Once the shock does, in fact, begin to wear off, Hachiman is left to lie in bed wide awake for the whole night, catastrophizing. My life has entered its VS Imaginator phase, is a phrase he thinks some variation of repeatedly. He can only be positive that he hasn't been trapped in one of his acquaintance's, Zaimokuza's, horrid amateur light novels because the God of Repulsion is, A, physically quite a lot older than him, and, B, to the best of his knowledge, perpetually clothed.

What occupies Hachiman the most is, why hasn't she simply killed him? If all the woman needs him for is faith, like she'd said, he highly doubts that there's very much to stop her from killing him and going off to find someone who'd provide her with such more freely. She absolutely hasn't shared with him the full extent of her capabilities. Probably, she hasn't shared so much as a fraction with him.

So, the question stands: Why is Hachiman still alive? It's difficult for him to believe the woman to be particularly altruistic.

He finally manages to fall into a doze in the wee hours of the morning, but when he wakes up nowhere near yet to noon, he still feels awful. He tosses and turns for a while longer, roiling against the unfairness of a cruel, uncaring universe, before Komachi eventually wakes up also, at a much more normal hour. Their dad is overseas for work and their mom had, in this instance, gone with him, so it's just Hachiman, Komachi, and Kamakura for breakfast.

He doesn't mention anything about the inexplicable, green woman who popped out of a stone slab, and frankly, ever since he'd gotten up and the woman had still been off elsewhere, Hachiman had been making headway in convincing himself that he'd made the whole thing up. But still, his paranoia isn't so easy to shake.

Following breakfast, Hachiman boots up the PC in his room, and gets to pulling up what information he's able to on the Stoneworkers. It's only been little more than a year since he was in middle school, but with a new perspective, he might be able to find something he can use anyway.

Sadly, he finds nothing of special note. Not, at any rate, by the time that the woman appears at his shoulder and says, "Libraries are undervalued in this era."

Hachiman screams and falls out of his chair.

"Big Brother?!" Komachi calls up from downstairs, concerned.

"I'm fine!" Hachiman calls back, maybe a touch too quickly, from on his ass on the floor. "Just tripped, Komachi!"

"Well!" Komachi concludes. "Don't die!"

Easier said than done, Hachiman grumps, privately. He pulls himself back up to his feet with a hand on his desk. The woman is watching him, as impassively disapproving as she's been from the jump, so Hachiman stares her down right back as he mutters, "Give me a second."

Then, Hachiman speeds off out of his room. He locates Kamakura chilling out on the staircase rail, and when Hachiman picks Kamakura up, Kamakura allows it. Hachiman returns to his room with his cat, shuts the door behind them, and releases Kamakura onto his bed.

"There," Hachiman pronounces, sitting back down in his desk chair. He gestures to Kamakura, who kneads the sheets and then settles down to loaf. "Now, Komachi won't wonder why I'm talking to myself up here."

Because Hachiman, fortuitously, is the type of person who talks out loud to his cat. He wonders, vaguely, if Light Yagami's sister had ever wondered why he spent so long seemingly speaking with no one, up in his room. As far as Hachiman remembers, the Yagami family didn't have a cat, in the manga or in the anime.

The woman floats over to Kamakura, which makes Hachiman's stomach briefly seize with terror, but all she does is reach out her hand. Kamakura, obligingly, sniffs it. Then, she scratches Kamakura behind one ear. In her other hand, she has a rolled up sheet of paper, which she may or may not have stolen from a stationary store.

Hachiman blinks at the woman. "I thought no one could see you. And, hold on a minute—why can't anyone see you? You seemed surprised about that."

The woman doesn't look up from Kamakura. She sits down on the edge of Hachiman's bed and proceeds to pat Kamakura's little head. Kamakura tolerates this.

"I was, but in hindsight, it makes sense," the woman explains. "The humans of this age don't expect to see me."

Hachiman waves his forearm at her, the one with the tattoo on it. "And I'm the exception, huh? It doesn't matter what I expect. And Kamakura…"

"Cats aren't as bound by their preconceived notions of the world as humans are," the woman finishes, like this is very obvious and eminently true. For once, Hachiman agrees with her completely. But then, she changes the subject, abruptly. "You're in reasonable shape, from what I've seen of other teenagers in this time and place, but you don't exercise regularly."

Hachiman winces. "What's that got to do with you?"

"You won't really understand what I've offered you unless you put yourself in a position to better benefit from it, or unless you're unlucky." She levels a flatly unimpressed look at him. "And it would be a good way for me to get a better idea of what you're like. So long as you're alive, I am stuck with you, you know."

