After a soft thud in the closed bathroom, Ichijō Mirai opened the game pod.
After lazily rinsing his body and drying his hair with a hair dryer, he stepped down the stairs in the afterglow of midday and greeted Ishida Eiko with, "Good afternoon."
There were people in the dessert store at lunchtime.
It was a young woman sitting by the window, her face hanging low, her long brown hair hanging down like silk, almost to the ground, blocking most of her face, revealing only the tip of her pale nose, which was a little translucent under the sunlight, and appeared to be a little light red.
In front of the long-haired guest was a half-eaten triangular cherry dessert, red, emitting a tantalizing luster, and even the cherries on the spoon on the side of the plate seemed to shine in the sun.
But the guest's attention was on her cell phone, which she was slowly pressing the keypad, and unlike her hair, which was unadorned, there was a golden bell tied to her wrist by a red string, which she was gently shaking.
Ishida Eiko poked her head out of the kitchen, "Mirai?"
She was a little surprised that Ichijō Mirai would come down for dinner at the right time, but immediately responded, "You're just in time, the meal that was packed separately for you is still hot, so you don't need to heat it up in the microwave, you can eat it right away."
"Come on, come on."
"Do you have any ramen? Something spicy in a red broth," Ichijō Mirai didn't pay much attention to the customer who ate dessert instead of the main course for lunch, and only glanced at it to make sure it wasn't an enemy out of habit, then withdrew his eyes, "something red."
He was hungry.
After seeing the large amount of red color splattered in his field of vision .
...What a strange appetite, but Ichijō Mirai decided to satisfy himself.
"Ramen?" Ishida Eiko was stunned, and subconsciously looked to Mr. Ishida, "I remember a ramen place not far away,"
"There's a ramen shop not far away," Mr. Ishida immediately stood up and answered, "I'll go get it,"
"Do you have any dietary restrictions?"
Ichijō Mirai thought for a moment.
He thought that the ramen restaurant that the evil-minded Morofushi-san had found probably wasn't a common ramen restaurant in Japan, and didn't know much about what would be put in Japanese style ramen, but he knew one thing, "No special requests."
"Most of the food in Japan is probably taboo for me, if you really think about it... but I can eat it all, so I don't have any special requests."
"Thank you, Uncle."
When you're asking for a favor, you have to be sweet.
Mr. Ishida probably didn't think so. He was like an agent who saw the Elemental Devourer wagging its tail. He silently took a few steps back before hurriedly walking out of the kitchen and around the counter. "Okay, okay, ten minutes!"
He walked out of the dessert store in a hurry, not stopping to look at the customer by the window.
The customer at the window didn't look up either.
She kept her head down, her eyes fixed on the screen of her cell phone, her white fingers slowly pressing the buttons one after another to reply to Mouri Ran's message.
But from the moment Ichijō Mirai came downstairs, all she could get out of the phone was garbled code.
The phone buzzed silently, vibrating on the desktop as it moved from side to side, and a new message popped up: [Today's sun is so big and warm that it feels like a fire when it shines on my palms, and I feel like I'm a fluffy bun being baked ^^]
[Cute Sonoko, are you eating lunch? Can you hold out your hand and feel the sunshine? Even though we're not together, it feels like we're together when we're exposed to the same sunlight.]
It's a text from Mouri Ran.
Mouri Ran's tone of voice was like that of a 3 or 4 year old child, intimate, lively and childish, describing the feeling of the sun and coaxing Suzuki Sonoko to try it out.
Suzuki Sonoko knows what the sun feels like today.
It's warm, and it's...tense.
She still didn't look up, but kept her head down, her cheeks, which hadn't seen the light of day for two or three hours, flushed with a reddish hue, but her eyes were incredibly bright.
The dessert store was quiet, and every now and then Ichijō Mirai's or Ishida Eiko's voice came through, indistinctly, as if through a pane of glass.
Suzuki Sonoko was happy.
Instead of deleting the gibberish, she pressed the keys carefully and replied to Mouri Ran, saying that the sun was really warm.
The message was in three parts.
The first part was a reply to Mouri Ran's question 'What does lunch taste like?' Suzuki Sonoko praised the red cherries seriously.
The second part is garbled.
The third part was an answer to the sunshine.
At the end, she adds a rusty: [Today was fun].
After a moment's hesitation, she copied Mouri Ran's cute face text and put it at the end.
After replying to the message, Suzuki Sonoko still didn't look up, and underneath her long, silky hair, her ears quietly perked up as she listened to Ichijō Mirai's not-so-vibrant, but incredibly life-like voice.
She gave a small smile.
Her cell phone buzzed, and Suzuki Sonoko looked down, blinking slowly as she read the message: Mouri Ran had realized she wasn't home.
But instead of asking anxiously like the bodyguards, or beating around the bush to find out where she was, he asked about the taste and texture of the cake, curious about whether it was a solid, sandy sweetness or a fluffy, cotton-like sweetness, and curious about whether Suzuki Sonoko was happy because she had eaten her favorite cake.
