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High School Hack and Slash Chapter 149 Part 2

「Kah! Sweets matter is soaking into my brain~」

Mai is on a high as she gulps down a spoonful of pudding à la mode.

Her blood sugar seems to be spiking.

Or rather, she looks like an old man having a glass of beer right after taking a bath.

A large number of sweets are also laid out on the table.

It’s so colorful of a visual, so sickening that I think I’m going to get heartburn just looking at it: macarons, cream anmitsu filled with anko, mont blanc, cream puffs, and so on.

「Hmm. The map distributed looks like nothing but that of an ordinary school building, does it not…?」

Shizuka, who has a Japanese sweet set of Mitarashi dango and green tea in front of her, tilts her head slightly as she looks at the printout of the assignment.

On the printout paper, the set quota as well as the map for the dungeon practice are listed.

For the assignment that was notified during homeroom, the scope of the investigation is divided into groups.

It’s an assignment designed for parties, not solos.

I guess this means that communication in order to form a party is also a subject of evaluation, huh.

I left the negotiation pertaining to the division of the survey area among classmates to Shizuka.

Such negotiation works are too impossible of a task for me.

But still, isn’t it completely a loner-slayer of an assignment (quest), I wonder?

「It’s not like there’s any restriction that says you have to conquer only with your classmates, after all. That means it’s okay even if you ask for help from your other party members.」

Seiichi, holding only a cup of black coffee in his hand, shrugs his shoulders.

True enough, be it material gathering- or mapping-type of quests, as long as you submit your deliverables, everything is okay.

It’s on the level that even trading fruits of labors with sen is tacitly approved.

Looking at it from another perspective, I guess such negotiation and dealings also serve as a way to learn the workings of the world, huh.

「Yes, I guess so. All we have to do is to take pictures of the checkpoints, and I think the difficulty level is quite on the low side.」

「In that case, let’s conquer it with ourselves alone.」

If it’s the four of us, we can handle almost all kinds of quests.

We ought to finish it quickly and offer follow up to Saki and the Senpais, who are conversely of the specialized one-trick types.

「Well, why not?」

「Well then, let’s go in that direction… It has been a while, has it not? Since we last acted together with these members only, I mean.」

Shizuka smiles in a slightly nostalgic fashion.

◇ ◇ ◇

　The investigation facility, the sealed old club room building, turned out to be closer than I had expected.

It seems to be a repurposing of the original special classroom building as a club room.

Since it’s located off the main facilities and school routes, we haven’t noticed its existence until now.

No, it’s more like it was out of our perception, huh.

For us to not notice such a magnificent building with such a strong presence, it feels a little unnatural.

How should I put it, the smell of miasma, or rather….

This place, I wonder if it has been turned into a dungeon.

「… the so-called, natural dungeon, huh.」

Shizuka, looking up at the two-story wooden building, mutters quietly.

The『Iwado Woodland』 that we headed to during summer vacation for forest school was also called a natural dungeon.

It’s a dungeon domain that has manifested on the above ground, different from the dungeon located at the underground of the academy.

The stagnant pool of miasma causes monsters to appear, so it seems.

Nonetheless, with merely the level of miasma pressure that stagnates on the above ground, the most it can produce are monsters of small fry level.

Besides, if I were to put it bluntly, I think the area around Asagi-sou has a higher miasma concentration.

「Ah~… that may be true.」

「My senses may have gone numb, but the place is as good as abnormal, after all….」

The building, a fusion of Japanese and Western styles that has a sense of romance to it, does look old, but doesn’t decay like a dilapidated house.

It’s just that, crows’ cawing is reverberating eerily, and you can feel gazes as if something is looking at you from behind the window.

It has a pretty gothic horror feel to it.

「Let’s go back for once and come up with a countermeasure. Let’s do so. Yes, we ought to do so.」

Shizuka-san, smiling sweetly, looks back at me.

I wonder if I should ignore the fact that her cheeks are twitching and she’s drenched in strange sweat.

「What to do now? Should we change into our real equipment for dungeon conquest?」

「No.」

I wonder.

To begin with, the academy uniforms are designed to be something like simple armored suits, and I don’t have that bad of a feeling about it.

It boasts no dangerous-level sense of pressure either, about the outer stratums of the dungeon at best.

It’s just that, it’s not so much of a malice, but I feel like I’m being rejected.

「It’s no brainer, but we have no insurance since we didn’t go through Rashomon, okay.」

In other words, it means you can’t use the cheat called『returning from death』.

「Even if monsters do spring up, they’ll most likely be at goblin-level.」

「I can beat such things with my bare hands, but you see… Given the fact that we can use our skills, then friendly fires from other classmates would be bad news, don’t you think~?」

Other than us, no students have come yet.

It sounds like a pain if we were to bump into each other, so let’s go there quickly in the capacity of preliminary check.

「Please cease the thought, Touma-san. Safety comes first. Ah, I have a good idea. Now that the test is over, let’s go on a date for a change… Ahh, ahh, wait, please wait.」

Linking arms with Shizuka, I head to the entrance of the old special classroom building.

For the time being, let’s try going in, shall we?

I mean, we’ll find out once we get there.

◇ ◇ ◇

　It wasn’t that old of a matter that the building called the old club room building or the old special classroom building was designated off-limits.

Until about three years ago, it was actually used as a club room for the middle-rank B-rank clubs.

Even so, however, they moved out soon after the new club building was completed.

There was the policy to repurpose the building as opposed to tearing it down, but there was no mistaking that it had been left as it was with its purpose of use remaining undecided.

There were other similar vacant buildings scattered around the academy grounds.

Such vacant buildings were utilized by some students as traditional love hotels.

The origin of the『rumor』 that turned into one of the Seven Wonders was something spread by such students.

According to them…

 

『The view from the window was that of above the clouds』

『No, I looked down on a town that looked like a miniature』

『It was a stretch of an ocean. I could see the coastline in the distance』

『When I opened the door inside the building, it was on top of a skyscraper. If I had taken a step inside, I probably would have fallen』

『Once you go into the classroom, never close the door. When you open the door, it leads to some strange places, you know』

『When I thought I went to the bathroom, I found myself flying through the air on a toilet bowl』

 

As a number of such unnatural phenomenon were reported in the Seven Wonders of the Academy thread, the name given to it was the『Drifting Classroom in the Sky』.

Investigation team was also dispatched by the academy, but as they confirmed no such unnatural phenomenon, it was dismissed as a hoax.

As a matter of fact, various occult phenomenon had been reported on a daily basis at the academy.

In order to scrutinize them all, they were lacking in manpower as well as obligation-esque motivation.

Unless it posed some immediate damage, they simply left it alone or proclaimed it off-limits.

「Say… Come on, cheer up already. Kazuto.」

「T, that’s right. Kazuto-san.」

Sena and Shiho, walking side by side, voiced out encouragement.