Uh, Sure, Dessler Does Look Like He’d Be Good at Billiards – Part 04

“What’s going on? I wanna play too.” Big Teach headed our way.

Hoot. The horned owl next to Haruna suddenly slimmed down.

Owls usually stayed puffed up with fluffy feathers. When they threatened, they fluffed up even more. When they were afraid, they slimmed down, squinted their eyes as much as possible, and tried to pass as branches. I had no clue what it was so scared of, and neither did Haruna.

Only one person seemed to get it. Anderson was staring at Big Teach, nervous as the owl. Ever since those two showed up, he’d been awfully quiet. He was shaking like he’d been tossed naked into the North Pole.

“What’s wrong, Anderson?”

Even the girls around him worried at his sudden change.

“Well… uh… ah… uh…”

His voice came out broken, barely words. Like nothing reached his ears. I guess this was what they meant by a deer caught in the headlights.

When Kyouko stepped forward, the boys squealed. When Big Teach stepped forward, Anderson twitched, and the girls squealed. Apparently, he felt a certain way about Big Teach.

Tap, tap. Someone patted my back. I turned to see Eu, holding up a note.

“To an Underworlder, she’s a demon. It’s an understandable reaction.”

Right. Anderson was an Underworlder, enemy of the Magiclad Girls. And Big Teach was in a whole different league, even among them.

“In the Underworld, there’s a saying.”

Eu handed me another note.

“If you meet a snake, kill it before it kills you. If you meet a bear, run before it kills you. If you meet her, give up.”

Ahah. So she really was seen as a demon.

Yeah, no way would I ever want to go against Big Teach at full power. Not that I’d ever seen her go all out.

“How about this move?!” Hiramatsu, eyes serious yet looking more cheerful than usual, suddenly raised her hand.

Eu glanced at my face, then at Kyouko’s, then at Hiramatsu’s. After a moment of thought, she returned to her shogi board.

So she wasn’t going to help me here. Well, Eu did love her shogi.

Once Eu made her move, Hiramatsu frowned again, groaning as she thought hard.

Worried about Anderson, I called out, “You okay? Wanna rest over in the corner?”

“Yeah… I guess so.”

Out of courtesy or displeasure, the girls left us alone, and we moved to the corner. The horned owl that had perched on Haruna’s shoulder also flew over without a sound, fleeing from Kyouko and Big Teach. Owls had special feathers that let them flap almost silently.

Anderson gulped down some soda, then sat on the floor, hiding behind the billiards table. I sat down beside him.

“Man, I was shocked. Never thought a Magiclad Girl with that kind of power would show up.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Complicated circumstances. But Big Teach isn’t scary, you know.”

“In the Underworld, we have a saying.”

“About giving up if you meet her? Eu just told me about it.”

“When I first heard that saying, I thought, just tell me who it is. But now I get it. There’s no need to specify. The moment you meet her, you just know.” Anderson laughed, though he still trembled.

“Why are you even here in this world?” I asked.

“Call me a watcher. If a Magiclad Girl starts making weird moves, I dispatch a Megalo. But lately, they haven’t been too active, so I’ve been enjoying life here.”

“What do you mean by weird moves?”

“Like making fake Megalo and mass-producing them.”

“That wasn’t the Magiclad Girls.”

“I know. But at first, I panicked, thinking Villiers had finally copied Megalo tech. I thought the Magiclad Girls have resumed their invasion.”

The ones who made the fake Megalos were Kyouko and the King of the Night. Their goal was to start a war in this world. So yeah, the King of the Night’s plan went perfectly.

“This is just me talking, so don’t take offense,” I prefaced, “but couldn’t you drag the Magiclad Girls into the Underworld and fight it out there?”

“That’d be tough. You can only go wild if it’s not your territory.”

True enough. Most Megalo didn’t care about collateral damage, wrecking buildings left and right. Not that I wanted any of that here.

Meanwhile, Haruna and Kyouko’s billiards match turned into something bizarre.

Haruna smacked the cue ball with all her might. “That was definitely a home run!” she said, throwing out her chest. Her boobs was philosophical, in that it existed only in theory.

“Come on! That’s not even billiards anymore!” Kyouko slapped the table in anger, her big chest bouncing wildly just from leaning forward.

“How do we play, then?” Big Teach spun her cue like a baton.

Hey, cut it out! That’s dangerous.

“You hit this white ball,” Kyouko explained, “then sink the numbered balls into the pockets in order.”

“Got it!” Haruna hurled the cue ball, cleanly knocking the one-ball straight into a pocket.

“That will have to do,” Kyouko muttered. She must have realized that no matter how angry she got, it meant nothing.

“It’s my turn,” Big Teach said.

“What? No, since Haruna sank a ball, she goes again.”

Big Teach picked up the cue ball. Thud. The white ball sank into the table, and a shockwave—no one knew how—knocked every ball around it straight into the pockets.

“What happens if they all go in at once like that?” Big Teach asked.

“What was that just now?”
“Magic?”
“Maybe the table’s just old.”

The spectators could not understand what they had just witnessed.

This was bad. I wanted to keep it secret that she was a Magiclad Girl. Things were bound to get messy otherwise.