"Well, excuse me!" Hachiman snaps, but her words catch up with him, and it gives him pause. Hachiman regards the woman dubiously. "Wait. What are you talking about? What you offered me?"

The woman indicates to his conspicuously uninjured finger with her rolled up paper. Hachiman's throat becomes very dry.

Suspiciously, he hazards, "Transhumansim?" Is she going to replace his bones with guns?

"I suppose." She retrieves the paper back to her side. With her other hand, she's still giving Kamakura pats. "It would still be up to you to maintain a routine, a respectable work ethic, and a will to improve, but I can streamline the process for you. Better, more immediately obvious returns, and less pain on the way there. That sort of thing."

Hachiman shakes his head, nebulously disbelieving. So more like performance enhancing drugs, then.

He squints at the woman. "Are there side effects?"

The woman thinks it over. She concludes, "A longer life."

"Negative side effects," Hachiman corrects, annoyed.

The woman crosses her arms. "No. Not provided that you take proper care of your body and don't overdo it." Kamakura, now bereft of pats, gives her the stink-eye. "And on my end, I'm the god of Repulsion. Of rejection. Put another way, I'm the god of never settling for doing things by halves." She narrows her eyes at Hachiman down her nose, with an air of determined superiority about her. It nearly reminds him of Yukinoshita, except that the quality of it is different, more secure somehow. "Unless outside forces made it pressingly necessary, I wouldn't suggest a flawed procedure. I would work out the flaws, first."

Hachiman shakes his head again. It's still difficult to try to fit his brain around the concept that an ancient, all-powerful god would try to get him to, of all things, lead a healthier lifestyle. It seems very small, and very petty in the face of all the other things he might have imagined a reawakened dread-deity prioritizing.

But here Hachiman is.

He needles, "If you wanted me to be a more impressive high priest, couldn't you just…" Hachiman gestures ambiguously, all-encompassingly. He's playing with fire here, he knows, but he wouldn't be Hachiman Hikigaya if he restrained himself from mouthing off. "Make me more impressive? With your magic biology powers."

The woman glares at him in reprimand. "I'm not just going to reconstruct your entire physiology in one go. Such a dramatic transformation would definitely kill you."

Hachiman feels just chastised enough not to promptly interrogate why it is, actually, that she hasn't just killed him. But maybe he's being prejudiced. If he had all of Superman's powers, would he be a hero, or a villain?

… Well. Best not to ponder that, on second thought.

"And," the woman goes on, before he can recalibrate, "I told you, the whole point of this for me would be that I could see how you handle yourself. If you're not posed to put in effort, or if you're not posed to choose whether to put in effort, it's useless to me."

At least she's being up front about her intentions to put him in a petri dish, Hachiman qualifies. Most people he knows won't admit it plainly at gunpoint.

"So you want me to have a training arc," Hachiman complains, dry.

The woman stares at him, but that's fine. He doesn't need her to get any of his references.

In the end, he's enamored enough with the prospect of getting abs that he goes along with her, if only out of bile curiosity.

XXX

Komachi leaves to spend the midday with a friend, so she isn't there to question Hachiman's sudden bout of athletic fancy. His loungewear is practical enough to move around in, so he just has to put on his running shoes, and the woman directs him to the backyard. Kamakura follows him, which is at least a consolation, and the woman, unexpectedly, is considerate enough to grab a water bottle and a face towel for him. She deposits both of those on the porch deck, beside where Kamakura takes up post.

Hachiman has just enough time to start feeling a little stupid, when the woman, floating before him, holds up her sheet of paper and lets it unfurl. It contains a list of exercises, as well as how many repetitions each should warrant.

Hachiman's jaw drops.

"You're joking," he accuses.

"I'm very serious," the woman tells him flatly. "I really hate wasting time."

The number of exercises would be manageable, but it's the repetitions that Hachiman takes issue with, and the fact that he assumes she's going to want him to go more than one round of the whole list. Frankly, she's asking for the impossible.

"I can't do all of that," Hachiman argues, beginning to sweat already. "I'm in alright shape, sure, but I'm not an athlete. I might actually die."

"You're not going to die," is all the woman has to say for herself, like Hachiman is, somehow, the unreasonable one.

She's so obviously determined to stick to this route, he can't bring himself to maintain eye contact with her. Which is exactly how Ms. Hiratsuka and Yukinoshita keep dragging him into things, actually. But still, with less conviction, Hachiman maintains, "I don't even know what most of these exercises are."

"I'll show you."

