Iriya no Sora UFO no Natsu:Love Letter

It was decided.

That girl was alien. As the Chief thought was correct, the Sonohara Base really was a UFO base. It actually had a place for a secret underside landing for UFOs coming from the other side of the universe. Aliens and big-wig government officials were talking at the same table. For the purpose of preparing for the coming “day of war,” he was certain that the government brass was getting desperate to get what seemed to be a helping hand in advanced technology from aliens. However, since the aliens spoke somehow in a voice that was something like a helium-breathed tone, saying, “We will give you all of our technology in the event of the reality of the abandonment of war for world peace for all of your people, and your world becomes a member of universal society.” Whatever book he had appeared to have read that from, it gave an amazing feeling for what it meant for why aliens cared about world peace. He was certain both aliens and the northern higher-ups were doing negotiations. Even if the war could be prevented anytime by not looking like it started, it was also a reason for not starting that. No matter what side thought they could try to keep that in hand. A long stalemate continued, and the aliens finally appeared to take definite action. Every possible place in world society turned for the worse as countless agents gave up. Their first task was to ascertain humanity’s true character in their view. Was humanity really acting as a loving intelligent race in peace, or were they a savage race that did nothing but kill their brethren? If the results of the investigation possibly produced the latter, Earth would immediately be blown to smithereens by the UFO’s super weapon. It seemed absolute. That girl who called herself Iriya was also really another one of those agents.

It was because of the “middle school” in charge.

He did not remember the subject of the lesson and the like at all.

The bell rang at the end of two periods; Iizuka returned to the cemetery; and a growing number of students wiped blackboards clean with erasers. But with his thoughts unable to escape from a marsh, he stared at his white notebook unable to take notes in a straight line after all by just opening them, and he seemed to tightly grasp his mechanical pencil that had no eraser so that it could not move about. Asaba being alone, cut himself away from reality already during breaktime, as if he was glued to his window seat that took place in a poorly done collage, so that he could not think about why the characters for “Iriya Kana” always were being written on the blackboard of his mind.

“Hey Asaba!”

His forehead was poked. There in front of his eyes was Hanamura’s face, who was was sitting backwards in his desk, leaning his body forward in a grandiose manner and smiling peerlessly close to Asaba’s face as he peeped from below.

“What’s with you acting like such a moron? Could it possibly be that ‘you have that transfer student on you mind’ kind of thing?”

A bull’s eye is a bull’s eye. But, until now it would not have seemed to be such an absurd bull’s eye.

“Sh-shut up!”

Nishikubo suddenly placed his hands on both of Asaba’s shoulders with a pop.

“Well, aren’t you two moderately interested? If only Sudou was not so opposed to invitations to the Newspaper Club, you know.”

Asaba was becoming increasingly flustered. Shaking himself free of Nishikubo’s hands, “Ah, Akiho is opposed to it.”

Hanamura rested his chin in his hands temporarily. A slight smile surfaced, and he had a fixed look in his eyes on the back of the classroom pervert with lewd fingertips.

“It’s no good, absolutely no good. That is not the “Newspaper Club’s” style. It is ‘Sonohara Denpa’ all the more.”

Nishikubo followed up on Hanamura’s previous glance, muttering, “That may be so.” Asaba gain, mustering his courage from the bottom of his gut in secret, lifted his face, and slowly turned around to face that back of the classroom.

She was there.

In the very back of the classroom, she was in the second seat from the vicinity of the corridor. Next to that, having been in the “third seat from the vicinity of the corridor,” expecting to notice her existence just less than a minute before, even if it was a dream or an illusion, Iriya was sitting there.

Just sitting there.

So without doing anything, denying the existence of anything on the desk too in sum, he let his gaze fall quietly in less than the twinkling of a star. He would not resist even if a person seized him, but no matter what, that person would not tame him like an animal can be with a mood.

…Iriya, Kana.

Aah..., hearing that was a surprise. Iriya-kun was a girl returning to her home country.

Quickly bowing his head next to Iriya, Kawaguchi Taizou seemed to say he was 35 and single.

Furthermore with Kawaguchi, he had an insensible way of speaking in waves of returning to an autopsy, and he attached himself to following the explanation of Iriya’s past. With both of her parents already gone, she lived together with her older brother serving in the Aviation Self-Defense Force, having lived on overseas military bases with that connection for a very long time, but her brother returned to their home country in an assignment change to Sonohara by chance, where they now resided at Sonohara City’s Sonohara Military Base Residence Area. Was it so that he was forgetting he didn’t have a desk. Hey day duty, come with a desk and chair running to the tool shed please. Ah, because that was what it meant, he thought that on that face of this and that Iriya-kun’s inexperience to Japanese school life could be why. Thereabouts everyone wanted to give her various kinds of advice on what to do. She understood, right?

No, she didn’t.

He did not think that Kawaguchi’s explanation was a complete lie.

However, that explanation could not get him to completely mesh together last night’s pool incident. First was the awfully loud patrol car’s siren, next was Iriya’s thin shoulder staring fixedly at the pool’s watery surface, then was the mystery of the appearance of the man who called himself her elder brother, followed by the black-suited mass who sieged the school, after which his memory failed, and then, now those wristbands were covering that silver,

...did he try to taste them?

“...‘electric,’ they had that taste, didn’t they?”

With Asaba muttering, Hanamura and Nishikubo exchanged glances and said at the same time,

“Huh?”

“Oh? Ah, well that.”

Nishikubo forced open a part in Asaba’s hair with a jerk of both of his hands from behind.

“You know, did you bake your brains waiting around in the mountains until the last day of the month?”

Asaba shook himself free of Nishikubo’s hands, yelling, “Stop that, you moron!” At that time, Hanamura said,

“Hey look at that. Which class’s buddies are those guys? Aren’t there already rumors going around, right?”

From the door of the classroom’s entrance, the faces of male students from some other class somewhere were peeping in. Indeed, they were gazing with staring eyes in Iriya’s direction with a greedy look. Hanamura laughed,

“Hee, hee, hee, it is like the faces of hawks breaking plates full of fried tofu, isn’t it?”

Hearing that made Nishikubo suddenly make a face that said, “Ah.”

“...Is that so, is that so? I just remembered. Those guys are probably Class 1’s lot.”

Asaba and Hanamura made faces that said, “What the...?”

“Not quite, they are hawks in fried tofu, you know. Have you tried getting to know the ‘best jerks of Class 1?’ I am acquaintances with those jerks somehow, but you know.”

Asaba shook his head. Hanamura responded, “Know, eh?” Nishikubo quickly said,

“It’s because those jerks became overly proud before summer vacation. They said that a female transfer student was planning to come at the end of vacation. Asaba said even quicker than Hanamura,

“...Eh, then that ‘Iriya,’ the thing really is that they planned to force her to enter Class 1?”

“Probably. With Kawaguchi yelling just now, you know it was because he had to go pick up day duty for those jerks’ seating arrangement in advance. If it was because our class came to a decision a long time ago beforehand about the seats, then that would be a normal arrangement for sure. Surely some kind of a circumstance suddenly changed plans.”

“What kind of ‘some kind of a circumstance?’”

“Is that all you know?”

Some kind of a circumstance. Saying no more than that single word, the reason why the present Asaba was concerned was weighty. Lying face down from that overwhelming weight, his horrible imagination wound a coil inside his head again, and an unhealthy feeling of sweat went dripping down the middle of his back in a secret crawl.

As he thought, wasn’t last night’s pool matter really a hallucination?

If possible, with a reason of something like “Because at the onset I met a middle schooler by coincidence,” wasn’t it because he ended up being assigned in “the number one important investigation mission?” Was it because one’s slight effort was controlling the fate of humanity perhaps? What should he do, what should he do? If it was an investigation, he wanted someone else to do it. Like Nishikubo or something. He thought Hanamura would be a little bad for this. If it was somehow the Chief being selected for the investigation mission, humanity’s destruction was five seconds away. While Nishikubo and Hanamura were far removed from Asaba’s sort of suffering, Iriya gazed at each entrance,

“...Somehow, they are weird guys, you know, right?”

“Well, I’ll admit that it’s because she is cute.”

“Possibly, could it not be because she is good at things like memorizing Japanese?”

“Well, I’ll admit that it’s because she is cute.” [TL Note: This is not a mistake]

“Oh, oh, Let’s look at that. Those jerks intend to land in enemy territory, you know. As expected of 6th grade punks.”

It wasn’t going to be inexcusable.

