When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace: Volume 7 E-Book

Kota Nozomi

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

Seitenzahl: 322

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Summer is here! Swimsuits and poolside shenanigans await Andou when Chifuyu asks him to do team trivia at the water park. But the fun doesn’t stop there! Andou’s in for some slipping and sliding summertime memories when Sayumi invites him to spend time with her at the pool. That’s not all, though: Andou’s determined to live out his vacation to the fullest with some fun in the sun when Hatoko wants to hang out together at the beach. Even after all that, Andou’s not content to rest on his laurels, since he’s happy to dive into a day of splashing around and munching on junk food with Tomoyo when she offers him her spare water park ticket. Wait...huh? Why does everyone keep asking to spend one-on-one time with him around large bodies of water? Not just to fill an arbitrary beach episode quota, that’s for sure! Plots will be hatched, schemes will be schemed, and secrets will be revealed as the girls of the literary club make the most of their time alone with Andou!

Leseprobe

Prologue ★ Are You Ready?

I scrolled back up and started reading again from the top of the list. I ran through the results over and over, taking extra care to ensure I hadn’t overlooked or misread a single entry, opening my eyes as wide as dinner plates and gluing them to my laptop’s screen as I processed the words displayed on it. I believed with all my heart that the one string I was looking for was hidden somewhere within that sea of letters, and I kept searching until my eyes were dry and bloodshot. In the end, though...I never tracked it down. I read the whole list twenty times over, and it was simply nowhere to be found.

Yugami Hizumi. Yugami, written with the characters for “a playful god,” and Hizumi, written with the characters for “clearest crimson,” both surname and given name meaning “distortion” when read out loud. I’d chosen a pretty stylish pen name, if I do say so myself, but it didn’t appear on the list of the twenty-two writers who’d passed the second round of judging. That meant, in short, that the manuscript I’d submitted had been rejected.

“So, I looost,” I groaned. I let out a deep sigh as I detached my eyeballs from the laptop screen and slumped back into my chair, using my freshly disenthralled peepers to gawk listlessly at my room’s ceiling. “Ugh. Ugggh. Ugaaahhhhhhhhh...”

It wasn’t quite a scream, and it wasn’t quite a moan. It was a sort of weird, half-shouted midpoint of a mouth noise, and I kept it going all the while as I stood up, walked over to my bed, and flopped down into it face-first. Then I started rolling around for no particular reason, kicking my feet pointlessly and battering my old body pillow like a sandbag as I unleashed a full Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms taijutsu on it. I knew all this flailing was pointless, and I knew people would probably be weirded out if they saw me behaving this way, but a bitter frustration had escaped from the depths of my heart and was now coursing through my body at a breakneck pace, driving me to these outlandish antics as it vented out into the atmosphere.

I made it all the way to the Eight Trigrams Three-Hundred Sixty-One Style—a game-original move—then stopped to let out another sigh and take a deep breath. My wild outburst had, in the end, helped me calm down a little.

“Sorry, pillow,” I said. I’d pummeled and poked the poor thing into oblivion, and before anything else, an apology seemed in order. Then I stood up, walked back over to my desk, and took another look at my laptop’s screen.

I’d submitted my story to a light novel publishing label’s up-and-coming author competition. About a week after summer vacation had begun—that is to say, earlier today—their editorial department sent out a tweet to announce that the results of the second round of judging had been posted, and I’d nervously and excitedly navigated my way to the announcement page, praying feverishly all the while that I’d manage to pass. And in the end...I’d been rejected. Tragically, it seemed that God wasn’t the sort of entity who’d be sure to hear you when you were at your most desperate.

The first round of judging had pared an initial 534 entries down to 127. In other words, I’d managed to clear roughly one-in-five odds to make it through the first round, only to fall short of the final twenty-two entries in the second.

