“HOLY CRAP I’M LAAAAAAAAAAATE?!”
It’s eight friggin’ thirty!
There I was, sprinting at full speed down the road to my school, knowing full well that class had started ages ago. It goes without saying that I had a slice of bread in my mouth... I mean, really, I had a slice of bread in my mouth, but turns out it’s actually pretty darn hard to run like that. I ended up shoving it into a plastic bag, then chucking that into my satchel for good measure.
I suddenly became keenly aware that the only people who could hum a jaunty tune as they skip their way to school under these circumstances must be fictional. I’m just not carefree enough to have that sorta attitude, dangit! And if I were, I’d just skip school entirely! So I kept running, cursing those nonexistent, happy-go-lucky punks...until I came to a sudden stop.
“Haaah... Wheeze... Bleugh...”
Yeah, running to the point of exhaustion in the blazing summer heat sure is a great way to make yourself barf. I propped myself up on a nearby telephone pole, retching as I tried to catch my breath. Absolutely pathetic.
“Screw it... Maybe I should just ditch.”
In my exhaustion, my thought process took a turn for the logical. I mean, if I ditched school for the day, I wouldn’t have to force myself to keep running, right?
“C’mon, it’s just one day! What’s the big deal?” The tiny devil on my shoulder whispered into my ear.
“You shouldn’t be running around like this! You never know when a car might come speeding around the corner; it’s much too dangerous. You should go home and take it easy for today.” The tiny angel on my other shoulder offered an alternate opinion. Indeed, this could be the debate of the century brewing... Wait, huh? They actually agreed! Well, so much for that!
“Yup, time to play hooky.”
The moment I made the decision, I felt a massive weight lift from my shoulders. It’d be completely unthinkable for a puny little human like me to defy the will of my guardian angel-devil duo! They made the call, so there’s nothing I can do about it! I, Kunugi Kou, was a free man, and as such there was nothing to stop me from triumphantly abandoning the road to my school. Yes, this would be one small step for me, one giant leap for my journey towards habitual delinquency!
I mean, let’s be real here: the likes of me cutting school for a day isn’t gonna bring the whole of society to a grinding halt. You get further in life if you don’t sweat the small stuff and live in the moment! Probably. I was all ready to set off and enjoy the fruits of my freedom to the fullest.
“Kyaaaaahhhhhhh!”
Suddenly, a girlish scream rang out.
Three words (which I’ll write as an acronym for decency’s sake) popped into my head: WTF?
“WTF?”
I actually said it out loud, on account of it being just that unnatural a situation for me to get thrust into. This sort of comic-book-cliché development’s not supposed to happen to me! I’m an extra, for crying out loud, not the main character! Shouldn’t he be the one who runs into stuff like this?!
Unfortunately, reality’s a cruel mistress that doesn’t wait for you, no matter how much you wish for it. While I was frozen in shock, a girl burst out from a side street off to the right, just a little ways ahead of me. A beautiful girl. Yup, a plain old beautiful girl. A beautiful girl who had abject terror written all over her face, but a beautiful girl nonetheless.
I had a horrible feeling I knew what was going on. It was one of those scenes where an attractive young woman gets set upon by a rampaging hoodlum, and the random dude who happens to be nearby saves her, thus getting promoted to protagonist status. I figured that if I was right about that, this could very well be a heaven-sent opportunity intended to reward me for being so quiet and cooperative in my role as an extra.
But y’know what, God? Hate to say it, but I think you might be misunderstanding something here. I don’t want that promotion you’re offering me in the slightest. I happen to like my peaceful, quiet, dull-as-dirt lifestyle—in fact, I love it! I don’t want any big, crazy events. I wanna live out my life the same way that billions of people have done before me: by watching it slowly dribble down the drain in a state of complete, unremarkable tedium. That’s my wish, if you feel like granting it.
As a side note, putting a girl through something traumatizing enough to make her scream like that, just to give some extra a promotion? Dick move, God. You bumbling, balding blowhard.
