A Trespass on Good Faith
Tsubaki Issei was waiting on the roof of the school, where a chill wind whipped his hair around. He was alone; his only companions were the whistling of the breeze, the shouting of the baseball club on the athletic field, and the distant playing of the brass band club.
He was a short boy, only about 160 centimeters tall, with fair skin, long hair drawn back into a tail, and almond-shaped eyes which were currently narrowed like razors. He’d removed his high-collared uniform jacket to stand in just a T-shirt, on the dead center of the roof, in a confident pose.
The dark, leaden sky seemed to warn of the vicious battle to come.
Now, come to me, Sagara Sousuke... Issei declared internally to his mortal enemy. Today, at last, I’ll humiliate you. I’ll take you out in one hit with a strike from my body and soul!
Issei was the president of the karate society; a grappler developing a unique fighting style that incorporated a variety of martial arts. Last week, he’d lost to Sagara Sousuke in a one-on-one duel. He’d relaxed his guard then—or rather, completely dropped it—and though he’d admitted defeat at the time, the loss continued to nag at him. That was why today, he’d challenged Sagara Sousuke to a rematch.
Here, on this roof. Now, after class. Let us settle this, man to man, once and for all!
He’d summed up these feelings in a letter of challenge, which he’d written with an ink brush and placed in Sagara Sousuke’s shoe cubby during lunch break. When he prepared to leave school for the day, Sousuke would surely see the letter in the cubby and come to meet him here. He’d told Issei he would fight him at any time, after all.
I shall be... victorious! thought Issei, clenching his fists and widening his eyes. Fighting spirit began to emanate from his body.
Just then... the sound of an explosion echoed out from the southern building’s first floor. It came from the direction of the entrance hall, where the students’ shoe cubbies sat.
Issei looked over for a moment curiously, then forced the distracting thoughts out of his mind. No... ignore it, he told himself. Focus on the coming fight.
Sagara Sousuke would surely come. Issei just had to keep waiting here, patiently, until the moment he arrived. No matter how many minutes, hours, or days it took!
●
“You... You human bomb!” Chidori Kaname leaped up high, readied her fan double-handed overhead, and slammed it down on Sagara Sousuke as hard as she could. Whap! The sound rang out through the entrance hall, which was still filled with white smoke.
“That hurt quite a lot,” Sousuke said, rubbing his head.
“Oh, shut up!” Kaname shouted at him. “How many thousands of times will you do this same thing?! How many shoe cubbies must you destroy before you’re finally satisfied?!” She pointed at a pair of freshly fried shoes from which smoke was still rising.
“But there was definitely a foreign object in my cubby.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to blow it up!”
“But the moment I lower my guard to accommodate social exceptions is when the real trap—”
“Oh, traps, traps, traps! Has there ever really been a bomb here?!” Kaname demanded. “Answer me now!”
“I agree that this also wasn’t a bomb and instead some kind of letter, but...” said Sousuke, gathering up the letter’s burnt fragments. Due to having been in close proximity to the explosion, there was little on them that was legible.
“Show it to me,” she said. “Oh, for the love of... you can’t even read it anymore! What now?”
“It was unavoidable. I’ll take it back and attempt to restore it, but...” Sousuke responded, his expression blank.
“Just make sure you clean all this up. I’m out!”
“I see.”
“It’ll probably rain today... The weather report said it could go all night long, and it’ll probably get cold, so get home ASAP. See ya.” And with that, Kaname left.
The weather report was right: it rained all night that night. Kaname pulled an extra blanket out of her closet and slept soundly through the deepening chill.
The next morning, in the 2-4 classroom...
“Sagaraaa!” The door burst open, and Tsubaki Issei stomped in, looking like a drowned rat. His hair and clothing were soaked, and his face was blanched from cold, wet, and exhaustion. His lips had turned blue, his eyes were bloodshot, and he burned with a violent anger.
Sousuke and Kaname, standing in the corner of the classroom and arguing about something or other, whispered in unison.
“Tsubaki?”
“Tsubaki-kun?”
Issei strode into the classroom and pointed straight at one of their classmates, Kazama Shinji. “Why did you run from me, Sagara?! You coward!” he shouted at him.
Shinji cringed back from him. “I... I’m sorry! I don’t have any money!”
“Eh?” At this, the extremely nearsighted Issei’s eyes narrowed, and he leaned in to peer at him more carefully. “I’m sorry,” he said, “wrong person.”
