Anko Mitarashi shrugged, leaned back a little, tilted her head and said with a grin, “All right, I’ll stop teasing you.
I’m Anko Mitarashi, keeper of the peace and safety of the school festival.
I heard crying just now.
Was that you three?”
Senhime, Yumiko and Reiko all went silent, on the edge of despair.
“Keeper of the peace and safety of the school festival” sounded awfully familiar.
Another pervert school festival staffer.
They wanted to run.
And compared to Yuuga, the woman in front of them seemed even scarier.
They exchanged a glance and stood up in perfect unison.
Under Yumiko and Reiko’s watching eyes, Senhime took a step forward and bowed to Anko Mitarashi.
“Anko-senpai, it wasn’t us, you misheard.
We’re retreating.”
“Hey!
Hold on, you three?”
Anko Mitarashi watched the three girls scurry off, baffled, and rubbed her forehead.
If they were fine, then it didn’t matter.
The reason a jonin like Anko Mitarashi was at the Academy at all, working the school festival, was that she was bored out of her mind.
She’d just wrapped up an S-rank mission a few days back, so she was resting up in the Village.
Sitting at home alone was dull, and a few days ago she’d happened to see Iruka posting the job.
Anko liked to have fun, so she figured she could go mess around at the school festival, only to find out after arriving that it really was boring.
A school festival put together by kids aged six to ten was a step down from things like the Village’s summer festival, and the fact that nobody was selling dango made her especially miserable.
Wandering around, she’d come this way, heard girls crying, and thought something serious had happened.
She came to look and got called a pervert.
Anko Mitarashi sighed and tilted her head, and her eyes turned to slit pupils, cold like a snake’s, for a flicker of a moment.
She stretched and decided to keep wandering.
“Hm…
did those three girls drop this?”
Two steps on, Anko Mitarashi stopped and narrowed her eyes at a notebook lying not far off, a plain pale blue cover, the kind you could buy cheap at any shop.
She walked over, picked it up, and muttered, “Oh my, a little girl’s diary?
Let me have a peek.”
With that, Anko Mitarashi gathered chakra in her feet, sprang into the air, flipped once and landed neatly on the branch of a maple tree, then lazily opened the notebook to the first page.
A few large characters were written neatly across it: “Konoha Love Story.” Nothing else on the page.
Anko Mitarashi rubbed her chin, the corners of her mouth lifting into a smile, and ran her finger over the word “love.” “What’s this?
Konoha Love Story.
Looks like a romance novel.
Guess those girls are at that age too.”
She’d been hooked on romance novels herself for a while once, but she got sick of them fast, because they were all the same formula.
Samurai and princess, ninja and the client’s daughter, wandering swordsman and the young lady of a wealthy house.
You read the opening and you already knew the ending.
Boring.
Still, she was already lying on a branch, so Anko Mitarashi kept reading.
She flicked her finger and turned to the second page.
[It was a summer evening.
The stifling heat had eased off a good deal, but the cicadas were still shrilling.
The last of the sunset dyed the whole western side of Konoha orange-red, like a veil laid over it.]
[Rika Akana stood at the gate of Konoha, gazing into the distance, her long black hair blowing in the wind, as if she had stepped into a painting.]
Reading this, Anko Mitarashi felt like she had become Rika Akana herself, standing at the great gate of Konoha and looking off into the distance.
With the story set in Konoha, it was easy to put yourself in it.
[“Rika, the clerk you’re waiting for still hasn’t shown up?” asked Takaki, the jonin on gate duty, one hand propping up his chin, the other twirling a pen out of boredom.]
[“Not yet, Takaki-kun.” Rika Akana had a bit of a headache over it herself.
She turned to him and it came out sounding like a complaint.
“The boss told me to wait here for a clerk named Kanji Nagao, but it looks like he’s late.
It’s such a pain.”]
[Takaki looked up at the sky and kindly offered, “If it gets too late, just come back tomorrow.
I’m about to go off shift, and I’ll be closing the village gate before long.”]
Here Anko Mitarashi paused.
So it wasn’t the story of a princess or the young lady of a great house.
The heroine, Rika, seemed to be a working girl.
[“I’ll wait a little longer.” Rika Akana smiled gently and stayed right where she was, not budging at all.]
[Finally, just as Takaki’s shift was about to end, a young man with a bundle on his back came hurrying up to the village gate, out of breath, clearly having run the whole way.]
[But it seemed he had no idea Rika Akana was waiting for him.
Kanji Nagao walked right past her to Takaki’s desk.
Looking at Takaki, who had already packed up his things, he said apologetically, “Sorry.
I’m Kanji Nagao, from Ai Village in the Land of Fire.
Could I waste a few minutes of your time to register so I can get into Konoha?”]
Reading that, Anko Mitarashi swore under her breath.
“What a dope.
The person he should be apologizing to is Rika, it’s Rika!
Who could ever fall for a guy like that?”
A male lead with no social sense was painful to watch.
Anko Mitarashi ripped into Kanji in her head, a total blockhead.
Having thoroughly cursed Kanji Nagao out, she read straight on.
[Takaki took out the village entry register again, resigned, and handed Kanji Nagao a pen.
“Buddy, the person you should be apologizing to isn’t me, it’s Miss Akana, who’s been waiting for you this whole time.”]
[“Huh?” Kanji Nagao took the pen and looked at Takaki, completely lost.
“What Miss Akana?”]
[Takaki pointed at Rika Akana, who was walking over, and said with some surprise, “Aren’t you a clerk at the Konoha ninja tool shop?
She’s a clerk there too.
She’s been waiting here a long time for you.
I didn’t expect that you two didn’t know each other.”]
[Kanji Nagao looked where Takaki was pointing and saw a woman with hair just past her shoulders, about twenty years old, wearing a pink headband, her round face a little flushed, with thick eyebrows and big eyes.
She looked like a wonderful girl.]