When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace: Volume 11 E-Book

Kota Nozomi

• Herausgeber: J-Novel Club
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

It’s finally happened. A full year after Andou and his literary club friends awakened to tremendously potent powers, the world of supernatural battles has finally arrived at their doorstep in the form of Tamaki: a girl from the darkest moment in Andou’s past! Andou has plenty of baggage with Tamaki, and Tamaki seems to have quite an axe to grind with him, so when she spirits him away to an unfamiliar cityscape, it seems safe to say her intentions are less than peaceful. Worse still, the nature of Tamaki’s power means that there’s little to no hope of Andou’s significantly more combat-capable friends storming onto the scene to bail him out! If Andou wants to make it out unscathed, he’ll have to confront his past head-on and use both his wits and his power to their fullest potential!

But, of course, Andou’s plight pales in comparison to one single, burning question: what’s Sagami up to while all of that’s going down?

Leseprobe

Prologue: stART

By the way, have you ever thought about the difference between main stories and spinoffs?

Main stories and spinoffs. Main plots and side stories. The mainstream and the copycat. The original and the derivative. The numbered entry and the Gaiden digression. For better or for worse, it feels like after a work of fiction gains a certain degree of popularity, it getting a spinoff in some form or another is something of an inevitability.

I don’t mean that in the mixed-media production sense—it’s slightly distinct. The so-called spinoffs that I’m talking about tend to be focused on depicting scenes that didn’t get directly shown in the original work, or shining a spotlight on popular side characters’ pasts or futures, or leaving all the characters the same but majorly shaking up the setting, or putting the whole thing into a four-panel gag manga format where the characters only barely resemble their original selves. There are all sorts of ways to go about it, really, but the core of their identity is that they always depict the story in a distinctly different manner from that of its original work. Those are the pieces of media that society at large refers to as spinoffs.

Do publishing houses or collaborating companies request that the creator of a piece of media make a spinoff once the original work takes off? Or do creators themselves ask to make them, hoping to use up concepts and ideas they couldn’t work into the originals, and the publishing houses only green-light their ideas if the series is a hit? That, I can’t say for sure—probably both happen and it’s a case-by-case thing—but regardless, it wouldn’t change the point I’m building up to.

I, speaking as a reader who’s experienced countless stories of all shapes and sizes—speaking as the human being named Sagami Shizumu—believe from the bottom of my heart that in this world, there is no such thing as a spinoff. Or rather, looking at it from the opposite perspective, I believe that in this world, there are nothing but spinoffs.

Okay, yes, I appreciate that I’m coming across as frustratingly indecisive, but the fact of the matter is that all of the experiences that have led me to this point have instilled a certain set of values within me, and all the other people I’ve taken the time to observe have led me to this impression. I simply can’t help it. It’s not a very easy feeling to put into words, but I’ll do my absolute best to explain it in the simplest terms possible. In return, I just ask that you stick with me all the way to the end of this excessively long-winded prologue.

Now then—what is a main story? What is a spinoff? What are manga, and novels, and anime, and TV dramas, and movies, and works of fiction of all kinds? In my view—my purely subjective personal opinion—they’reworks of selection. They’re just scenes, settings, states of affairs, et cetera, et cetera, all cropped to size and strung together—in other words, they’re the cumulative form of that which was selected to be shown to an audience.

The selected. The appointed. The chosen ones. The product of a strict and scrupulous screening process. That is the identity of the stories we so very much love to consume.

This is such a given it’s probably going to sound insipid, but not every aspect of a story’s world is depicted in the story itself. There will, without fail, be aspects of the story that aren’t included. Take, for instance, a hypothetical baseball manga: no series would depict each and every pitch thrown in each inning, top and bottom, that occurs over the course of a whole match (for the sake of argument, let’s just call Big Windup! an outlier). Instead, many innings are summed up in digest form. Some batters strike out offscreen while the protagonist is arguing with one of their teammates. Sometimes, when the protagonist’s team is up against a lackluster opponent, the whole match will be summed up in a piece of narration to the tune of “And then they won without much difficulty” and unceremoniously cut from the story.