I found myself staring vacantly at those twenty-two pen names and titles, all of which—at least in the eyes of the editorial department—belonged to better works than mine. The eventual winners would have summaries and critiques of their stories, information about the author’s age and hometown, and other similar stuff listed publicly, but at this stage, all that was available was the names of the authors and their stories. And so, in spite of the fact that I knew next to nothing about them, I found myself scanning through the list of works and muttering things like “Okay, no way that one can sell” and “Oof, somebody’s a real bandwagon chaser.” And yet, when I thought that those were the titles that had left mine in the dust and moved on past the second round...

“Okay, no. This is pathetic,” I muttered as I gave my head a smack and tried to move away from the unsightly jealousy that was rapidly overtaking me. A small part of me considered giving the editorial department a call, but I frantically shook my head and drove that idea away. Absolutely not—that’s the most pathetic thing an aspiring author can possibly do! If you wash out, then you wash out. You have to take the results you’re given and accept them.

“Agggh! I know I have to accept it, but still, this one hurt...”

I’d submitted stories to this competition three times to date. I’d been dropped in the first round of judging twice, and now the second round once. I’d been really hyped at making it through the initial round for the first time, but the excitement hadn’t lasted. Winning an award was still far out of my reach. Three submissions wasn’t very many at all, on a relative scale, and I was still in high school, so it might’ve been silly for me to get this depressed over my rejection...but there were also plenty of people out there who’d debuted with their very first work, and novelists making their pro debut in high school wasn’t unheard of either. So, yeah—it still hurt, in the end.

“Maybe I just don’t have any talent,” I mumbled, when suddenly, a memory buried deep within my subconscious sprang to the forefront. A man’s face leaped into my mind’s eye, grinning dauntlessly as he opened his mouth to speak.

“You hear people assert that talent and effort are polar opposites all the time, but the truth is that on a fundamental level, they’re exactly the same thing. They’re both nothing more than a means by which results are brought about.”

So said Kiryuu Hajime, also known as Kiryuu Heldkaiser Luci-First—my half brother. We shared a father, we’d lived together since I was little, and I’d always referred to him as “O brother of”— No, scratch that last part. That’d never happened. I’d always called him Hajime, like a normal person would.

“Your talent, your effort—and for that matter, your environment, the era you live in, and your genes as well—none of them mean anything except in retrospect. Your success or your failure comes first, and only once that determination has been made will the people around you claim that you’d only succeeded because you’d had talent or put in the effort, or that you’d only failed because you’d lacked talent or motivation. They’re excuses, justifications, and they can only be applied after a result has already been reached.”

I can’t really remember what’d set Hajime off on this particular ramble. Most of the time he ended up in this mode, it’d happen while he was tutoring me on something, and this’d probably been no exception. Hajime had been smart enough to compete at a top level in the national practice exams, so every once in a while, I’d have him help me with my studies. I figure I’d probably said something along the lines of, “I’m not talented like you are, so this doesn’t come naturally to me,” and the rest was history.

“Per the quantum uncertainty principle, the very nature of all things under creation is only established upon their observation. It’s the same thing, really.”

...And this is exactly why I only had him help me every once in a while. My brother was the sort of person who’d casually drop quantum mechanics and metaphysical mumbo jumbo into a lesson he was teaching a girl whose courses still had names like “science” and “social studies.” He was, in short, not an ideal tutor.

“The ignorant masses believe that it’s a matter of process—that by going through the motions, step by step, results are produced. They believe that steady, consistent effort paves the road to success. The truth, however, is the exact opposite,” said Hajime, his tone carrying a certain sense of self-aggrandizing exuberance. “Going through the motions doesn’t produce results. No, the ‘motions’ themselves are born retroactively from a predetermined result. The present does not exist by virtue of the past—the past is born by virtue of us, here in the present, seeking answers that lie there.”

I’m not really sure what sort of face I’d been making throughout all this, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was probably an “I have no clue what to make of all the gobbledygook you’re spewing at me” expression. That, I figure, is why Hajime started breaking his theory down and explaining it in slightly simpler terms.

