File 10: Sannuki-san and Karateka-san
File 10: Sannuki-san and Karateka-san
1
“You’ve grown a lot, Sorawo,” Toriko, who was sitting beside me, said not long after the semi-express to Hannou departed from Ikebukuro.
“What? My height?”
“Your hair.”
Toriko tried to touch my head with her right hand, so I dodged as I responded. “I haven’t cut it in a while. I think the last time was before I met you.”
“Half a year or so?”
“I guess? It’s starting to get annoying, I think. Should I cut it?”
“I think you’re fine as is.”
“You mean that?”
“Your hair is black and silky. I’m sure you’d be cute if you grew it out.”
I wasn’t the kind of person who was confident in my own appearance, but I sure didn’t mind hearing that from Toriko. “W-Well, maybe I’ll grow it out a bit then.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ll look great like that.” Toriko nodded happily.
To be honest, any time Toriko complimented me on my appearance, complicated feelings crossed my mind. It was clear to me that, no matter who was looking, when the two of us were side-by-side, she was the pretty one. Toriko had to be well aware she was beautiful, too.
But she didn’t hesitate to drop a compliment on me...
I was looking sideways at her as I pondered. Toriko noticed and looked me in the eye.
“Whaaaat?”
“Nothing.”
I looked away. It had been some months since we first met, but I still couldn’t get used to it at all. There’s a saying that goes, “You get used to beauty in three days,” but that’s a lie. Only someone who’d never met a truly beautiful person could say that. Today, Toriko was wearing a white V-neck shirt with light-colored denim jeans, a gray jacket, and a pair of sneakers. It was a simple outfit, but it was unfair how good Toriko made it look. I was wearing a striped sweatshirt, green cardigan, navy blue pants, and sneakers.
It had been a month since we encountered the Yamanoke. We had dived into the other world three times since then.
As we moved from the gate at Kozakura’s house to the gate in Jinbouchou using the AP-1, we planted the massive number of gardening poles we had bought and wrapped fluorescent tape around the ends of the poles to make them stand out more. That had at least secured a safe, glitch-free route for us. A highway of our own creation.
“But it’s possible the glitches move, and that new ones might be created, right?”
Toriko raised a fair point, but I had wanted to do this—badly. In fact, if it were possible, I’d have wanted to lay bricks, too. I’d wanted to explore and do expeditions since finding the other world. This was the first step.
I had dreamed of creating a place just for myself in an unfamiliar world. That dream had changed slightly now—it wasn’t just for myself, but for both Toriko and me. A place for both of us.
“We’re not gonna name the road?” Toriko asked as we were looking down from the roof of the skeletal building at the fluorescent tape reflecting the sunlight. It was on our third exploration, as we were preparing to head home.
“Name it?”
“Highways tend to have names, right? The Tokaido, the Silk Road, the Via Romana, Route 66...”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well then, we’ll take one kanji from each of our names, and call it the Soratori Road...”
“Yeah, no.”
“Why not?!”
Pretending not to see the look of genuine shock on Toriko’s face, I said, “Let’s keep it simple... It can be Route 1. In honor of the AP-1. It’s worked real hard for us.”
“Hm... Feels too simple, but if that’s your reasoning behind it...” Toriko groaned in consternation.
“Okay, Route 1 it is,” I tried to say as flatly as possible. Internally, I was a mess. Take one kanji from each of our names? What? Just the thought of it was embarrassing...
That was how the first road on our map of the other world came to be known as Route 1.
During these three exploration trips, we prioritized safety, and refrained from going anywhere new. Instead, we made good progress collecting anything strange that came across our path. That was purely for monetary reasons. Most of the things we picked up to sell to the DS Lab through Kozakura looked like nothing but garbage, and were, but a number of them were “hits.”
First, there was a photo we picked up at the revolving observational platform. The faces of the unknown family of four in the framed monochrome picture changed day by day, and sometimes they all turned into dogs.
Next, there was a pure white shirt. Initially it just looked like a piece of laundry that had been blown away from somewhere, but on closer inspection it had been woven from living plants that resembled extremely fine daikon radish sprouts. When we found it, we realized something was off when we couldn’t lift it up off the ground, so we dug it up along with the dirt under it.
Lastly, there was a black matchbox. There was only one match inside. When we opened it, it filled with a black liquid, and it didn’t spill out even when turned upside down.
We were successfully able to get the DS Lab to buy these off us as UB artifacts. Even with splitting the money with Toriko, I made enough to live off of for the immediate future.
...Which was little comfort because, on closer consideration, we still had the loan on the AP-1 to pay. That ate up a ton of it, and my financial situation was unclear once again in no time. I was going to have to find something again soon.
The reason we were riding the Seibu-Ikebukuro Line today was to go to Kozakura’s house in Shakujii-kouen and discuss the direction of our next expedition.
For the umpteenth time, I took a sideways glance at Toriko. Toriko was sitting there with an impassive look on her face, looking so calm I hated her for it.
The new information I had heard from her after our encounter with the Yamanoke had left me more than a little mixed up emotionally. It seemed she had a complicated family situation and had been raised by two mothers. “Mama” and “Mom.” Was Mama the soldier? From what Kozakura had told me, they were both deceased, but I hadn’t heard the details. Toriko hadn’t probed at my past since then, so I figured it was probably better if I didn’t ask questions, either.
That’s what I thought, at least.
But why had she told me that?
Did she want me to ask after all? But I didn’t know how to talk about other people’s families. I had none of the subtlety for it.
Besides, I had a lot more I needed to think about, too.
The shadow of Satsuki Uruma that had been stalking us since the Yamanoke incident did not appear on future trips. It was a little bit of a surprise after how persistently she’d trailed us before, but it was actually more worrying now that she had vanished. I had turned around several times when I thought I saw her during our trips, and that aroused Toriko’s suspicion. It felt like having a creepy bug hide when you looked away from it for a moment.
The train arrived at Shakujii-kouen Station. We walked the now-familiar course from the traffic circle in front of the station, through the shopping district, before continuing into the high-class residential area. Fall was in the air, and the heat of summer, which had lingered until just recently, seemed like nothing more than a lie now.
“How is Karateka-san doing lately?” Toriko asked as we were going down the hill, as if she had just suddenly remembered her.
“Ohh. She’s been quiet lately, now that you mention it. I feel like I haven’t seen her all week.”
Karateka—a girl in her first year at the same university I attended. Akari Seto. Ever since we helped her with the Ninja Cats, this willful kouhai of mine had taken a lot of interest in me. I didn’t want her hanging around me all the time, so I made a point of giving her the coolest reception I could.
“You think she finally gave up? Good, good.”
“I mean, with how cold you act, maybe she’s abandoned you? It’s not often you have a younger girl who looks up to you. You’ve got to take care of her.”
“That’s an irresponsible thing to say. The girl’s seen us carrying guns, yeah? You don’t want her sticking her head into this any deeper, do you?”
“Well, doesn’t that make providing aftercare all the more important? If she felt like it, she could have us arrested in an instant.”