Given the protagonist’s team’s activities are subjected to that sort of abridgment, I’m sure you can imagine how much more all of this applies when it comes to the opposing teams. There are some cases where the ultimate rival team gets its matches depicted in a reasonable level of detail, but there are far, far more teams filled with noncharacters who most readers won’t remember at all the second they leave the page. And that’s not even the half of it—after all, while the protagonist and their team are pouring their hearts and souls into baseball, their school’s soccer club’s also pouring their hearts and souls into their chosen game. It’s just not depicted particularly carefully, because why would a baseball manga put time and effort into portraying people who play some other sport? The soccer club probably has their own fair share of soccer club drama, but since their drama wasn’t selected, it’s excluded from the limelight.

This doesn’t apply exclusively to baseball manga. There’s no such thing as a work of fiction that depicts all of its characters to an equal degree—there will always be a certain hierarchy. That, in part, is how the main characters are separated from the extras. It goes even deeper than that, though, since not even the protagonists—the characters who serve as the linchpins of their works—have their lives depicted in full. It’s just unthinkable to portray every minute of their day-to-day life, from morning to night—to portray when they talk, act, eat, sleep, excrete, et cetera et cetera—in minute detail. There will always be factors that get trimmed or omitted.

Let’s say the story opens with the protagonist’s first day in high school. That, by extension, means the first fifteen-ish years of their life were cut right out of the plot, just like that. Even protagonists who self-identify as “perfectly average high school students” should have a perfectly average high school student’s worth of history and past experiences, but all of them get chopped, simply and dispassionately.

It goes without saying, by the way, that I’m not talking about the sort of traumatic pasts that will end up being featured in a big, elaborate backstory arc somewhere along the way. I’m talking about the mundane stuff—the plain, inconsequential aspects of their pasts that don’t feel worth depicting at all. In short: if something in a story doesn’t feel like it needs to be shown, it will be omitted. It will be excluded, abridged, alluded to, summarized, or simplified. After all, depicting all of those little details—depicting every single time in every single day that the protagonist eats, sleeps, and shits—would make for a terrible story.

Every once in a while (typically when a production’s exhausted all its resources), TV anime will resort to summarizing the previous events in the series in episodes people call “recaps” or “clip shows.” When you really think about it, though, isn’t fiction itself always a sort of summary? More specifically, it’s the sort of summary that homes in on all the good bits, showing the audience only the parts that they want to see. Out of the whole wide world the characters live in, only the aspects that either the readers want to read about or that the author wants to write about are chosen—selected—and those aspects are what become the final work.

Now then, this is the important part: whenever something is chosen, that means, by definition, that something else wasn’t chosen. The panels in manga, the frames in anime, and the text in novels were all chosen to be adapted in a selective process, and it goes without saying that there are plenty of all of the above that weren’t chosen as well. Scenes that were cut, sequences that didn’t beg depiction, moments that were left to the readers’ imagination... These will, inevitably, exist, due simply to the fact that a work of fiction cannot exist in full within a piece of media.

Media is media, nothing more and nothing less. It’s simply a means of transmitting information at its core. Manga, anime, novels...they’re all just methods of communicating descriptions of worlds and the lives of the characters who live in them to readers—not transmitting the worlds themselves in full. Thus, it’s inevitable that the scenes depicted in media won’t be the whole story. It’s inevitable that there will be some situations and information not included.

Here’s an example: it’s pretty common for shonen manga to cover up a heroine’s nipples or p—y with steam, or just draw them as flat and featureless patches of skin. That doesn’t mean that the heroines don’t have nipples and p—s, though. They do! Their nipples and p—s are very much there. Not just in manga that draw the nipples in for the volume releases or anime that omit the steam for the Blu-rays either—every heroine in every work of fiction has nipples and a p—y. The same goes for seinen manga and R-rated doujinshi—beneath the mosaic or the black censor bar, the real deal does, in fact, exist.

