alpindale/light-novels · Datasets at Hugging Face

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“I hate you! I never want to see your face again so hurry up and die, you pig-fucking bastard!”
“…?”
“Akari Chiga.”
“Enough already.”
Though it did make me a tiny bit happy.
“Hah. I’m insanely big-hearted, but I’ve got a seriously short fuse. Unlike you. In fact, I can transform into a Super Saiyan once a week.”
“Uh huh…”
Might actually be true.
“Against a jackass like Zerozaki who’s always ready to throw down, I can really let myself go and have some fun. Overthinkers like you guys, though, always hemming and hawing, you annoy the crap out of me.”
“This is like some prime-time soap about a high school. Not that this place is anything like a high school…”
“‘I just wanted you to pay attention to me, teacher,’ that kind of thing? When was the last time you watched TV, Iitan? But listen, it doesn’t really have anything to do with that, ya know,” Aikawa said with a grin. “Not like my lecture was ever going to get through to her. You’d already taken care of the lecturing. Since no matter what I said, I was coming from a position of safety. If you tell a starving person that ‘man cannot survive on bread alone,’ they’re going to tell you to go to hell, right? But you’d already done the convincing, she could relate to you. Thankfully I just had to take care of the cleanup.”
Is that how it was?
I didn’t think so, but if that were true…then maybe I’d been able to save Hime-chan, just a tiny bit. I, who could do no saving, had saved Hime-chan, who was beyond salvation. That right there was nothing more than a record-breakingly broken contradiction.
“Then again, hahaha, no matter how cool you manage to sound, the skirt kind of ruins the effect.”
“Did you have to say that? I’d almost forgotten about it, dammit. Still, I guess it’s finally over.”
“I keep telling everybody,” Aikawa smacked me upside the head. “You can’t just decide it’s over. For cryin’ out loud. Don’t you get it? Life’s never over, not even when we die.”
“Not even when we die?” That was a novel opinion.
“Yeah. Even after you’re dead, your influence lingers on. The truth is, nothing’s ever over. Same’s true for her… Maybe you’ll understand when you’re a little more grown up? But even if you don’t, at least act like you do. That alone’ll make a huge difference.”
“That’s not something I want to understand, though,” I said, then looked down at Hime-chan. “What’ll become of her? If this school’s done for… But with something this big, escaping, dropping out, those questions aren’t relevant anymore, are they? She killed the Director, after all.”
“No idea. My job is to get Ichihime out of here, anything after that is outside the terms of my contract─or at least I’d like to think so. But I guess that’s not gonna fly? The girl’s no stranger to me, so yeah, I’ll deal with it.”
“I see.”
She really is soft on her friends.
But that, that above all, is what makes her the strongest.
“First things first, we’ll hand her over to the police.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Wawaa! Ikkun’s pissed! I only said what anybody would say! That’s like playing strip poker, but in the middle of a contest to see who can stand being in the sun the longest!”
“Enough with the impressions already.”
It was too late, no one could stop Jun Aikawa now.
“Kahaha. Well, this is one hell of a riot.” With this impression of Mr. No Longer Human, Aikawa sat down beside Hime-chan, who’d finally stopped twitching. Lovingly, and with a certain air of resignation, the world’s strongest stroked Hime-chan’s face and remarked with a little nod, “When she’s asleep, she just looks like a sweet kid… Dammit, the little shit.”
Her gesture was like that of an older sister dealing with a sibling who was a real handful, and it somehow struck me as charming. Aikawa was absolutely not a tender person, truly not at all a pleasant person. But she still couldn’t just abandon a girl like Hime-chan.
“…Hm.”
“What’s wrong?”
“This is no good. Her heart’s stopped.”
