What’s going on?
I looked towards the curtain that partitioned off the bathroom.
“Kin-chan?! What’s wrong?!”
The curtain flew completely open. It was Shirayuki in her priestess garbs. For some reason, her face was full of anxiety and her cute round eyes were wide open.
“W-Wha?!” I exclaimed, taken completely of guard and taking a step back.
Now that I think about, this situation … Normally—well, I’m not really sure what’s normal in a situation like this, but aren’t the gender roles switched here?!
For a quick moment, I was having such a hard time coping with the ordeal that this was the kind of inane analysis I made.
“W-What is it all of a sudden?!”
“Huh? You … On the phone, you ...”
“... Phone?”
“Y-You said to come right away and hung up suddenly, so ...”
“I didn’t call anyone!”
“But it was your voice! It was an unidentified call, but you said you were in the bathroom!”
That’s not possible. She must have been hearing things.
“How could I make a phone call when I was taking a shower?! That’s insane!”
“B-But the ph-ph-phooo …!”
It would seem that Shirayuki’s brain had finally finished processing the fact that I was naked from the waist up, and her eyes went from my face to my collarbone, chest, and ultimately my navel. Her face, which seconds ago had been nearly drained of color, became bright red from the bottom of her chin to the top of her forehead, just like some sort of meter. She then took a deep breath—almost as if she were meditating; only her face was nowhere as composed.
“I’m!”
“I’m”?
“I’m so sorry!!”
Shirayuki jumped back diagonally in a more peculiar way than I could have ever imagined. In midair, she bent her knees so that she was sitting in the proper Japanese fashion, and extending her arms in front of her, landed with her forehead touching the floor. It was the perfect dogeza.3
“I-I-I-I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
Shirayuki bundled herself up, and her ears were so red I thought steam would be coming out of them. Shirayuki suddenly lifted her head, and she was so worked up that her eyes were swirling like whirlpools.
“... It’s because you were in the bathroom! It’s because you were naked that I was imagining you taking a shower! It's true! I-I was practicing kidou techniques but my heart wasn’t really into it! It’s all true!”
“I-I didn’t ask!”
“But then my imagination ... ! It was all woosh, and whoom! P-Please forgive me! I’m-I’m such a bad person! I’m just pretending to be a good girl, but the truth is I’m a bad girl who thinks of naughty things! I could be a Hollywood actress! I’m such a ... #$%&!”
This is bad.
“H-Hey ...”
At this rate, something was going to snap, and Shirayuki, who was a bit strange to begin with, might just go completely of the deep end. For the meantime, I put one knee on the floor and knelt in front of Shirayuki.
“C-Come on. Relax. Someone probably called the wrong number. It’s not something you need to apologize for,” I said, making my best effort to sound as calm as possible ... but approaching Shirayuki half naked proved to be a mistake. Shirayuki swiftly covered her eyes with both hands. I did have a feeling she was looking at my chest though the cracks between her fingers though ... And then ...
“We’ll call it even!” Shirayuki suddenly screamed incomprehensibly again. She stopped covering her face and it was completely red as if she had a fever. In truth, she really was burning up.
What are you, a stove?
“‘We’ll call it even’? What are you talking about?”
Shirayuki’s dysfunctional thought processor turned out an equally dysfunctional solution. “If you watch me while I change clothes, we’ll be even!”
“Say what?!”
Shirayuki grabbed the collar of her white kimono with her right hand and unraveled the belt of her hakama with the left. She rapidly began taking off her priestess garbs as if they had caught on fire!
“W-Wait! There’s no need to call anything even! That’s not what this is about! Stop undressing!” I pleaded as I grabbed Shirayuki’s clothes, trying to keep them on her.
“I’m undressing! I’ve made up my mind! I’m fine with this! If you’re the one watching, then it’s fine! In fact, it’s fine! So please, don’t worry about it!”
N-No way in hell I’m letting you get undressed!
If the day ever comes when I see those “battle panties” on Shirayuki, I can say without a single doubt in my mind that I’ll be on the fast track to hysteria mode. I was doing everything in my power to keep Shirayuki’s kimono and hakama on her body.