Whenever you turned around to the back in reflection, 2nd year class 4 representative Nakagomi Makiko was the flagship for the closely combined fleet of four female student friends, but they were about to go make a resolute charge of whispering stories of the deep desks and chairs aimed for “Iriya” Island. Iriya sensibly perceived the appearance of an enemy, and she suddenly lifted her head as they were about to split up their distance between their three desks, completely laying her eyes close to Nakagomi with an unreadable facial expression. But, nevertheless Nakagomi did not flinch. Anyone’s surroundings would change the circumstances of pursuing a stare to the end, failing to hear each conversation dropping their voices, and they were going to pull back from the classroom in order to dissolve the clatter of break time. Above all Asaba did not get the feeling of having Nakagomi stop, making him wonder what was going to happen to the Earth.

And then Nakagomi stood in front of Iriya’s eyes.

It was the first speech.

“...U, um, you know,”

she stalled. Secretly taking in a deep breath there, Nakagomi forced the considerably impossible feeling of a smile to rise to the surface,

“Nakagomi Makiko, that is who I am. Me being the class head, ask me about anything you don’t get, ok?

Iriya was completely silent.

Nakagomi’s pretense faltered. The other three people came in with a confused follow-up. Saying their names in succession, they attacked in waves of tides right there. Where were they abiding before? “Since I suck at English, please teach me, ok?” “I was also a transfer student when I was in elementary.” “Is your brother cool?”

Iriya wound up casting her eyes downward.

That thing stirred Nakagomi and her three friends’ feelings of “if you somehow had not been sent to school,” causing them to fly about even more with rapidly successive words. Iriya still persisted with her defensive silence. Becoming as it was, the four as well as just Iriya began friendly conversation this time just dying off in the middle of the conversation, and sometimes Iriya assuming an air of “Huh?” But, Iriya took refuge in the increasingly deeper inner parts of a trench whenever that happened, and chasing after that Nakagomi and company lost sight of the heat of the moment before they knew it. Looking like he was getting a stomachache, Asaba ended up looking like the hair on top of his head was turning pure white as far as he was concerned, even if it was someone with long, long, long, hair, but his actual condition went bit by bit past the amount of time needed to go to the bathroom, and then Iriya finally raised her head.

Nakagomi and her friends’ conversation was interrupted, and they closed observed Iriya’s next blunt action from the middle of the classroom. Iriya flinched from that thing, let that drowning person’s eyes wander about the middle of the classroom, and with those eyes at length, she stopped looking for someone to call on who had a window seat.

The classroom continued to be filled with noise.

It was obvious to everyone’s eyes as well.

Iriya, hoping to seek complete assistance, clearly watched Asaba intently.

“Hey.”

Hanamura murmured in a low voice. Nishikubo used a side glance.

Still Asaba was silent for a short while. From second period on he always had his hand on his mechanical pencil, as it were, clicking above his notebook, and he stood up slowly drawing himself out of his desk quietly.

And then, by it coming from Iriya this time, it came to infect one right in the midst of everyone’s eyes without saying a word to anybody to be sure, and Asaba said it thus.

“Bathroom.”

Seemingly said before, he really went to the bathroom.

Secluded alone in a private room, even if nobody was looking to that extent, Asaba sat down on the toilet seat dropping his pants and underwear with the utmost care as well. Somehow or other, it happened to appear to slightly constrict the possible limits of believing the lie that they would end up attaching themselves to him.

And, he worried about being completely ass naked.

By a ratio of about 9 to 1, crying out of sympathy for one’s things was one of the things that irritated Iriya.

But, he began to worry again about how much longer until the bell for the start of third period rang. Asaba increased his breath for depth, lifted his unnecessarily dropped pants, unnecessarily put water in the sink, and happily left the bathroom unnecessarily washing his hands.

“What a spineless coward.”

There Akiho was lying in wait.

“Wh, what is it?”

He made a bluff. Thinking it was not his business, then what he should have said was, you know...it also gave the feeling that he wanted to do something about what he was seemingly saying, but because Akiho was kind of making a scary face he kept himself from saying too much, “...Since the bell rang, you should already have returned to the classroom.”

Akiho did not respond at all.

“Is that girl an acquaintance of yours or something?”

“Naw, it isn’t like that but,”

Prior to that, the words became muddy so that he almost could not breathe as well.

“Then what is the reason behind this?”

Anyway, here he dodged Akiho’s inquisition with exception.

“I really have nothing to do with her. Because I was with the Chief in the mountains all the time during summer vacation, how could I with Kawaguch saying she just recently now returned from overseas?”

“Akiho firmly glared at Asaba with a deeply sceptical look, and suddenly said this.

“The pool, was it?”

He thought his heart was going to jump out of his mouth.

“Before the start of first period, Asaba, you came to me to ask something about school swimsuits. On that you and the Chief differ because you should have returned home sometime between your mountain seclusion. Whether it was at a municipal pool or wherever you met that girl, didn’t you? And, at that time that girl’s swimsuit didn’t have a name tag on it, didn’t it? Eeh? So that’s it. Hmmm.”

“Well, it wasn’t for the reason that Akiho seemed to think,” thought Asaba.

With the result of the end in question for the time being, Akiho’s sharp-eyed expression produced some tolerance as well,

“Did that girl’s Japanese really suck? Did she speak and stuff like that?”

Nishikubo was saying something that seemed to resemble it. If it meant joining in the exposition of that silent girl’s return, it appeared that everybody in the lower classes thought and felt the same thing.

It made people’s heads dizzy.

“Let’s see...”

People’s feet staggered.

“Tell us straight up about what that is, you know. How did this story come to be rather? At that time..., was it, he Asaba, you ok? Your face is horribly pale.”

It was sudden.

Being attacked by dizziness seemed to overturn heaven and earth, which meant that he was unable to continue standing for a while in a surprising way. He squatted in that place. He had a severely bad feeling. It felt like he had gotten motion sickness and the flu together. He put up with the risk of the seemingly gushing feeling of nausea.

“You ok?! Hey Asaba what’s the matter?!”

Akiho was making an uproar. By the raised field of vision elsewhere severely narrowed, the topped feet of surprised students coming and going in the hallway showed worry. Not letting out an indecently loud voice, it was because thinking by accident about things like the heart and throat, but there was not any time for just letting that out of his mouth. A cold sweat came gushing out throughout his face.

He took deep breaths many times.

Then, starting in almost the same suddenness, the badness of the feeling rapidly went away in passing.

He stood up one way or another. Wiping out the sweat on his forehead, the coldness of his face made him upset. The dizziness went away into exile for a considerable end, but even so the feeling came to prove to be extremely less objectionable.

“I feel better.”

Asaba seemed to say. Yet, if he saw Akiho’s eyes, Asaba’s facial color would have gone beyond extremely pale to completely white. Akiho grabbed Asaba’s hand with a jerk.

“You feel better, my ass! We’re going to the nurse’s office! I am going with you, too!”

Surely, he thought it was a good idea to go to the nurse’s office.

Still, he also thought that Akiho did not have to go as far as escorting and attending to him.

“I can go by myself, since you need to return to the classroom since the lesson is starting, you know.”

Akiho did not take his hands completely. Asaba rapidly withdrew his hands and started walking.

Sonohara Middle School’s hallways were in disorder traditionally from the days of old. You could make a heap of the empty boxes of teaching supplies next to the wall, with lined up mops and buckets preventing people from entering lockers, and, anytime you did not tear off “New members joining” posters, they would beckon by fluttering someone who passed by on their journey. With the entrance of the nurse’s office before that and the passage that continued to the gym being on this side, you could soon understand it was because it came from a poster containing the logo of “Refine Sake ● Tennouzan Hill.” Last year’s school festival, the girl’s basketball club was guilty of the vestiges of an arranged marriage pub. On the side door was hanging a label that had written on it, “Responsible party for starting the fire ● Shiina Mayumi.”

Akiho opened the door with much strength,

“Excuse me.”

Asaba’s staggering hand rushed to pull open the door to the nurse’s office at the last minute, and exactly on the opposite side of the door were three male student that appeared to come into a head-on collision with him.

“Now, now, the next class is starting very soon, you know, so be gone with ya, be gone.”

The backs of those three students were continuously and forcefully pashed by both of Shiina Mayumi’s hands. With the middle of the three being Funatsu, who was in the same class as Asaba until last year and who noticed Asaba, he made a perfect circle with his eyes as if to say “Yo,”

“What’s with the color of your face?”

“Is it really that bad again?” thought Asaba. Shiina Mayumi and Asaba’s eyes caught a glimpse of each other’s faces,

“Oops, this person doesn’t seem to be faking illness, am I wrong?”

