VOLUME 1

Chapter 2: Part 2

It was evening, and I was walking along with Orito. It had been raining since the middle of the day, so it was great. Those terrible rays of sunlight couldn’t win against those clouds after all.

Orito had agreed to share his deep blue umbrella with me, and we looked just like two lovebirds walking shoulder to shoulder.

“Aikawa, what’s with that smile? That’s gross.”

“Is it?”

Good weather put people into good moods after all. My head had been getting terribly burnt before, right? It’s definitely not because I’m walking home with Orito. Don’t get me wrong.

“If you smile like that later, Kyouko will be happy too.”

Orito smiled. Why did it annoy me when boys smiled? Kyouko-chan was the survivor of the serial murders that I was now going to meet.

“Now that I think about it, how exactly does Kyouko-chan know about me?”

“Beats me. Maybe she met you at some point during junior high school?”

“Well, I was pretty popular after all.”

“Yeah right. Only people like witches would fall in love with you.”

“But you definitely said that Kyouko-chan was in love with me or something.”

“Yeah. When I went to visit her she seemed awfully keen on meeting you. I dunno, maybe she got hit in the head and suffered brain damage.”

You’re going to go that far?!

“Hey, Aikawa. Kyouko is like a second little sister to me. If you do something strange to her I’m going to kill you, alright?”

“Yeah yeah got it.”

We leisurely strolled along while talking about our bowling outing tomorrow (I had completely forgotten about that). Being able to talk to a normal person like this about normal things almost made me forget that I was in the middle of a giant whirlpool of murder and violence.

I definitely didn’t want to get him involved in all this. There were things&h.e.l.lip; I didn’t want to lose. Everyone had those kinds of things&h.e.l.lip;

Even zombies.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES