Hachiman had been essentially done with his food, so he decides to take advantage of the rest of lunch break to go looking for Kamiki the Younger. In light of recent complications to his life, it might be in his best interests to take Kamiki the Elder up on his offer to look at the other items in his grandfather's collection, in case they can provide some explanation for the God of Repulsion's presence. Unfortunately, Hachiman doesn't actually know how to get in touch with him.
Therefore, he'll have to go through Kamiki the Younger. Hachiman remembers that she's from Class 2-B, so he goes to their homeroom, followed by the floating woman, where the room's front door is open. When he pokes his head through, a group of guys sitting around the desks next to the door notice him, and one of them asks Hachiman if he's there for someone.
"Is Miki Kamiki in this class?" Hachiman queries, though he's confident.
"Oh," the guy says. "Yeah, gimmie a second."
He gets up and goes over to Kamiki the Younger, who's with her friends, a trio of other girls, deeper into the formation of desks. He talks to her, though Hachiman can't hear them over everyone else's chatter; still, the other boy jabs his thumb at Hachiman over his shoulder, and when Kamiki the Younger follows it, she spots Hachiman and her face lights up with recognition. She gets up, and both she and the boy return to the classroom's front, the boy to his buddies and Kamiki the Younger to humor Hachiman. Her own three friends watch on with rapt curiosity.
"Hikigaya," Kamiki the Younger greets. It's a bit of a relief that she remembers his name. "If it's about your paycheck for the other day, Kamon asked Yukinoshita to get it to you at your club. He's always on top of that sort of thing."
Hachiman still feels a little self-conscious about the invisible, green woman suspended in midair to one side of him that no one else knows about, but he pushes his discomfort aside. "Good to know, but that's not it." Hachiman had forgotten all about getting paid, actually. "He said he'd let me look at your grandpa's collection of old time-y stuff, but I left before I could get his number."
"Oh!" Kamiki the Younger perks up. "Right, he'd mentioned that." She smiles at Hachiman, appreciative, and it throws him off. "You know, he's tried to get into that scene before, since he wanted to honor the old man's memory. But it's just not really his thing." She shakes her head. "He says he doesn't get all that archeology and history stuff at all, so he's pretty happy to have found someone who might be able to make a bit of sense of it for him."
"No pressure or anything," Hachiman deadpans.
Kamiki the Younger startles, and then hurries to wave him off. "What? No, no! It's just a nice bonus for him, if you do know anything about it. On its own, it's already good if someone can just get a kick out of grandpa's collection."
Hachiman doesn't know what to say to that. He rubs the back of his neck and looks away. "Right."
"Let me just grab Kamon's number for you," Kamiki the Younger tells Hachiman, before an awkward pause can brew between them.
She scurries off to her desk where, as she scribbles the number down onto the page of a notebook and tears that piece of the paper off, her friends begin to get excited and, probably, tease her. But Kamiki the Younger seems to shut them down quickly, with what Hachiman can only assume to be something along the lines of, It's my cousin's number.
She comes back and hands Hachiman the paper, which he tucks into his pants pocket. He thanks her, and soon enough, he's on his way again.
Exit, pursued by an invisible, floating woman.
XXX
Hachiman gets back to his class close to the end of the break, so there's a wave of other students also returning. A small cluster of boys passes him by just at the doorway, and one of them claps Hachiman on the back in camaraderie as he goes.
"Hey, man, good job back there," he whispers, conspiratorial and grinning, to an extremely startled Hachiman. The other boy nods discreetly to Miura, who's sitting at her desk, messing with her phone. "Someone had to knock the queen bitch down a peg eventually."
Hachiman can only stare at the other guy in shock, like a deer facing down a car, as the pack of boys move on to their own desks. Hachiman, though, stops dead in his tracks, still processing.
Amazing, he thinks, bordering on hysterical. I have an in with the misogynists.
It hadn't even occurred to him how other people would understand his exchange with Miura. He'd only wanted to get her to back off of Yuigahama, and he doesn't regret sticking up for his own sense of general rightness. But for a random bystander, that entire mess wouldn't be about Yuigahama anymore at all, would it? It's about the spectacle. The schadenfreude.
