Hayama gets Hachiman home, extracts reassurance from Hachiman that he won't just drop dead, and then politely gets out of Hachiman's hair. He really is a considerate person.

Blessedly, Komachi isn't home yet, so Hachiman only has to hold himself together long enough to lock the door behind him, at which point he races to the bathroom and dry heaves into the toilet for a bit. He manages not to throw up.

Then, he checks Kamakura's food and water, practically on autopilot. That done, he settles heavily onto his desk chair, boots up his PC, and pulls up every local news site he can recall.

There's that string of vandalism incidents against yakuza offices, which is ongoing. Reports of some unidentified good Samaritan or other do-gooding around town, interfering with muggings, accidents, and the like. A boom in adoptions from the area's animal shelters, and a sharp decrease in strays on Chiba City's streets. A streak of miraculous recoveries from terminal illnesses and injuries at the nearby hospitals.

Hachiman squints at that last one. It can't be, can it? Except, and he scowls at this, it very well might be.

But it's not what he's looking for, and anyway, it doesn't matter. He's not going to question the woman about her solo outings again.

Giving up on the news sites in somewhat of a huff, Hachiman turns instead to personal blogs from his area. Initially, it seems useless, and he doesn't find anything.

I'm being stupid, he tries to convince himself. I probably just imagined it. Right?

And even if the woman's kind won't be invisible to him anymore in person, since Hachiman is eminently able to believe in and reluctantly accept the reality right in front of him, that doesn't mean they can be captured on camera.

He's about to give up, when he sees it.

An otherwise innocuous selfie, taken by some perfectly ordinary middle schoolers, in front of Kamiki the Elder's cafe. Behind them, that horrible, impossible spheroid, frozen for posterity in time.

Hachiman's eyes dart to the date. Only three days after he'd awoken the Fifty-First God.

Probably, after Kamiki the Elder had made his now-deleted post.

Hachiman doubles over in his chair, hand over his mouth, his guts seizing with terror. He thinks, almost a prayer—

What do I—?

And then, the woman is there, rocketing down into Hachiman's room through his ceiling, so fast that he can't even really make her out until she's come to an abrupt halt, just above the floor. In that instant, her legs are folded up under her like a reckless diver, her arms braced, her pigtails flared up with momentum.

There's that immense pressure again, like gravity, like a load of rocks. That weight. Hachiman can't breathe, and his computer screen freaks out. But then the woman straightens back out to her full height in the air, her face and posture thunderous, and the weight is gone.

She doesn't even have to look at the screen, now back to normal. Her eyes narrow to baleful slits.

"I see," she says, clipped. "I was right to follow Kamon around."

Hachiman, who had been startled nearly enough to fall out of his seat, blinks hugely at her. "You've been following Kamiki?"

"Yes."

"I thought you were avoiding me," Hachiman admits, as if from very far away.

The woman's eyebrows knit together. "I thought you might want space, but I wasn't avoiding you." She concedes, "I can see how it might have seemed that way, but it wasn't the point. I don't put problems off."

Hachiman slumps. Because she doesn't, does she? She's the god of being a hardass. He feels, suddenly, very small and very dumb.

"Right," Hachiman says, strained.

The woman regards him. "You should call in sick from school and stay home for the next few days."

Hachiman tenses. "What about Komachi?"

"She'll be fine so long as she stays away from that cafe." The woman crosses her arms and watches Hachiman down her nose. "There's nothing of interest to those… things … about her. Not like you."

Hachiman's fingers close over his forearm, over his uniform sleeve, over where the tattoo is.

"You don't know what that thing was?" he rasps.

"I can make some very educated guesses," the woman qualifies. She glowers, bearing teeth. "But its craftsmanship is shoddier than anything we would've ever tolerated."

Hachiman croaks, "I see." And, "What will you do?"

"First, I have the day's routine to run you through." She inclines her head to Hachiman, just slightly, and her expression darkens somehow. Still and in contrast, her eyes are a bright, inhuman blue. "Then, I'll find that drone, I'll find whoever built and released it, and I'll wring their intentions out of them."

