When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace: Volume 2

Chapter 1: Awakening——Aborted

I have a childhood friend. His name is Andou Jurai, but I’ve called him Juu for as long as I can remember. We live right next to each other, and our parents have always been on good terms, so we’ve been close ever since we were little kids.

We went to the same kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and even high school, purely by chance! Juu likes to say that we’re stuck with each other...which is rich coming from a guy who’s always going on about fate this and destiny that. Why couldn’t he say that our friendship was destined too? Not that it really matters to me or anything...

Speaking of Juu, he’s always loved playing make-believe. He couldn’t get enough of those riders and rangers on TV, and I used to pretend to transform into superheroes with him all the time. Every time whatever show that was airing introduced a new transformation pose or a new special attack, Juu would have it mastered within the day, and he’d show it off to me the first chance he got.

I always loved those little performances of his...though actually, that’s not quite right. Honestly, I didn’t care about riders or rangers or any of that stuff at all. What I loved was watching Juu enjoy himself to his heart’s content.

As we grew older, though, Juu started maturing in a really strange direction. For example, one time in sixth grade, he came up to me and said, in the most serious tone possible, Hey, Hatoko. Have you ever considered the possibility that the world we live in is all just a long, elaborate dream playing out deep within my subconscious? Can you prove that it isn’t? You can’t, right?

Frankly, all I could think was, How on earth does he say stuff like that with a straight face?

Then there was one time in our first year of middle school. "Why do you think people die, Hatoko? I’ll tell you: it’s because somewhere, deep down, they believe they’re going to die someday. Thus, it stands to reason that the opposite is also true: if one truly believes with every fiber of their being that they’ll never die..."

All I could think was, "Why does he look so satisfied with himself?"

Then there was something he told me in our third year of middle school—the pièce de résistance of Juu-isms. It happened right after I’d called him Juu, just like I always did.

You really need to stop calling me that, Hatoko. We’re in our last year of middle school, you know? Isn’t it about time to give that tired old nickname a rest? he said, his voice cold and indifferent.

It was a bit of a shock, honestly, but it was also pretty easy for me to accept. Juu was a boy, after all. He was probably just embarrassed about a girl calling him by a friendly, cutesy nickname.

Yeah...okay, I replied, doing my best to keep my disappointment from showing on my face. What should I call you, then?

Juu grinned—maybe the biggest and brightest grin I’d ever seen from him. From now on, call me Guiltia Sin Jurai!

Not even joking.

All I could think was, Oh, god, he’s actually serious.

To make a long story short: my childhood friend Juu is a really strange person.

☆

Oh...it’s you, Andou. Hey, do you know why I asked you to come talk with me?

One day after school, I found myself in the staff room speaking with my conspicuously irritated English teacher, Miss Satomi.

Actually, no.

You don’t, huh...? Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t, she replied offhandedly before failing to stifle a big, long yawn.

Aside from being my English teacher, Satomi Shiharu was also my homeroom teacher and the faculty advisor for the literary club. As such, I had a pretty close working relationship with her. She looked well put together on a superficial level—she seemed to be in decent shape, and she had a nice enough face—but she suffered from a critical lack of motivation and projected a constant not-my-problem sort of aura, which made it hard to describe her as attractive on the whole.

The sleep mask that she kept more or less constantly strapped around her head, just in case she got the chance for a power-nap, certainly didn’t help either. She had a ton of them, all with different designs. Today’s happened to have writing on it, which read Sleep Well, Grow Well. Where does she even buy those things?

So, I wanted to talk with you about...yeah. You know. About...that. Uhh...what was it again?

"Don’t ask me!" She’s as groggy as ever...

Miss Satomi was actually the aunt of Himeki Chifuyu, an elementary schooler who came by the literary club to hang out almost every day. If they had one thing in common, it was their mutual tendency to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Their exhaustion meter was always turned up to eleven. It made me wonder if it was genetic or something. Could their whole family be like that?