“You mean she’s never going to wake up?!”
Everyone, be careful with stun guns.
I’m serious.
“Oh well. If she dies, no big deal.”
“It’s a huge deal!”
“The perp is one of us!”
“And it wouldn’t be me! Why the hell did you have to take the limiter off the stun gun?! The regular voltage probably would’ve been plenty to knock her out!”
“But it wouldn’t have fried the lines.”
So she did it because she couldn’t be bothered to untangle them by hand?!
“It’s fine, I’ll resuscitate her right now… Chill out, Iitan, your dryness is your best quality. Try to keep what little personality you have.”
Aikawa leaned over to begin CPR, then seemed to change her mind and looked up at me again.
“You wanna take a shot at it, Iitan? This is your big chance to get in there without being called a pedophile.”
“Don’t play around with people’s lives! Please, this is serious!”
“What’s your problem, does it gross you out? Yeah, artificial respiration definitely does have kind of a necrophilia vibe.”
“Exactly, I know it’s me we’re talking about here, but dead bodies are one thing that even I’m not into─wait, scratch that!” For the first time in his life, the nonsense user was so flustered that he played the straight man to his own joke. “Quit fooling around! Do you have some disease where you can’t be serious for more than five seconds?!”
“Man, you’ve got no sense of humor… What a stick in the mud. You stupid idiot. I can’t stand you, Ikkun.”
And at long last, Aikawa began life-saving procedures. While she was doing the chest compressions, I could hear Hime-chan’s ribs snapping one after another, but let’s file that under unavoidable. Aikawa continued for five minutes, ten minutes, then stood up and said, “’Kay, all finished. She’s back.”
“Taking this pretty lightly, aren’t you…”
Life and death, killing, being killed, did the world’s strongest even get a do-over on these kinds of things? I sailed past astounded and ended up feeling empty.
This─was really no big deal to her. Performances and lies, falsehood and deception, no matter what else happened, such things were irrelevant to Jun Aikawa. And even if they were relevant─they were meaningless.
Aikawa hoisted Hime-chan onto her back and stood up.
“Do you want me to take her? You must be tired, Jun.”
“Nah.” Aikawa shook her head. “It’s my job.”
And Aikawa set off down the hall with Hime-chan on her back. Walking along beside her, I asked by way of confirmation, “But we can relax for the moment, right? We’ve come to a stopping point? The Academy doesn’t have a director anymore, or a tactics expert─so all that’s left now is for us to leave, right?”
“…………”
“Why’s your answer four ellipses in a row?”
Was she doing an impression of Teruko now?
Even I can do that one.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Aikawa said, not meeting my eyes. “Ichihime did a good job of manipulating info vis-à-vis the other students here, and she did a good job of hiding, but it seems she didn’t do much of anything when it comes to the ‘outside world.’ Apparently there are people who know that something abnormal is going on inside the school.”
“People like who?”
“The various alumnae of Hang ’Em High who now work at Rule. Oh, and the elite of the Origami family. Aaand everyone from all the other branches of Sumiyuri Academy.”
“That’s an ominous list.”
“See, they were all waiting outside the gates.”
“…”
Is that why…it took her so long to get back from changing her clothes?
In other words, things have gone from bad to worse…
“Okaaay. This’ll just be the mop-up. Before they all come storming in here, let’s march straight out there like we own the place. Drumroll please.”
Aikawa sounded excited as she strode away down the hallway, so dimly lit that we could see nothing of what lay ahead of us. She walked calmly, ready for anything, for all the world as if she felt no uneasiness at all.
“Those people make me laugh.”
What else could I do? I just followed along behind her, the world’s strongest, like a sigh with a little nonsense mixed in.

