Karasuma Kumiko wa Miko de Nai - 1

Karasuma Kumiko is not a Miko
Chapter 1
O cherry blossoms
Although you yet live, always
Be ready for death
===
"My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness.  So I lived, and so I died.  And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot chose but weep", - Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince.
===
Cries of cicadas could be heard outside the window. The warm air was dyed in colours of the twilight sun.

2019, summer...

Sitting in my room at the Taisha, I received a report of Takashima Yuuna's death from a fellow priest.

"Having manifested Shuten Douji, she repelled three large Vertexes, after which her life signs were lost in the vicinity of Shinju... After the Forestization was lifted, Takashima Yuuna's survival could not be confirmed and her KIA status was deemed to be certain... Huh."

I glanced at the priest who brought me the report as I was reading it. He lowered his head, averting his eyes.
My position in the Taisha was both that of a priestess and that of "Takashima Yuuna's Miko". For the latter, I found the Hero Takashima Yuuna on the day of what was subsequently named the "7/30 Disaster", the day in 2015 when the Vertexes appeared, and guided her to Shikoku.

Yuuna became affiliated to the Taisha as a Hero, and so did I, as a Miko, but by the time I joined the Taisha my Miko powers had already disappeared. Whether you took Uesato Hinata, who found Nogi Wakaba, Aki Masuzu, who found Doi Tamako and Iyojima Anzu, or Hanamoto Yoshika, who found Koori Chikage, - all of the girls who displayed Miko powers were in their early teens. I, on the other hand, was already past twenty. I must have been past the age when one could display powers of a Shinju's Miko, and for that reason, I lost them rather quickly.
Though I might've had lost my powers and become a priestess, the fact I was a Miko who guided a Hero stayed true, and I was in a special position at the Taisha even in spite of my inexperience. And so, the priest in front of me acted with a fair bit of obedience.

...That's how it was.

"Phew... I got it. Leave me alone for a while."

The priest bowed out and left the room.

Aaah. So you've died, Yuuna.
I always thought she wouldn't live long with her personality.
Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified as a heinous criminal at the young age of some thirty years.　Buddha, who lived until his eighties and died peacefully, surrounded by his numerous students. Why were the two universally known saints so different? And Yuuna died at mere fourteen years of age.
I sluggishly rose from my chair. My body felt heavier than usual, and my limbs wouldn't move the way I wanted them to. Was I feeling under the weather? Caught a summer cold?

No, I was...
I was depressed.
The news of Yuuna's passing dealt mental damage to me. To think a scumbag like me was capable of such a human sentiment.
I must have liked Yuuna more than I realised.
I opened my desk drawer and took the fake bottom off. Underneath, in the hidden department, lie cigarettes and nootropics, my old friends from before I entered the Taisha.
I took a cigarette out of the box and lit it on fire. I put it into my mouth, sucking the smoke into my lungs.

"...Gross."

The cigarettes were four years old, well past their expiration date, so they both smelled and tasted disgusting. They degraded to nothing but implements to supply nicotine and tar.
Aki probably wouldn't have said anything if she spotted me, but Hanamoto would be very upfront about displaying her disgust.
Having dulled my head, I began thinking about what to do.
I caught a bookshelf in the corner of my eye. There, mixed in among the numerous monographs and thesis collections - vestiges of my student days - were three picture books. The author of them was one "Yokote Matsuri".

"...I guess I've got to tell her about Yuuna's death for now."

Yokote Matsuri was a girl I came to know in the 7/30 Disaster. She said her dream was to become a picture book author.  Even after Yuuna and I entered the Taisha, she kept sending me one picture book a year. The first book she sent me was a picture book version of Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince". The other two were her original stories.

The first one was most likely meant to be a satire on us. Or perhaps her way of sending advice. I did not know what she meant with the other two.
I began writing a letter to Matsuri, using a sheet torn from a notebook as letter paper. As anachronistic as writing a physical letter was, an e-mail would be saved on a server somewhere. A physical letter was safer.
Leaking the information of a Hero's death outside without permission was an outrageous act. But Matsuri had a right to know.