I yearn for true gender equality, Hachiman croaks internally, pained.
Floating to one side of him, the woman scowls. "I really hate how difficult humans insist on making it for themselves to understand one another."
"Amen," Hachiman mutters under his breath, almost more of an exhale than a sound. The woman still perks up, so he presumes that she was able to hear him regardless. Whatever the case, class will be starting soon, so Hachiman forces himself to go back to his desk.
Even at the end of the school day, though, as Hachiman is headed for the Service Club's room in the dying sunlight, his brief encounter with the other boy is still bothering him. The woman had flown off to parts unknown after lunch, so Hachiman hadn't had much to distract him.
That is, Hachiman doesn't have much to distract him until he's approaching the clubroom's door, and he notices Yukinoshita and Yuigahama are both crowded against it. They're peeking into the room beyond through its built-in windows.
"What are you doing?" Hachiman asks.
They both jump.
"Would you not sneak up on us like that?" Yukinoshita snaps.
Hachiman looks away, irritated. "Fine," he grumps. "Sorry." More to the point: "What are you doing?"
Yukinoshita and Yuigahama exchange an uncertain glance. Then, Yuigahama tells Hachiman, "There's someone suspicious in the clubroom."
And just when Hachiman had thought his day couldn't get stupider.
XXX
Yukinoshita does deliver Hachiman his pay from that weekend before they all part ways for the day, so that's something, at least. Yuigahama reacts with shocked betrayal to the revelation that Hachiman and Yukinoshita had gone off to do club stuff without her, but then Yukinoshita points out that Yuigahama had never registered as a member, and the two of them go off to get the paperwork done.
After ditching them, Hachiman gets home before Komachi, as is the usual. He'd bought lancets on his way home, but he's not really brave enough to try them out yet. Hachiman changes out of his uniform, checks to make sure that Kamakura has enough food and water, and then gets started on making dinner. He's in the middle of chopping up green onions when the woman floats into his house through the wall, and then into the kitchen to watch the green onion chopping process from over Hachiman's shoulder.
"I'll leave your serving in the fridge," Hachiman tells her. "Komachi won't notice. So long as her snacks are still in there, she doesn't even look at anything else."
The woman considers him. Then, she says, "Thanks." Another beat, and she also says, "If you want to see real results, you'll have to exercise regularly."
Hachiman pauses in his onion chopping to make a face at her. "You want me to work out."
"There are only so many hours in the day, so for today, forty-five minutes should be enough," she reasons.
Hachiman huffs. "Fine. But I have to get dinner ready first, or Komachi will whine." He grimaces, recalling something else. "Actually, wait. There's a book I have to read for my club. It's probably going to eat up my whole night, already."
"A book," the woman repeats, with a note of contemplative suspicion. She flies over to the couch, where Hachiman's school bag is, and reaches for it. Hachiman expects her to just rummage around in his bag unannounced, but she stops with her hand hovering about the bag and looks to Hachiman. "Do you mind?"
He's surprised enough that he glances away and says, "Go ahead."
She does, retrieving the clipped together stack of papers that Hachiman had so generously termed a book. The woman holds the papers up with one hand and uses the other to flip through them.
She immediately scowls. Hachiman snorts.
"What does your club do?" the woman asks.
"We fulfill requests." Hachiman gets back to dealing with the green onions. He's almost done with them, but he's only paying enough attention not to nick himself, so it's slower going. "Another student wanted us to read his light novel and give him feedback, since he's going to enter it into a competition. He was too scared to put it up online for review."
The woman's eyes snap from the pages up to Hachiman, sharply disapproving. "What does he expect you to do, then?"
Hachiman shakes his head. "I kinda know Zaimokuza, and he's not the type who'd actually want us to ooh and aah about a book we didn't like. He just doesn't want to get trolls."
"Trolls," the woman echoes, frowning.
