I continued to back up farther and farther as bullets imbedded themselves in the floor right in front of my toes.
“You! Are! A! Real! Beast! A maggot! Bacteria!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Aria stamped her feet loudly as she marched toward me with her pistols firing away, and eventually, I was cornered in the balcony.
D-Dead end!
Looking below me, I could see Tokyo Bay.
“A . . . A-A-After molesting me, now you’re going after Shirayuki?! Y-You king of perverts!” It had come to point that Aria was now pointing her two pistols at my actual body.
What are you going to do, Kinji?! If I run inside the bulletproof storage locker, it’s only going to thrown over the edge of the balcony with me inside it!
“T-That’s not it, Aria!” cried Shirakuyuki, “Stop being such a sore loser!
Hearing Shirayuki’s somewhat odd statement, Aria spun around and looked at her with furrowed brows.
“H-H-How am I being a sore loser?!”repudiated Aria, bearing her cuspid.
“Kin-chan wasn’t forcing himself on me! We were in mutual consent!”
“Mu-Mutual consent?”
“That’s right! I was trying to undress myself! Kin-chan’s not at fault!”
“U-Undress yourself? W-W-W-What in the world were you two trying to do?!”
Aria was obviously flustered, and Shirayuki lunged at her in an attempt to snatch away her pistols. I wasn’t overly thrilled about the statements she was making, but I ungrudgingly routed for Shirayuki.
“Well, e-e-e-even if you were in mutual consent …!!” said Aria, whose face quickly turned bright red as she dove in front of Shirayuki and performed a technique similar to a spring hip throw, sending the priestess backwards onto the floor.
“Aaah!”
“. . . Kinji! F-F-For a bodyguard to do something like that is taboo!” yelled Aria, now bearing her cuspid at me as she stepped over Shirayuki.
“I could overlook the two of you being friendly, b-but engaging in t-t-that kind of relationship with the client makes you a failure as a butei! A failure! A colossal failure!!” Aria’s high pitched voiced sounded like it might shatter the window in front of me. “This calls for a hole opening festival!”
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Aria ruthlessly opened fire on me with her pistols.
“Ngh!” I jumped over the side of the balcony and using the wire inside my belt, hung from the railing like Spiderman.
T-That was a close call.
Or so I thought.
“Go cool your head! And I’m not giving you a ring buoy!”
Bang! Snap!
Aria’s scolding was followed by a bullet that severed the wire, and after I bounded off the safety fence below me, a loud splash echoed in the darkness. When I had gathered my wits, I found myself in the waters of Tokyo Bay.
A bodyguard ... is not to get deeply involved with the client. Sure enough, that was one of the most basic rules of body guarding, and it was clearly written in the Assault textbook. The reason is because when a bodyguard dispenses with the proper formalities, he or she tends to be off guard and isn’t be able to be make sound judgments when the situation calls for it. But our mission this time was given to us as a result of the educational affairs department’s over-protectiveness, and one could argue that it was more like “playing bodyguard.” This whole ordeal came to pass simply because Aria had changed her attitude and became frantic at hearing the name “Durandal,” so it was very much a bother when she got angry with me, her partner, for not taking it more seriously. So here we are now. The exhaustion was already taking its toll on me, and after coming out of the shower only to get into a fight with Shirayuki in my birthday suit, I wound up plummeting into Tokyo Bay ...
… and catching a cold.
In the morning, my head was reeling as I held a thermometer in my mouth, and Aria was fairly cross as she told me what a disgrace I was, but she didn't torment me any further like she usually does. Shirayuki vehemently insisted on staying home as well so that she could nurse me to health, but I couldn’t allow her to do something like that for me and somehow managed to have her go to school. Therefore, I was now spending the time lying mind-numbingly bored in my bed. My fever was wavering back and forth around a temperature of 100.4 degrees. I didn’t always feel too badly, but I was having a rough time at the moment. I was beginning to lose consciousness from the high fever that was most likely the virus army’s last resistive efforts. After a while—probably sometime around the lunch hour—somebody came into the apartment. It would seem the person came to check up on me ... which means it had to be Shirayuki. Too lethargic to even call out, I just went back to sleep. I could have sworn that I felt ... somebody tenderly laying a hand upon my aching forehead to check my temperature. It was a very gentle hand.
When I awoke, it was two in the afternoon. According to the thermometer, I still had a temperature of 100.4 degrees, but perhaps I was adjusting to the fever because I was feeling a little better.
“...”
I groggily sat up, sensing that I was the only one in the apartment. I was rather thirsty. It was probably because I had done so much sweating. Desiring a glass of water, I stumbled my way out of the bedroom, and upon closing the door, I felt something on the doorknob. It was a plastic bag.
“?”
I searched inside it to find Yamato Pharmaceutical’s “Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion.” It was in an old-fashioned package, and with most medications failing to have very much of an effect on me, it was the single remarkable medicine that I could take for colds.
. . . Shirayuki got this for me? She really does know me well, doesn’t she. But…did I ever tell her about this medicine? Oh, well.
Glory to the power of Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion. Thanks to the medicine, when I next woke up, my temperature had returned to normal. It was already evening, and when I went into the living room, I came across Shirayuki who looked as if she had just come back.
“Ah, Kin-chan, how’s your cold?”
“It’s fine. My fever went down and my headache’s gone too.”
“Thank goodness. I’m so glad,” said Shirayuki, but her expressions of relief soon changed to sniveling.
“Didn’t I tell you not to cry so much?”
“I know.” Shirayuki wiped her tears away with her finger and showed me a face beaming with happiness.
“... It’s all because of the ‘Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion’ you got me. After taking some and going to bed, I was cured in no time.”
“Huh? I ... was thinking of cooking you Chinese remedial foods since you don’t like medicine, but ...”
“Hm? You got it for me, didn’t you? Sorry for the trouble. They only sell it at the dirty Chinese herbal drug store on that maze-like corner of Ameyoko. It was probably a little scary for a girl to venture in there by herself. Thanks a lot.”
“Wha ... ah.” Shirayuki put a slender white finder to her lip ... and had a look that suggested she was pondering over something ... “... S-Sure,” she said at last, averting her eyes.
I’m currently inside an Assault facility that closely resembles a gymnasium and holding an electric guitar, which doesn’t really suit my image. Today, we’re rehearsing for the Adsiard’s closing ceremony, so having been forced to join the Adsiard band by Aria, I, too, was doing some simple practice with a borrowed Danelectro DC 59.
“Let me show you my gratitude ...”
I wasn’t the vocalist, but I sang in a low voice as I repeatedly went over the song’s intro, which I was in charge of playing. I had practiced the guitar a little when I was taking the masquerading course at Kanagawa’s Butei junior high school, it was only a short two-minute part, and Shiranui, who was the other guitarist and the vocalist, was quite good, so practicing wasn’t too much of a chore … But this entire scene of an Assault facility being used for peaceful means just felt very odd to me. It’s sad, I do admit. Behind Muto, who was avidly beating his drums in a way that made one think he was trying to impress someone, Aria and the other girls were practicing their cheer dances with pom-poms in hand. The sounds of whistles blaring filled the air as they nimbly danced about, swinging around their short skirts.
Ah, hell. Every single last one of ’em is dressed like that.
Muto was saying something about it being a feast for the eyes that one could only partake in once a year, but to me it was horrific sight.