Because *she* was Takashima Yuuna's real Miko.

Tasting the expired cigarette, I began to recall the events of four years past. How woefully vulgar and unromantic compared to the hero of "In Search of Lost Time" who mused about the past while enjoying madeleines.'


30th of July, 2015. I was riding a bike from Osaka to Gose, Nara Prefecture.
At the time, I was a graduate student belonging to a certain cultural anthropology laboratory in a certain Osakan university. I was looking into the Akitsu-Nakanishi ruins in Gose for a paper when a senior introduced me to a member of the research team, and so I was heading to the scene.
The Akitsu-Nakanishi ruins were supposedly of great importance to some ancient ritual, and the 26th excavation was just underway. And it so happened that the large-scale examination of the ruins was about to finish for the time being. In other words, it was the last and best chance to get my hands on some info concerning those ruins.
Riding from Osaka on the Hanshin Expressway, I headed towards the Katsuragi interchange in Nara. On the way there I was listening to the radio on my smartphone through my wireless earphones. The news about all the natural disasters that began in July all over the country were pouring in. Earthquakes, typhoons, downpours, a historical high in observed temperature...

"The weather's been weird these past years and natural disasters keep happening", I mumbled to myself, gripping the handles. "The whole Earth's acting strange. Maybe I'll get to see humanity die out in my lifetime."

Osaka and Nara, to my knowledge, weren't affected that badly at the time. At worst there would be weak earthquakes a few times a day. But if the earthquakes and disasters had continued, the excavation would likely have been called off or postponed. The repeated natural disasters were throwing the schedule off as it was already.
I reached Gose in the afternoon. I was supposed to meet up with the excavation staff the following day. I decided to spend the day riding around the city to check the lay of the land and confirm where the ruins were.
It might have had been a part of my research, but I remember myself feeling somewhat hollow and frustrated.
I could loosely see how my life would have gone. I'd have finished my university curriculum and joined some university as a lecturer. I would've written a few papers a year, spending some odd dozen years that way. At some point, I would've gotten married, maybe given birth to a child, and made a family. As the old professors would've retired, I would've taken their place as an associate professor or a professor proper, again writing a few papers a year and growing old. The rails of life are despair-inducingly firm and are outfitted with impeccable safety measures. One can neither break them neither get away from them.

By the time I finished writing down the peculiarities of local geography, the sun had set. I decided to do some shopping before going to the hotel and stopped by a nearby supermarket.
The supermarket in question was build next to a crematorium, surrounded by countless gravestones. The immense contrast between life and death was nothing short of artistic. I bought some drinks, alcohol and a packed dinner. There were a lot of families shopping there. I let out a small sigh.
As I put my purchases-to-be in the basket and headed towards the cashier, my vision began to shake.
No, the ground was the one shaking.
Another earthquake. But it wasn't like the weak earthquakes that had been continuing for days, that one was quite strong. A six on the intensity scale, no less.
The customers began screaming and the produce began falling to the floor.
The tremors continued for quite a while, then finally stopped.
The goods were scattered across the floor and both the staff and the customers were panicked. The cash register wasn't working properly either. It looked like I wouldn't be getting out of the store for a while. I looked outside, seeing that the sun had already set and darkness set in...

It was at that moment that I heard something slam into the window from outside the store. At first, I didn't understand what it was. The "object" that slammed into the window was wet with something crimson and slid down the glass. It was a long, thin object just short of a metre in length, split in two.

It was the lower half of a human being. There was no torso. Just the bottom half that was torn off, thrown away and slammed right into the glass.

Screaming filled the store, several times louder than during the earthquake.

Was the half of the corpse that came flying in real? It was far too ill-spirited to be a mere prank. And who would even have done that to begin with? And if it was real...

