Editing Internet Shrine Maiden Tsugumi-chan:Volume1 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 4===

Flowers of light blossomed in the distance.

But then those points of light began moving to the side like a school of little fish. This wasn’t a fireworks show. Hundreds of LED-equipped drones were performing coordinated acrobatics. They didn’t produce a boom like fireworks did, so they were free to perform even late at night.

In this case, that meant past 2 in the morning.

Despite both existing in the middle of the night, this area felt like a completely different world from the distant beer garden.

“Dammit, Rainy. I worked hard getting that ghost video and then you have to upstage me… But maybe I never had a chance against those boobs. They do say sex always wins out against horror.”

Chatty was chatting to herself, not because she was afraid or lonely, but because she had a video app running on the phone currently in her short-sleeve sailor shirt’s breast pocket. She had heard rumors that girls with big enough chests couldn’t store their phone in that pocket, but was that really true? Thinking back, she thought Yahirodono-san had kept hers in her skirt pocket.

“I need something better. Some legit horror.”

So she was visiting a haunted location. However, she had not chosen a creepy abandoned hospital or run-down cemetery. It was a location they had seen from the yacht taxi during the day: Overlook Bridge. This time, she had arrived on the high-tech drawbridge from the land route. However, the 50m movable bridge was known by another name on the darker parts of the web.

“''Mincemeat Drawbridge'', huh? Whew, that’s crazy… Is it cause of the poor lighting? It does look creepy at night. Anyway, I’m here at the rumored Mincemeat Bridge tonight. In the past three years, five people have been caught in the bridge’s moving parts and crushed by its 130 horsepower, so now it’s said to be haunted. Got that?”

For Chatty, it didn’t really matter if there was really a ghost here or not. She just wanted some proof to show that she had gone to the supposedly haunted place to check it out for herself. She wanted to be able to talk about it as someone who was there, not something she had heard from a friend of a friend. She wanted to be able to say with confidence that it wasn’t just a made up story. Hence the video taken with her phone. Even if there wasn’t a ghost, just catching a chips bag blown by the wind or a black cut cutting by in front of her would be scary if it happened without warning. Then they could all gather together during lunch to watch it and freak out.

Or so she thought.

“Huh? What’s the deal? My phone’s not working.”

She didn’t feel the gentle warmth she normally did when her phone was in her breast pocket.

Puzzled, she pulled her phone out and found it wasn’t just the app acting up. The entire phone wasn’t responding. She opened the foldable screen and tried tapping it and speaking to it. She tried to remember how it was done and then pressed both the rarely-used buttons at once, but still nothing. It was frozen and wouldn’t do a thing.

She didn’t understand.

Something she had taken for granted suddenly wasn’t working. That alone made unease grow rapidly within her.

She suddenly realized she was standing all alone in the shadows late at night.

She heard something like a ringing in her ears. It was quiet, fine, unsteady, and shrill…

And as she panicked, Chatty looked up from her phone to see…



“…''Huh''?”