Festival of Opposition
Matchmaking game. Haunted house. Maze. Curry shop. Karaoke parlor. Manga café. Cosplay café. Couples’ café. Doujinshi shop. Used book shop. Conveyor belt sushi. Izakaya. Lingerie pub. Topless bar—
“Enough already!” Chidori Kaname shouted, slamming her chalk against the blackboard. Prior to that point, she’d been silently writing her classmates’ requests down on it.
It was currently homeroom period in July, during their first school term. The culture festival wouldn’t be held until late September in their second term, but it was getting to the point where they had to submit their class’s project proposal. And so, the group was having a discussion about what they wanted it to be.
“I know the Jindai culture festival rules are pretty lax, but there’s still limits, y’know? Stop yelling out stuff that’s totally nuts!” Kaname declared.
In response, her classmates exchanged glances with their friends nearby.
“Huh? But...”
“You told us to call ideas out as we had them...”
“So that’s what we did...”
They all muttered to themselves, sulking.
Kaname mussed up her hair and groaned. “Okay, look. How exactly are we going to run a topless bar or a lingerie pub?! Do you really think the school would even approve those things?!”
“Kana-chan, I’m equally impressed that you know what those things are...” Tokiwa Kyoko muttered.
Kaname elected to ignore that comment and resumed her entreaties of the class. “C’mon, guys. We’ve really gotta pick here. It was the same thing last year—we ran out of time and submitted a totally random plan that had us all scrambling later. Honestly...”
“Yeah, a topless bar might be a little bit too much to ask,” Kyoko muttered again, “but I think an izakaya might work.”
“We’re underage!” Kaname yelled.
“What about one of the cafés, then? What exactly is a couples café, anyway?”
“No comment. I mean, I think those last existed when your parents were children. Everyone was poor. Yes, the old days. Back before they were even karaoke parlors...” Kaname’s eyes became distant, for some reason.
“You say the strangest things sometimes, Chidori...”
“Question: is it perverted?”
“Perverted?” echoed Kaname.
“Could you tell us exactly what happens there?”
“There’s no need for you to know. Anyway, we don’t have any time to waste, so let’s keep going!” she said, deciding to swerve away from that subject and get them back on track. “We just need something that’s actually feasible. So... um, we can erase this one, this one, this one...” Kaname screwed up her face thoughtfully as she removed one idea after another from the blackboard. One unseemly plan after another vanished before their eyes.
Then one member of the class, a boy with a sullen expression, spoke. “What about a shooting range?”
“Conveyor belt sushi is out, I think...” Kaname mumbled to herself. “Used book shop is out... also needs to piss off and die forever... and then, um...”
“I suggest a shooting range,” Sousuke said insistently.
“I think that’s about it,” Kaname announced, ignoring his suggestion. “If you can think of anything else, tell me right away. We’re gonna vote!”
“Shooting range,” he said again. “We can teach the proper handling of live ammunition to reduce accidents and stigma.”
“Ready, everyone?! No other suggestions?! Okay, we’ll go with a simple majority...”
“Shooting—” Sagara Sousuke, who’d continued insisting on his own idea from his back-row seat, took a hit from Kaname’s blackboard eraser and toppled over.
“Shut up!!!” she snarled. Then she went on as if nothing had happened. “First, matchmaking game. Raise your hands if that’s your choice!”
Five people raised their hands. Kaname silently wrote “Five” on the board.
“Next... Haunted house?”
Eight people raised their hands for this.
“Karaoke parlor?”
After a few minutes, they had their result. The plan chosen by popular vote was... cosplay café.
“Huh? How did that happen?” Kaname slumped over as she cast a sideways glance at the students doing a little dance in celebration. The boys were mostly pleased, and some of the girls seemed enthusiastic, but the others just groaned.
“Um, but... it’s pretty fun,” Kyoko ventured. “We all get to dress up, right?”
“All nurses and mikos and maids and stuff!”
“Awesome! Awesome! Maids! Incidentally, it’s mostly enthusiast magazines that spell it ‘meido’ in Japanese, but apparently proper newspaper style is to write it as ‘meedo’! The chief editor of a manga magazine that has hefty wrestlers cosplaying as maids said so with great admiration. Even though that’s kind of irrelevant here!” a member of their class, Onodera Kotaro, rambled on enthusiastically.
“It sure is...” Kaname said with a sigh after casting a glance at him.
“Well, whatever. Any costumes that are weird or too pervy will be rejected, but treat it like a costume parade and we should be okay. Okay, let’s go with that,” Kaname announced decisively. “Cosplay café! I’m gonna bang out a proposal about that and send it to the culture festival executive committee. Is that acceptable? Any objections?!”
