Editing Shinmai Maou no Keiyakusha:Volume 4 Chapter 2 (section)

===Part 8===

When Naruse Mio, Basara and Yuki returned to the front door of their house together, it was already past 8pm.

“We’re home~”

After Mio opened the door and announced that they were home safely, the living room door suddenly opened.

I thought that it would definitely be Maria, but it seems that I’m wrong.

The person who rushed out to the corridor was —

“Kurumi-chan…?” Seeing Kurumi’s face blushing bright red, Mio held her as she called her name, and in the end —

“——!”

When Kurumi saw Mio and the others, her face became even redder.

“…W-What is it?”

“! — I-It’s nothing…you don’t need to worry about me!”

After Kurumi cried that out loud, she quickly rushed up the stairs.

“…Don’t worry about it, I’ll go see.”

Yuki took her shoes off, and then followed Kurumi upstairs.

How is she doing?

—The day after Basara and Yuki forced her to submit, Kurumi shut herself inside her room; but at night she reluctantly came out of the room after being persuaded by two people, and seemed to act rather normal recently. Because she was monitoring Mio, who was the former Demon Lord’s daughter and Maria was Mio’s follower, Kurumi maintained her distance towards her; but since they lived under the same roof, they inevitably saw each other every day, and they also spoke to each other every day. But like this, it had basically reverted to how it was that day. At that time—

“Oya oya, welcome home, everyone.”

Seeing Maria come out of the living room, Mio narrowed her eyes. That was because Maria seemed to be laughing about something in a corner of her mouth.

“Maria…you didn’t do anything to Kurumi-chan while we were gone did you?”

“I didn’t do anything special…I just invited her to have a bath together, and she also agreed.”

“Having a bath together…how would she agree?”

Maria couldn’t help smiling as she said

“Of course she would. While Mio-sama was busy attending school, Kurumi-san and I had already become good friends.”

“…You didn’t threaten her with anything weird, right?”

“How would I…it was absolutely mutual. Kurumi-san is a lot cuter than I imagined, and surprisingly straightforward.”

Maria playfully giggled as she said

“—Just then, we were happily watching a video together.”

“Video…uh, could it be…!”

With a nervous sense of foreboding, Mio pushed Maria aside, and stood in the doorway of the living room.

“……I knew it.”

Seeing the image displayed on the TV, Mio sighed as her shoulders dropped. The large LCD screen was currently playing a video of Basara and Yuki carving an immense pleasure onto Kurumi’s body; it was an image of her first experience of female pleasure and ecstasy. After being seen by Kurumi in her dog cosplay, Mio barricaded herself in her own room upstairs; although she heard the occasional cries of Yuki and Kurumi from downstairs, and asked what happened the next day…but she didn’t expect it to be so intense. Maria, who followed her into the living room, said with a glittering tone

“Look, Kurumi-san is really gifted. These days, sisters who have such a close relationship with each other that they’re able to make such incredible movies are really rare. Ah, this makes it really hard for me suppress the feelings in my heart, even my tears are going to flow out…”

“I really can’t supress the feeling of sympathy in my heart…”

Mio didn’t even have the energy to get angry. Truly pitiful — even for Mio, who was the first to make the master-servant contract with Basara, she pondered in her mind about the how chaotic the shameless relationship between her and Basara had become; Kurumi only had the experience of that night, but engraved in her mind and body, it was probably a new, and extremely intense pleasure.

“This isn’t any good, now she’ll stay in her room for a while again…”

After Mio helplessly murmured that, Maria suddenly realised—

“Strange, where’s Basara-san?”

Mio also turned around to look — but at some point unbeknownst to them, Basara had disappeared from the entrance.

Basara returned to his own room, and then after placing his bag onto the desk, he lied down on his bed. While staring at the ceiling, he thought about the all the connections between the information that he had received until now, and the current situation.

The current scope had already been narrowed down; it was determined that the target was Basara, and that it was someone related to Hijirigasaka Academy. It could be inferred that regardless of whether that attack was a warning, or if it had any other significance, there was definitely a reason behind it, and that would be an opportunity for the enemy to take action.

Firstly…the first probability was that the reason behind the attack and the cause for it were initiated simultaneously at that time. The day that Basara was attacked at the station, two unusual things had occurred. The first was that it was his first time attending the sports festival organising committee, and the second was that he visited Hasegawa Chisato’s house. Currently — the possibility of that incident being related to the sports festival organising committee was higher. That attack could have been a warning to Basara to withdraw from the sports festival organising committee.

