3-21: The School’s Strongest Enemy (1/2)
The mornings of the boy known as Nakamura Shinichi would start early in the morning at 7AM.
Unfortunately, because he has been using the same trick since his first day transferring here to leave his room and investigate the school and the city, and has even been investigating the network through his foster, he barely gets any sleep.
The reason he is able to fool his pursuers and do as he pleases is because, one, they think he is in his room, and two, because he moves during that period between evening and dusk when it’s easiest to move around.
Thanks to that he was able to procure the information he wanted these past few days.
Unfortunately, it was also because of that that it was hard to spend time with other students.
“Itadakimasu!”
“Kyui!”
As usual, Shinichi stood out with his black uniform as he ate breakfast at the cafeteria.
The menu for today was the cooked salmon set meal (with natto), but unlike the first or second day, Shinichi wasn’t overeating.
He had only done that to use up his food allowance for last month. Right now he was just eating enough to stay within the exempted range.Despite that he was grateful to be able to have a guaranteed meal with a balanced diet everyday.
Just thinking back to his life when he was a traveler where a day’s meal wasn’t guaranteed is enough to make him feel like coming to this school was worth it.
Not to mention…
“Uu, damn it, my emotions are welling up again! The more I bite into it, the more the taste seeps out, ah, yes, this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for!”
He wanted to eat this ordinary white rice so much that every bite of it was enough to make him tear up.
This miraculous white rice that could stand on its own with just its sweetness and umami was apparently worth his tears.
At first, the onlookers around would look at him with weird gazes, but after realizing that it was the unique reaction that returnees had, they eventually got used to it and stopped gawking.
“Thank you for the food!”
“Kyui!”
After happily finishing their meals with a smile, they headed to school and walked to their classroom.
From time to time, the students he passed by would give him a strange look upon seeing his different uniform, but that was it.
If there is nothing unusual, there’s no reason to be afraid either.
Even though it’s only been a week since the night of the bombing terrorist incident.
“They’re pretty tough, aren’t they?”
“Kyukyui?”
‘Aren’t they just lacking a sense for danger?’ that voice seemed to say, and Shinichi wryly smiled.
It was a terrorist incident wherein one step wrong would have definitely led to casualties, and yet not only do the students show no signs of being afraid, not even the people living at the city care.
Some of the information may have been covered up, but there was no hiding an explosion of that scale.
So, in other words, even though word of the terrorist attack was known throughout the city, neither the students nor the townsfolk cared.
Coming to this city or school requires a certain degree of resolve.
That sounds nice and all, but the reason why there were no casualties was because of the work of the security department.
That’s why the people living in the city took terrorists so lightly. Although another reason was because of the existence of another threat that is raybeasts. But that was not something the people here had to participate with in the first place.
Since Shinichi was living here now, he decided he would get rid of the sparks that happened to fall onto the wayside.
Still, it was true that the security department and the student council does their job well.
The incident during his first night became complicated partly because he was involved.
Now that he has already grasped their information network, there’s little reason for him to appear in the front lines.
What’s more is that someone very troubling is waiting for him at this school.
He didn’t want to accompany that person right now, though, as his thoughts probably won’t be able to keep up.
“…Good luck, me…”
“Kyukyui!””
Shinichi made a fist while he sat in his chair inside his classroom and encouraged himself.
She, who was sat on his shoulders, also cried out to encouraged him.
And then as if that was some kind of signal, the ‘enemy’ arrived—
“Dobe agaro kirelol ten…?”
“Wrong, wrong! You’re reading it wrong! If you say it like that, the sentence will become ‘I will steal your possessions’!”
“What!?”
He was to translate the sentence ‘please share with me some of your fruits’ to the Garesto language.
In the face of such a problem, Shinichi was made to suffer a sense of defeat he has never before gone through until now.
Standing in Shinichi’s way was the first class (enemy) of the day, Garesto Language.
As the name suggests, it is a class wherein one studied the language of the otherworld, Garesto. Translator devices might indeed exist, but there’s a convenience that comes to people who can read, write, and communicate without them.
It’s also not that unheard of for neither party to have a translator device on them.
Unfortunately, to Shinichi, this class could be said to be his Achilles’ heel.
He has always been bad at learning foreign languages, and even when he was a middle school student, his grades at English were terrible.
To someone like that, teaching the language of another world was just asking too much.
On top of that, he was also a returnee from a different otherworld.
He had gotten too used to Falandia’s tongue, and Falandia and Garesto shared many words and words with the same pronunciation.
When there are words where the meaning is exactly the same, and at the same time, words where the meaning is completely different, distinguishing which is which becomes needlessly difficult.
The characters also looked subtly similar, and yet they read differently.
If Shinichi had learned the Falandia language properly, then perhaps he might have still been able to swing it, but his knowledge of it was forcefully implanted into him after being able to learn a smattering on his own.
It was because of that cheat-like method that he was able to become instantly fluent at it, but it had the opposite effect when studying a falsely similar language like the Garesto tongue.
Being able to read it in a half-baked manner juts brought about confusion and made it difficult for him to learn it.
Shinichi’s high rank in Skill was completely useless in studying.