"It's like…" Hachiman is done with the green onions. He puts the knife down. "People online who will make fun of stuff just for the sake of making fun of it. You know, to be jerks."
The woman's countenance darkens into a dedicated glower. "Right. Because, after all, a civilization that understands I don't like it as a personal attack is only providing this type of individual with ammunition. Of course."
"Some people really do mean I don't like it as a personal attack, though," Hachiman points out.
But the woman shakes her head. "If it isn't expressed in good faith, then it's just another kind of lie." She glares at the paper. "It's human nature to recoil from criticism, even if it was meant in good faith. It's also most humans' first instinct to prefer an expected, positive response from others over a genuine, negative response. But superficial interactions like that won't really make any of you happy."
Hachiman mulls this over.
"I guess," he supposes, eventually, "That kinda makes Zaimokuza less of a pain than a lot of other people I know, then."
"But he's a pain in other ways," the woman hazards.
Hachiman grins, crooked and off-putting. "That's an understatement."
"Hm." The woman regards Zaimokuza's book. "I'm going to read it too. I'll read it aloud, for now, so that you can multitask."
So that I can exercise for forty-five minutes, Hachiman translates, irritated.
Somehow, though, it doesn't sound so bad. And, well…
It's not like Hachiman doesn't want to see the God of Repulsion tear Zaimokuza's writing to shreds.
XXX
The Fifty-First God, who rules over Antimony and whose domain is Repulsion, is, predictably, utterly ruthless. She complains about craft errors and unfortunate implications in Zaimokuza's work that Hachiman hadn't even been aware could exist. She complains about everything from the characters to the world to the subtext, with the same dogged, determined scrutiny that she's leveled at everything else Hachiman's heard her rant about. Even with how harsh she is, it's an attention to detail that Hachiman, paradoxically, believes that Zaimokuza would've been flattered by, since Zaimokuza is so oddly earnest. Fascinated with the woman's dedication to the accurate dislike of even something so trivial, Hachiman finds himself taking notes, after he has his other responsibilities out of the way.
The woman does give credit where credit is due, which is the most surprising thing of all. For one, Hachiman isn't confident that Zaimokuza himself even realized that his light novel had subtext, of any sort. But as the woman had been with Hachiman when she hassled him into doing calisthenics, she seems to honestly want Zaimokuza to improve, if he's able to.
Who knows? Maybe he can.
Hachiman barely gets any sleep, but the woman, in occasional flashes of green, keeps it from catching up with him. She warns him, sternly, that he shouldn't rely too much on this function of her abilities, since his mental health will still demand that he rest regularly; but Hachiman actually likes to sleep, so he's not worried about it.
The next morning, he prepares for school with something of a spring to his step, which is highly unusual for Hachiman. Because he does love to sleep, after all, and he mostly hates his peers. But he has a fat stack of notes on Zaimokuza's book and a load of scathing opinions to his name, and Hachiman has always been eager to share his scathing opinions.
Komachi had left earlier, having made plans with her friends to check out a new bakery shop that opened on the way to her middle school, and when Hachiman makes it downstairs, he finds that she'd left the TV on. Komachi often just wants the TV for the background noise, so it's just playing the news, something or other about an unknown samaritan vigilante having smashed in all the windows of what's almost definitely a front for the local yakuza.
"Some people need better hobbies," Hachiman observes, as he hits the power button on the remote. He's already in his uniform, and his bag is over his shoulder, with his notes for Zaimokuza inside.
"Yes," agrees the woman, floating, cross-armed, and glaring at the now black TV screen flatly. There's an ambiguous quality to her tone that nags at Hachiman, but then Kamakura rubs up against his leg and meows, and Hachiman has more important matters to attend to.
Hachiman discards the remote onto the coffee table and leans down to pat Kamakura's little head. "What could you possibly want?" he questions his cat. "You're as spoiled as house cats get. You don't have problems."
"He's telling you he wants more water in his bowl," the woman informs Hachiman. "Komachi forgot to refill it before she went out."
Hachiman stares at the woman.
"What?" she snaps.
