"We Still Don't Know the Events of That Nap"—Upon waking, Chitose Murase apologized to Sen Getsusa with great guilt, saying she had dreamed of a battle against monsters or something.
Sen Getsusa strongly expressed... that she didn't want to hear it.
"If you won't listen, you won't listen. Honestly, I wanted to tell her about my epic battle with the slime..."
Even as she busied herself with publishing matters at home that night, Chitose Murase couldn't understand the strange expression on Sen Getsusa's face when she left.
However, Sen Getsusa didn't want to bring it up either; she was currently troubled by another matter.
"You're saying she's missing?"
Sen Getsusa pondered as Aoyama Nanami nodded anxiously in front of her. "Yuno still has a period of wages that haven't been settled. She should have come to collect them long ago, but it's been three days, and she isn't answering her phone."
"I purposely didn't do a bank transfer because I wanted to see her. But..."
Sen Getsusa guessed, "Since it's the holidays, could she have gone abroad for a trip?"
Aoyama Nanami shook her head. "Impossible. I even made a special trip to visit her yesterday."
At this point, Aoyama Nanami's expression became even stranger. "The lights were clearly on inside, but as soon as I knocked, they all went out. It was strange, like..."
"Like pretending no one was home?"
Sen Getsusa and Aoyama Nanami looked at each other, while the strong girl Machida Mariko spoke up from the side: "Did Sister Yuesha visit last time?"
"I only dropped her off at the door." Sen Getsusa tapped her temple. "I always felt there was something wrong with Yuno's mother."
"Should we call the police?" Mariko said worriedly.
Aoyama Nanami: "Maybe we've got it wrong?"
Sen Getsusa's pink fingernails slid across the convenience store counters. She walked around in thought, then turned back to look at the two worried girls. "If we're wrong, it's at least better than someone getting hurt. How about this, I'll go visit first and find a way to check on Yuno's situation."
"If I really can't find her, then we'll call the police."
Aoyama Nanami hurriedly stepped forward and grabbed Sen Getsusa's hand, her ponytail swaying behind her head. "No! Wouldn't that be even more dangerous? If something really happened, wouldn't Sengetsu-sha going just mean one more person getting hurt?"
Mariko chimed in from the side as well.
Sen Getsusa gently pulled her hand from Aoyama Nanami's, then grabbed it and patted the back of Nanami's hand twice. "Don't worry, Nanami, I can do it! I'm practically a lone wolf walking in the night!"
Sen Getsusa's cool actions and over-the-top words left Aoyama Nanami and Machida Mariko with complicated expressions.
What kind of chuunibyou act are you pulling... The two stared at the girl speechlessly, watching as she quietly took a pink lollipop shaped like a microphone from a box on the counter, stuffed it into her pocket, and then ran out like the wind before they could reply.
"I'm off!"
By the time Aoyama Nanami snapped out of it and chased after her, that long, soft wavy hair had already disappeared around the street corner.
"Hey! You didn't pay, Sen Getsusa!!"
Paying for the rich girl once again, Aoyama Nanami was full of energy today too!
————Streetlights flickering————
Coming to Yuno Gasai's house for the second time, it still gave Sen Getsusa a cold feeling.
The windows were tightly covered by curtains, not letting a single sliver of light through.
Withered yellow vines climbed the outer walls, and as she approached, the yard was even more desolate and overgrown with weeds.
It seemed like no one had weeded for a long time; a dust-covered low table sat next to a dead sapling.
She pushed open the gate, stepped up the porch, and knocked on the door a few times with her right hand.
Knock, knock-knock.
Just as Aoyama Nanami had said, no one opened the door, and there was no response.
Knock, knock, knock.
Sen Getsusa waited quietly for a few minutes, then turned to scan the street corner where she had come from.
There was no one around; the quiet street only echoed with the sound of an empty milk carton scraping against the ground, carried by the wind.
It'll be trouble if I get caught. Aoyama Nanami, you owe me at least fifteen lollipops.
Thinking this, Sen Getsusa took a few deep breaths, pretended to relax her neck casually with a wandering gaze—then reached out to grab the door handle and gently pushed the security door.
Crack... snap... bang!
A grating sound was heard, followed by the sharp friction of metal shattering.
Sen Getsusa 'lightly' pushed the door open and walked in, closing it behind her.
If there were any pedestrians on the road at this moment, they would only think it was a girl returning home too late, carefully opening and closing the door for fear of being discovered by her parents.
They couldn't see the door handle crushed in the girl's hand after she entered, nor the inner mechanism of the handle connection that had been twisted to pieces.
Entering the house, Sen Getsusa stepped directly onto a thick, deep yellow carpet—the room smelled of mold and dust.
She didn't rush to search, but first poked her head around to look at both sides and up the stairs.
"Hello? Sorry to disturb you."
The house was so quiet that there wasn't even an echo of her own voice, as if it were a black hole, receiving all of Sen Getsusa's words and then chewing them up to swallow them into its belly.
She tiptoed further into the house.
There was no carpet here, and her boots made a creaking sound on the floorboards.
But why am I acting like a thief?
Thinking of this, she simply walked with open strides, carefully pushing open every door to check.
"Yuno Gasai?" she tested in a small voice every time she pushed open a door.
"I am Sen Getsusa, are you home?"
"Yuno-chan?"
Turning a corner, the second floor seemed to be Yuno Gasai's bedroom.
She found a pair of pink slippers by the door, along with scattered erasers and rulers.
Pushing open the door, she was greeted by a face full of dust, causing Sen Getsusa to cough a few times.
It seems like it hasn't been used for a long time?
"This is?"
She looked around the girl's room in surprise.
A simple wooden bed covered with a thin blanket; just by looking at it, one could imagine how uncomfortable it would be to lie on.
An ordinary wooden chair, a small desk that could only be used by one person, with an old desk lamp on it.
This was everything in the room, completely unrelated to the magnificent appearance downstairs.
Not just unrelated, it was incredibly cramped.
The walls were covered with various schedules written in red, black, and blue—test scores, sleep times, flower arrangement, piano, tea ceremony, sewing, communication skills, etiquette training, cooking, art appreciation, World history, economics... there were many more behind them, probably torn off forcefully by someone.
Every item in the schedules had a score, with the assessment time and the progress still needed to be learned calculated by days and months.
This kind of densely packed information covered the walls of the entire room.
Turning around, she pulled open a drawer. Inside the small wooden table lay a notebook pieced together—it looked like paper collected from various places and then slowly, secretly pieced into a small notebook.
Flipping it open, the handwriting on the first few pages looked very immature.
[I have a Papa and Mama!]
There was only this one sentence on the first page, written crookedly.
There seemed to be a mistake written next to it, which was scribbled into a dark blotch. It was as if the writer had thought it over and decided that leaving only this sentence as an opening was enough to express her joy.
Then, as she flipped through, the handwriting became increasingly mature and beautiful.
And also increasingly gloomy and sad.
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