It’s a given, really. Those heroines, after all, are alive. They’re living beings, which means they have the same set of genitalia that any other living being does. They eat, breathe, and even excrete—all the natural metabolic processes you’d expect from a living human. The excretion scenes get cut, of course, unless you’re reading a work created for readers with a very particular fetish, but the fact that the scenes are cut doesn’t change the fact that, off-screen, all of those characters do use the bathroom.

There was a popular cliché among idols of a previous generation—and Death Note’s Misa Misa—that went something to the tune of “Idols don’t poop.” It was always sort of hard to tell just how serious anyone was about the whole thing, but when it all comes down to it, if idols actually didn’t pass waste at all, that would be gross in its own right. It would make them either terminally constipated, or otherwise literal aliens.

Humans poop. No matter how pretty someone may be—no matter how beautiful a girl is—they still poop. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re not grade-schoolers who kick up a fuss every time a classmate steps into a toilet stall. In fact, you’d have to have a screw loose to make a big deal out of something as banal as pooping.

Let’s illustrate this with a hypothetical: imagine, if you will, that the world I live in is a series of light novels starring Andou Jurai as its protagonist. I can think of a number of lovely young ladies who would probably be that novel’s heroines, and needless to say, every one of them poops. Even Kanzaki Tomoyo, even Kushikawa Hatoko, even Himeki Chifuyu, even Takanashi Sayumi, even Kudou Mirei, even Kuki Madoka, even Andou Machi, even Satomi Shiharu—all of them poop, without exception. You wouldn’t see it described in the text or pictured in the illustrations, though, because the text and illustrations of a light novel do not represent its world in its totality. Aspects of the world that aren’t directly depicted still exist, even including actions the characters take that common sense would dictate shouldn’t be depicted.

They poop. They piss. Once a month, the girls get their periods. They pick their noses, and they probably pass gas too. They might groom their underarm and pubic hair. They masturbate— Well, actually, that one’s sort of in question. They say that unlike guys, there are a surprising number of girls who don’t masturbate at all. A survey I saw once concluded that about thirty percent of high school girls haven’t tried it even once, after all...but if you look at that from the opposite perspective, it means that seventy percent of high school girls have. That, in short, means that out of the four high school girls in the picture—Kanzaki Tomoyo, Kushikawa Hatoko, Takanashi Sayumi, and Kudou Mirei—three of them, statistically speaking, have probably masturbated at least once. I think it’s safe to assume that Himeki Chifuyu and Kuki Madoka haven’t yet, but... Oh. Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if those two have started getting their periods? Considering most girls have their first somewhere between the ages of ten and sixteen, it’s probably still a little early for them, but—

Okay. I should probably stop now. I might’ve let myself get a little too worked up in a slightly unfortunate manner. People call me a pervert all the time, but even I know perfectly well that the line of thought I was traveling down a second ago was beyond the pale. My bad, won’t happen again.

So anyway, I’ve gotten quite a fair distance off track by now, but the point that I’m really trying to get at here is that the totality of a piece of fiction is not contained within that piece of fiction. Manga aren’t just drawings, novels aren’t just prose, and anime aren’t just video and voice acting. I believe that... How to put this into words...? I believe that within those innumerable works of media, deep down, the worlds that all those characters live in really do exist. The fictional worlds that the characters live in existed before the work comes about, and said work is created by picking and choosing the parts of the story that should be depicted in digest form—hence, fiction is a work of selection.

That’s the way I see it. No—it’s the way I want to see it. It’s what I want to believe. What I want to have blind faith in. After all...the alternative is to believe that the characters and stories I love so much are nothing more than flights of imagination, and that’s something that I don’t want, by any means.

Behind the words and images that make up a work, behind the mind of the author who created it, I want to believe that a completely different dimension and timeline exist where all the characters I love live. I want to believe that, rather than the product of simple fantasy, fiction is a truthful account of a world and its characters brought into being by one’s will. I want to believe that they’re works of purest nonfiction—unembellished documentaries that present nothing but the unvarnished truth to their viewers.

