I very much wanted to immediately shift into soliciting him, but the problem was that he was someone with a wealth of life experience and that he was a policeman who was in the middle of chasing down everyone related to the Super Water Sphere Incident. If I arranged an overly contrived encounter, there was a chance that he would see through it, and any half-hearted attempt could perhaps even cause him to come at us with handcuffs. There was absolutely zero need for a prison arc in Amaterasu’s story. No thank you.
Even though I was capable of wiping out humankind, I could not read minds, nor could I read the future. Consequently, contact with Detective Kumano needed to be arranged with the utmost care. But with that said, due to the police sniffing around, our two students had been staying away from Ama-no-Iwato the past few days. Why is it that the mere presence of the police triggers a strange sense of guilt in everybody? And even though it’s highly unlikely, it feels like everything wrong that I had done in my past is being exposed and denounced. It was clear that until we took care of the beguilement event, it was going to be impossible to proceed with the traitor event with peace of mind. Therefore, speed was called for in equal measure to caution.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), the two detectives had apparently decided to investigate Ama-no-Iwato even further. Therefore, we would have a ton of opportunities to “bump into” them. The two of them busied themselves going around questioning people in the vicinity and monitoring our storefront from a room that they procured in one of the buildings on the other side of the street. They were rather persistent in their efforts, but by using chronoprohiberis and telekinesis, we could peek all we wanted at their investigation notes and reports to their superiors to stay up-to-date on their investigation. It was basically playing rock-paper-scissors while letting the other person go first. I loved how easy it made things.
Notably, Detective Kumano and Detective Dirtbag were not together all the time. For example, one would remain on stakeout while the other would go to buy groceries, or maybe the two of them would both go out to eat but do so in separate restaurants. As such, every once in a while, there would be windows of opportunity several minutes or several tens of minutes long where they would be isolated. The way I saw it, the simplest and most direct way to recruit them was to throw a World Shadow at them during one of those moments and see how they react.
The policeman is a species that immediately calls for support from all nearby individuals of the same species whenever they sense danger. Together with proper positioning and simplistic weapons, they seek to create situations advantageous to themselves where they can utilize numbers to overwhelm their enemies.
Rumors regarding World Shadows were all over the streets, such that even the police were aware of them to some degree, even though there had been no confirmed sightings as of yet. However, that should be enough for them to immediately identify one when it appears in front of them. What would Detective Kumano do upon encountering a World Shadow that assaults innocents? Be it running away, keeping a distance to observe it, calling for backup, or engaging it in battle, the way he reacted would help me to gauge the degree of his yearning for the extraordinary. Personally speaking, I wanted the opportunity to applaud a showing of overflowing passion that prompted him to dive straight into battle, police procedural manual be damned.
The lineup on his shelves at home by itself was not enough to draw the conclusion that he still yearned for the extraordinary. People get less proactive and more defensive with age. Despite still wishing for the extraordinary, all the fetters of society get in the way, one’s body grows weaker, and all the planning involving life after retirement occupies all of one’s time. There is the path that one had trodden, and there is the guaranteed path that is visible ahead. It requires courage to deviate from that path of safety and step onto a dangerous road of uncertainties. Heroes like Baba are in the extreme minority.
In other words, there was a possibility that, despite feeling a yearning for the extraordinary, Detective Kumano would be unable to dive in when the extraordinary suddenly came knocking, choosing instead to cling to what’s normal and ordinary. That was why there was a need to test him with a taste of the extraordinary in the form of a World Shadow encounter.
Having decided what to do, there was no reason to delay any further. I once again called on the services of last time’s Part-Time-kun, this time paying him 10,000 yen to pretend to be a passerby who got stopped by Detective Kumano as he went around questioning people, feeding him a bogus statement of “Oh yeah, several days ago, I think I saw a strange figure in the building slated for demolition close to here.” One customer coming in for the World Shadow introduction course.
The location that I had Part-Time-kun point toward was actually the place where Baba and Shouta-kun had made first contact. Kaburagi-san had acquired the building—of course, under a proxy name so as to ensure that her name wouldn’t appear on any of the documents—and left it as is, still slated for demolition but otherwise left untouched.
As for Detective Yasui, the dirtbag of the pair, he was literally being held in his steps by Baba, who was pretending to be a lost child clinging to his legs and wailing at the top of her lungs. In order to hide her identity, she was wearing a hat that hid her ears, and her hair had been dyed blond. As this time it was a veteran detective that we were trying to pull the wool over on, I wanted to direct the entirety of my telekinetic capacity toward the scene of the encounter, so as to be ready to deal with any unforeseen problems immediately. As such, I was completely entrusting Baba with Detective Dirtbag. When I asked her for at least 10 minutes, she confidently assured me that I would have 20. It’s times like these when it becomes obvious how helpful it is to have more hands on deck.
As for Kaburagi-san, it was with the absolute worst of coincidences that her parents just happened to have scheduled a marriage interview for her today. In order to save face, she had no choice but to attend, and thus could not be present for our event. I was a bit concerned about her end too, but I had to focus on Detective Kumano for the moment.
One last time, I scoured the surroundings of the abandoned building with telekinesis to ensure that there weren’t going to be any unrelated people getting caught up in the World Shadow attack...... and then my senses picked up on Shouta-kun.
Hold on a freaking moment. Why are you here?
However, once I gave it a bit more thought, the dots connected in my mind. Shouta-kun lived in Adachi City, and both his house and Ama-no-Iwato were in relatively close proximity to this abandoned building. This was a coincidence that I should have seen coming.
When I found him, Shouta-kun was just in the middle of stuffing a pack of chocolate cigarettes into his schoolbag, nonchalantly ambling down a narrow path illuminated by the setting sun while humming a tune under his breath. The front of his jacket uniform was undone, and he was holding his schoolbag over his shoulder in freestyle delinquent fashion. Judging by the direction that he was walking, he was most likely on his way to Ama-no-Iwato after having restocked on chocolate cigarettes from his usual snack shop. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Does Shouta-kun have a predisposition that naturally draws him toward trouble?
Well, this is an unexpected development, but there’s no cause for alarm. Let’s draw him away quick and easy.