What I understood was that something was wrong. I cast my gaze outside the store's windows. There, in the night sky beyond the glass, were several massive "things" wriggling. They were much larger than a bear. Their bodies were round and disturbingly white. They brought to mind humongous deep-sea creatures, or perhaps caterpillars. The fact they were moving implied that they were animals, but I had never seen any animal like them before. And those animals weren't crawling on the ground, no. They were moving while slightly floating above the ground.
In the darkness, the wriggling white monstrosities were swallowing people outside the store and crushing them with their massive mouths. Both the parked cars and the people inside them were masticated one after another.
The bottom half of a person that had slammed into the glass just then must've come from a person killed by those things.

"People! They're eating them!"

"Nooooo!"

The store was filled with screaming.
A man next to me ran out of the store, howling. He tried to get into a car parked in the lot but got eaten by one of the white monsters before he could reach it. Splatters of blood and chunks of flesh fell from the monster's mouth onto the parking lot's asphalt surface.
Others trying to get away in their cars suffered the same fate: some before getting into the car, some after getting the car but before starting the engine.

Trying to run away aimlessly would only have seen one become their feed.

I had no idea what those creatures were, but it was evident that if they had the power to break cars, they would've eventually broken through the roof and walls into the store. The chaos inside the store was getting worse.

"Someone call for help!"

"Call for who!?"

"The police!?"

"The SDF!"

"My phone isn't working!"

Some of the men pushed shopping carts and movable shelves to the store entrance and began to pile them up in a barricade.
I dialed 110 on my phone. There was no connection. The dial tone was there, but nobody came in. I tried to call 119, but nobody answered still.

"...What is even happening?"

The rails of life I thought firm and impeccable were in shambles. Those strange monsters wrecked them with such ease.

There were three of those white monsters outside the window. If they made it into the buildings, everyone in it, including me, would be done for.

"Shut that damn brat up!"

A man in a black shirt was shouting at a girl crying in fear and her mother. That man was giving orders to the men barricading the entrance just before. He must've been a leader of sorts.
Perfect. How useful.

The moment the man in a black shirt tried to raise his hand on the crying girl, I grabbed his arm. Lightly twisting it and putting him in a joint lock, I took a ballpoint pen out of my pocket and pressed it against his neck.

"Scumbag. It doesn't matter what situation it is, raising your hand on the weak isn't particularly admirable."

The man glared at me, biting his lip in frustration. He, however, did not pointlessly resist. Dropping a brusque "Fine", he left, as if trying to run away.
The mood in the surroundings changed.
The girl's mother expressed deep gratitude. People around me were also praising my actions. As a woman who saved a little girl and reprimanded an arrogant man, I gained respect and trust from the people surrounding me.

That single action must've had raised my authority in that situation by quite a lot.

"Listen here, everyone! I have a suggestion!"

All of the stares were directed at me. Expectations, anxiety, doubt, suspicion... Trying to read the emotions in the amassed gazes, I began to address everyone in the room.

"Those monsters are going to break into the building before long! Think about it, they're powerful enough to break cars, the barricade is pointless!"

"...So what are we gonna do then?" asked a delinquent-ish young brown-haired woman in a frustrated voice. Her belligerent tone was likely a bluff to hide her fear. I didn't answer her but addressed everyone in the room.

"We have to leave the building right away and ask for help!"

"But those monsters will kill us!"

"Luckily, there's just three of them! If we split into groups and run in different directions, there's a chance of surviving and it's high!"

My words made a lot of people visibly perplexed.

"But... Some people might manage to run away, but some won't and they'll get killed..." said a timid-looking bespectacled man.

"It's okay. Everyone will make it. I'll be the decoy", I answered.


The plan I described to everyone was as follows, and as simple as possible.
The only people who would escape would be those in good physical shape. Children, the elderly and the sick would stay inside and wait for the escapees to call for rescue.
First, I would exit the store, pretend to run away and draw the monsters' attention. As the man who tried escaping earlier and got eaten proved, those monsters immediately start chasing humans the moment they see one. Most wild animals tend to run away when they see a human, but those things seemed to have different habits.
After that, the people would start escaping the store in groups of five people and intervals of twenty seconds.
They would probably start chasing me when I left the store. I would run from them, keeping a certain distance between us, for exactly sixty seconds and try to lead them at least a little away from the store. The group split would be necessary because people are prone to panicking in numbers too small but cannot respond fast enough in numbers too large. I had no concrete basis for my decision, but five people seemed like a good enough number to me.

