And on top of that, the burial-mound-like mountain of boxes had destabilized as the bullet had upset its delicate equilibrium. In the next moment, the leaning tower passed the point of no return in front of Kyouhei as his face contorted, then the tower began to collapse like a landslide.
“Ahhhhhhh!” Kyouhei screamed.
With the warehouse already reeking of dust... appearing for all the world to have not been cleaned in over a month, like the all-male household it was, the falling boxes raised a smokescreen of dust as they collapsed.
Kyouhei managed to avoid the murderously heavy boxes through all of that with essentially just intuition. If he’d been hit, he would have had broken bones at best, and at worst would have caved in his skull and died instantly. His senses were so sharp he might stand a good chance at getting through a minefield even.
After a few dozen seconds, however, Kyouhei was in almost some kind of yoga posture and breathing heavily.
“...I’m glad to be alive...”
He lifted himself up with that muttering, among others, before surveying the warehouse, the debris finally beginning to settle.
He then let out a long sigh.
“I seriously need to move out or something, for my health at least... Hmm?”
The mountain in the ‘warehouse’ had collapsed, and right in the middle of the aftermath was some strange-looking object.
It was oblong and made of some kind of black material.
“What’s that...?”
He blinked and looked more closely.
It was almost like...
“A coffin...?”
There wasn’t an epigraph or crucifix engraved on it, but... with its ominously black surface and roughly two-meter length and 70-centimeter width, it was about ‘the right size for a person,’ and made him think of a Western coffin.
“Seriously... old man, you’re... you’re not starting in that line of work...”
Maybe he wasn’t satisfied with the trading and had decided to move into the funeral business; Kyouhei couldn’t say it was impossible.
After all, his father had no concept of ‘normal’ or ‘common sense.’ Or maybe he did have it, but didn’t use it and couldn’t sell it.
The only things Kyouhei could say that Shuuhei definitely wouldn’t do were suicide, entering the priesthood, and philanthropy. He wouldn’t be surprised at anything apart from those, though; that was just the kind of person Shuuhei Nanbu was.
“Well... E-Even if he did, well, there wo-wouldn’t be a body in there, right? Ha hah, ahahahahahahahaha,” he muttered, practically asking himself.
It could well be a new, unused one, but he wouldn’t go out of his way to store a coffin with something in it. Probably. Definitely. Maybe.
Then Kyouhei noticed something.
The coffin—that’s how he was thinking of it for now—seemed to be mechanical. Looking closely, he could see thin pipes and small machinery in several places on it.
“This is...”
One of the things it had was... a meaningful red switch.
It had the word ‘CAUTION!’ printed neatly under it and was furnished with a plastic cover. That meant that it had been made difficult to push, but with the absolute mess he accidentally created, it was almost begging to be pushed.
“...Haha. That’s how it goes?” he laughed stiffly.
It didn’t seem likely to be empty, and he shouldn’t open it. He should just pretend to have never seen it, then there’d be no problems, like with all the other crazy things he’d seen.
That’s right, normal high schoolers would see this and immediately know it was dangerous, and have nothing more to do with it. They shouldn’t have anything to do with it, so they wouldn’t. Actually, Kyouhei told himself, it doesn’t exist, so I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about it, so I can’t have anything to do with—
He was backing away from the coffin as he told himself these things, but he was shaking slightly, so he rested his back against another mountain of boxes.
Before he could react, there was a crack sound. A lucky cat statue—Kyouhei had long since forsworn the pointless act of questioning the providence of such things—fell from atop the pile of boxes and broke the plastic cover on the coffin with eerie precision... hitting the red button.
“Gah?!” Kyouhei cried out in dismay. He had a bad feeling something was about to explode. That feeling only strengthened as the coffin began making mechanical noises before venting steam-like white smoke everywhere with a whoosh .
“C-Crap?!”
Without thinking about it, he jammed a helmet that had rolled near him, with ‘Born to Kill’ written on it, onto his head, and hid behind the same mountain of boxes.
“Wha... It... It’s not going to explode?!”
There was no one there to answer him. And well, even if his father had been there to say it wouldn’t, Kyouhei wouldn’t have put any faith in his answer.
Instead, he ever so gingerly looked out, to see the lid of the coffin rising with a keening squeal, opening almost like a door.
Then, some strangely thin and pale things appeared on the rim of the opening.
“Eh?”
It took Kyouhei a moment to realize that those things were fingers, what with the angle he was looking from and the situation... But those fingers were white as snow, ever so pale, looking like something lifeless, probably just because of the atmosphere in the ‘warehouse.’
Moments later, following the fingers was a hand, following the hand a wrist, following the wrist an elbow. The thin, pale thing was... an arm.
The arm was like the fingers, something that looked like a mannequin’s... It had none of the softness or vibrancy of a human, but for that exact reason, it had an exquisite beauty to it.
The fingers gripped the edge of the coffin. Everything past the elbow was pulled out, the shoulder and the torso after it rose from the bottom of the large black box.
It wasn’t a corpse, at least.
However, rather than reassure Kyouhei, that made him freeze with another fear.
There was something in the coffin.
It slowly rotated its neck and looked at Kyouhei.
“D... D...”
It was a girl as she was born; in other words, a girl not wearing a stitch of clothing.
“Daaaaaaaaaad?!” Kyouhei yelled with an anger that would have brought down satellites at his father, who wasn’t there.