He then walked up to the next desk over. “Sagara! Why didn’t you come?! Did you run in fear of me?” he howled again.
This time, it was Tokiwa Kyoko who scooted back, wincing. “Um... my name’s Tokiwa, actually.”
“Eh?” Issei narrowed his eyes once more as he leaned forward to inspect her. “Wrong person again. Forgive me.”
This time, he scanned his furious gaze around the room. The students looked away, consciously avoiding his gaze.
“What a curious man,” Sousuke whispered.
“I forgot how super-nearsighted he is, yeah,” Kaname added.
Perhaps hearing their voices, Issei seemed to finally pinpoint Sousuke’s location and walked straight up to him. “Sagara!”
“You’re looking poorly, Tsubaki.”
“Silence! You backed out of our duel, you impudent coward!” Issei shouted, pointing straight at Kaname.
Kaname indicated Sousuke beside her with her thumb. “Wrong person. You want him.”
“Ngh... Ch-Chidori, was it? A fine morning to you. Ah, but no matter... My business is with him today!” Though he blushed red as he recognized Kaname, Issei eventually turned back to his correct target. “Sagara. I was waiting on the roof all night. Don’t tell me you didn’t read the letter of challenge I placed in your shoe cubby!”
Kaname eyed Sousuke. “So it was a letter of challenge, huh?”
“I didn’t know that until now,” Sousuke protested. “I attempted to restore it last night, but I was unable to make it legible.”
“What are you talking about?!” Issei howled.
“Tsubaki, I detonated your letter of challenge. You should attempt to make an appointment through conventional channels next time,” Sousuke said in a businesslike manner.
Meanwhile, Issei trembled. “Y-You detonated it? Impossible. I... I... I spent all night in the rain... ahh... achoo!” He sneezed, his shoulders heaving with breath.
“Were you really waiting this whole time? From yesterday after class until now?!” Kaname asked in shock.
Issei looked downward. “Yes...”
“Hold on; let me check you,” she said, walking up to Issei and putting a hand on his forehead.
Issei flushed crimson, while the rest of the class just watched curiously.
“That’s the kind of thing that gives a man the wrong impression,” said one.
“Kana-chan can be really thoughtless now and then,” said another.
“Look, Sagara-kun! Doesn’t that tick you off?” asked a third.
Ignoring the presumptuous whispers around her, Kaname released Issei. “Yeah, feels like a fever,” she told him. “I bet you’ve got a cold. You should’ve given up and left sooner.”
“Oh... I wanted to, but someone must have locked the door to the roof, and the door was too sturdy to break with my fists, and... ngh...” Issei held back tears as some kind of emotion seemed to well up in him. “I thought I was going to die there. It was cold. So... so cold...” He pursed his lips tightly, clenching his bloody fists.
Kaname patted him soothingly on the head. “Poor thing. Sousuke, this is your fault, okay? You need to say you’re sorry.”
Sousuke had simply been staring at Kaname and Issei silently up until now, but... “Very well,” he responded sullenly after a moment’s pause. Then he placed a hunk of dried meat on top of the desk in front of Issei. “You must be hungry, Tsubaki,” he offered. “Eat this and go.”
Issei said nothing.
“Well? Eat it. It’s delicious. And it’s yours,” said Sousuke, speaking with a strange sense of calm.
Meanwhile, Issei trembled violently. A hostile air hung between them, intimidating the students around them into silence. “And now you treat me like a stray dog...”
“Don’t worry. It’s not poisoned.”
“I’ll kill you!” Issei shouted, charging at Sousuke with tears in his eyes. He furiously released a straight punch, which Sousuke dodged just in time. Issei’s fist hit the blackboard behind him instead, creating a hole with a loud cracking sound.
“You appear to be doing well enough after all,” Sousuke observed.
“Shut up! Get on your hands and knees and apologize, you... you...!”
“But you still can’t hide your exhaustion, Tsubaki. Your movements lack their customary sharpness.”
“Ngh... nnngh, you...!” Issei flailed around like a spoiled child, continuing to strike at Sousuke as the other man fled. Sousuke used desks and chairs as shields, lithely dodging each blow as they ran around the room.
It was extremely bothersome. Finally Kaname, unable to take it any longer, shouted out, “Excuse me! It’s almost class time, got it? Are you two listening?!”