(2) chapter number given is likely out of range: 0
Chapter: 31

Suspension 1

(2) chapter number given is likely out of range: 0
Chapter: 32

Suspension 1
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether it’s crazier to treat people as objects or objects as people, it’s abundantly clear which one is more of a nuisance─so I’ll omit everything that happened after that. And, some time later.
I was in a certain hospital in the Kyoto suburbs. Completely healed in a week─that was the prognosis I’d been given. How this outcome came about, I’m actually not going to tell you. The one thing I will say is that if the weakest wants to roll with the strongest, it doesn’t come for free; there’s a price that must be paid. But if that price is nothing more than a few broken bones, I’d call that a good deal. I’m supposed to go on a trip with Kunagisa at the beginning of next month, so as long as I’m out of the hospital by then, I’ll be happy.
Life in the hospital really isn’t so boring. I’d only just started reading that book Miiko lent me when Aikawa first showed up, and as long as there’s room to stretch out my legs and get some sleep, one place is pretty much as good as another as far as I’m concerned. As long as it’s not, well, an abnormal place.
Aikawa came to visit me the day before I was to be discharged from the hospital. This time she didn’t knock. It seemed her personal knocking craze had come to an end. She was wearing the same bright-red suit as always, but whether she’d had a new one made or just had a closet full of duplicates, I couldn’t tell you.
“Yooo, sorry for the radio silence to keep you waiting! You have but to speak my name and I shall roll over Beethoven! Damn, a private room, huh? Mister moneybags over here.”
“I can’t bear to sleep in the same room as some stranger, that’s all. Just the thought of someone I don’t know watching me sleep gives me the willies. It isn’t cheap, but what can you do.”
“Hmmm. Well then, I’ve got great news for you,” said Aikawa, casually tossing an envelope onto the bed. A fat one. I didn’t need to ask to know what was inside.
“Here’s your piece of the action for helping me out this time around.”
“Thanks anyway, Jun, but I don’t need your money. With Hime-chan the way she is you probably didn’t make much on this job, so this one’s on the house.”
“Aren’t you the stoic one. But this kind of thing has to be done properly. They say a man who has no money might as well have no head, ya know?”
“So? Who cares about a head, it’ll just end up decapitated or strangulated or suspended from the ceiling anyway. I’m pretty sure that expression just means that money’s not all that important.”
“Hanh. Look at you, the humble shepherd.”
Chuckling sardonically, Aikawa sat down in the folding chair set out for well-wishers. I didn’t believe for a second that she was there to wish me well, but I couldn’t tell her not to sit.
“Still, pressing you into service without giving you something in return would go against my moral code. Let’s see. Okay, I’ve got it, I’ll do an impression of Hikari in a compromising position.”
“Please don’t.”
“Ah, no, stop it! Not that! Please, no more! You can’t! Stop, I said!”
“You’re the one who needs to stop!”

“I hate you! I never want to see your face again so hurry up and die, you pig-fucking bastard!”

“…?”

“Akari Chiga.”

“Enough already.”

Though it did make me a tiny bit happy.

“Hah. I’m insanely big-hearted, but I’ve got a seriously short fuse. Unlike you. In fact, I can transform into a Super Saiyan once a week.”

“Uh huh…”

Might actually be true.

“Against a jackass like Zerozaki who’s always ready to throw down, I can really let myself go and have some fun. Overthinkers like you guys, though, always hemming and hawing, you annoy the crap out of me.”

“This is like some prime-time soap about a high school. Not that this place is anything like a high school…”

“‘I just wanted you to pay attention to me, teacher,’ that kind of thing? When was the last time you watched TV, Iitan? But listen, it doesn’t really have anything to do with that, ya know,” Aikawa said with a grin. “Not like my lecture was ever going to get through to her. You’d already taken care of the lecturing. Since no matter what I said, I was coming from a position of safety. If you tell a starving person that ‘man cannot survive on bread alone,’ they’re going to tell you to go to hell, right? But you’d already done the convincing, she could relate to you. Thankfully I just had to take care of the cleanup.”

Is that how it was?

I didn’t think so, but if that were true…then maybe I’d been able to save Hime-chan, just a tiny bit. I, who could do no saving, had saved Hime-chan, who was beyond salvation. That right there was nothing more than a record-breakingly broken contradiction.

“Then again, hahaha, no matter how cool you manage to sound, the skirt kind of ruins the effect.”

“Did you have to say that? I’d almost forgotten about it, dammit. Still, I guess it’s finally over.”

“I keep telling everybody,” Aikawa smacked me upside the head. “You can’t just decide it’s over. For cryin’ out loud. Don’t you get it? Life’s never over, not even when we die.”

“Not even when we die?” That was a novel opinion.

“Yeah. Even after you’re dead, your influence lingers on. The truth is, nothing’s ever over. Same’s true for her… Maybe you’ll understand when you’re a little more grown up? But even if you don’t, at least act like you do. That alone’ll make a huge difference.”

