Black Bullet - Volume 2 - Chapter 1.4

4

“This is terrible…” Holding the spoils of the evening limited-time sale war in their reusable bags, Rentaro’s and Enju’s feet stopped. The police car sunk into the concrete wall was in a sorry state —it looked like it had been kicked by Godzilla.

The sirens were smashed, the hood was crushed, and the exhaust pipe was bent in a strange direction. Outside the cordoned-off area, a large number of onlookers were crowded around, taking pictures with their phones with one hand.

Rentaro approached one of them hesitatingly and said, “Hey, do you know what in the world happened here…?”

“Who knows? It looks like they haven’t caught the perpetrator yet. But aren’t the only ones who can do something like this the Red-Eyes?”

Rentaro ground his teeth in frustration at not being able to refute this presumptive reasoning. It was true that even though it wasn’t strictly speaking impossible for a human to do this, the probability that it was a human was low enough to ignore.

“There are no leads, and the officer attacked is still unconscious in critical condition.”

“Critical condition? He’s not dead?”

“Hmm? Yeah, what about it?”

“Nothing…” Rentaro felt bad saying it, but because the car had been so thoroughly destroyed, he had thought that the officer driving it would have left this world, as well. Rentaro gave a quick bow in thanks and returned to Enju.

Enju had covered her eyes, still holding her shopping bag. Rentaro stopped for a second and approached her slowly. “Enju,” he said quietly, “you’re not the one who did it. It was one of the other Children.”

Enju gave him a quick, bitter smile but then soon showed him a full smile. “Rentaro, you are too kind. Yes, I am fine now.”

“All right, let’s go home, then.” On the way home, he and Enju had a rambling conversation as she swung her shopping bags back and forth.

“And then, you know the new cartoon Go, Zengar! that just started…?”

As Rentaro snuck a peek at the side of Enju’s face, he wondered if he should say it. Should he just mind his own business?

Rentaro said diffidently, “Enju, don’t worry about it. You weren’t the one who did it.”

Enju tilted her head and looked at him like she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Hmm? Whatever is the matter, Rentaro?”

“You weren’t the one who did it.”

Enju’s gaze wavered, and she seemed flustered. “Wh-what’s the matter, Rentaro? You seem strange.”

Rentaro put his hands on Enju’s shoulders and turned her toward him, saying each word clearly and distinctly. “I said, you weren’t the one who did that, Enju…”

Enju made a perplexed face, but then unconsciously, her face crumpled and her expression wavered. Enju looked down and wiped her eyes quickly with her sleeve. “R-Rentaro, you’re amazing! How did you know that I was still concerned about that? Even though Kisara and Sumire wouldn’t have realized…”

Rentaro put his hand on her head and let out a long breath. “Because it’s you…”

“Why can’t everyone just get along, Rentaro…?” Enju’s voice was hoarse, and it sounded like it would disappear at any moment.

“I don’t know………” Even as Rentaro tousled Enju’s hair, he saw a bleak future for the Cursed Children. Born at almost the same time as the Great Gastrea War ten years ago, the Cursed Children were ten years old or younger. As such, it was probably too much to ask for them to possess wise judgment.

However, each time a crime like this was committed, the hatred the Stolen Generation—who already hated Gastrea—had for the Cursed Children grew stronger. The girls didn’t know. They didn’t realize that hatred would swing in the opposite direction of where force was applied, like a pendulum. Sometimes with far more force.

Each time one of the Cursed Children committed a crime, it was as if Enju’s neck was being strangled slowly with a silk rope, and it made Rentaro’s chest hurt to watch it. No, more accurately, it was as if the net trapping the Children was getting tighter, in a way they couldn’t see.

Rentaro narrowed his eyes and looked back once more at the scene behind them. He didn’t know who’d done it, but Rentaro doubted he could forgive the perpetrator.

Enju finally separated herself slowly from Rentaro and wiped her face one more time with her sleeve. “All right, this time—this time—I am surely fine!”