“‘Aftercare’? What do you mean, exactly?” I asked.
“How about you stop giving her the cold shoulder and hear her out properly? That much should be easy.”
I glared at Toriko for saying that without a second thought. It wasn’t so easy for me, and I had already realized that, despite the self-important way Toriko was complaining, she didn’t have great communication skills herself. She could be awfully curt with people she was meeting for the first time, but then clingy around those she had opened up to. Fundamentally, she seemed unable to maintain a proper emotional distance from others.
“Besides, are you...” I started to say, then shut my mouth.
“What?”
“...Nothing.”
“Now I’m curious.”
“Don’t worry, it’s nothing.”
Besides, are you all right with that? How did Toriko feel about Akari?
They were both former students of Satsuki Uruma. Satsuki Uruma had been searching for partners to explore the other world, and during her work as a tutor, she tried to entice anyone who seemed they might prove useful. I had to wonder what she thought she was doing with high school students. Toriko had been shocked to learn her “friend” had been making contact with Akari at the same time.
I couldn’t accept the way that Toriko was still telling me I should get along with Karateka. Maybe she was saying it because the way I was so unsociable concerned her, but was there no jealousy there?
“If you’re going to start saying something, finish it! You’re making me curious.”
As I brushed off Toriko’s stubborn insistence, we arrived at Kozakura’s house. Crossing the overgrown lawn, and avoiding the gate to the other world that shimmered like a heat haze in front of the entrance, we climbed up onto the porch. Though the gate was not functional unless Toriko used her left hand to open it, I still had no desire to walk through it.
Toriko rang the bell, and then opened the front door with total familiarity.
“We’re heeeere... Oh!”
As she looked down, Toriko’s voice faded out. That made me look down, too, and I saw an unfamiliar pair of shoes left next to Kozakura’s clogs.
They were high-heeled lace-up boots.
I could hear friendly chatter from down the hall, on the left. One was Kozakura’s low voice, and the other voice was female, too. I couldn’t make out the details of the conversation, but things seemed peaceful enough.
“Who is it? Can you tell?” I asked, but Toriko shook her head.
“Other than me, Satsuki... and Migiwa, I have no idea who would come here.”
As we were talking in hushed voices, Kozakura called out from the other side of the door. “What’s taking you? Come on in.”
We looked at one another, then took off our shoes and went inside the house. I walked down the dark corridor, and opened the door.
“Hello... Wha?!”
As I poked my head in and saw the situation, the greeting evaporated from my mouth. In the reception room, across the table from Kozakura, was none other than the person we were just talking about.
“Sorry to intrude, Senpai!”
I stood there speechless as Karateka—Akari Seto—gave me a cheery smile.
2
“Why... are you here...?”
I managed to choke the words out, but my voice was probably still a bit shaky.
Had she tailed us? Used cameras? Wiretaps? The unsettling possibilities unfolded inside my head.
Why was she at Kozakura’s house, waiting for us? Had she seen us? Heard us? How much did she know? About us? Were we going to have to m-make her disappear? No, calm down. But...
I must have looked pretty pale, because Kozakura furrowed her brow. “Hey, Sorawo-chan, what’s the matter? Are you all right?” she asked.
“Ko... Kozakura-san. Why is—”
“I hear this girl is your kouhai. She came bearing gifts, even at such a young age. That makes her more considerate than the two of you, doesn’t it?”
In Kozakura’s hands was a colorful box that contained youkan jelly. It had been pre-cut for easy eating.
My gaze slowly moved to settle on Akari’s face. “Wh... What did you come here for...?”
There was a person who, unbeknownst to me, had information about me, and was acting on it. I couldn’t stand it. Probably because of the trouble the cult had caused me.
“Says she has something to talk to you about,” Kozakura said, and Akari nodded.
“I’m here because there’s something I wanted to ask you about, Sorawo-senpai, Toriko-san. I tried to bring it up at school a number of times, Senpai, but you seem so busy lately.”
Now that she mentioned it, she had... I hadn’t thought much of it, though.
“I’d heard about Kozakura-san from Uruma-sensei. That she had a friend who lived alone in Shakujii-kouen.”
“How is that connected to me?” I asked.
“You said it yourself, Senpai. You gather in Shakujii-kouen to talk about things. That made it click. ‘Oh, it must be the same person!’”
Huh? Did I say that...? It’s true that I’ve been annoyed enough by Akari following me around that my responses have been getting pretty lazy. But would I let information slip like that...?
Maybe my confusion had shown on my face, because Akari’s eyes darted up and to the left.
...Hold on, was she tailing me after all?
“You heard her. Pretty clever kouhai you’ve got, hm?” Kozakura seemed strangely smiley in her own way. Was she excited to have a guest for the first time in a while? “How long are you going to just stand there? Sit down already.”
“Oh, right...”
Me and Toriko sat down in some empty chairs. There was tea on the table, perhaps to go with the youkan. The hot tea that Toriko and I had never been served.
“What’s the matter? Why so dazed? Make some tea for yourselves if you want,” Kozakura said.
“Right... I’ll have some.” In order to calm myself down, I put some water from the kettle into the teapot, and poured tea for Toriko and me. I took a sip and scowled despite myself. Was this tea too old? How long had it been in the canister...?
“Oh! Come to think of it, Toriko-san, you were one of Uruma-sensei’s students like me, right?” Akari let that one loose with no forewarning, and I nearly spewed my tea.
“Well, yeah,” Toriko replied nonchalantly.
“I heard she’d gone missing. Have you had any contact since—”
“Nothing, no.”
“I see... If I figure anything out, I’ll let you know, too.”
“Thanks.”
Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of an obsession with Satsuki Uruma from the way Akari spoke. On the other hand, it was hard to tell how Toriko really felt based on her reaction. Her responses were curt, but that was always true of Toriko when she was in her shy mode. It was scary how brusque she was when we were talking to the U.S. forces at Kisaragi Station.
“More importantly, what was it you wanted to ask about? If you’re coming to Sorawo with this, something bizarre must have happened, right?” Toriko asked, and Akari nodded.
“Something has, in fact.”
“More ninja cats?”
“No, that matter’s been completely resolved. I haven’t been attacked since.”
“Well... that’s good.”
“It is. Now, about what I wanted to ask. This isn’t happening to me, it’s happening to a friend. The thing is—”
“Wh-Whoa, hold up! I haven’t said a word about helping yet,” I hurriedly tried to put a stop to this, but Kozakura raised her voice.
“What’re you saying? How about you stop being mean and help her out?”
I stared back at Kozakura.
“You can’t just abandon your kouhai when she’s in trouble. I mean, she came all this way because she relies on you, Sorawo-chan.”
“Kozakura-san...?”
I was getting more and more scared. Why would she say that? Did she like Akari that much? How was this kouhai of mine so shrewd? Had she used some unknown communication method that I could never imagine to make a difficult woman like Kozakura cave in to her?
“Um, are you sure about that, Kozakura-san? Is that really all right?” I asked.
“How so?”
“I mean, she’s one of Satsuki-san’s students. Honestly, you must have some thoughts about that.”