“That’s not something I want to understand, though,” I said, then looked down at Hime-chan. “What’ll become of her? If this school’s done for… But with something this big, escaping, dropping out, those questions aren’t relevant anymore, are they? She killed the Director, after all.”

“No idea. My job is to get Ichihime out of here, anything after that is outside the terms of my contract─or at least I’d like to think so. But I guess that’s not gonna fly? The girl’s no stranger to me, so yeah, I’ll deal with it.”

“I see.”

She really is soft on her friends.

But that, that above all, is what makes her the strongest.

“First things first, we’ll hand her over to the police.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Wawaa! Ikkun’s pissed! I only said what anybody would say! That’s like playing strip poker, but in the middle of a contest to see who can stand being in the sun the longest!”

“Enough with the impressions already.”

It was too late, no one could stop Jun Aikawa now.

“Kahaha. Well, this is one hell of a riot.” With this impression of Mr. No Longer Human, Aikawa sat down beside Hime-chan, who’d finally stopped twitching. Lovingly, and with a certain air of resignation, the world’s strongest stroked Hime-chan’s face and remarked with a little nod, “When she’s asleep, she just looks like a sweet kid… Dammit, the little shit.”

Her gesture was like that of an older sister dealing with a sibling who was a real handful, and it somehow struck me as charming. Aikawa was absolutely not a tender person, truly not at all a pleasant person. But she still couldn’t just abandon a girl like Hime-chan.

“…Hm.”

“What’s wrong?”

“This is no good. Her heart’s stopped.”

“You mean she’s never going to wake up?!”

Everyone, be careful with stun guns.

I’m serious.

“Oh well. If she dies, no big deal.”

“It’s a huge deal!”

“The perp is one of us!”

“And it wouldn’t be me! Why the hell did you have to take the limiter off the stun gun?! The regular voltage probably would’ve been plenty to knock her out!”

“But it wouldn’t have fried the lines.”

So she did it because she couldn’t be bothered to untangle them by hand?!

“It’s fine, I’ll resuscitate her right now… Chill out, Iitan, your dryness is your best quality. Try to keep what little personality you have.”

Aikawa leaned over to begin CPR, then seemed to change her mind and looked up at me again.

“You wanna take a shot at it, Iitan? This is your big chance to get in there without being called a pedophile.”

“Don’t play around with people’s lives! Please, this is serious!”

“What’s your problem, does it gross you out? Yeah, artificial respiration definitely does have kind of a necrophilia vibe.”

“Exactly, I know it’s me we’re talking about here, but dead bodies are one thing that even I’m not into─wait, scratch that!” For the first time in his life, the nonsense user was so flustered that he played the straight man to his own joke. “Quit fooling around! Do you have some disease where you can’t be serious for more than five seconds?!”

“Man, you’ve got no sense of humor… What a stick in the mud. You stupid idiot. I can’t stand you, Ikkun.”

And at long last, Aikawa began life-saving procedures. While she was doing the chest compressions, I could hear Hime-chan’s ribs snapping one after another, but let’s file that under unavoidable. Aikawa continued for five minutes, ten minutes, then stood up and said, “’Kay, all finished. She’s back.”

“Taking this pretty lightly, aren’t you…”

Life and death, killing, being killed, did the world’s strongest even get a do-over on these kinds of things? I sailed past astounded and ended up feeling empty.

This─was really no big deal to her. Performances and lies, falsehood and deception, no matter what else happened, such things were irrelevant to Jun Aikawa. And even if they were relevant─they were meaningless.

Aikawa hoisted Hime-chan onto her back and stood up.

“Do you want me to take her? You must be tired, Jun.”

“Nah.” Aikawa shook her head. “It’s my job.”

And Aikawa set off down the hall with Hime-chan on her back. Walking along beside her, I asked by way of confirmation, “But we can relax for the moment, right? We’ve come to a stopping point? The Academy doesn’t have a director anymore, or a tactics expert─so all that’s left now is for us to leave, right?”