Rentaro smiled. “Yeah… Okay.” In order to dispel the solemn atmosphere, Rentaro exhaled deeply, puffing out his chest and laughing loudly, looking down at the shopping bags. “By the way, Enju, we got a good haul at the limited-time sale today, huh?”

Enju grinned mischievously. “I did not think we would be able to purchase meat so cheaply, either.”

Rentaro pumped his fist. “We’re having sukiyaki today!”

“Sukiyaki…!” Enju hopped happily.

As soon as Rentaro got back to their rundown eight-tatami-mat apartment, he put on an apron and went to the kitchen. As he cut the vegetables into bite-size pieces, Enju capered around Rentaro, chattering excitedly about the cartoon she was currently into, Go, Zengar! It sounded like it was based on those old shows about fighting squadrons and transforming robots.

“And then, and then, there’s the robot of justice, Zenin Zengar, and the evil robot, Akuin Akkar. And the storyboards for episode eighteen were—”

“Zenin zenga, like ‘one good turn deserves another’? And akuin akka, like ‘what goes around comes around’? Aren’t those Buddhist terms or something? That’s a pretty advanced cartoon.”

Enju proudly put both hands on her hips, as if impressed that Rentaro had noticed. “That’s right. And the most amazing thing is that the squadron consists of four chief priests and a Buddhist nun, and they are all bald, and their five temples combine to form one large transforming robot.”

“R-really……”

The cartoons you watch are so weird, Rentaro thought as he put konnyaku noodles, leeks, chrysanthemum leaves, and mushrooms on a bamboo draining basket and then unfolded a low table that was leaning against the wall. Putting on oven mitts, Rentaro moved the sukiyaki pot from the kitchen to the gas burner on the table and turned it on. Before long, the ingredients were boiling gently, and the warm steam was rising to meet Rentaro’s and Enju’s faces. As the sweet smell of the sauce filled the room, Rentaro started salivating. He couldn’t wait to eat. It had been days since he’d had such extravagant food for dinner.

After Rentaro chided Enju for putting her hands on the low table and jumping around, she switched to hitting the bowl with the egg in it with her chopsticks and yelling, “Is it time to eat yet?”

Rentaro gave a wry smile. Urging Enju to sit down, they had just started to chorus, “Time to eat!” when the front door’s intercom rang unexpectedly.

Rentaro scowled as he turned to look at the clock on the wall. Who could it be at this time of night?

“S-Satomi dear…” With a voice that was on the verge of death, a beautiful girl wearing Japanese-style clothes barged in. She had a large face mask over her mouth, her face was red, and she sounded like she had a bad cough.

Rentaro was taken aback. He knew this face. And it was a face that he wanted to avoid seeing if possible. “M-Miori?! What are you doing here?”

The girl in the kimono took cold medicine and nutritional supplement drinks out of the shopping bag on her arm and put them in Rentaro’s hands. She seemed to be making an appeal to him as she pointed at herself repeatedly.

“T-take care of me…while I’m sick…” Saying just that seemed to use up all her energy, and she fell with a thud to the floor of the entryway.

Rentaro’s mouth gaped as he was overcome with surprise. But, that was not the end of the situation.

Seconds after the girl in the kimono fell, Kisara Tendo came through the entrance, her face haggard. “S-Satomi…… I know it’s sudden, but take this…” Then Kisara handed him a tray of beef with a half-price price tag on it.

It was cheaper than the sale meat Rentaro had bought. “Make sukiyaki with it… I’m…hungry…” Saying only that, Kisara fainted from hunger and fell with a thud to the floor of the entryway. The girl in the kimono was smushed and made a weird sound.

One sick person. One unconscious person. A total of two people had suddenly barged into the Satomi home.

Rentaro turned white as a sheet. “Th-this is terrible…”

Enju raised her voice, sounding unhappy. “Another woman I do not know is here! Rentaro, explain yourself! Who is this woman who is not Kisara?!”