“No objections!” the entirety of class 2-4 threw in, clearly finding the long debate too tiresome to argue about it any longer.
Two weeks later, in the student council room...
“Why did you reject Class 4’s proposal?!” Kaname asked angrily, slapping the sheaf of documents onto the table. She glared breathlessly at the culture festival executive committee chairman, who remained nonplussed in the faith of her rage.
“I don’t know where to start,” said the chairman, Tomita, while scratching his chin. He was a large second-year student wearing small, round spectacles. “I mean, a cosplay café? There’re so many issues with a proposal like that. Remember that we’re staging mock businesses in a school, after all. We can’t permit exhibits with a sexual connotation.”
“It’s just a normal café with the wait staff in costumes,” Kaname objected. “How is that sexual?!”
“I don’t think it is, obviously, but the teachers and parents might disagree,” Tomita told her. “If someone gets the wrong idea and complains, heads will surely roll. You get it?”
“B-But—”
“Your proposal was rejected, and that’s the last word. Sorry and all, but this isn’t my decision alone. The executive committee made the decision together, and it can’t be overturned. Isn’t that right, Hayashimizu-senpai?” asked Tomita, turning to Hayashimizu Atsunobu for confirmation.
Student Council President Hayashimizu was working at his desk. Upon being addressed, he continued paging through his papers silently for a few moments, then at last said, quietly, “If it’s been decided by the executive committee, then Tomita-kun is correct.”
“Senpai?!” Kaname screamed.
Tomita snorted smugly.
“Tomita-kun. Would you mind leaving the room for a moment? Chidori-kun, come here,” Hayashimizu said, his eyes still on his documents.
Tomita shrugged and took his leave.
Kaname strode up to Hayashimizu, anger on full display. “Senpai, what’s going on here? You can’t really be siding with him!”
“He’s right, Chidori-kun. I must respect the judgment of the culture festival executive committee as much as possible.”
“But—”
“If I were to say, ‘Chidori-kun is right, take it back and reconsider,’ what would the committee’s members think? They’d think the student council president was undermining their authority,” Hayashimizu pointed out. “They’d be unhappy. It would deplete morale. It would sow distrust in the two of us, and have a negative impact on the culture festival as a whole.”
“And so, we just have to let them be completely unreasonable?”
Hayashimizu looked up at Kaname with sympathetic eyes. “Were the complaints from anyone but you, I could have taken Tomita to task for it. But as you are the student council vice president, I’m afraid my hands are tied.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” muttered Kaname.
“You’re right,” he agreed, “it’s not fair. Authority is more constraining than most people assume.”
“Okay, but...” Kaname’s irritation died down, and she lost the will to argue any further. Hayashimizu did have a point, after all. She wasn’t exactly happy about conceding the issue, but... he seemed to have his own principles of noblesse oblige. “What am I supposed to tell my class?” she asked next.
“You can make me the villain if you wish,” Hayashimizu offered. “I’m fully accustomed to such defamation. And more importantly, you should choose a new idea.”
“A new idea, huh?” said Kaname, folding her arms.
After using an overtime homeroom period for discussion, Class 2-4 decided to go forward with a normal café. Sousuke persisted in insisting on a mortar safety course, but Kaname denied him again with a sumo ketaguri move.
Tomita, the executive committee president, looked unhappy about it, but took her proposal readily enough. The next day, they received word that their proposal had been accepted. Now they could rest easy... Or so they thought, until a few days later, when they received the printout containing all the class proposals. When the students of Class 4 saw it, they hit the roof.
Class 2-4 would get to do their café, but...
Class 2-7: Costume Café
That’s what the print-out said. Class 2-7 happened to be the class to which the executive committee chairman, Tomita, belonged.
“What the hell?!”
“How is cosplay different from costume?!”
“We gotta fight this! We deserve an apology and compensation, so that this tragedy never repeats itself...”
“I feel like it’s a common euphemism lately, but I’m still mad!”
They really were furious. After all, the executive committee had rejected their own proposal, which was exactly the same other than the title. And the prioritized class just happened to be the one to which the committee chairman belonged...
“Unforgivable!”
“They’ll pay for this!”
“It’s tyranny!”
The whole group shouted in rage.
Obviously, as class representative, it fell to Kaname to calm the chaos. Slap!!! She hit the blackboard with her palm so loudly that it echoed throughout the classroom. The class immediately fell silent.
“Kana-chan?”