At the end, I asked Suzuki Sonoko if she was at the sweet store near Mouri's house, but I didn't have a question.
Talking about one's own feelings about the world and asking the person concerned how they feel about the world is one of the therapeutic methods for people with mental illnesses.
The words "the world is beautiful" or "the water is cool" are more emotionally stimulating than "the world is beautiful", and they are more likely to touch the person in the turtle's shell without moving.
Suzuki Sonoko moved.
She answered Mouri Ran's question seriously: [No.]
It's not because I ate my favorite dessert that I'm happy.
[It's because she met someone.]
A person who died before her eyes.
Someone who had let warm blood splash against her skin, beads of it cascading down her eyelashes and blending with her tears, who for a moment reminded her of a passionate embrace in the speed of a motorcycle, and who had died with a sense of determination.
Mouri Ran hadn't replied.
She must have been on her way to the sweet store and didn't know how to reply.
Suzuki Sonoko took the initiative to add a note: [Fox.]
This is an animal that Suzuki Sonoko must not hear or see since she was kidnapped as a child, rescued by a police officer, and suffered from a severe stress disorder after witnessing the death of the police officer.
Everyone had made a point of avoiding the subject in front of Suzuki Sonoko, but now she was bringing it up.
It took a moment for Mouri Ran to reply.
She carefully organized her vocabulary: [Does Sonoko still feel guilty? In fact, in that case, the police officer wasn't guilty of...].
Suzuki Sonoko didn't read the rest of the sentence.
She rustily adjusted her seating position from sitting upright, tentatively to tilting her chin and moving her body a little closer to the interior of the dessert store.
Just a little bit.
The warm sunlight came in, warming Suzuki Sonoko's cheeks like brilliant gold, and the feeling of fresh blood splashing on her face made her wince a little, but after a few flicks of her ears, she pursed her lips, pressed her hand to her chest, and felt her heart beating, and her thoughts flew around a little bit like dust in the sun.
Alive, healthy, pampered, saying 'la' in a lively tone of voice...
'Fox'.
Still alive.
Happy.
The glimpse of Ichijō Mirai that she had just caught in Suzuki Sonoko's racing thoughts combined to form a sunny, cheerful smile.
She felt her rapidly beating heart with the roots of her palm, her green eyes were like the surface of a sparkling lake, and the golden scales of the sunlight that came from her happiness were silently biting into the overly intense joyfulness that was too much for her.
It's great that no one died because of their weak, defiant selves.
^^
^^
Ichijō Mirai is lying down.
Ichijō Mirai stood up.
The road was clear in the middle of the afternoon, the sun wasn't too hot, and the traffic wasn't too heavy, with the occasional car skidding by.
On the side of the road, Ichijō Mirai opened his eyes, and his first movement was a toss of his head, as if a hairy animal had just stretched out in the water and was slowly coming ashore, and his first movement was to shiver and shake off the water droplets.
His fingers moved in an inertial motion, causing the bright red goshogi to bounce in mid-air.
The small golden bell on the knot of the goshogi's cord made a soft sound, overlapping with some ethereal, very soft sound that caught Ichijō Mirai's ear.
He was stunned, and subconsciously listened for a few seconds, hearing the sound of a car traveling down the street, and reacted with a sense of hindsight, "Was that... the kind of song I heard when I was taking my medication?"
It's a pleasant, ethereal sound, but Ichijō Mirai had just finished collapsing himself, so it was a little hard to hear such a gentle, nursery rhyme like lulling a child into a deep sleep.
Because it's so light.
It's so light that it's like applauding when someone shoots themselves in the face, which is a bit of a turn-off.
Ichijō Mirai, who got off the line for a ramen noodle dinner so quickly after the blood was spilled, wasn't quite as hateful.
However, he could surmise the amount of hatred that would silently pour out of him after he happily finished himself off only to realize that 'someone is happily applauding even more than he is'.
[Uh,] the system is ambivalent, [is it?]
It avoids the question, advising Ichijō Mirai, [Do you seem to be deliberately teasing the hostages? I'd rather not...]
"I'm trying to do my job," Ichijō Mirai says with a straight face, "How can I appease her if I don't know her personality and reactions?"
But it's a bit of a cat-and-mouse thing to do, isn't it?
"Now I know how to deal with the timid one. She likes the police, or the Japanese police."
It's a bit of a misnomer.
But the child is still young, and when she grows up, she'll probably realize just how much the Japanese police of this world are a black eye to criminals who don't worry about their personal problems.
Ichijō Mirai dialed Onidzuka Hachizo's phone and said, "Hey, instructor, are there any police officers in Shibuya-ku right now? Or in Katsushika-ku, or if not, transfer, forget it."