“…………”

“Why’s your answer four ellipses in a row?”

Was she doing an impression of Teruko now?

Even I can do that one.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Aikawa said, not meeting my eyes. “Ichihime did a good job of manipulating info vis-à-vis the other students here, and she did a good job of hiding, but it seems she didn’t do much of anything when it comes to the ‘outside world.’ Apparently there are people who know that something abnormal is going on inside the school.”

“People like who?”

“The various alumnae of Hang ’Em High who now work at Rule. Oh, and the elite of the Origami family. Aaand everyone from all the other branches of Sumiyuri Academy.”

“That’s an ominous list.”

“See, they were all waiting outside the gates.”

“…”

Is that why…it took her so long to get back from changing her clothes?

In other words, things have gone from bad to worse…

“Okaaay. This’ll just be the mop-up. Before they all come storming in here, let’s march straight out there like we own the place. Drumroll please.”

Aikawa sounded excited as she strode away down the hallway, so dimly lit that we could see nothing of what lay ahead of us. She walked calmly, ready for anything, for all the world as if she felt no uneasiness at all.

“Those people make me laugh.”

What else could I do? I just followed along behind her, the world’s strongest, like a sigh with a little nonsense mixed in.

(2) chapter number given is likely out of range: 0

Chapter: 31

Suspension 1

(2) chapter number given is likely out of range: 0

Chapter: 32

Suspension 1

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether it’s crazier to treat people as objects or objects as people, it’s abundantly clear which one is more of a nuisance─so I’ll omit everything that happened after that. And, some time later.

I was in a certain hospital in the Kyoto suburbs. Completely healed in a week─that was the prognosis I’d been given. How this outcome came about, I’m actually not going to tell you. The one thing I will say is that if the weakest wants to roll with the strongest, it doesn’t come for free; there’s a price that must be paid. But if that price is nothing more than a few broken bones, I’d call that a good deal. I’m supposed to go on a trip with Kunagisa at the beginning of next month, so as long as I’m out of the hospital by then, I’ll be happy.

Life in the hospital really isn’t so boring. I’d only just started reading that book Miiko lent me when Aikawa first showed up, and as long as there’s room to stretch out my legs and get some sleep, one place is pretty much as good as another as far as I’m concerned. As long as it’s not, well, an abnormal place.

Aikawa came to visit me the day before I was to be discharged from the hospital. This time she didn’t knock. It seemed her personal knocking craze had come to an end. She was wearing the same bright-red suit as always, but whether she’d had a new one made or just had a closet full of duplicates, I couldn’t tell you.

“Yooo, sorry for the radio silence to keep you waiting! You have but to speak my name and I shall roll over Beethoven! Damn, a private room, huh? Mister moneybags over here.”

“I can’t bear to sleep in the same room as some stranger, that’s all. Just the thought of someone I don’t know watching me sleep gives me the willies. It isn’t cheap, but what can you do.”

“Hmmm. Well then, I’ve got great news for you,” said Aikawa, casually tossing an envelope onto the bed. A fat one. I didn’t need to ask to know what was inside.

“Here’s your piece of the action for helping me out this time around.”

“Thanks anyway, Jun, but I don’t need your money. With Hime-chan the way she is you probably didn’t make much on this job, so this one’s on the house.”

“Aren’t you the stoic one. But this kind of thing has to be done properly. They say a man who has no money might as well have no head, ya know?”

“So? Who cares about a head, it’ll just end up decapitated or strangulated or suspended from the ceiling anyway. I’m pretty sure that expression just means that money’s not all that important.”

“Hanh. Look at you, the humble shepherd.”

Chuckling sardonically, Aikawa sat down in the folding chair set out for well-wishers. I didn’t believe for a second that she was there to wish me well, but I couldn’t tell her not to sit.

“Still, pressing you into service without giving you something in return would go against my moral code. Let’s see. Okay, I’ve got it, I’ll do an impression of Hikari in a compromising position.”

“Please don’t.”

“Ah, no, stop it! Not that! Please, no more! You can’t! Stop, I said!”

“You’re the one who needs to stop!”