—The ones who hoped that Basara would withdraw from the organising committee consisted of two factions. One of those factions wanted the sports festival to be successful — in other words, the people who were dissatisfied because they saw that there were problems due to there being too many people in the organising committee. Of the leaders, most of them had tried to encourage Kajiura and other student council members to reject Basara. Although reluctant to think so, in their position, rejecting Basara and a few others was rather normal. But the ones who wanted the sports festival to succeed didn’t just include the few who were members of the student council; so not only students, but also teachers could be suspected.

The other faction had nothing to do with the sports festival, as they simply wanted to exclude Basara — the faction who just wanted to get rid of Basara. This faction naturally consisted of the fans of Mio and Yuki who were led by Donoue and Hozumi. The one whose hostility towards Basara was the easiest to understand was Donoue of the Mio Faction. Ever since the attack at the station, looking at the enemy’s selfish attitude that involving innocent people didn’t matter, unlike the people who wanted the sports festival to succeed like Kajiura, Donoue seemed closer to that. Although, at the time when Donoue and a few others took Basara behind the school building, Sakazaki interrupted to break it up, and nothing had happened since then; but since the very first organising committee meeting when he saw Mio next to Basara, there was no guarantee that his hostility wouldn’t resurge. The problem was — Basara living together with Mio and Yuki was something which was long known by the entire school, on the other hand, it was unlikely that Donoue would organise such an attack just because they were attending the organising committee together; but by explaining Donoue’s out of control behaviour being ‘caused by the manipulation of that attack’, it would be more reasonable.

…However. If the enemy always had ill intentions to Basara — attacking Basara at that time was really a good choice. That was because the intelligent Takigawa had returned to the Demon Realm. When Takigawa returned to the Demon Realm, it was just a few hours before Basara was attacked — just after he was advised by Mio and Yuki that they had finished shopping at the supermarket. It was the day after the attack that Basara began to feel that he was being watched at school, it could be said that all of this happened after Takigawa took leave from the school. …Also, [The Village] had now sent Kurumi over. If the enemy knew about this information beforehand, it was possible that it was an attempt to make the [Village] believe that Basara had the risk of involving innocent people, thus they timed their attack so that Kurumi would make it there in time. As soon as [The Village] determined that the situation was too serious, simply leaving the organising committee wouldn’t be enough to resolve things, and he would quickly have to face the fate of either leaving Mio or Yuki.

—However, up until now, it still lacked any decisive evidence. So today, Basara changed the passive stance that he had adopted until now, and tried an active stance — using the conflict with Donoue and the others as a reason; if he used that opportunity to amplify the situation, it would also force them to leave the organising committee together. At the time, Mio and Yuki were absent because they were rehearsing for the cheerleading competition, so if they decided to attack Basara out of jealousy, it would provide an excellent opportunity for them to reveal themselves. Also — Basara had thought about it, in the slight chance that the faction which wanted him out of the organising committee so that the sports festival would succeed really didn’t exist, then it was possible that they were the culprits. Under such circumstances, Basara’s departure would appease their discontent; in the process, he would also be able to remove Donoue, who had purchased expensive fireworks and wasted two hundred thousand. In addition to achieving this compensation effect, it could also be considered his final contribution to the sports festival organising committee. But — due to Sakazaki’s appearance, he wasn’t able to successfully lure the other side into making their next move, so it was a failure in the end.

For Basara, time was of the essence, and he needed to immediately find a method to discover the enemy’s true motive — But he didn’t think that…with what he heard from Sakazaki, the situation was once again plunged into a mysterious fog.

“……Be careful of Hasegawa Chisato?”

If Sakazaki hadn’t said so, Basara really wouldn’t have realised that he had been influenced by her ever since he met her; after faithfully trusting her advice, it was almost to the extent that he blindly followed it — but that itself was a strange phenomenon. The biggest taboo in combat or a mission was [belief]. An overly strong subjective sense would undermine composure, narrow one’s vision, and prevent people from making correct judgements. That was why Basara underwent extremely rigorous training while he was in [The Village], and fought battles in which he didn’t think that he would be able to win so that he could develop the habit of seeing things from different perspectives.Therefore, he was able to discover Takigawa’s true identity, and was also able to find an unexpected way to put an end to Zolgear. Given that he was like that, why did he fully trust only Hasegawa — or rather, why didn’t he suspect her? This enemy was able to create powerful barriers, and was also able to control people’s minds. As Sakazaki said, the situation around Hasegawa was quite unusual, and even Takigawa had never mentioned anything against her. It seemed as though everything around Hasegawa would change according to her needs.

