Chapter 26 – Hey, Are You Hiding Something From Us? (Yandere Awakening)

After school at the beginning of the week following his duel with the Disciplinary Committee Chair, Kaoru, Shinta couldn’t hide his somewhat depressed expression.

(To think I’d be summoned again in such a short amount of time…)

The truth was that Shinta had received yet another summons to the kendo club right after lunch break. During a brief moment when he had stepped away from Ichizu and Miina, Kaoru had approached him and asked him to come by after school.

True, when he left that day, he had told her to rely on him if anything came up, but he never expected to be suddenly summoned right at the start of the week.

(I seriously doubt it, but she’s not asking for another duel, is she…)

If he remembered correctly, the kendo club generally had Mondays off. Imagining that he might be challenged to another no-holds-barred match because no other members were around, it was no wonder Shinta was feeling down.

However, considering he had acted all high and mighty telling her to rely on him when push came to shove, he couldn’t just coldly brush her off, so he eventually decided to head to the kendo club…

“Hey, Shinta-kun, where are you going? Do you have plans after this?”

As he was about to leave the classroom, Ichizu called out to him. Shinta tried to come up with a random excuse, but when he turned around and saw the look in her eyes, he involuntarily froze.

Behind him stood Ichizu with a smile playing on her lips, but her eyes weren’t smiling in the slightest.

“W-What’s wrong, Ichizu? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Hmm~ Is there something weird about my face?”

“No… um…”

As Shinta mumbled his words in the face of the unique pressure radiating from Ichizu, another person chimed in.

“Hmm~ What’s the matter, Shinta? You’re making a flustered face, which is rare for you.”

The person who had newly called out to him was Miina, and just like Ichizu, while her face was smiling, the eyes she directed at him had lost all their highlights. Continuing with their bizarre behavior, the two of them fired off questions one after another.

“Hey, hey, are you planning to go to the kendo club again today, Shinta-kun?”

“I wonder what reason Shinta from the go-home club would have to show his face at the kendo club~?”

“You said you had business at the kendo club last Friday too, didn’t you, Shinta-kun?”

“I’m… so curious about what business you have at the kendo club that you’d even turn us down for it~…”

Shinta flinched as the two closed in on him without giving him a moment to reply.

He could easily guess the reason these two were backing him into a corner like this. After school last Friday, he had turned down their invitation to fulfill his promise of a mock match with Kaoru at the kendo club. Because he hadn’t given them the specific details at the time, it had likely planted a seed of doubt in the two girls. Why would a guy with no club affiliations turn down their invitation for business at the kendo club?

And now, knowing that he was going to show his face there again today, right at the start of the week, Shinta sensed that a certain possibility must have bubbled up inside Ichizu and Miina.

(Could it be… they think I found a girl I’m interested in at the kendo club?)

Thinking about it normally, just visiting the club back-to-back wouldn’t lead to such a massive leap in logic, but Shinta figured their current thought process was defying common sense. Turning down their invitations just to show up at the kendo club probably made them assume he had met a woman he got along with better than them.

Even if the likelihood of that was extremely low, their intense auras made it clear they wouldn’t just ignore any potential obstacle. That was exactly why they were trying to pry the reason out of him, even if it took the form of a half-interrogation.

“Hey, Shinta-kun, won’t you tell us why you’re showing your face at the kendo club?”

“Or perhaps… is it a reason you’d rather we didn’t know?”

“No, that’s…”

Under their freezing gazes, Shinta involuntarily faltered, and that reaction only seemed to accelerate their misunderstanding.

“Hey, hey, hey, why are you stuttering like that, Shinta-kun? Could it be that there’s a girl at the kendo club you’re interested in?”

“W-Why would you think that? At the very least, it’s nothing frivolous like that!”

“Then tell me, what’s with that reaction? You look exactly like a ‘married man desperately trying to hide his affair’, you know~? Miina-sensei is just so, so curious she can’t help it.”

Before he knew it, he had been backed into a corner of the classroom, trapped by his two friends closing in on him. Shinta never showed the slightest fear or hesitation in the face of hostility or malice, but this was the one time he couldn’t stop the cold sweat, trembling inwardly at a chill that felt like ice being shoved down his back.

That was exactly why he could do nothing but nod without a second thought to the girls’ next words.

“Hey, can we tag along too? We can, right? Of course we can, right? Hey… won’t you say it’s fine? It’s fine, right? It’s fine, right? It’s fine, right?”

With their faces brought in at point-blank range, stared down by four eyes entirely devoid of light, Shinta could only answer, “Yes.”