Now then. After that long, long explanation, I’d bet you can take a guess as to what my seemingly contradictory words way back in the beginning of all this truly meant. There is no such thing in this world as a spinoff—or rather, from the opposite perspective, this world contains nothing but spinoffs. In other words, in this world, main stories and spinoffs are one and the same. Trying to differentiate them would be an outlandish thing to do.

It just makes sense, doesn’t it? The only difference between a main story and a spinoff is when, where, or upon whom a spotlight is shined in the fictional world. It’s as petty as a distinction could get. I think there’s something sort of messed up about putting some stories on a pedestal just because they chose particular pieces of a preexisting fictional world to present in abridged form. Everyone is the main character of their own life and a supporting character in the lives of those around them. That’s why I feel so strongly that it’s just plain absurd that some people’s stories should be the main ones and others’ stories the spinoffs.

Let’s say once again, for example’s sake, that the world around me is part of a single light novel series. Volume one would portray the relationships within the literary club, with Andou Jurai at its center. The rom-com that revolves around him would probably count as the series’s main story. Then, around volume five or so, the spotlight would shine upon Kiryuu Hajime and the supernatural battles that surround him. That might very well end up being called the spinoff of the rom-com main story.

But—and this is a big but—is there really that much of a difference between their two stories? All that the two of them are doing is living in their own worlds. Andou Jurai has been living his main story, and Kiryuu Hajime has been living his. That’s all there is to it—they each live their lives to the best of their abilities, and nothing else. Sorting them into main story and spinoff, main and side plots, numbered entry and Gaiden chapter, would merely be a matter of convenience—or business—at most. A work of fiction is a carefully selected summary of events that occurred in the preexisting world of a story, adapted and depicted through media, nothing more—and there is no actual pecking order or hierarchical structure among them.

But, well... I’ve dragged this conversation on for quite a long time now—too long—and I’ve honestly lost track of what it was all really supposed to be about, so to sum up: everything I’ve said so far is what fiction means to me. I’m not interested in forcing my viewpoint onto other people, and I’m not looking for people to identify with it either. All I want is for that to remain my personal impression as I enjoy all the stories the world has to offer.

And with all of that established...I think it’s finally time for our story to begin. Not a main story or a spinoff. Just a story, plain and simple. A story of the world I live in, portrayed through the perspective I see it from—my story.

A bit of advance warning: I make no guarantee that it’s going to be amusing. I’m all about being amused by other people, not amusing people myself. I’m not cut out to be a protagonist or a narrator—I’m more of a comic relief sort of character who throws the story for a loop every once in a while. In other words, I’m hopeless, and I take pride in that.

If you’re all right with all that, though, then let’s get started. It’s time to begin a tale that’s neither a beginning nor an end—just one story among many.

Chapter 1: Sagamicizm of the One-Ten-Three

“...AAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!”

I let out a deathly scream—a wail of purest, irrepressible despondency. The time: after school. The place: my own home, in my own room. I simply lay there on my bed, paying no regard to how much I was annoying my neighbors as I shrieked and lamented, a waterfall of tears pouring down my cheeks.

Despair: the complete loss of all hope. There couldn’t have been a better word to sum up my current state of mind. A wish far greater than any other had been severed—a truly once-in-a-millennium stroke of luck the likes of which I would never see again had been wasted—and now I was tormented by regret and hopelessness that defied description.

“I-It’s back!” I choked out between heaving sobs. “It’s baaack...”

It was like a foreign body situation—or rather, a foreign member situation. I’d even go so far as to call it a sense of defilement. The almost nostalgic presence between my legs—one that I’d known very well since the moment I was born—gave me no choice but to scream to the high heavens.

“I-I’m... I’m... I’m a guy agaaaaaain!”

For those of you who might not have a solid grasp on the situation, a quick summary of the sequence of events that led to this point:

Summer vacation was long gone, the cultural festival had passed, and the second semester was well underway when, one day, the first love of a girl with painfully limited romantic experience triggered a large-scale incident. The girl in question was Takanashi Sayumi, a third-year student at Senkou High. She had just stepped down from her position as president of the literary club the day before, and, having been relieved of the obligations and restrictions that came with that position, she’d resolved to tell the boy she’d set her sights on how she felt about him. In other words, she’d committed to confessing her love to Andou Jurai.