I stood at the entrance to the store, peering at the darkness and steadying my breathing.
I could faintly see the white giants moving around in the darkness. Their movements didn't come off as nimble, but they were clearly moving through the air at a speed far higher than a running human could manage.

I steeled myself and dashed outside.

"Over here! Come and get me!"

To start, I intentionally raised my voice and ran towards the monsters to get their attention. When all three of them noticed me and began heading towards me, I changed direction and began running away from the supermarket.
The speed advantage was clearly on their side, so they would've caught up easily if I simply ran. I ran between the cars in the parking lot, trying to have them impede the monsters' movement and block their path even a little bit.
But the monsters had enough power to chew straight through a car, so the cars provided little effect. They only bought me a bit of time, at best.
The monsters brushed the cars aside like mere toys or crushed them with their fiendish mouths, inching closer and closer.
Running out of the parking lot, I jumped over the fence and ran into the crematorium cemetery. The monsters knocked the gravestones over one after another, paying little attention to them. They clearly had no feelings concerning the dead.

"Haah... Haah... Haah..."

My breathing was getting rough. My legs were slowly getting heavier. Unlike most university researchers with their chronic sedentary lifestyle, I worked out a fair amount, but even then my speed began to drop at some point.
I promised to act as a decoy for the people in the store for sixty seconds.
Almost thirty had passed.
I was confident that I could lead the monsters a reasonable distance away from the supermarket in that sixty-second period.
Those sixty seconds were my bet. Not a bet against those white monsters, no.
It was a game of chicken between me and the people in the supermarket.

I ran out of the cemetery and onto the road. Then, two of the three monsters following me changed their course and headed towards the supermarket.

"...Idiots."

Still on the run from my remaining pursuer, I ran back towards the supermarket.

The people inside the store began to scramble for the exit. Sixty seconds hadn't passed yet. The monsters must've had returned to attack the people trying to escape. They must've been quite intelligent. Instead of chasing me alone,  they rationally split into two groups in order to secure the most prey.
But with only one pursuer left, the threat to me dropped considerably.

I reached the bike I had parked at the parking lot. I got on it and started the engine. With the speed of a bike, I could probably get away from the monster.

Had the people inside the store waited the full sixty seconds, I could've led the monsters far enough away for them to escape. And died.

But they didn't wait. They couldn't suppress their fear rushing them. The people who ran away from the store likely got chased down by the monsters and killed.
I turned around to look at the people who ran away, expecting them to have been mercilessly torn apart...

And saw something beyond my imagination.

The ones who were being attacked weren't the people who ran away, but the white monsters.
A girl stood between the people trying to run away and the white monsters, swinging her fists at them. A look at the girl's movements betrayed martial arts experience. But the girl was seemingly of elementary school age, dozens of times smaller than the monsters. Normally, a strike from a child's fist wouldn't even tickle such a monster.

But the monsters who took the girl's punches had bits of flesh break off them, trying to distance themselves from her as if running away. The damage was evident.

"Yuu-chan! Be careful!"

The one who called out to the mysterious elementary school girl was a girl seemingly of middle school age standing at a distance from her. She ran up to the people trying to escape and called out to them.

"U-Um, p-please go back inside! So you don't get in the way of Yuu-chan's fighting!"

They, however, just stood confused and didn't budge.

(What the hell? Those two kids are way more level-headed than the adults.)

...I changed my mind. I was planning to escape on my bike, but I wanted to see more of those girls.

I quickly started my bike and turned around, dodging my pursuer. Then headed towards the fighting elementary schooler.
The girl was putting up a good fight, but the situation was bad. While she was punching one of the monsters, another rushed her from behind.
She noticed the attack approaching from the back, but couldn't dodge it fully. The enemy in the front didn't let up on the attacking, either.

