Flag 1: Love Makes the World Go Round (II)

"K-Kazuma?"

"Yes, I'm Kazuma."

Hachiman Hikigaya had decided to drop by the clubroom to let the others know that he won't be able to attend the club activities today owing to the fact that Onizuka-sensei, who also happened to be their club advisor had mislead Hiratsuka-sensei, the guidance counselor, into dishing out a punishment which involved cleaning one of the practical classrooms of the Detective Q Initiative.

However, when he peeked inside the clubroom, he found none other than Satou Kazuma seated in one of the chairs meant for the clients who come here to have their problems sorted out and that made him reassess his priorities.

Sure, he would be the first to admit that he didn't have any problems with Kazuma and considered him a sort of friend, owing to the fact that he was rotten to the core and didn't believe in putting up false façade. With him, what you see is what you get, but what you get might not necessarily be what you want or socially acceptable for that matter.

But he was okay in his book.

However that didn't necessarily mean he was okay with him meeting his other acquaintances, especially the people in his club who all happened to be women. No, he was not a rapist or a molester, he was none of those things. He was something far worse. He was a staunch believer in gender equality and in his own words had confessed something to the extent of having no problem in dolling out drop kicks to a women right in the face if they decided to piss him off with their double standards.

But perhaps, he was over analyzing things a bit too much. After all the women in the clubroom were all nice, nothing to worry about on that front. Kazuma shouldn't have any problem with them. On second thought he should probably stick around and help him with his problems. Yes, that's what friends should do, he thought.

"Hikki, you know, Kazuma-san?"

"Yeah, I do."

Hachiman hoped Yuigahama wouldn't go into details. He really didn't want her to fish for information and ask for more details about how he knew him. He didn't feel like explaining their friendship, because it was one of those things that just happened which can't really be explained.

"Tea?" Chitanda asked.

"Um, sure." Hachiman said.

He found himself with a cup of steaming tea and before he knew it, he had already taken his seat by the long table, Tomoko Kuroki to his left, Yui Yuigahama to his right, followed by Eru Chitanda who had handed Satou Kazuma a plate of handmade biscuits.

"I got to say, I'm loving the customer service of this club!" Kazuma said taking a big bite of his biscuit. He chewed it and helped it down with some tea. Afterwards, he smacked his lips and went on. "This stuff is really delicious! Are you sure you guys aren't famous for your customer service, instead of whatever else kind of service you guys provide. I mean seriously, Chitanda-chan, you can make a killing selling these at some store. Do you have alcohol?"

"You drink alcohol with biscuits now, Kazuma?" Hachiman asked incredulously.

"I was just asking. Jeez, Hikigaya. What's up with you all of a sudden? It's like you don't want me here at the club. That's not true, is it?"

The bastard smiled when he said that. Of course that's exactly what it was. Kazuma knew it, Hachiman knew it. Except for his naïve and innocent club mates, everyone in the room knew it. And it looked like Kazuma was really enjoying this kind of nice and pleasant atmosphere which always permeated the clubroom, the smell of freshly brewed tea and handmade biscuits.

For a second, Hachiman wished the clubroom could return to those early days, when Yuigahama and him were the only members. He still had horrible flashbacks about her handmade cookies and the smell of burnt coffee, the sight of a dead flower by the window. Back in those days, they survived on stuff brought from vending machines.

He wished Kazuma could have come to their clubroom back then and not now when everything seemed oddly wholesome. Even Tomoko Kuroki, the silent, awkward, antisocial, perverted creep of a woman agreed with him on that, the service club had become an enjoyable place to hang out and talk about your life problems and find solutions to them at some point or another.

But Hachiman knew Kazuma and he felt like his life problems would be too much to deal with for a club like them which was focused more on achievable goals and firmly rooted in the real world which was beyond the scope of surreal imagination and flights of fancy.

"Hikki, how do you know, Kazuma-san?" Yuigahama asked.

As it would seem, Hachiman didn't have to answer the question. Kazuma spoke in his stead. "He was a part of the Isekai Rehabilitation Scheme back in our first year. We were really jealous of him when he first introduced himself. I mean, almost everyone in the class got run over by truck-kun and there he was, standing in front of us, saying he got into an accident with a freaking Aston Martin! Talk about emo elitist douchebag."

"I don't know Kazuma." Hachiman said with a smirk. "There was that one schmuck who was scared to death. He thought he was saving a girl from a speeding truck, when in fact it was a slow moving tractor. In fact, the girl didn't need saving in the first place. I also heard the guy pissed his pants, died of a heart attack and was isekai'd to a fantasy world where he was partnered with a Useless Goddess."

"Well at least, I was isekai'd. You were just stuck in a hospital for a month." Kazuma shouted, embarrassed.

Checkmate.