In the end, however, when the moment loomed large, she hesitated. This was (I assume) her very first time telling a boy she loved him, and she just couldn’t bring herself to take that final, fateful step forward. She couldn’t work up the courage on her own...and so she sought to obtain it in a manner that was probably not in the spirit of the rules. Route of Origin, Takanashi Sayumi’s supernatural power, gave her the ability to return anything to the way it was meant to be, and its definition of “anything,” it seemed, extended beyond the boundaries of physical, three-dimensional objects. It could act upon concepts just as easily, and on that day, she used it on her own feelings of love, of all things.

Now then, what is the way that a feeling of love is meant to be? That’s simple enough: there is no one correct answer, because the answer is different for everyone. As Kaneko Misuzu put it, “Everyone’s different, and that’s just fine.” That’s just how it goes with love. In other words, you could say that not having a way one’s feelings of love are meant to be is the way they’re meant to be...but I guess I’d be wading a little too deep into the rhetoric swamp if I tried to make that argument.

In any case, Route of Origin was given a challenge that would make even the most vaunted of philosophers shrug, and in response, it defied its wielder’s will and went on a rampage. As a result, everyone who held feelings of love for Andou Jurai was caught up in its effects. Kanzaki Tomoyo was stricken with a case of chuunibyou, Kushikawa Hatoko turned into a yandere, Himeki Chifuyu became a high schooler, Takanashi Sayumi started wearing glasses, Kudou Mirei went mad with love—and I, Sagami Shizumu, turned into a girl.

Working backward from how the phenomenon manifested, it seemed most likely that the hidden desires within all of our hearts had been brought to the surface. That was just conjecture, of course, but in my case, at least I could say with absolute confidence that it was perfectly on the mark. I had, after all, always wanted to get turned into a girl.

For as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed of becoming a beautiful young maiden. No real surprise that I was super into gender benders—that is, stories in which the protagonist gets their gender swapped (guy to girl, in my case) for whatever reason. Andou had made it clear in the past that he wasn’t into the genre at all, and to be fair, I could understand why it would weird some people out, but personally? I loved the stuff.

Watching a story’s protagonist freak out after waking up with a girl’s body one morning was indescribably arousing to me. I mean that very literally—indescribably arousing. There were simply no words that could do justice to the unique sort of excitement it brought me. The thought of a protagonist getting to experience a woman’s body, a woman’s erogenous zones, a woman’s arousal—all sensations that a guy could never possibly hope to savor—filled me with a guilty sort of ebullient pleasure like no other.

Did I, as a guy, want to have my way with the transformed protagonist? Or did I want to be the one getting transformed and letting a guy have his way with me? I couldn’t say—trying to explain it was a hopeless effort—but whatever the case, the budding excitement in my heart and loins was without question the real deal.

The fact of the matter, however, was that in reality, inexplicable overnight gender-bending just wasn’t a thing. It was a fantasy on the same level of realism as getting transmigrated to another world or getting caught up in a death game. To be fair, the fact that it was a scenario that wasn’t realistic was probably why it had such a profound, taboo-tinged appeal that drew so many people to it so intensely, but the point is that it was something that could never, ever happen in real life. I knew that very well, so my desire to be turned into a girl was nothing more to me than a fantasy that crossed my mind on occasion. I had no expectations whatsoever that it would ever actually happen...but then...

But then, it actually did.

Somehow, my dream had been granted. I woke up one morning and found that I’d turned into a girl. And—though it might be weird to say this about myself—I was a pretty darn cute girl, at that. I was a self-admitted sleazebag of a guy, and widely acknowledged as such, but I’d still never lacked for girls attempting to court me, thanks mostly to the good looks I’d inherited from my mother.

I’m no narcissist, to be clear. My feelings on my own appearance didn’t go any further than an objective “Yup, I’m pretty handsome, all right” every once in a while when I looked in a mirror, and I wasn’t particularly attached to my own good looks. The moment I saw the female version of me in the mirror, however, my heart began pounding like a drum. Huh? Who the hell is that hottie? I thought. I fell for her in an instant. It was literal love at first sight.