Ah, right, that’s it! she said, finally remembering why she’d called me to the staff room. It’s about the test you took the other day.

You mean the English test? Why, was there a problem?

"A problem? Of course there was! There were a bunch of them, even—it wouldn’t be a test if there weren’t!"

"Not that sort of problem! I’m asking if there was a problem with any of my answers!"

Ohhh, okay. Yeah, that makes more sense. Anyway, yeah, you could say there was a problem, in a manner of speaking, she said, pulling my answer sheet out of a folder and laying it down on her desk.

What could the issue be? I wondered. We’d taken the test just recently, and I was actually pretty confident that I’d done well on it, so I couldn’t imagine what merited a personal callout like this.

Let’s start here, said Miss Satomi, pointing at one of the questions. It was a translation problem; we were given an English sentence, and I was supposed to translate it into Japanese. The English sentence read:

•Tom wakes up at six every morning.

And I translated it as:

Tom Awakens at six every morning.

Hmm. Nope, don’t see a problem here.

‘Awakens’? Seriously...? And why did you capitalize it? Is it supposed to be some sort of proper noun? Just what on earth happens to Tom at six a.m. every morning?

Search me. You’d have to ask Tom.

Right... We’ll come back to that. Next is this problem, said Miss Satomi, pointing at a different spot on my test.

•She continued crying in the dark room.

She continued lamenting in the stygian chamber.

"What sort of high schooler just casually uses the word ‘lamenting’ like that? Heck, I had to think for a hot minute before I could remember what ‘stygian’ meant! That’s the sort of word you usually only see in old gothic horror novels!"

Ha ha, thanks!

That wasn’t a compliment. I was criticizing you, actually. She sighed listlessly. I have so many other examples, it’s hardly even worth trying to list them all. You put ‘cachinnate’ instead of ‘laugh,’ ‘forfend’ instead of ‘protect,’ ‘expeditious’ instead of ‘fast,’ ‘circumscribe’ instead of ‘circle,’ ‘relinquish’ instead of ‘drop,’ ‘absolve’ instead of ‘forgive,’ ‘befouled’ instead of ‘dirty’... Hey, Andou?

Miss Satomi looked up at me. She didn’t sound accusatory so much as just plain curious. Why do you go so far out of your way to use weird, rare words? she asked.

I chuckled internally. Really now? What an utterly silly question. Because they’re just sorta, I dunno...neat, I guess. Right?

It’s the same reason I dropped a stygian into Dark and Dark’s preamble. I couldn’t think of a better way to explain it than calling them just plain neat, but that didn’t change the fact that they are most certainly that thing. Complicated words: cool. Weird, archaic words that nobody else ever uses: hella cool.

Miss Satomi sighed once again. "Yup, that’s the Andou I know—totally incomprehensible. Speaking of which, you know that all those nonsense words you use make it really hard to understand what you’re actually trying to say, right? Not that I care that much, really, she clarified, giving me a look that made it very clear I was a certifiable problem child in her eyes. The fact that you actually get decent grades in spite of it all is pretty obnoxious, though."

That’s right. I, Andou Jurai, the second-year high schooler, got grades that put me in the upper-middle tiers of my class’s rankings. I was actually pretty diligent about studying in my free time.

"I’d love to mark all the questions you decided to screw around on as wrong, but I have to admit, they’re technically close enough to correct that I can’t really justify it..."

Mwa ha ha! That’s right! I’ve mastered the nuances that let me get away with this stuff! Take sneer, for instance. You can’t swap that out for smile when it’s a happy, friendly sort of expression. No, a sneer has to be scornful, disdainful!

Ughhh... Miss Satomi spent a moment longer glaring at my test, then she let out a big yawn. Oh, whatever. I’m too sleepy to bother anymore. Bringing you back into polite society’s a lost cause—or at the very least, I’ve lost all motivation to make it happen. I’ll leave rehabilitating you up to Takanashi.