"It's too much trouble to connect," he changed his tone, "Don't bother, I'll borrow a uniform from one of the officers on my way, I'm in a hurry, you don't have to talk, don't bother to call, bye."
He hung up the phone, cruelly leaving Onidzuka Hachizo unable to utter a full syllable the entire time.
Onidzuka Hachizo:"..."
System: [...]
[You,] it probes hesitantly, inquiring tentatively, [aren't you going to call your classmates?]
And you're going alone?
Ichijō Mirai put away his omamori and accepted the gift of nature, picking up an unoccupied car on the street and driving towards the factory.
As he drove, he frowned, "It's far, tsk."
Then answered the system, "No call."
"Now for the second time," He said flatly, "I don't think I'm going to be able to appease her to blue bar percent the second time around."
[?]
The system is surprised.
Surprise #1: Huh, Ichijō Mirai doesn't think he'll be able to pacify Suzuki Sonoko the second time around?
A rare lack of confidence.
Even when it comes to his marksmanship, Ichijō Mirai has the nerve to blame the enemy for not coming forward, for the bullets not tracking automatically, for the enemy having a partner, for the weather that day and the winds being too strong.
Even a passing dog is at fault when he fails to hit an enemy.
But now, he said frankly that he couldn't pacify the hostage for the second time.
It's a bit suspicious: it's just one meeting, Suzuki Sonoko's blue bar is under 20, and the difficulty of calming her down hasn't even shown yet, so how can Ichijō Mirai be sure that she must be very difficult to deal with?
Surprise #2: Hundred, hundred percent?
...the second time it's really not a hundred percent.
Ten more times might be a bit much.
"You're going to pop the question mark in my face," Ichijō Mirai said, a bit impatiently, "question mark, question mark, I'm not good at calming people,"
He's always been good at telling lies with his eyes open, but he can't tell lies about things that don't exist, "My pacifying skills are worse than my marksmanship, if the mission is to pull hate values, I don't even need to read the file function to get the job done, but pacifying people..."
It's too hard, isn't it?
"It's the third kid we've met that's a little special, and haven't you realized from my handling of the first two that I'm really bad at calming people, much less kids?"
"My approach to children has always been one of equal communication."
Ichijō Mirai, having been a child, and having been able to understand when he was five or six years old, was able to communicate with children of five or six years old as if they were grown-ups, as if they were rational beings who understood what they were doing, and as if they were equals.
It worked.
Personally, he thought it worked well, at least from the point of view of his relationship with Conan, it did work well.
But for children under 5 or 6 years old, and children with special circumstances, who were more ignorant than normal children due to illness, it was a bit of a handicap.
And I'm a little bit numb about the skill that all the kids are lighting up, "Making a fuss".
"But this child is good, not unreasonable," Ichijō Mirai seriously reflecting on themselves, "I actually thought that if she is unreasonable, too abrasive, then I backfile three or four times, after saving up enough impatience, waste a time to save the archive directly to kill her to get rid of the anger to come..."
Killing people is not a good thing. Killing a lot of people is an admirable thing, but touching a child is something so unethical that even criminals are a bit displeased.
For the player, of course, it's not bad enough, it's something you can really do if you're in the right mood.
It's just something that can be done, and even players don't want to do it if they don't have to.
...Excluding players who are extraordinarily idle and those who have a bad sense of humor.
Luckily Suzuki Sonoko seems to be a good kid, although she doesn't say a word and her blue bar is on the verge of collapsing, she keeps her basic logic online and gives all kinds of positive and negative feedback, not the kind of kid who just cries with tears in her eyes and cries if she doesn't listen or doesn't listen, she just cries.
Ichijō Mirai was relieved.
So relieved that he was even more determined than usual to pick up nature's gifts when he sped past a police officer, backed up quickly, and dragged him into the car without saying a word to get his uniform and equipment.
By the time he arrived at the factory, he was already a human police officer.
Of course, Mr. Police Officer and Mr. Crazy Man have different ways of approaching the hostages. While Mr. Crazy Man can go in with a bang and scare children badly, Mr. Police Officer has to sneak into the factory and meet with the hostages silently.
The snails cautiously touch each other with their antennae.
This time, the humanoid Ichijō Mirai didn't alert any of the robbers, and like a brave man knocking on Rapunzel's back with a witch on his back, he knocked on the window on the fifth floor.
Inside the window, Suzuki Sonoko, who had plenty of blue stripes, turned her head and subconsciously shook her body like a frightened fluffy tits.
"Hi, good afternoon," Ichijō Mirai smiled at her, "Ms. Hostage, I'm a Japanese Police."
He held up the freshly minted Inuo officer's ID without changing his expression, and thoughtfully blocked the photo of the officer's badge with his thumb.
Suzuki Sonoko was stunned.
She looked at Ichijō Mirai, who poked his head out of the window, peeking out first his black hair and then his red eyes, and his eyes blinked a few times, rounding up, "...F-"
"Fox?!"