“Huh? Rules aside, is that even possible?” Shota tilted his head.
“Huh? Oh... uh, no, of course it isn’t.” The image of Mutsuko flying lightly through the air flitted through his mind and he tried to change the subject.
“Then, let’s see... we also tried to see if we could do the Explosive Disappearing Ball, but we just couldn’t make it work!”
“Yeah, because it’s physically impossible!” Yuichi shouted.
It was a bizarre goal shoot where you triggered an explosion in the ball right in front of the goalkeeper’s eyes to make it look like the ball had disappeared.
Yuichi had gotten to the point where he could hit a non-spinning ball with an overhead kick, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the most important part, where the ball seemed to explode and disappear in front of the keeper’s eyes. But that was only natural. It was a ridiculous move to begin with.
Yuichi decided to cut Mutsuko off before she could get too far into the tale of the True Soccer Warriors, Real Mannism, who used soccer to stand against an evil organization plotting soccer-based world domination. “Enough soccer talk, Sis. Let’s get going.”
The club room was as cluttered as ever.
As a former classroom in the old school building, it was quite large, but the library-like lines of shelves and ever-present clutter made it feel small and cramped.
The walls were lined with colorful protrusions called bouldering holds, which added even more to the room’s feeling of disorder. Yuichi seemed to be the only one who used the holds, as well.
At the center of the room sat a whiteboard and a long table, where Kanako sat, elegantly sipping tea. She projected the image of an ivory tower girl, though her family was not especially rich.
Yuichi took his seat as Mutsuko moved to stand in front of the whiteboard. Aiko and Natsuki showed up not long afterward.
“Now, we’d better look lively, or summer vacation will start before we know it! We gotta get talking about our training camp!” Mutsuko said cheerfully.
Yuichi remembered the conversation they had had the day before in the Chinese restaurant. He’d assumed she was just getting carried away then, but apparently she was serious.
“If we’re gonna go, I wanna go somewhere fun!” she said. “Okay! Tell me your ideas!”
Yuichi really didn’t want to go, as it seemed like a giant pain, but he knew saying that would be pointless.
“Let’s have the camp at school. In this club room,” Yuichi ventured. It seemed the least of all possible evils.
“...Okay, fine. We’ll keep that as a candidate.” Mutsuko scowled a little, but still wrote Yuichi’s suggestion on the whiteboard.
Without prompting, Aiko, sitting beside him, began writing that in her notebook. At some point, she had grown accustomed to her secretarial duties.
“What about you, Noro?” Mutsuko asked.
“Let’s see. It’s summer, so I really think the beach would be best. Would it be better to go far away?”
“Good question. There’s a public swimming area nearby, but then we wouldn’t be staying overnight... Well, we can think about the place later. Beach, then. Next up, Takeuchi.” Mutsuko wrote the new candidate on the whiteboard.
“Noro. You are aware we’re discussing a training camp for the survival club, aren’t you?” Natsuki asked Aiko, coldly.
“Huh? I guess I wasn’t thinking about that... Well, Takeuchi, do you have a candidate?” Aiko huffed a little in reply. She apparently wasn’t expecting to be questioned on that.
“Yes. I recommend my junkyard as a training camp location,” Natsuki proclaimed unashamedly.
“What is that, exactly?” Yuichi asked, getting a bad feeling in his gut. The name didn’t make it sound like anywhere he’d want to be.
“It’s a place where failures are discarded. A secret location in the middle of nowhere, unmarked on maps. I once used it as hunting grounds. What do you think? It’s ideal for survival, isn’t it?” Natsuki said triumphantly to Aiko.
“No way! I’m not doing that!” Yuichi said vehemently.
Yuichi wondered what she meant by “failures,” but decided not to ask. It couldn’t possibly be any answer he wanted to hear.
“Nice! That sounds so exciting, Takeuchi!” Mutsuko cried.
Perhaps Natsuki and Mutsuko had similar tastes; Mutsuko liked ruins and secrets, after all.