The word “narcissist,” by the way, is derived from Narcissus, a figure in Greek mythology. Narcissus was a beautiful young man who fell in love with the image of his own face reflected in a spring—and in that moment, I suddenly understood how he’d felt at the time very well. I’m so glad I was born handsome, I thought. If I’d finally gotten gender-swapped only to come out on the other side as an uggo, all that joy I was feeling would’ve been replaced with pure revulsion.

Anyway, the point is that the excitement I felt from turning into a girl was genuinely beyond description for me. The circumstances being what they were, there was only one thing that I could possibly do next: masturbate. Drop everything, pants included, and just go at it. Explore every one of my new body’s forbidden nooks and crannies—bushwhack through the untamed thicket to brave the terrible crevasse beneath, blazing a valiant trail with but a single finger. Savor every drop of pleasure that a woman’s body, supposedly many times more sensitive than a man’s, had to offer—

Actually, no, wait a minute. This will be my first time getting off in a girl’s body—a momentous occasion. This doesn’t exactly feel like a situation where “Haste makes waste” applies, but on the other hand, there’s no way that taking it too lightly would be a good idea. I should get as prepared as I possibly can and make sure I have no regrets by the time I’m done!

So I did a little shopping. The moment school was over, I went out and bought a bunch of...well, let’s just call them toys. Not even I’m enough of a degenerate to put the specific details of my purchase down in writing here, so let’s just say I was well stocked on items in the “lubricating” and “vibrating” categories. I’d prepared everything I could need to make sure that my first self-pleasure experience as a girl would be the best it could possibly be.

And so, I stepped into my house, fully armed and ready to rumble. I locked the front door, went to my room, locked that door as well, and was just about to drop my underwear and set forth into a world of unfathomable pleasure...when I noticed that said underwear had, somewhere along the way, turned from the pure-white panties I’d been expecting into one of my usual pairs of boxer shorts. And that wasn’t all—I realized that a valley had become a mountain as well, if you catch my drift.

“I was so close... I was so close!” I groaned in mourning, kicking my legs with impotent frustration. Ahh, dammit all! If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve come right home without stopping by the smut shop! I should’ve just rubbed one out with my fingers as quickly as possible! There’s probably a cucumber or an eggplant in the fridge that would’ve done the job just fine!

I’d been thrown for too much of a loop to do anything at all that morning, and all I’d had time to do at school was conduct a survey of the girls’ restroom and locker room. As a result, my time as a girl had ended without me having ever so much as prodded the actual goods.

“This can’t be happening... I turned into a girl and didn’t get to do anything sexy at all?!” I mean, like...am I in a shonen magazine or something?! What is this, Ranma 1/2?!

I spent a moment longer groaning and sniffling, then finally let out a heavy sigh. I hadn’t recovered from the state of shock I’d been thrown into yet, but I also knew that blubbering about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I sat up, then took a look into the bag of adult toys that I’d bought on the way home.

“Ugh... What am I supposed to do with these now? It seemed like such a good idea to buy three sizes back then, since I didn’t know how tight I’d be down there...”

Actually, now that I’m thinking about this with a clearer head, was I really planning on taking my own virginity with a factory-made lump of rubber? It seemed almost tragic when I thought about it in those terms...tragic, or horrifying. The excitement of turning into a girl had clearly robbed me of all composure.

Looking at my situation from a more objective point of view had helped me calm down a little, so I took the chance to inspect myself and my surroundings a little more closely. My body had completely returned to its male form, and my uniform had been swapped from a girl’s to a guy’s as well. My skirt was now a pair of slacks, my panties were boxers, and the C-cup bra I’d been wearing had been wiped from existence entirely. It wasn’t just that my body had gone through a transformation. My clothing and possessions—all of my character-defining accessories—had been returned to their former state.