“Listen, Sorawo-chan,” Kozakura said, her smile growing even stronger. “Me, I don’t want to get involved in any more creepy stories than I already have. Never. Not for anyone, okay? Do you understand?”
Oh.
“Kouhai-chan here has come all this way, so, please, stow your complaints, and help her out, or whatever it takes, and take care of this somewhere other than my house. Okay? You get it? Is what I’m saying getting through to you?”
“P... Probably, yes.”
Oh, I got it. Basically, Kozakura was pretty mad. An uninvited guest had turned up, and she was afraid of being caught up in something again... Though, if she wasn’t being played by Akari’s communication skills, that was some small relief, at least.
“...What do you think, Toriko?” I asked hesitantly. She’d been very quiet for a while now.
“I’ve been saying it all along, haven’t I? Let’s lend her a hand. A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
“Well... You would say that, Toriko.” I slumped against the back of the sofa. “Siiiigh, fine. I get it. I’ll hear you out.”
“Thank you so much, Senpai!”
I watched with exasperation as Akari’s face lit up. “So, what is it? This was about your friend, right? What’s attacking now?”
“There’s nothing... attacking.” Akari hesitated a moment, and then a strange name came to her lips. “Have you heard of... Sannukikano?”
3
“It was about a month ago when I got a call from my friend, Nattsun.”
“Nattsun.”
“Oh, her full name is Natsumi Ichikawa. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and she lives real close by.”
By “close by,” she meant near the university that Akari and I both attended.
“Is she in the same year as you?”
“Oh, Nattsun’s not a student. She’s the same age as me, but her family runs a workshop. She had already started helping out there when we were in high school, and she still is now.”
“Hmm.”
“Nattsun called me, and she said, ‘There’s a weird monkey in the yard.’”
“A weird monkey?”
“She sent pictures—here, look.”
She showed me the screen of her phone—there was an image of a furry creature sitting on a garden stone. It looked like a Japanese macaque that was facing away from the camera, but when Akari slid her finger across the screen, that impression was dispelled.
“Ugh, what even is that? It’s not a monkey, right?” Toriko, who was looking at the screen with me, raised her voice.
Just as she said, the face turned towards us in the second picture was not that of a monkey. It had a human-like expression, with a faint smile, like something was funny. Its body was all monkey, though. If there was a creature that was somewhere between monkey and human, I had a feeling it would have looked a lot like this.
Akari tried to show Kozakura the screen, too, but Kozakura just leaned away with a smile still on her face. I felt a strong will to not subject herself to anything scary coming from that smile.
“According to Nattsun, this monkey talked to her.”
“Hmm. And?”
When I indicated she should go on, Akari got a mystified look on her face. “Uh, does this kind of thing happen often, maybe?”
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t really react to hearing that the monkey spoke.”
“I mean, if cats can be ninjas, I’m sure monkeys can talk, too,” I said.
“I-I see...”
“So, what did it say?”
“Oh, right. If I recall...”
According to the explanation Akari gave, the monkey approached “Nattsun” and said this:
“Sannukikano will be coming, so show her this. If you say you took it yourself, she will give you one, too. Bury it in the yard afterward.”
Then it left in a hurry. There was something that had fallen where the monkey had been, so she took a closer look, and...
“It was teeth, right? Human teeth,” I said.
Akari’s eyes widened.
“How did you know?!”
“I mean, I know that story.”
Akari, Toriko, and Kozakura’s eyes all focused on me, and I shifted around in my seat restlessly.
Sannukikano. With that distinctive of a name, it was easy for me to find it in my memories of net lore. It wasn’t a well-known story, but it went more or less the same way. If I recall, some days later, an old crone named Sannukikano did come to visit. Once the narrator did as the monkey said—showing her the teeth and saying they had taken them themselves—the crone gave them more teeth. They buried the teeth they were left with, and the story ended there. It was a strange story, with the motivations and basis for the aberration’s actions remaining unclear.
When I explained that, Akari’s eyes lit up.
“W... Wow! Wow! I knew you were the person to talk to, Senpai! I never knew there was a story like that!”
“Yeah, well, if you search online, I think you’ll find it... So, did Sannukikano come?”
“The thing about that is... Nattsun chucked the teeth.”
“Huh?”
“Ever since she did, her family has been getting hurt, strange people have followed her around, and all sorts of unpleasant things have been happening. I just happened to hear about it when I met her recently, but it sounds like it’s pretty awful. That’s why I was thinking we should get expert help.”
But I’m not an expert.
Like with the ninja cats, I felt like the stories I heard from Akari reproduced the ones I had read online almost exactly, even though the person directly experiencing the events, whether that was Akari or “Nattsun,” wasn’t familiar with the original story.
Each time the other world had tried to make contact with me before now, it had used scary stories inside my head as a sort of template. But now that I saw people who didn’t have my familiarity with net lore and true ghost stories having experiences that followed that template, the theory was on shaky ground.
No... Maybe...?
As I thought about it, Toriko spoke up. “Sounds like another one involving the other world, right?”
“Yes... maybe,” I replied half-heartedly, but a strange thought was occurring to me.
There was someone in the depths of the other world that was aware of us. On the beach in Okinawa, we had been called by our names—Sorawo Kamikoshi and Toriko Nishina—so I had no doubt of that.
Were “they” trying to harass us here in the surface world?
Could it be that this entire sequence of events—from Akari and her friend having this bizarre encounter, to their coming to us for help—was targeting Toriko and me...?
Unconsciously, my hand had gone to my right thigh. In the other world, that was where the holster with my Makarov would always be.
During the ninja cats incident, Akari found out we had guns. I couldn’t take any further risk of getting busted for violating the firearm and sword law.
Still, if I wasn’t going to walk around with a gun, then how was I supposed to protect myself if we encountered an entity from the other world on this side?
4
I took the Saikyo Line to Minami-Yono with Toriko and Akari, and we got on a bus at the traffic circle. If we rode for another ten minutes or so, we would arrive at the university, and right by my apartment, but this time we disembarked along the way there.
Akari was taking us to “Nattsun”’s house... or rather her family’s workshop a little way off the main road.
The building bore a faded sign that read Ichikawa Automobile Repair Shop. In the workshop where the smell of oil and metal welding hung in the air, there were two vehicles: a kei car and a van. There were two legs sticking out from under the van, which had been lifted up on a jack.
“Nattsun, got a moment?” Akari called out, and the legs moved. The person who had been doing the work came out from under the van on what looked like a skateboard. It was a young woman wearing a gray jumpsuit. Her red hair with dark roots was tied up at the back of her head. My first impression, honestly, was that she looked like a delinquent.
“Akari, what’s up? You message me on LINE?”
“Sure did.”
“Sorry, wasn’t looking.”
“Geez. I told you to keep an eye on it.”
When she talked to “Nattsun,” Akari’s tone was a lot more relaxed and casual than when she spoke to me. I guess she’s actually trying to be polite, I thought as Akari indicated towards us.
“You know how I was saying I might be able to get you some expert help? Well, they’re here.”