Wow. It was horribly mean considering they were really sick people, too. While a lovestruck smile came to the surface on Funatsu’s and his buddies’ faces, they seemed to object, but Shiina Mayumi could not have cared less,

“What the...you faking losers get the heck out of here, got it?”

Surprisingly kicking the three out into the middle of the hallway, she ended up closing the door on their backs with a slap. Because he had done things like this during his trip over summer vacation, he was truly used to it.

With the students of Sonohara Middle School generally like this, Shiina Mayumi criticized them, “If you look properly, there’s an incredible babe.” Because she always wore the garments of a doctor’s white gown completely without wearing any make-up, she did not stand out. To make matters worse, her speech was horribly vulgar as she said with coolness things like “ass” and “cock.” A little less than a month before summer vacation began, in order to recover from being sick Kurobe-sensei decided to take an extended leave of absence which came to be a change in how the school did things. Both male and female students were continuing to say,”I wish there was a little bit of a pretty face,” but the person herself would not tolerate it in the least. Each and every day, having both of her hands thrusted into the pockets of the white doctor’s coat, she walked around seemingly content while her slippers rang a slapping sound.

“Umm,”

With Akiho having her mouth hanging open at that time, Shiina Mayumi suddenly interrupted with a large voice,

“Wait! I have to make a guess.”

Saying this, the core of her eyes looked hard fixedly into the approaching Asaba’s pale face. Thinking about it carefully somewhere between 5-10 seconds, she rose her had in assent at this on account of doing without any mistakes, and she pointed her beautiful butt at Asaba to declare it decisively.

“Shinnaa.”

“That’s, that’s wrong!”

Akiho let out in a loud voice, and Asaba looked at her with a fleeting side glance,

“Is it really wrong?”

“It’s wrong, you know.”

Thinking that he should explain it himself,

“...Umm, just now a sudden bad feeling came over me, something like nausea.”

Therupon Akiho interposed,

“Because it was really sudden, his facial color somehow became less of a ghastly paleness than before.”

Shiina Mayumi was settling in. Asaba was allowed to sit in a circular chair, and he dropped his hips into the pipe chair facing him.

“Even now you facial color doesn’t look well, you know. Have you been eating a proper breakfast?”

Asaba nodded,

“Yet, supposing now that I am no longer nauseated, I am feeling a great deal better.”

“You should probably lie down for a bit, got it? Since I’ll contact your teacher to explain things, what’s your class and name?”

With Asaba not opening his mouth quick enough, Akiho answered, “Asaba Naoyuki of 2nd year class 4.”

Shiina Mayumi pulled out a ball-point pen from her breast pocket, turned the pages of a bound and corded registry of names while muttering “Asaba from 2nd year class 4, hmm,” and the core of her eyes suddenly came close muttering “Asaba?” completely unexpectedly,

“No waay, Asaba-kun?! Really you, Asaba-kun?! Asaba-kun of 2nd year class 4?!”

Both Asaba and Akiho ended up being taken aback without thinking by the loudness of her voice that seemed to speak to them.

Shiina Mayumi somehow came to an agreement by herself for some reason. “Oooooooooh, I get it, or do Iiiiiiii...,” and Asaba became curious without thinking about his tendency for letting his body lean forward at desktops as she said, “Eeeeeeeh, is that so, is that so? You’re Asaba-kun, riight? Hmmmmmmm.” and so forth, which if he thought about it was something like a cat meowing five times as she laughed until she said “oh” like she suddenly remembered something important,

“Meaning, you are that Asaba-kun, you know, aren’t you?! You’re not feeling well?! You ok?!”

...Wat, what’s with person?

Asaba was just absolutely and obviously dumbfounded, but Akiho suddenly became concerned watching Shiina Mayumi in confusion,

“U, um, what is the matter?”

“Eh? Ah, no, no, no, it’s not like that, it’s not like that at all, it’s nothing at all. Uumm, yeah, then since you Asaba-kun are responsible for this return to your classroom. Class has already stared. Right?”

Shiina Mayumi normally forced herself to train in the art of saying things, and she ended up driving Akiho out of the nurse’s office by forcefully pushing on Akiho’s back with both as she seemed to have said something again.

She slammed the door shut.

She turned around. Until then she struck to change her sharp-eyed expression,

“...So that you can have my full attention I would like to hear it one more time, could I? Sonohara Middle School, 2nd year class 4, attendance number one’s Asaba Naoyuki-kun. I am surely not mistaken, am I?”

“...Yes. That is correct.”

The very seriousness of her tone made Asaba nervous. Shiina Mayumi bit her lip as she looked up at the ceiling, thought about something wholeheartedly, and asked Asaba once again as she gazed even more intently at him.

“You suddenly weren’t feeling well because you had nausea, right?”

“...That is right.”

Shiina-sensei sat down facing Asaba with a thump. She took his pulse in a rough manner, and she turned his eyelids inside out to take a peep inside his eyes. “Haa,” she breathed out of her nose, and she sat straight in her chair to correct herself.

“Well then, I suppose I should examine you a little after this. Since I am going to ask a few questions, I would like you to answer them. The usual questions will be a little different, but if you can’t give me an honest answer it with be the same as if it wasn’t a right answer. Got it?”

Asaba nodded his head.

Thus, the first question went like this.

“What is today’s date?”

All too soon was he unable to answer. Shiina Mayumi’s stare spurred on Asaba’s impatience. Her surprise attack being as sly as it was thinking that kind of thing let each second of time escape.

“Ah, um, since it is today, it seems, in other words because today is the first day of the second semester, it is September 1st.”

Taking an additional 10 seconds he finally seemed to answer.

Having again no time to breath the next question came flying at him.

“Do you have any chronic diseases?”

“Yeah. I mean, no, I do not. I do not have a chronic disease.”

“Then, don’t you always take your medicine and stuff?”

“Uum, I take plenty of Vitamin C. With my meals. It’s because my old man seems like that.”

“‘C,’ ascorbic acid?”

“Aah, umm, I don’t know the full details though.”

“What is 17+26?”

Because he was unprepared again, it ended up taking him about 20 seconds this time.

“...3, wait a sec, 40. 43? U, um, I would like to start over from the beginning or something.”

“Do you have any allergies?”

“Wha? No, none, I think.”

“Tell me the principal’s name.”

“Murayama Kanji.”

This time somehow or other the response came immediately. He got the hang of it soon before long.

“When you started feeling sick, did it not severely overwhelm you?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Weren’t you face, hands, and feet freezing?”

“They were. I am not concerned about it now though.”

And then.

“What day is June 24th?”

“Surely this, it has to be an investigative test of someone’s sensitivity or something in terms of health,” he thought.

So that he could not tell the real certainty of the questions, she mixed in heaps of dummy questions perhaps. Or, even if the questions weren’t dummies or real ones everything was fine because he probably knew what the aim was to make him consider the given theme in succession. Answering whatever it was truthfully, at that time which reaction showed might have been really important. Without knowing, without knowing [sic] which hand was shaking or which eyeball was swimming around to look around restlessly.

Yet,

even in doing that,

“...that, that ‘question,’ do I have to absolutely say what June 24th is?”

Not ony not answering, the questions started to go right back.

“When you weren’t feeling well, did you have anything like fast palpitations?”

“...That is, I do not think so.”

“Globular plasma, mirage, weather balloon. Which kind of photos did you take?”

“...Umm.”

“Mantell. Chiles-Whitted. What is next?”

He had learned it by ear. Since the answer was inside his head, it came tumbling out. Historical UFO sightings have left 3 big cases. Captain Mantell’s crash, the Chile-Whitted sighting, and with the third sighting, and Gorman’s dog fight.

“When you weren’t feeling well, did the front of your eyes become completely white, or did you see light nearing?”

“...No.”

“Just now who was always behind you?”

He could not move about as well.

“I was hearing and seeing things? It seemed like I had seven fingers on my hands, and couldn’t I hear someone’s voice discussing pulling out your internal organs? ‘Screw Adamski getting a backbone, where do I get the feeling of having heard those words before? [TL Note: See George Adamski]

Outside of the nurse’s office, the cicadas were crying.

...This person, what’s with her?

Outside of the window the whitened outlines of things melted as the summer sunlight waxed.

Inside the dim, unnaturally somewhat cool nurse’s office hung in the air the faint smell of old medicine. Outside the window curtains the silent wind became pregnant with flutterings of ghost. Perhaps here and there within sight adjoined Red Cross marks for worried victims was really a trap. A colored photo of lungs that was out of focus on a bulletin explaining the harms of smoking, walls reminiscent of an operation room, the completely unfeeling warmth of a bed, poisonous-colored glass bottles line up inside of a closet, nether bloodless nor tearless big tweezers, East Asian medically manufactured water not from any island, and the look of the ever unchanging white sink that took hundreds of people’s vomit and exreta.