“Kin-chan, stop! Let go!” cried Shirayuki.
“Just do what I say!” I cried in return.
“I’m back,” announced Aria.
... ...
... Aria …?
Arai, coming back at the worst possible timing, dropped the paper bag she was carrying, and a Matsumotoya peach bun that fell out rolled along floor. It kept going until it rolled up against Shirayuki’s white socks as she continued to struggle with me. With the arrival of a third party, Shirayuki hastily began straightening up her priestess garbs. Her black eyes had tears in them, and her clothes were disheveled. ... And I, half naked, had a firm grip on those clothes. There was also the conversation we just had. “Kin-chan, stop!” “Just do what I say!”
“... W-Why ... youuuuuu …” came Aria’s voice, like the growling of a lion.
She plunged her small hands into the sides of her skirt. “Kinji, you idiot!!”
Blam! Blam!
A jet-black and a silver Government mercilessly fired .45 ACP cartridges in my direction!
“Whoa!” I cried out, noticing the bullet hole that appeared right next to my heel and jumped to my feet.
W-Wait a second! Not only am I not wearing my bulletproof uniform, I’m naked here! “T-T-This is what happens when I leave her to you for just a few minutes?! Y-You sexual deviant! Die!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Aria shot at my feet with the same rhythm at with she yelled disparaging remarks at me.
“W-Wait! If we just talk about this, I can explain!” I continued to back up farther and farther as bullets imbedded themselves in the floor right in front of my toes.
“You! Are! A! Real! Beast! A maggot! Bacteria!”
Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Aria stamped her feet loudly as she marched toward me with her pistols firing away, and eventually, I was cornered in the balcony.
D-Dead end!
Looking below me, I could see Tokyo Bay.
“A . . . A-A-After molesting me, now you’re going after Shirayuki?! Y-You king of perverts!” It had come to point that Aria was now pointing her two pistols at my actual body.
What are you going to do, Kinji?! If I run inside the bulletproof storage locker, it’s only going to thrown over the edge of the balcony with me inside it!
“T-That’s not it, Aria!” cried Shirakuyuki, “Stop being such a sore loser!
Hearing Shirayuki’s somewhat odd statement, Aria spun around and looked at her with furrowed brows.
“H-H-How am I being a sore loser?!”repudiated Aria, bearing her cuspid.
“Kin-chan wasn’t forcing himself on me! We were in mutual consent!”
“Mu-Mutual consent?”
“That’s right! I was trying to undress myself! Kin-chan’s not at fault!”
“U-Undress yourself? W-W-W-What in the world were you two trying to do?!”
Aria was obviously flustered, and Shirayuki lunged at her in an attempt to snatch away her pistols. I wasn’t overly thrilled about the statements she was making, but I ungrudgingly routed for Shirayuki.
“Well, e-e-e-even if you were in mutual consent …!!” said Aria, whose face quickly turned bright red as she dove in front of Shirayuki and performed a techn
ique similar to a spring hip throw, sending the priestess backwards onto the floor.
“Aaah!”
“. . . Kinji! F-F-For a bodyguard to do something like that is taboo!” yelled Aria, now bearing her cuspid at me as she stepped over Shirayuki.
“I could overlook the two of you being friendly, b-but engaging in t-t-that kind of relationship with the client makes you a failure as a butei! A failure! A colossal failure!!” Aria’s high pitched voiced sounded like it might shatter the window in front of me. “This calls for a hole opening festival!”
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Aria ruthlessly opened fire on me with her pistols.
“Ngh!” I jumped over the side of the balcony and using the wire inside my belt, hung from the railing like Spiderman.
T-That was a close call.
Or so I thought.
“Go cool your head! And I’m not giving you a ring buoy!”
Bang! Snap!
Aria’s scolding was followed by a bullet that severed the wire, and after I bounded off the safety fence below me, a loud splash echoed in the darkness. When I had gathered my wits, I found myself in the waters of Tokyo Bay.