“For real? Sorry to put you out like this...”
“Nattsun”’s eyes went over Akari’s shoulders... and right past me to stop on Toriko’s face. She blinked repeatedly, as if taken aback.
“Hey. The name’s Ichikawa. Kamikoshi-senpai, right? Sorry for the trouble.”
“Ah, Nattsun! No, no, that’s Toriko-san. This is Kamikoshi-senpai,” Akari explained.
Her eyes turned to me.
“Oh...! Huh, really? This is Kamikoshi-senpai? ...Hmm.”
Whoa, what was this attitude? Was she looking down on me? I was a bit miffed, but Akari was getting excited about something.
“They’re both experts on this kind of thing, so I’m sure they can help you, too! Tell Senpai about it.”
“Hmm, well... I don’t mind,” “Nattsun” said, looking not at all convinced. She made no attempt to hide her suspicion of me.
Well, I couldn’t blame her. I looked like a gloomy otaku, so I couldn’t imagine myself and a delinquent like her getting along all that great. If she was giving me this treatment after I came all this way here, I didn’t care much for her, either.
“Oh, it’s fine. If you don’t need me, I’ll be going—” I started to say, but Toriko cut me off.
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
Toriko was pointing at “Nattsun”’s hand. I took a look, and her dirty white-gloved hands were holding a mass of hair. There were even what looked like torn bits of flesh attached to it here and there.
“Nattsun” looked down at what she was holding, and scowled.
“This stuff’s wrapped all around the drive shaft...”
She tossed it into an empty paint can with an irritated click of her tongue, and I heard a gross splattering sound from inside.
“Heard the car wasn’t in an accident, though. Happens a lot lately.”
Toriko and I looked at one another.
“Nattsun” took off her gloves, then, reconsidering, she said, “Yeah, since you’re here already... would you mind coming with me a bit?”
“Nattsun”—Natsumi Ichikawa—took us around to the back of the workshop where the house was. When we went further around behind the old-style one-story home, there was a surprisingly large yard. They might have been landlords at some point in the past. In between the green garden trees, there were a number of large garden stones. Pointing to one of them, Natsumi said, “That’s where it was. The monkey. Was gonna snap a pic for Instagram, since you don’t see them often, but it turned this way and started talking to me. ‘Zannuki’s coming, too bad for you’ or something like that.”
“Zannuki? Not Sannukikano?” Akari interjected.
“Kano? Wuzzat?”
“No, you said it before. Quite clearly.”
“No way. I don’t remember.” Natsumi’s brow furrowed. “I dunno if it was San or Zan, or whatever, but I wasn’t hearing the monkey’s words with my ears. They were right inside my head. So, I got spooked, and the monkey bolted. Next thing I knew, there were teeth at my feet.”
“Do you still have them?” I asked, and Natsumi shook her head.
“It was creepy, so I tossed them right away. Bad idea?”
“Nah, of course you would do that.”
I couldn’t blame her. I mean, it was the logical thing to do. That she threw away the teeth was a deviation from the original net lore, but doing as the monkey said was clearly aberrant behavior to begin with.
“But still, can’t help but think I messed up. It’s all gone to hell since.”
“Gone to hell?”
“Think it was three days after the monkey? Some old lady was hanging from that tree.”
“Wha...”
She was pointing towards a pine tree at the edge of the garden. One of the thick lower branches had been cut down at an odd place, and the cut was fresh.
“Had no idea who she was, so I was at a real loss. Why’d she have to go and die in our yard...? The police came, and they asked all kinds of questions, but I didn’t have a clue.”
What? In the Sannukikano story, the old woman came, but she didn’t die there or anything.
“Everything’s been kind of crazy since... My old man got caught under a car he was working on when the jack came loose, and it busted his ribs. Mom got involved in a hit-and-run...”
“Huh?! Are they okay?!” Toriko asked.
Natsumi let out a sigh. “Both of them are in the hospital, so I gotta take care of everything around the house. There’s been all sorts of other weirdness... I get nothing but vehicles that look like they were in accidents coming in for repair, and there’s been a ton of reports of suspicious people, too. This one old fart with a knife came towards me smiling, so I bashed him with a wrench. Then I got this creepy phone call in the middle of the night that was just a woman laughing.”
“Nattsun...”
When Natsumi’s tone became more and more agitated, Akari gave her a reassuring pat on the head. Then, sighing again, Natsumi continued.
“Kamikoshi-senpai... was it? You think this is really my own fault? I heard you helped Akari before, but is there even any helping me with this?”
The way true ghost stories worked was unreasonable. It was like being forced to play a shitty game where the goal and the rules were poorly defined. On top of that, if you messed up, the penalties were massive. One mistake could mean death, madness, or a curse on your entire family.
“Senpai, isn’t this, you know, like my thing with the ninja cats?”
I nodded reluctantly. When the ninja cats attacked, the area around her got weird—that was how Akari once described the transition into the interstitial space between the surface world and the other world.
“What should we do this time?”
“Hrm...”
As I was struggling for words, there was a tap on my shoulder, and Toriko spoke. “It’s simple, isn’t it? We just do the usual.”
“The usual?”
“You look at it with your right eye, and I—”
“Let me just remind you, we can’t use these.”
I made the shape of a gun with my right hand, and Toriko’s eyes widened.
“Oh!”
“No, not, ‘Oh!’ Geez.”
Still, after coming all this way, I knew I probably couldn’t just go home and abandon them. Even I had that much empathy. I turned to Natsumi, who was sticking close to Akari. “For now... how about we look for the missing teeth?”
5
I had the other three back away, then focused on my right eye. If the teeth the monkey gave her were from the other world, I’d be able to distinguish them by their silver halo.
However, based on past experience, that rule didn’t always apply. If I brought back a pebble from the other world, it would just be a little piece of rock with no halo in this one.
I walked around the yard, surveying the area. The grass was long, the trees overgrown, and the water in the pond was full of green algae. It was, on the whole, in a sorry state. Natsumi said she randomly discarded the teeth, so if they were here, they wouldn’t be that far away.
I turned back, looking through my left eye, and the other three looked at me and gulped. The way I was walking around, searching for a thing other people couldn’t see, I looked like a medium on one of those shows about ghosts. When I thought of it that way, it kind of killed my enthusiasm.
“How’s it look, Senpai?” Akari shouted, but I shook my head.
“No luck. I don’t see anything that looks like it. Ichikawa-san, did you throw it this far?”
“Nah, I just kicked and scattered them, so if they’re around at all, they should be here.”
“Haven’t they already been taken?” Toriko asked plainly.
“By who?”
“Sannuki-san.”
“She just came and took them, you mean?”
“That, or maybe the lady hanging from the tree was Sannuki-san.” Toriko was just saying whatever came to mind.
“Do you think she was shocked when she wasn’t given the teeth?”
“Akari, we don’t need to dig into it,” I couldn’t help but interrupt.