"Kiddo! Stay put right there!"

The girl let out a bewildered "Eh?" and looked at me.

Without dropping the speed, I leapt off my bike and sent it hurtling straight at one of the monsters. At the same time, I pushed the girl down, grabbing her and avoiding the other monster's attack. With the girl in my arms, I rolled across the asphalt. The bike suit I was wearing tore up and my body was aching from the impact.

"U-Urgh... That really stings..."

But the girl was safe. I managed to save her.

"M-Miss, are you okay!?"

"Yeah, just some scrapes..."

I stood up and looked at the white monsters.

The one I crashed my bike into had taken seemingly no damage at all. Even despite common sense saying that a hurtling bike should have had more power than a girl's fists.

"Kiddo. How come you can fight those monsters?"

"Um... I don't know. But when I put these on, it made me think I could fight."

I took a closer look and saw the girl wearing old-looking gauntlets on her hands. They were too large and rough for her hands, as well as rusted.
Were those gauntlets granting her the power to fight the monsters?
It was hard to believe, but then again, so was the existence of those monsters to begin with. There was no choice but to accept any paranormal phenomenon.

"Thank you for saving me, Miss! I'm fine, so I'll definitely get those monsters this time!"

That girl... That child fighting such a dangerous fight for someone else was more of an anomaly than even those gauntlets or those white monsters.
She looked at the approaching monsters and raised her fists.

...The girl seemed to have knowledge of martial arts, but the situation didn't lend well to them. All martial arts involve an "expected combat situation". Whether you're fighting in a ring or somewhere on the city streets.  Whether there is a separation by weight class. Whether attacks to the vitals are allowed. Whether weapons are usable. Whether you have armour.  And so on, and so on... The expectations were different depending on the martial art, and so were the situations where one could display their strength. If a karate fighter fought a kendo practitioner, the karate fighter would win under karate rules while the kendo practitioner would win under kendo rules. Whatever martial art the girl might've been using was likely not intended for "taking down massive monsters while wearing metal gauntlets".

"A word of advice", I told the girl. "Keep your feet planted firmly on the ground when you punch the enemy. Mind how you rotate your hips and punch as if you're slamming your entire body into the enemy. Focus on the impact of one blow, not on footwork or landing multiple punches."

"Eh? O-Okay, I'll try!"

Normally, just being told that wouldn't mean she could put it to use right away. But the girl's swings changed drastically after my words. The next blow from her pulverised the monster.

"...That's right, do it like this. And yell loudly when you strike!"

"Okay! Oooooh!"

The girl's punches became even stronger. She was definitely a martial arts prodigy.
A second blow, then a third one. The girl's tiny fists brought down the remaining monsters. The three defeated monsters disappeared into the air, as if melting.

With the monsters gone, we headed back into the supermarket.

"Yuu-chan, are you okay!?"

The middle schooler girl ran up to the elementary girl, worried.

"I'm okay! This lady here saved me", answered the younger one.

I was trying to dial 110 and 119, but that time around I couldn't even hear the dial tone. Calling for help that way seemed impossible.

"Um... Thank you very much for saving Yuu-chan. You're not... hurt, are you?" said the middle schooler awkwardly, looking at my torn-up bike suit. She kept looking down, avoiding eye contact with me. Must've been a shy one. Like a whole different person from the girl who forcefully told the adults outside to take shelter just a moment ago.

"Just tore up my clothes. A few scrapes here and there, but nothing serious. I'm good at falling the right way."

That being said, my clothing was in a sorry state.

The elementary girl looked up at me and said, "My name is Takashima Yuuna. What's yours, Miss?"

"Karasuma Kumiko."

"Um... My name is Yokote Matsuri", nervously named herself the middle schooler.

Takashima Yuuna and Yokote Matsuri. The bright and cheery younger girl and the somewhat gloomy and shy older girl. A contrastive pair.

