Right Arm of the Saint (12 page)

Yaze went through the turnstile, still grappling with Kojou’s shoulders.

“Heya… Wait, that’s not Nagisa-chan. Who is that? We had a girl like this in our junior high?”

Noticing Yukina walking beside them, he looked at Kojou’s face in what seemed a bit of surprise. Kojou gloomily thrust Yaze away.

“Transfer student. She’s in Nagisa’s class.”

“Ohh, I see, I see. …So, Kojou, why are you going to school together with the little transfer here?”

“I just bumped into her on the way ’cause she lives close to us. A bit of talking’s normal, geez,” Kojou replied while keeping his cool. It’s not like he was lying. He might’ve met her when leaving the entrance to his apartment, but that was still on the way to school, technically.

“I am Yukina Himeragi. And you are Yaze Motoki, right?”

Yukina spoke while lowering her head in perfect courtesy. Yaze suddenly made a very pleasant expression.

“Oh, what’s this? So he’s been talkin’ about me?”

“No, there was information on you in Akatsuki-senpai’s file.”

“Ah? File?”

Looking at the question mark that came over Yaze’s expression, Yukina apparently realized her mistake. Her blank expression twitched faintly as she shook her head.

“No, it’s nothing at all. I’m kidding.”

“R-right. Well, nice to meet ya.”

Yaze made a friendly, smiling face while giving her a thumbs-up.

“Hey, so you’re a musician girl? What kind of genres do you do?”

“Musician… Ah yes. Er, actually I’m not very knowledgeable about music.”

“Eh? Ah, I mean, that’s a guitar on your back, right? Maybe a bass?”

“Ah…yes. You’re right.”

Remembering she had a “guitar case” on her back, Yukina hurriedly tried to gloss over it.

And, when Yaze suspiciously raised an eyebrow, she awkwardly averted her eyes.

“Um, I’m sorry, Senpais. I have to go now.”

“R-right. Later, Himeragi.”

Kojou waved in recognition as Yukina ran off like that to the junior high school campus.

Yaze silently gazed, watching her for a while like that.

“Hey, Kojou. That girl, she’s kinda mysterious, ain’t she?”

“Nah, she just transferred, she’s just a bit scrambled about stuff still.”

“Is that so… Hmm. If this doesn’t become trouble of some kind, then great,” Yaze murmured in an oddly serious tone. Kojou shot his friend a doubtful look back.

“Trouble?”

“Yeah. Make sure you pull this off right, Kojou, for your sake
and
the sake of not messing up my peaceful, lively school life. I mean, you are kind of my precious childhood friend and stuff.”

What’s he talkin’ about?
thought Kojou, shifting his gaze to Yaze with a perplexed look.

Yaze was looking at the high school campus, at Kojou and Yaze’s classroom on the second floor. Asagi, sitting right at the window, was waving her hand, having just noticed them arriving at school.

“Good morning, Kojou. You’re really looking laid-back here first thing in the morning. Well, you always do.”

Homeroom, right before classes began. As Kojou sat in his own seat, Asagi, sitting just ahead, spoke to him.

As usual, she was dressed in a gorgeous way with a hairstyle to match, but today, her usual liveliness served to conceal a shadow, as if an aura of ennui hung over her somehow.

Kojou waved back with the same listless expression.

“Gee, thanks. Hey, you look sleepy yourself.”

“I am. Thanks to that, my makeup isn’t sitting well… You saw about yesterday’s explosion on the news, right?”

Asagi spoke while fussing over imperfections under her eyes with a hand mirror.

Gulp.
Kojou was somewhat suspicious as he responded.

“Y-yeah. A little bit.”

“Right after that, a big shot from the Gigafloat Management Corp was crying to me over the phone. Their mainframe for disaster countermeasures got blown away, and they had to put together a replacement system from scratch. That’s what happens when you buy your hardware from the lowest bidder. It’s not tuned at all, and its inbound filtering is like a sieve.”

“I don’t really follow, but…sounds like a big mess… Sorry.”

As Kojou appropriately ignored Asagi’s technobabble, he was tortured by a guilty conscience. To think that even people this close to him had been harmed by yesterday’s incident.

Asagi shot Kojou a dubious look as he sunk into silence.

“Why are you apologizing?”

“Uh…no reason. So anyway, you’re helping people across the whole island, then, Asagi?”