A bodyguard ... is not to get deeply involved with the client. Sure enough, that was one of the most basic rules of body guarding, and it was clearly written in the Assault textbook. The reason is because when a bodyguard dispenses with the proper formalities, he or she tends to be off guard and isn’t be able to be make sound judgments when the situation calls for it. But our mission this time was given to us as a result of the educational affairs department’s over-protectiveness, and one could argue that it was more like “playing bodyguard.” This whole ordeal came to pass simply because Aria had changed her attitude and became frantic at hearing the name “Durandal,” so it was very much a bother when she got angry with me, her partner, for not taking it more seriously. So here we are now. The exhaustion was already taking its toll on me, and after coming out of the shower only to get into a fight with Shirayuki in my birthday suit, I wound up plummeting into Tokyo Bay ...
… and catching a cold.
In the morning, my head was reeling as I held a thermometer in my mouth, and Aria was fairly cross as she told me what a disgrace I was, but she didn't torment me any further like she usually does. Shirayuki vehemently insisted on staying home as well so that she could nurse me to health, but I couldn’t allow her to do something like that for me and somehow managed to have her go to school. Therefore, I was now spending the time lying mind-numbingly bored in my bed. My fever was wavering back and forth around a temperature of 100.4 degrees. I didn’t always feel too badly, but I was having a rough time at the moment. I was beginning to lose consciousness from the high fever that was most likely the virus army’s last resistive efforts. After a while—probably sometime around the lunch hour—somebody came into the apartment. It would seem the person came to check up on me ... which means it had to be Shirayuki. Too lethargic to even call out, I just went back to sleep. I could have sworn that I felt ... somebody tenderly laying a hand upon my aching forehead to check my temperature. It was a very gentle hand.
When I awoke, it was two in the afternoon. According to the thermometer, I still had a temperature of 100.4 degrees, but perhaps I was adjusting to the fever because I was feeling a little better.
“...”
I groggily sat up, sensing that I was the only one in the apartment. I was rather thirsty. It was probably because I had done so much sweating. Desiring a glass of water, I stumbled my way out of the bedroom, and upon closing the door, I felt something on the doorknob. It was a plastic bag.
“?”
I searched inside it to find Yamato Pharmaceutical’s “Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion.” It was in an old-fashioned package, and with most medications failing to have very much of an effect on me, it was the single remarkable medicine that I could take for colds.
. . . Shirayuki got this for me? She really does know me well, doesn’t she. But…did I ever tell her about this medicine? Oh, well.
Glory to the power of Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion. Thanks to the medicine, when I next woke up, my temperature had returned to normal. It was already evening, and when I went into the living room, I came across Shirayuki who looked as if she had just come back.
“Ah, Kin-chan, how’s your cold?”
“It’s fine. My fever went down and my headache’s gone too.”
“Thank goodness. I’m so glad,” said Shirayuki, but her expressions of relief soon changed to sniveling.
“Didn’t I tell you not to cry so much?”
“I know.” Shirayuki wiped her tears away with her finger and showed me a face beaming with happiness.
“... It’s all because of the ‘Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion’ you got me. After taking some and going to bed, I was cured in no time.”
“Huh? I ... was thinking of cooking you Chinese remedial foods since you don’t like medicine, but ...”
“Hm? You got it for me, didn’t you? Sorry for the trouble. They only sell it at the dirty Chinese herbal drug store on that maze-like corner of Ameyoko. It was probably a little scary for a girl to venture in there by herself. Thanks a lot.”
“Wha ... ah.” Shirayuki put a slender white finder to her lip ... and had a look that suggested she was pondering over something ... “... S-Sure,” she said at last, averting her eyes.
I’m currently inside an Assault facility that closely resembles a gymnasium and holding an electric guitar, which doesn’t really suit my image. Today, we’re rehearsing for the Adsiard’s closing ceremony, so having been forced to join the Adsiard band by Aria, I, too, was doing some simple practice with a borrowed Danelectro DC 59.
