After a moment’s thought, Ende pointed to her right eye. “My eyes can see words. They see labels above a person’s head that describe their role.”
Furu cocked her head at the outrageous claim. She wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be impressive, and she couldn’t figure out why the girl was bringing it up now.
“Well, as you’re thinking right now, it’s not that big a deal, which is why I never gave the ability a name,” Ende said. “When I need to explain it to people, all I say is, ‘I see words.’ But lately, I have started to think about naming it.”
“Oh?” Furu hesitated, still unsure of what to say or what she was getting at.
“Soul Reader,” the girl whispered softly.
“Is that what you call your ability to see things?” It didn’t sound terribly descriptive to Furu, but if that was what the ability’s user had decided, she didn’t see a problem with it.
But Ende looked unsatisfied. “No! Yes, but no! I... I don’t want it to have that name! But no matter how hard I think about it, it’s all that comes to mind!” Ende’s previously detached manner had taken a sudden 180, and she began shouting in annoyance.
“What are you talking about?” Leader asked, stunned.
The werewolf was still standing calmly beside him, but didn’t seem particularly interested in the conversation.
“I’m saying... that someone is rewriting the ‘books’ that I read! Someone has decided that this power should be called ‘Soul Reader’! It’s unforgivable! My books! My very own books!” Ende raged, violently gesticulating with her entire body. Furu worried that she might end up tearing that worn-out old dress of hers to shreds.
“Aren’t you the one who writes the ‘books’? Can’t you just rewrite them?” Furu asked.
“No! All I can do is choose which one to read!”
“Ah... then couldn’t you, metaphorically, just read a book that doesn’t have ‘Soul Reader’ in it?”
“It is, metaphorically, in all of them!” Ende shouted.
Furu was growing a little confused. The conversation’s metaphor was becoming impenetrable. “So, what are you going to do? It seems to me that you should just deal with the ability having that name.”
“It gets on my nerves! This is the first time anyone’s done anything so stifling to me since the day I was born! Oh, that’s right, I used to think names didn’t matter! But now that it’s there, the fact that I can’t rename it is really getting under my skin!”
“And... is that related to the way you want to help us?” Furu asked.
“Yes,” the girl said. “I have an idea of who caused this, and if that person dies, things go back to normal. I’ll need the wolf’s power to do it, and if I take the wolf away, that’s one less thing you’ll need to do. And it’ll take the wolf to the princess. Not a bad deal, I think.”
“I’m not unwilling... but this is quite surprising,” said Leader. “I’d always assumed that when you people wanted something done, you used more heavy-handed measures to force people into it.”
Furu felt the same way. She’d thought the girl would have the power of destiny and to intervene in world affairs.
“We’re not omnipotent,” Ende explained to the skeptical Leader. “You can tell that from the fact that the world stays in balance, can’t you? And when someone has the same power we do, it’s impossible for us to intervene directly. There’s an order of things we need to respect.”
“Rather than standing here talking this whole time, why don’t we go somewhere else?” Leader asked.
Ende, who had lost a bit of her cool, agreed.
Furu let out a sigh. She was relieved that nothing was going to happen here just yet, but at the same time, things did seem to have gotten more complicated.
Chapter 1: The Secrets of the World are Revealed With Surprising Ease?!
The label “Little Sister” hung in the air.
Yuichi sat, cross-legged and glassy-eyed, as he watched Yoriko hard at work on her travel preparations.
Yoriko Sakaki. As it said on the label above her head, she was Yuichi’s little sister, and in her second year of middle school. She was a beautiful girl with striking, long, black hair, currently dressed casually in denim hot pants and a camisole. She was pulling items out of her closet and scrutinizing them carefully — so carefully that there was still almost nothing in her large travel bag.
“Do you need all that clothing?” Yuichi asked.
It wasn’t even noon yet, but Yuichi had already finished his prep for the summer training camp they’d be going on tomorrow. Of course, he didn’t have much to bring — just two days’ worth of underpants and T-shirts in his backpack.