I didn’t want to be made fun of for anthropomorphizing the aberrations that appeared in true ghost stories, or rather, for trying to give them motives that a human could understand. It was... a difference in interpretation, I suppose. To accept scary things as scary, and the unknowable as unknowable—that, I felt, was the proper way to interact with true ghost stories. I think it was a pretty tiresome line of thought, but I had never talked about it with anyone, so give me a break.
Well, I had put a fair number of bullets in those aberrations by this point, to be honest.
“It’s really not anywhere... Huh?”
Just as I gave up on finding the teeth and looked up, by the edge of the garden, at the foot of a ginkgo tree, I spotted an unnatural disturbance in the ground. The dirt was raised, like someone had dug there, then filled the hole back in.
“Did you find them, Sorawo?” Toriko asked.
I turned back to her. “There’s something buried here. Do you have anything we can dig with?”
Natsumi brought a shovel from the repair shop to dig. Eventually the tip of it struck something hard, and a ceramic jar appeared from under the dirt. It was big enough where I needed both hands to lift it up, and it had a white glaze on it.
Akari crouched down and scrutinized it closely. “It’s like a burial urn.”
“Ichikawa-san, do you know anything about this?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Can we open it?”
Natsumi nodded. I took the shovel from her, hooked it under the lid of the urn, and lifted it.
“Whoa...!” I cried out despite myself. That burial urn guess hadn’t been far off mark—it was filled with a massive number of teeth.
Yellowed teeth, taken from who knows how many people, filled the urn to the brim. There were teeth with fillings, and unblemished white teeth mixed in, too. We figured the urn had been buried relatively recently.
“What is this? Gross...!” Natsumi groaned after looking into the urn.
“Can you tell if the teeth the monkey gave you are in here?”
“As if I could tell them apart. There weren’t anywhere near this many.”
“Hey, Sorawo. Here, too...”
I looked over when Toriko called my name. She was standing in front of a garden stone, looking at it. There were the same signs of the ground having been dug up, then filled back in.
We looked at each other. I silently thrust the shovel into the earth.
What came up wasn’t an urn... but bones.
For an instant, I panicked, thinking I’d turned up a human corpse, but the bone and body structure were completely different. It was likely a dog. I say “likely” because it cut off abruptly at the neck, and just the skull bones were missing.
“Senpai... Is this one, too?”
The spot Akari found had a miniature Japanese-style house made of plain wood. It had been badly slashed with some sort of blade, and black paint had been splattered over it.
“It’s a household shrine,” I said, and Natsumi had a sudden realization.
“Seriously? This is ours.”
“It’s yours?”
“We had a household shrine in the repair shop, but I haven’t seen it in a while.”
“Does that mean someone removed and buried it?”
“It feels kinda like there’s a curse or something being cast here...” Akari said quietly.
“Do you recognize the urn or the dog?” I asked, but Natsumi shook her head.
We looked around the yard. In a span of ten minutes, we had found three items that felt like concentrated malice. If we took our time searching, there might have been even more.
Natsumi stood there, unsure of what to do. Her tough girl persona was gone, and she looked like a forlorn little girl. Akari walked over next to her and took her hand. Without saying a word, Natsumi lowered her gaze and gripped her hand in return.
“Normally, it might be best to report this to the police as harassment, but they probably aren’t going to take this seriously,” I said.
“We don’t really want to approach the police anyway,” Toriko whispered.
Honestly, there was some element of truth to that. I was feeling pretty numbed, and I had just accepted it because I had no choice, but we were anti-social university students who were violating the firearm and sword law on a daily basis.
“Let’s see if we can find anything else. Maybe if we destroy all of this it’ll improve the situation.”
I have to admit, it was a haphazard plan, but the other three nodded.
The four of us split up and looked around the yard. In addition to the stuff that was buried, we looked for anything that seemed out of place and anything hanging from the trees. Neither Toriko or I knew what this place was originally like, so any time something caught our eye, we called Natsumi over to check it.
“Hey, Natsumi, would you happen to have been taking lessons from Satsuki, too?” Toriko subtly asked.
“Who’s Satsuki?”
“Satsuki Uruma. Tall, long black hair, wears glasses...”
“She’s talking about my tutor, Nattsun.”
With that added explanation from Akari, she seemed to get it. “Oh, I’ve seen her. We didn’t know each other, though.”
“Hmm, I see. Oh, I’m gonna go look over there.” Toriko cut off the conversation with obvious relief and headed over to some overgrown bushes on the other side of the yard. She’d asked what she wanted to, then took off. Toriko Nishina: a woman who was surprisingly inept at talking to anyone she didn’t already know...
“Ah! Toriko-san, watch your feet over there. There’s a bamboo grove in the back, so you’ll be in real trouble if you trip!”Akari called out, hurrying after Toriko. The next thing I knew, I was alone with Natsumi.
Aw, crap. I had no place calling out Toriko for her poor communication skills when I was so bad at talking to people I didn’t know myself.
“...We weren’t acquainted, no.”
I was surprised when Natsumi started talking to me.
“Huh?”
“I knew her as Akari’s tutor, ‘Satsuki-san.’ But I never liked her, you know.”
“You didn’t?”
“I dunno, the woman was scary. I saw her walking with Akari from a distance one time, and even though I didn’t do anything, she suddenly turns and looks at me. I went, ‘Whoa.’ It was a different type of fear than I got from the senpai at my school. She was creepy. And...”
Natsumi looked over to Akari, who was talking with Toriko on the other side of the yard, then continued.“...I was afraid she would take Akari away.”
“Akari-chan? Why?”
“She was awfully close to Akari... and Akari seemed attached to her, too, in her own way. I was really worried that she was being tricked by a bad adult. I mean, she’s cute, you know? That’s why she’s always had people calling out to her. When we were kids, I’d chase off the worst of them, but once she started taking karate, she got stronger than me.”
I never asked any of this, but Natsumi went on, as if deriding herself.
“Even now, Akari will tell me, ‘You’re so tough and reliable, Nattsun,’ but honestly she’s way stronger. I mean, in high school, she won a local tournament and went to the nationals. There’s nothing I can do for her anymore, is there?”
“Ichikawa-san...”
I was shaken.
Why’re you telling me, a total stranger, your life story like this? Scary... Or what? Are you another woman who can’t keep a proper emotional distance from other people? If so, even though she’s a delinquent, there might be some common ground between us, I was thinking when Natsumi turned and looked at me.
“Honestly, I was wary of ‘Kamikoshi-senpai,’ too.”
“Huh?”
“Akari was always telling me how great you are, Senpai. Like, how you saved her from ninja cats? Or something? And how you’re super reliable. Then I heard you were connected to that tutor, and I thought you were bad news, too.”
“I’m not connected to her, Toriko is...”
“Ah, yeah, I got the shivers the first time I saw Toriko-san. I thought, if it was a beauty like her, I couldn’t blame Akari for praising her. But when I heard that you’re ‘Kamikoshi-senpai,’ I went, ‘Huh?’”
“Huh?”
Huh?
“But... You really are an expert, huh? Sorry I was rude.”
Was rude? She was still being rude to me, now, in the present tense, wasn’t she?