They certainly weren’t— They knocked over the lectern, broke a vase, crashed through the cleaning supplies... and finally ended up out in the hall.
“No more!” yelled Issei. “I’ll use my ultimate strike and bury you at last!”
“Try it,” Sousuke offered.
“Graaaah!” Issei took in a deep breath, then lowered his hips and pulled back his right fist like he was drawing a bow. “Daidomyaku style, ultimate fist! Near-Death-Inducing Punch!” The sound of Issei’s strike ripping through the air was almost audible as his fist plunged itself into the torso of the person in front of him—
Who happened to be a passing custodian.
“Bglfwuh!” the old man shouted. Blood spurted from his mouth as his body went flying. Eventually, he landed before sliding for a long time down the corridor... and then, he lay still.
“Ah... what did you do?” Kaname ran out of the room after them, her jaw dropping in dismay.
“Heh heh heh...” Issei remained with his fist thrust out, eyes lowered, laughing quietly. “Well? How did you like that, Sagara?!”
Sousuke, who was still standing right next to Issei, merely folded his arms with a frown.
In the student council room after class that day...
“A week’s recovery, they say,” said Hayashimizu Atsunobu, the student council president, who was a young man with slicked-back hair and an intellectual air about him. He was dressed in a white uniform with a high collar and wore wire-frame glasses.
“So... it wasn’t that bad?” Kaname asked.
“It’s not merely a matter of the injury’s severity, Chidori-kun. For a student to grievously harm Mr. Onuki, the school custodian, is in itself the issue,” he reminded her. “I spent all day considering a variety of solutions to the unpleasant matter: to cover up, to persuade, or to deny student council involvement.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Hayashimizu told her. “But...” he then turned his gaze to Sousuke and Issei, who stood on either side of her.
Sousuke was at attention as usual, chest up and out. Meanwhile, Issei was slumped over, head hung, looking duly chastened.
“Tsubaki Issei-kun, was it? Why are you so dead-set on defeating Sagara-kun? I did hear you had some kind of strange bet over your eviction from the judo dojo. I believe it was—”
“—That if he can beat Sousuke, I have to become manager of their karate society,” said Kaname. “Not that they asked me if I was okay with that...”
“That’s right,” Hayashimizu said neutrally. “But Tsubaki-kun, I’m afraid that deal is off. Chidori-kun is the student council vice president; Sagara-kun has no authority to decide her fate.”
“That’s right, Senpai.” Kaname let out a snort as she glanced at Hayashimizu, impressed. It was unusual to see him show such respect for her position.
“In addition, you’re mistaken if you think your organization can possess her,” he continued. “You should feel ashamed of yourselves.”
“That’s right!”
“Remember this for the future—The only one that controls Chidori Kaname is me, the student council president.”
“You said it! ...Wait, what?”
Ignoring Kaname’s glare, Hayashimizu scanned Issei for a reaction. A moment later...
“I...” Issei spoke at last. “I don’t care about the manager thing. I hate that I let my guard down and lost to Sagara. He’s such a nothing. Such a... cheating, sneaky, ignorant, impudent, unpleasant, out-of-control, cowardly, lying, insincere, stupid little nothing...” Issei rattled off the list of insults, his eyes still pointed downward.
“That’s quite a list... Though I feel about half of it is correct,” admitted Hayashimizu.
“Hmm.” Sousuke didn’t seem angry about this, but a single trail of greasy sweat trickled down his temple.
“I want to fight him one more time. I want a match whose result I can accept,” Issei pleaded. “That’s all!”
“I see. I believe I understand the situation,” said Hayashimizu, reclining in his chair. “It’s not good to let these resentments fester. And fights breaking out in the school isn’t good for public safety. Very well... I’d like you to have one proper match. If Tsubaki-kun wins, I’ll give the karate society a spare club room. But if Sagara-kun wins, you must abandon all hope of ever beating him. What do you think?”
“Senpai?” Kaname asked, startled.
“I accept, Mr. President.”
“Thank you, Mr. President!”
Kaname blinked in surprise as the boys on either side of her immediately readied for combat. One reached into his pocket, the other pulled back a fist...
“Now, wait a moment.” Hayashimizu stopped them.
The boys looked at him suspiciously.
“What is it?”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t condone the use of violence to solve your problems. Why don’t you try a competition method that relies a bit more on your mind and character?”
“Eh?” they both asked.