“Heh heh heh... That Tomita’s got some nerve,” she snarled, as the rest of the group stared at her, dumbstruck. A shining aura rose off of her figure, and the backlighting it provided cast her whole face pitch black except for her shining eyes and the beaming crescent of her mouth.
Yes... Kaname was the angriest of them all.
“Fighting this won’t get us anywhere,” she announced. “They’ll just give us the runaround, after all.”
“But Chidori...”
“The lesson we teach them will be completely above board, then!” she announced brightly. “We won’t draw customers in with cheap tricks. We’ll just run a better café!”
“Hmm...” The classmates exchanged glances with each other.
Standing before them, Kaname took on the posture of an old dictator from some country or other and proclaimed, “Aromatic coffee! Delicious food! Fabulous decorations! Above-and-beyond service! We will mobilize all of these things to bring in every customer we can! Manipulating the masses is easy! The smallest bit of calculation, when added to a more or less honest presentation, can be shockingly persuasive! To recover from the political defeat of having our cosplay café proposal refused, we must fight back with the spirit of chivalry! It is only in this way that we can teach the uncultured swine of Class 7 a lesson! We must use this feeling of failure to fuel us, and make them accept the obvious superiority of Class 4!”
“That was all grandiose and urgent, but it’s pretty basic strategy...” Onodera Kotaro muttered.
“Who cares if it’s basic?” Kaname demanded. “It’s the best way to make sure they can’t complain when they lose. Well?!”
“Got it.”
“I’m in.”
“No objections!”
Her classmates chimed in one after another.
“Okay! Leave the planning to me! I’ll focus on nothing but this, and see this café through!” Kaname proclaimed proudly.
Tokiwa Kyoko then spoke up hesitantly, “But Kana-chan. Are you sure you want to promise that so easily? You are vice president, and you’ll probably be busy with lots of other stuff, right?”
“Hah! No worries there. It’s July now. The culture festival is in September, so we’ve got plenty of time. Just leave yourselves in my hands!” Kaname cackled, thumping her chest.
When the project list was released, Tomita, head of the executive committee, had a feeling that Class 2-4 would come to confront him, and felt a feeling of anticlimax when they didn’t. “Eh? Maybe they weren’t that enthusiastic about it,” he said, puzzled, as the Class 7 proposal meeting went on around him.
“Either way, there’s no need to show mercy,” one of the Class 7 students told him.
“Yeah, yeah. We need to have our revenge for last year. I can’t believe those Class 4 jerks submitted the same idea as us, just to spite us...” Tomita growled.
“Going to great lengths to make sure you were head of the executive committee was a good call,” his classmates agreed.
Jindai High School didn’t rearrange the compositions of its classes every year; their students stayed the same throughout all three years. Last year at the culture festival, Tomita’s Class 1-7 had done a haunted house. But Kaname’s Class 1-4 submitted a proposal for the same. And this was more than just a haunted house—they’d gone with the bizarre concept of “RPG-like matchmaking maze karaoke haunted house with trading curry.”
“Their proposal was baffling, but in the end, the students swarmed to Class 4...”
“What even is ‘trading curry’?”
“One way or another, Class 7 lost big time as a result. That’s why we decided we’d get them back this year, even if we had to resort to dirty tactics to do it!”
“You get it, Tomita-kun?! You’d better keep putting pressure on their proposal! Got it?”
As his classmates urged him on, Tomita shrugged agreeably.
And so summer vacation arrived.
Classes taking the culture festival seriously needed to start work before August was over, but just as the students of Class 7 had anticipated, Kaname’s class was struggling to get things started.
One of the reasons for this was their central organizing figure, Kaname. She was the current student council vice president, and had been the vice chairman of the culture festival executive committee the year before. She’d ended up being called off on one minor culture festival-related task after another, and had barely had time to help out her own class.
Additionally, the executive committee members kept coming to her with questions. “Where do you start buying materials?” and “What do we do if we go over budget?” and “What kind of documentation should we have in the nurse’s office?” It wasn’t until after their second term started that she realized this was Tomita’s roundabout way of sabotaging her.
And that wasn’t her only problem. Kaname had wanted to use her free time towards the end of summer break to work on detailed planning for their class project, but as luck would have it, that time ended up being spent on a terrible misadventure in the south seas. Even after that was over, she was so exhausted by the experience that it took her a few days before she could think about the culture festival again.
But now they were well into their second term. She’d handed in her summer homework and was finally ready to focus on culture festival preparations, when suddenly, a ridiculous transfer student had arrived in Class 4, and thrown Kaname’s and Sousuke’s lives into chaos for about two weeks. By the time she could finally catch her breath, the culture festival was just ten days away.
