Chapter 61

SUB.10 Whatever it was, it had its black hair in sausage curls and wore a maid outfit. Not the kind of outfit used for doing work in an old castle in France, mind you, but the dubious kind that people handing out flyers in Akihabara would be wearing. It was a maid outfit in fluorescent yellow. Psychedelic, as if cut out of a page in history, complete with a miniskirt, frilly knee socks, and a black corset. But more ridiculous than its outfit was how it had appeared. It had emerged from directly under the man in the uniform. As if slipping underneath his legs, the girl in the maid outfit, her posture lowered, charged straight at Oumi. With a hard glunk, the girl grabbed Oumi’s garden spade kunai, holding it in place. Then she actually smiled and murmured to Oumi in a quiet voice, “The dangerous stuff stops here. If you claim you have to kill this guy to survive, then I have a smoother way of settling things.” A moment later, still holding Oumi’s kunai in place, the girl swung her leg straight up toward the ceiling. It wasn’t a kick aimed at the uniformed man’s face. When she bent her slender leg, she folded the back of her knee around the man’s wrist, as if handcuffing it. And then she turned. With her other leg, which was still on the floor, she launched herself into a jump. Using Oumi’s kunai as a pivot, she spun her legs around like a bamboo-copter. Oumi reflexively dropped her kunai from the pain in her wrist, while at the same moment, the girl in maid clothes turned the back of her knee around the uniformed man’s arm. In the blink of an eye, the girl brought her head into a higher position than the man’s. Then she buried the knee of her free leg deep into his jaw. “Oh.” She moved away the knee she had slammed him with, then put the knee of her other leg—the one pinning his arm down—onto the man’s shoulder. In complete disregard for her miniskirt, she then put all her weight on him. With the man’s face between her thighs, she pushed him straight backward. “There we go.” A sharp noise. The girl was now sitting right on top of the uniformed man, squeezing her target between her butt and the floor. After seeing him lose consciousness, she stood up, toying with the knife and kunai in her hands. “…Hmm. Maybe I gave him a little too much for free. I tried going for the embarrassing thing to hurt my pride, but that just gave him an ample life experience… This talent of mine is always so annoying.” Oumi carefully reached behind her as she watched the girl mutter to herself. At a glance, it appeared she had employed a tricky form of martial arts where one used their hands to run and their feet to throw. But that wasn’t enough to explain how the girl had just moved. Oumi could tell—because she was a Koga shinobi pursuing rationalization within the scope of common sense. You couldn’t have pulled off those motions with human muscles alone. It was so clearly contradictory, and yet those contradictions kept zooming toward the finish line. This girl’s power was obviously supernatural. She wielded that which Oumi herself sought. “Who the hell are you?” demanded Oumi. “Hmm? Maria Kumokawa,” said the girl in the dubious maid outfit, readily revealing her identity. “I’m from Academy City, but don’t worry—I’m not with the people attacking the city. I’m also not a competitor in Natural Selector, but my goal isn’t much different. Just like you, I came here to steal a peek at how these monsters fight each other. Of course, in my case, it’s only because I’m searching for someone.” “……” The girl made it sound like nothing, but she possessed far more resolve than Oumi. Oumi had tried to acquire information on supernatural powers safely, by smoothly assimilating into Natural Selector. But Kumokawa had known from the start that Academy City and the Anti–Academy City Science Guardians would clash, and she’d still entered the fray. To be honest, if Oumi had foreseen these risks, she might have chosen another method entirely.