“Caring for others is also a valuable skill, and a far loftier one than the use of guns or fists. What would you think of something like that?” With that, the student council president produced an envelope with some documents inside.
●
Jindai High custodian, Onuki Zenji, lay in bed while letting out the occasional groan of pain. His head was on a flattened pillow, and his body was covered in a stained blanket. He was just over fifty, with thinning hair and stubble. He had a bit of paunch around his stomach and jawline, but due to his daily labor, perhaps, his face was tanned and his arms were well muscled.
Having worked at the school for twenty-five years now, Onuki had been there longer than most of the teachers, and he knew the school building and its other facilities like the back of his hand.
“Hnngh... mm.” The side he’d been punched in that morning ached. Perhaps that was why he wasn’t hungry, even though it was evening. In his twenty-five years here, he’d been on the receiving end of violence from students a few times before. But he’d never taken a punch that hard. Onuki thanked his lucky stars that he hadn’t ended up in the hospital.
Darn it. What’s wrong with them? he wondered, pulling the blanket up to his chin and letting out a sigh.
Indeed, what was wrong with students these days? In addition to this most recent act, he felt like property damages had been far worse this year. Didn’t kids these days have any respect for people and property? It was as if their society had paid for its growing prosperity with the character of its children.
Onuki found himself reflecting on his past.
It was better in the old days, he told himself. The students were so pure, so passionate, so burning with hope for the future. They’d approached him as they would any other teacher and helped him with his work with a smile. He still remembered their cheerful voices...
“Onuki-san, we’ll help you clean!”
“This school is important to all of us!”
“Wow! You do this backbreaking work all the time? Amazing!”
“You’re like a father to us, Onuki-san!”
“Yeah, seriously! Ha ha ha!”
That’s how it had been.
Even the delinquent behind most of the violence had sometimes helped him lay tile. Onuki remembered the boy snatching the toolbox from his hands. “Sheesh, I can’t stand to watch this no more,” he’d said. “Hand it over. My pop’s a carpenter.” The words had brought tears to his eyes.
How many years had it been since those students, so kind deep down, had left him behind? Students these days did nothing but treat him like he didn’t exist, throw their garbage everywhere, and destroy school property. It was a truly lamentable situation.
And then, just as he’d curled up on his futon to wallow in the nostalgia...
There was a knock at the door to the custodian’s room.
“Come in,” he responded, wondering who it could be at this hour.
“Excuse us.”
“We’re coming in.”
Two boys entered, and Onuki scowled as he saw them. One of them was the culprit behind most of the recent property damage—Sagara Sousuke was the name, he believed. The other was the one who had hit him this morning—Tsubaki Issei, he believed. The latter was currently wearing glasses as thick as the bottoms of milk bottles.
The two boys stepped into his six-tatami-mat room and looked silently down on Onuki. Both wore sullen scowls.
Have they come to finish me off? Onuki wondered as they began to address him.
“Are you still in pain?” Sousuke asked glumly.
“What are you doing here?” Onuki asked.
“Are you still in pain or not? Answer the question!” Issei demanded impatiently.
“Y-Yes, I am still in pain...”
“Good,” they said in unison, before tearing the blanket off his bed and beginning to strip him down.
“Wh-What are you doing?!” Onuki demanded, floundering in protest. Ignoring his objections, Sousuke and Issei poked and prodded at him violently.
“He’s got internal bleeding,” Sousuke announced.
“He needs a hot compress,” replied Issei. “Go fetch one.”
“We can’t let him get too cold. Get his head down, warm him up, then get a urine sample—”
“First, ask how he’s feeling. What’s his pulse? Is he dizzy? Well, Mr. Custodian?”
“Ow, that tickles. S-Stop it!” he shouted, and the two stopped in place. The half-naked, middle-aged man snatched his blanket back and pulled away from them, his face deathly pale. “Wh-What in the world are you doing? Don’t tell me... You’re exploiting my vulnerable state to take my ripe old body by force?! You want a taste of the fruit moments before it falls from the tree?!” What kind of world is this? I knew that young people these days were degenerate... but to think that their perversions have gone this far! Onuki thought, trembling in fear.
Sousuke and Issei shared a sullen glance, and then...
“You appear to be under a misapprehension,” observed Sousuke.
“Calm down. We aren’t here to hurt you,” Issei added.
“What?”
