In other words: intense overtime, no pay, and zero work satisfaction. It’d be like going to work for the most disgustingly exploitative corporation imaginable. Like hell was I gonna let myself end up as one of those background characters!
“C’mon, join the club; it’ll be fun! And tell me your name while you’re at it!”
“What, so getting my name’s an afterthought?”
“Maybe I’m just too shy to admit that’s what I really want!”
“You don’t have a shy bone in your body.”
“Oh, you realized?” Kazuki was smiling as simplemindedly as ever, but by that point her face was drenched with sweat, and her breathing was wild and strained. I was in pretty much the same boat. Again: I, the guy who was doped up on mana, was having just as hard a time as she was. Where the hell does this chick hide all that energy in that small frame of hers? It’s a real mystery.
“I can imagine so many wild possibilities if you did join, though! Like, first, we’ll cram in so much training before finals we won’t even have time to sleep! Then, after summer vacation starts, we’ll have a hellish summer training camp waiting for us, and we can even hole up in the mountains together for more training after that! Like, y’know, one of those ten-day wilderness survival excursions!”
“I’d love to meet the guy who could listen to that pitch and decide that joining sounds like a good idea!” How would she even know about the hellish training camp thing? She’s still a first-year; she can’t have gone through one of those yet! On the other hand, considering the side of her I was seeing at that moment, I could easily imagine her turning it into hell for the other club members without breaking a sweat.
“Huh...?” Suddenly, the smell...stopped? Not in the sense that it stopped smelling—it was growing stronger and stronger, actually, in a manner that could only make me conclude that the man had stopped, and I was closing in on him.
“Sorry, Kazuki, but no more time to chat. I’ve gotta move.” I’d ended up getting pulled into the conversation, but I hadn’t forgotten my actual objective. I felt a bit bad about doing this to Kazuki, but it was time for me to sprint at full speed. I figured that an obsessive track maniac like her would end up taking that defeat and turning it into motivation, anyway. She’d be fine.
“Whoa?! Hey, Senpai?!” I heard her shout with shock behind me, but I accelerated in a flash and left her in the dust, running at a speed that nobody my age could possibly manage, no matter how all-out they went. Well, not in this world, anyway.
My final destination ended up being a fenced-off construction site. They were going to put up an apartment building there, best I could tell; it was an empty lot in a desolate neighborhood about five stations away from Meiou City. He stood in the center of the lot: a portly man in a suit, back turned to me like he was the final boss of a dungeon. The sun had completely set at that point and the lot was pitch black, but I knew in an instant that it was him and made the obvious first move.
“Geh heh heh! So you made it, Kunughi Kobphhaugh?!?!?!”
“DIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
I dropkicked him in the head. You better believe I put all the momentum of my sprint into it, too, and blew him most of the way across the lot. He bounced along the ground like a soccer ball. In fact, I hit him so hard that I’d almost worried about accidentally killing him, but considering our interactions up to that point he definitely wasn’t a normal person, and I was pretty sure he’d be fine.
“Heh heh heh... You certainly have a funny way of greeting people.” As expected, he stood up like nothing had happened at all. I could just make out his silhouette through the dust cloud raised by his impact. “I’m glad to see you’re back in top condition. Forcing you to drink this was worth the effort.”
He pulled the bottle from before out of his pocket again. That confirmed my suspicions—he’d force-fed it to me, and whatever it was, it had allowed me to recover my mana. Apparently, that was all according to plan for him.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Your partner for your first kiss, of course!” He pressed his fingers up to his lips, obviously provoking me.
“Oh, you are so dead!” I’d managed to cool off a bit thanks to my conversation with Kazuki, but all of a sudden I was filled with rage all over again. He walked off that first kick like it was nothing—nobody would blame me if I gave him a couple more for good measure, right...?
“I was long gone by then, but you shouted so loudly I heard you anyway. In any case, no need to worry—it was my first kiss too.”
“I don’t give a crap!” Oh god, that first kiss shout was loud enough for people outside to hear it?! This sucks! Knowing it was also his first just made the situation suck even harder. Nobody would be proud of exchanging first kisses with a greasy, middle-aged degenerate! Hell, that’s the exact opposite of reassuring! It’s a social time bomb that’ll explode the minute anyone finds out about this nightmare!
“Heh heh heh, oh, pwease, don’t be so angwy!” he snickered. “I’m sure you realize that bloodshed’s frowned upon in this world, don’tcha?”
“‘This world’... I knew it—you too?”
“That’s right. I came here from the same world as you—from that fantasy land of swords and sorcery, as they say in these parts.” He admitted it immediately and easily. Apparently, he’d had no intention of hiding it in the first place.
“What’re you after? Why would you—”
“Why would I try to assault the lovely little lady from before?” He cut me off, sneering as he predicted my line of questioning. It wasn’t the gross, sleazy grin from before. This was something altogether different.
“You didn’t try to assault her; you did assault her!”
“If I’d actually been trying, do you really believe she would have been able to escape? I wasn’t after her, Kunughi Koh. I was after you.”
“Me...?”
“You’ve gone soft, but I had a feeling that making contact with her would spur you to action.” Her—he emphasized the word in a weird way that really got my attention. It almost felt like he wasn’t really talking about Ayase at all. “Wait, really?” he continued. “You haven’t noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“About the girl! Ayase Hikari is—” His words cut off mid-sentence. Hikari’s what? If you weren’t going after her out of pure perversion, why were you chasing her...? I waited for him to finish his thought, but he didn’t. We just stood there, silently.
“I’m waiting?”
“I’m aware, but...who is that?” His style of speech suddenly shifted—he sounded a bit stiffer than he had up until that moment. It seemed to me that he’d been caught somewhat off guard, and I had to wonder if that was how he talked normally.
More importantly, though, who is “that”? His gaze was fixed on a point behind me, and I turned to look, though I took great care to make sure not to let my guard down. I couldn’t let him get the jump on me while I was distracted. I spotted “that” immediately: Kazuki, crouched down and holding her tracksuit’s jacket in front of her as if it’d help her blend in. Who does she think she is, a ninja?
“What’re you doing over there?” I called out.
“Ah, you knew I was watching?” she responded.
“Nope! Honestly, didn’t notice at all. Kinda freaking out here.” Seriously, it felt like my heart just about leapt out through my mouth the moment I noticed her. Thankfully, I managed to hold back a yelp, which helped preserve what very little dignity I had left. Kazuki, meanwhile, abandoned all pretense of stealth the moment she was discovered. She slung her jacket over her shoulder and smiled as she walked up to me.
“I can’t believe you left me behind like that, Senpai!” She pouted. “You’ve got this really weird smell on you today, though, so I managed to follow you anyway.” The old guy’s durian might’ve let me track him, but apparently it also lured Kazuki right to us.
“You know that means it’s your fault she’s here, right? This is more complicated than ever because you just had to go and blow up a damn durian in my apartment!”
“I do believe you’re trying to pass the buck to me.”
“Can’t pass the buck to someone who already has it! Why the hell did you have a durian in the first place?! Were you trying to harass me, or what?!”