Fujiko felt something bothering her, and so she headed back to the surface once more via her secret route. She wasn’t lying about the headache, either. The contradiction she’d felt before was welling up from the bottom of her heart, and it was eating away at her.
Once she made it back to the surface, Fujiko’s demeanor changed to that of the perfect little young lady. The students in the midst of their lunchtime chats turned to her with eyes of admiration. Fujiko lowered her head in greeting, and they all responded with cheerful voices.
This greeting was practically a ritual at this point, but then Fujiko froze when she saw a certain girl. As head of the girl’s dorm, she knew the faces of all the female students. Even if she couldn’t remember their names, she would at least know their faces. This student, however, was unknown to her.
The girl had long hair tied in a ponytail. Her uniform didn’t quite seem to fit, and it made her look a bit disheveled. Her features were clearly defined, and while you might call her beautiful, there was something unsettling about her. After greeting the student, Fujiko realized that it came from the fact that her eyes and face aggressively showed her thoughts and feelings.
“A fine afternoon to you.” Fujiko bowed, and the girl looked at her with wide eyes, as if fascinated by her.
“A fine afternoon? Wow, you’re hilarious!”
“Oh, am I?” Fujiko’s answer was cheerful, but in her heart she felt her guard raising up. There was something about this girl that put her on edge, beyond simple rudeness.
The girl laughed loudly.
“That’s right! I mean, you’re not the type, are you? I can tell by looking what a nasty girl you are. I can tell you this: people like you are beyond help.”
“Y-You’re being very rude!” Fujiko just barely managed to keep her external composure, but the girl now had the upper hand.
“Hahaha! If you want to lie, you need to tell a lie that won’t make you panic when it’s found out! Otherwise it’s not fun, Fujiko Eto!”
The girl’s voice was cheerful and innocent, and she spread out her hands in glee and spun around right where she stood.
“You’re not a student here, are you?!” Fujiko said, now with certainty, as she prepared to fire a mana ball from her right hand. But before she could, the girl had jumped behind her.
“I’m not a student, but I do have permission to enter the school! Listen, Fujiko Eto, if you keep avoiding the truth, you’re going to make enemies, okay? Like me, for example!”
At this point it was hard for even Fujiko to keep up her act. She stopped herself from launching an attack, and watched the girl leave with a smile. She was running away at a very fast pace.
“Who was that, Fujiko?”
The other students saw the commotion and ran up to her, worried. Fujiko kept her good rich girl act up as she put her hand on her cheek, picking her words so that she’d sound like a victim.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s going on. It seems that someone strange has entered the school. I’ll make sure to tell the teachers.”
It took Fujiko a lot of effort to maintain her composure.
○
At that same moment, Junko was hiding in her dorm room alone after having her clothes blown off by Akuto. Of course, she was embarrassed about losing her clothes in front of everyone, but a full night had already passed, and last night at dinner her friends had come to comfort her. She was calm now, at least about that. But whenever she was alone, she was ruled by feelings that she didn’t understand, and there was nothing she could do about it.
“That idiot! Dumbass! Fool!”
Junko had spent the whole night in her futon, but each time she saw Akuto’s jacket on top of it, she would start to flail around and throw a tantrum. The obvious solution would be to put it somewhere she couldn’t see it, but Junko told herself that it was the only place she had room for it.
—And I have to think about what I’ll say when I give it back, too.
She needed to thank him for it, but if she didn’t chose her words right she’d sound like an idiot. And then he wouldn’t take her seriously. How was she supposed to give it back to him anyway? Was she supposed to wash it first? But if it wasn’t dirty, it probably didn’t need that...
Junko picked up the jacket and looked for stains on the inside. It had been touching her skin, so if there was some kind of stain on it, that would be mortifying.
—No, wouldn’t be problem be the smell?
Suddenly she got worried and pressed her face into the jacket.
—So this is his...
When she realized what she was doing, Junko’s face reddened as if it were about to explode, and she moved her face away from the jacket. She spent a moment catching her breath and then got up from the futon.
Junko started to run from one corner of the room to the other, flailing her arms around and smacking everything she could see.
“Soga! Keena Soga! You’re not here, right?! You’re not spying on me, are you?!”
She’d remembered the time the invisible Keena had been spying on her in her room. After spending ten minutes or so giving her room a thorough search, Junko finally calmed down. Then, after making sure that her doors were locked, she sat down on her knees on the futon.
Then she raised Akuto’s jacket with trembling hands, closed her eyes, and held it close to her body, rubbing her face against the inside.
—This feeling...
Suddenly, the buzzer on her student handbook rang.
“Hyaaah!” Junko screamed and jumped a full meter straight up. She quickly looked around to see if anyone had seen her, but of course she was completely alone. She looked down at the handbook and saw that a message had come from her family. She let out her breath in a puff and calmly looked at it.
Junko’s mind cleared instantly. On the surface, the message looked unremarkable. But in a secret code only those of the Hattori clan knew, this is what it said:
《Someone from the Teruya Clan is on the move. We will meet at the designated point.》
—Them?