“We were assigned to nurse you back to health,” Issei clarified. “We’ll be living with you and working for you until you’ve recovered.”
“Yes. We have permission from the principal and the student council president. Leave your work to us, and focus on your convalescence,” Sousuke advised.
“R-Really?”
The two of them nodded firmly.
Onuki stared at them... and after a few seconds, he welled up with tears. “Ngh... ahh...”
The boys tilted their heads in confusion.
“In my twenty-five years as a custodian, I... I’ve never been so moved! Why was I so convinced, as the century draws to an end, that people’s hearts had become lawless?! Ah, there is still mercy in this world. Thank you. Thank you, both of you!” Onuki cried manly tears as he shook each boy’s hand.
Sousuke responded noncommittally and then said, more officially, “So we’ll be helping you here for a few days. During that time, please pay close attention to the mission execution performance of Sagara Sousuke, Class 2-4.”
“Eh?”
“No, Mr. Custodian! I’m the one whose name you should remember! Watch and see how I, Tsubaki Issei of Class 2-8, apply myself to your care!”
What strange things to say... Onuki thought, sitting there in stunned silence.
Sousuke then stood up again. “Are you hungry? I’ll cook. Lie down, please.”
“Wait! Your cooking is dog food. I’ll cook,” said Issei. “My knife skills, which I acquired at my part-time job—”
“You can’t be trusted with a knife,” Sousuke scoffed. “You might mistake Mr. Onuki for a side of pork and carve him up.”
“I would not!”
“At any rate, lie down, four-eyes. You’ll just get in the way.”
“Hmph. You’re the one who should lie down!”
“I can’t do that.”
“You little...!”
Ignoring the confused Onuki, Sousuke and Issei raced each other to the kitchen and began to snatch ingredients and tools from each other.
“Give me that cutting board, Sagara!”
“If you want it, give me access to the fridge.”
“Never! And how do you expect to use the burner without a pot?!” Issei demanded.
“Then you’ll never get these green peppers,” taunted Sagara.
“Are you threatening me?!”
The two fought and insulted each other inside the small kitchen. It was so pathetic that Onuki Zenji grimaced. “B-Boys... I appreciate the concern, but could you please be a bit quieter—”
“You want me to take them by force?!” Issei bellowed.
“Go ahead and try,” Sousuke invited him. “I’ll shove this ham down your throat and watch you choke to death.”
“Try it!”
Crash!
Issei threw a bowl, which Sousuke blocked with a cutting board before swinging at his opponent with a ladle. Issei lithely dodged the blows and counterattacked with a daikon radish. Sousuke created a smoke screen with flour and pepper and—
“S-Stop it...” Onuki choked out, but Sousuke and Issei heedlessly continued their battle.
The next afternoon, in the student council room...
“Are you really sure about this?” Kaname asked Hayashimizu.
He stopped talking and held up a hand to Mikihara Ren, the secretary—who was taking dictation on a word processor nearby—signaling for her to stop. “Excuse me,” he replied. “Am I sure about what?”
“Sousuke and Tsubaki-kun,” Kaname clarified. “Giving them free rein for three days, then asking the custodian to judge which one of them was more earnest and helpful...”
“Hm. As a pacifist, I cannot condone open conflict among the students. I thought it was a good idea, myself...”
“It wasn’t a good idea at all! You know what they’re like. They’ll each spend three days threatening him to choose them on pain of death. The poor custodian...”
Hayashimizu smiled quietly at this. “You worry too much, Chidori-kun. They’re both decent men deep down. If the rules require them to offer their services, then they will, at a minimum, do that. Even if they go too far and cause some kind of problem... the damage will at least remain limited to the school.”
“Uh-huh...”
“And there we are now. See? They’re working hard.” Hayashimizu indicated outside the window, then cut the conversation off and resumed his dictation. “Ahem... As seen here, as a matter of conflict resolution, rules forbidding the use of physical force are the basis for the minimal understanding necessary to ensure the survival of humans in a way that transcends politics, race, nationality...”
The secretary continued tapping at the word processor, taking down Hayashimizu’s strange thoughts.
Kaname decided to leave well enough alone and instead looked out the student council room window at the athletic field.
Wow, she marveled, they really are working...
Sousuke was jogging along a corner of the athletic field, shouldering a long, thin plank. He eventually arrived in front of the sports clubs’ building and dropped the plank on the ground, about to get to work fixing a bench with a hole in it.
