Here's my little gift for Valentine's Day+1 (yeah, it's an important day too !). I hope you'll enjoy it.
4- Level 3 : The Canteen
Konata raised the crystal above her head.
"Now we just have to find the entry to the next level," she said with a broad smile.
"Kona-chan, look! Your armor seems to cover you better now," Tsukasa suddenly noticed. "Your shield is bigger, too!"
Konata checked for herself and seemed to grow even happier.
"You know what this means? We've leveled up again! Tatatata tata tatata!"
And, humming the Victory Fanfare, she marched out of the gymnasium. Her three friends followed her, rummaging respectively in their spell books, bags and bullet-belts to find the new tools they now had.
"The evening is already drawing in," Miyuki said resignedly.
"I hope our parents won't worry." Kagami sighed.
"Maybe they won't notice anything?" Tsukasa suggested shyly. "I mean, It's not really our world, so maybe the time doesn't work the same way."
"Maybe..." Kagami repeated, not really convinced.
Thanks to the growing darkness, it didn't take Konata long to notice a red glow, similar to the one of the crystal's. It was emanating from the door leading to the canteen, in the back of the main building. Again, she just had to press the crystal against the seal of light to make it disappear.
"Ladies, allow me to present to you the third level!" the otaku announced, entering the building.
"I hope it will be the last," Kagami said gloomily. "I don't find that funny anymo..."
The girl broke off, her mouth round of surprise. One of the wall of the dining hall's entry was entirely covered with mathematical formulas, gleaming with a soft blue light.
"What the heck is that?" Konata asked, horror-stricken.
"Mathematical formulas... They look like equations to solve. It should even be possible in one's head," Miyuki thought aloud.
"But.. but why would we do such a thing?" Konata cried out with indignation, as if Miyuki had just suggested something indecent.
"Izumi-san, haven't you noticed that those formulas have exactly the same glow as the lock and the key of the changing room?" Miyuki explained patiently. "It is most certainly a necessary step in our progress."
"You're right, it should be a riddle!"
Kagami's eyes suddenly began to shine with excitement. She put her gun on the floor and sat quite naturally in the middle of the corridor.
"What a shame, I left all my things in the classroom. We will need something to write with," she regretted.
Miyuki settled down beside her. Searching in her pockets, she finally pulled out a pencil.
"It should be enough," she estimated. "Watch, the formulas have been made difficult with square roots, logarithms and more, but the solution of each equation appears to be a rounded number!"
"Hmm, so we would get a sequence of rounded numbers, like... a code? And maybe we could convert it in letters?"
"I am sure it will work! Let's try!"
Konata and Tsukasa exchanged glances, feeling as though the were the most useless people on earth, at the moment.
"Maybe we should explore the zone first, before rushing on to solve a riddle that could turn out to be invalid, " Konata suggested.
But Miyuki and Kagami were too engrossed on their calculations to pay attention to her speech.
"Come on, Tsukasa. Let's go have a look around," the blue-haired girl decided, a bit hurt.
"Are you sure, Kona-chan? Isn't it too dangerous to just go for the two of us?"
"No worries! The tank and the healer are the soul of a party! Everyone else is secondary."
And so, leaving the "secondary" characters to their calculations, the two girls headed for the main room. As expected, several monsters were roaming aimlessly amongst the tables. Their appearance made Tsukasa freeze in horror.
"Oh my gosh, it's disgusting!" she exclaimed.
Konata inspected them with curiosity.
"You're right, they look like golems of... of food! Yucky, eh?" she said with a radiant smile. "But it's pretty normal in a canteen, don't you think?"
The little Warrior was aiming for the door which was leading to the rest of the building, where all the classrooms were. But to reach it, they would have to get rid of one of those golems.
"Are you ready, Tsukasa?" she questioned, drawing her sword.
"Huh? What? Now? Here?"
Considering her answer more than sufficient, Konata launched at the monsters.
"Protect!" Tsukasa shouted, suddenly remembering this important spell.
A blue bubble closed around Konata, strengthening her defense. And without further ado, she thrust her sword in the heap of entangled noodles forming the monster's chest. And the creature seemed to take it very badly.
"Aha, I told you it couldn't work with japanese!"
"Ahem."
"It was a good idea to try with romaji. Luckily it was in english and not in another obscure language."