“Your personality is a real mystery, Kamikoshi-senpai. You look like a gloomy otaku, but you don’t get scared like I’d expect.”
“You don’t have to tell me every single thing you think, okay?!”
I had been through some scary stuff before now, but I still couldn’t quite get used to terror and malice. If there was one thing that separated me from Akari and Natsumi, it was experience. I couldn’t deny that the reason this delinquent didn’t scare me was because I could shoot her any time.
Natsumi lowered her head. “I don’t really get it, but I did something wrong, and that’s brought a curse or something on us, right? That’s what this is,” she mumbled.
Her sudden shift from rude mode to depressed mode was too much for me to keep up with emotionally. My mouth hung open for a few seconds, but I managed to recover and respond. “Well... Not necessarily. This stuff is like getting in an accident. It’s bad luck you encountered it in the first place, and it’s probably no one’s fault.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Someone put a curse on my family, right? Because I didn’t hand over the teeth.”
Oh, that’s where the difference in understanding was.
“How should I put this? When it comes to these things, it’s not about cause and effect. It wasn’t inevitable that you would encounter a telepathic monkey, right, Ichikawa-san? From the beginning, nothing about this was logical. That’s why it’s the same for the events that followed. Like, take that pot full of teeth. It’s the sort of thing that would make you think you’re cursed for sure, but you’re just caught up in a single chain of events, and I don’t think there’s any point in thinking about the meaning behind any single part of the process.”
“That’s why it’s an ‘accident’?” Natsumi asked.
“Yeah, that’s right. It might be closer to an illness, or a disaster, actually. If you look for the cause of an accident, an illness, or a disaster... they exist, sure. But there’s no reason to the ‘why did this have to happen to me?’ part. So you don’t need to think you messed up.”
“I kinda get it... but I don’t want to get Akari involved in that accident. I do want help, of course, but...”
“Yeah...”
All I can do is look, I may not be able to save you... is what I wanted to say, but I stopped short of doing so.
A certain calculating idea came into my head. “Well... I’ll try to help, but can I expect a reward?” I asked.
“How much are we talking?”
“Not money... Would you be able to customize a vehicle for us?”
Natsumi blinked, as if caught by surprise.
“Customize it? Sure, it’s possible...”
“Is it okay if it’s a farm work vehicle?”
The confusion on Natsumi’s face only grew. When I was about to explain the AP-1, I realized Toriko and Akari were staring in our direction.
“Huh? What?” I asked, standing there.
“Sorawo, behind you!” Toriko shouted.
6
Natsumi and I turned in unison. I was looking at the tree with one branch cut off; there was a figure wearing a kimono standing at the foot of it.
It was an old lady in an elegant kimono, but the way she was half bent over was unnatural.
When had she appeared? I hadn’t noticed at all.
“Who’re you?” Natsumi asked, and the old woman responded.
“I am Sannukikano.”
Toriko and Akari ran over, gathering the four of us in one corner of the yard. The old woman who called herself Sannukikano was smiling.
“What’re you here for?” Natsumi said intimidatingly.
“Because I did not receive them.”
“Huh?”
“I did not receive the teeth, so I cannot give them to you.”
“What’re you going on about?”
“Now, I must take them with me, it seems.”
The moment the old woman said that, Natsumi let out a congested groan, and bent over.
“Ichikawa-san?”
Natsumi covered her mouth with her hands. I saw red strings dripping through the gaps in her fingers. Blood fell to the ground, and something white fell there.
It was a tooth.
“Whuh... What is this?!” Natsumi screamed, blood erupting from her mouth.
“That is one,” the old woman said, still smiling.
“Nattsun!” Akari ran up and took on a karate stance. “What’re you doing to Nattsun, you hag?!”
That shout, louder than I expected from her small body, made me cower for a moment. But the old woman was unfazed.
“I am Sannukikano.”
There was no emotion as she repeated the same line from before. No doubt about it, this was a “phenomenon” from the other world.
“Akari, no.” Natsumi tried to stop her, still covering her mouth, but Akari didn’t turn around.
“You stay back, Nattsun,” she said.
Standing next to me, Toriko had her hand in her tote bag. Our eyes met. She was telling me she could draw her gun at any time, but I gave a short shake of my head. No, Toriko. We don’t know the situation yet.
I focused on my right eye in order to pull back the veil of reality—to see Sannukikano’s true form.
The old woman blurred, and something entirely different appeared.
There were five dead monkey mummies intertwined at the core of the thing, and countless human teeth whirling around it like a swarm of mosquitoes. That grotesque form that was not even remotely human made me back away in spite of myself. The mummies’ mouths moved, and a human voice sounded from those pure black cavities.
“Karateka-san, may I take them?” Sannukikano, stripped of its old woman form, asked Akari. A moment later, I realized—That thing just used the nickname I made up for Akari!
But Akari wasn’t distracted by that. “Shut up. You aren’t getting a thing,” she muttered angrily, gradually closing the distance. However, she wasn’t attacking; I could see she was hesitating to throw a punch. That was to be expected, of course. In her eyes, she was facing a little old lady.
The teeth whirling around Sannukikano changed the way they were moving, as though they were taking aim. The whorl approached Akari, and she cried out.
“...Ow.”
There was another white tooth in the blood that Akari spat out.
“Two,” Sannukikano counted.
“Sorawo, can I?” Toriko asked impatiently, and I shouted despite myself.
“No! Stay back, Toriko!”
“Huh? Just hold on...”
“Absolutely not! Just listen to me! Stay!”
“‘Stay?’”
“Okay?!”
“O-Okay...”
Though she looked at me with confusion, Toriko must have been surprised by my intensity, because she backed down.
It was true that guns might work, but we just couldn’t use them. It would be beyond bad to open fire in a residential area like this. Besides... if she opened fire, the enemy would target her. No way was I going to let that thing touch Toriko’s teeth!
“Akari! That thing isn’t human! You can clobber it!” I shouted.
“I-It’s not, Senpai?!”
“It’s fine! Go to town on it! You tried to kick a ninja cat, didn’t you? It’s the same! If you can kick a cat, you can kick a weird old woman, too!”
“You’re making me sound too awful, Senpai! That one came at me with a blade, so I had to protect myself, and... wait, what does this one have?! What’d it do to me?! And Nattsun, too!”
“It pulled out your tooth incredibly fast. Hurry, or it’ll get you again.”
“Seriously? But...”
Even after I told her all that, Akari was still hesitating.
Fine then. This is an emergency... Sorry, but I’ll be using that karate of yours.
“Okay, Akari. Listen to me. I’ll be looking at you.”
“Senpai?”
“Because I’m looking, you are strong. Your karate will work on any monster.”
I focused my right eye not just on Sannukikano, but on Akari, too.
“Go get it, Karateka.”
For an instant, Akari stopped, then let out a chuckle. Up until then, there had been no openings in her stance, but suddenly she relaxed. She moved her head left, then right, cracking her neck.
“Ngh. Heheh. Yeah, that’s right. I’m tough. Heheh.”
“Akari...?” Natsumi called out to her, sounding suspicious.