“Imagine, if you will, an incredibly talented pitcher—the sort of national hero who’s achieved great things domestically and abroad, writing his name into the sport’s history. The news media would put him right up on a pedestal and declare him a gifted athlete, I’m sure. Meanwhile, documentary programs would dig into his time as a student, or the time he’d been in a slump, telling the moving tale about how really, he’d always put in more effort than anyone. Those are the moments when effort and talent come into being, for the purpose of rationalization and nothing else.”

I just stared blankly at him.

“You just used the word ‘talent’ to rationalize something as well. Perhaps the actual scenario was ‘I can’t solve the problem myself’ or ‘I can’t get the sort of grades that he does.’ Whatever the case, you concluded the issue stemmed from a lack of academic talent because you already knew the result and desired to rationalize it. Oh, but don’t get me wrong—I’m not criticizing you, of course! Rationalizing is simply second nature for humans, after all.”

Finally, Hajime was nearing his conclusion.

“When presented with a result, mankind is wont to seek out a process that led to it. Just as we only rationalize our dreams to be dreams at the moment we awaken from them, so too do we begin with the result then seek out an explanation—a process—that can convince us and others why said result turned out that way. Such is the way of this world,” Hajime declared smugly, finishing his explanation with a rhetorical flourish.

Having listened to his whole speech from start to finish, only one thought came to mind.

So friggin’ what?!

At the end of his long, looong, rambling explanation, absolutely nothing had been resolved or established whatsoever. He hadn’t rebuked me, and he sure as hell hadn’t encouraged me. He’d just spouted off his little pet theory, and that was the end of it. I could only assume he’d been in the mood to brag to me about the philosophical concept he’d come up with and chosen to seize a flimsy excuse to do so. It wasn’t the first time he’d pulled that move either—my brother had always been kind of a handful like that. I’ve taken to calling those lectures he gave me his chuunversion sessions when I reminisce about them.

“And the worst part about it is that I could never quite argue against the stuff he told me,” I sighed. I also had to admit: I’d never really minded when an extended lecture from him left me with “So what?” as my only reaction. There was a certain enjoyment to be had in the act of learning that sort of philosophical trivia. That was why I’d chosen ethics as my elective course in school and why I enjoyed it as much as I did. The fact that Andou had said pretty much the same thing to me at one point was one of the things that made me realize that the two of us actually saw eye to eye—

“Oh! That’s right... I told Andou about all this, didn’t I?”

Back when I’d passed the first round of judging, I’d told Andou about it. Worse still, he’d thrown me a little celebration and everything. We’d gone out for cake together, spent ages browsing in a bookstore...and bumped into Tamaki, a girl with an incredibly thick accent and a distinctively rustic sense of fashion. She was an old friend of Andou’s from when he was in the eighth grade, and also Sagami’s ex-girlfriend.

“I should tell him how it turned out, shouldn’t I? He celebrated for me and everything, so it feels like I have to now...”

Andou hadn’t asked me about the judging process even once since then. He could be surprisingly considerate about that sort of thing when push came to shove. I was pretty sure he actually understood that I—or really, that aspiring authors in general—wouldn’t appreciate being questioned about how it was going. I had all sorts of things that I didn’t want to be asked about...but at the same time, I had all sorts of things that I wanted to say as well. I didn’t want people to interrogate me about how my writing was going, or how the contest had turned out, but I did want to brag whenever things were going well. I had to admit, it must’ve been a real pain to deal with me and my ambitions sometimes.

In any case, I wanted to tell Andou. It’s not that I wanted him to comfort me or try to cheer me up. It was just that since I’d told him about my early results, I felt like I had a duty to keep him up to date.

Yeah. That’s right. A duty. That’s all this is.

I stood there silently for a moment, then glanced over to the side of my computer. There, on my desk, was the ticket I’d received a few days earlier. A ticket for free entry to the public pool—specifically, a ticket for two. My mom had given it to me, and it’d been lying there ever since, untouched.

“Oh, for the... Come on, seriously?” I grumbled, pressing a hand to my forehead before I knew it. The air conditioner in my room was running at full blast, but I could feel my face growing hotter by the second. “What am I thinking? Why would I even consider using this as an excuse...?”

