I mean, what the hell is with the “go on and make her happy even if it costs you your life” thing. Why do I have to devote myself so completely to her? Aren’t friends and family members supposed to depend on each other? If Kaburagi-san laid down her life to help me, it wouldn’t make me happy at all. I’m sure it’s the same for her too. Kaburagi-san is an independent woman, all right? Sure, she may have her weaknesses, but she is not a damsel in distress. She is not someone who only needs protecting, and neither is she the kind of person who would be satisfied only ever being on the receiving end. A single-sided “I’ll make you happy” is only a mockery of who Kaburagi-san is. The correct words to her heart are “I’ll make you happy, so please make me happy too. Let’s live life together.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” His favor meter with me was far from being high enough that I would give him love advice. Although it was really high about an hour ago, you were the one who crashed it yourself.
Then again, there wasn’t much point in rejecting him offhand here and, by angering him, sowing possible seeds of discord for the future. Therefore, I decided to reply in the affirmative just to get him off my case. “All right. And this isn’t exactly in exchange, but I also have a request for you.”
“Let me hear it.”
“Please don’t sue me for aggravated assault. Like, seriously. Please don’t.”
President Kaneyama looked startled for a while, then burst out into laughter. He laughed and laughed and laughed until he laughed too much and groaned while suppressing the wounds on his face. Oi, what’s so funny? This is important, dammit.
After his laughter subsided, President Kaneyama and I had a quick discussion, during which I got him to promise to dispose of the fabricated “evidence” and re-collect all the leaked PSI drives.
When the talk was over and I was about to take my leave, President Kaneyama said, “I had thought to keep this to myself, but out of respect for you, I’ll say this: Lonalia Linalia Baba-Nyan has been making suspicious movements. Be wary of her.”
“Sure, ‘k,” I replied with a perfunctory nod. He didn’t need to tell me, I was aware. Most likely he was referring to all the things that she had done so that Shouta-kun and Touka-chan would grow suspicious of her. This person sure is sharp in all the wrong places, isn’t he.
I then left the room for real, and found Kaburagi-san waiting for me by the main entrance. While walking shoulder to shoulder on our way over to the car parked in the parking lot, Kaburagi-san asked, “How did it go?”
“Everything’s settled. He’ll re-collect the PSI drives for us and destroy the fabricated ‘evidence.’”
“Did you two settle things properly though? What if he was only pretending to be repentant?”
“That crazy ‘I <3 Kaburagi-san’ man went so far as to say ‘you go on and make Kaburagi-san happy,’ so he was most likely completely serious.”
“......How did you reply to that?”
“Ha~ha~ha~ No can do, miss. It was a manly promise from one guy to another, so I can’t tell even you!”
Even if it was only lip service, “I promised to make you happy” was just so embarrassing that there was no way I could bring myself to say it out loud. I tried to gloss over it with a silly joke, which prompted her to giggle to herself.
For several days afterward, Kaburagi-san was permanently in a really great mood.
⚔
“Baba-san, has there been anything bothering you recently?”
On the first day of the Golden Week holiday, all the members of the secret organization Amaterasu were gathered in Ama-no-Iwato, raising a lively commotion. Baba-Nyan was sitting in the counter seat next to the wall, dangling her legs carefreely while turning the pages of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Crime and Punishment. Her eyes continued chasing the words on the page even as she answered Kaburagi half-heartedly. “Nothing of particular note...... why do you ask?”
“President Kaneyama mentioned that you seemed a bit off lately, so I thought I would check in with you and see how things are.”
Baba-Nyan’s hand froze in the middle of turning the next page. “I venture to infer that he was most likely talking about the strange things I did while possessed. Now, I am recovered in full.”
“That’s what I thought too. Sorry for asking a weird question.”
“No, no, I mind it not.”
“What’re you two talking about?”
“Oh, just a little something about Baba-san. President Kaneyama said that he had noticed her being a bit off lately, so I was just asking her about that.”
“Well, she did get possessed for quite a while... Baba-san, are you sure you’ve fully recovered?”
“Indeed. As you can see.” While clenching her weak-as-usual fists as a display of her recovered vigor and smiling in response to the concern shown by Touka, who had jumped into the conversation, Baba-Nyan pushed her mind to think quickly. She was 90% sure that what Kaneo Kaneyama had noticed were the things that she had done for the traitor event, especially in light of the extra effort she put in to make them a bit more conspicuous so the students could spot them easier. However, she couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that he might have caught sight of her filching platinum or tools from the Kaneyama Tech labs or misappropriating parts from PSI drives in the middle of tests. She reminded herself of the need to be even more vigilant going forward, especially against Kaburagi.
The fact was, all the other Amaterasu members were very closely tied to Sago, which made it too dangerous to try pulling anyone into becoming her ally. Additionally, Kaburagi was both sharp-eyed and extremely intelligent, so much so that it took all of Baba’s effort just to avoid making her suspicious.
Another way of looking at the situation was that successfully roping Kaburagi in as an ally would be extremely reassuring, but she was just way too close to Sago. As an aside, the two of them seemed even closer than many married couples were, so Baba could not understand how they weren’t even going out with each other. But in any case, the point was that Kaburagi would be an extremely reliable ally, but approaching her would be far too risky.
On the other hand, Yasuo Yasui made for a very convenient pawn. Although the ease with which he could be manipulated by money made him outright untrustworthy, he did not possess the guts to do anything overly ambitious, and he was cunning enough to a certain degree. That combination of traits made him the perfect person to use as a gofer who would be satisfied with the fragmented pieces of information that he was drip fed. And in fact, he did pretty good work in return for all the money being transferred into his account.
The way Baba communicated with Yasui was through Morse code. Baba was capable of picking up sounds undetectable to humans. As Sago’s telekinetic eavesdropping was fundamentally just an extension of his own five senses, what he couldn’t hear in real life, he couldn’t hear telekinetically either. Even in spite of that, Baba always made sure to properly disguise it every time she sent Yasui a message, be it pretending to be picking up something she had dropped or pretending to be tapping her earphones along with music. One could say that she was being far too careful, but thanks to all her efforts, Sago and Kaburagi were still completely in the dark.
The PSI drive that Baba had named “Demon Lord Killer” was already completed. She would carry out her plan two days later, at Ama-no-Iwato. At the birthday party that Kaburagi had planned for Sago, everything was going to come to a conclusion————