With that, Hachiman slumps, defeated.

The woman's eyes widen by a fraction, and then narrow nearly to slits, but Hachiman doesn't have a guess as to what that's about. He doesn't have much of an opportunity to dwell on the matter either, because the woman starts him on the first exercise. Hachiman wonders if she'd read about calisthenics at the library, and more pressingly, whether she will let him stop before he passes out.

Except, bizarrely, that Hachiman doesn't pass out. By her proposed training regiment, clearly the woman's intention is to train him until he dies of exertion, but even as the sun above travels visibly across the blue of the late spring sky, Hachiman doesn't feel that way at all. For someone who already hates gym anyway, where not very much is really asked of him and his peers in the least, this is incredibly suspect.

There's a faintly dull, grounding ache building up in Hachiman's limbs, certainly, but he's not in true pain, and he doesn't feel unpleasantly heavy with fatigue. He's not exhausted. If anything, he feels increasingly better, compared to how tired he'd been when he'd woken up.

And the woman is a surprisingly patient teacher, even as her bad attitude and derisive disposition remain as they have been. She doesn't miss a beat or call special attention to it when Hachiman isn't immediately proficient or when his form isn't immediately correct, and when he does well, she tells him so. There's no fanfare or frills to her, but that's how Hachiman prefers for people to be, anyway. And she doesn't care that he complains, so long as he still does the exercises.

Who am I? Hachiman demands, privately, while doing his fifth set of jumping jacks. Subaru Natsuki?

His only clue as to what's really happening to him are the flashes of green light intermittently bisecting the air.

"That's enough," the woman, floating off to one side of Hachiman, tells him eventually, after she has him run through stretches, just as he's starting to get really suspicious. She gestures with her hand for him to stop.

Hachiman does. Experimentally, he interlocks his fingers and stretches both arms like that, palms out. He lets his arms drop. Has a drink from the water bottle, before putting the water bottle back down.

The sunlight is only just beginning to noticeably dip from its noontime peak. He's tired, but not overwhelmingly so, and sweaty, but again, not overwhelmingly so. He's not even particularly uncomfortable. And his brain is producing the happy, good work! chemicals, but Hachiman can't let himself be sidetracked by that.

The woman nods to him. "Well done."

He squints at her. "What was that?"

"Nothing you haven't seen me do."

"I've seen you fly, phase through walls, and heal," Hachiman recounts, irritated. "And just now, you definitely haven't just been flying."

"Healing," the woman echoes, irritated in kind, but also like she's testing out the syllables. She clarifies, "As a consequence of strenuous physical activity, your muscles tear themselves apart, and then come back together stronger. Ordinarily, you would need to let them rest for them to heal, which takes time." She holds up a hand. Flexes it into a fist, then unflexes it. "Ordinarily."

Hachiman swallows, unnerved. So not exactly performance enhancing drugs, then. "I've never had a gym teacher describe exercise that way."

"This world is more impressive and full of miracles than this era's people give it credit for," she informs him, bluntly. Like this is all very obvious. Her hand drops back to her side, and she scowls. "Than people have been giving it credit for for ages and ages, by the looks of it. But that's human nature for you."

Hachiman startles, a bit. "How can you just say stuff like that?"

She frowns at him. "Like what?"

"Like…" Hachiman rubs the back of his neck. "This world is this, human nature is that. Isn't that kind of broad?"

Not to mention, embarrassing. Hachiman would know. He used to make such sweeping statements in middle school, in the throes of his Eighth Grader Syndrome, and he still makes them in his head. But not aloud. Not anymore.

Except that Hachiman is much more inclined to make pessimistic sweeping statements about the world, rather than optimistic ones, of course.

But the woman stares at him blankly. She says, "I'm a god."

"Right," Hachiman croaks, letting his hand fall back down. Yes, how could he have forgotten? His life has taken a turn for the absurd. This woman is floating. "Yeah." Wanting to end the conversation, Hachiman turns and makes to go back inside. "Anyway, I've got some homework due tomorrow, so I'm just gonna…"

Not two steps, and his stomach growls.

"... Get lunch, and then do my homework." He's glad he's facing away from the woman, since he can feel himself turning red. But a thought occurs to Hachiman that distracts him, so he glances back at her over his shoulder, evaluating. "Do gods need to eat?"

The woman perks up. "By setting aside food for me, in effect, you'd be sacrificing it to me. So, essentially, yes, even if it's not generally as efficient as blood."

Hachiman huffs. He picks Kamakura up to bring inside with him.

He's not looking at the woman when he says, "Hope you like day-old leftovers."