If that was the case, then maybe they’d kill me, too. I still had the gold tooth key, for one thing.
“Wait, this is a Mumuu-style conspiracy theory! I’ve been watching too much anime!”
I was about to become the hero of a grand story, get caught up in a vast conspiracy, and go on a great adventure. Yeah. That was definitely what was about to happen. If that was the case, then I wanted a beautiful girl to travel with me! Maybe some hot, slutty older girl, or a younger girl with a giant rack and a really sharp tongue!
“—Wait, what am I talking about?” I stopped in the middle of the road and looked around.
It was Saturday, so even though it was commuting hours, there weren’t that many students or salarymen around. It was a slightly warm, peaceful day in early spring. Everything felt shockingly normal.
But my heart was still pounding. It was like I’d been left behind as the rest of the world moved on.
“No, no, no. See? I’m touching this light pole!” I said, touching a light pole. “I can touch it! My hand’s not going through it!” If I was dead, then how come I could touch a light pole?
Suddenly, I saw a Seimei High School uniform amidst the crowd. There was no school today. Was somebody going to school for a club activity?
A thought occurred to me.
How many days of school had I missed?
A single day might be ignored, but if I’d been absent for multiple days, I would’ve expected a call from the teacher.
“Did I... get any calls?”
Mom was busy at work, but if she heard I was skipping, she’d make time to come and tell me I needed to go to school. But I couldn’t remember seeing her for the past several days...
Was I just spacing out? Or...
“Hmm...?”
As I tried to remember, I saw something fall from a girl’s bag as she passed by me. I picked it up and saw that it was a pink pass case for the train. The train pass inside had the name “Saeko Kitaya” on it.
I instantly realized I’d made a mistake. Now that I’d picked it up, I had to call out to her and tell her she’d dropped it. But those kind of communication skills were beyond me.
Sighing, I looked up to try to find her. But...
There were several women walking ahead of me, and I couldn’t tell which one of them she was, even though I’d just seen her drop it.
Maybe I was more of a mess than I thought.
With perfect timing—or maybe awful timing, depending on how you looked at it—the crosswalk signal in front of me turned red. Everyone stopped to wait for the light to change. At this point, it would be worse for me if I didn’t call out to her. People would think I took her pass case and walked off with it.
Sigh... I just wanted to get to Café☆Blue Moon...
I decided to work up my courage and talk to the woman in front of me who was wearing a suit.
“U-Um... E-E-Excuse me!”
Crap... I sounded really creepy.
“...Huh?” She turned around towards me, but quickly frowned and turned away.
Wow... totally ignored. That hurt. I mean, sure, I was creepy, but...
“U-Um... did you drop your... pass case?” I said, my voice trembling, but she didn’t even turn around.
At this distance, there was no way she couldn’t have heard me... If she was completely ignoring me, that meant she must not have dropped it. And even if she realized, there was no way I was giving it back after she was so rude, anyway!
Next, I talked to a girl who seemed to be in college and was wearing way too much makeup. She was playing with her smartphone while she waited for the light and looked like she was about to go on a date.
“U-Um, did you drop your pass case?” This time I was able to speak normally!
“Huh? My pass case?” She began to rummage through her bag. Eventually, she pulled out a yellow pass case and frowned at me. “...It’s right here.”
“Oh, sorry...”
Why’d she get so upset? I wasn’t trying to hit on her. It took a lot of courage for me to talk to a girl I didn’t know, and I was doing it out of the goodness of my heart anyway. Man, girls are such a pain.
Maybe I should just assume that whoever owned the pass case was long gone. Then I could just deliver it to the office at the station, and I wouldn’t have to try any more of these draining conversations.
I saw a high school girl in a blazer waiting on the right for the light to change. I’d talk to her, and if that didn’t work I’d give up.
“U-Um... S-S-Sa-Saeko K-Ki-Kitaya?”
“......?” The girl looked up at me when I said her name. She was a plain-looking, pig-tailed girl who looked like a background character from an anime.
She stared at me suspiciously. Since she’d reacted, that meant she must be Saeko Kitaya. She only looked upset because a strange boy had called her name, and it wasn’t because I was creepy... right?
“E-Excuse me... You dropped your pass case...”
“Huh? Oh, that’s mine!” She quickly took the case out of my hands. “Thank you so much!” She began to bow again and again. “I really appreciate it! I could’ve been in big trouble!”
“Oh, um, you’re welcome.”