Let the record show that I didn’t think I was in any need of rehabilitation in the first place. From a purely objective perspective, I’d actually call myself a pretty diligent student! My grades were just fine, and my attendance record was totally unblemished: not so much as a single tardy on the books. I’ll grant you that every once in a while I had a little bit of trouble on the impulse control front, but that aside, I was just an average high schooler who’d been chosen by the fates for a higher purpose.

Anyway, Miss Satomi seemed to have decided she was done with me and pulled her sleep mask down over her eyes. That was her way of saying that it was naptime and I could go on my way, so I quietly turned around to oblige her. Or at least, that was the plan until the staff room’s door slid open before I managed to get there.

Oh, hey, Andou. What’re you doing here? asked an excessively handsome young man as he stepped inside. He had the sort of face that was better described as beautiful rather than studly, and his slender, delicate figure gave him an overall air of elegant refinement. His hair was also longer than most boys kept theirs, tied back in a ponytail.

Oh. Sagami, I bluntly replied. His full name was Sagami Shizumu, and he was...well, not a friend of mine, that’s for darn sure. More of an acquaintance, really. Or rather, just a guy I happened to have been stuck in the same class with for two years running. We tended to eat lunch in our classroom together, but that was pretty much where our relationship began and ended.

Sagami walked over to me and gave me the sort of look that would make his admirers swoon. What do you mean, ‘Sagami’? How many times have I told you to stop treating me like a stranger and call me Sagamin, already?

"Not happening! If I call you by a nickname, people are gonna start thinking we’re friends or something."

Is that how it is? What a shame.

"And besides, you’re the one who never shows me the reverence and awe I deserve! How many times have I told you to call me Guiltia Sin Jurai?"

Absolutely not. If I call you by your true name, people are going to start thinking I’m a lunatic, he quipped harshly. "But anyway, what are you doing here, Andou?"

I gave Sagami a quick rundown on what had landed me in the staff room, and he blithely replied that he wasn’t surprised. He sure didn’t seem to care much for somebody who’d gone out of his way to ask about it, but I already knew he was that sort of person and didn’t pay it much mind.

Your turn, I said after I’d finished explaining. "What’re you here for?"

Me? I’m just here to pick up the love of my life, that’s all. With that, he strolled over to Miss Satomi (who was out like a light at that point) and shook her by the shoulder.

Mnhgh...whaddya want? Oh...Sagami?

Yes, it’s me, and I’d appreciate it if you’d return my lover now.

Oooh, right... Totally forgot about that. She slowly, stiffly heaved herself to her feet, plodded over to a corner of the staff room, and then plodded her way right back again carrying Sagami’s lover...by which I mean his Nintendo 3DS. Here. Hope this taught you a lesson about playing video games in class.

"Excuse me, but I wasn’t playing anything. I was fostering a beautiful, budding relationship!" proclaimed Sagami, his brilliant smile contrasting with how hopelessly gross his proclamation actually was.

Sagami’s looks were so off the charts it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call him a living personification of beauty itself, but that just served to cover up his true identity. He was a nerd, and even worse, he was one of those nerds: the sort of nerd that falls hopelessly in love with 2D girls; the kind of nerd who calls anime characters his waifus and video game characters his lovers.

That thought process reminded me of something. Hey, speaking of lovers, didn’t you tell me you were dating a first-year girl just a little while back?

Oh yeah, her. That’s old news. She dumped me, as usual.

"Already? It didn’t even last a week this time?!"

Just awful, right? And she was the one who asked me out in the first place!

Let me guess: you decided to stop to buy some scantily clad anime girl figure while you were walking home with her, right?

Wrong. I was buying an eroge this time. Then she shouted something about how I wasn’t the person she thought I was and dumped me on the spot.

That’s the same thing, moron!

Thanks to his peerless looks, Sagami was stupidly popular with the opposite sex. He got asked out often enough to get more than a little on my nerves, and what was even more irritating was the fact that he said yes every single time.