But — around Hasegawa, two irregular people had appeared. One of them was Basara himself. Obviously, Hasegawa got closer to Basara on her own. If she was behind the attack, the time when he treated Takigawa to yakiniku and met her probably wasn’t a coincidence, and she had an ulterior motive to inviting him over to her house. It was frightening…in the case that Hasegawa was the culprit, the reason why she was so interested in Basara was — [Banishing Shift]. Supposing that Hasegawa was able to control the minds of everyone around her — perhaps in some way, since Basara was able to eliminate any physical or magical attack, it may have caught her interested or posed a threat her, so she wanted to know if it was possible for him to eliminate her mind control. Thus, she designed various experiments, such as taking her swimsuit off in the infirmary and eating or bathing at her own house in an attempt to cloud Basara’s emotional judgement, and when she finally saw Basara as a threat, she attacked when Basara left — thinking about it that way, it seemed far more reasonable than Donoue attacking out of jealousy.

But…she didn’t deal with the problem that she couldn’t ignore — that was the other irregular person, Sakazaki. Neither Basara, Yuki nor Takigawa detected anything wrong with Hasegawa, yet Sakazaki did. Supposing that Hasegawa eliminated those that were aware of her by manipulation, Sakazaki should have been before Basara. Also, Sakazaki chose that time to tell Basara about the problem with Hasegawa — what was the reason behind that? Sakazaki said that he saw Basara under the influence of Hasegawa, did he tell that to Basara just so that Hasegawa would know about Sakazaki’s suspicions? Could it be that this was the other side’s trap? What Sakazaki said, could it just have been a made-up story so that Basara’s focus would be directed towards Hasegawa who was unrelated to everything, and he would then show an opening? That way, Sakazaki didn’t intentionally say that, but was instead subjected to the manipulation of the true culprit. …No. At the least, Basara’s trust towards Hasegawa was an undisputable fact.

I don’t think it was all a lie.

It’s just that — regardless of whether he believed Hasegawa or Sakazaki to be the suspect, the clues he currently possessed were not enough to decide, and he didn’t know who among Donoue, Hozumi, Tachibana, or Kajiura was the attacker, or being manipulated — no, even if the attacker was one of them, it was impossible to determine whether they were being manipulated. Under these circumstances, determining the next move was —

“…! No, how can I think like that…!”

Toujou Basara sat up on the bed, and looked straight ahead.

What am I worried about?

After he cheered himself up, he calmed down a bit.

Discard prejudice, and suspect every possibility. And then — come up with a countermeasure for each possibility. …It should be fine, because…

He himself had the ability to be sure of things. At that time, someone knocked on the door.

“Basara…?”

It was a person that he could definitely be sure of — Naruse Mio asked from outside

“Ever since we walked home from school, you’ve been acting a bit strange…is there anything wrong?”

Her voice indicated that she was concerned for Basara.

Really, I made her worry.

So Basara took a deep breath, and said

“Sorry…I’m just a bit disturbed, I’ll think of a way to deal with it.”

But, I’m already fine.

“Help me call everyone to the living room, I’ll tell everyone about what I encountered today, and also everything that I’ve understood recently. Also—”

Toujou Basara continued

“For an enemy whose identity and motive is unknown — this is how we should deal with it.”

There were still far too many suspects at the moment; the people he had suspicions about couldn’t be counted on one hand. But the knowledge they possessed was not zero. The enemy’s objective was Basara, and they didn’t care about bringing chaos to the surroundings. They couldn’t lose to such a despicable enemy. That was enough. Hence, they would start with what they had available. Perhaps the sports festival would be an important key. The outcome would decide whether they could get through that day. If they had to fight, then so be it. Although he was reluctant to suspect his classmates or teachers, they didn’t have a choice right now. Regardless of what torment the heart suffered — they needed to fight right now so that they could believe in everything once again.

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