“I bet you’ve got a boy you have your eye on to invite along,” my mom had said, and the first face to pop into my mind had been that dumbass’s.

B-But, I mean...it’s not like I have any other guy friends I’m really close to! It’s only natural that he’d be the first one to come to mind... Y-Yeah, this doesn’t mean anything about how I feel about him at all... He’s just a clubmate, nothing more and nothing less... I-I’m just getting all weird about this because of all that stuff Hatoko said, that’s all—

Suddenly, I felt a prickling pain in my chest. Just a tiny, sharp sting, like I’d jabbed myself on a rose’s thorn. The conversation I’d had with Hatoko in the club room right before summer vacation entered the forefront of my mind once more. She was always such a gentle, pleasant girl, but the declaration of love she’d made in that moment had jabbed me like a sword of pure ice. So why didn’t I...?

“Ahhh! Seriously, screw this!”

My mind was such a mess it felt like my brain might just pop under the pressure of it all, and I let my emotions carry me away. I slammed my fist into my desk, then kept that momentum going and pulled out my phone, brought up my contact list, selected the very first name in it, and hit the call button.

“H-Hello?”

☆

“Yeah, sure. Sounds good. Okay, then—in two years, at the Sabaody Archipelago.”

“I am not meeting you there!”

With that last little bit of banter, my phone call with Tomoyo came to a close. I’d been sprawled out on my bed reading manga when she’d called, but now I was sitting up to look at the calendar hanging on my wall. She’d invited me to the public pool, and I had to update it accordingly.

“Hmm. I sure wasn’t counting on this,” I muttered as I wrote “Frolic with the Witch of Antinomy: Endless Paradox in the Wellspring of Eden” into my schedule. I wasn’t opposed to going to the pool with Tomoyo, of course. I was pretty fond of swimming, and going to the pool was a summer staple in my mind.

Indeed, summer meant pools and swimsuits, the third or fourth volume of a light novel meant an obligatory swimsuit arc, and an anime adaptation meant an also obligatory swimsuit episode, whether or not there was one in the source material. By the way, the reason the third volume of your average light novel series is so likely to contain a swimsuit arc has to do with the fact that tons of series open in April, at the start of the Japanese academic and fiscal year. That means that most stories ended up getting to the summer season right around the third volume or so, and that’s really all there is to it. It’s kinda just standard practice to start school stories at the beginning of the school year. But I digress.

Back to the point at hand: I was totally in favor of going to the pool in and of itself, but in this case, I guess you could say it put me in a bit of a fix—or rather, it played into a strange and ongoing sequence of events. I looked at my calendar once more, scanning back across the three days before my meeting with Tomoyo, all of which had plans already penned in.

“I never expected everyone in the literary club to invite me to the pool independently, that’s for sure...”

Truth really is stranger than fiction, sometimes.

Chapter 1 ★ July and the Princess of a Thousand Winters Go to the Pool with the Nine-Headed Demon

Hello, everyone! My name is Kuki Madoka, and I’m a fourth grader in class 1 at Yokoi Elementary School.

The first week of summer vacation passed by before I knew it, and a day I’d been planning for ages had finally arrived: it was the day I’d be going out to play at our city’s water park! My best friend, Chii, and I were going there together.

“Isn’t the weather great today, Chii? It’s the perfect day for a trip to the pool!” I said as I looked up at the sky. We were sitting together on a bench at the bus stop, and the sun was shining away above us. There was nothing subtle about the weather that day. It was the height of summer, and nature was making a show of it.

Chii, who was sitting beside me, gave me a little nod. She was carrying Squirrely, the stuffed animal she always brought everywhere with her, as well as a bag stuffed full of individually wrapped strawberry-jam-filled marshmallows. She took out one of the little packets, tore it open, and popped a marshmallow into her mouth.

“By the way, Chii, have you started on your summer homework yet?” I asked as she passed me the empty wrapper, doing my best to sound like I was just making casual small talk.

Chii gave me a grumpy glare. “I hate you, Cookie.”