The training camp was set to last a week, but they were going to Aiko’s family’s villa, and Aiko had said that they could do laundry there. Yuichi thought it would be best to just wash his clothes as he needed to.
“Of course I do! You’re the one being ridiculous.”
Yuichi was slightly cowed by the venomous look Yoriko threw him. She apparently intended to wear a different outfit every day.
“By the way, I guess I should have asked this earlier, but are you serious about this?” he asked. “This is a training camp for our survival club.”
“Mutsuko said that I could come,” Yoriko shot back.
Though it was a club training camp, it was an unofficial one; their adviser wasn’t coming, so there was technically no issue with Yoriko joining them. Even so, Yuichi still had a bad feeling about it.
“Big Brother, if you have time to spare, why don’t you help Mutsuko?” Yoriko said without looking back. Her eyes were focused on the row of outfits in front of her. “Last time I looked, it was absolute chaos in there.”
“Is there anything I can even help her with?” Yuichi murmured to himself. Still, he stood up and headed for the room next door.
The door was open, so he walked right in. The room was as cluttered as usual, and at the center of it was Mutsuko, struggling to cram things into a bag.
This was Mutsuko Sakaki. She was Yuichi’s older sister, and in her second year in high school. She was a beautiful girl, too, but unlike his little sister, anything you said about her had to be prefaced with “unfortunate.”
The ornaments in her hair were one such expression of this. Though quite flashy, they were becoming on her, so that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they were real bladed weapons — made of Damascus steel, as she herself claimed.
In addition, she was currently dressed in a white ao dai, a type of Vietnamese folk costume. That looked good on her, too — it was just seeing her wear it as day-to-day wear in Japan that left Yuichi at a loss for how to react.
Above her head, the label “Big Sister” hovered, seeming to assert her place as Yuichi’s elder.
But it does say “Big Sister,” not “Elder Sister”... he thought, mulling over the nuance in maturity that it implied.
Yuichi had first begun seeing labels over people’s heads that spring. He knew that they revealed something about the person they described, but he hadn’t figured out any more than that.
He had grown accustomed to this phenomenon, and was now able to ignore them, as long as they didn’t contain anything too outrageous.
“Huh? What is it, Yu?” Mutsuko looked up, her hand still in her travel bag. That same instant, something sprung out from just below her hand.
Yuichi reflexively grabbed the thing between his index and middle finger.
A disc-shaped blade, about ten centimeters in diameter, moving at 1/8 the speed of sound. If I dodge it, it’ll put a mark in the wall that’ll make our mother sad. Such was the judgment he had made in a moment.
Yuichi looked at the object he had caught. It was a weapon of Indian origin known as a chakram, a bladed disc.
“Sis. What do you have to say for yourself?” Yuichi waved the chakram around lightly, glaring at Mutsuko.
Mutsuko certainly did look uncomfortable, but suddenly opened her mouth. “If you w
ere a character in Another you’d be dead right now!”
“But it’s me, so I’m alive!” Yuichi snapped.
“I-It’s training! You never know when something might pop out at you!”
“You’re so lying! I know a ‘Whoops’ expression when I see one!” he shouted.
Why does she even need that at a training camp? he wondered.
The thing Mutsuko was trying to shove into the bag was a metallic glove known as a gauntlet. Multiple chakrams were loaded on the outside of it.
“Oh, by the way! This is called a chakram shooter—”
“Spare me the explanation. Is there anything I can help with?” It seemed like the explanation would be a long one, so he cut her off at the pass.
“Hmm, I can’t think of anything...” Mutsuko seemed to be seriously thinking about it, but came up with nothing. She was probably thinking that having Yuichi bumble around trying to help would be less efficient than just doing it herself.
“That’s okay,” Yuichi said. “Also, uh, maybe you could you lay off a little? You probably shouldn’t try to cram all those deadly weapons in one bag.”
