Vol 1 Chapter 11 (2/2)

Though she acted embarra.s.sed as Homura and Touya openly admired her, Misasagi-senpai still managed to gently chide the two of them.

“It’s true that this is a wonderful gift on Nutella. But you mustn’t overestimate your abilities and rely on them too much. You should think well and hard to ascertain what is your true power.”

“……”

The two juniors continued watching her with even stronger admiration, causing Misasagi-senpai to turn increasingly red and shy away.

The three of them walked along the ridge.

They were walking on a long rocky path that Homura wasn’t used to.

When she was having some trouble traversing the path, Misasagi-senpai called out to her from behind.

“Hinooka-san, please use this pole.”

Senpai took out a light yet solid foldable cane. The pointed end was made so that it wouldn’t slide across a rock surface. It was one of the tools whose use Homura couldn’t figure out earlier.

“A cane…”

“It’s quite convenient. It makes walking much easier. You lightly grip them with both hands like you’re skiing and…”

“Umm, I’m fine, really. It looks like it’d be hard to keep my balance while gripping it.”

“Hey, Hinooka? You should properly listen to senpai and—”

Interrupting Touya as he tried to reprimand Homura, Misasagi calmly continued speaking.

“In that case, how about putting on some gloves? It will get rid of the friction while you use both your hands.”

“Sure…”

Homura reluctantly nodded.

Truthfully, her main reason for refusing the cane was that it had a clumsy image as something used by old people to her.

The gloves that Misasagi-senpai next took out were thin, but they fitted Homura snugly and perfectly protected her hands when she lightly hit them against a rock. The finger sleeves were also made to resist slipping.

These items were too uncouth to Homura’s aesthetical senses, but their functional beauty put them in permissible range for her.

“Touya-kun, it’s time to switch the vanguard position.”

“…Ah, sorry. I unconsciously hurried too much.”

Touya shamefully apologized, but Misasagi-senpai shook her head.

“No, not at all. I’ll be taking a route that’s as easy to walk through as possible, so make sure to follow while carefully watching my footsteps.”

They returned to a single-file procession and started walking once more.

Their pace went down a bit, but the fact that they were advancing in bent-back postures didn’t change.

The winding slope gradually became sharper, forcing Homura to almost crawl on all four limbs. The gloves unexpectedly helped a lot here.

“What is this, rock-climbing? But it’s more like I’m crawling than climbing, right? Then is it rock-crawling? Am I a rock-crawler?”

Though Homura joked around like that, no retorts came from Touya.

When Homura couldn’t vent herself by talking, her thoughts turned in unpleasant directions.

“……”

She felt as if her lump of stamina, which she had thought to be bottomless, had greatly diminished and become cold.

In her mind, Homura had imagined the Exploration as a group that gallantly conquered meadows while being caressed by a gentle wind beneath Nutella’s majestic view, yet what was this?

What lay before her eyes were perfectly ordinary rocks, and dried earth in every direction.

Above them was just a dull cloudy sky, and furthermore the surroundings were covered in fog, spurring on the oppressive and suffocating feeling that gripped Homura. So plain; it was all completely plain.

Her hair became coiled in the damp air. Speaking of which, she hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror since they had departed. The most she had done was wash her face in the river as they walked.

Up ahead, Misasagi-senpai’s hair was beautifully smooth like a delicate doll’s as usual, so much so that she could immediately appear in a cosmetics commercial just as she was.

Misasagi-senpai turned back to look at her.

“We’ll be coming out onto a flat ridge just up ahead.”

“Really?”

It would be a lie to say that Homura wasn’t irritated at how Misasagi-senpai regularly turned around to confirm her pace.

Homura still couldn’t believe her earlier words about how this was the easiest route. She felt like she had been deceived simply because senpai wanted to get her excited.

Simply because she wanted to see Homura’s ungainly form as a result—

“……No, no.”

As expected, Homura’s thoughts didn’t turn that mean and unpleasant, but she could clearly tell that Misasagi-senpai was lowering her usual pace. For some reason, Homura couldn’t honestly accept the sight of her doing that.

They finally pa.s.sed over the sharp slope.

The natural path bored into the ridge turned flat and level.

The fog turned into a distinct lump and pa.s.sed over Homura and the others.

To the right was a rock wall that was at last too vertical to climb—

And to their left was a cliff. The bottom was far out of sight. The width of the long and narrow foothold they stood on was, at most, equal to the average height of a person. In some places, it was only a few dozen centimeters. Small enough to cover by stretching one arm.

However, it wasn’t that shocking if you compared it to a small and narrow subway station platform.

There was a firm wooden bridge built across the places where the path was cut off here and there.

Obviously, it was constructed by previous members of the Exploration Club. Homura couldn’t possibly understand the effort and pa.s.sion that had gone into bring the necessary materials here using their own strength.

They crossed over the bridge without tasting any thrill.

They could just quickly pa.s.s over something like this without fear.

“If they went to the trouble of making these, they should have adding railings to them as—”

Suddenly, her feet lost the sensation of touching surface and her body was in the air.

She might have heard Touya dumbly say, “Ah.”

“———”

She wasn’t able to let out a single noise.

In movies and dramas, this would be a scene where the person screamed as they fell. Definitely.

But Homura couldn’t let out a single breath from her stiff and frozen body.

I’m going to die.

That fear alone ruled her entire body.

When she came to, she was lying face up.

She could only hear the faint thumping of her heart, as if she were at the bottom of a pool.

“F-Fall!”

She didn’t understand where she was.