"Pfft, Hahaha! You pissed you pants! And were isekai'd because of a heart attack. Hahaha! That's so lame!"

"I take back what I said about the customer service of this club." Kazuma said. "You clearly don't know how to treat your customers, if one of your club mates does nothing but laugh at his miserable death. Hey! Why are you lot looking at her!? What's going on?!"

Satou Kazuma wouldn't get it and Hachiman Hikigaya wasn't in the right mood to explain to him what had happened just now. But the rest of the club mates knew and that was important. This wasn't a dream, he wasn't hearing things. This had really happened and Yuigahama and Chitanda were witness to that fact like he was: Tomoko Kuroki had spoken up in front of a client.

It was highly unusual for her and by unusual he meant this had never happened before. Tomoko Kuroki had social anxiety, something which she didn't like to discuss. The rest of the club mates had tried on multiple occasions to let her open up and talk about stuff, discuss about what happened around their club or what happened to her in life, but she would shut herself off and never answer, bottling everything up in her own psyche.

Over the month, Hachiman Hikigaya and Eikichi Onizuka had been able to get her to talk and even then it took a lot of effort, patience and the ability to sort through the craziness that was her mind, misinterpreting and misunderstanding the day to day situations of her life. But, they were making progress. Tomoko talked to Onizuka-sensei, because she had hots for the blonde teacher and she talked to Hachiman because she thought out of the other club mates, her roommate and the people she had in class, he was the only one who came close to understanding her.

But gradually she was making progress. Usually when a client comes to the service club room she would listen to their problems like the rest of them and sometimes she would say a word or two about it to Hachiman. When the client would leave and the rest of the club mates would go into more of an in-depth discussion about the problem, she would speak one or two sentences. Sometimes she would even talk to Chitanda and Yuigahama.

But this never happened before. Tomoko Kuroki had burst out laughing and started talking like a normal person. Well, not a normal person per se, but more of a jerk who had been a tad too honest with something unpleasant and laughed at a horrible situation like someone's death. Though, Hachiman had to admit, the bit about pissing his pants was indeed quite funny. But was it funny enough to erase all of Tomoko's social anxiety and awkwardness that came with making small talk, no it wasn't that funny. He was pretty sure nothing in life would be that hilarious.

"What are you guys staring at?" Tomoko said out loud. "C'mon you have to admit, it was funny. He pissed his pants!"

"I think the more important thing is I died!" Kazuma said, angrily "And should you really be making fun of other people when you look like that, you emo brat! I can think of two emo jokes on the top of my head while you are still busy laughing at me. That's it! You asked for it. Here's number one: How many Emo kids does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

"Screw! Hahaha!" Tomoko started laughing.

"That's not the joke, dammit!" Kazuma didn't know what to do. Hikigaya and his club mates weren't even looking at him "Okay, the answer is: None, 'coz they all sit in the dark and cry!"

No one laughed. Kazuma shook in his seat with uncontrollable rage. Even Hikigaya hadn't laughed at it. On second thought, he was an emo too, so maybe the joke had hit a bit too close to home. Well, screw it. The emo girl, what was her name again, Tomoko something, yeah, she was laughing. Laughing at the wrong bits mind you, but still laughing.

Now it was time to shock and awe.

Kazuma smirked evilly as he started to tell the next joke. "Why don't emo girls date emo boys?"

He paused for a minute. He also forgot that he was doing these jokes to get back at the emo brat because when she shined her emerald eyes on him, he looked way too happy for his own liking. But screw it, she was making him seem way more funny that he usually was. That should account for something, maybe the start of his popular phase again.

"Why?" Tomoko Kuroki asked, giggling.

Kazuma smirked. "'Coz they've already got a pussy."

Tomoko Kuroki burst into laughter and Kazuma smiled at her. Huh, perhaps he had misjudged her. From the looks of it, he had misjudged a lot of people in the room it seems. Eru Chitanda was blushing red, embarrassed and doing this sort of dance, where she didn't know whether to cover her ears or her mouth or close her eyes. Yuigahama, on the other hand looked the closest she could come to being livid and she was scowling down at him with her peach coloured eyes.

"Kazuma-san, look what you have done!" Yuigahama shouted.

"What? I only gave that woman some medicine. Some laughter medicine, that is. You have to admit, she looked sick when I first came in here."

Hachiman gave him a look. He then decided that he would deal with Tomoko Kuroki and her weirdness/turn to normality later. At first he needed to clear out Satou Kazuma from the clubroom.

"What do you want, Kazuma?" he asked.

Kazuma rubbed the back of his head. "Look, I heard about your club and what you guys do and thought I should come here with my problem."

"And what seems to be the problem?" Hachiman asked.

"Megumin has been acting strange." Kazuma explained. "I don't know how to explain it, but she has been acting really love-dovey with me and at first, I was kinda weirded out by all the attention she was suddenly giving me, but then I thought, why the hell not. I mean, I'm a great guy. I'm top shelf boyfriend material, don't you think."