"There's no way," Hachiman says, flatly disbelieving. More emphatically: "There is no way you talk to cats. You knew that from inference."
The woman stares at him flatly right back. "This is your bridge too far?"
"If I could talk to Kamakura, I wouldn't have even wanted friends in middle school." In support of his point, Hachiman picks Kamakura up. Kamakura allows this.
The woman's shoulders lower a fraction, in concession of the point. She prompts, "Didn't you ever wonder how I could speak and understand your language?"
Oh, Hachiman thinks, suddenly incredibly discomforted. He's glad he's holding Kamakura. Yeah.
"You downloaded it from my brain?" Hachiman hazards.
The woman blinks at him, which is awful. "In a way, I suppose." Double awful! The woman reaches over to scratch behind Kamakura's ear. "I have senses that humans and other animals don't. Cats don't communicate like humans do, they don't exactly have a language per se, but I can get a general impression of their intentions."
Hachiman considers her, wary.
"And with humans?" he asks, reluctantly.
The woman retreats. Re-crosses her arms. "Animals perceive reality as they believe that it is, and there's a power in that faith. All of you perceiving the world together, it forms a sort of consensus. You could think of it as a kind of… mesh, maybe, that exists everywhere, over everything." The woman inclines her head to Hachiman. "As a god, I'm keyed into it. A god can always understand and be understood."
Hachiman is careful not to let his arms constrict too much around Kamakura.
"And that's why you can talk to cats," Hachiman concludes.
The woman nods. "That's right."
"That's…" Hachiman makes himself untense, just a bit. "Actually kinda cool."
The woman stares at him again. "That's what you're impressed with?"
"... Yes?"
The woman huffs, but for once, Hachiman doesn't get the sense that she's displeased.
Hachiman refills Kamakura's water.
XXX
The woman doesn't tag along with Hachiman to school, flying off elsewhere instead, but as Hachiman is parking his bicycle at the bike rack, Yuigahama joins him.
"Good morning, Hikki!" she greets, punctuated by Yuigahama swinging her backpack directly onto Hachiman's back. He yelps, but Yuigahama ignores it. "You're energetic today. Did something good happen?"
Hachiman squints at Yuigahama, who, to his knowledge, has no inexplicable, floating god to make up for an all-nighter. Instead of answering her, he accuses, "You didn't read Zaimokuza's book at all, did you?"
Yuigahama jumps, caught red-handed. "I, uh… um…"
Hachiman huffs, almost a laugh. He crouches down to lock up his bike. "I thought you wanted to be a member of the Service Club. You do know that means fulfilling requests, right?"
Yuigahama bristles. "He didn't say we had to read it in one night! I was going to read it over the weekend. I, uhhh…" She trails off again. "Totally…"
"You're not missing out on much," Hachiman admits, standing back up. He hefts his school bag from the bicycle's basket and onto his shoulder, and starts the walk to class.
Yuigahama falls into step with him, mollified. "That bad, huh?"
"Eh," Hachiman qualifies. "He's passionate about his story, I'll give him that. But passion doesn't necessarily make something good."
That seems to strike a contemplative cord with Yuigahama.
"I guess just trying hard on its own isn't really enough, is it?" she muses. "Well, you do have to try hard, either way. But if you're just not that talented…"
"I don't know if I'd call it a matter of talent. A matter of thought, maybe." Hachiman shrugs. They make it out of where the bike racks are, closer to the front of the school building. "If you don't want your effort to go to waste, you need to think about what you're putting it into, and what it makes sense to do to improve and see results. You have to understand the what and the why of the parts, for the whole to become more sophisticated. Some people are just better at that skill than others, like with anything." He smiles his unpleasant, off-putting smile, smug. "As for me, I don't want to put in any effort at all."
Yuigahama elbows him. "You always have to say one line too many, don't you, Hikki? Just for a second there, you almost sounded cool."
Hachiman disregards her. It isn't like there's anything that he, himself, is passionate about or wants to improve at, so in Hachiman's mind, none of this has anything to do with him.