Even if he considered it, he probably looked.

Kurobe-sensei disappeared before anyone knew it.

Kurobe-sensei had taken a long vacation to recover from illness.

That was even despite seeming to be healthy.

Having Shiina Mayumi come to this school as a representative afterwards meant that she was going to end up becoming a popluar person.

In all, wasn’t it an alien conspiracy?

In here, wasn’t the smell of medicine drifting about a neat hell? Wasn’t in front of his eyes this person as well as in reality an alien’s underling? Since Shiina-sensei was certainly an amazing beauty if you looked hard enough and listened to her unbelievable stories, she was popular with both boys and girls, but wasn’t anyone that was not about to look going to have their face cleaved in two from gaping there at the squirming tentacles that came out? As night fell it continued kidnapping people to bring into the UFO on the nurse’s office’s bed, and the slippered squirming tip-toeing tentacles of Shiina-sensei had blood spraying and flying everywhere from her dreadful experiments on living humans.

“...Asaba-kun? Hey Asaba-kun what’s the matter?! You feeling crappy again?!”

Asaba, returning to reality, could not only call out in a big voice but was also shaking from his shoulders, upon feeling the smell of shampoo from Shiina Mayumi’s hair faintly floating in the air. Once more Shiina Mayumi’s face approached his own, and it was like their foreheads were close enough to join together with Asaba’s fever.

“...It is! I am okay, I am fine, um, just a little faint.”

Becoming embarrassed for just a moment, Asaba put on a confused face.

“Really?”

Shiina Mayumi was staring fixedly at Asaba.

She seemed to have an amazingly worried look on her face.

“...Well then, look at this.”

A ballpoint pen was projecting out in front of Asaba’s eyes. With the pen’s body made out of clear plastic, there was in the middle a blond woman in a red swimsuit. That swimsuit was actually colored read with fin grains of sand, and the sand in front of Asaba’s eyes flowing down in a rustle, the blond woman was soon becoming butt naked. Asaba began to worry about the meaning of life without thinking,

“Because the pen moves, my eyes are chasing after it at this moment.”

Since Shiina Mayumi moved the pen up and down, left and right, the movements of Asaba’s eyes observed it fixedly. Asaba tried concentrating his senses on the continuing movements of the pen beyond, but it did not matter how long the ever nearby inner part of his eyes oozed out the feeling of pain.

“...Your head hurt?”

Asaba nodded. Shiina Mayumi thought about something for a while looking up at the ceiling, took a small breath, came to something of a conclusion, and got up from the chair letting out a yell of “Alright.”

“Although I think you are ok already, you should rest a while, you know. Take these. Get a lot of sleep, too.”

Her tone said neither consent nor refusal. She presented him with a paper cup full of barley tea and tiny particles of a yellow pill, and Asaba swallowed it as if it was by letting out words of vigor. He slowly put the towel-blanket over his head beside the head of the bed.

“Take it easy for a while, ok?”

Saying this, Shiina Mayumi forcefully closed the partitioning curtain.

In just now coming beside the bed, drowsiness started well up from the core of his body. Was the medicine he just took already started to take effect perhaps? No matter what, it was of a feeling. Or, did that really mean that his body was that exhausted up to that point without him knowing at all?

Outside of the partitioning curtain, Shiina Mayumi muttered in a small voice, “For crying out loud.”

The sound of her slippered footsteps was quiet as she crossed the nurse’s office. The sound of sitting down in a chair with a thump, the sound of the telephone receiver being picked up, and the sound of roughly pressing the buttons with vigor on the phone without difficulty. Slowly being filled inside with a sense of drowsiness, Asaba pursued one by one sounds that he could hear coming from outside the curtain.

Shiina-sensei was somewhere trying to make a phone call.

He thought she tried contacting someone as he rested for these class periods, but he was wrong. The length of the number was long. It was an outside phone number. Where she was calling, of course he didn’t know.

Sleepy.

The other side soon picked up the phone.

“...Hello. This is Shiina from back-up. Yeah, the nurse’s office...Understood, it has not been significant enough that I could tell you anything, you know. Enough Enomoto, …wait? Hello hello?!”

He could he Shiina Mayumi muttering that she was cut off. She pushed the receiver’s hook to throw it pushed buttons roughtly again, and suddenly after a while,

“You bastard, you have the guts to cut off your superior and think you can away with it, you dick!! How big of a help you are, you hack, for heaven’s sake!! Enough!! Now get your lazy ass out here quickly before I have something to say Enomoto!!”

Being heavily drowsy, Asaba was faintly surprised. Who was that “Enomoto?” An extremely long time later, she was leaping for joy after hanging up the phone with that “Enomoto.”

“...Why can’t they understand phone conversations?”

A very short time later,

“What a failure! It’s just you doing this in the line of duty, you idiot!”

Between,

Shiina Mayumi muttered a laugh.

“He feigned ignorance. Fine He gave me a hint. Now who do you think is coming here?”

A little while later,

“Use good moderation in feigning ignorance! You used a mist cocktail on Asaba-kun last night?! Why did you do something so dangerous?! That with every person again,”

Reacting to his own name, the sinking sense of drowsiness gave way slightly to Asaba’s consciousness.

“The problem is that you live not knowing, you know!! You meant to take responsibility if perhaps by any chance that happened?! He could have gotten even sicker, you hear me?”

There her words paused, and it was like inclining his ear fixedly on the words of an excuse that he could hear from the phone for a long, long time.

Before long, he could hear what sounded like her blowing into the receiver from her nose,

“...And, what did you give him?”

The time of one word’s length.

“I see.”

Another interval,

“No. I think that was the safest choice. Besides, I do think so myself.”

The sound of her getting up from her chair and walking around in her slippers as they flopped.

She talked while walking with the phone in her hand, and the voice moved to coming from the direction of the window.

“No, that’s not quite right you know. If that bug should succeed again, he should just go off and die on his own without interruption. I cannot assert that it was bad to have a detailed examination, but I think it was a flashback from the mist.”

A while later,

The sound of the window closing.

Later again,

“Of course, you moron. Anyway, I will do just that. Right now, I am a middle school nurse to the bitter end, got it? Because I hid tapped grape sugar in the bathroom somehow in the morning from two days of drunkenness. Outside of one’s public appearance, since you plan can go ahead as scheduled, it’s different, but it is from the mist’s overdose shock that you were talking that was absolutely impossible to somehow do something with the merbromin solution and the wrapper’s mark. Even though it was relying on it, it is quite troubling. This is absolutely the last time for crying out loud for this half-baked communication. Got it?”

And then, uneventfully not even one second later, like hitting to say it out loud, the phone receiver was returned to its hook. The infirmary returned to silence. Her back caught the light from the window, and standing near the bed, Shiina Mayumi’s figure was becoming a dimly suspended light-colored shadow against the curtain partition. Like being able to vicariously see the distant figure of Asaba through the curtain, Shiina Mayumi’s shadow firmly commanded a view right near Asaba’s bedside.

Before long,

“Asaba-kun? Are you awake?”

Silence.

“Excuse me, Kana-cha...”

Shiina Mayumi paused what she was saying, and continued in a tone of half-speaking to herself.

“Please get along with Iriya-san.”

And then, it was already by that time that Asaba had long fallen asleep.

Being somewhat warm woke him up.

The dust floating around in midair sparkled. The angle of the rays of the sun had drastically changed, and the omitted speckles through the dividing curtain warmed Asaba’s face at an angle. He covered his eyes with both of his arms, it became gloomy from the perspiration while he was asleep so that he rose his body to kick off the covers.

He was not in a bad mood. He also did not feel dizzy. He had a feeling as if he had had a dream about someone fighting on the phone.

A face projected out from the gap in the curtain. It wasn’t Shiina Mayumi’s figure. He was a little surprised to a wall clock. Lunch break was already over, and 5th period was starting.

He felt somewhat reluctant returning to the classroom.

“Perhaps I should just go home as things are,” he thought just a little.

Just in case, Shiina Mayumi had left behind a memo that said, “Return to class” on the desk, and leaving the nurse’s office, he at best listlessly walked through the hallway and slowly wavered. Today was Wednesday, and Wednesday’s 5th period was English, English class’s Kishmoto was indeed a disagreeable middle-aged lady. When he was seemingly thinking, “As I thought, Wouldn’t it be quite clever to find a way to wait until 5th period?” he had already reached the classroom door.