I haven’t made any preparations at all—
Kaname, sweating from every pore and fidgeting, revealed this fact to her homeroom and earned a collective scream from her classmates.
“What?! How can that be?”
“We’ve only got ten days left?!”
“What have you been doing the past month and change?!”
Kaname could do nothing but silently receive her classmates’ rebukes—“I’m disappointed” and “Do you even care?” and “After all that bragging you did...” She did feel quite responsible and remained abashed for some time, but the jeers kept on coming. A more timid girl would probably have started crying and apologizing, but this was Kaname. After reaching the limits of what she could take...
“Shut up!” She turned it all back on them, shouting and kicking over the lectern in front of her.
“Eek!”
“Wah!”
The students in the front row dove out of the way of the falling lectern. Their teacher, Kagurazaka Eri, who’d been watching the proceedings from the corner, also started in shock.
“I’ve been busy, okay?!” she shouted aggressively. “I almost died time and again... and again and again! I didn’t have time to think about the damned culture festival! What the hell right do you have to complain after you put all the burden on me anyway?!”
“Ngh...”
“But the fact is that I haven’t prepared, so we’ve got to do something. At this rate, we’ll have a café that no one wants to visit. What’ll happen then?”
“What will happen then?” the group asked in response to her rhetorical question.
“We’ll end up in the red! And if we’re in the red, we won’t have money for our after party,” she reminded them. “We won’t be able to eat expensive seafood or drink so*rs, bee*, or s*ke!”
“No way!!!” the students responded in unison.
“That’s right!” Kaname continued ruthlessly. “Remember the bliss we sampled last year with the profits earned off our inexplicably popular RPG-like matchmaking maze karaoke haunted house with trading curry? Have you forgotten that glory already?!”
Her words had the entire group feeling nostalgic in an instant.
“Yeah, that was something else...”
“Shiori got black-out drunk and tried to take off her clothes...”
“But it was Ono-D who stripped instead and confessed his love to Chidori on the roof...”
“And Enta dented a parked Benz and then ran off. That was a close call.”
“Who was it who took a dive into the lake in Inokashira Park again?”
There were just two people in the classroom who had no idea what anyone was talking about: the transfer student Sousuke, and the teacher Kagurazaka Eri.
“I don’t fully understand, but an after party sounds a bit like some sort of dangerous cult ritual...” Sousuke muttered.
“Excuse me, everyone? I wish you’d told me... or rather, I wish you wouldn’t talk about any of it with me around...” Eri muttered.
But Kaname ignored them and shouted out loud, “This isn’t just about the after-party! The culture festival executive committee is already cracking down on our use of the home ec room and water fountains, and denying us priority use of materials and ingredients. Tomita of Class 7 is behind this! Doesn’t it make you crazy?!”
“Yeah!” the whole class responded immediately.
“Excellent. Will you work with me, then? We’ll call in seat fillers to help us fight!”
“Seat fillers?”
“If a shop looks empty, customers will assume it’s bad, so they won’t come in. That’s an ironclad rule,” Kaname told them. “So we’ll want to call in our friends from our middle school days and stuff to make it look like it’s well attended. A whole lot of them!”
“Hmm...”
“Each of you has a minimum quota of five people. Got it?!”
“Okay...”
It was a desperate plan, but no one was going to put themselves out there by objecting.
Several days later, at the Class 7 planning meeting...
“Looks like they’re scrambling to get it done last-minute,” a member of the Class 4 recon team told Tomita and the others. “The food is improvised, the decorations are half-assed, and they’re bringing in seat fillers to make it look like there’s demand.”
“And the classroom where they’re running their café will be on the third floor of the south building, away from the other projects.”
“Looks like Class 7 will be this year’s winner. Heh heh heh...” The Class-7 students smiled at each other, looking like executives for a secret evil organization.
“No... we need to do more. We need to steal away the seat fillers they’re calling in, too,” Tomita said.
“Steal them? How?”
“There’s an orientation booth beside the gate. I’ve placed a committee member there who I’ve got on the take. They’ll tell them that Class 4’s display is ‘effectively’ non-functional, and that they should come to Class 7’s café instead.” In other words, they were going to divert the friends and acquaintances that Kaname’s Class 4 were inviting to their own room.
“But won’t the jig be up the minute one of them calls a friend?”
“A guy from the radio club said he bought a jamming device in Akihabara recently. We’ll borrow that.”
“I see... But that’s a pretty dirty trick.”