"AHEM."
Coming back from their exploration, Konata and Tsukasa finally managed to catch their friends' attention. They were kneeling on the ground, surrounded by a sea of numbers and letters they had scribbled down straight on the tiles. Miyuki turned around.
"We have almost deciphered the enigma, we just have to transla... My Goodness, what happened to you, Izumi-san?"
"Did you splash around in a bowl of ramen, Konata?" Kagami added mockingly, seeing the unsavoury look of her friend, covered with crumbs of food.
"OK, I have two bad news," Konata said, irritated, the sword thrown on her shoulder. "Well... one of them is good news for you, I guess. First, the door leading to the classes is locked, and I don't think we can open it like we did until now, with a crystal, a key, or whatever... Secondly.... we can't fight without you two, or it lasts way too long."
Tsukasa let herself slip to the ground.
"I need to get back my magic points," she said breathlessly. "Kona-chan isn't really gifted when it comes to evading the hits."
Konata sat to take a rest, as well, but it didn't prevent her from protesting vigorously. Nothing could be more insulting than being considered "not really gifted" by Tsukasa.
"Konata, please, go back to the restroom and clean yourself," Kagami asked. "This smell of old leftovers isn't very pleasant."
Having her dignity greatly offended by part of an audience that wasn't paying attention to her in the first place, Konata stood on the few scraps left of her pride and went back into the playground.
When the girl came back, she was welcomed by Miyuki's and Kagami's triumphant smiles. They had just finished translating the riddle!
"I'm warning you, it is a bit odd," Miyuki said before beginning to read aloud.
"The item you seek is well hidden,
behind a deadly, livid keeper.
Through you'll be allowed to be
and nothing will hamper your progress
if, with your very hands prepared,
a chocolate cake you offer."
Miyuki released a small cough, embarassed.
"A chocolate cake?" Konata echoed skeptically. "What's with this phoney riddle? Maybe the translation wasn't very accurate?"
"Hey, I'll have you know that I have A's in English, so I'm pretty sure that's what the riddle said," Kagami argued, indignant.
"And what is the item we're looking for?" Tsukasa asked. "The exit?"
Kagami and Miyuki shrugged as one. They had just translated the text, they hadn't invented it.
"Are you sure you didn't get it completly wrong?" Konata asked, narrowing her eyes in an accusing look.
"Feel free to search for another meaning, if you can do any better," Kagami said dryly, offering her the pencil.
Konata stepped back abruptly, as if one had put a snake under her nose.
"No, no, it's all right. I trust you," she said with eagerness. "Maybe we'll get the meaning of this if we explore the dining hall in a bit more detail?"
And so, they got ready to fight. In the hall, there were only three golems remaining. More energetic than ever, Konata was leaping over chairs and tables, finding that obstacles were making fights much more interesting. Kagami couldn't agree with that, after being nearly hit square in the face by a stool thrown on a monster with too much enthusiasm.
Once the creatures were killed and the students freed, reassured and escorted outside where they were left to their fate (after all, who ever cared about how the NPC saved in a dungeon make their way out safe and sound, and often... faster than the heroes), the girls searched through the dining hall, hoping for an exit, or even another enigma. But they found nothing.
"We must go to the other side," Konata finally said, pointing at the stands where the students were usually served.
They climbed over the counters and arrived in the wide kitchen. Here again, they had to clean the room of the monsters before being able to explore in detail. There were only two doors in the room. The first was the one of the cold room, and a quick glance was enough to notice there was nothing of value within.
Konata placed her hand on the handle of the second door, turned it, and opened it. Behind was standing a huge panther with two heads, chained. Planted on its strong legs, it welcomed the blue-haired girl with a deafening roar. In terror, Konata slammed the door and leaned against it, facing her friends.
"I... I think I get why the chocolate cake has to step in now," she said, her voice shaking a little.
White as a sheet, the other three nodded nervously, their eyes widened by the sight of the guardian's sharp fangs.
"You mean we have to start cooking? Now? Here?" Kagami asked, finding it wasn't really in line with their previous adventures.
"Don't worry Kagamin, I know you're hopeless in the kitchen. Miyuki-san and you can just help us gathering the ingredients and the utensils, then you can rest. Or look for another riddle if you want. Tsukasa and me will handle everything else. Won't we, Tsukasa? Tsukasa?"
