Chris pulled the freshly ground coffee from behind the counter. Kamuro Masumi watched him deftly pour several unlabeled liquids into a cleaning spray bottle and couldn't help herself:
"What are you doing? Making a bioweapon?"
"More or less."
Chris tightened the cap and gave the bottle a casual shake.
"We don't have any Black Sphere weapons, so a straight fight is off the table. But we don't need to actually fight to the death — we just need to stall long enough for the upperclassmen to get here."
He held up the spray bottle.
"Working with what's on hand. Bleach and degreaser mixed together makes a decent tear-gas spray. Coffee grounds and cinnamon powder wrapped up tight" — he patted the little packet on the counter — "become a flash-blind grenade. If anything gets close, throw it straight at their face."
Kamuro Masumi stared at him for a moment, something close to genuine admiration crossing her face.
"You're actually incredible... the fact that you can think of all this right now. Is there anything I can do to help?"
Chris glanced up, caught sight of Shiina Hiyori and Amikura Mako making their way back from the entrance, and shook his head.
"Resources are limited. I've done what I can. Spinning your wheels won't help — save your energy for running later."
Kamuro Masumi considered that for a beat, then nodded. "Fair point. You're right."
Shiina Hiyori came over and quietly reported:
"Chris-kun, the front door is shut. I wedged a mop through the handle to brace it — I didn't seal it completely though. Is that alright?"
"That's perfect."
Chris gave her a genuine smile of approval.
"If we completely blocked it and something happened to come in through the café's back door, we'd be trapped with no way out. Always leave yourself an escape route."
"Ugh, don't say things like that!"
Kamuro Masumi reached over and gave him a light swat on the shoulder.
"Why would you put that image in our heads?! Don't go full Sakayanagi Arisu on us and jinx everything!"
Shiina Hiyori blinked and glanced curiously at Kamuro.
Amikura Mako did the same — though where Shiina's curiosity was quiet and contained, Amikura's was a little more upfront. Whether to cut through the suffocating tension in the air, or simply because she couldn't help it, she spoke up:
"I know you two don't seem all that close on the surface... but you and Sakayanagi-san are actually pretty good friends, aren't you, Kamuro-san?"
Something flickered across Kamuro Masumi's face — the ghost of memories she would have preferred to keep buried. Her mouth twitched. She pivoted immediately.
"...Anyway, now that we've got everything set up, let's go check out the emergency exit."
Amikura Mako hadn't seen that coming, but she was perceptive enough not to push it.
She glanced toward the corridor leading to the stockroom, and a new worry surfaced.
"I wonder about the central air conditioning flow in here... If the powder drifts back through the vents, we could knock ourselves out before anything else even shows up."
"I checked that, actually."
Shiina Hiyori pointed up at the ventilation grate overhead.
"The airflow here is pretty balanced — it uses a wall-hugging air curtain design, with the return intake pulling inward. As long as we stay away from the specific return zones, we shouldn't catch any blowback."
Amikura Mako let out a quiet breath of relief and left it there.
Chris distributed the improvised powder packets to the three girls.
"Alright. Let's move."
He rose and took the lead, guiding the group toward the emergency exit tucked deep in the café's back storage area.
As they moved, Chris kept his expression tight, his gaze sweeping the shadows with deliberate, measured wariness — a look sharp enough that the girls behind him found their own hearts clenching, palms going damp.
Of course, it was all an act.
He'd arranged every corner of this himself. He knew exactly where everything was.
That said...
He kept up the performance while his thoughts drifted inward.
The combo I set up for this run — The Silence plus the Ghoul — the difficulty really is something else.
Oh well. Horikita Manabu and Nagumo Miyabi combined with Ayanokoji... a little extra weight on the bar never hurt anyone. How else are you going to push them to their limits?
——
While Chris's thoughts were still wandering.
Outside the café's front entrance.
Click.
The door handle turned — a small, quiet sound.
Nagumo Miyabi looked at the closed doors and the tightly drawn curtains, then glanced sidelong at the red dot on the screen of the Black Sphere weapon held by the Class C student beside him.
"Interesting."
"The green dot and the red dot are almost on top of each other. These unlucky civilians who got left behind — they actually moved toward the creature? Bold of them."
Horikita Manabu didn't dignify that with a response. He drew his blade and sliced through the door lock in a single clean stroke.
"When you don't know the enemy's location or capabilities, choosing a defensible position and identifying alternate escape routes is standard tactical thinking."
"Our priority right now is reaching them before any casualties occur."
Nagumo took the rebuke with zero offense, just a lazy eye-roll.
Then he turned, a half-smile pulling at his mouth, and addressed the figure who had been quietly trailing in the middle of the group the whole time.
"You catch that, Ayanokoji-kun? President Horikita is very worried about you guys."
"Guess the spotlight's on you now, first-year. Let's see what you've got."
"Do well enough... and I have a feeling President Horikita wouldn't mind bringing someone with your kind of talent into the student council."
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka was sharp enough to catch the pointed weight Nagumo had placed on the word Horikita.
His brow ticked up, almost imperceptibly. His gaze shifted to Horikita Manabu.
Horikita Manabu neither confirmed nor denied it. He simply pushed the door open and walked in.
Ayanokoji didn't take the bait or probe further. He followed the group into the café without a word.
The moment he stepped inside, he noticed it.
The main floor looked undisturbed at a glance — but along the only path leading to the stockroom, the espresso machine and counter showed clear signs of having been moved.
He said nothing. He kept walking.
It was only when the faint, mingled scent of coffee grounds and cinnamon lingering in the air reached him that Ayanokoji unconsciously slowed his pace.
Horikita Manabu, walking nearby, caught it — and something like approval surfaced briefly in his eyes.
"Your instincts are sharp."
"No wonder you've survived crashing these exams as many times as you have. Stay close and watch yourself."
He checked the radar again.
"According to the Black Sphere scanner, the nearest target is at the end of this corridor. Should be just the one."
Ayanokoji gave a small nod and quietly fell back a half-step, settling into the shadow at Horikita Manabu's flank.
For some reason he couldn't pin down, something about the way Nagumo Miyabi kept looking at him felt off.
There was a quality to it — unreadable, measuring, laced with something that read almost like interest.
He couldn't find anything in his memory that matched it cleanly. So he simply looked away. Out of sight, out of mind.
That small, deliberate avoidance — far from cooling Nagumo's attention — had exactly the opposite effect. The curiosity that had been fading reignited on the spot.
That look... now that's interesting.
The low, droning hum of the central air conditioning filled the silence as the group pressed forward through the storage room, moving single-file down the narrow service corridor.
At last, they emerged into the rear logistics hallway — the one marked as the emergency exit route.
What greeted them was not the bloodbath they'd half-expected. No screaming students in frenzied retreat.
Instead —
Chris and Kamuro Masumi stood with their backs to the doorway, holding a length of coarse rope they'd found somewhere, methodically hog-tying something sprawled on the floor.
That something...
...was a slender, humanoid figure in a black suit, completely unconscious.
"That's..."
Horikita Manabu's footsteps faltered.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's expression went still.
Like a lock deep in his mind being undone — like a latent memory that had lain dormant surfacing all at once, jolted awake by a trigger he hadn't anticipated.
I remember now.
Ayanokoji Kiyotaka's pupils contracted.
That missing Molotov cocktail. That blank, missing stretch of memory.
____
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