“Well, Orihara? Any ideas?” Mutsuko asked Kanako as she wrote “junkyard” on the whiteboard.
“Is there a way we could travel to an isekai?” Kanako asked. It was a bizarre request — to want to travel to another dimension or time period.
“No!” Yuichi interrupted quickly. “And even if there were, we shouldn’t do it!”
“Do you have any leads?” Natsuki asked.
Even if she did, they shouldn’t do it, Yuichi protested internally.
“Um, well. I heard you can get to isekai through elevators!” Kanako said. She really did seem to enjoy isekai stories.
“Isn’t that an urban legend?” Yuichi asked. Even he had heard that story. If you pressed the floor buttons in the elevator in just the right order, it would take you to a nonexistent floor, which would lead you to another world.
“Search for the isekai elevator...” Mutsuko added to the whiteboard.
“Do you have any ideas, Sis?” he asked.
“Of course!” she proclaimed. “I was thinking we might go overseas!”
“Wait a minute! That’s too insane!” Countless objections popped into Yuichi’s head all at once. “Actually, I just realized a bigger problem. We don’t even have permission to do a training camp, do we? Does this club even have an advisor?”
Official club activities required an advisor, but Yuichi had never seen anyone like that around.
“It’s Ms. Nodayama, the grammar teacher! She told me I could do what I want, so I do!”
“And you don’t see any issue with your interpretation of ‘do what you want’?” He couldn’t imagine that the teacher had meant to give permission to stick bouldering holds in the wall and haul in bookcases by the dozens.
At the same time, he knew that if the grammar teacher Nodayama — in other words, Hanako — was their advisor, they would be fine. Hanako hated to be bothered about anything. She would never come all the way to the club room to tell them what to do.
“Where, specifically, do you want to go overseas?” Natsuki asked, dispassionately.
“What about Taiwan?” Mutsuko asked. “It’s a storehouse of martial arts! Martial arts were suppressed during China’s cultural revolution, so all the great martial artists escaped to Taiwan. That’s why Taiwan is full of master martial artists!”
“I think you’re the only one who would enjoy that, Sis,” Yuichi snorted. Though he couldn’t help but feel that that objection was coming a bit late. Their activities at the club tended to be whatever Mutsuko liked.
“Could we go to India to learn Kalaripayattu? Ah! Or we could learn ancient Muay Thai! Did you know that Muay Thai came from Indian Kalaripayattu? Or maybe... oh! What about England? The quarterstaff! I’m not talking about the old PC game; I mean the weapon!”
“Look, we’re not going to a foreign country! There are a lot of problems with that, and the first one is that it’s too expensive!” Yuichi shouted.
Mutsuko had combined a lot of different martial arts to create the one that Yuichi practiced, leading to something chaotic and baffling. So while he couldn’t claim he had no interest in real martial arts, he wasn’t so passionate about it that he would go overseas to do it.
“Um, if money’s an issue, I could probably help out,” Aiko said hesitantly.
Her family ran a hospital, and they were wealthy. Apparently Aiko had significant funds at her control, too.
“No,” Yuichi objected. “No matter how much money you have, that doesn’t feel right.” He didn’t like the idea of any one member shouldering all the burden for their training camp trip.
“Oh, I forgot to say this at the beginning, but the club funds can handle anything, so don’t worry! Feel free to throw out even expensive ideas!” Mutsuko said.
“How much do you have in club funds to be able to cover an overseas summer training camp?!”
As might be suggested by the over-abundance of bizarre items crowding both Mutsuko’s room at home and the club room, she had some mysterious source of funding. Yuichi had decided not to ask what it was, as he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know the answer. In the end, they decided to rethink their ideas with the knowledge that money was now no object.
Chapter 3: Clash!! The Pink Clinic!
There was a hospital known as the Pink Clinic. Despite the name, it was a proper hospital in scale.