“Let me show you my gratitude ...”
I wasn’t the vocalist, but I sang in a low voice as I repeatedly went over the song’s intro, which I was in charge of playing. I had practiced the guitar a little when I was taking the masquerading course at Kanagawa’s Butei junior high school, it was only a short two-minute part, and Shiranui, who was the other guitarist and the vocalist, was quite good, so practicing wasn’t too much of a chore … But this entire scene of an Assault facility being used for peaceful means just felt very odd to me. It’s sad, I do admit. Behind Muto, who was avidly beating his drums in a way that made one think he was trying to impress someone, Aria and the other girls were practicing their cheer dances with pom-poms in hand. The sounds of whistles blaring filled the air as they nimbly danced about, swinging around their short skirts.
Ah, hell. Every single last one of ’em is dressed like that.
Muto was saying something about it being a feast for the eyes that one could only partake in once a year, but to me it was horrific sight.
What am I gonna do if some mistake leads me to activating hysteria mode? I think I’ll just keep my eyes on my own hands.
“Okay everyone, that’s enough for today. Thanks for all your hard work.” Sounding just a teacher, Shirayuki, the supervisor, announced the end of rehearsal, and all the girls voiced their compliance before heading off in every direction. Now at ease, I had more than enough of this space that seemed to reek of girls, so I put away the guitar and decided to climb up the stairs and go out onto the roof. It was a beautiful, clear day in the month of May. The warm sun was inviting on my skin. It was the perfect weather for taking a nap. That being the case, I proceed to lie flat on my back and took a deep breath of the refreshing spring breeze.
Ahhh ... this is nice. The wind in May is worth its weight in gold.
Such were my thoughts as I was enjoying my nap on the rooftop when I noticed the nice, bittersweet fragrance of gardenias blended in the passing wind.
“?”
I opened my eyes halfway and was instantly thrown out of heaven and plunged into hell, which is to say, the soles of a white sneaker came down directly on my face.
“Ngh!”
Subsequently, that small sneaker began delivering a flurry of kicks to my head until I
managed to roll out of the way.
“What are you slacking off for?! Guard Shirayuki like you’re supposed to be doing, you useless piece of junk!”
The person stomping her feet next to my ear was Aria in her cheerleader uniform. She had her pom-pom carrying hands on her hips, and was enraged with indignation.
“A-Aria?”
She had followed me even all the way out here. I gave her a rebellious glare as I sat up, and she lifted her leg high into the air—as high as the top of her head—with a motion that was obviously unrelated to a cheer routine. Her foot robbed me of my coveted sun and that’s when I realized ... she was expecting me to catch her guillotine-like kick with my bare hands! Determined to show her up, I proceeded to catch her axe kick...
Clap!
My hands pathetically came together in prayer right above Aria’s shin ... and the heel of a twenty-one centimeter miniature foot was planted squarely on the top of my head. I fell right back on my rear end, wishing Aria would just cut me some slack. I was used to getting punched and kicked from participating in Assaults hand-to-hand combat sessions, but the damage of constantly getting hit in the head over and over again was starting to add up. Standing in front of me, Aria stuck out her fake chest.
“Oh, come on! Get it right at least once! This isn’t a game, you know?!” Aria roared as she looked down at me with her glaring cuspid.
“L ... Look here …” I said, clutching my head as I stood up, “if you’re my partner, be a little more considerate of the condition I’m in. Let me have a break every now and then. I’m just getting over a cold because of some idiot who threw me off the balcony and into the freezing, dirty waters of Tokyo Bay at night,” I said, making a slightly long-winded sarcastic remark.
“W ... Well, I’m sorry, okay? I was thinking that I might have gone a little overboard ...” said Aria, averting her red eyes and partially turning away from me. It was a cute gesture, so I felt like following it up with a nice one of my own.
“Well, I won’t hold it against you. My cold’s cured now thanks the ‘Extra Concentrated Kudzu Infusion’ that Shirayuki gave me.”
Aria the Scarlet Ammo (novel), Volume 2 Page 7