Just then, Tsubaki Issei ran up to him, also carrying a plank, and attempted to fix the bench himself. Sousuke ignored him but kicked Issei’s plank away and hammered his own plank onto the bench. Issei shouted something and smashed Sousuke’s plank with a hammer from the side.
Or... maybe not?
Perhaps in retaliation, Sousuke drew his gun and began shooting at Issei’s board. Issei, enraged, drew back his fist. Sousuke fought back with his plank fragments, and after a brief exchange... Somehow, the bench they’d come to fix ended up broken entirely in half. They seemed to notice it shortly thereafter, standing there for a puzzled moment before turning to glare at each other... and then resuming their unsightly bickering.
Maybe letting them punch each other would’ve been better, thought Kaname, who shook her head with a grimace as she watched it all go down.
Onuki Zenji wandered the school that night. Normally, around this time, he’d be patrolling for things he should fix, clean, or check, but the places Sousuke and Issei had attended to were in such bad condition that not even a maestro like Onuki could fix them.
“Unbelievable...” he muttered. The floor with a single loose tile had been fixed back into place with so much glue that it was now three times higher than the tiles around it. The wall whose paint had begun to chip was now repainted in a sloppy camouflage pattern. The flowerbed beside the school had been so excessively watered that it now looked like a bottomless bog. The chain-link fence off the athletic field that had only had a small hole in it was now reinforced with forbidding barbed wire and high-voltage current. The bench in front of the club building had been “fixed” into a tilted L-shape, and the bronze statue near the entrance now had its head turned 180 degrees. And that wasn’t even all...
“Hmm...” It was all so awful, even groaning about it was draining for Ozuki. He felt so disheartened, in fact, that he couldn’t even bring himself to check the pond where he kept the koi he’d been raising for ten years now.
No, no... Don’t be angry, he told himself. They’d worked all day for him, and their intentions were good, in their own way. Even if their execution was awkward, it would be ungrateful to scold them for it. Yes... that’s right. Endure, thought Onuki. You’ve worked here twenty-five years. You’ve endured countless frustrations and overcome many trials. No one can endure like you!
But even as he had that thought, he felt the sweat rise on his face.
As Onuki returned to his room, clinging unsteadily to the walls...
Crash! A low table went flying, busting through the door. It struck Onuki in the head and knocked him over.
“Ngh...” As he lay there in the hallway, he could hear Sousuke and Issei yelling at each other within.
“What’s wrong with you?” Issei yelled. “Why do you always try to get in my way?!”
“I think you’ve got it backwards,” Sousuke told him. “You’re the one in my way.”
“Just tell me why! Why did you throw the cloud-ear mushroom I bought in the trash?!”
“Was that supposed to be food? I assumed it was silicon or some kind of wood shavings— wait. Mr. Onuki is...”
“Hmm?”
The two of them finally seemed to notice Onuki’s presence, abandoning their quarrel to run up to him.
“His head’s split open,” Sousuke said accusingly. “Tsubaki, what were you thinking?”
“Only because you dodged the table!”
“Which I wouldn’t have had to do if you hadn’t thrown it at me.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t do things that make me want to throw tables at you!” Issei replied.
“A brazen abdication of responsibility. But it won’t excuse the fact that you killed Mr. Onuki.”
“He’s not dead yet!”
“Anyway, let’s get him inside.”
Undeterred from their verbal sparring, the two of them carried the custodian to the bed in his room.
An hour later, Onuki had somewhat recovered, and managed to swallow down his temper with superhuman patience and effort. He still felt the urge to have a go at them both with a kitchen knife, but somehow managed to swallow that down too.
Endure, endure... he told himself.
That’s right. They didn’t mean any harm. In fact, they had hurried to tidy up the room and were now seated in the traditional kneeling posture before him, looking very deflated indeed. Still, he had to give them a talking to. It was for their own good!
Onuki sat up and spoke formally. “Sit there, both of you.”
“We are sitting, sir.”
“Just sit already!” he snarled.
“But we’re already sitting...” Despite their protestations, Sousuke and Issei awkwardly stood up and sat down again.
Onuki cleared his throat and then, with the archetypal inflections of an old man, said, “Let me say this first: I am extremely grateful for your loyalty and passion. Results aside, I acknowledge the impressive effort it takes to attempt sophisticated and taxing custodial duties.”
