Note: For anyone who doesn't know, they extended the deadline for voting on the SpaceBattles short story contest to December 1st. So, if anybody's already on there and feels like voting for IlPogitano's Legitimate Methods of Problem-Solving, it's at: https/forums./threads/official-25th-anniversary-short-story-contest-public-voting-now-open.1178400/

:)

XXX

When Hachiman gets to the clubroom after school that day, Yukinoshita is napping there, upright in her chair. She's so unfairly pretty that he forgets what she's like, in the brief moment between him walking into the room and Yukinoshita snapping awake. But then Yukinoshita does wake up, at which point she opens her big mouth.

Yuigahama and Zaimokuza arrive shortly, and so does the woman, who floats in through the wall. There's a terrifying second in which Hachiman remembers the woman's explanation of her invisibility, to do with what people do or don't expect to see, and he thinks, wildly: What does that mean for someone as delusional as Zaimokuza, then?

But Zaimokuza doesn't react, and Hachiman is sure that he would have, if he'd noticed anything to react to. In a way, it's kind of reassuring, that Zaimokuza apparently isn't as far gone as Hachiman sometimes worries.

On the other hand, if Zaimokuza really were that far gone, he might've had more of the right of it than any of them. Ah, well.

Hachiman, Yuigahama, and Zaimokuza all also pull out some of the chairs that are stacked up in the back of the unused classroom that serves as the Service Club's clubroom, and with each of them and Yukinoshita, they form a circle for discussion. The woman goes and sits on the windowsill, phased through the windowpane and with her back to them.

"Now then," Zaimokuza announces, arms crossed. "Let me hear your thoughts about my novel."

Yukinoshita frowns, her eyebrows pinched together. She's holding her copy of Zaimokuza's book, and she clearly took his request seriously, judging by the great quantity of colorful sticky tabs squished between the pages. "I apologize, but I don't understand this sort of thing very well."

"No matter," Zaimokuza assures her, buoyed by Yukinoshita's serious affect. He's actually smiling. Hachiman almost feels bad for him. "I wanted to hear the opinions of ordinary folk. Say whatever you need to."

If it was anyone else speaking, Hachiman probably wouldn't believe them. Even when most people say stuff like, I want your honest opinion, or, I want to know what you think, what they really mean is, tell me that you liked it, and furthermore, encourage me by telling me that it's really how you feel, whether or not it's true. But it's Zaimokuza, who if nothing else, will walk the walk. Even when walking the walk is really, really embarrassing. Especially then.

Over in her own seat, Yuigahama frantically flips through her copy of the book, desperately skimming it.

"Fine," Yukinoshita says, at length. She sighs. "It was quite terrible."

Zaimokuza jolts. Hachiman winces in sympathy.

"Reading it was actually painful," Yukinoshita admits, continuing. "It was unspeakably tedious."

Zaimokuza recoils as if shot. Despite that, strained, he prompts, "For my own reference, might I ask what part of it you found to be so terrible and tedious?"

"First…" Yukinoshita leafs to the relevant page. It's the first page. "The grammar is atrocious. Why use inverse word order? Do you not know how to use particles? Did you not learn any in grade school?"

Zaimokuza looks ready to die. Still, he answers Yukinoshita. "I used a style that would sound more familiar to readers…"

"Shouldn't you achieve a minimal mastery of Japanese before you attempt that?" presses Yukinoshita. "And the improper uses of…"

Yukinoshita goes on in this vein, breezing through a lightning round of some of Zaimokuza's most glaring inadequacies as a writer and shooting down his feeble justifications.

"Could you not force others to read a story that isn't complete?" she demands, eventually. With an incredulous laugh in her voice, she adds, "Get some common sense before attempting to show off literary talent."

By this point, Zaimokuza is on his hands and knees on the floor, like he'd just lost a life or death game of Yu-Gi-Oh. Hachiman gives Yukinoshita the stink-eye.

"His request was that we give him feedback, you know," Hachiman snaps. "Not that you call him names."