And now, there was nobody in the classroom. Apparently written in bold with chalk on the belly of the blackboard was, “5th period English is in the audio-visual room.”

“Today was a day of thoroughly unconnected lessons,” thought Asaba.

His once admirable mood ended up vanishing.

“I guess I should have gone home in the first place.”

Firmly resolving this time, he began to make preparations to go home by way of conclusion. If one called it an English lesson in the audio-visual room, that was good to hear, but the extreme Kishimoto just forcing everyone to write one impressions of an English movie with the subtitles off was in short really skipping some crucial steps. Moreover, it was 5th period. At any rate about this time, he decided that about half of the guys in class were nodding off. It was possible that Iriya was able to present her honest feelings. Either way, Iriya was a girl who had returned to Japan from overseas...

His hands stopped making preparations for going home.

Asaba slowly raised his head, and turned around to face the back of the classroom.

Iriya’s desk was there.

And now then, nobody was in the classroom. The slanting rays of the sun shining through the window at a diagonal were prominent in the dimly lit classroom, and the calm blowing breeze carried the fever of the day in with it.

Turbulent thoughts crept into Asaba’s mind.

A feeling of mental strain heavily stirred the gastric juices in his stomach. The throbbing [it caused] began to do double time. Asaba slowly approached Iriya’s desk. Already crying alone in the inside of his head, “What the heck are you thinking you idiot?! Stop it! That is absolutely horrid!” But, Asaba’s feet again sped up, which was far from stopping. Placing his hands on Iriya’s desk, he looked around to check if nobody was inside the classroom as expected. He caught sight of the wall clock. It was three minutes. The time limit was three minutes. Even if nothing was left, he rounded up by three minutes. He seemingly decided that.

Commence operation.

He pulled away the chair from the desk to peek inside the desk. It was empty. He picked up the brand new school bag that had been hanging on the hook and put it on top of the desk. There was no sticker with any kind of mascot on it.

The “so uncool and like a pain in the butt” name tag remained attached to the handle, even though most student would remove it, but on the Shen card, there was no blood type nor telephone number nor address nor name written on it.

His fingers lifted the bag’s two strap fasteners.

“Anyone else would desperately stopped. I already stopped from not calling it a bad thing, since it was seriously awful, and in spite of the various events that happened since last night to a degree, I already have been having my mind in the gutter with things that I don’t understand again like some elementary school kid who became interested in the opposite gender, which is not any different from a kid that likes to suck on their whistle, seeing my companion here is an agent that came from outer space!!

Are aliens fit for the terrifying Sonohara Electro-magnetic Wave Correspondents?

He inhaled a quivering breath.

He unfastened the strap fastener.

He opened up the standing bag. He peeped into the crowded insides. On the right half were brand new textbooks with nothing appealing and a spiral bound notebook placed in vertically, and on the left side was thrust in something like a clothe bundle. He put it on top of the desk, stuck his hand inside, and there was something angular among them. There was a bento from after lunch time and a heavy draft.

He took out her commuter pass.

He opened it.

Inside were four sheets of a mysterious card.

On one of the sheets was something like a passing permit issued for the Sonohara Base gate. Made of plastic, which was so thick that it was not about to easily bend, there was what looked like a magnetic reader for a machine at the bottom of the card. On the surface was Iriya’s photographic portrait along with incomprehensible numbers and codes lining it, and it appeared to be what he feared were entry forms for entering the living quarters for the residential district of the base. He wondered why the “full name” column had been left blank. It appeared that the same thing appeared on all of the remaining three sheets. There was something that resembled a telephone card. The rounded corners also felt soft to the touch, and the far right edge was missing a slight rounding.

If he tried once again to take out his own telephone card from his wallet, the dimensions as well as the shape were exactly the same. The more he looked the more he wanted to say that “Wasn’t this the exact same telephone care?” But, the characters and the design were not completely printed. With the bottom and surface being grey, a bar code as well as numbers indicating the frequency or instructions that said “Do not let this get close to anything magnetic. Do not stain. Do not bend.” were not there. Only just a speck, something printed like a small triangular arrow, apparently used to insert the surface into a certain direction, it was something that he could barely understand. However, before inserting it, was it really for a pay phone as he expected? Ignoring the voice inside of his head that screamed “Knock it off,” he thrust one sheet of the three sheets of what looked like a telephone card into his pants’ pocket.

Looking up at the wall clock, already two minutes had passed.

He was impatient.

He threw the card into the bag pocket, restoring the commuter pass. Persuading himself that it was the end if someone looked into this, he put the hand bag back down. While trembling with fear in his heart of hearts of what to do to come out of this clean, he got together best contents of his thoughts. He took out three small long cylindrical plastic bottles of medicine, a handheld game console, and three packs of CD-ROMs with software on them.

“Just now seeing the bottle of medicine, as I thought, last night’s pool incident wasn’t a dream,” he said, feeling strangely relieved.

Opening the lid of the small bottle, he tried spilling the contents into his hand. Not a sugar-coated pill, but a compressed molded pill. Whitish in color, no characters or numbers were carved on it. He could see the contents of the bottle along with three similar cylindrical somethings, but Asaba, taking each of the three respectively from the bottle, he put each of them in his pocket wrapped in tissue. A voice inside his head muttered a voice of shock. It’s already past the point of no return. You absolutely can’t get out of this one. And thus, to deal the last blow, he took the handheld game console in his hands. Really catching his sight, it was quite the usual game counter. Having four analog cursor keys and buttons, on top of a main color LCD screen, it was surrounded by a laser display port. Having this type of equipment according to price in three varieties, three of each kind somehow spoke of being lucky embarrassingly having a less than grandiose name. As for this Iriya, who had the three sub-screens with a laser that could give an aerial view, it was commonly known to be called the “number one, most expensive thing” type. If he tried to turn the game console over, the software insert slit already had a ROM pack inserted into it. Having no manufacturer’s markings, without having any colored labels affixed, instead a black magic alphabet and numbers were scribbled onto it.

In this way it was readable.

‘BARCAP-S03’

He thought that it could have been a pirated ROM.

As he thought again about the three other ROM packs, ‘DCA-SO8’ ‘DCA-S14’ ‘BARCAP-SO6’

Already three minutes had long passed.

“That’s enough, just get it over with, let’s make a full retreat,” he could hear the voice inside his head as usual. Still, Asaba was standing stock still with the game machine in his hand.

Iriya, he wondered what kind of games she liked.

He really wondered who gave Iriya things like mysterious cards and large quantities of medicine and the sort, but he thought, “Iriya personally chose to carry things like this game console and software for sure.” It was different from “having to hold onto it.”

That decision not being anybody elses, it must have been Iriya’s.

More than examining the medicine and the card, etc., someone must have been trying out this game, but he got the feeling of being closer to Iriya.

Asaba put his finger on the power button of the game console, and pressed it.

“What the heck am I doing?”

At that moment, only the inside of his head became damaged, but the top of head escaped by blowing off the ejection seat.

He thought he was going to die. The screaming got louder. “With this, the world is going to end,” he thought. On reflex, he turned his head to look over his shoulder, his feet became slovenly tangled, and his hands just let go of the game console involuntarily.

She splendidly grasped the game console in midair with the wristband covering her right wrist. Without changing her facial expression, without a single blink, she saw the game console was no more. She held the English textbook and spiral bound notebook in her armpit, and fixing her expressionless gaze on the immobilized Asaba, Iriya asked once again.

“What are you doing?”

He could not come up with an excuse. No matter what kind of excuse he tried, it was probably useless. A human being who was sniffing around their surroundings could not expect any sort of mercy from an agent from outer space. Why was Iriya here in the first place? Right now, wasn’t she supposed to be watching “Little House on the Prairie” with the subtitles turned off in the audio-visual room in class? Deciding, there had to be some sort of trick in the bag. With Iriya having heard an alarm, in order to deal with this hindrance of a human being that was trying to spy out her true colors, she had teleported here from the audio-visual room. Surely time was being suspended in the audio-visual room about this time, and exactly right now spit was just about to drool from Hanamura’s mouth onto his desk below as Nishikubo glanced his eyes on reading a paperback book while the skirt of Laura Ingles fluttered every which way as she ran in the middle of the forest calling for help for her father who had been wounded by the accidental discharge of a sports gun.

“Move.”

Iriya asked three times of him to do.

When Asaba staggered half of a step backwards to back off, Iriya silently approached the desk, and began pulling out the contents of the bag to put them back in order. It did not appear as if she was angry or in confusion. She acted as if in her mind the likes of the existence of Asaba were to be ignored.