“Sorry, Nattsun. I took too long. So it pulled out your tooth. Heheh. Mine, too. Heheheh.”
“Akari, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong. I’m just pissed. You hurt Nattsun. Don’t screw with us, you old hag. You’re gonna need dentures when I’m done with you,” Akari said in a threatening voice, then kicked off from the ground. She landed a flying kick more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen right on Sannukikano. Her opponent was staggered, and Akari landed on the ground, then hit it with a combo of three thrusting kicks.
With fists, elbows, fingers, legs, and headbutts, she unleashed a combination of attacks that went faster than my eyes could follow. Each time she struck, there was a dull echo, and chunks of monkey mummy and teeth would go flying like black and white blood.
I had no knowledge of martial arts or combat sports, so I couldn’t have told you what was happening, but Natsumi and Toriko’s intermittent cries of, “Whoa,” “Whaa,” “Eek,” and, “Ohh,” allowed me to infer that something pretty nasty was going on. Come to think of it, Sannukikano looked human to everyone but me.
I’d done this for just a moment with the ninja cats. If I looked closely at someone with my right eye, it made them go a little crazy. When there was no other option, having an insane karate monster on our side was more reliable than anything.
As long as she was on our side.
The way Akari was now, she had simply lost her mind, not been given some ability to touch beings from the other world. If I had my right eye on the enemy, physical attacks would still work. It didn’t matter whether those attacks were made with bullets, or fists.
“Uh, Sorawo, don’t you think that’s enough...?”
Toriko gave me a hesitant tap on the shoulder. I looked over, and Akari was standing on top of the fallen Sannukikano, unleashing an incredible flurry of punches on the thing. In my right eye, I saw the teeth had been scattered all over, and the monkey mummies had been torn limb from limb.
Diverting my focus away from my right eye, I called out to Akari. “Akari! That’s enough!”
She came to a sudden stop. At the same time, the wind blew past, blowing away the remains on the ground. I covered my face with my hands reflexively. When the wind passed and I opened my eyes, there was nothing left.
“Huh...? She’s gone?” Natsumi mumbled, dumbfounded.
Focusing away from my right eye, I looked around the area. The sense that the area was in a state of decay weakened, and the air around us seemed to change.
It might have been that, without us noticing it, we had been brought into that dangerous interstitial area.
Then Akari came running towards me, sparkles in her eyes. “Senpaaai! I did it! I really did it!”
The way she came at me, out of breath, was almost like a big dog. There was blood dripping from the corners of her mouth. She hugged me without killing her momentum at all, so I nearly got bowled over.
“Gweh.”
“I was able to beat the monster! It’s because you were looking, Senpai!”
“Y-Yeah, uh, good work,” I replied as she gave me a bear hug and swung me around.
“Hahhh, I just don’t know how to describe it, but it felt super good! Like something inside me that had been holding me back was blown away.”
“O-Oh, yeah? Good for you.”
“Yessss. Oh, and... When you look at me, Senpai, it makes my heart race. I wonder what this feeling is...”
“That? Y-You’re misunderstanding it, okay?”
“A-Akariii...” Natsumi called her name, sounding like she was about to cry. She had blood dripping from the corners of her mouth, too. Akari quickly let go of me and gave Natsumi an energetic hug.
“Nattsun! Sorry, sorry! Were you watching? Hey, was I tough, or what?”
“Y-Yeah, you were super cool. You scared me a bit, though.”
“Heheh, I’ll bet!”
Akari hugged Natsumi—who was taller than her—tightly, and swung her around.
“You’re the strongest, Akari. You don’t even need me anymore, huh?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I mean, I can’t do anything for you now. Kamikoshi-senpai is way better...”
“Nattsun, Nattsun—that’s not true at all, okay? Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying, okay?! It’s just, you keep on saying, ‘Senpai, Senpai.’”
“There, there. Everything’s all right now, okay?”
Rubbing her back and head as she hugged her, Akari comforted Natsumi.
“Natsumi-chan and Akari-chan get along really, really well, huh?” Toriko whispered in my ear.
“Looks like it. She was calling her cute earlier, too.”
Toriko stared at me as I made that unconcerned reply. “Sorawo, you did something with your right eye, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Don’t use it on Akari too much. I feel bad for her.”
“I know.”
“Do you really? Look at me, Sorawo.”
Toriko seemed kind of upset, and if I left her like this, I had a feeling like she might start lecturing me. Looking at the other two, who were ignoring us and enjoying an intimate moment, I decided to change the topic.
“Toriko, you call me cute pretty often, like Natsumi-chan does to Akari, don’t you?”
Toriko looked back at me in silence, blinking intensely. That shook her more than I expected. “...Maybe I do.”
“What part of me are you looking at that makes you think that?”
“Huh...? Your eyes... and your mouth... and your hair, maybe...?”
“Hmm.”
That’s not enough to go on to figure out what she likes, huh?
Having finally calmed down, Natsumi and Akari came over.
“You think this ‘accident’ is over now, Senpai?” Natsumi asked.
“Yeah, probably. Based on past experience, once you take one of those things out, it neutralizes the aberration.”
“Is it okay if we just leave the urn and the other stuff alone?”
“I think you can gather the stuff up, and burn it, or put it out with the trash,” I replied, and Natsumi breathed a big sigh of relief.
“Thank you... I appreciate it.”
“Thank you!” Akari cried out.
I was pretty sure I had only done what I usually did with Toriko, but this was kind of like we were in an athletics club, and it felt weird.
“Oh, right! You two, you should pick up your own teeth,” Toriko said, as if she had just remembered. “If you put them in milk, and go to the dentist right away, they might be able to put them back in for you.”
“For real?!” Natsumi gasped.
“Whoa, we’d better hurry.”
The two of them quickly turned around and picked up the shining white teeth in the middle of the blood on the ground. I joined them as they went in through the side entrance, and got some milk ready. “So, about what happened here... Do you have any idea what might have triggered it?” I asked.
“Triggered it?” Natsumi echoed.
“In Akari-chan’s case, it was accepting a weird amulet. Have you received anything from anyone, Ichikawa-san?”
“Not really... Oh, but maybe that had something to do with it.”
“What?”
“Just a little while back, I was watching scary videos. From a YouTuber.”
“Online, you mean?”
“Yeah. The stories themselves weren’t that scary, so I don’t remember them, but... they talked about it there. There are kinds of stories that infect you if you know them. The ‘self-responsibility’ type.”
Infectious aberrations. It was a common story topic, but...
“I didn’t really believe in them, but now that I think back, the day after I heard about them, the monkey showed up.”
“Hmm? Who told the story?” I asked.
“It was a woman, and her name was... Luna-sama, I think?”
“Hmm. Luna-sama, huh?”
“Yup. Oh, I remember now. Lunaurumi.”
Luna... Moon, huh? Urumi... Opaque...
“...?!”
An instant later, Toriko and I both stared speechlessly at Natsumi.
“Huh...? What?”
“Satsuki Uruma?!”