Yukinoshita meets his stink-eye with a cool, dispassionate glare. "If he wants to improve, he should be able to handle this much. I won't do him any favors by sugarcoating how bad his book was."

"No one is asking you to sugarcoat anything," Hachiman fires back. "But how is he supposed to improve if you don't even try to explain to him why his book was bad? You're just pointing and laughing. Medieval peasants at a bear baiting party can do that much."

And that's just it, isn't it? Yukinoshita had clearly put a lot of effort into taking Zaimokuza's book apart, but she doesn't believe for a second that he'll really take her criticism to heart, so she's not even trying.

(There is irony here that Hachiman fails to pick up on.)

Yuigahama, distressed, looks between Yukinoshita and Hachiman like she's watching a ping pong match. Yukinoshita raises a single, skeptical eyebrow at Hachiman.

She gestures for him to go on. "If you think you can do better, you're welcome to try."

Hachiman smirks, smug. "I'd be happy to."

"Hachiman…" Zaimokuza pleads, with a glimmer of hope, as Hachiman reaches into his school bag on the floor next to his chair. "You understand, right…?"

Hachiman retrieves his fat stack of notes and holds it up, smiling at Zaimokuza winningly. "So I couldn't figure out what specifically you were plagiarizing, but—"

Zaimokuza recoils as if shot.

"—Zaimokuza, you need to apologize to women." With a smack of paper on paper, Hachiman piles his notes onto Zaimokuza's clipped together novel, on his lap. "Why isn't the heroine our main character? She has way more of a reason to get involved with the plot than the protagonist, her backstory is more interesting and dramatic, and she has the stronger personality. But the narrative is so disinterested in what she's thinking or feeling unless it's about her growing attraction to the protagonist, that she somehow still comes off as more of an accessory to him than a character in her own right. I mean, how am I supposed to get invested in either of them like this? If it was up to me, I'd write him out wholesale. He hasn't done anything that another character didn't have more of a right to do, since none of it has really had anything to do with him. And if you really want the heroine to still get a boyfriend, and you want normal people to want to read about it, then you can't just expect your audience to want them to get together because they're a guy and a girl. If you can't even articulate what they find so interesting about each other, what could the reader possibly find interesting about them? As individuals, and as a couple?"

Zaimokuza and Yuigahama stare at him, slack jawed. Yukinoshita stares at Hachiman too, but only for a second, before hiding a mean little smile primly behind her hand.

"I didn't know you had it in you, Hikigaya," Yukinoshita allows, amused mostly at Zaimokuza's expense.

"I'm not done," Hachiman tells her. Zaimokuza flinches, but Hachiman ignores him. "This thing is weird about class stuff too. Setting aside the slavery subplot for a second, because every bargain bin light novel and its dog is doing that, you know the part where the little thief kid is going on about how he hates nobles because they live in total excess while his poor mother was left to die of a treatable illness, just because they couldn't afford to cure her? And how it hurt the heroine's feelings, because she's a noble?" Hachiman picks up his copy of the book and flips to the relevant page. He waves it around at Zaimokuza for emphasis. "And how the whole point of this scene was for the protagonist to defend the heroine, because some nobles aren't so bad, so it's really unfair for the thief kid to be so harsh with her? And somehow, the thief kid is the one who apologizes to her?" Hachiman waves the paper some more. "A woman is dead, Zaimokuza."

Yukinoshita bristles. She's a damn rich person, as Haruhi Fujioka would put it, so Hachiman had been confident she wouldn't have caught this bit, and he's thrilled to be proven right. Nevermind that if it weren't for the god of being a hater at his disposal, he wouldn't have caught it either.

Zaimokuza, though, blinks at Hachiman. "Oh." He sits back up, still on the floor, and crosses both his arms and legs. "Huh. Yeah, when you put it like that, it's a little…" Zaimokuza perks up. "What else is there?"

It's Yukinoshita's turn to give Hachiman the stink-eye.

Hachiman grins his awful grin, baring teeth, and thinks that when it comes to their bet, he can probably chalk this request up in his own favor.