Junko’s eyes narrowed. It was the name of a clan that had been their rivals for many years.
2 - Who’s That Girl?
Akuto had a bad feeling. No, it was less a feeling and more a prediction. And of course, his prediction was correct.
As he was relaxing in his dorm at night, he saw one injured person after another being brought to the cafeteria. Evidently the nurse’s office was empty except for a single nurse at night, and she couldn’t handle the sudden influx of injuries.
Akuto was having some after-dinner tea with Hiroshi and Korone. He watched as one table after another was moved to the side, and male students were placed atop them like fish at a market. If this was a fish market, it would’ve been a great catch. The number of students kept going up. The students who were worshipers of Ko-Roh, who wanted to be doctors, were busy giving them first aid.
“This is probably because of that treasure hunt thing, isn’t it?” Akuto said. Hiroshi nodded.
“That’s right, boss.”
“Treasure hunting is for kids. There’s no reason to go out and get hurt in the process...”
The second the words left Akuto’s mouth, the air in the cafeteria froze. The other students must have thought he was insulting them. Eyes filled with anger and hatred stared at Akuto. He’d forgotten that the students here respected recklessness and a love of danger, and considered “dumb fun” a virtue.
—Crap.
Oddly enough, Akuto was extremely sensitive to these sorts of changes in a room’s atmosphere. He stood up and walked over to where a first-year student was healing an injured second-year, and smiled at him as best he could.
“I’m a worshiper of Ko-Roh too. If you can just teach me how to use healing magic... No, you don’t even have to teach me. I’ll help,” Akuto said, but the two of them wouldn’t have looked more scared if the world’s worst doctor had walked over. Their faces went pale and they just kept shaking
their heads.
“You don’t need to be that scared. I’m not going to do anything.” Akuto leaned over, and the first-year screamed and leapt back. The second-year, who only moments before had been badly hurt, suddenly jumped up on the table and started hopping on one foot, screaming, “I’m better! I’m all better!”
“N-No, I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone, okay?”
Akuto left and walked back to his seat.
“Korone, do you think you can help them?” he asked.
“Certainly. My orders are to obey the will of the my observation target.”
Korone trotted over to the injured boy. Unlike Akuto, she was extremely popular. When she took her medicines out of her bag, they all started to frantically motion her over.
Akuto watched her treat one student after another, and decided that now it would be easier to talk to them. He picked one of the closer students, and, as cheerfully as he could, asked the question that had been bothering him.
“So something got you, huh?”
The student went pale for an instant, but he must’ve thought that there was no point staying quiet, because he answered with a sour expression. He was a big guy, probably one of the strongest in the first-year class.
“Yeah. It took me out before I even knew what was going on. It was pretty strong.”
“Really?” Akuto said, and every student in the room looked back at him. The awkwardness that had temporarily vanished was back.
—I guess they thought I was implying that they’re all weak for losing, huh? Since they said they lost before they even knew what hit them, I was just surprised that something like that even exists.
When he realized what was going on, Akuto coughed and chose his next words carefully.
“Sorry. I just never knew a monster like that even existed. I mean, look at how many of you got hurt. If you all attacked at once, you should be able to take down even a strong monster, right?”
“We didn’t all attack at once. We were split up.” The first-year student sounded annoyed.
“Then all of you guys attacked it on your own?”
“We didn’t attack it.”
“Then it attacked you. But I mean, there’s so many of you. Shouldn’t you have just stayed grouped together?” Akuto was genuinely curious, but the first-year sounded even more frustrated.
“We weren’t all looking for the treasure together. We all went on our own. A few people went in pairs, but that was it.”
“Oh, right!” Akuto sounded as if something had just dawned on him.
“It was a treasure hunt! Of course you’d try to get there before everybody else! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize! If you weren’t so self-interested, there’s no way so many of you would’ve gotten hurt!”
The whole cafeteria went dead silent.
—Whoops. I screwed up again, didn’t I?
Akuto tried to make up for it by saying his next words loud enough for everyone to hear.
“No, I just meant that if you’d worked together, you would’ve had a better result. The students at this school are all really strong, right? With the right leader, you’d be very powerful.”
It seemed that the first-year student was now so irritated that he just didn’t care anymore, because his tone towards Akuto was now brutal.
“Shut up. We don’t have anybody to lead us.”
“No, you’ve got that ranking system, right? If you can just have the most powerful person lead you...”
And then Akuto realized his mistake. He hadn’t noticed until he’d said it.
—Wait. I was the one who defeated the last top-ranked person!
Akuto froze. The people around him were starting to murmur now.
“So you’re saying that if you were in charge, things would go well?”
“You want us to serve you, Demon King?”
“Wait, doesn’t that mean that the Demon King set the whole thing up so that this would happen...?”
“You’re right. He was the one who found the map, and it was his woman who put those copies of it up everywhere.”
This was going in a bad direction. They were all looking at Akuto with a mixture of astonishment and terror.
Akuto shook his head and stood up.
