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“Anyway,” muttered Kyouhei as he walked alone through the coastal warehouse district, “if he was a bit more mature, with some common sense, I wouldn’t be so...”
The buildings were lined up like concrete boxes in the salty air. Every so often there was an abandoned wreck of a car rusting away, and the noises of steam whistles on boats along with cranes unloading and loading goods echoed through the area.
The location was ill-befitting a teenager in their school uniform, but Kyouhei wasn’t lost or going out of his way; this was his route home. His house was straight through this district.
Even so, there obviously wasn’t just a normal ‘house’ in the warehouse district.
In other words...
Kyouhei’s house was finally in his sight. It was excessively simple in appearance, with bare concrete walls, and a shutter in place of a door. There was no pointed roof, and on the whole, it was more or less a box.
Indeed, this was a house in name only... Really, it was without a doubt a warehouse.
Kyouhei stood in front of the building and punched in a code on the number pad next to the shutter.
“Authorization Code confirmed.”
“Deactivating defensive measures one through seven.”
“To continue, provide a fingerprint and vein pattern.”
Kyouhei put his index finger into a hole at the top of the device and waited for three seconds.
Finally, with a small grinding noise, the shutter began to roll up.
Someone seeing it for the first time might mock the security and call the place some secret base. Incidentally, if you were to slip up even slightly with this procedure, there was a wonderful system that would give you an electric shock with no warning. Kyouhei had come home in the past to find a thief convulsing in front of the shutter.
Well, all that aside, Kyouhei took a fortifying breath and ducked under the shutter.
Immediately, his nose was assaulted by the scent of dust. Grimacing, he flicked the switch next to the already closing shutter, instantly lighting the area with the harsh light of fluorescent tubing. Then, filling his vision were countless... boxes.
The boxes weren’t built up into a tower, nor a wall, they just made the warehouse into a labyrinth. There weren’t ten or 20, nor even one or two hundred; there were easily more like 1,000, though he hadn’t counted them. The number was always fluctuating.
There were both wooden and cardboard boxes, and even metal containers. Many of them had things written on them in English or other languages, but Kyouhei did his best not to read them, lest he see something all too serious like ‘AK74 Type Assault Rifle x50.’
All of these boxes were stock for Kyouhei’s father’s work. That was why the numbers fluctuated as the days went by.
His father, Shuuhei Nanbu, was what he called an International Trader that sold anything and everything. If he could make a profit on it, he’d sell it... regardless of country. And if someone would buy it, he’d sell it to whomever it was.
The lack of integrity was almost moving.
Some time before, he had sold old gaming PCs and combat sims as ‘the latest military strategy computers’ for a sum with seven zeros trailing off the end, in dollars as well. He’d also tried to sell a panda to a canned food company and was wanted by the Chinese police and army.
Well... doing that thing obviously led to more than a few issues. Having been carted around across the globe by his father, Kyouhei had been dragged into a variety of troubles too.
He’d first resigned himself to death when suspended above a boiling pot in a cannibal village, and he’d been chased off from an area of desert in a certain country, labeled ‘Area 51,’ by an armored vehicle equipped with a heavy machine gun. Yes, Kyouhei had narrowly escaped from certain death with his father.
The floor was packed with boxes and various items in bags, so despite the floor being huge in an absolute sense, there was nowhere for Kyouhei to step.
On top of that, Kyouhei lived on the second floor. Or more accurately, on the wide catwalks surrounding the inner walls of the warehouse, with the necessary furnishings and such in place to make a living area. To get to those catwalks, however, he would have to climb the stairs further inside the warehouse.
In other words, to put his bag down, to change clothes, to even lie in his bed, Kyouhei would have to traverse the chaos of the warehouse.
“...Seriously, he keeps picking up the weirdest things...”
He constantly had to hold back the urge to just toss the lot as he set out on his voyage.
The reason that he didn’t lay a finger on any of the things in the chaotic warehouse despite his unceasing litany of mental complaints wasn’t that he was being considerate of his father’s work; it was just a matter of self-preservation.
If he decided to just start sorting or disposing of things, then who knew what he’d find. He knew from experience that there were plenty of things that might be better to not know the truth about, like certain leaves, flowers, or powders.
Well, that’s why Kyouhei took the position of ‘see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.’
However...
“What’s he playing at...? He’s not an international trader or anything; he’s just gonna get arrested.”
Something... shifted... under his feet as he muttered to himself.
He must have kicked something. It wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence for something to go rolling across the floor in here, but—
“Ah... Wha?!”
The thing rolling its way across the floor was, by all appearances, a handgun. And, being in Shuuhei’s ‘warehouse,’ it wasn’t likely to be a harmless cap gun.
And so...
Bang.
“Uwah?!” Kyouhei yelled, instinctively covering his head.
The safety seemed to have failed on the cheap contraband gun, and it had discharged as it hit a box. The bullet had ricocheted around the room before coming to rest into another box near Kyouhei.
“That was clo...ooooose?!”