“A-anyway, Enju, I’ll pretend I didn’t see anything, so please abandon one of them outside!”

Enju didn’t really understand what was going on and tilted her head in question. “Hmm? Rentaro, what are you saying?”

“Kisara and this girl don’t get along at all! Leaving them in the same space will cause an awful chemical reaction.”

Enju leaned over the girl in the kimono and started poking the girl with her chopsticks. “Well, who is she?”

Rentaro scratched the back of his head and remembered that Enju hadn’t actually been introduced to her yet. “This is Miori. Miori Shiba. The student council president of my school, Magata High School, and the daughter of the CEO of Shiba Heavy Weapons, the weapons corporation that supplies us with equipment.”

The phrase “bed of thorns” was meant for times like this, Rentaro thought as he broke out into a cold sweat. Across the table from Rentaro was an unhappy-looking Kisara, kneeling properly and poking at the sukiyaki pot. Diagonally across from him was Enju, grinning, and next to him in equally high spirits was Miori.

Miori’s face was still red, but after a dose of cold medicine and nutritional drinks, she had soon recovered enough to sit up. Now, she had even taken off her face mask that would get in the way of eating sukiyaki. In the end, it was doubtful whether she even really needed someone to look after her while she was sick. Rentaro looked sideways at Miori, wondering if it had just been an excuse to come to his house.

She seemed to be the perfect little rich girl, with her long, wavy, shiny black hair and her brightly colored Japanese-style clothes. As they were both rich girls with a certain noble air about them, she and Kisara were very similar, but there were definite differences in their Japanese versus Western tastes and in their ways of thinking.

“Sorry y’all ended up treating me, too, Satomi dear,” Miori said with a drawl.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about—”

“Yes, there is,” Kisara said flatly, with her eyes closed and just her chopsticks moving silently and continuously. “We brought ingredients like respectable people do, but that snake woman over there is eating for free. It’s a bother. I wish she would leave immediately.”

“Oh, were you here, Kisara? Your boobs were so large that I couldn’t see your face.”

There was a strange sound that Rentaro had never heard before as Kisara crushed the chopsticks in her hand.

Hey, those are my chopsticks!

“Sorry, Satomi, can I have another pair of chopsticks?” Kisara tilted her head with a sweet rich girl smile, but her hand was shaking.

Rentaro stuck out his hand fearfully, and Kisara deposited the chopstick shards into his palm. When he looked more closely, he could see that the chopsticks had been shattered into well over twenty pieces. He couldn’t even imagine how much strength was needed to crush them so thoroughly.

Rentaro, who had managed to defeat the highly ranked Kagetane Hiruko pair as well as repelling a Stage Five Gastrea, wanted to run away from this place this instant.

Kisara stared at Rentaro. “By the way, Satomi, what are you going to do about the job?”

“About that. If you’re okay with it, President, I’d like to accept.”

“All right, I’ll fill out the paperwork and send it along.”

Rentaro turned to face Enju again. “Enju, I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, but we have an escort mission. I’m counting on you.”

Enju saluted sharply and said cheerfully, “All right, a job!”

Miori narrowed her eyes and looked at Enju mischievously. “Enju, I’ve heard a lot about you from dear Satomi. You’re such a cute little thing. Dear Satomi’s always complaining to me about how hard it is to hold in his feelings when he’s turned on by you.”

Enju’s pigtails bounced sharply in surprise. “Is that right, Rentaro?! It is not necessary to hold in your feelings!”

“It’s not true! Miori, stop making things up!”

Miori spread open a large fan and covered her mouth, snickering. At first glance, it looked like a refined gesture, but her fan was an iron fan, reinforced with iron in a number of places and a fine weapon in its own right. “You know those combat shoes you wear, Enju? We designed them based on measurements from dear Satomi. How are they? Are they comfortable?”

“Oh, yes! So you made those? Yes, they are good shoes.”

“I see, I see. Come back and tell us when your feet grow and they get too tight. I’ll make some new ones for you. Also, Enju, those Varanium bullets dear Satomi scatters all over the place, and the equipment he uses—they’re all provided by our company, you know.”