“Ahh!” Mutsuko’s eyes opened wide.
“What?”
“I was so focused on trying to cram all the stuff in, I didn’t even think about it! I should just get another bag, right?”
Yuichi was thinking over how to respond to her this time when the phone in his pocket rang.
It was his classmate, Tomomi Hamasaki.
Nihao the China was a Chinese restaurant.
It was a small institution near the back gate to Seishin High, the school Yuichi attended. It was also the home of his classmate, Tomomi Hamasaki.
Lacking for anything else to do, he had come in response to Tomomi’s call.
The restaurant itself gave off a faint impression of griminess, as usual, and there was no one there, even during what should have been the lunch rush.
“Hey, thanks for coming!” Tomomi cried out as he entered the store.
She was wearing a cheongsam with her hair done up in two buns. When they had class together at school, she left her hair down and wore glasses, which made her look like a completely different person. The label above her head read “Fake.” He didn’t know what that meant, and he wasn’t eager to investigate.
“No customers as usual, I see...” Yuichi said, then cast a glance at the restaurant’s owner, a man with braided hair who was reading a newspaper leisurely behind the counter. Tomomi aside, he thought he might take offense at that, but the man didn’t bat an eye.
The label above this man’s head was “Nihao the China,” the same name as the restaurant. It was the most incomprehensible of the labels Yuichi had seen so far.
“Serial Killer”... “Vampire”... “Witch”... “Zombie”... “Anthromorph”...
He didn’t really know what any of them meant, but they at least evoked certain images. “Nihao the China” was completely opaque.
Yuichi had a seat at the restaurant’s sole round table.
“Your order?” Tomomi asked him with a bright smile.
“I’m not here as a customer, remember? You said you had something to talk about.”
“What?!” Tomomi scowled, flying suddenly off the handle. Yuichi was taken aback. “You think you can come to a Chinese restaurant to just sit down and talk? What the hell?! You wouldn’t meet up at a coffee shop and only order water, but you’ll do that for something even worse?!”
“Don’t get mad at me! You’re the one who invited me out! Is this some kind of strategy because you don’t get any customers?”
“Yes, in part! Do you know how hard-pressed we are to find customers? Do you just want to abandon your struggling, poverty-stricken classmate? Well, Sakaki?!” She may have been trying to illicit sympathy, but her tone was overbearing and superior.
“...Fine. Fried rice lunch, please.” Yuichi picked the cheapest lunch set from the lunchtime menu on the table. He’d intended to eat lunch at home, but if she was going to interrogate him like this, he didn’t have a choice.
“Dad! One fried rice lunch!” Tomomi called out the order in a loud voice, despite it being unnecessary in the small restaurant.
Tomomi’s father, head chef Nihao the China, folded up his newspaper, set it on the counter, and went into the kitchen.
“Boy, you won’t listen to my own story, but the minute I drop Aiko’s name, you come running? Kind of hurts, y’know?” Tomomi started, sitting down opposite of him. It seemed she had no intention of doing her job.
“Listen... if you say someone’s life is on the line, of course I’m going to come,” Yuichi said. On the phone before, Tomomi had said that Aiko was in danger.
“Oh? So if I said my own life was in danger, you’d listen to my story?” she asked.
“...I’d find it a little bit fishy, but I wouldn’t want you dying because I ignored you, so I’d at least hear you out,” Yuichi answered after a moment’s thought. He was a bit closer to her than most of his classmates, so he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep well at night if something happened to her.
“You’re very honest, Sakaki,” she said.
“So? What’s going on?” he asked.
Judging from how she had talked when she’d come to see him in the hospital, Tomomi knew a lot about what was going on in town, so Yuichi doubted she was lying or joking.
“It’s going to be a long story. Is that okay?” she asked.
“Well, I did order food, and I don’t have much else to do right now...”