She smiled and kept bowing. And then the light changed and everyone started to walk. The high school girl bowed once more and started to walk towards the station.
“I looked pretty cool just now, didn’t I?”
Whoops. I was starting to grin. It wasn’t often in my life that I had a girl my age who was grateful to me. “Yeah, she definitely has a thing for me. Maybe I’ll get another Basara girl?”
If this really was a fated encounter, I’d see her again soon. She could graduate from being an extra and become a main character. Her looks were, well, average at best, but that meant that she could differentiate herself from Ryotasu and Myu-Pom. Put her together with Ryotasu, the weird one, and Myu-Pom, the popular one, and you could probably have a pretty good girl band.
And there was one more thing I’d learned from my encounter with her.
“Dead people can’t give back pass cases.”
I felt stupid for being so scared a moment ago.
If I told Sarai about this, he’d laugh at me for sure. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he’d laugh. It was just the kind of asshole thing he’d do. Not, of course, that I minded.
“It’s great to be alive!”
It had been several days since I’d been to Café☆Blue Moon. I hadn’t been here since the incident at Enmeiji. Actually, I’d never been here this early in the morning. I wasn’t even sure they’d be open, but the sign said that they were.
Would anybody come to a weird shop like this?
“Huh...?”
There was someone here.
It was still morning, but Ryotasu and Sarai were both inside the café.
Shouldn’t they be at school? I’d been NEET-ing for a while, so maybe I wasn’t one to talk.
“Oh, Gamotan! Samurai Gamonosuke! ☆ I was just about to call you!”
“...Good timing.”
“Wh-What’s going on?” Ryotasu was one thing, but was I close enough to Sarai for him to wait for me?
I couldn’t see Master Izumin at the counter. Maybe he was back in the kitchen.
Instead there was a woman I didn’t recognize at the counter. She was wearing a black suit, and her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore stylish silver-rimmed glasses and gave off an aura of a capable businesswoman.
“Hello,” she said.
“Oh... hi.” I bowed, a little scared. She was staring at me like she was trying to figure me out, and I didn’t like it.
Who was this woman?
Why was she staring at me like that?
“Wait, don’t tell me...”
Was this the older sister of Saeko Kitaya, the plain-looking extra character whose pass case I’d just returned? They were both kind of plain-looking, so they had that in common! Maybe she’d come here to thank me for helping her sister!
Wait... No way. That would be like something out of a bad light novel. And anyway, there was no way she could find me that fast.
“So, he’s the boy?” the woman in the glasses asked Ryotasu.
“Yup! This is Samurai Gamonosuke! ☆” Ryotasu puffed out her chest proudly.
“Huh? What?”
Was this somebody who knew Ryotasu?
“Right, Gamotan?”
“Uh, right.” I nodded. Ryotasu seemed to have introduced me to the woman in glasses, but I still didn’t know what was going on.
The woman saw my confusion and handed me her card. “I’m sorry for bothering you like this. Here’s my card.”
I took it.
“What?!”
The card read...
“Monthly Mumuu Editorial Department, Toko Sumikaze.”
“Mumuu? You mean THE Mumuu?”
“I think it’s the Mumuu you’re thinking of, yes.”
“Seriously?!”
Was this the woman that Myu-Pom was talking about? She’d said her name was Toko, after all, which matched the name on the card.
“Uhyaah...” I almost made a weird noise. No, I did make a weird noise.
This was my chance to meet an editor from the legendary occult magazine Mumuu! What an opportunity!
“U-Um, what’s someone from Mumuu doing here? Don’t tell me you came to see me...”
“Yes, that’s right. I heard about this place from Miyuu— I mean, Miss Aikawa.”
H... HELL YES!
An interview from a magazine! If I got an interview with Mumuu, that would make Kirikiri Basara the prince of the occult world! There’d be no limit to how high my hit counter could go! There’d be no limit to how much I could make off affiliates!
“Maybe I’ll be getting Ryotasu that ice cream sooner than I thought.”
“Poyah?”
It felt like everything had been bad news lately, but finally the pendulum was starting to swing back! Maybe this was one of those monthly biorhythm things?
No, wait. Wait. I needed to stay focused here. We were about to talk business.
“A-Ahem. If you’re here to interview me about Kirikiri Basara, then can you tell me more about what we’ll be discussing first? My site’s a very scientific one, you see. It’s just about trying to shine a light on the mysteries of the world. I don’t want to have a lot of amateurs flooding my site hoping to see scary pictures.”