“Sir.”
“However! There’s one thing I cannot forgive, and that’s how badly you two seem to get along. You fight, you hurt each other, you quarrel over meaningless things. It’s pathetic,” he told them witheringly. “You’re not old friends by any chance, are you?”
“Absolutely not!” they voiced in unison.
“I only met him last week.”
“And even if we were stuck together for the next fifty years, we’d never be friends! Never!”
“I... I see.” Briefly dumbfounded by their vehemence, Onuki recovered enough to say, “Even so, you need to find some spirit of cooperation. Conflict does no one any good. I personally think you two cooperating on something might help, but...”
With that, Sousuke and Issei shared a glance.
“Hmm. Regarding that...”
“The truth is, we did cooperate a little bit just now...”
“Oh?”
Sousuke stood up and headed for the kitchen. He picked up a dish sitting beside the stove and placed it onto the table. It was fish stewed in miso. “Tonight’s dinner.”
“Sagara arranged the ingredients, and I cooked. It’s delicious,” said Issei. “Try some.”
Onuki looked at it hesitantly, then took the chopsticks he was offered and tried the soup. “Well, well. It’s... delicious. Truly, truly...” The fish was fatty and rich, and there was exactly the right amount of ginger in the soup. Onuki devoured the fish, feeling suddenly very pleased, and said, “You actually did something competently for once. Amazing. By the way, what is this fish? I can’t quite place the flavor...”
“It’s koi,” said Sousuke. “I caught it in the pond behind the school building.”
Onuki’s smile froze in place.
“It was quite large,” he boasted. “It struggled quite a lot, and took a long time to kill.”
Onuki quietly laid down his chopsticks. Then he slowly stood up, opened the closet in the room, rooted around in it, and pulled out an old chainsaw. The custodian then said, smiling, “You know, you two. That koi...”
“That koi?” the two asked, slowly moving into defensive postures.
“I’ve been raising her for fifteen years with great care. I cared for her so much, I even thought I’d stand a chance at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forest, and Fisheries Award. That’s how much she meant to me. Her name was Catherine,” he told them. “I named her after a famous French actress.”
“Aha...”
“And you caught her?” Onuki asked, his voice deceptively friendly. “It took a long time to kill her? And then, of all things, you made me eat her?”
“It appears so,” Sousuke lamented.
“Yeah, yeah... I’ve finally caught on. There’s not a single good intention in you. Everything you’ve been doing since yesterday has been a way of spiting me.”
“Eh? Onuki-san, you—”
Vrooooom! Rumm, rumm, rumm... Onuki started up the chainsaw’s engine. A roar rang out as the jagged blade began to spin at high velocity.
“Mr. Custodian?” Issei asked nervously.
“I must avenge my darling Catherine. I’m sorry, but it’s time to die. Sagara-kun. Tsubaki-kun.” With bloodshot eyes, Onuki raised the chainsaw high, and...
“Wait—”
“Die!” Smiling a smile that would make Jack Nicholson blush, Onuki Zenji leaped into action.
A misty rain was falling that morning.
When Kaname arrived at school, in the middle of stifling a yawn, she found the inside of the building a total mess. The parts of the walls and ceiling that weren’t made of reinforced concrete had been torn apart. Glass was broken, tiles were shattered. Sparks and water gushed from severed electric cables and sundered water pipes. Kaname accosted and asked several of the nervous-looking students standing nearby what had happened, but nobody seemed to know.
The anxious Kaname wandered around the school before classes and eventually discovered a gaunt-looking Sousuke and Issei in the gym storehouse.
“Wh-What happened?” she asked him.
Sousuke replied, as pale as death. “I spent all night with the rampaging custodian. I’ve never struggled so much against a man who wasn’t in some kind of combat vehicle. My bullets didn’t even slow him down. Unbelievable,” he responded listlessly.
Issei seemed to be, if anything, in even worse shape. “Never again. I’ll never fight again. I’m out forever. Never again...” he whispered, hugging his knees.
She wondered what kind of bloodbath they’d been witness to, but it seemed like the kind of thing you couldn’t imagine unless you’d been there.
The competition between Sousuke and Issei thus ended inconclusively.
Mr. Onuki himself regained consciousness that afternoon, and when Kaname asked him what had happened, he responded, absently,
“Eh? I don’t remember at all...”
〈A Trespass on Good Faith — The End〉
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