Hachiman jolts. "You don't really expect me to fight, do you?"

"No," the woman confirms. "I expect you to stay out of it." However, as always, she doesn't let Hachiman get too comfortable. "But if my expectations aren't met, I owe it to you, at the absolute least, to prepare you for the future however I can."

That last part almost sounds like Ms. Hiratsuka, except that Ms. Hiratsuka tries against Hachiman's will to prepare him for a future wherein he'll have to socialize with others, rather than one in which he risks violent death by sci-fi spheroid.

Hachiman deflates.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

XXX

By the time Hachiman and the woman are out in the yard, Hachiman with the spear un-tube'd and the woman floating, cross-armed, before him, he's still unbearably jumpy, his nerves still unpleasantly taut. Hachiman doesn't feel brittle, exactly, but more like his skin is too tight for his organs. It's awful, and he worries it'll make him clumsy. He's sure he has a nasty headache brewing.

The woman, frowning at him, apparently has similar doubts to Hachiman. She extends an arm, holding out her hand palm down and out, in what Hachiman recognizes as an offer even before she speaks.

"If you can't relax, you won't achieve as much," she tells Hachiman, which he vaguely understands from sports anime to be true. "I can rebalance your chemicals."

By all rights, Hachiman should refuse and run for the hills. But the inside of his head really is an excruciating place to be, as of the moment, so with a tentatively embarrassed eagerness, he says, "My chemicals could do with some rebalancing."

The woman nods, and green light lances thin, perfect lines through the air around Hachiman's head. It's sort of like seeing stars, in a way, and hurts just for a fraction of a moment, like a shot of vaccine. But then, immediately, Hachiman's body is cooperating with him again, and he feels once more like a person.

He can't help the sigh of relief that escapes him.

"You'll still react to the same stressors in the same ways you usually would, so this is temporary," the woman warns him. "You have a broadly healthy brain, so I'm not inclined to meddle with its regular operations, even if you wanted me to."

As if in evidence, Hachiman can already feel himself start to stress about the implications of the woman's capacity to scramble the human mind. He waves her off. "I definitely don't want you to do that, so I appreciate it."

From there, there's no wasting time, which is how it always is with the woman anyway. While Hachiman had been putting on his running shoes, before going outside, she'd flown off and obtained four small, discrete piles of respectively soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls, and marbles, which stand like little pyramids behind her.

She points over her shoulder at the soccer balls. "I'm going to throw these at you. Defend with the spear."

"High stakes dodgeball, huh?" Hachiman gripes. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since you're American."

The woman's eyebrows inch together. "Dodgeball," she echoes, testing it out. "The people we had our agreement with did play a version of what your historians now call the Mesoamerican ball game, but it wasn't about dodging the ball."

There's a mad, unthinking second in which Hachiman almost blurts out a question about the specific set of rules that the Stoneworkers had used, since archeologists have no idea about it. But in the end, he stamps the urge back down.

The woman doesn't really need a response from him, evidently, at any rate. She raises her hand again and says, "If you don't mind, I'll be helping you along with improving your reflexes."

Hachiman's mouth is dry. Still, he nods.

The woman does, in fact, pelt him with soccer balls, punctuated by flashes of her green light all around him. Once he's gotten consistent about slicing, deflecting, or dodging the soccer balls, she graduates him to the baseballs, and so on. By the point that they stop for the day, Hachiman has just about made it to the marbles, though he's still sketchy with them.

He doesn't let himself get too big of a head over it. Whenever a projectile had bounced off of Hachiman rather than the spear, it hadn't particularly hurt, so the woman must not have been throwing very hard. Probably, this is just all he's ready for, for now.

When they're done, the woman goes off presumably to keep staking out Kamiki the Elder's location, or to pursue some other method of dealing with the spheroid problem unknown to Hachiman. Just dwelling on it has Hachiman starting to feel utterly rotten again, so he tries not to.

He mostly doesn't succeed, but it's the attempt that counts.

