Side: Kasumigaseki

For the past few days, the Bureau of Paranormal Countermeasures had been going about its usual business with no major trouble. If at all possible, they hoped today, too, would be a quiet one.

But what always shattered that peace of theirs was, without fail, a single phone call.

As the phone began to ring, one of the men picked it up, a look of distaste on his face that he kept out of his voice alone.

"…Understood. We'll dispatch personnel immediately."

When he hung up, his colleagues were holding their breath. They were prepared for any kind of report. They just wished, if possible, to be spared anything troublesome.

"A civilian student got into the ninth one. Apparently he's making a big fuss claiming he saw a new species of monkey."

"Come on, the place was locked, wasn't it?"

"He broke it open, that's what!"

The members of the Bureau immediately got on the line to the relevant divisions in each ministry. There was also a cover-up team dispatched whenever this sort of trouble cropped up. They made arrangements to rush those people to the scene at once.

"Is it the ones who fell into the dungeon before?!"

"No! A different student, they say! He'd heard the rumors about something interesting in the basement and tried to film a video, so he broke the lock with a crowbar at night and got in!"

The dungeon's entrance was supposed to have been sealed off, but they hadn't set up anything like the round-the-clock monitoring a private security company would run, where any anomaly would be caught the instant it happened.

Since the ninth dungeon sat within school grounds, building a private-security-grade monitoring setup wouldn't have been technically difficult—but some of the places where dungeons appeared had no electricity or running water to begin with, so they weren't in a position to set up a surveillance network across all of them.

On top of that, there was no legal basis for laying a surveillance network over private land, and with the politicians hesitating to commit, it had never come to pass.

So there were staff who grumbled that they should at least have set up a monitoring system for the ninth one—but saying that solved nothing.

"Little bastards!"

One of the men spat out a curse of a kind you'd never normally hear in a government office, and everyone pretended not to notice.

People wandered into off-limits places and stirred up trouble. It was a common enough thing, but for those in the position of cleaning up after it, it was more than they could bear.

A generation ago, maybe you could have used a knuckle sandwich to shut them up—but in this day and age, that was out of the question.

"It's my daughter's birthday today, you know."

Another man slumped his shoulders and got to work.

He had a daughter at home today, waiting eagerly for him to come back early. The thought that she'd be sad because he had to clean up after some students who couldn't even follow the rules welled up in him as anger and grief with nowhere to go.

If at all possible, he wanted the problem settled fast, before it got tangled. He was at the point where he couldn't get through the work without praying to every god and buddha there was.

Side: Amahashi Kakeru

When I got to school, the whole place was in an uproar over the dungeon.

From the entrance to the hallways, everyone was buzzing about the same thing.

"Hey, Amahashi!"

"Don't make a scene. You'll get dragged into it."

The moment I walked into the classroom, the thing Kitamura held up to me was an image and a video of what looked like a Lesser Goblin.

The place looked like the school basement. Some third-year upperclassman was making a huge fuss, claiming he'd snuck into the dungeon and pulled off filming a new species of monkey.

A Lesser Goblin, a monkey, huh. Well, if you tried to fit it into real-world terms, I guess that's how it'd come out. So compared to Kitamura and the others, who'd called it a creature, he'd taken it more realistically.

"Dragged into it…?"

"If they think you're a dangerous person, you might get watched. You want adults tailing you and bugging your place?"

The color drained from Kitamura's face right before my eyes.

"You—you didn't say anything to those upperclassmen, did you?"

"I didn't say a word to anybody. I mean, I don't even know the guy. And the teachers told us, didn't they—not to tell anyone until we know the details. I haven't even told my parents, 'cause I don't want to worry them. And on top of that, Horii-san's old man warned me about it when we met…"

He looked like a loose-lipped guy, but if he was that emphatic, then Kitamura was in the clear. Those upperclassmen had been going around saying the Lesser Goblin was a new species of monkey.

The basement was already the subject of rumors, but I didn't think the talk about the creature had gotten around. I didn't want to believe we'd be suspected, but…

"Amahashi-kun…"

Following Kitamura, Horii-san and Aizawa-san called out to me uneasily as well.

"You two didn't say anything to anyone, right?"

"No…"

"As if I would."

Good, the two of them were clean too. In that case…

"I haven't told anyone either. Horii-san, sorry, but could you get in touch with your dad right away and explain the situation? We might get suspected of leaking information. Depending on how this plays out, we'll need someone who can talk to the government or the school and negotiate."

"Yes, understood."

I wanted to believe it'd be fine. But if we ended up under surveillance, it'd be a hassle. Maybe I should let Noctia know by email too. I couldn't move from here, but they might send people to watch or investigate the house.

It seemed like a lot was going on behind the scenes, and it'd be a problem if they planted bugs or something. Having to watch what we said even at home would be hell.

Honestly, I didn't really want to drag them into it, but this was the time to ask the adults for help.

Horii-san's old man wouldn't want his daughter watched either. I figured he'd protect us too, while he was at it for her sake.

The last thing I wanted was for that man to get left a step behind.

Maybe because I'd stoked their anxiety a little, Kitamura and Aizawa-san looked uneasy—but when Horii-san came back looking calm, they seemed to relax a bit.

"My father says he'll act on it right away. If anyone asks us anything, we should just tell them the truth exactly as it is."

"Got it. It'll probably be fine. Probably."

Right after it happened, we'd have been under a lot more suspicion. But the fact that it had been more than a week by now was a small mercy, I supposed.

"Kitamura, so what happened to those upperclassmen?"

"Ah, they got called to the staff room, I think…"

"Did you hear how the filming went?"

"Not directly, no. But the way it's getting passed around as the upperclassmen's account is just that they were filming the basement when some weird monkey came out, screeched, and lunged at them. Apparently the upperclassmen just turned tail and ran back the way they came."

Same level as the idiots who upload flame-bait videos to the internet. And to think they go to the same school. They say let sleeping dogs lie. Nothing good comes of getting involved.

For one thing, the school has security equipment. Break in in the middle of the night and the security company would detect the anomaly and send someone out right away.

Did they not install any security equipment on the prefab hut blocking the dungeon entrance? Anyone who knows that kind of security gear should be able to spot it on sight. Those upperclassmen must've known exactly what they were doing.

Damn it—if I got put under surveillance over this, even beating the crap out of those upperclassmen wouldn't be enough to calm me down.