“So what? If we’re gonna do this, we’ve gotta be thorough about it. You can never underestimate what Class 4 might pull at the last minute,” Tomita said, the eyes behind his round glasses flashing.
The next ten days passed in a flash. The school was bustling with preparations, and the sound of hammers and saws rang throughout the school after classes finished. With their preparations lagging further and further behind, Kaname and her friends ended up having to stay overnight at school the day before. The main movers of Class 4 had been working on café decorations without rest, but the work was slow. Overnight, things would suddenly need epoxy, or a power tool would break down... but when they went to the executive committee to borrow what they needed, they always seemed to be out of glue, or didn’t have any drills to rent, and turned them away. Apparently, Tomita cast a long shadow over the executive committee.
Kaname and the others, now growing furious, forged a plan to steal what they needed from the committee, but it seemed Tomita and his goons had anticipated that—they had people standing watch over the various work areas, making casual theft a no-go.
Left with no other choice, Kaname sent Kazama Shinji, one of their class’s boys, to bike out to a late-night discount store to buy what they needed. But on his way, Shinji found himself accosted by a tyrannical police officer in the Sengawa Precinct. “It was awful! She took one look at me and without any evidence said I looked like a perv, and that I was probably on my way to peep on the women’s bath or steal underwear!” he pleaded tearfully over the phone.
“Well, she’s not that far off the mark...” Kaname muttered in response.
“Not you too, Chidori-san! You can’t just—”
“Oh, sorry, sorry. Don’t worry about the shopping. Just be back by morning, okay?”
“Hey—”
Click. Kaname hung up and rubbed her eyes sleepily. “Right. In that case...” She called up the cell phone of Sousuke, whom she hadn’t seen since evening fell. The EC had some items and tools they absolutely needed, and she was hoping to ask the battlefield veteran to embark on a proper robbery, but...
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help the class,” Sousuke responded coldly. “I have student council preparations. My hands are full. There’s a job I’m staying up all night to do alone.”
She didn’t know what kind of job it was, but it sounded important, so she didn’t press the issue. They didn’t have a choice but to keep working on their decorating job.
And so that bloody last night of preparations ended, and the morning of the day arrived. The opening ceremony took place on a specially built stage in the courtyard under a clear blue sky.
It was a finely built stage. Banners had been hung up over the courtyard beside the flags of various countries, streamers, and ribbons decorating the school building. There were speeches from the executive committee head and the health committee heads, too.
Then the PA committee member acting as MC said, “Okay, next we have some words from the head of school security and aide to the student council president. Sagara-san, take it away.”
Sousuke took to the lectern under the eyes of all. “I am the aide to the president,” Sousuke said into the mic. “We’ve been blessed with good weather today, and the culture festival will proceed without issue. I cannot tell you how pleased I am. But in order to enjoy the event, please heed my next words regarding the open house period.” He cleared his throat, took out a sheet of paper and began to read aloud.
The students gathered in the courtyard breezeways and on the rooftop watched him curiously.
“First, if you see any suspicious figures, please report them immediately. Do not approach. The student council SWAT team will take care of it. If you see a suspicious object, report it immediately. Do not touch it. The student council bomb squad will take care of it.”
The students looked on, dumbstruck.
“Next,” he continued, “do not bring any objects of a length of more than fifty centimeters to the roof. If you break this rule, it will be assumed that you’re carrying a sniper rifle, and you’ll be shot to death on sight.”
The students continued to look on, dumbstruck.
“Additionally, anti-personnel mines have been planted around the school perimeter to prevent unlawful entry. Please see the detailed diagram of mine layout on the sheet provided with your pamphlets. Also, two dobermans at the front gate will attack anyone who might be smuggling in explosives. Please be advised, they are trained to go for the throat. These measures were taken in the interest of security and terrorism prevention. Anyone caught breaking them or causing any kind of trouble should be prepared for the consequences.”
A mood ill befitting a festival settled over the crowd.
Here, Sousuke wrapped it up. “That is all. Now, have a fun culture festival, everyone.”
“As if!” Kaname, who had been quietly watching in her capacity as vice president from the back, suddenly charged and kicked him off the stage. “Is that the job you spent all night on?! You were planting mines?!”
“It was quite difficult,” he told her.
“Oh, shut up! And you did all that without helping our class... you creep!” she said, leaping off the stage after him and standing astride him.
The MC eyed Kaname as he said, “Um... A-Anyway, let’s have a word from the president.”
Hayashimizu stepped up and spoke into the mic. “Testing, testing. I hereby declare the 49th Annual Jindai High Festival open.”
“Um... is that all?” the MC asked.