XXX

Hachiman and Zaimokuza wind up walking part of the way home together. The woman floats along with them also, but Zaimokuza doesn't know about that, which is a blessing. His Eighth Grade Syndrome-er heart would never recover.

"If I'm not worried about how the heroine is going to get undressed," Zaimokuza babbles as they head down a street, as he had been doing since they'd left school, "That means I can give her cooler, more elaborate armor, right? Maybe something like Saber… but with big, spiky pauldrons!"

"Maybe don't talk about undressing your heroine so loudly in public," Hachiman mutters, conspicuously avoiding eye contact with a pair of older women ambling in the opposite direction to himself, Zaimokuza, and the floating woman. The two older women shoot concerned glances his and Zaimokuza's way, and Hachiman is sure they're going to start gossiping about young people these days as soon as they're out of earshot.

"But I'm talking about dressing her," Zaimokuza argues. "Eyes on the prize, Hachiman! Big, spiky pauldrons!" He lights up. "And her armor can have a cool name! Like Dragonking Armor, or something…!"

"Something more like Manifest Oath would obviously be cooler," says Hachiman, reflexively.

He doesn't expect Zaimokuza to even really have heard him, but Zaimokuza mulls it over. Then, oddly cheered, he says, "You know, when I asked you guys to take a look at my novel, I didn't even really think any of you would read it. But even if you didn't like it, the fact that you took enough of an interest to rip me apart like you did means you must have seen something in it, right?"

Hachiman startles. "What? No. I just…"

Just, what? Got caught up in the pace of an ancient, incredibly petty god of disgust? There's no way that Hachiman can tell Zaimokuza that.

So Hachiman tells him, lamely: "... I was just bored."

"You love being bored," Zaimokuza points out, and Hachiman clicks his teeth, because they both know it's true. He can't argue with it. "Listen, I really appreciate it. That's all I mean."

"Whatever makes you happy," Hachiman grumbles, giving up.

They approach an intersection, and Zaimokuza changes the subject again, back to his story itself.

"I know I told you before that the heroine would have the hammer of the gods,"—here, Zaimokuza strikes a stupid pose,—"Gungnir Hammer! But, what if all of the gods had weapons that they could give people? Then, I could have lots of characters have them, and they could all have cool names like that."

"Gungnir is a spear," the woman says out of nowhere, frowning.

Hachiman jolts, but only a little, discreetly. For her benefit, he repeats to Zaimokuza, "Gungnir is a spear."

"Oh, huh. It is?" Zaimokuza blinks at Hachiman. He shrugs. "Well, I guess that's fine, so long as someone else has a hammer. But if any given weapon is tied to one god, I have to pick out which one the heroine got hers from."

They get to the intersection, where the light is green for cars, so they stop. There isn't anyone else around. Without really looking at them, Hachiman watches the cars that whiz by, and in turn, Hachiman and Zaimokuza are watched by a murder of crows perched on the power lines overhead.

Hachiman doesn't really like how the crows are looking at him.

"A god of love would be kind of generic," Zaimokuza reasons. "A god of wrath, maybe? That could be cool. Giving the heroine a really scary god, I mean, that you wouldn't usually see with the protagonist."

"How about the god of hate?" Hachiman suggests, before he can think about it. He freezes, feeling the woman's stare boring holes into the back of his head.

Zaimokuza beams, which is even more distressing. "My brother in arms!" he exclaims. "I knew you had it in you!"

Hachiman quickly, desperately backtracks, eyes fixed anywhere but on Zaimokuza or the woman. Dryly, he tacks on, "She could have pigtails."

Zaimokuza either doesn't catch Hachiman's sarcasm, or he doesn't care. "The god of hate, with tsundere twintails! Yes, I can see it so clearly! And then the heroine can have a training arc where… and if I do that, she can have a love interest who has to… and if it's like that, then…"

The light turns red. Zaimokuza hurriedly checks both ends of the road, and then he takes off running to the other side, laughing like a madman.

