VOLUME 6

Chapter 6 – The Most Floor-Pounding Day of the Year

Chapter 6: Part 1

It was raining.

Raining cats and dogs.

A single boy stood there without an umbrella, completely still. He was like a frog waiting for the rain to pa.s.s, or a snail.

Where had he left his umbrella? Why was he just standing there? These were all mysteries.

But, no matter what the answer was, the boy just stood there silently. Or wait… no, he might have been crouching.

The rain hid the boy like a curtain, or maybe a mosaic.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t know who this boy was, or where this was supposed to be.

But, a single girl soon appeared in front of the boy. Or maybe it was a boy… it was hard to tell.

“You can… my… -brella.”

Her voice seemed to vanish in the midst of the pouring rain. All I could understand was that she was offering her umbrella to the boy.

What a kind girl… wait, I really still didn’t know if that was a girl or a boy. The rain made it hard to tell anything.

The only thing I could tell was that the girl (?) was smiling. I could see her (?) white teeth through the rain.

My mind began to fog, and I…

I woke up.

I heard a loud chime around me, signaling that our lunch break was here.

Ugh, what a sentimental, bittersweet dream that was. It was also annoyingly hard to see anything in that dream.

Today was December 15th. It was a great day for a downpour… or it should’ve been.

Who the h.e.l.l was with that little kid? Dammit, this didn’t make me happy. Even the sound of fat raindrops beating against our window was starting to grate on my nerves, so I shook my head strongly from side to side to try and dispel the lingering memories of that dream.

Anyways, it had been a few days since Orito’s mixer.

I wanted to contact the super legendary Underworld person that Yuu had told me about, the one who was supposed to be able to help me beat the strongest masou shoujo Chris. So, I thought about trying to talk to Anderson-kun, the only person I knew at school who might know about the others from the Underworld.

Well, granted, it remained to be seen if this person really was super and legendary.

Anyways, there might be people from the Underworld at this school, other than Anderson-kun.

But, ever since that mixer, the handsome gentleman Anderson-kun was constantly surrounded by girls. There was no way an introverted zombie like myself could find an opening to talk with him.

Haruna and Tomonori might just be able to brazenly push their way through all the rabid fangirls, but there’s no way I had that kind of courage.

So, at the end of third period, I decided to get Tomonori to relay the message for me.

“Tomonori, I really need to talk to Anderson-kun about something, but it’s hard to get close to him… so could you tell him that I want to meet with him? You’re in the same cla.s.s, right?”

That’s what I ended up telling her.

Tomonori and Anderson-kun were in the same cla.s.s. So it was easier for her to approach him just when cla.s.s ended, when there weren’t a random gaggle of girls surrounding him.

“Got it! I’ll do it! Also stop calling me Tomonori!”

Tomonori’s incredibly tomboyish words were followed by a dependable little bow. Okay, I think everything should be fine now, but…

“Hey, Aikawa~~. I’m back!”

Tomonori came back during the lunch break. Came back by herself…

“I told him what you said!”

“Okay. So, where exactly is he then?”

I probably sounded a bit annoyed right then, but Tomonori didn’t seem to mind.

“He said he loves you too!”

She gave me an incredibly tomboyish thumbs up.

… Wait, what the h.e.l.l?! Exactly what did Tomonori tell Anderson-kun?! Ugh, now I’m blusing!

I was now deeply regretting letting this idiot Tomonori be my messenger.

“By the way, Aikawa, let’s do a bit of studying for the afternoon!”

“Got it. Let me finish eating first…”

Tomonori looked blankly down at me as I held my head in my arms. It seemed my strategy to get her to realize her mistake by acting extremely depressed had one hundred percent failed.

“You just ended up sleeping through fourth period and forgetting what I wanted you to say, didn’t you?”

“Eh? Ahh, yeah. I mean, come on… this kind of rain always makes you h.e.l.la sleepy, doesn’t it?”

Well, admittedly I had been sleeping too…

“And I also had a pretty weird dream. I was like, a hero or something and I was raising up this fountain pen!” (1)

Hm, so Tomonori also had a weird dream? Just like me… I hope this rain didn’t have some unpleasant ability to give people hallucinations or something.

“Dreams can take all your experiences and jumble them up into one, or show you your future self, or have lots of other fun surprises… but when the weather is bad my dreams are usually pretty bad too.”

I thought back to the hazy, annoying dream I had just experienced. So some of Tomonori’s dreams were like that too?

“Got it. I’ll forgive you this time.”

The past me. The future me. And a few illusions mixed in.

Which one of those categories did the dream I just had fit into?

I looked outside the window. The downpour showed no signs of stopping, and the rain continued to pelt against our window.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

(1) Possibly a reference to the fact that HERO is a brand of fountain pens.