When Kiriha and I arrived at school, we were stopped by Uchimine’s voice in front of the classroom.
I turned around and saw Uchimine running toward us.
“Good morning, Uchimine.”
“I recognized you even from the back because of your beautiful hair, Harikiri-san.”
“Can you call me Kiriha? I hate that last name.”
Kiriha’s voice trailed off in a grimace.
–Yesterday I thought you didn’t get along with your parents, but I guess you don’t like them because there’s a [needle] on it? +
If she was bullied because of her bee abilities, you would understand how she felt.
“Sorry, sorry. So, Kiriha-san, how’s the cohabitation life going?”
“Un, honey is very sweet.”
“Heh, as expected of Okui-kun. But, Okui-kun, please try to be moderate in your relationship. Otherwise, Kiriha-san will hate you.”
“No, no, no man has more moderation than I do.”
“Eh~, I wonder about that.”
Uchimine chuckled as she put her hand over the contours of her face.
Somehow, I felt like the whole group of girls had a flow of teasing me.
“Oi, Okui!”
When I turned around at the sudden shout, I saw Bando, with a shaved head, appearing after Uchimine.
His usual cronies were not there. Bando was alone.
With an angry look on his face, a blue streak on his forehead, and a crease between his eyebrows, he closed the distance between us with a broad step.
“How nice to have a woman around in the morning, huh!”
I stepped forward in front of them to protect Kiriha and Uchimine.
“That’s not important, but what happened to your head?”
“It’s that poisoned b*tch’s fault! I woke up covered in some kind of glue and they had to cut it all off!”
I looked it up on the Internet since then, and it seemed that bee venom causes severe pain, itching, and difficulty breathing.
It must have been really bad because it caused me to peel my white eyes out. +
What was more disturbing was Bando calling her a poisoned woman.
I looked over my shoulder to see Kiriha’s mood, and sure enough, she looked terribly irritated.
To her, who was bullied because of her bee ability, a poisonous woman was a forbidden word.
“Move aside, honey. That idiot needs a re-education.”
“Re-education? Then I’m going to train you!” +
“Don’t get all mushy on me, you weakling. You will look more and more miserable!”
–This is not good. If I let the two of them get into any more confrontations, Bando’s hate will be directed more toward Kiriha than me.
I had to do something, and in front of me, Bando held an ice cudgel in his hand. At the tip of Kiriha’s finger, a needle transparent as glass was formed. That must be the bee’s stingers, reproduced with her ability.
As soon as Bando raised the ice cudgel, I reflexively activated teleportation.
Instantly, his image disappeared, as if the animation had deleted only the Bando layer.
Kiriha, who had lost her opponent and was looking over her shoulder, blinked and looked at me.
“Honey, where did you teleport that idiot to?”
“Eh, where’s ……?”
“Okui-kun, did you not specify a location?”
Uchimine rolled her eyes and put her hand over her mouth in surprise.
“No, it shouldn’t be possible to teleport unless I specify a location, hmmm, I imagined a basement so that he can’t come after us right away, but did this school even have a basement?”
Immediately after I scratched my cheek, I heard a scream of despair from outside the school.
Everyone gathered by the window and started making a fuss about what was going on.
When we looked out the window, Uchimine turned pale.
“The manhole in front of the school gate……no way, Bando-kun…….”
I got a chill in the pit of my stomach imagining it.
In fiction, sewers were often used by the protagonists as a hidden passageway, but in reality, sewers were not such underground passageways.
Sewage containing all kinds of human waste, including toilets, kitchens, bathrooms, and factory wastewater, flows and decomposes in the sewers, and the place where the foul-smelling gases accumulate seemed to be a literal hellscape.
If one were to fall into the river of filth, it would be too cruel to describe in words.
“Good grief, I’m going to go and retrieve him, because if he dies of quicksand, it’ll be a problem for Honey.”
Letting out a languid sigh, Kiriha jumped out the window.