"Of course."

"Was that sarcasm, Hikigaya?"

"Of course."

"Well screw you, Hikigaya. I thought it was the start of my popular phase. Megumin was really into me and she's a girl, so I was into her. We walked around, holding hands, we made our way down below the university bunker, she caused an explosion and tired herself out and I carried her back to her place on my back. It was, dare I say it, oddly romantic. This went on for a few days. We did other romantic things like going out for drinks."

"She's not old enough to drink."

"Like that has ever stopped me. Really Hikigaya, you say this like you don't know me."

"Sometimes I forget that you are scum. Please continue."

"Right, so we went out for drinks and I shouldn't say that we were drunk, but we had a few and it created a pleasant buzz in my head. Now at this point in the story, I should point out that I had no intention to do anything else. I mean, I had my fun. I had a good time. I wasn't thinking about spending the night with her at some cheap hotel."

"Good to know chivalry ain't dead." Tomoko Kuroki spoke up.

Hachiman tried not to act as shocked as he should be. Perhaps, this was the new normal. He had to get used to it, Tomoko speaking up and making communication with the clients. He only wished it had been someone other than Kazuma, because –

"I know right." Kazuma said. "Can you believe the outrageous prices of those rooms!? And they charge by the hour. Besides, it's not like I was planning to sleep with her that night. I mean, we were both drunk. And it would be my first time having sex with a real woman. I would want her to be in top form and being drunk would make for a lousy experience. For the time being all I wanted to do was just make out with her and fool around for a bit, maybe grope her a bit, here and there. You understand right, Hikigaya."

Yuigahama and Chitanda turned to Hikigaya in an instant and the two of them looked at him with the eyes of a woman who were walking down an empty deserted alleyway in the middle of the night and came face to face with a flasher with a torch light.

"Hikki is it true? Have you done this sort of thing!?" Yuigahama asked.

"Yes, senpai. I also want to know." Chitanda said.

The only short answer Hachiman could think of at that moment was to point at Kazuma and say. "I'm not like him."

Kazuma crossed his arms. "You wish you were like me."

Tomoko Kuroki clapped her hands to get their attention. "Can we please get back to the story he's telling. This seems a lot more interesting."

"Right." Kazuma faked a cough into his hand before continuing. "So, I did the chivalrous thing and brought her back to the women's dorm. We had fun, we had drinks and now it was time to say goodbye for the night. I know they say it's bad manners to kiss on the first date, but I always believed those are some old fashioned rules set down by our elders who are responsible for the declining birth rate of our great country, so I don't hold them to much esteem. Besides, I had paid for everything that night. She didn't spend a single yen out of her pocket. That's not very gender equal in my book, but I didn't say anything. I was saving it for this moment. I was gonna ask her for a kiss, and see how things moved on from there. If she was okay with taking things to the next level I was gonna invite her to my room, kick my roommates out and then say goodbye to my virginity."

"But that didn't happen, did it?" Hachiman asked.

"I hate how you do that." Kazuma said, annoyed. "How do you know?"

"Because you wouldn't be here otherwise, genius." Tomoko said.

"Well, you are right." Kazuma said, sounding disappointed. Then he smiled. "But you are also wrong. Megumin grabbed my collar and pulled me down for a kiss. It was a fantastic kiss, my first kiss." He had an almost Un-Kazuma-ish expression on his face. But then it was replaced by its usual, twisted, dejected look, when something didn't go according to his weird plans.

"Then what happened?" Hachiman asked.

"I don't know. I'm not sure." Kazuma said. "There I was kissing her and the next thing I knew, something strange came out of her. It didn't have a form, but it definitely looked monstrous and strange. Then it became this large, bloated, white thing with a peculiar face, no maybe it was yellow with red features, I don't really remember. I was drunk, but not that drunk. That thing came out of her and shot out straight into space or at least reached as far as the sky above, where it got trapped into a big jar by a flying shinigami with a scythe."

Hachiman made a face, but said nothing. Yuigahama opened her mouth. "Um, are you sure this was not all a drunken dream you had afterwards, when you said, goodbye to Megumin-san."

"No, it was real. You have to believe me! But that's not even the strangest part. What happened next blew my mind." Kazuma said, fiercely. "You know, Megumin kissed me right. She pulled me down by the collar and planted one on my lips. It really happened. But then when I tried to kiss her again, she smacked me right in the face and blushed, spouting some nonsense about 'what the hell are you doing". I replied, "I'm kissing you, you daft woman!' and that's when she screamed and caused an explosion. I almost died! Again!"

"Perhaps, she didn't want to kiss you again?" Hachiman offered.