Enju looked around at the shabby eight-tatami-mat room and tilted her head with a look of bewilderment. “But Satomi doesn’t have the money to pay for that.”

“It’s free.”

“Free?”

“I’ll explain about that,” Rentaro interrupted.

It might have seemed like civsec officers were the only ones who gained from sponsorship contracts with weapons companies that supplied them with equipment, but of course, that was not the case. For weapons companies, being known to supply equipment to strong civsec officer pairs whose names were brands in and of themselves could be used for marketing campaigns.

Once pairs rose to a certain rank, their private information stopped being published on the list managed by the country, but if they weren’t afraid of being kidnapped or assassinated by other countries and continued to show their faces in public, strong pairs could make a lot of money from advertisements and commercials. However, the weapons companies also did not just sponsor anyone off the street, of course, and there was a strict review process involved.

A year earlier, when the Tendo Civil Security Agency had just been founded and had no results to speak of yet, they applied knowing they had nothing to lose, but—

Miori was all smiles as she took Rentaro’s arm and suddenly blew into his ear. Rentaro’s body stiffened in surprise. “And then, Enju, the minute I saw dear Satomi, I knew. He will be someone great in the future, I thought. That’s why we accepted him, with some conditions.”

“Conditions? What conditions?”

“There were a few. He had to test new products, appear in commercials, you know. One of them was that he had to study with me at Magata High School. I have it all in writing.” She laughed. “Dear Satomi is all mine.”

Rentaro thought going to school was a waste of time, but because of their contract, he was partially bound to the school and was being forced to attend. The worst was if they happened to bump into each other during the all-school assemblies, when Miori would be on stage as student council president and give him conspicuous winks or wave at him, which made the other boys at school hate him.

“Satomi, get away from that woman this instant.” Kisara’s eyes were steady.

“H-hey, idiot, get off of me, Miori. They’re touching! They’re touching!”

As Rentaro became flustered, Miori smiled teasingly, still hanging on to his arm. “What? What’re touching? Could you be talking about my chest? I’m making them touch on purpose. Even so, you’ve got it tough, Satomi dear. Kisara has those large breasts hanging off her but seems unexpectedly prudish, and if you go after Enju, you’ll end up in handcuffs, right? So…” With slightly flushed cheeks, Miori looked at Rentaro with upturned eyes. “Hey, Satomi dear. Am I cute?”

“H-huh?! You beat the second-place person at the beauty contest at the school festival by a wide margin. What are you asking about it now for—?”

“I want to hear it from your lips, Satomi dear.”

He was perplexed by her strange tone of voice and her acting cute and scratched his head. “Well, y-yeah, you’re cute.”

“Say it again.”

“I-I said, you’re cute…”

“Did you hear that? Hey, Kisara, did you hear that? He called me cute twice! Oh my, what should I do?”

Kisara had her fists on her knees and was trembling all over.

“And you know, Satomi dear, we have our own private civil security agency at Shiba Heavy Weapons, so why don’t you quit Tendo Civil Security Agency and work for us?” Miori continued. “If you join now, I’ll throw in the right to do whatever you like to the most beautiful girl in school whenever you want.”

“Y-you can’t!” Kisara hurriedly leaned her body forward. “S-Satomi has a contract with the Tendo Civil Security Agency! Not with you guys.”

“He can just break that contract. We can pay you this much, Satomi dear.” Miori quickly flicked the abacus she pulled from the sleeve of her kimono and brought it coquettishly to Rentaro’s face.

When he saw the number, the chrysanthemum leaf he was eating almost came out of his nose. “What’s with that number? It’s a joke, right?”

“Satomi dear, you’ve risen to the rank of 1,000, haven’t you? That’s your market price, you know.”

“It is?”

Looking at Kisara, he saw her stuffing her mouth with meat and vegetables like a squirrel and turned her nose up, looking the other way. Apparently, she had activated the Kisara rule where she didn’t have to talk if there was something in her mouth.