I gave up on phone calling for help and began to look for info on the social networks. In our age, that was where you could get news the quickest.
On the net, talk of encountering white monsters, much like we did, was going around. There were many posts from people whose family or friends were slaughtered by them.
A good look at the posts made it clear that some areas experienced little in terms of monster attacks.
Shikoku was one of those areas. There were still a few messages about monster encounters in Shikoku, but their number was overwhelmingly low compared to the rest of the country.

"...Shikoku, then."

"Eh?"

Yokote Matsuri looked at me with confusion.

"I'm heading to Shikoku. Looks like it's safe there... Girls, where are your parents?"

"We got separated..." said Takashima Yuuna with a frown. Yokote Matsuri went quiet and didn't answer.

"If Shikoku is a safe area, your parents might be heading there too. Want to go there with me?"

The girls exchanged glances and nodded in agreement.


The bike I had crashed into the monster earlier was in a sorry, broken state. The trunk box in the back was broken too, but the stuff I had inside it was safe. I took my clothes out of it and changed in the toilet.

"Kumiko-san, are you a chemist?" inquired Takashima Yuuna, looking at my lab coat with curiosity.

"Nope, not a chemist. Roughly speaking, I'm a history researcher in training."

A kid wouldn't understand much if I said "cultural anthropology" or "archeology".
In the first place, there was no need for a humanities researcher to wear a lab coat, unlike a natural sciences one. I just wore one to feel different from other people.
A while after I enrolled, I got bored of living a tranquil life and wanted to do something weird, different from others. I did everything I could think of, aside from crimes. Even things that would make the girls in front of me nauseous or disgusted, plenty of times.
Wearing a lab coat despite being in humanities was one of those "weird things" I started doing back then.
Yet by the time I became a graduate student, repeatedly "doing something weird" itself became routine to me, and I lost track of what was weird and what was normal. After that, I began to intentionally avoid strange behaviour, but the lab coat stuck.

"Researcher... So a scientist? So you're smart!"

Takashima Yuuna's eyes were sparkling. I could only smirk at such pristine eyes.

"Scholars are the dumbest lot in the whole world, you know? They're completely ignorant of anything beyond their specialisation."

I threw my torn-up bike suit in the supermarket's garbage bin and went outside. Takashima Yuuna and Yokote Matsuri followed me.

After the monsters appeared, a man tried to escape in his car. He got slaughtered before he could get inside, and I was heading towards his torn-up remains.

"Ugh..."

Yokote Matsuri stopped and averted her eyes on the way to the corpse, unable to look at it.

"Don't come any closer if you can't."

"O-Okay... Sorry..."

Yokote Matsuri went away from the corpse, and Takashima Yuuna went along, worried about her.

I put my hand into the trouser pockets of the corpse that barely resembled a human anymore. Just like I expected, the car keys were there.

I got into the car, pushed the engine start button and turned it on without any issues. There was plenty of gas in the tank, too.
I moved the car and drove up to Yokote Matsuri and Takashima Yuuna.

"Get in. We're going to Shikoku. If all's well, we should get there in half a day. I'm planning to drop by a police station on the way, but I'm not expecting much help in this situation."

"...We can't."

The one who said that was Takashima Yuuna.

"Can't? Can't what?"

"We can't run away on our own, we have to take the people in the supermarket with us."

"...Oh, easy for you to say."

I looked towards the supermarket. There were still a dozen or so people left inside. Most of the people ran away after the monsters were defeated, but a fair number of them still remained. Some of them elderly and children.

"You're not suggesting that we take all those people along, are you? Moving in a group is too dangerous. Besides, how are we going to fit them all in the car? Not gonna work."

"But we can't just leave all those people in the store be. I'm not going if we aren't taking them."

Takashima Yuuna wasn't backing down. What was I supposed to do?
We could've encountered more of those monsters on the way to Shikoku. They were apparently all over the country. And if we did encounter them, Takashima Yuuna was the only one who could fight them.

"...Fine, have it your way. Guess there's nothing to do but find some usable cars and drive together."

"Uh, in that case... I've seen a bus on the way here, could we use that?" said Yokote Matsuri nervously.