"Then, why didn't she tell me that!" Kazuma said, outraged. "Instead, she is now pretending that she doesn't remember what the hell happened that night. She doesn't remember our kiss, when she was the one who kissed me in the first place. I don't know what is going on with her. She is not acting lovey-dovey anymore. All the romantic things we were doing, poof, now they aren't happening anymore, her feeling for me, gone, vanished, like the thing which left her body and was captured by that flying woman in the sky with the scythe."

Something about this tale didn't make sense. It was the fact that it sounded more and more like the truth. Kazuma could lie about a number of things, but this wasn't one of them. "Are you still going along with her when she wants to cause an explosion?"

Kazuma nodded. "Every Thursday. But what does that have to do with anything?"

"Nothing."

"What do your friends think?" Chitanda asked. Then she looked, tentatively at both Hikigaya-senpai and Kuroki-san. "I mean, if you have friends, that is."

Kazuma didn't take offense. She was a proper host and she had given him the biscuits and tea. Beside unlike the rest of them, she had been nothing but kind. So was Yuigahama, but she was the president, so it was more or less her job to be nice for the service club. But Chitanda didn't have to be. Still she was and that deserved an answer in his book.

"Darkness thinks it's some kind of neglect play and Aqua thinks she's possessed."

Hachiman thought it over and then sighed. He really didn't feel bad doing this. It was all for the best, after all. It was sometimes diabolical how things worked out accordingly to plan. He tried not to smirk when he made an apologetic face.

"I think your request is beyond the scope of our humble service club, Kazuma." Hachiman said. "I would suggest going to the Sket Dan or the SOS Brigade. They are more suitable and well equipped with handling this sort of supernatural problems."

Kazuma made a face. "But Suzumiya is a bitch."

Hachiman nodded. "Be that as it may, I can't think of anyway that we can help you." Then, without being too forceful or acting too happy, he grabbed him by both shoulders and almost singlehandedly dragged him to the exit.

Needless to say, Hachiman wanted Kazuma gone from the service club. Kazuma also understood that pretty much, because of which he couldn't help but throw a last passing remark at his friend. "I understand, I understand. My romantic problems must be too much for your virgin club. After all, you probably haven't ever been kissed in your life."

Hachiman decided to let him have that one. "You got that right."

"No, he got it all wrong."

"Huh?"

And before anyone could make sense of the situation and understand what the hell was going on, Hachiman felt a sharp tug and he realized he was being yanked down by the collar of his shirt. Rotten dead fish eyes didn't even have a chance to blink before they saw the half lidded jade green eyes of the shorter woman.

Tomoko Kuroki's lips brushed against his and he pried open her mouth with his tongue, something he did out of instinct rather than thought. Was this really happening, had Tomoko kissed him and was he kissing her back. Before he knew it, his ears picked up the sharp reaction of the others. Some gasped, some were calling their names with a worried tone and then all of it was replaced by something close to shock and amazement.

While kissing Tomoko, he had closed his eyes, but upon opening them, he saw it, the same thing Kazuma described. It was coming out of Tomoko, having no corporal form, just a strange monstrous thing, a large, bloated puff of smoke with somewhat peculiar features resembling those of a face.

But before he could really focus on it, the thing zoomed out off the window of the clubroom and shot off to the sky, vanishing from their sight.

"What the hell just happened?"

Tomoko Kuroki was confused. She didn't know why her lips felt swollen and why she was in the arms of Hachiman Hikigaya. The guy just looked at her real weird and then ran out of the clubroom saying he was late for some punishment.

What the people in the clubroom also didn't know was that thing which escaped Tomoko Kuroki's body was a loose soul. High in the sky, away from view of others down below, the loose soul was captured by a woman flying with a scythe.

She was excited and thrilled to have captured two souls in record time.

"I can't wait for it to be official." The woman said, excited and proud of her accomplishment. "I will even let the human shake my hand, if he wants."

A/N: Okay, now this is a big chapter (4000+ words.) Is everyone on board the Oregairu x TWGOK arc? Because if you want, I can go back to the normal one shot style of writing, with Hachiman interacting with a new woman in each chapter. Now, here are the options for the next chapter:

Option 1: Oregairu x The World God Only Knows Arc. (Continue)

Option 2: Infinite x Universal (One-Shots)

Option 3: Hachiman and Keima Katsuragi – Work Together.

Option 4: Hachiman Works with Haqua.

Option 5: Author's Choice (I decide the next chapter)

Please pick any of the above options or suggest something in the review.

Hope everyone enjoyed reading this chapter.

Leave lots and lots of reviews, follow and fave.

Won't betray your dreams.

Trivia: According to most Isekai protagonist, one day a conspicuous looking red button begging to be pressed appeared before them and after one of the members of their individual groups pressed the button, they found themselves hurled into this world line, enrolled in Neo Tokyo University as a part of the Isekai Rehabilitation Scheme.