Within her narrow vision, there were only the cloudy sky and black pine branches that covered her view of the sky.

There was no sign of Misasagi-senpai or Touya nearby. She was alone.

“Rope! Be careful of falling rocks! I’ll secure her!”

Hot. Her back was hot.

When she thought that, she realized that it was the sensation of rock pressing against her through her backpack.

It was slightly painful when she stirred.

Her palms, creeping down either side of her rear, touched a rough surface, but the heels of her feet didn’t touch anything and seemed to be suspended in mid-air.

Speaking of which, immediately after crossing the bridge, she had stepped on a clump of gra.s.s, but beyond that gra.s.s had been a pile of unstable rocks… and she had no memory after that.

“—Don’t move, Hinooka-san.”

As she remained lying face up, she heard a voice from above her head.

It was senpai’s voice. She sounded like she was somewhere very far away.

Sounds increasingly got closer, until finally they reached right beside her.

Senpai’s face peeked down at Homura, looking upside-down from her perspective.

“Can you breathe? Do your lungs hurt?”

“………”

What should I say in reply—Even as she thought that, Homura only managed to half-open her mouth and slightly nod.

Misasagi-senpai quickly confirmed the state of Homura’s body and then gently helped her sit up.

She gripped Homura’s fingers with one hand and stroked her back with her other hand as she held her.

“You’re okay,” Misasagi-senpai whispered in her ear.

“…Senpai…”

She could finally speak again.

Senpai didn’t move away as she continued holding Homura.

“Umm… I’m fine now.”

“I’ll stay like this a little longer until I calm down.”

“Hah, sure.”

Homura could hear senpai’s heartbeat as their chests were pressed together. It sounded so clear to her that Homura wondered whether it was pumping far faster than her own.

While embraced by a warm body, Homura looked at their surroundings over senpai’s shoulder.

They were on a small ledge that b.u.t.ted out midway down the cliff. Several big and small rocks were scattered about. Beyond that was once again the seemingly bottomless cliff precipice.

She had fallen about six or seven meters. The fact that she had fallen on her back and been cus.h.i.+oned by a thicket of creeping pines as she fell seemed to have reduced the damage to her body.

They remained there like that for about ten minutes.

While being pulled up by the rope from the top of the cliff, Homura was a.s.sisted by Misasagi-senpai from behind and managed to return to their original path. Climbing up the rock face with the rope had been anticlimactically simple.

“……”

Touya greeted her with a blood-drained face.

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah. My back was struck a bit, but my feet are completely fine.”

“I see. Thank goodness.”

It was then that Homura bowed her head deeply to the other two.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Touya patted his chest in relief.

“I was shocked when you suddenly disappeared.”

“No, I’m really sorry about that.”

While Misasagi-senpai reconfirmed the location where Homura had fallen, Touya diligently cleaned the dust off the rope and stowed it away.

Afterwards, their group resumed traversing the ridge while exchanging few words between them.

“…What did you shout before?”

“Ah, I said ‘Fall’. It was in order to inform senpai that you had fallen. Well, senpai seemed to have already noticed, though.”

“Heh, ‘Fall’, huh? It doesn’t seem like I’ll ever have the chance to say it myself.”

“…No, there’s no way to be sure. Also, we use it to warn of falling rocks as well.”

As they walked for a while exchanging bits of conversation, the path turned into a gentle descent and moved away from the precipitous terrain.

Suddenly, the memory of the precipitous path until now vividly rose up in Homura’s mind.

“…Kuh…”

A chill rea.s.serted itself through her body and her knees felt like the strength had been drained out of them.

If there hadn’t coincidentally been a ledge there back then. If the branches hadn’t broken her fall and she had hit the stone surface on her head. If she had been injured and left alone on that ledge. All alone, on this uninhabited planet.

She discreetly hugged her cowering body.

But at the same time, Homura only remembered the warmth of Misasagi-senpai, who was leading them down the path in front right this moment.

She wasn’t alone.

By the time the clouds broke and an interval of clear weather seemed to peek down on them, the sky had become a deeper blue and soon became completely darkened.

The madder red sunset dyed the thin clouds, and the spectacle reflected by the lake below was too majestic to put into words.

There was also something abnormal about the wall in the sky that had appeared once more.

“The Bagel’s been eaten away…”

On the opposite side of the horizon from the setting sun, a certain section of the Bagel was completely cut off.

“That happens when the Bagel enters Nutella’s shadow. You can see it again at night.”

“How mysterious.”

The stars were twinkling above.

Among them, the ones that glittered the most brightly and noticeably were Nutella’s satellites.

“Hinooka-san, you’re also tired, right?”

“Yes, the truth is, my feet are completely worn out… Are we almost at the relay base?”

“It’s not that far away now, but we’ll arrive at the base tomorrow. Tonight, we’ll camp outside. There’s a good place to camp nearby.”

“So hungry,” Touya groaned out.

Misasagi-senpai let out a giggle and lifted up the bow on her back for a bit.

“I was going to cook a bird or rabbit as tonight’s treat for dinner if I could catch any, but they’re a bit far from here… Please make do with preserved food and soup for tonight.”

“That’s more than enough! Ah, so you have found wild animals. Anything like deer for example!?”

“Well, they’re similar to deer, but they’re an endemic species to Nutella,” Misasagi-senpai explained. “They’re quite tasty.”

“So you’ve eaten some before.”

“Senpai, enough with the talk of meat. It’s making me even hungrier.”

“But what are even more delicious are the ground mice lookalikes…”

Chapter 11 END

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