“Why?!” I shouted, reeling with astonishment. No way! Did I really just ruin our friendship?!

“I hate people with no common sense,” Chii continued.

N-No common sense? I never imagined I’d receive that piece of criticism, especially not from Chii. It was a painful enough thing to hear on its own, and she was the last person I’d ever wanted to hear it from. It was like getting a lecture on the importance of washing your hands from Bacteriaman.

“Listen, Cookie,” said Chifuyu, looking me in the eye with a very serious look on her face. “Summer vacation is a vacation. You don’t think about homework on vacations. That’s common sense. Okay?”

I gaped. I’d never thought that just mentioning homework would make her this upset with me. It seemed that the word “homework” itself was taboo, as far as Chii was concerned. “O-Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry, Chii. I should’ve known better.”

“As long as you understand,” said Chii, seemingly satisfied.

I knew perfectly well that around the end of summer vacation, she’d be begging me to let her copy my homework. That was what had happened last year and the year before that, after all. She couldn’t do anything without me around to help her. Hee hee hee!

“Heeey, Chifuyu! Kuki!” a boorish, boyish voice rang out, cutting off our friendly chat. The boy in question, Andou, was waving at us as he ran toward the bus stop. “Hey, guys! It’s been a while, huh?” he said, greeting us with a friendly smile as he jogged up to our bench.

Chii stood up and raised a hand to return his greeting. “Long time no see, Andou,” she said.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Andou replied. “And man, talk about great weather, right? We sure got lucky it ended up being so sunny out today!”

“I made a rain charm to make sure it would be,” Chii proudly declared.

“Oh, that’d explain it! Guess we have your charm to thank for it being such a clear day, then.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Charmy.”

“U-Uhh... Chifuyu? Are you talking to that...wadded-up ball of tissue you just pulled out of your pocket?” Andou asked concernedly. “That, uhh, really sounds like the sorta name you’d give to the rain charm you made, doesn’t it?”

“This is Charmy’s brain.”

“Its brain?!”

“It’s where Charmy’s thoughts, feelings, and memories are all stored.”

“Holy crap, Chifuyu! I mean, like...I guess you do put a wadded-up tissue in those charms to pad out their heads, and that would sorta count as their brains, but, seriously, just no! Carrying around the inside bit’s not the same thing as carrying around an actual charm! What happened to the outer tissue?!”

“It ran away.”

“Your rain charm’s body ran away and left its brains behind?!”

“It’s okay. The body has a new brain in it now.”

“That... Huh. This is weird, actually. That’s not really all that different from how Anpanman swaps out his head, but getting all anatomical and calling it his brain introduces a whole deep, philosophical dilemma to the scenario... Like, doesn’t this raise all sorts of questions about what part of us is us, and where our consciousness is stored, and stuff?”

“Charmy’s brain is still Charmy, even without a body.”

“Right. So, Chifuyu, I think it’s about time you told us the truth. Why doesn’t Charmy have a body, a face, or any of that stuff?”

“I got bored.”

“Oooh, okay. Yeah, I see how this happened. You do get bored and give up on stuff all the time. Like how you were gonna fold a thousand cranes the other day, but only actually folded one baby crane in the end...”

The moment Andou had shown up, the two of them kicked off a whole cheerful conversation with each other, which I now decided to cut into.

“Andou!” I said. “Thank you very much for being our chaperone to the pool today! I really appreciate you being willing to accompany us on such short notice!”

“You sure are conscientious about this stuff, huh, Kuki? It’s cool, and you don’t have to be all formal with me! Heck, I’m actually glad you bothered to invite me,” said Andou with a slightly awkward grin. “I mean, like... Y’know. We sorta had that whole thing last time... I was kinda worried you hated my guts after all that, honestly.”

“Ha ha ha, what on earth would make you think that?” I said with a perfect smile. “That was a long time ago, and I’ve let bygones be bygones! I certainly never would’ve invited you to chaperone us at the pool if I hated you!”