Crouched, the girl was paralyzed, hands clenched on her ears and eyes tighly shut. Her lips were moving very fast on a silent mantra.
"Tsukasa!" Both Konata and Kagami shouted.
"Is... is it gone?" She asked weakly, squeezing one eye open.
"We can't say that, Tsukasa-san, but if we don't leave the kitchen, we will be safe," Miyuki comforted, offering her a helping hand.
"Yeah, just have to make a cake to soften it up, you know, nothing unusual," Kagami added negligently.
And so, it was done. Tsukasa and Konata pooled their memory to create a recipe. Miyuki and Kagami rummaged in the cupboards to bring them saucepans, baking tins, flour, eggs and everything they rendered useful to prepare a chocolate cake. When the cooks began to make the batter, they sent away their clumsy friends to search for another occupation.
Which they didn't find.
Sitting afar, her chin in the hand, Miyuki was watching their friends bustling about in front of the worktop. In a cloud of flour and batter's splashs, Tsukasa and Konata were talking joyfully, sharing the work.
"Tsukasa-san and Izumi-san get along very well, don't they?" she commented, short of conversational topics, leaning toward Kagami.
"Ah... yeah...yeah, of course!" The other girl answered with a strange feeling of awkwardness.
Miyuki smiled at her, bowing her head on the side. Feeling that something was bothering Kagami, she was expecting her friend to open her heart to her about it. But she didn't, and the twin-pigtailed girl retreated into a thoughtful silence, letting Miyuki alone with her boredom.
"It's ready to go in the oven!" Tsukasa finally anounced.
"While waiting, we might as well make something to eat. It's getting late and I'm starving," Konata added.
A bit more than one hour later, finally full and in possession of the "Ultimate Chocolate Cake Softener of Cats" as Konata was calling it, the girls were ready to meet the keeper.
Holding the cake with the two hands, the Warrior nodded to Kagami, who opened the door. The chained animal roared, and its two mouths stretched toward Konata. The girl threw them the pastry and stepped back cautiously. The heads caught it and gobbled it up in the twinkling of an eye. Within a moment, while the panther was licking its chops, nothing happened.
And suddenly, its two pairs of eyes turned from red to green and it started shaking. The quivers increased while its size was slowly shrinking. Shrinking to the size of a small cat, which ran away through the legs of the girls, astounded.
"Well done!" Konata congratulated. "That was great teamwork!"
What the guardian was protecting wasn't more than a small patch of corridor overlooking doors. The first one was leading to a small room which could be a restroom for the canteen's staff, the second door, allowing to reach the rest of the bulding, was locked. So they hadn't any other choice than looking in the restroom.
"Could you come and see that, please? I think I have found what we're here for," Miyuki called, waving a roll of parchment she had just found on a small table. It wasn't really well hidden.
Her three friends settled down around her when she was unrolling the sheet. Silence took over while they were trying to understand what they had under the eye.
"It looks like the sports field...."
"But what is this thing on it? It looks like a flying machine."
"Would it be the blueprint for a machine? Look, there's a list of elements drawn on the side, like... you know, the assemblage's plan of some furnitures."
"And there's a monster drawn beside each element..."
"OK, I'll summarize," Konata finally said. "We have to kill monsters on the sports field. With the elements they will give us, we'll build this flying machine which will take us... I have no idea where, we will have to keep our eyes open. I would bet on the roof of the building. But we will see tomorrow, it should be really late now."
Whith sighs of resignation, her friends agreed with the next day's schedule. But now, a good night of rest was necessary. Tsukasa who already went far beyond her usual bedtime, was dozing on her feet.
Conveniently stacked in a corner, several futons and blankets seemed to have been left here just for them. So, without more hesitation, the girls pushed away the table and the chairs to settle down for the night. Kagami had to put herself to bed her sister who had fallen asleep in the blankets.
When she finally laid down too, it was with a sigh of relief. However, even if her body was exhausted, her mind was way too excited to let her fall asleep easily. The memories of the day were madly swirling in her head. Who knows? She thought. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up in my bed?
By her side, someone else was too overexcited to sleep. Laying on her back, arms crossed behind her head, Konata was thinking about today's past events, as well. One in particular. When she was closing her eyes, she could hear again Kagami's voice shouting her name with fear, while she had found herself defenseless in front of an agressive bird. "Konata! Konata! Hang on!". This memory was making her heart beat faster.