What differentiated a clinic from a hospital was primarily the number of beds: a facility with twenty beds or more was called a hospital.
The official name was Mochizuki Gastrointestinal Hospital. It had 72 beds and specialized in internal medicine. People just called it the Pink Clinic because for some reason, a lot of nurses there ended up dating patients.
They could have just called it the Pink Hospital, but perhaps “clinic” just rolled better off the tongue.
The hospital had closed several years ago, and no one knew why. It may have been the strange name, or the overall creepiness of the place. The building had since become a dwelling for the homeless and a meeting place for local delinquents. The neighbors had long complained to the authorities to get something done about it.
“Hey... I thought we were going home. How did we end up in here?” Aiko murmured, crouched behind the sofa.
“You said you smelled blood, didn’t you?” Yuichi, positioned beside her, whispered back.
They were in the hospital’s first floor lobby, hiding behind the sofa in the reception area.
Yuichi and Aiko had decided to walk home together after club, but as they had passed in front of the abandoned Pink Clinic, Aiko had stopped abruptly.
“Well... I didn’t mean to imply that we should go inside and check...”
The entrance to the hospital had been locked, but perhaps owing to the building’s age, the lock was a simple enough mechanism. Yuichi picked it easily enough and they had made it inside.
“We couldn’t just call the police. Who would believe us if we said ‘we were walking in front of the hospital and smelled blood’?” he responded. “It could be urgent. And anyway, you didn’t have to come with me.”
“I know, but I didn’t want to walk home alone...”
Was it an accident, or violence? The smell of danger was thick in the air, but Aiko had followed him without a second thought.
“But the smell of blood, huh? Well, if you didn’t say that kind of thing now and then, I’d forget you were a vampire.”
“I sort of wish you would forget, actually...”
They both peeked over the edge of the sofa toward the back of the lobby.
The windows were blocked off, so no light made it in from the outside, but the fluorescent lights of the lobby were on.
Near the middle of the lobby, some mean-looking characters were standing around a girl.
Her cheek was swollen as though she’d been hit. Blood was dripping from the corner of her mouth.
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this...” Yuichi said with a scowl. It was easy to imagine what was going to happen next.
“We’ve got to help her!” Aiko responded in hushed tones, her face pale.
“That’s right. The question is, who they really are...”
There were six of them, not too many for Yuichi to handle. He could probably take out a hundred if he had to; his big sister’s training had prepared him to fight large numbers of opponents. The real problem was what Soul Reader revealed to him.
It wasn’t about the girl, who simply had “High School Student” written over her head.
Four of the assailants were labeled “Delinquent,” which also wasn’t a problem.
The issue was the remaining two, who bore the label “Vampire?”
What? What does the question mark mean?! Yuichi was getting pretty fed up with his magic sight’s irresponsibility.
“Hey, any clue about the two who are holding the girl down?” he asked.
The two “Vampire?”s were holding the girl from behind. She was trembling in fear, seemingly incapable of resisting as the four delinquents jeered obscenities at her.
“Huh? Why do you ask?”
“They’re ‘Vampire?’s.”
“Why did you phrase that like a question?” Aiko asked.
“I have to. There’s a question mark at the end of their label.” It sounded ridiculous, but it was the simple truth.
“Uh? Um... I’ve never seen them before, but they don’t look like members of my clan...” She was probably referring to the cheap, hoodlum-like air about them.
“Then I probably don’t need to hold back. I doubt ‘Vampire?’s could be all that tough, anyway.”
“Hey, are you using me as the standard to base that on?” She puffed out her cheeks in annoyance. Well, she was right, he was. “Anyway, it’s no time to worry about that! You’ve got to hurry!”
“I know, but if we just run out there, they’ll learn who we are.” Yuichi had taken out a group of delinquents once before, but it had ended up as a huge mess, with his family getting involved. Guys like these didn’t think about consequences. Revealing his face to them could be bad in the long term.