The problem, though, was that even when he was in a relationship, he made absolutely no effort whatsoever to adjust his lifestyle to suit his partner. Nobody would ever imagine him as the sort of person who indulged in hyper-nerdy hobbies judging by his looks alone, and when his girlfriends would find out about said hobbies (more or less instantly, thanks to his behavior), they would dump him soon after

The rumor that the quality of Sagami Shizumu’s looks and his personality had a perfectly inverse relationship with each other had spread far and wide among the second- and third-year girls at that point, and the flood of prospective girlfriends had finally started to die down. The moment a new school year and a new class of first-years had arrived, though, history began repeating itself. God, I can’t stand this guy. Sure would be nice if he got hit by a truck or something.

"Give it to me straight, Sagami. What side are you on? 2D or 3D? Which one are you really into?"

Both of them, but if I absolutely had to choose, I suppose I’d have to pick 2D girls. 3D ones are just a close second. They’re nice and all, but they’re also a pain in way too many ways.

What an absolute waste of a pretty face. If he had any sense of decency, he’d raise his hands in the air, shout People of Earth! Let me give you my hottie energy! and pull a reverse Spirit Bomb, sacrificing himself for the sake of men all around the world.

I see you two are still a couple peas in a pod, muttered Miss Satomi as she watched our exchange. Guess problem students of a feather flock together, or something to that tune. Look, Andou, Sagami—I’m not saying that having geeky hobbies is a bad thing! I’m just saying you should learn to tone it down a little, that’s all.

The two of us did a synchronized double take. We’d been just about ready to leave, but there was no way we were letting a comment like that go unchallenged.

Not that I was mad about getting called a geek, to be clear! I was perfectly aware that the word was pretty much made to describe people like me, and I was way too forgiving of a person to snap over something that petty. Getting lumped in with Sagami, though? Now that was unforgivable!

"Please, I replied, give me a break, Miss Satomi! I’m nothing like that moé-swilling, waifu-wrangling creeper! He’s one of those losers who picks anime to watch based on which voice actresses are in them!"

"That’s right! We’re nothing alike! I refuse to even consider the idea that I have anything in common with that chuuni nutjob. He’s the sort of cringelord who dreams up self-insert OCs for every new anime he gets into, and I’ll thank you for not putting me on his level."

Sparks flew as we spent a couple seconds glaring daggers at each other. Neither of us was willing to budge an inch, even if said sparks lit the room aflame around us.

"Well, you only ever watch those stupid, boring harem anime! I snapped. What’s so fun about seeing some random guy flirt around with a bunch of girls? There’s literally no substance to those shows at all!"

"No substance? What on earth are you talking about? When it comes to shows like that, flirting around with girls is the substance, and I happen to enjoy them!"

Oh, and while I’m at it, how about you stop buying all the Blu-rays for the smuttier ones? I know for a fact you only get them ’cause you’re hoping that all the steam and light rays covering up the boobs got edited out! If you wanna see nipples that badly, just buy actual hentai like a normal person!

You just don’t get it! Nipples in a work of popular media have a very particular appeal that nipples in pornography could never hope to achieve.

Hmph!

"And besides, who are you to talk, Andou? The shows you watch are all so ridiculously convoluted that trying to understand them on a first viewing is a total lost cause. Unless, of course, you track down their official websites and memorize a technical manual’s worth of jargon and diagrams in advance—because that’s a totally normal thing to do, right?"

"Hah! They’re good because they’re convoluted! Highly developed, finely tuned worldbuilding is all about seeing how all those tiny, intricate details fit together!"

At the very least, they could stop using made-up words for all their technical terms. You don’t get all the exposition on them when the story’s adapted to anime, so it ends up sounding like a load of hot nonsense.

"Why do you think the official sites have lists of all the terminology in the first place?! Or, you know, you could just read the original work!"

You’re impossible, really. This is exactly why I can’t stand chuunis like you.

Yeah, well it’s better than being an obnoxious moé freak!

"You’d best watch yourself, Andou, or I’ll