Flying through the air as it was, she pulled open a manhole with a beeswaxed string.
Immediately, Bando’s screams became louder but gradually became weaker.
Into the hole, Kiriha hung the string.
“Oi, can you hear me? You can hold on to this string.”
Unable to watch the Bando’s downfall, which was once my greatest enemy, I moved away from the window
“……ambulance, should I call one?”
“….I’ve already called it….. Do you know what? I heard that the first time someone cleans sewers, they always get an infection and go to bed for a week……”
“Uchimine is so knowledgeable…….haha.”
“I just happened to see it on TV…….haha.”
“…..”
As I shared my feelings of indescribable disappointment, I naturally asked.
“Hey, what do you think of Kiriha, Uchimine?”
“What do you mean? I think she’s very beautiful.”
“No, it’s not that…….that girl, she said yesterday. ‘I don’t need friends. As long as Honey’s with me, that’s all I need’…….”
At my confession, Uchimine’s face turned dark for a moment, but her eyes immediately tightened.
Apparently, she was willing to listen to me seriously.
However, I felt it would not be a good idea to tell her about Kiriha’s bee ability, and I was at a loss as to how to explain it to her.
But as I kept my mouth shut, Uchimine started to ask me.
“What do you want Kiriha-san to do, Okui-kun?”
“I hope she gets along with Uchimine and the others. I didn’t have any friends until junior high school, and I can’t speak for others, but I thought that when I met everyone at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications I wanted to be friends with them. After all, I think we all need friends. But Kiriha doesn’t seem to think so, and it worries me.”
“I see you have affection for your girlfriend. Okui-kun is a good boyfriend.”
After saying that in a calm voice, Uchimine said with a serious face.
“This is just my wild guess, but I’m sure Kiriha-san was bullied because of her ability.”
As if by magic, Uchimine guessed Kiriha’s past.
“We people with abilities seem to be bullied or popular depending on our personalities and abilities. I was the one who fixed everyone’s broken things and they liked me, and Bando-kun became the leader of the boys because of his personality.”
“Ah.”
I nodded heavily, remembering Bando, whom I had been watching since the first grade.
“But maybe Kiriha-san was afraid of her combat-type abilities. So she couldn’t trust anyone, but she wasn’t afraid of Okui-kun, so I guess all the feelings she had been suppressing for so long tilted toward Okui-kun.”
“Huh? Was Uchimine there at that time?”
“Even if I wasn’t there, I would know. Because, Okui-kun, you are the one who voluntarily undergoes psychometry, right? There’s no way you would be afraid of a person with combat-type abilities. But from your reaction, it seems I was right on the money.”
I was a little embarrassed when she sighed and looked at me as if she were looking at a silly pet. I wondered why, when there was nothing to be embarrassed about.
“……Honestly, I’m glad she thinks that way about me. It seems like I helped Kiriha even a little. But I’m kind of sad. She said she doesn’t need friends as long as she has a boyfriend, and that’s just like being dependent.”
“You are right, Okui-kun. But then, even more so, I think the only person who can help Kiriha-san is you, Okui-kun.”
I felt as if I awoke from my slumber.
Uchimine was right.
If I was the only one Kiriha was opening up to, then I, and I alone, should be able to change her.
“Thank you. By the way, Uchimine is really smart. I haven’t talked to you at all, but you seem to know everything.”
“I’m not like that. I just understand the feeling.”
“Eh? What does that mean–?”
“Honey.”
In the middle of my asking, Kiriha came back.
“Oh, how did it go?”
“My eyes and ears were so covered in filth that I couldn’t see or hear anything, so I attached him with a beeswaxed string, pulled him up, and knocked him to the ground.”
I looked around and saw a filthy-colored human figure bobbing in front of the rear gate like a fish that had been landed out of the water.
–A second later, I heard the sound of an ambulance.
A/N Sidenote:
The reason for the success despite the ambiguity of the teleportation destination is that the level of teleportation has increased.