“Everything about the world’s alterations—or, really, our characters’ alterations—has gone back to normal... I guess that probably means that Takanashi finally told him,” I muttered to myself. It was the only explanation I could think of for why the changes that Route of Origin’s rampage had made to the world would have been undone. “Sheesh. You could’ve taken your time, Takanashi! Then all these sex toys might not have gone to waste.”

Upon reflection, it struck me that I’d said something along the lines of “I’ll simply stand back and watch, like the reader I am. I’d like nothing more than to observe how Takanashi Sayumi’s time as a heroine comes to a close”—a pretty cool line, all around—then totally ignored her actual confession-of-love event after school in favor of running home to get myself off. Even I was starting to think I was beyond help.

“I wonder how it went, though. Did it work out well for her?” I mumbled...but to be honest, I already knew the answer. Takanashi had most assuredly failed. I felt confident in saying that the two of them were definitely not an item now. I didn’t have any proof to back that claim up, but I could still make it with certainty.

Andou’s feelings—his capacity for love, if you will—were frozen. They’d been that way ever since we were in the eighth grade. He just didn’t have what it took to decide to go out with any one specific individual, and unless he found some way to work past his eighth-grade trauma...

“Well, I guess I can just ask her how it all went tomorrow. For now, I have to figure out a way to work off all this frustration,” I said to myself. I’d been just one step away from the main event, only for it to be postponed—indefinitely. It probably goes without saying that I was dealing with a lot of pent-up lust.

“My clothes and underwear changed into stuff a guy would wear, so you’d think those would change into stuff for a guy too,” I grumbled bitterly as my gaze dropped to the bag once more. Everything I’d been wearing had transformed right along with me when I’d turned back into a boy, but the bag of obscenities had remained completely unchanged.

Dammit, Route of Origin! You couldn’t have been just a little more flexible? If you had to change my sex back, you could’ve had the decency to swap out all those women’s sex toys for a bunch of TENGAs or something! What’s a guy even supposed to do with all these vibrating...

“...I guess I could just shove one up my—” I began, but just before my frustration drove me in a risky—actually, make that straight up out-of-bounds—direction, I was forced to put my business on hold yet again, this time by a sudden phone call.

“By the way, Saitou, do you ever use toys when you masturbate?”

“Pfff!”

I’d been called over to a certain chain restaurant, where I found myself sitting directly across from a crusty, Kitaro-haired hag...or rather, from Saitou Hitomi, who had just spewed a whole mouthful of water across the table. Fortunately, I managed to dodge the spray just in time.

Ugh, nasty. I wouldn’t have bothered dodging if it had been a little girl’s saliva-infused water—in fact, I would’ve dodged into the blast if that’d been the case—but getting covered in a twenty-whatever-year-old’s drink was no better than getting covered in sewage. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

Saitou spent a moment coughing and spluttering, then looked back up at me. “Huh? Wha... Excuse me?!”

“Oh, don’t worry! You can rest assured that I’m not even slightly interested on a personal level in how you go about doing your business,” I said placidly as she started wiping off the table with her napkin, eye still wide open with shock. “I just happen to be in a bit of a situation at the moment. I’ve come into possession of a number of women’s sex toys, and I don’t have anything to do with them.”

Saitou gave me a look. “What sort of situation would end like that?” she asked.

“I was just thinking that I could pass them off to you if you wanted them,” I said, waving her question aside.

“I-I do not want them!”

“No need to be shy!”

“That’s really not the problem here!”

“Are you sure? I’ll cut you quite the deal if you take them here and now.”

“You were planning on charging me?!”

“Here, take a look at this one! See how it’s ribbed for your—”

“Wha— No! Do not pull that crap out here!” Saitou shouted, her face flushing bright red as I brought out one of the vibrating thingies I’d obtained as an example. Judging by how genuinely put off she looked, it struck me that she probably wasn’t just being awkward about it—she really wasn’t interested at all.

Hmm. Shame. That’s a very rare instance of me trying to do something nice for someone, wasted.

“Look...Sagami?” Saitou sighed.

“Yes?”

“Let me set something straight. We’re not, you know...we’re not that close, are we? We barely know each other, actually. We’re friends of friends at best, right?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Okay. So...shouldn’t you be a little