So anyway, my apologies, random beautiful girl. God’s presumably the one who thought this development up, so it’s not really my responsibility, but I still feel like I should say sorry for the fact that I can’t do squat to help you out here. Assuming I’m reading the situation right, some really nasty delinquent’s about to come barging out of that side street after her. Most likely, he’s chasing her ’cause he’s been entranced by her beauty. There might even be more than one of them. That’s how these things usually go.
The thing is, extras who could actually deal with that sort of thing are pretty much one in a million. You’d have to be holding hidden depths of strength, or have learned karate via a correspondence course, or some other super special something-or-other along those lines. This was too heavy a responsibility for me to deal with.
That said, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I abandoned her without helping at all. If anything, standing back and watching a disaster like this play out in front of me without batting an eyelash would be pretty protagonist-ish in its own right. If I didn’t help her, odds were good she’d shout something along the lines of “Hey, why aren’t you helping?! What kind of person doesn’t help in a situation like this?!” and drag me into the mess against my will.
As such, I’ll have to fight cliché with cliché. Time for operation “Officer, over here!” It’s actually quite straightforward. Step one: call the cops. Step two: tell them where you are and what’s happening. That’s literally it. I mean, come on, she’s a delicate lady and this is Japan, a country of peace and tranquility. The odds of her getting knocked out and abducted before the police show up are super low, probably!
Meanwhile, while I was busy internally monologuing about my next move, the girl tripped over her own feet and face-planted right in front of me. It was such a painfully cliché development, it almost made me want to ask her if I could see the script.
“Umm, hey, you okay?”
My innocent bystander instincts kicked in and I talked to her. Crap! The girl looked up at me in shock, then flinched away at the sound of footsteps pounding down the side street after her. Those footsteps had me more confused than freaked out, though, namely because there was only one person’s worth of them. Judging by the weight of the impacts, I could tell that they were on the heavier side of things, and pretty darn slow too. She looked perfectly fit at a glance, so I had to wonder: couldn’t she just outrun her mystery pursuer? At the speed they were going, it wouldn’t be all that hard.
Of course, while I was distracted by all that nonsense, I missed my chance to A: call the cops and B: just run the hell away. That’s when, as if dispatched by the fates themselves to mock me for my carelessness...it appeared.
“C’mewe, pweddy wady! Wait foh meeeeeee!”
“Gyaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?!”
“Wha— Augh?!”
“It” was absolutely repulsive, and the slightest glance at it triggered my fight-or-flight reflex so hard that I kicked it back the way it came without thinking twice. This...thing was a butt-naked old man. I’ll spare you the gory details—take my word for it, you don’t wanna hear them, and I definitely don’t wanna talk about them. Let’s just say he was so potent an exhibitionist that just breathing the same air as him was enough to make me regret getting up that morning.
Come on, seriously?! This sort of scene calls for a street punk, not some freaky old streaker! The real world doesn’t have a filter to censor that crap with pixels!
Anyway, the sudden pervert appearance was such a completely unexpected development that I went and unleashed my golden foot of decapitation (capable of pulverizing the spine of even the most thick-necked boxer!) on him. As such, I figured it was time to scrap operation “Officer, over here!” and swap over to operation “Officer, he’s over here!” The actual process is exactly the same—just turn the desperation dial up to 1200%. That’s right, it’s time for 1200% courage mode. Just gotta bite the bullet and go for it...
“Ah, umm!”
“Wha—huh?!”
Caught off guard by a sudden voice, I reflexively hid behind a nearby telephone pole. I didn’t have the chance to look, but I was sure that the person talking to me was the girl the creepy pervert guy had been chasing after. Now, admittedly, I’d barely seen her face and I’d only really heard her scream up until then, but I still had absolute confidence in my conclusion. My evidence: we were literally the only people around at the time. Yeah, just call me Sherlock.