“U, um...”

“If he didn’t say something,” thought Asaba,

“What about 5th period? Are you skipping?”

Iriya finished putting all of the things in the bag on the desk and fastened the strap fastener, as if standing alone,

“...the ‘audio-visual room,’ where?”

“Eh?”

Iriya pointed at the silent front blackboard. Certainly expressly without turning around, he understood that on there was written as much as “5th period English is in the audio-visual room.” However,

“Hopefully, everyone sticks around afterwards...”

“If we go back, there won’t be anyone else.”

The significance was not quite understood.

If she already knew the truth, Iriya would have tried put together some fragment of a conjecture with her words.

What an importunate time for English in Kishimoto’s class.

Since most were coming to the classroom before the belll rang for class to begin, it was considered distasteful and messed up in regard to students coming late. Therefore, those guys in class finishing migrating from classroom to classroom ahead of time, Iriya had strolled from there to here alone at lunchtime since already not everybody had come back, that way leaving everyone behind.

So that is how it probably is, huh?

It peeved him off.

“What bunch of senseless idiots.” he thought.

But, “While saying that, I would do the same thing,” Asaba re-thought. “When the accosted Iriya came to look for assistance as she was surrounded by Nakagomi and her gang like a machine gun, who the heck on earth would end up running away and only leaving the single word of ‘Toilet?’”

Showing signs of thought satisfied Asaba’s mind. “It couldn’t be helped. Exceedingly being me, it was not a place where he could work out stuff. With directing the so-called mechanics of a school classroom being for better or for worse peculiar, complex, and bizarre, it appears that if it were me that I would be horrible at it. Besides, Nakagomi and her friends didn’t mean anything by it. That not being anybody’s fault, it should have been like a passing incident of misfortune.”

“You know,”

“Setting aside theory, let’s apologize at any rate,” he thought. If it was a fact that he ended up abandoning Iriya by running away, of course it was also a fact that he ended up opening her bag on his own volition.

Even though Nakagomi tried to assume the position of getting the guys in class to start, with everyone and nobody being the bad guy, he thought she should be saying just that thing.

“Umm, concerning this morning,”

she interrupted.

From the classroom corner, the intra-school broadcasting duty speaker was overseen by a pair, but the mood was revived together with the “beating” noise. Those extreme song lyrics just flowed in a 2 beat time signature to the melody of the school song calling to give rise to a public discussion on the inside of the PTA.

“Ah calling Iriya of class 2-4.”

Thereupon, the voice became distant, and someone asked, “That Iriya?!” It was Vice Principal Tashiro. Because he was constantly no matter what talking into the mic like he was using it to breathe with, one could imagine the smell of bad breath coming off of it through the speakers.

“Iriya Kana-san. Ah Iriya Kana-san of class 2-4, I repeat, since an urgent phone call is coming in from Tanaka-san, please come to the staff room.”

A phone call?

Asaba, turning his head around, said to Iriya, “Who is ‘Tanaka-san?’’

And then, Asaba thought he saw there what was like a faint tremor in her facial expression. That is, not so much that Iriya was leaving by breaking through the surface of a stretched out thick wall around them, he thought it was like the last vestiges of intense emotions.

If Asaba were to turn his head around quickly once again for an instant, he probably would not have been able to see through the true character of those emotions. But, in the twinkling of an eye at the end of closing the drilled hole in the wall, Iriya returned to being the same old Iriya.

She gripped her bag, and said,

“...I’m off.”

Asaba watched Iriya intently.

She began running.

Her skirt undulated, and her hair fluttered.

And then, Vice Principal Tashiro breathed a nasally breath on last time into the mic, and when the speaker leaving behind the melody of the school song was silent again, Asaba became the only person in the classroom.

He could hear the sounds of the cicadas.

After that, Asaba killed the time during 5th period in the library, and neatly made an appearance for 6th period Current Affairs.

Without Iriya returning in the end as it was from being summoned to the staff room, Ujiki in Current Affairs explained that “circumstances caused her to leave early.”

Thus, not until sweeping time, Asaba was informed about Iriya’s “Get away from me” speech. After Asaba ran away from the classroom leaving with the word “bathroom,” it seems that one could say that Iriya was faced by the surrounding crowd of Nakagomi and her friends as they pleased at her desk.

Shut up. Get away from me.

“You’re terrible, you know, yeah, you.”

Relying only on a wet rag to wipe the blackboard, Nishikubo said like he was moaning.

“Nakagomi was really crying or something. The other three even...flared up in anger.”

As Hanamura was sitting on the teacher’s desk, he picked up the broom at his feet quite skillfully balancing it.

Mimicking while wearing a smirking smile,

“Something like, ‘You shouldn’t talking like that?!’ right?”

Nishikubo nodded, and said,

“That is that it was already a HUGE uproar.”

“More like, ‘No matter how I think about it, it was absolutely unbelievable!!’ wasn’t it?”

Moreover, Nishikubo said,

“Even so, you know that from the Iriya’s manner of nonchalant perspective it’s okay not to say anything. I say that in contrast if you look at it thinking ‘Hey, nice shot,’ you will suddenly have a nosebleed in one nostril in the meantime going, ‘drip drip drip,’ so to speak.”

Asaba unintentionally wound up asking in return, “Eh?”

“No way it would be a nosebleed! A bloody nose.”

It was the scent of chlorine, but Asaba’s mind recalled the towel dyed nosebleed red.

“Anyhow, it was an interesting situation where those girls made a racket grumbling about Iriya’s nosebleed attack like sea lice. With Iriya completely and quickly leaving the classroom as she liked, she came back after the bell for 3rd period rang slightly flushed [?] with toilet paper stuffed up her nose.”

Although Asaba tried to take a guess on a slightly flushing [?] Iriya working out the details of having toilet paper in her nose, he was not very good at it at all.

“And?”

As Asaba urged to continue, Nishikubo laughed scornfully.

“It was as usual. After that, the current status for everyone is pretty much letting sleeping dogs lie.”

“I guess that is just how things are, right?” thought Asaba.

At any rate, it was “Get away from me.”

During the time he was dropping dead in the nurse’s office, it seems that Iriya unintentionally already isolated herself in one day today. Since Nakagomi and her friends’ group were a great influence among other things in class, making other girls afraid of getting involved in their business say, “An enemy of my friend is my enemy,” it was expected that Iriya was inadvertently becoming a loose cannon on deck. Since even if one supposed that Iriya probably did not want to stay in the classroom, wasn’t she during lunchtime still wandering aimlessly around from here to there in the school building? It was understandable that she ended up leaving alone and removing herself from the classroom without hearing what anybody had to say.

His feelings of shame and sorrow became worse.

As far as him not doing anything at that time as well, at least if he had not just run away to the bathroom, Iriya probably could have gone on without saying something like “Get away from me” as well.

To make matters worse, he was caught red-handed fishing around the contents of her bag by opening it without permission. For all that, he appeared to be thinking about at least giving her a word of apology. About this time, if that baldy Tashiro hadn’t called Iriya,

“Excuse me you three, get off of your lazy duffs and help out by carrying the desk, got it?!”

Ahiho’s anger was reaching a head. Notwithstanding, with scared faces, the scowling Nishikubo and Hanamura grungingly returned to cleaning, but Asaba brooded as long as he liked standing stock still then and there. Akiho whacked Asaba upside the head with a broom, and said,

“What the heck are you spacing out for? Get to work,”

and according becoming quickly serious,

“Hey, you ok? You alright? Perhaps you don’t feel well again?”

“...Huh? Did you say something?”

“His usual idiotic habit, huh?” sighed Akiho slightly,

“Ah, that’s it Asaba, today I don’t have club activities, ok?”

“How come?”

“From now on, I am going to be an Air Defense Committee Member. I will be doing stuff starting tomorrow like setting things up and hearing explanations.”

“Is that so? Air Defense Training tomorrow, was it?”

It was the duty of Library Committee Members to easily handle the routine tasks of the library; the Health Preservation Committee Members helped heal the sick and wounded; it was the job of student to take people to the nurse’s office; and the job of the Air Defense Committee Members incidentally was to count the number of students and guide them. Because they had nothing to do as usual, interested people as students became relatively “simple committee members.”

Akiho, smiling bitterly, said,

“Hanamura-sensei was in high spirits, saying something like, ‘This time, the theme is realism.’ Since it will most likely get late, the club president was also apparently saying to go straight home today.”

“Got it.”