“The truth is, I don’t understand everything about it, either. And it might sound a little fishy in parts, so reserve judgment until you hear the whole thing,” she said.
Yuichi nodded and settled in to listen.
“Now... Actually, before I start, how about you spill all your secrets?”
“What secrets?” Yuichi asked, playing dumb. He’d had a lot of secrets from the start, but lately they just seemed to keep piling on.
“Look, don’t bother feigning ignorance after what you did to our shop, okay? I know pretty much everything anyway. That Aiko’s a vampire, that you beat up her big brother, all that stuff.” Tomomi looked completely exasperated.
“Oh... that’s right, Sis was pretty thoughtless back there, huh?” Yuichi remembered how she had leaked the whole series of events to the people in the store by providing a live feed of everything that went down.
“Well, she wasn’t totally thoughtless,” she said. “Why do you think we don’t get many customers here?”
“Because the owner’s a weirdo?”
“No! I mean, he is, but that’s not the reason — it’s because normal people can’t come in here. They don’t even realize it exists!” she cried.
“Huh? But I can come in.”
“That’s because you’re not normal!”
Yuichi found he couldn’t argue with her. After everything that had happened, he couldn’t exactly claim to be just an average high school student.
“I’m not saying you’re a yokai or a monster, okay?” she said. “I mean ‘not normal’ in the sense that you’ve gotten mixed up in special circumstances. Now, to keep going, this is a pocket dimension.”
A pocket dimension. Disbelieving, Yuichi looked out the window.
The light of the setting sun shone in.
“Huh?” He had come in around noon, and not much time could have passed since then. He quickly checked the watch on his arm. It was just after noon. His instincts were correct.
Yuichi rose to his feet, sending the chair over with a clatter. He approached the window.
Across the road was the hedge that surrounded Seishin High. The restaurant was behind the school, so there was nothing suspicious about the view. Which meant that it was only the time that was different.
“...I guess it could be worse...” Yuichi bounced back after a moment. Telling himself not to fixate too much on it, he picked his chair up off the floor.
“Wow, you adapt quick
ly,” she commented. “I like that about you... Well, when I say pocket dimension, I just mean it’s a little out of phase with everything else. That’s why normal people can’t come in here.”
“But the anthromorphs made it in,” Yuichi objected. But a second later, he realized it was because they weren’t normal, either.
“...Which means Orihara... has entered an isekai without realizing it...” Yuichi wondered if she would be happy to know this place was one.
“Oh, and time doesn’t pass quicker here or anything, so don’t worry about that,” Tomomi added.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Yuichi said. “So now that I know why you don’t get any customers, I have to ask... why do you even run the restaurant?”
“I’ll explain that later. For now, I want a full account of what it is you’ve gotten involved in.”
“Because it’s connected to the stuff with Noro, right? Okay.” There was no point in hiding it now. Yuichi began relaying everything that had gone down since the beginning of spring.
How, after the end of spring vacation, he had suddenly become able to see labels over people’s heads.
How he had realized that one of his classmates, Natsuki Takeuchi, was a serial killer, how she had threatened him as a result, and how they had achieved a tenuous reconciliation afterward.
How he’d had to stop the ambitions of the vampire Aiko Noro’s big brother, Kyoya.
“Oh, wow... I know I asked, but that was way worse than I thought,” Tomomi said. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“You little...”
“But anyway... Soul Reader, huh? That’s not good.”
“Really? I’ve gotten pretty used to it lately, so I was thinking maybe it wasn’t a problem after all?”
“Hmm, I’ll have to explain the Aiko situation for that to make sense, too, so let’s go to that first. Aiko transformed during that incident the other day, right?”
Yuichi thought back to Aiko’s appearance then. Sparkling wings had appeared from her back. It had been an unbelievable sight.
“That was really not good, okay?” Tomomi said. “Aiko’s awakening energized the denizens of the dark world.”
Humanity’s Extinction Happens During Summer Vacation?! Page 2