As Enju blew on her meat to cool it, she looked at Miori. “Why don’t you and Kisara get along?” She should have just stopped, but instead, Enju waved handheld fireworks around a powder keg.

Miori laughed. “That’s a good question. Of course, there is a long history between the Shiba and Tendo families, but Kisara and I are way beyond that. We hate each other on a genetic level.”

“Small boobs.” Kisara mumbled this softly.

However, Miori was the better actor. She turned over her fan and waved it softly. “Japanese clothes look better on those with moderate chests. Large, vulgar breasts are unnecessary. Do you understand, Kisara?”

For some reason, Enju’s head bobbed up and down as she nodded.

There was a popping sound—the sound of Kisara’s blood vessel ripping as she looked down.

Even though there was no more food on Kisara’s plate, her chopsticks were still mechanically making the trip between her plate and her mouth. It was scary. “Hey, Yukikage…… What’s that? You want to drink the blood of the snake woman? Well, if you say so…” She laughed evilly. Kisara was so angry that it caused a shift in her mental state, and she had begun talking to the sword at her side. “Satomi, this food tastes good, but I think there’s something missing. And that is Miori’s blood!”

Hey, come on…

Kisara finally started to stand unsteadily. “Miori, do you know what bloodletting is? Apparently, when sick people bleed a little bit, they feel better. I will……be happy to perform bloodletting on you.”

Kisara drew her sword and aimed it at Miori’s eyes.

“Everything from the neck up is unnecessary.”

That’s not called bloodletting. Rentaro wanted to just hold his head. He didn’t want this to happen. That’s why he didn’t want to have the two of them in the same space. “C-calm down, Kisara.”

“Calm down? Did you just tell me to calm down? My anger is ecstasy!” Even her language ability was uncertain now, and when Kisara started to breathe Lamaze style, Miori stood quietly with a smug look on her face.

Rentaro remembered the phrase “an ostrich in the desert.” There was an anecdote about how an ostrich in the desert will stick its head in the sand and pretend it can’t see anything when an enemy appears.

At a loss, Rentaro desperately stuffed meat into his mouth and tried to avert his eyes from reality. Yeah, the meat is delicious. It’s superdelicious.

Kisara and Miori moved away from the table and faced each other, opening some distance between them.

Kisara spoke. “Miori. Someday, I will buy your company’s stock twice over and short sell it, crushing the whole company! And then at the general stockholder meeting, I’ll disrupt the meeting as an extortionist and torment you until you cry!”

“I wouldn’t if I were you. Shiba Heavy Weapons is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as part of the Nikkei Tokyo 60, and is one of Japan’s mainstay industries. It’s suicidal to try to short sell it. Anyway, how much capital does the runaway daughter of the Tendo family have, anyway? If you start by buying, you can make a lot of money, you know.”

“I would rather bite off my tongue and die than make money off your company’s stocks!”

“Does that mean you won’t back down?”

“I’ll send you to the other world.”

Miori reached into her kimono sleeve and pulled out a government sidearm, a Swordfish, custom-made just for her, and then took a complicated stance with her iron fan in one hand and handgun in the other. “I don’t know about your Tendo style or whatever, but it’s just an improvised martial art that’s barely been around for a hundred years. I’ll make you bow to the Shiba style.”

Kisara took her sword-drawing stance and spoke in a cold voice. “Shut up, Miori. Save your sass for the hereafter.”

In the midst of this volatile situation, Enju was the only one who balled her fist and said, “Be careful, Miori! If you touch Kisara, she’ll suck up your boobs!” energetically cheering her on. It seemed like Enju was on Miori’s side.

For some reason, the fluorescent lightbulb that had just been changed flickered.

“Shiba Style Niten Kitcho—”

“Tendo Sword Drawing, First Style, Number 2—”

Rentaro realized that he was never getting his cleaning deposit back and was suddenly very depressed.