Asaba replied half-heartedly. He returned to cleaning. Revising the mapping of his brains, meditating at 90%, and allocating control to the remaining 10% from his head down, he halfheartedly carried the desk, halfheartedly sweep with the broom, and halfheartedly threw out the trash. Going beyond doing things automatically, before realizing it, a person unwittingly more than overworks themselves without noticing it, Asaba kept thinking absent-mindedly about Iriya’s circumstances.

Naturally like oil and water, whenever they met each other, Suizenji Kunihiro and Sudou Akiho always only argued, but both had two common features.

For one, they were strong at rock-paper-scissors.

Secondly, they ate often.

Since Suizenji gave the impression by how much he ate that a bug lived in his stomach, Akiho gave the impression by how much she ate that some brat lived in her stomach. Sonohara Junior High School’s nearby special meal of the day shop “Shimizu” was like the site of the Newspaper Club’s second clubroom, but Asaba was always made fun of by the lunch ladies when he imitated by generally asking for seconds consisting of rice only enough for one person. Moreover as a man with a huge body, Suizenji, you might say, really as a matter of course, stuffed his gullet somehow or other, but Akiho, moreover, was kind of impressive, so to speak, as she was not about to lose in cramming her stomach. Since both of them were somehow always eating even in the clubroom with huge mind-boggling lunch boxes, to that extent of gorging themselves, it was what an outsider looking on could call both a miracle and a wonder that neither had a single ounce of fat on them, but to say this in brief, “How long could they live day after day with that fighting spirit?” thought Asaba, really saying that to question the problem.

Thus, today Suizenji turned up at the clubroom with his food in hand again. He greedily consumed some anpan and a pork cutlet sandwich, and he drank so much of a badly colored juice that from looking at his body he was throwing himself into it,

“Iriya...Kanaa?”

Thinking about it for a second, Suizenji said it like this. “The actress of ‘Anywhere AV,’ that is. Is it indie music?”

Even me, in spite of it resembling the name of an Enka singer,” thought Asaba.

“Still, it is alright.”

Asaba turned away becoming sulky. He thought that it was absolutely a mistake in the first place to try to talk in consultation with the club president. Furthermore, Suizenji began eating with gusto by taking out three onigiri from a sack from the store, and Asaba incidentally gave a fleeting sidelong glance as he consumed two of them,

“Ahuabahohuhuain.” [TL note: this is transliterated nonsense]

“Huh?”

Suizenji’s glaring Adam’s apple suddenly moved, and emptying it in one shot with a mouthful of food, said,

“Correspondent Asaba.”

“What is it?”

“Hey, trying to be all ears as you open the door to your heart, a sighing boy out of nowhere comes to me wanting me to hear him talk from his heart about something worrying someone, but still that is probably really just my imagination, isn’t it?”

“Your imagination, eh?”

“If so, good.”

Suizenji quickly withdrew. Pulling out of the bag from the store this time a cup of fried soba, he began to pour hot water from Akiho’s personal electric pot. While viewing that situation half-stunned, Asaba dragged along the tail end of each of his thoughts in his head carried from the classroom.

Anyhow, he wished for an opportunity to try to talk with Iriya.

First, he wanted to apologize and hear what seemed to be a mountain of things, and as for being isolated in the middle of class, he also thought that he could become someone she could talk to about things if she wanted to at the very least.

Having said that, Iriya still ended up disagreeably shunning everyone with him included. Although Akiho would definitely call him a spineless yellow-bellied coward, Asaba’s real intentions could not be helped there.

He twisted his face. “At least, if I could have something of a pretext,” he thought.

It wasn’t like it was aggravating even if he did talk with Iriya in front of his classmates.

“Even if it happens again today, you’ll still make a pig of yourself, won’t you?”

Throwing out the water for the fried soba out the window, Suizenji abruptly turned around,

“With her being summoned suddenly at lunchtime, I was busy downing my food.”

“Who was it that called her? Was it a teacher or a gang leader?”

“She’s a 1st year student, you know. I got stuck at the same time mowing down an excellent refine handmade bento.”

“Weren’t you stuffing your face?” muttered Asaba.

“Thus, rarely about this time,” he thought. At the beginning of spring certainly outbroke the “Suizenji is hot phenomenon” between the 1st year girl students that naturally settled down about the middle of 1st semester.

There also set in occasionally a fad of a competition of sending outrageous outdated love letters to him.

“So, how did it go?”

“Thanks to that, I ate out of such tiny bento boxes.”

“That’s not it, more like what I feel like talking about.”

“That’s not what I was saying. It’s not like my rival after all is going to be confused with the name of Jean Marcel either.”

“Suizenji-san. By the way, girls work to make bento boxes with all their might so that both of you can eat it together, so why the heck do you want to talk about the Roswell [UFO] Incident?”

Asaba, with the feelings of a Buddhist statue, thought of the 1st year girls without knowing jack about their names or faces. He thought, “I want to live strongly.” And then, “Thinking about it again, it was pointless to try to talking to the club president about the incident with Iriya after all.”

Even if temporarily he was diligently listening, talking about this kind of thing was the outcome at best.

If he wanted to apologize, then apologize already.

If he wanted to listen about what happened, then listen already.

If he wanted to be an adviser, then just act like it. Never mind what’s around you.

He also felt like if that was supposed to be the case he held an immensely proper view. Still, if that was something he could have done, Asaba wouldn’t have worried about it from the outset.

Suizenji, as if suddenly recalling something, stopped pulling the noodles with his hand [out of the cup.]

“Hey, so, well, Correspondent Sudou?”

“Eh, ah. Akiho kind of said that today she was going to be late because she is an Air Defense Committee Member to go home without her.”

Suizenji smacked his lips,

“Is that so? For tomorrow’s evacuation training?”

“It is the Air Defense, you know.”

“You moron, no matter where there is the ‘Air Defense.’ When the siren goes off in the hallway, hide the fact that you are at your wits’ end, and count the number of people standing in line who tottered as far as the designated shelter. If you are going to survive an aerial bombing with such half-baked training, just do everyone a favor and kill yourself right now. The same goes for anyone gawking, whose old man won’t be helped by fire, thunder, or earthquakes, got it?!”

Suizenji looked up at the ceiling for 2 minutes, returned from bending back in the chair, [and said],

“For crying out loud, just skip out on the stupid committee. We can’t distribute the next issue unless she comes.”

“You’re right, what are we going to do about next issue’s featured article? Since it was complete nonsense to bury ourselves in the mountains, I think it can’t be helped that we miss such an article.”

Calm, Suizenji pondered,

“Correspondent Asaba. Are you free next weekend?”

“Well, at present...”

His chair creaking, Suizenji leaned forward [to say],

“Correspondent Asaba, then concerning the matter of going and diving into every nook and cranny in the no entry zone of Sonohara Base with a camera in one hand, that means that you should take photos as much as you like of alien corpses and UFO wreckage.”

Asaba clearly replied,

“There is a 100% chance of me getting caught. Please do that by yourself, Chief.”

“I don’t mind getting caught as long as we take the photos we need.”

“Wouldn’t it be the same as not being able to photograph if the film was confiscated? This is hard to say [?], but if I get arrested because of some stupid false premise, I am not going to become some ass of a delinquent for something like Japanese juvenille law, got it? After I will surely get handcuffed and thrown into an investigation room, the Chief’s favorite will be investigated up the asshole, you know.”

It was complementary scandalous conduct concerning his asshole. With Suizenji coming across psychic phenomena with a boom spring this year, Asaba and Suizenji has taken 110 turns collecting data by sneaking in the middle of the night in the girls’ bathroom at the train station that was haunted according to rumors. They weren’t writing it for the May edition report, but an especially horrendous thing happened this time as Asaba and Suizenji were dressed as girls. Of course being Suizenji’s idea, even better yet so to speak, that pretext was from sneaking into the girls’ bathroom to collect data, it was said that according to rumors, “It is the ghost of a secretary who committed suicide by hanging herself over being torn in love,” and “She strangles women who go into the bathroom who are prettier than herself from behind.” Taking out his younger sister’s uniform to wear, Asaba still had the feeling that he was surprisingly being watched, but the six-foot [TL note: ~1.83m] tall nearby stature of Suizenji with the appearance of a hardened body in chillingly freshly bought clothes was the only horror. A person from the neighborhood who was noticing the 110 turns drove them off, and seeing the appearance of a patrol car, Asaba wound up running away dazed and falling in a panic at any rate, but Suizenji presented to the policeman a student notebook naturally without stepping back at all then and there, and he said, “I am a journalist in the middle of collecting data for an activity,” requesting not to hand it over. Suizenji, who was taken to the police office to receive a reprimanding, made a triumphal return to the clubroom with a grand smiling face resulting after school the next day, and threw the film that he had taken out of his pocket.