“That is all, yes,” said Hayashimizu. It was as barebones a declaration as could be imagined. The students, shaken out of their daze, let out a cheer and headed off to their own exhibits.
After lecturing Sousuke and neutralizing all the mines, calling off the guard dogs, and returning to Class 2-4... Kaname learned that the café still wasn’t ready to go.
They’d truly worked at it all night, but there was just no fighting the EC. The room was still strewn with lumber and construction paper, and they hadn’t even finished the entrance sign. They hadn’t set up the cooking space, the wall decorations, or even the menu. It was as far from the café they’d originally envisioned as could be.
“How’s it going?” Kaname asked.
Kyoko, who’d skipped the entrance ceremony to focus on preparations, just groaned in response. “It’s no use,” she said. “I’m not sure we’ll even be done by noon...” The students of Class 4 all looked at Kaname in exhaustion. The classroom they’d been allotted was still sixty percent ready at best. “I’m really not sure how it could possibly work out...”
The whole class slouched and sighed, but kept on working regardless.
In the morning after the culture festival started, Onodera, who went to scout out Class 7, came running back.
“How was it, Ono-D?”
“Amazing,” he told them. “I just looked in and the place is packed. The decorations look amazing. And the waitresses...”
“The waitresses?”
“They’re wearing aprons over swimsuits.”
Kaname gasped.
“The people are loving it,” Onodera went on. “The costume café thing was just a front. It’s basically a lingerie pub. And for the female patrons, the waiters are wearing aprons over swimsuits too. And they’re all totally hot!”
“Th-That’s so sneaky!” Kaname was too disgusted to say anything more than that. After Tomita had said in the first term that ‘cosplay’ would give parents the wrong impression, now his own class was wearing aprons over swimsuits!
“We can’t win by fighting fair. If only we’d fought back with a no-panties café...” Onodera said.
Kaname glared at him. “It’s not too late. Why don’t you spearhead that one yourself?”
“Hmm? You wanna see it? Wanna see it?” Onodera started working on unbuckling his belt.
Kaname knocked him out flat and then let out a sigh. “Ahh... Looks like Class 4 is a loser this year. I hate being the victim of a dirty trick like that, but it is what it is.”
The whole group sank upon hearing Kaname’s words.
Realizing that her admission was depressing morale, she worked hard to put on a cheerful front. “But... oh, you know! We did call in our friends from other schools! So we should at least make it look nice for the people who are coming to see us!”
“Right...” they all said despondently.
“I’m gonna work hard and make up some awesome sweets for us to serve tomorrow. Even if we give up on the after party, we can still do a good job, okay?”
“Yeah...”
“Okay, so let’s hurry! Our friends from other schools are on the way!” Kaname clapped her hands and the rest of them went back to their jobs.
“It’s weird, though,” Kyoko muttered. “My middle school friends should’ve been here by now. I definitely asked them to fill seats here. But there’s no sign of them yet...”
“You too, Kyoko?” Shiori, another girl in the class, said. “My friends said they’d come in the morning too. I’ve been trying to call them, but I can’t get through.”
“You too, Shiori?” Kyoko said
“Yeah, me too,” said a boy. “It’s weird.”
A few other students nodded in agreement. Nobody’s friends have shown up to the culture festival yet? Kaname wondered suspiciously.
Sousuke, beside her, tilted his head, thinking. “I see... So it wasn’t just me.”
“You called friends too, Sousuke?
“That was the rule, wasn’t it? I put in a few calls last week through every route I could.”
“Not to Mithril people, was it?” Kaname whispered.
“Actually, Mithril is busy testing the just-repaired submarine. The colonel seemed truly disappointed about missing it... but regardless, none of them are coming.”
“Uh-huh...”
“Instead, I called old friends not involved in my current line of work. The last time I spoke to them, they all said they were nearby, but...”
“Your old friends?”
“Yes,” he told her. “From my mercenary days.”
“They’re here?”
“I believe so.”
A strange atmosphere had fallen over Tomita’s Class 7 café, and not at all the good kind—it was as if the smell of gunpowder hung over the proceedings.
The majority of the people there weren’t teenagers. They weren’t even Japanese. White, Black, Asian... Some Arabic, some Latino. They were all dressed in street clothes, but seemed to have a few things in common: their gazes were shrewd, and although they weren’t smiling, they were still strangely polite. They had large, muscular bodies and seemed to have things hidden under their jackets and around their ankles. They had their attention focused on their surroundings at all times, and were sitting in such a way that they could rise from their seats at a moment’s notice.
In other words, they were all just like the “problem student” of Class 2-4.
