We discussed our route, and as evening arrived, we headed to a convenience store to buy dinner.
With the coming journey in mind, we bought more food than usual and ate it back at the hotel.
“Oh? Ramen is delicious.”
“Seriously, it really is.”
“I’m genuinely impressed…”
For dinner, we chose the cup ramen Elvis had been eager to try.
It was the right choice. The ramen was incredibly good.
“Right? We ate fish and meat too, but something like this definitely doesn’t exist in the other world. Let’s have some chocolate later.”
There had been very little in the way of sweets in the other world.
“Still, cup ramen and chocolate both exist here. I don’t know about cup ramen, but isn’t chocolate usually imported from other countries?”
“Maybe the human territories still import goods. Japan relied heavily on imports, and most of the human-controlled towns seem to be near the coast, right?”
Kumamoto was also facing the ocean.
“Well, I guess we should be grateful. I’m curious about what happened to other countries, though.”
“Does it really matter? We should just move forward according to our own plans.”
“That’s true.”
We finished dinner, but the cup ramen wasn’t quite enough, so we waited while snacking on chocolate and potato chips.
“What time should we go?”
Hmm…
“How late do you think places like that stay open?”
There was no way we would know.
We had been high school students before all this.
“Who knows? But there’s no point going too late. How about around 9 PM?”
That should work.
“Ayaka, are you coming too?”
“What? Do you want to go alone?”
No way.
“No, I’m just confirming. Honestly, I want you to come with me. It feels kind of scary.”
“Then we’ll go together. If it looks dangerous, we’ll retreat. We can probably handle ourselves, but I don’t want some pointless trouble delaying us.”
That was true.
Getting detained by the Self-Defense Forces or the police would be a pain.
“Elvis, come with us too.”
“Sure.”
While looking at our phones, we waited until after 9 PM before leaving the room.
When we went down to the first floor and stepped outside, the atmosphere was completely different from during the day.
Somehow, it felt noisy.
“What happened? Is something going on?”
“I don’t know. But it’s dark.”
There weren’t many streetlights on.
For a city of this size, it felt a little strange.
“It’s still an end-of-the-world situation, after all. Hmm… The noise is probably coming from the entertainment district.”
“Let’s check it out.”
We suppressed our mana and headed toward the entertainment district.
When we arrived at the same street we had visited during the day, the atmosphere had clearly changed.
The deserted daytime atmosphere was gone. Men browsed the storefronts or walked along while touts in black suits called out to them.
In short, it was very much an adults-only world.
“I don’t like this…”
Ayaka would naturally feel that way.
But unfortunately, I could somewhat understand what those men were feeling.
“Maybe it’s because the world is like this now…”
“Hey, is it really okay for me to be walking down this street?”
Probably not…
“Let’s walk quickly with our heads down. We’ll just look like a couple who took a wrong turn.”
“Got it. Anyway, let’s hurry.”
Ayaka took my hand, so we continued walking down the street together.
The touts in black suits—and their well-dressed customers—clearly looked annoyed.
Still, we had our own reasons for being there, so we continued forward while searching.
“…How’s it?”
“…There are more people than during the day, but I don’t sense anything unusual. What about you?”
Hmm…
“…I feel mana coming from inside some of the shops. But it’s not very strong.”
Probably not one of our classmates.
“…No luck, then. Let’s go back to Beppu after all.”
“…Yeah.”
We kept walking, and just as we were about to leave the street, I got a bad feeling.
“…Ayaka, look down.”
“Huh?”
I pulled Ayaka close and put an arm around her shoulders.
Then, while avoiding looking to the side as much as possible, we continued forward.
A young man emerging from one of the shops entered the edge of my vision.
However, I kept walking without reacting. Once we passed through the street, I grabbed Ayaka’s hand.
“…Run.”
“Y-yeah.”
We ran through the relatively busy drinking district.
After going a fair distance, I glanced back.
We had already left the drinking district behind, and there was no one following us.
“What happened?”
“I’ll explain later. Let’s take a detour and head back to the hotel.”
“Okay.”
We continued through the nightlife district, taking several turns to make sure no one was following us.
About thirty minutes later, we returned to the hotel and entered the room that Elvis and I were using.
“Hey, what happened?”
Elvis jumped out of my pocket, returned to his original form, and immediately asked.
“So? Was there someone there in that red-light district?”
During the thirty minutes we spent walking, I had thought about whether I should tell them or not.
The conclusion was that I should.
“Elvis, sorry, but sleep on the floor tonight.”
“Hm? That’s fine, but…”
Elvis nodded.
“Ayaka, sleep on that bed.”
I pointed toward the bed near the window.
“Well, okay.”
Ayaka nodded and sat down on the bed by the window.
“What I’m about to tell you, I want you to tell Takamiya-san and Kitaura-san later.”
“Okay.”
“Ayaka and I joined up five years ago. This happened about two years before that, when the four of us were still traveling together.”
Shouta was still alive then, and despite everything, we were enjoying the journey—joking around and fooling about together.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yeah… We were still journeying to defeat the Demon King, fighting monsters and completing missions from the god.”
The god would occasionally give us quests.
Since we received rewards for completing them, we did quite a few.
“We were doing that too back then…”
Ayaka looked into the distance.
She had probably enjoyed those days in her own way, just like we had.
“Then, one day, we found a certain corpse.”
“A corpse…”
“It was Sakashita-san.”
Our classmate, Sakashita-san.
“Sakashita-san… I didn’t really talk to her much, but I remember her as the girl who was always reading books.”
That was my impression of her too.
The phrase “literary girl” suited her perfectly.
But she had died.
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