“She keeps giving me weird masks and I always throw them away, but...” Yuichi began searching through his bag for something to cover his face. It was full of all kinds of things Yuichi didn’t recognize. Mutsuko must have put them in without telling him.
“Um... I’m not gonna ask about that one...”
“Ugh, why are there panties in here?!” Yuichi threw a pair of women’s underwear on the floor. They were pink and cute, and most likely Mutsuko’s.
Then Yuichi trembled in terror. Had she intended for him to wear them on his face? He recalled her telling him once about a superhero who wore panties as a mask...
“Isn’t there anything else?” Aiko asked.
As he continued searching the bag, he found a flesh-colored mask with “Meat” written on the forehead, a white mask with flames around the eyes, and a mask shaped like a butterfly. Yuichi threw them to the floor, one after another.
But there wasn’t a whole lot better to choose from. He pulled out a skull-like mask that looked vaguely like it was meant for bondage.
“It’s pretty middle school, but it’s better than nothing. Here.” Yuichi put that one on, and handed another mask to Aiko. This one had a rabbit motif.
“Huh? I need one, too?”
“Just in case. Take this, also.” Yuichi handed Aiko a stun gun. It was the type meant for self-defense, that opened with the push of a button. Mutsuko had taught them how to use them during class. “Wear this, too.”
He pulled out a raincoat and handed it to her. The Seishin High girls’ uniform was recognizable, so it could cause trouble if they saw it. The boys’ uniform wasn’t particularly noteworthy, so there was no need to cover it.
He pulled out several stones from his bag and gripped them in his left hand.
“What are those?”
“Oh, throwing 500 yen coins all the time would get expensive, so I made these out of lead.”
“Hey. That reminds me, you still haven’t paid me back...”
Yuichi recalled the ten 500 yen coins he’d thrown at the serial killer on that day at school.
“Okay. Well, I’m off,” he said, intentionally deflecting the issue of money. “Hang on to my bag. Oh, and it could get bad if they hear our names, so be careful not to use mine.”
This wasn’t the time to be arguing about something that happened weeks ago, he thought as he left his bag behind.
“...Is it just me, or are you really into this?” Aiko murmured.
Yuichi ignored that, too, and ran off.
Keeping low, he sneaked out from behind the sofa and got around behind the men. His first targets were the two restraining the girl. He gave them several swift kicks to the groin from behind.
“Huh?” The girl asked as she realized that the men were abruptly toppling over. Yuichi grabbed the girl’s shoulder and pulled her back roughly.
That left the other four. Yanking the girl behind him, Yuichi stepped closer to them, and held his right arm high and behind him.
His opponents hadn’t yet processed what was happening.
He planted the blade of his hand to two of the men’s necks and swung them downwards, slamming them both to the floor.
He let his momentum carry him into a turn, and chained that into a flying spin-kick that hit the third man in the back of the head and sent him flying into the ground.
The last of them finally seemed to realize what was going on, but Yuichi grabbed his hand and pulled him in closer, while striking him in the solar plexus with his elbow.
It was over in just a few seconds. The men all fell to the ground without even having the opportunity to mount resistance.
“U-Um...” the girl spoke up, slumped against the wall.
“Hey. Isn’t there a more peaceful way to do that? Like knock them out with a karate chop to the neck?” Aiko asked, catching up after it seemed everything was safe.
“You really think it’s that easy? If you want to disable someone, you’ve got to put them in a lot of pain.”
The men were currently disabled from their excruciating pain and fear.
“Are you okay?” Aiko asked the girl tenderly.
“Yes... um, who are you two?” The girl was clearly suspicious of the two people in their odd masks.
“What should we do?” Aiko asked in a low voice.
“We’ll just have to go on like this... Let’s see. We’re here to help, so there’s no need to worry about—” Yuichi froze up in the middle of speaking.
There were more people coming in from the entrance.
“There are a lot of ’em, huh?”
The Half-Baked Vampire vs. The Strongest Little Sister?! Page 4