“It—It’s not that huge a deal, though.”

Asagi spoke quickly, seeming to blush a little. Then her usual leering grin emerged.

“But, maybe you should be thanking me all the same. There’s a restaurant at Keystone Gate that has a cake buffet…”

“Yeah, sometime, sure. I’ll think about it once I get my summer break homework settled.”

Kojou tried to paper it all over. Keystone Gate was the section where the four Gigafloats connected—the giant building literally at the center of Itogami Island. It was the island’s most fashionable spot, brimming with high-end brands and specialty stores. And this restaurant was right there. An expensive one, no doubt.

“Homework, huh.”

As Asagi rested her chin on her hands, she muttered in an indifferent tone, seemingly on purpose. For some reason, she was glancing sideways at Kojou intermittently.

“B-by the way Kojou, I thought I’d ask… Whatever happened after that?”

“After that?”

“You know, yesterday, the girl you were at the station with. Nagisa-chan’s classmate, you said?

“I mean, not that it matters to me either way.”

“Oh yeah.”

Something like that happened, too, didn’t it?
Kojou recalled. Thanks to the intensity of the disturbance that followed, he felt like it was already something in the distant past.

“Oh, we just went home like normal.”

“Is that…so?”

“Yeah, I was just helping her carry back the stuff she bought.”

“Th-that so? Hmm… I see.”

Asagi’s expression seemed to brighten as she lifted her face.

Right around then, in a corner of the classroom, there was a small commotion punctuated by
ooh
s. Several boys had gathered in the corner around a single raised cell phone.

“What’s that all about?”

Kojou watched his worked-up classmates looking as if he’d spotted something unpleasant in a train station washroom.

Asagi called out to Rin Tsukishima, a friend of hers who just happened to be passing by.

“Hey, Rin. What’s up? What are the guys getting all worked up about?”

“Ah, that? Seems some girl transferred into junior high.”

Rin Tsukishima was the class representative. She was a student whose height and style made her seem very adult.

She had meager social graces and was a girl of few words, but there were surprisingly many boys who went for that. Among first-year high school boys, she was number one in the Girls I Wanna Be Walked All Over By rankings by a rather glowing margin; she had apparently been rather shocked to learn of that result.

“A junior high school transfer student…?”

Kojou’s face grimaced a bit as he made a low murmur. “Good grief,” Rin murmured, watching the boys in exasperation.

“Apparently the rumor is that she’s extremely cute, so they’ve ordered the juniors in their clubs to send them pictures.”

As Asagi’s brow furled, she drew her face close to Kojou.

“Hey, this transfer student, is that the one in Nagisa-chan’s class?”

“Yeah, probably.”

Kojou nodded with a pained expression. It was a pretty safe bet it was Yukina.

Rin watched the exchange between Kojou and Asagi with mild amusement.

“Not going to go and look, Akatsuki?”

“Nah, not interested.”

As Kojou tossed his reply, Rin said, “I see,” nodding with apparent satisfaction.

“I suppose. You have Asagi, after all, Akatsuki.”

“Huh?”

Kojou looked up in surprise. He met the very close Asagi’s eyes, and both hurriedly separated simultaneously.

Asagi, even with her cheeks reddening, maintained her cool attitude as she looked up at Rin.

“There you go again, Rin… Kojou and I aren’t like that. We’re just friends from back in junior high. Right?”

“R-right. Asagi hangs out with me and Yaze a lot. It’s just natural.”

Kojou, too, conveyed it as the plain truth. For some reason, Rin made a disappointed-looking face as she listened.

“So, in the end, no progress this summer, either? Even though Yaze seems to be making out fine with an older girlfriend?”

“That’s ’cause Yaze and his girlfriend are both weirdos.” Kojou nonchalantly asserted it like it was inconvenient to be compared to either.

Certainly, in spite of appearances, it was a fact that Yaze had a girlfriend. As soon as he’d graduated to high school in April, he’d fallen in love at first sight with a third-year senior. After a number of passionate approaches straight out of a romantic comedy, they’d finally become a couple just before summer vacation.

“I suppose so,” Rin agreed, looking at Kojou with a meaningful expression.

“Certainly I think she is a bit eccentric, too, but, Akatsuki-kun, I don’t think I want to hear
you
calling anyone odd. I have the feeling you have some very interesting secrets yourself.”

“No idea what you’re talkin’ about, Tsukishima.”

