My Favorite Thing is the Secret Art: Swallow Reversal. My Special Skill is the Secret Art: Swallow Reversal. My Hobby is the Secret Art: Swallow Reversal – Part 01
When I woke up, math class was already over, and the next period had started. Actually, that one looked just about finished too.
I glanced to my left and saw the curtain swaying in the breeze. The window was open, probably because of the heat. I didn’t know who opened it, but hey, nice curtain work. As I spaced out thinking, the bell rang.
Next was—oh, lunchtime. Food. Time for food.
I quickly pulled out my lunch, made by the one and only Haruna. Yes, the genius, pretty Demon Baroness herself.
“I make some mean rolled omelet!” she had said confidently.
Grinning, I opened the lid with the best zombie smile I could manage. And immediately, that smile twisted into one of pure confusion.
Of course there’d be a punchline. I should’ve known.
“Give me a break,” I groaned.
Plain rice would’ve been better. I would’ve even preferred just rice sprinkled with seasoning flakes.
My entire lunch box was yellow.
“I make some mean rolled omelet!”
Yeah, I got that. Loud and clear. But she was a little too confident. Just rolled omelet? Seriously?
And what was the point of this little green plastic divider with the jagged edges? It definitely wasn’t meant to be a decor surrounding the omelet like a ranch fence.
“Aikawa. It’s rare to see you with a normal-looking lunch.”
A guy appeared next to me—Orito. Brown spiky hair, glasses, the kind of annoying classmate every school has.
Average height, average weight, average looks. Pretty unremarkable overall. Maybe that’s why he kept his spiky hair so meticulously styled, his only defining trait. He’d been glued to my side since nursery school. A real pain in the ass.
“Whoa.” Orito stared at my lunch like he was genuinely disturbed.
Please stop looking at it like you’re watching a dying animal.
“If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s gone way too far. It’s not even funny anymore.”
Shaking his head, Orito dragged a chair over from the seat beside mine and plopped down a very normal-looking lunch on my desk.
“I like rolled omelet,” he said and tried to take a bite, only to realize he had no chopsticks.
Come on, Demon Baroness, how do you screw up something so basic? Good thing I was a convenience store enthusiast and had a stockpile of disposable chopsticks in my locker.
“Hey, Aikawa,” he called out just as I stood up.
“Hm? What?”
“When did you stop telling me to eat at my own desk again?”
That was because no matter how many times I told him, he kept eating at mine. I eventually gave up.
“Then eat at your own desk. I wanna be alone. Stay away.”
“Aw, don’t be like that.”
And for some reason, he gave a satisfied smile. Damn, this guy is hella annoying.
I walked to my locker in the back of the room—one of those personal lockers that didn’t even have a lock—and grabbed a pair of chopsticks. Then I returned to face the yellow mess spread out before me.
I was terrified. Since becoming a zombie, I’d fought all kinds of creatures, but none of them felt as dangerous as this. There had to be something off about it. I slowly dug my chopsticks into one of the corners. I took a breath—not too deep—and brought a bite to my mouth. Chomp.
“Hmgh!”
Delicious! Unbelievably good! It was the kind of flavor that made it feel like the entire universe was about to pour out of my mouth. Was she some kind of top-tier chef? I’d never been this moved by an omelet in my entire life.
But—yeah, there was a but.
I didn’t need an entire lunch box full of it. The better it tasted, the more I craved plain white rice. Damn, I’m tearing up. For all sorts of reasons. This was what they meant by even zombies have tears.
So I made a proposal.
“Hey, Orito. I’ve got this incredible omelet on my hands right now. Just a bit, let me trade it for that soul of Japanese cuisine. Come on.”
“What? You should’ve put rice in your lunch from the start. This is what you get for pulling this stupid joke.”
He grumbled and complained, but he ended up making the trade anyway.
The moment the galaxy-level flavor hit his tongue, Orito’s eyes flew wide. He gave me a stunned look, like he couldn’t even find the right words to say, then stood up from his seat.
“Hey, guys! Aikawa’s omelet is insane! He’s trading it for plain rice right now!”
Hey now, Orito. No need to blow it out of proportion. Zombies are timid creatures who just want to live quiet lives.
A few people started heading my way. Oh well. I had a ridiculous amount of omelet anyway. Might as well share it.
That was my initial attitude.
But then the legend of Aikawa’s Ultimate Rolled Omelet spread through the class like wildfire. Before I knew it, my all-yellow lunch had transformed into a box filled entirely with plain white rice. Some had sprinkles of seasoning flakes, which was probably their families’ touch.
Sure, I’d said earlier that I would’ve preferred plain rice with just seasoning flakes. But now that I got my wish, it felt unexpectedly depressing.
I never thought the greatest rolled omelet of the century would all be traded away for rice. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to call them out on it.
The girls were smiling, saying it was good. There was no way I could ruin that.
You know how in games and movies, zombies can sometimes read the room?
Yeah, I was that kind of zombie too.
Afternoon classes wrapped up without incident. And by that, I meant I slept through all of them.
That mid-afternoon sunlight should be illegal. I nearly died for real. Now I just had to wait for the sun to set before heading home.
I looked out over the field, bathed in the glow of sunset. The track club ran across the orange-tinted ground like kids playing in a park. Whatever it was that made them so happy, their faces were lit up with joy. Watching the toned bodies of girls immersed in sports, I found myself understanding the guy who invented gym shorts.
There were hardly any students left in the classroom. As usual, it looked like Orito and I would be the last to go. The students who were actually living normal adolescent lives had already left the room, laughing and chatting with their friends.
Orito looked like he was finally heading home too. He slung his bag over his shoulder and stood up, letting out a big yawn.
“Come to think of it, Aikawa, you’ve been heading home late recently. What do you even do after school?”
“Sleep.”
“After all the napping you already do?”
Orito laughed and smacked me on the back. Honestly, it wasn’t so much sleeping as getting defeated in battle by the sun. Though I guess it amounted to the same thing.
“I mean, your place is close, so it’s probably fine, but still. There’s been a lot of murders lately, y’know? Be careful, all right?”
He was actually worried about me for once. I couldn’t help but snort. True, there’d been a string of gruesome dismemberments lately. Likely the work of the same killer.
And probably the same one who killed me. Though now, I’d be the one doing the killing.
“Honestly, I’d like to meet that killer,” I said.
“Oh yeah, that reminds me. Speaking of meeting people, my little sister’s friend apparently came across one of those murders. Her name’s Kyouko. Ring any bells?”
Huh… Wait, what? Someone lived? That couldn’t be right. I thought there weren’t any survivors from those cases. Well, I guess I technically counted as one.
“Never heard of her. What’s she like?”
“Same age as my sister, so fourteen. Tall for a middle schooler, but with a baby face. Big tits, too. Way cuter than my sister.”
“Doesn’t ring any bells. So what’s Kyouko want with me?”
“Hmm, so you don’t know her, but she knows you. Must be love at first sight!”
He grinned like an idiot. The eyes behind his glasses had pure degenerate written all over them.
“Bit of a leap, don’t you think?”
“You have no idea how often she asks about you. I’m telling you, she’s totally into you! Helping a poor orphaned schoolgirl meet her crush is pure class. Is that so hard to get? Just go meet her. Pretty please?”
God, he was annoying. The sheepish smile he gave while pressing his palms together made me want to punch him across twenty meters of open ground.
But more importantly, this was a lead. A lead on the murder case, right there in front of me.
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