There was a microbus on the edge of the parking lot. It wasn't parked, but rather seemed to have been abandoned there.

When I got inside the bus, I found a single woman lying on the floor, with no indication of what happened to her. Blood was coming out of her head. I checked for a pulse and saw that she was already dead. I checked the driver seat and saw the engine key still there, in the slot.

That bus could probably take on all of the people in the store. I had a license for mid-sized vehicles and had experience driving a microbus, too.
I pulled the woman's corpse out of the bus and laid it down on the parking lot.

Yokote Matsuri, upon seeing the corpse, closed her mouth and fell on the ground.

"Urgh... Haah, haah, haah, eek, haah..."

Her face went pale and she began to hyperventilate.

"Ah, this is bad!"

Takashima Yuuna rushed to the corpse and wiped the blood off its head with her clothes.

"Sorry, Yuu-chan... Thanks..."

With the blood no longer visible on the corpse, Yokote Matsuri finally managed to calm her breathing down.

"What's wrong?"

"Matsuri-san can't handle blood..."

Yokote Matsuri nodded in response to Takashima Yuuna's words.

"Yes... I'm sorry. I was avoiding getting too close to blood at the parking lot, so I managed better there..."

Maybe she had a traumatic experience of some sort. Yokote Matsuri looked at the female corpse on the asphalt and asked, her face still pale, "By the way, who is this woman?"

"She was in the bus, on the floor. She's dead."

"Dead..."

"Maybe she got killed. In a situation like this, fear and panic could drive even fellow humans to kill each other."

It wasn't uncommon for casualties to arise at protests and riots overseas. And what was happening to the country was worse than any protest or riot.

"This corpse", I took a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it, "could be any of us in the future. Taking a large group along means always facing the risk of internal strife."

Yokote Matsuri and Takashima Yuuna both looked at the woman's corpse with sullen faces.

"But those white monsters are a lot more dangerous than internal strife right now. Who knows how many of them there are... From what I've seen on the net, a lot of people are encountering them all over the country."

"If we run into the monsters, I'll fight and protect everyone. Yokote-san is here too", said Takashima Yuuna.

"And how does her being here help us?"

"Yokote-san can sense where those monsters are."

I looked at Yokote Matsuri.

She answered, "Yes... Sort of..." with little confidence in her voice.

So if Takashima Yuuna was the fighter who could take down those monsters, Yokote Matsuri was the radar who could detect them?
If so, they really were stupid. Because the safest thing for them to do would've been to escape on their own.


I left the woman's corpse at the crematorium cemetery, as the least I could do to pay condolences. After that I told the people in the store we'd be heading to Shikoku.
Some people doubted that we'd be safe if we went to Shikoku, but nobody had any complaints about the fact we'd be all moving together in the bus. Everyone understood that travelling with Takashima Yuuna, who could fight off the monsters, was the safest course of action.

Yokote Matsuri and Takashima Yuuna were sitting together, right behind the driver's seat. Takashima Yuuna dozed off shortly after I began driving. She put her head on Yokote Matsuri's shoulder, breathing softly. Her defenselessness made it clear that she trusted her. She was sleeping so innocently that you would've never guessed she was fighting grotesque monsters just earlier.

With Takashima Yuuna asleep, Yokote Matsuri began talking to me.

"Karasuma-san... Why were you smiling back then?"

"Back when?"

"Yuu-chan and I got to the supermarket right when you ran outside on your own, Karasuma-san. I thought your plan was to act as a decoy, draw those monsters away and let everyone escape. I thought you were so brave and amazing. But..."

"But what? Say it clearly."

"When you were running to grab their attention... And when the monsters turned around to attack people who ran from the supermarket... You were smiling, Karasuma-san."

"Must be your imagination."

"..."

"Why would I have been smiling? I was on the verge of death back there. Not the time to be smiling."

"You're... right. Must've been my mistake. I'm sorry for saying something so weird..."

What a perceptive girl.

At that moment, I was having the time of my life.