“Y-Yeah, true enough! Guess I was worrying for nothing, huh?” Andou said, then let out a sigh of relief.

I hadn’t forgotten what had happened last time, of course. I remembered very well that Andou was a hopeless lolicon: the sort of irredeemable pervert who gets aroused by girls who are far too young for him. Did I hate him? Certainly not. My opinion of Andou wasn’t even close to that mild. The dark, violent emotion that surged from deep down in the pit of my stomach, rushing through my whole body, could never have been described so simply as the single word hate. The sin that scummy lolicon had committed—the sin of deceiving Chii and luring her to his side—was deeper than the deepest ocean and heavier than the largest mountain.

“Oh, the bus is here! Hey, do you two have your tickets? Want me to hold on to them just to make sure nobody loses theirs?” Andou offered. It seemed he was trying to act reliable, maybe since he was the oldest of us.

I wasn’t going to let him trick me with that kind front, though. He’d jumped at the chance to portray himself as a nice, helpful role model, but that didn’t change the fact that deep down, he was a genuine lolicon. I knew exactly what sort of wicked intentions he was hiding behind that helpful mask of his.

Heh heh heh! Prepare yourself, Andou! Today, I’m going to tear that mask right off and expose you for who you really are!

“Ugh...”

“What is it, Andou?”

“Nothing, really... I just got this crazy chill all of a sudden. Maybe I’m coming down with a summer cold?”

“I...think I might die.”

“I’ve been feeling my chest get all thumpy...”

“It gets thumpy, and then it’s like it’s getting squeezed...and my face gets red, and I can’t focus...”

“When Andou...”

“When Andou’s nearby. Or when I think about him. My chest gets really thumpy then...”

Chii had come to my home and said all of that to me, blushing faintly the whole time, just a little while before summer vacation had started. Back then, I’d tried to sort of forcibly distract her from the truth by telling her that she should just eat a marshmallow whenever she was starting to feel any of the symptoms she’d described to me. It hadn’t been a great diversion, but Chii had been content to just heed my advice and had told me she felt like she was all better again before she left. Still, after all that, I’d become certain: Chii, apparently, had fallen in love with Andou Jurai.

I felt like I had an okay grasp of Chii’s relationships with everyone in the Senkou High literary club. Their group had a big secret, and I’d gotten into a bit of a fight with Chii over it, but at this point I’d already learned the truth: their secret was that Andou suffered from a terrible and incurable disease known as the lolita complex. He’d admitted it to me personally, so there was no mistaking it. He’d told me that it was only thanks to Chii keeping him company that he was able to suppress his attraction to little girls.

When I really stopped to think about it, the whole story was ridiculous, but I’d decided that as long as Chii was satisfied with that explanation, I would respect her wishes and not protest it. But. But. If the two of them showed any signs of trying to move their relationship past that point, then that would be a very different story. Speaking as her friend—as her best friend—I wasn’t about to let Chii fall into the hands of some lying, stinking lolicon!

Chii had apparently started to develop romantic feelings for Andou, but I knew that was just because she was such an incredibly nice girl. I was certain that she just felt so much pity for that laughably pathetic scumbag that she couldn’t bear to leave him on his own and ended up sympathizing with him as a result. She’d been taking care of him like he was a strange, endangered animal she’d saved from the streets, and she had mistaken those feelings for ones of real affection.

Yes, that must be what’s happening. I’m sure of it! And there’s no way I’ll let that man get away with taking advantage of her kindness!

If there was one upside to the situation, it was that Chii had yet to realize how she felt about him. Thankfully, she still believed that eating a marshmallow was all it’d take to stop her heart from going all pitter-patter for him. On the other hand, that meant that if I was going to make a move, I would have to do it now, before it was too late. That was why I’d decided to set things up so that the three of us would go to the pool together. I called it “Operation Ruin Andou’s Public Image!”

I’d laid all sorts of secret schemes in preparation for today. I’d stayed up really late last night, not going to bed until 10 p.m. to polish my plan to perfection. I knew that once I’d finished carrying out my plan, Chii’s opinion of Andou would drop dramatically, and when it did, the budding flower of love within her would wither and die before it could ever manage to bloom. I felt a little guilty, yes...but I knew that I had to harden my heart and do what had to be done to protect my friend.