“E-Excuse me...” a waitress said timidly.
“What?” a middle-aged man of African descent replied in English, his brow furrowing. In addition to his Jindai High Festival pamphlet, he was holding a sightseeing map of Kyoto for some reason. “Excuse me, Miss. I’d like to see Sergeant Seagal. Where is he—”
“Oh, er... E-Excuse me!” The terrified girl retreated into the back of the shop, crying.
Tomita and the others watched, faces pale, and began to argue urgently.
“What’s going on? Why are these our customers?!”
“How should I know?!”
“They’re all scary foreigners!”
“This is so bad. They’re driving the other customers away!”
Even as they spoke, a customer who’d come in hopes of seeing waitresses in swimsuits appeared in the door, then turned right around and ran the other way. Those who’d already been seated when the men first arrived left without finishing their tea, unable to bear the quiet menace of the scene.
“Ahh... This is a terrible atmosphere for a café,” Tomita moaned. “Normal foreigners are bad enough...”
“Tomita! Tell them to leave!”
“Are you crazy,” he said, “I don’t speak English!”
Tomita and the others remained engaged in their hurried conversation, when a member of the group of Arabic-looking men sitting in a corner of the room raised his voice.
“Excuse me!” he called out. “Excuse me!”
Tomita and his classmates looked up and saw him beckoning to them. Unable to refuse, Tomita approached the group.
The man then began speaking in broken Japanese, holding a notebook in one hand for reference. “Doko, Kashim? Watashi au. Watashi kita. Tooku. Tawku.”
“Huh?” said Tomita. “Um... um...”
“Kashim! Musuko. Tora, Badakhshan. Musuko. Al Majeed!”
Tomita was just about on the verge of tears in his confusion, when...
“Zaid, Fahim, Gulrose!” came a voice from the door.
He turned and saw Sousuke running into the room.
“Zaid. Thank you for coming. You too Fahim, Gulrose.” His expression was as sullen as ever as he greeted the three Pakistinis who met him with broad smiles. He’d completely ignored the confusion of the Japanese kids around them.
“Kashim,” said Zaid, “you’re looking well. Why are you dressed like that?”
“It’s this school’s uniform,” Sousuke explained.
“School? Is this a school?” Zaid and the others looked around, as if something had finally snapped into place for them.
“And where’s Muhammad?” Sousuke asked.
The three Pakastinis immediately turned grave. “We haven’t seen him for two years. He took the Rk-91 you left him and volunteered for the civil war in Tajikistan.”
“I see...”
“I don’t know how things are going there. The enemy apparently has a lot of French ASes.”
“Mistral IIs? Too much for that beat-up old Savage to take, I’m sure...” said Sousuke, trailing off regretfully.
“Yeah, but Muhammad’ll work things out. Now, Kashim...” Zaid glanced around him. “It seems you have a number of other friends here. Shouldn’t you attend to them?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. We’ll catch up more later.” Leaving Zaid and the others looking surprised by his apology, Sousuke went to greet his other visitors.
A stern-looking Black man raised a hand to Sousuke and said, in English, “Seagal. You’re looking well!”
“Thanks for coming, Zimmer,” said Sousuke. “How’s everything at the training camp?”
“Well enough, though we’re going to be busy. We’ve had issues with our ammo resupply routes. How are Weber and Mao? Things going well for them?”
“I think so. How’s Major Estes?”
“In a bad mood, as always. We got a real snotty little trainee in recently, and he half killed him in hand-to-hand combat practice,” Zimmer laughed. “By the way...”
They continued talking about one thing and another. The Class 7 café had been transformed into a reunion venue exclusively for Sousuke and his friends—in other words, a danger zone populated by veteran mercenaries from dangerous regions throughout the world.
“Just who is Sagara-kun?” Kyoko asked Kaname as they peeked in the door, sweat pouring from her brow.
“You know who he is. And yeah, dangerous men like that are the only friends he has,” Kaname muttered back to her.
“Geh... I heard he grew up in some scary foreign countries, but it never felt real until now.”
“Well, this confirms that those Class 7 guys tried to swipe our customers, at least,” said Kaname.
“Yeah,” Kyoko agreed. “Maybe we should be grateful, in a way...”
Just then, Sousuke—who’d been engaged in conversation with a man who looked like an American mercenary—turned back to Kaname. “Chidori!” he shouted.
“What now?”
“How are preparations for the Class 4 café coming?” he asked. “I’d like to move everyone back there if I could...”
“No! No freaking way!” Kaname crossed her arms, forming a large X in his direction. “We won’t be able to open for a while yet, sorry.”