I stood and headed toward Big Teach, like a coach storming over to argue with a referee.

Kyouko leaned close and whispered in her ear. “Excuse me, Teach. Could you take it easy?”

“I am taking it easy.”

“In this world, there aren’t really any games where you have fun by breaking things.”

“Oh, my. Is that supposed to be fun?”

Apparently, in the magic kingdom of Villiers, breaking things for fun was the norm.

“Teach, Teach!”

“Oh, Ayumu. Do you want to join?”

She placed her hand over the buried cue ball, and it popped into her palm as if sucked up by a vacuum. The cracked table also returned to normal. To the crowd, it must have looked like a video running in reverse. A chorus of amazement rose.

“How did you do that?!” Mihara, the trendiest of the bunch, gawked wide-eyed.

“How? Spacetime…”

“Someone, please explain the actual rules to her,” Kyouko cut in, raising her hand. Her chest bounced lightly, and the boys instantly forgot what happened just moments ago.

I used the distraction to lean close to Big Teach and suggested, “Could you keep it a secret that you’re a Magiclad Girl?”

“Huh? Why bother? I can just erase everyone’s memories of today later.”

So that was it. Haruna and the Magiclad Girls did whatever they wanted because they assumed they could fix things later.

Once you gain strange powers, the world starts revolving around you. I needed to be careful too.

“Explain the rules? Ah, Anderson’s good at that,” Mihara said as she pulled Anderson to his feet.

Anderson let himself get pushed toward Big Teach, who was smiling brightly while holding a cue stick. His face had turned dark brown.

“H-H-How do you d-d-do?” His jaw clattered like he just went to the Arctic naked to watch the aurora.

This is bad. Anderson’s gonna die from stress!

“Hellooo. Nice to meet you.” Big Teach, in contrast, was calm. If she realized Anderson was from the Underworld, there’d be no guarantee he’d live. Maybe he felt like a knife was pressed to his throat.

“Aikawa. Aikawa.” Kyouko beckoned me over.

I glanced at Anderson holding Big Teach’s hand, then walked to her side.

“What? I kept my word, so hurry up and tell me Chris’s weakness,” I said.

“Nope. Miss Ariel probably thinks she can just erase everyone’s memories if she gets found out. But I don’t want mine erased. I want everyone here to keep the memory of me as someone they had fun with at this mixer. So, if they find out we’re from another world, or that we’re Magiclad Girls, I’ll never tell you anything.”

“That’s not what we agreed upon.”

“It is. What’s the point of me even being here if their memory gets erased?”

“Fine. But promise me this. When this is over, you’ll tell me for real.”

“Ahaha! If you’re satisfied with a criminal’s verbal promise, I’ll promise you anything.”

Seriously, this girl always had a way of mocking me.

“Let’s continue,” Big Teach said, grabbing the cue ball.

What do I do? I had to keep her away from the table somehow. But how?

The balls in the pockets floated back up as if moved by telekinesis. Well, that was basically what it was.

“Mekawaruef, mekawaruef.” She started chanting some weird spell. Red mana gushed around her like a torrent.

What the hell was she planning to do?! Was she really having that much fun at this party? I recalled what Kyouko said earlier: Magiclad Girls’ games were all about destruction.

I looked at Kyouko. She shot me a flat stare that said, do something or we’re screwed.

I knew. No matter what she destroyed, it’d all be the same. At least they wouldn’t think she was Japanese.

What now? How do you stop a girl like this? Some weird act maybe, anything to break her focus on billiards.

Was this one of those moments? Like suddenly kissing her and saying, “Sorry, this is the only way I know to calm a girl down”? But I wasn’t nearly that smooth.

What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?

Before I could sort my thoughts, I had already dashed forward and grabbed the hem of her skirt.

And then, heave-ho! I threw up both arms.

The time between Big Teach grabbing the cue ball and me flipping her skirt was two seconds.

What the hell am I doing?

Her skirt fluttered wide. Beneath it, a cute string panties covered her small round butt. Priceless. If only time could stop here, how happy I’d be.

Yeah, I knew this was the most horrible thing I could do. But it was the only option I had in this desperate situation.

Big Teach turned, still holding the cue ball.

Gulp. My mind wasn’t on the dazzling pink underwear, but on the disaster about to unfold.

“Ayumu, do you even realize what you just did?! You jizzter!”

“Hey, jesters were professional entertainers, not perverts.”

Haruna’s high kick smashed straight into my temple.

“That’s Aikawa for you! Doing what the rest of us could never pull off, like it’s nothing. I’m mesmerized. And grossed out!”

Say whatever you want. For now, I figured I should at least apologize to Big Teach.

“Ayumu, how could you? Rie, please take this outside,” Kyouko said.

“You only have yourself to blame, Ayumu,” Haruna added. “Still, at least I won’t have to see your dumb face for a week.”

The two Magiclad Girls looked unusually grave. It wasn’t because they were disgusted with me. Something else was going on.

Big Teach slowly turned around.

“Ah, sorry about what I did just now,” I said.

Her lovely, childlike face was frozen in a smile. Not moving at all. Like a doll.

“Ayumu.” Same sweet, high-pitched voice. “Step outside with me. Now.”

She sounded like a thug picking a fight.