She heard Kagami sighing and moving next to her. Her friend was obviously no more asleep than herself.
"Say, Kagami..." she started with a hushed voice. "Have you had at least some fun since we began this journey?"
Kagami turned around to face Konata, surprised at the concern. She smiled, she might as well face the facts.
"I must confess that resolving this enigma with Miyuki was fun. And everything we've done, those fights... it was entertaining, it's true," she admitted, moving closer to Konata so that their whispers wouldn't wake up the others.
"That's great! I could make this kind of wish again if you'd like!"
Kagami laughed softly.
"Oh, no, next you're offered a wish, please don't include us in it. And above all, if you have a second chance, don't waste it like this one, ask for something useful."
"Something useful? Like what?"
The conversation was taking an interesting turn. Konata's curiosity was cut to the quick. A playful smile appeared on her lips. She stretched her hand toward Kagami and met a lock of silky hair that she grabbed.
"What would you have asked for, Kagami? Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!"
The blue-haired girl emphasized each of her words with a light tug, implying clearly that she wouldn't stop before having an answer.
"Shhh, stop it " Kagami protested in a breath. "There's a lot of important stuff I'd have think about. Like having a job I like, world peace, or finding..."
The girl stopped, embarassed. What was it that she was going so far as to confiding from Konata?
"Finding what? Finding what? Finding what?" Konata asked, more and more interested, starting again to pull on the lock of hairs she hadn't let go of.
"Finding... finding my soulmate, owning a pretty house, a big family, those kind of things," Kagami ended in a nearly inaudible whisper.
In the darkness, Konata smiled tenderly at the aspirations of her tsundere, so serious and so normal. And above all, she didn't fail to notice the wording of her sentence. She didn't specify a boyfriend or a husband. Just a soulmate. It wasn't much, but it was enough to raise her hopes even by a little bit.
"Go ahead, you can make fun of me now," Kagami grumbled.
"I won't, Kagamin," Konata whispered lovingly. "But you sure know how to waste a wish. All the things you said you wanted, you will get them, it's obvious. It's entirely up to you. And a little bit of luck. But I... I've offered us all a wonderful adventure that we could never have lived otherwise!"
Kagami didn't answer. She was way too flustered. Konata's unusual seriousness, the kindness in her last words and the trust implied, everything added to a less conscious perception of the proximity of their two bodies, of Konata's breath which was tickling her arm intermittently.... was rocking her in a completly new well-being. She opened her mouth to talk, but didn't know what to say.
Feeling this sudden vulnerability, Konata thought it was now or never. She got up on her elbow and leaned closer to her friend.
"Listen Kagami, there's something I..." she began.
But without knowing it, she had just crossed the limits to what Kagami could unconsciously accept. As if a veil was ripped, the girl felt with acuteness Konata's position above her, the odd tone of her voice and she panicked.
"Stop it, don't fool around like this," She broke out abruptly, moving back. "You know I don't like this kind of jokes. In the darkness, I can't see your face and I don't know what you're plotting."
Being rejected before even being able to say a word hurt Konata more than she could have ever thought. As if a defensive reflex was triggered, her voice became immediatly provoking.
"In the darkness? So Kagami would rather do it with the light on?" She said huskily in a thoughtless, tactless comeback.
That, though, was exactly what must have been avoided. Adding such a connotation to a situation which was already quite ambiguous shattered the apparent composure Kagami had managed to keep. She violently pushed Konata back.
"It's always the same with you!" she hissed furiously. "You always have to spoil everything with your nonsenses!"
And wrapping angrily in her blanket, Kagami turned her back on the little otaku and crawled closer to Tsukasa, whose peaceful breathing alone could have calmed down a whole army of gremlins.
Konata allowed herself to fall on the back and hit her forhead with her fist. Damn it, couldn't she shut her big mouth before crossing the boundaries? Her approach was going well so far, too, but now... she had to start all over again. Kagami was right, she had spoiled everything.
Though, suddenly, her eyes widened. Wait a minute.... spoiled what exactly? What did she mean?
The half point of this story is reached ! 4 chapters done, and 4 more to come (but the last ones are longer ;) )
Next to come : Level 4 : The Sports Field ... and maybe more !