In fact, Class 4’s café would be opening very soon, but Kaname lied without regret and then strode away without even waiting for his reaction. Sousuke apparently believed her, and resumed his hushed conversation with his old battle colleagues. The members of Tomita’s Class 7 could only look on while silently praying for them to leave.
“Sorry, Norris. I’ll have to ask you to continue killing time here,” Sousuke said.
The American mercenary frowned. “I’d love to, but... Sagara, for a while now...”
“What is it?”
“Don’t turn around, all right? At your four. Those two Latinos... They look just like men I fought in Colombia”
“Costello and the others? Don’t be ri—”
“No, I’m certain of it. They’ve seen me too, and they’re radiating hostility.” The mercenary, Norris, spoke casually, adjusting his posture so that his hand could dart into his coat at any moment. That kind of strangely relaxed posture, in a professional soldier, was a sign of high alert.
Meanwhile, Tomita and the others were in a full-blown panic.
“Sagara. Are they really your old comrades?” the mercenary asked. “You didn’t invite them here through some other route or third party? There’s no chance they used you to lure me out here?”
“No. You’re worrying too much.”
“Sagara, you saved my life. But I’m sorry, I can’t trust you.”
“Norris.,” Sousuke said coldly, “there will be no killing here. I told everyone else the same thing.”
Norris swallowed hard. “But neutralizing them without killing them is on the table?”
“Norris!”
They were all veteran soldiers, after all, so the other men reacted immediately to the malice that Norris was now projecting. Some laid their coffee cups down on the tables, while some undid the buttons on the front of their suits, and others surreptitiously moved their chairs back to the walls. The Latino soldiers, too, took a stance that suggested an expectation of action.
It was unusual for a culture festival exhibit to reach this level of unpleasantness.
“Um... gentlemen, please... If you want to fight, I’d like to ask you to do it outside...” Tomita said, but of course, nobody listened to him. Barely any of them even understood Japanese.
And anyway, it wasn’t going to be a fight: it would be a war.
The air in the café, strained and chilly, was at last broken by one of the waitresses. “Please... Please, no more!” she shrieked, running out of the room. This had the same effect as a tossed coin hitting the ground in a duel scene in a Western.
The customers snapped into action at almost exactly the same time. There was chaos and shouting, followed by more chaos. Glasses broke, tables were overturned, and several men were thrown into walls or the floor. Movements so fast that the eyes of amateurs couldn’t follow were exchanged as the dozen men brawled, resulting in an unprecedented scene.
●
“Well, they’re not so bad once you get to know them,” Norris said later, a bruise around one eye.
“You’re a good man too, señor,” said his Latino companion, Costello, as he took a shot of tequila. He was bandaged up as well.
“Honestly, I was worried for a minute back there,” Zimmer said, turning up the glass of bourbon he’d brought.
“Good thing we’re in Japan, so none of us have guns. What do you usually do, Kashim?” Zaid asked, a cup in one hand.
“That’s a secret,” Sousuke said with his usual sullen expression. “But what were you thinking? This was my first culture festival. I wish you’d shown more self-control. I hand-picked you, after all. I hoped it would be a show of the faith I had in you...”
“Hey, we’re sorry,” Sousuke’s old comrades said in unison.
“It’s just a small world in this business.”
“It makes you really paranoid.”
“I feel sorry about what we did to that shop, too.”
They had moved from the Class 7 café to the Class 4 one. The Class 7 café had been completely destroyed in the brawl. And while the soldiers had apologized to the students of Class 7 and offered to help clean up, Tomita and the others had just stared at them, tears in their eyes, and asked them to leave.
“Now, my new friends,” Norris said, after a long round of talk and laughter in the Class 4 café. “Now that Sagara’s introduced us, what do you say we meet again here in this classroom at the next culture festival?”
“Oh? I like it. It would be a great chance to swap info.”
“And have another brawl? That’ll be something.”
The mercenaries shared a hearty laugh.
Sousuke, his expression as sullen as ever, just nodded along occasionally.
“Don’t come again! Never again!” Kaname, who was listening in, shouted at the mercenaries, sweat rising on her face.
Obviously, they weren’t listening.
Once the culture festival was over, the sales for Class 4 and 7 ended up being roughly equal. The accidental terrorism of the first day had really set Class 7 back, while Class 4 ended up doing pretty good business, just barely recouping their budget.
And so, Class 7 swore a quiet oath that they’d never pick a fight with Class 4 again.
Incidentally, there were other tales of chaos that came out of that culture festival...
But that would be another story.
[The End]
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