Chii’s the most important person in the world to me, and I’ll do my best for her sake!

“Wooow,” Chifuyu said, her eyes sparkling with amazement.

Just one glance at the scene before us was enough to let us know we were in for a good time. There were so many water-based attractions, I couldn’t even count them. They had a lazy river, a water slide, and even a big area made to look like a pirate ship! There was also a stage for holding events and performances. Everything was designed to delight and excite, and each attraction glimmered in the summer sunlight.

“This place looks great, doesn’t it, Chii?” I said.

“Yeah,” Chii replied.

“We’re gonna have tons of fun today, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Chii grunted. She was a girl of few words, but one look at her face told me that she was practically beside herself with excitement. She was so worked up, she was almost hyperventilating!

We headed into the locker room, changed into our swimsuits, then went out to a meeting place we’d picked earlier, holding hands along the way to make sure we didn’t get separated by the crowd. Chii was wearing a frilly one-piece swimsuit, and I had on one of the same design, though in a different color. We’d bought them together specifically for today’s outing, and I’m sure that everyone around us could tell how good of friends we were by our matching swimsuits. Heh heh!

“Andou really is taking his time, isn’t he?” I muttered. We’d changed in different locker rooms, needless to say, and we’d promised to wait for him out by the entrance, but we’d been waiting a while, and he still hadn’t come out yet. I thought that boys were usually supposed to get changed faster than girls, so I was confused. What is he doing in there?

“Ah. I see him,” said Chii, pointing toward the locker rooms.

I looked over, and there he was, walking toward us in a pair of swim trunks designed to look like shorts. He’d certainly taken his sweet time...and actually, he still was. For some reason, he was plodding toward us at a really slow pace, his shoulders slumped and his expression gloomy.

“Andou, you’re late,” said Chii.

“Yeah... Sorry, Chifuyu,” Andou sighed.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Sorta... Look at this, Kuki,” Andou said as he held out a hand toward us. He was holding a pair of swimming goggles. They looked like a perfectly ordinary pair you could’ve bought in just about any store, but one of their lenses had a huge crack running through it.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“I accidentally stepped on them while I was getting changed,” Andou moaned.

“You stepped on them? Is your foot all right?”

“Oh! Yeah, I’m totally fine. These lenses are plastic, so it barely even scratched me. It’s just, y’know...I just bought the things, so this was a real blow, mentally speaking,” Andou said. He sounded really depressed.

It was an unfortunate accident, but still, this was supposed to be the start of a fun day for all of us, and I didn’t like how he was bringing the mood down for me and Chii. Couldn’t he at least try not to drag us down with him?

“Wouldn’t wearing those be kind of dangerous? You should probably throw them away,” I said.

“Yeah, but, like, I literally just bought them,” said Andou. “I just can’t bring myself to throw them out, you know?”

And now he’s proving that he doesn’t know when to let go. As a guy, he should man up about stuff like this! This just proves that I can’t leave Chii in his hands!

“Plus, I figured I could ask Sayumi to take care of them,” Andou continued.

I cocked my head. “You mean Takanashi?”

“Ah!” Andou gasped. “Nope, never mind! It’s nothing! Yeah, you’re right, I’d better just throw ’em out!”

“Andou...” Chii sighed as she shot him an exasperated glance.

“S-Sorry! My bad, honestly,” Andou said. I wasn’t really sure what had just happened, but apparently, Chii’s opinion of him had gone down a step or two, so I was willing to call it a victory!

With that, the three of us started making our way toward the lazy river.

“I want a swim ring,” Chii said, so we went over to line up at a stand that was renting them out. The pool was pretty crowded, so we were going to have to wait for quite a while, and that meant this was my chance. I’d been handed the perfect opportunity to put one of the plans I’d thought up into action.

Plan number 1: Operation Nobody Likes a Pervert!