“Th-this! This is the film from last night!? Wasn’t it going to get confiscated!?

“Where were you hiding it?!”

This brought a smiling face that said that it was a journalistic triumph, and Suizenji answered with a loud enough voice that shook clubroom tenement.

“‘Asshole,’ you said!!”

In the end, that film went without becoming a news article. An enraged Akiho wound up throwing the working gloves on her hands into the incinerator hitting it. However, Asaba was even now thinking that such a thing was deplorable. Even as far as not taking out any space, he wanted to develop the film at the least. Or, perhaps, something might not have been photographed.

That being how life is, someone had appeared.

“Correspondent Asaba, how naive. You know that with the exception of an asshole’s vertical smile there are certain various ‘holes,’” Suizenji fearlessly smiled with the cup of fried soba in hand, “Hmm, for example, using a digital camera and a laptop in hand, it would have been nice to take a picture from the edge of the outside of the base with FTP flying. If the log wasn’t saved on the laptop, even if we were arrested, we were able to protect the graphics file.”

“So that we weren’t tortured in the end, right.”

“Correspondent Asaba. Don’t you want to check with your own eyes the true appearance of the foo fighter? Don’t you want to try listening to your Miranda rights as you are thrust and roll to the ground just once as a journalist? What a rush, just thinking about it makes you shiver, right?”

Like this, Suizenji’s utterance still was irrationally quite serious. “Wouldn’t it be better to stop being so serious?” thought Asaba at that time,

“Ah.”

At last, he realized that thing.

“Is that so? It would be nice if Iriya begged as well.”

Suizenji made a dubious face,

“Correspondent Asaba. What are you saying?”

“Umm, in other words right, today a transfer student came to my class. Her name is Iriya Kana, but her older brother is an officer in the Air Defense Forces or something, and you might say that now since the story is that she is living in the residential area of Sonohara Base, we might be able to cleverly ask in that case about a small field trip to the inside of the base despite it being off limits.”

“Correspondent Asaba!! Why the hell did you not tell me sooner, huh?!!”

Asaba tumbled down out of his chair. Suizenji stood up throwing away his share of half-eaten cup fried soba, and rushing over to the cork board hanging on the wall, he suddenly stuck 10 stickers on it adding to the column of text “the great search for a face” on “Iriya.”

“Follow me Correspondent Asaba.”

“Ha, huh?!”

Suizenji rushed out of the clubroom. Asaba chased him after that without understanding anything, but it was not like Asaba could catch up to the run of 100 meters-in-11-seconds sprinting Suizenji at full power. He plunged into the entrance crossing the ground, and with reaching the first corner on the mark, Asaba ended up losing sight of Suizenji’s back, but because of the screams that rose up like “Wah” or “Eek” where Suizenji was, he started to trek in the direction of Suizenji’s whereabouts in hot pursuit after that. Asaba barely managed to get to class 2-4’s classroom out of breath, which was dyed by the setting sun coming in from the window. Several students were left in the classroom, but they were taken aback by Suizenji’s abrupt intrusion.

Suizenji took a glancing survey of the inside of the classroom, and said,

“Correspondent Asaba. The transfer student who came from outer space as you said was who?”

Despite not saying a single word about such a thing, it seemed as if it ended up quickly becoming something like that inside of Suizenji’s mind.

“I, Iriya, during 5th period, left early, being called on the speaker that way.”

“Correspondent Asaba. Until now, how many clubs have their eyes on this transfer student as well?”

Asaba nodded while he took a deep breath of preparation in earnestness. It did not hurt to check, but because he thought that probably there was not any scout with a pretext from some club for Iriya, it seemed it was not likely that someone would come forward wanting Iriya to join a club from somewhere.

“Chief, perhaps, concerning Iriya,”

Suizenji declared clearly.

“Let’s go after her. We’ll be the ones to get the transfer student. I expect that we should get the jump on the other clubs. The Sonohara Electro-Magnetic Wave Newspaper Club has a constant need for superior talented people.”

“What should they do if the person in question did not have that in mind?” thought Asaba.

But, he thought of that as well. In the case that Iriya possibly joined the Newspaper Club, that is in brief, let’s do something to succeed “Before our classmates, even if Iriya told an aggravating pretext.”

Thus, he thought in this way. If Iriya possibly joined the the Newspaper Club, it might clarify the “something” for all kinds of incomprehensible things with the present state of affairs, but only if. Whatever kind of kettle it was, if by throwing Suizenji inside of it advanced a dramatic chemical reaction, some kind of conclusion invariably would come from it. There first day of the beginning of the second semester finally ended.

The cicadas were chirping.

The next day, due to someone’s harassment somehow, a cat was inside of Asaba’s shoe rack alive.

He spent the last evening transcribing nothing but the usual copied homework, and coming the next morning sleep-deprived, Asaba had a feeling that he was going to school late today as well. Getting off of his bicycle at the already overflowing small bicycle parking area, Asaba reluctantly hung up the chain lock, stopping the bike at the fence-like circle jutting out considerably from under the roof. As a result of getting into that place altogether meant getting out of there after school as the sun set, even if he returned home now partway, he would sit on a warm seat. But, it was not a place to stop more than that. He was in a heck of hurry bum rush to get to the entrance, and he opened with his hand that cover of his shoe box trying to fetch his indoor shoes.So far it was everyday life as usual.

Opening the shoe box cover in an instant, an orange tabby kitten jumped out from inside to cling right onto Asaba’s face stopping short of giving him a punch to the eye. [TL Note: Unsure of exact translation.] As a result of Asaba falling helplessly down, the kitten ran outside of the elevated entrance-way with a growling voice. Asaba entered the classroom in a confused mess, and as soon as he saw Akiho’s face, she said “Look what the cat dragged in,” as pain began to stab his finger, with a nice amount of blood coming from the scratch wound that he felt.

“Look here.”

Asaba raised his face timidly, himself sitting slantingly in his seat.

“Who the heck played such a horrible prank, huh?”

Akiho huffed in anger. Always in the bag of reserved adhesive plaster of the largest guy, he stuck it onto Asaba’s nose in a truly rude manner.

“Wasn’t that cat scared from being shut up in such a confined place?”

“That way, huh?” thought Asaba.

“By any chance, wasn’t that tawny kitten usually loitering around the bus stop? For about three months, its tail was slightly crooked. Did it have a collar?”

“I think it didn’t. But, I don’t know since it happened in a blink of time.”

Akiho finished with the box of adhesive plaster in the bag, and said,

“It is odd that there would be two tawny kittens, isn’t it? Still, having a tiny collar isn’t as good as living in the field, but having a slightly large collar isn’t as good as Tojiro from Takizawa’s Stationary Store.” Because she was always writing “We raise cats and dogs” articles, Akiho was excessively knowledgeable on the cat and dog situation around the school area.

“It’s nothing, although it doesn’t matter either way to me,”

Asaba thought about it absent-mindedly while probing the stuck adhesive plastic with his finger on his nose.

Who the heck purposefully put the cat in the shoe rack?

At that time, he felt someone’s glance suddenly.

Asaba nonchalantly turned his head around, and Akiho also followed what lured Asaba’s glance.

They were fixed in the direction staringly of Iriya, but she suddenly hid her face.

“What on earth was that?”

Akiho muttered. Asaba somehow or other returned an ill-at-ease glance, but Akiho concealed her voice as she fixedly stared at Iriya,

“Hey Asaba, You hear the ‘Get away from me’ story?”

Asaba nodded.

“Don’t you think that it is horrible? Hating Maki-chan and her lot is natural.”

“...But,”

“It’s just too much, you know. I wish that she would sincerely apologize if she carelessly said that. I don’t think that it would be too hard for me. I don’t know who the hell she thinks she is, but such a tone will absolutely not earn her any friends. What’s with that wristband, thinking that it looks cool or something.”

Asaba gave a surprised look. As for Sudou Akiho, it was the first time that he had heard her speak ill of someone in a slanderous manner thus far. Yet, with Akiho being Akiho, he made a face like one surprised at what words could come out of one’s mouth. Instantly recognizing Asaba’s stare, she smoothed her face over with a smile and forcibly changed the subject,

“Umm, hey Asaba, did the Chief decide on something yesterday? Like the layout of next issue’s articles?”

This time Asaba was startled.

“Ah, naw, we weren’t deciding that sort of thing, but,”

At any rate, they had ended up deciding on something unthinkable yesterday.