"I have to get home to my computer!" he calls back over his shoulder. "Thanks, Hachiman! I'll bring my next draft to the Service Club when it's done!"

And then, he's gone. Hachiman gawks at the horizon for long enough that the light changes color again, and he has to wait for it once more. Hachiman scowls.

"Don't," he emphasizes to the woman, "Say anything. Please."

The woman looks at him down her nose. "I didn't." But then, she does. Without quite so much disapproval, she tells Hachiman, "You did well."

Hachiman doesn't have a response to that. With a knot in his gut, he waits for the light to shift to red.

XXX

Before he goes to bed, Hachiman gathers up his resolves, and, sitting at his desk with his phone in one hand and Kamiki the Elder's number in the other, he calls Kamiki the Elder. Kamiki the Elder picks up, but he doesn't say anything, which Hachiman supposes to be reasonable. He could've been a scammer, after all.

So Hachiman says, "This is Hikigaya."

"Oh!" Kamiki the Elder returns over the line. "Miki told me you might call. About Grandpa's collection, right?"

"Yeah."

Somehow, talking about it makes Hachiman nervous. The last he'd seen of the woman, she'd taken up in the living room, watching some documentary or other on the TV with the sound off and the subtitles on. Komachi went to bed early, so it shouldn't be a problem, and the fact that the woman isn't in the room with him factored into Hachiman's decision to call Kamiki the Elder; but still, Hachiman wouldn't be surprised if the woman could still hear him even from a good distance, and it puts Hachiman off. He isn't sure why.

Kamiki the Elder continues, "I'm free this weekend, if that works for you."

Hachiman grimaces. He doesn't really want to blow one of his days off on this, even if it's important.

"What about Friday evening?" he asks.

"I work pretty late, but I guess school runs pretty late too, huh?" Kamiki the Elder muses. "Yeah, that's fine, if you can be here around seven pm."

"That works," Hachiman tells him. He'll just sleep in on Saturday.

With that decided, Kamiki the Elder gives Hachiman his address, which Hachiman scribbles down onto a conveniently within reach notebook. Afterwards, Hachiman makes his damnably awkward excuses and ends the call.

Once he's hung up, Hachiman collapses back into his chair with a long, exhausted exhale.

"I'm going with you," the woman informs him, her eyes peeking up and out of the floor, through which the rest of her is phased.

Hachiman screams and falls out of his chair. Fortunately, Komachi sleeps like the dead, so she isn't alerted.

"Please don't do that!" Hachiman snaps.

"Sorry," says the woman. She floats up the remainder of the way, to hover above Hachiman's floorboards. "But if it's about objects that might belong to me or to one of the others, I'm going with you."

"Right." Hachiman sits up straight. "I guess. If any of it is genuine, it might really be your junk, huh?"

Museums would hate her, he thinks.

"If you're going to steal any of it back, I'd prefer it if you didn't do anything that could be traced back to me," he adds, suspiciously, in warning.

"Just who do you think I am, exactly?" she huffs. "And it wouldn't be stealing, in the first place, if it's something that already belongs to me."

"If the law recognized you, as an owner of property or just in general, we would have much bigger problems than theft charges," Hachiman reasons, flatly.

"The laws of humans are nothing to me." Which is horrifying! She crosses her arms. "But I'm not going to make unnecessary trouble for you. I really hate people who make a nuisance of themselves without fair cause."

"Well." Hachiman gets to his feet. "We have that in common, at least."

The woman doesn't say anything to that, but she doesn't leave, and Hachiman doesn't know what else he's supposed to tell her or do. He could probably just ask her to leave outright, bluntly, but it feels to him like a weird note to end the conversation on, somehow.

So, with that in mind, it is against his better judgment that Hachiman instead asks the woman, "What documentary were you watching, again?"

As it turns out, the God of Repulsion is the easiest for Hachiman to handle when they have some mutual topic to complain about together.

He's not that surprised.

XXX

Note: I've been bouncing around a Golden Kamuy one-shot that threw off my schedule, so while I get it out of my system, heads up that the next chapter might be up in three weeks instead of the usual two.