My first strategy was ingeniously crafty, and it would make full use of the unique traits of the poolside environment we’d be spending the day in. This very plan was actually one of the reasons why I’d decided to make a water park our destination!

It was summer vacation, and that meant lots of people would be coming to the pool to play. Lots of those people, of course, would happen to be pretty ladies. My hope was that if Chii could catch Andou ogling some girl in a sexy swimsuit, she’d be disillusioned and lose interest in him. No love could be strong enough to survive a face-to-face encounter with that man’s base, perverted true self!

As luck would have it, a group of young, spirited ladies happened to pass right by us as we were waiting in line. They were probably college students, I think? They definitely looked mature, at least, and their figures accentuated by the bikinis they were wearing made them give off an aura so lewd I couldn’t even put it into words. They were also all cute enough that each of them could’ve easily cleaned up if their school ran a beauty pageant! Overall, the college crew (as I had quickly started calling them in my head) had the eye-catching looks to turn the heads of most of the men in the area.

Look at them! They’re so pretty! Andou must be staring too, I thought as I spun around, excited to catch him in the act...

“Ugggh... Man, I just bought those goggles too...”

“It’s okay, Andou.”

...only to find him still totally fixated on his broken goggles. He didn’t even spare the pretty ladies walking past us a glance. It was like they didn’t register with him at all! Just how long is he going to be distracted by those goggles?

In the end, the college crew passed by without Andou expressing even a little bit of interest in them. Hmph. Well, fine! There were still plenty of pretty ladies hanging out by the pool. The college crew was just the beginning!

And, as expected, it wasn’t long before another one passed right by us. Hmm, I thought to myself. This new lady was really something. She was wearing a super revealing bikini, but that wasn’t what made her so eye-catching. No, what really caught my attention were her boobs. They were huge, and they were bouncing around with every step she took!

Oh, my— Wow! I’m actually a little overwhelmed! She had a textbook hourglass figure, and she was showing it off without the slightest hesitation. Naturally, most of the nearby men had their eyes glued to her. Even the lifeguard who was supposed to be keeping an eye out for anyone in need of help had his binoculars pointed squarely at her instead! Ugh, talk about crass! I guess that’s just how all men are, deep down. So, how do you like that, Andou? There’s no way you could ignore a woman like—

“Actually...wait a second! Don’t these goggles kinda work like this? Like, the way only one of the lenses is cracked gives them that sorta ‘fresh off the battlefield’ vibe, doesn’t it?! Like I took a bullet to the goggles and barely escaped with my life after the glass deflected it!”

He’s still obsessing over his stupid goggles?! And he’s talking gibberish to boot! “Fresh off the battlefield”?! What on earth is he on about?!

“Mwa ha ha... Yes, the wounds these goggles have suffered are proof of the glorious deeds they’ve witnessed! A bit of battle damage makes them so much cooler! These are goggles that a heroic soldier would wear on his return from the fields of valor! Hella cool! Cool like the goggles Hange’s wearing in that one cut from the second Attack on Titan OP!”

It was no use. Andou was completely absorbed in his goggles and wasn’t so much as glancing at the buxom beauty walking past him. Then he actually went and put them on, even though one of the lenses was totally cracked!

“Hey, look at me, Chifuyu!” said Andou. “What do you think? Bet I look like I just got back from the battlefield, right?”

“Not really,” said Chii.

“Wha...?! Curses! Maybe they’re not battle-damaged enough?” Andou muttered to himself. Then he started deliberately breaking his goggles more than they already were, with his own two hands! I was completely lost. He’d taken his bizarre behavior so far, I didn’t even know what to think.

What should I do now? It wouldn’t be long before the super stacked lady would be out of eyeshot, so in a moment of panic, I decided to throw caution to the wind and call Andou’s attention to her directly. Right, this should work! The problem’s that he’s so focused on his goggles, he hasn’t even noticed her! The moment he does see her, though, he’ll reveal his base, male nature!

“A-Andou, look at her!” I said. “That lady’s figure is—”