“Heh-heh.” As Rin watched Kojou feign ignorance, seemingly sulking, she narrowed her eyes and laughed.

Her grandfather was a famous scholar of demonic ecology. Perhaps due to that, Rin was very learned about the characteristics of various demons; sometimes she acted as if she realized Kojou was not a normal human being.

However, Rin did not regard Kojou with enmity; she seemed disinclined to raise any special fuss in any case. It seemed like she was observing Kojou simply because she found him interesting. Here in Itogami City, where there were more demons, etc., than foreign residents, it wasn’t a big deal.

Saikai Academy had a number of demonic students, after all; they weren’t looked at in any special way, enough that a beautiful girl transferring into junior high attracted far more attention.

That said, even Rin would surely be surprised to know that Kojou was actually the Fourth Primogenitor.

“Oh yeah, Kojou. I brought that World History report I mentioned yesterday… You wanna look?” Asagi, whose mood had improved slightly at some point, spoke as she fished a pile of copying paper out of her bag.

Kojou nodded in a flash. “Yeah. Of course.”

“So! Cake buffet at Keystone Gate!”

“Ugh… All right already…”

Heartbroken, Kojou nodded. It was a matter of priorities; he was more
worried about how he was going to do the homework in front of his face than the condition of his wallet.

“Good, good,” Asagi replied, nodding with a smiling face as she handed the copying paper to Kojou.

“Ah? I wonder what’s with Natsuki-chan?”

That moment, Rin quietly muttered. It was too early for the homeroom session, but the class’s homeroom teacher, wearing a stifling, jet-black dress, entered the classroom with an expression of displeasure.

“Kojou Akatsuki, are you here?”

The charismatic homeroom teacher, small enough she looked like a little girl, called for Kojou at the classroom entrance with the aura of a ferocious deity. Kojou had a bad feeling about it as he sluggishly waved back.

“…’Sup?”

“Come to the student guidance room at noon. I need a word with you.”

Natsuki made a frigid declaration. Incidentally, her outfit on this day was a miniskirted, goth loli–style dress and socks with black-and-white borders. It was completely stifling as per usual, but it looked nice and cool compared to most of what she usually wore.

The frostiness and bloodlust of Natsuki’s implied threat sent a small shudder through Kojou.

“Eh? Er, you said I had until the first class of the last day of the week to turn in that English homework…”

“Also, bring that junior high transfer student with you.”

“Himeragi…? Why?”

Kojou’s voice unwittingly slipped.

The murmurs among the students broadened as the name of the much-rumored transfer student emerged from his lips.

“Would you understand if I said, last night’s incident?”

“Er, ah… No idea what you’re talkin’ ab—”

“Don’t play dumb with me. I’m going to speak to you very thoroughly about what the two of you were doing after running out of the game center late at night.”

Natsuki left that monologue behind her before departing without waiting for Kojou’s reply. After that, Kojou was sweating bullets while
bloodlust-filled glares from the male students poured upon him. And then…

“Akatsuki… What was she speaking of just now? Could you explain, in detail?”

The tall Rin stood beside the seated Kojou, leering down at him as she asked. She was so quiet normally, but at times like this, she was impressively intimidating.

“T-Tsukishima… Er, Asagi?”

Kojou spontaneously called for an assist. However, Asagi, who should have been sitting right there, had vanished at some point.

“If you want Asagi, she’s over there.”

Rin pointed to the back of the class with a straight face.

For some reason, Asagi was standing right by the garbage bin, innocently ripping to shreds the pile of paper in her hands over and over.

Geh!
As the sheets turned into shreds, Kojou sucked in his breath as he realized what the pile of paper was.

“W-wait. That wouldn’t be the World History report I asked you for, would it…”

As Kojou hurried to his feet, Asagi glared at him, eyes half-closed and filled with silent rage. Without saying a word…

“Hmph!”

…she made a hard snort, tossing the thoroughly destroyed paper into the garbage bin.

As soon as lunch break began, Kojou darted out of the classroom and rendezvoused with Yukina in the corridor in front of the staff room.

By the end of morning classes Kojou was tired enough to keel over, but Yukina looked considerably weakened as well, enough that she’d actually forgotten to bring that guitar case with her. Having seen his own classmates’ excitement, Kojou could largely picture what had happened, but being the center of the school’s attention seemed to have been quite an ordeal for her.