“That’s not true! I wouldn’t get anything out of doing that! I was just pointing out what you did wrong! But I don’t mean to criticize you. I’m just saying we can all work together now! Like maybe if you shared all your information about what it was that attacked you, you might be able to come up with a plan.”
One of Akuto’s flaws was that he always tried to act cooler than he was at times like this. But he had a point, so the wounded began to stir back to life and share information with the people around them.
“They turn into fog and you can’t attack them.”
“That got me too. And it was really dark, so I couldn’t see, but there were lots of insects or something flying around. I couldn’t hit them...”
“That’s right. The bugs were the attack, and the fog was what was controlling them. There’s no way to fight it.”
Akuto could hear them all talking with each other. Eventually, they started to discuss how to defeat it. But as the debate started to heat up, they started to argue about who should do what.
“So the decoy just has to draw the bugs away, you see?”
“Who’s going to be the decoy?!”
“Somebody fast.”
“Idiot. Everybody knows that you have somebody in heavy armor be the decoy.”
“What? Are you saying my opinion is wrong? Who are you calling an idiot?”
“That’s not it. I mean, it changes depending on who’s in charge.”
“That’s right. Who’s going to be in charge? Are we going to have a tournament to find out?”
“If we do that, then it’s just going to end up a fight to see who gets the treasure.”
“Who cares? If we have to fight, we have to fight. At least we’ll know who’s the strongest.”
The mood in the room began to turn dangerous. Akuto realized that it was his fault, in a way. He spoke up, hoping to fix things.
“Hey everyone, we don’t need to get like this! We don’t even know if the treasure exists. And it seems like it’s been left where it is for a long time. So why don’t we just pretend it doesn’t exist? Then everything will go back to normal.”
But that just poured oil on the fire.
“You’re the one who found the map!”
“And we’re fighting the monster to get revenge for injuring us! Not for the treasure!”
They started to shout. The fact that they’d switched their objective to “revenge” angered Akuto. It seemed to him like they were just trying to hide their own weakness.
“Then why don’t you all go out there on your own and lose again? There’s no point in talking to idiots who can’t even accept the fact that they’re weak! Why can’t you cooperate with each other?” Akuto yelled in frustration. His voice was loud enough that everyone stopped moving.
—I did it again.
But at this point, there was no backing down. Using this situation to put a stop to the treasure hunt would be to everybody’s benefit.
“Don’t go off on adventures if you’re too weak to handle them! If you really want to go, at least show that you’re capable of it first! And if you don’t have the guts to do that, don’t try and sneak around selfishly instead of working with other people! That’s all I want to say!”
Akuto ended his speech by slamming his fist down on the table. Inside he was shaking from embarrassment and regret, but if he backed down now after provoking them all, they might try to strangle him in his sleep. He stood up as straight as he could and glared at the people around him, then walked out of the cafeteria with his head held high.
Hiroshi followed after him, his eyes wet with tears.
“That was amazing, boss! You were so cool!”
“No... it just kinda ended up that way.”
“Y
ou’re being too humble! I get it! You’re not trying to rule the school by force, you want to make it so the whole school naturally respects you, right? And you’re training them so they’ll have the courage to make decisions on their own! You’re so smart! I’m learning so much from you!”
“Oh, uh... Good,” Akuto whispered, no longer having the strength to correct him. Hiroshi nodded vigorously.
“I’m so glad I joined forces with you, boss! Oh and don’t worry! I used the “speaker” to broadcast that speech throughout the whole dorm!”
“...The boys dorm, and the girl’s dorm?”
“Of course!” Hiroshi said, looking pleased with himself.
—Things will only get worse, now...
Akuto was starting to get a headache. In the end, thinking about it would get him nowhere, so he decided to stop thinking.
○
The next day, Akuto was summoned by the student council president. Akuto was an early riser, so he was already awake by the time he got the message. But the president herself still looked half-asleep. Even as she sat at her desk in the student council room, she was using her elbows to prop her head up and her eyes were drooping.
“Sorry to bring you here this early in the morning. I heard that... speech... yesterday. It was hilarious.”
Akuto couldn’t tell if she was upset or just sleepy, so he didn’t know how to react. She was a girl, but she looked like a strangely intimidating boy, and so it was hard to read her face.
“I’m embarrassed,” said Akuto, lowering his head.
“No, I think it’s fine,” she said with a yawn. “I was feeling bad about the kids getting hurt. That’s why I called you here. I want you, as head of the disciplinary committee, to officially ban treasure-hunting.”
“Officially?”
“Yup. Your powers as head of the disciplinary committee are pretty broad. You can punish people caught violating the rules. It’s kind of a ‘rule by fear’ thing, you see. And from what you said yesterday, you made it sound like if somebody is strong, it’s okay for them to go looking for it, right? You realize how bad that is, don’t you?”
“That’s true. I’m sorry.”
“Nah, it’s fine. If you’re going to apologize for something, apologize for not keeping your mouth shut about the map after I asked you to.”
Demon King Daimaou: Volume 2 Page 4