“Was she tall? Long-haired? With a nasty look in her eyes? Did she wear glasses? Was it an adult woman?” Toriko was speaking at a mile a minute.
“Nah, she wasn’t like that. More of a kid, if anything. Looked like a high-schooler, maybe? She was wearing a sailor suit.”
“A sailor suit...”
I looked at Toriko—she was vigorously shaking her head. Satsuki Uruma was apparently not the type to wear a sailor suit despite her age.
“I don’t remember anything about what kind of story it was, though,” Natsumi said, not noticing the air of tension between us.
7
Three days later, we were gathered in the reception room at Kozakura’s house, partially to report our findings. There was me, Toriko, and Akari. To show her thanks, Akari had brought dorayaki, as well as some decent Japanese tea as a gift. I guess it wasn’t just my imagination that the tea from last time tasted bad.
“When I heard the story and looked into it myself, it seems there really are traces of a video uploader like that existing,” Kozakura said, tapping away at her laptop keyboard.
“Traces?” I asked.
“There were two videos on YouTube and one on Niconico Douga that were uploaded with the name ‘Luna-sama’s Binaural Horror Stories,’ but they were reposts from elsewhere, and they’ve all been taken down. No account named ‘Lunaurumi’ exists. But there were a handful of references to the name on Twitter. Things like ‘Luna-sama’s video was crazy scary.’ I figure she’s the type of uploader that’s quietly popular on a closed service.”
“Then do you think what Nattsun saw was one of the reposts?” Akari asked.
“Most likely. Sorawo-chan, do you know what ‘self-responsibility’ type stories are?”
“Yes,” I replied to Kozakura. “It’s a name for a series of weakly-interlinked net lore stories that say that anyone who reads them will be visited by strange things. The name comes from the fact that anyone who reads them is expected to take responsibility for anything that happens to them as a result.”
“I see. It seems the repost video that was taken down was one of those ‘self-responsibility’ type stories.”
“Sannukikano is sometimes categorized as a ‘self-responsibility type’ story, but... Huh? Hold on.”
I looked up, and my eyes met with Kozakura’s serious stare.
“Sorawo-chan—is it possible she’s doing this intentionally?”
“I thought that, too.”
“What do you mean? Don’t just come to a conclusion on your own, you two,” Toriko, who couldn’t keep up with what Kozakura and I were talking about, said sulkily.
“Basically... we were speculating that someone who knows about the other world might be deliberately spreading infectious aberrations,” Kozakura explained.
“This Luna-sama person, you mean? What for?” Toriko asked.
“I wonder. Is it for the fun of it?”
“That, or... to bring people into contact with the other world?” I added onto Kozakura’s guess.
“Why would they want them to make contact?”
I shook my head. Piling speculation on speculation wouldn’t help.
“I’ll look into this a bit, too. I read through all the self-responsibility type net lore stories years ago, but I was never involved in any bizarre phenomena as a result. It should be totally...”
I trailed off, seeing that Kozakura and Toriko were giving me the most dubious looks in the history of everything.
“What?”
“No, not ‘what.’”
“Sorawo, do you understand what you’re saying?”
“Huh? What...? Yes, I understand...?” Their harsh stares were unrelenting, and I mumbled until I trailed off.
What?
“Still, I’ve got to hand it to you, Senpai... You sure know your urban legends, huh?”
Akari’s off-base compliment made me feel awkward. “Let me tell you, I have basically no interest in urban legends.”
“Huh?”
It wasn’t just Akari who reacted to my words with surprise. Toriko’s eyes widened with surprise, too.
“You don’t?”
“Yeah. None at all.”
“Uh, then... What are you interested in, Senpai?”
“True ghost stories.”
“How are they different?”
“Huh...? We’re going to have this talk? It’s boring, and I’ll bet you’re not that interested.”
“Please, go on. I want to hear!”
She pressed me on it, so I reluctantly began explaining..
“Okay, I’ll say it... Urban legends are rumors, right? They’re like, ‘this happened to a friend of a friend.’ People tell them as if they actually happened, but the origin of the story is unclear. There’s no source.”
“What about true ghost stories?”
“True ghost stories are the accounts of people who had direct encounters with the bizarre. There is a clear experiencer and reporter. There may be people who feel differently, but that’s how I define it.”
“And that’s all you’re interested in, huh, Sorawo? Why?”
“Because urban legends are lies,” I said, but Toriko didn’t seem to get it.
“With ‘true ghost stories,’ they could be made up, even if they’re being called true, though, right?”
“But the source of the information is clear, at least. That on its own is enough to make them different.”
Akari was cocking her head to the side. Toriko was thinking about it. Kozakura had already made the distinction, so she was munching on a dorayaki without much interest.
The difference between urban legends and true ghost stories was a major thing to me, but most people probably didn’t care. Everyone loves urban legends. The idea is exciting to them. But for me, in my middle and high school years, I desperately wanted to run away to someplace else. That’s why I approached ghost stories so seriously.
I wasn’t looking for a rumor that someone may or may not have said, I wanted an account of something someone had experienced, and written down. True ghost stories could be scary, bizarre, incomprehensible... To me, they were all reports on how to get to someplace other than here.
“Which is net lore?” Toriko asked. “Are they urban legends? Or true ghost stories?”
“Net lore means internet folklore, so it only refers to the medium. If they’re told on the net, then both urban legends and true ghost stories can be net lore.”
“Oh, I see! I get it!” Akari clapped her hands. “That’s why you never responded when I talked to you about urban legends!”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I understand now! I’ll bring you a proper true ghost story next time, then!”
“No thank you.”
“Why not?!”
Did she have to ask? That was exactly what she’d done this time, wasn’t it?
I had a growing suspicion that everything that Akari came to me about was a dangerous thing involving the interstitial space. I couldn’t use my gun carelessly, but there were physical threats, so in some ways it was actually more threatening than the other world.
I didn’t particularly want to be in scary situations.
I wanted to go somewhere else, to an unknown world. I wasn’t going to let a little terror get in the way of that. That was all.
“Come to think of it, Sorawo-chan, your hair’s grown, huh?” Kozakura said as if she’d just noticed.
“It has, yeah. Toriko was saying I should leave it like this, but what do you think, Kozakura-san?”
“I think it’s fine. You have pretty silky hair, so I think it would look good long.”
That’s just what Toriko said, I thought and almost smiled. If both of them said so, they had to be right.
“Okay, I’ll try growing it out, then,” I said, then realized Akari was staring at me. “What?”
“Oh, no, it just occurred to me—Senpai, if you grew your hair out, you might look kind of like Uruma-sensei.”
“...Huh?”
“Your body type, and the feeling you give off is completely different, though. I thought with long hair and glasses, if you stood still and kept quiet, you might look similar at a distance.”
“Oh... Oh, yeah?”
Unsure of how to respond to that, I looked around for someone to help, but Toriko and Kozakura were frozen solid on the sofa. They were looking at me as if they had realized something they shouldn’t.
Now then—was I going to grow my hair out, or cut it? It seemed that what should have been a minor decision had now become unexpectedly complicated.