XXX

The remainder of Wednesday and the whole of Thursday go by without anything else overtly alarming happening. Hachiman must very much look awful with stress, because Komachi doesn't question him when he claims to have caught a bad cold, and he faces no obstacles in his mission to stay home. He even has something of a paper trail, with Yukinoshita and Hayama having both witnessed him looking like hell, so Ms. Hiratsuka couldn't really call his bluff even if she'd wanted to. He still worries about Komachi going out, but she's always good about letting him know what her general whereabouts will be, so he'll at least have the chance to interfere if she considers going anywhere near Kamiki the Elder's cafe.

The woman still pops by on Thursday to throw marbles at Hachiman when Komachi is out of the house, which Hachiman does get better about countering. Otherwise, she's still off banging her head against their present circumstances however it is that she's deemed it best to.

Besides spear drills, Hachiman marinates in bed, distracting himself by means of video games, phone, or books, to the extent that he's able to. In a spur of paranoia, he keeps the spear, tube'd, in his grip under the blanket. Intermittently, he squints out at a murder of crows that's stationed itself, ominously, on a power line outside his window.

By Friday afternoon, Hachiman begins to suspect that he's succumbing to cabin fever, which is absurd. Usually, he loves cooping himself up in his room.

I'm seriously losing it, Hachiman thinks, incidentally after having lost, also, at another one-sided staring contest to the crows. They're stark and inky black against the slate gray sky, and if he were a more artistically inclined person, he might've appreciated that. As it is, he just flops back onto his pillow, overcome by a paradoxically, unfairly restless ennui.

Hachiman blinks blearily up at the ceiling, his arms spread out on either side of him, the tube-spear in one and his phone abandoned on the mattress somewhere next to his head. He lets himself feel very sorry for himself indeed.

The doorbell rings out through the house, and he startles, a bit. But then, muffled, he just barely hears the door opening and closing, and the voices of girls talking. Komachi hadn't mentioned having friends over, but it's pretty normal for her to forget, or for her friends to drop by mostly unannounced. After all, Komachi is, unlike Hachiman, a reasonably popular and entirely well-adjusted person.

It's not like it's his problem. And anyway, right then, his phone also rings. Hachiman gropes for it without really looking, locates it, and then lifts it up to narrow his eyes at the caller ID. He has just long enough to assure himself that it's probably spam, before he registers the kanji.

It's Kamiki the Elder calling. Hachiman freezes, grits his teeth, and answers.

"Have you seen Miki?" Kamiki the Elder asks immediately, before Hachiman can get a word in edgewise.

"No." Hachiman bolts to be sitting upright, already breaking out in a cold sweat. "Why?"

"Her mom said she hasn't been home since yesterday morning, when she left for school. I saw her on the way, but now none of us can get a hold of her. I…" There's a note of panic to Kamiki the Elder's voice that only feeds Hachiman's own sense of hollow, growing dread. "You're the only one from Sobu High I knew how to contact."

Hachiman could tell Kamiki the Elder that he hadn't, himself, been to school yesterday, or today, for that matter. He could stay out of it, like the woman had instructed him to. By all rights, the rational part of his brain is still well aware that he should.

But what Hachiman grinds out is, "Have you called the police?"

"No," Kamiki the Elder says. "Not yet."

"Good." Hachiman steels his resolve, throws the covers off, and gets to his feet. "Don't."

"What—?"

Hachiman hangs up. Kamiki the Elder tries to call him back, but Hachiman mutes his phone on autopilot.

There's a ringing, now, in Hachiman's ears, louder than a train hurtling by. He stuffs his phone and the tube into his pants pockets, pulls on a pair of sandals he'd happened to have lying around on the floor near his bed, and then clambers back onto the bed to get at the window. Hachiman slams it open, and most of the crows on the power line scatter at the noise, flying off in a misshapen, cawing cloud of wings and beaks and claws.

Komachi and her friends are downstairs, and if Hachiman ran out of the house in his jammies-adjacent loungewear at top speed, they would want to know why. So, in his hysterics, Hachiman climbs out of his second story window and then scrambles the rest of the way down to the ground. From there, he takes off like a shot, sprinting in the general direction of his school.

There had been footsteps coming up the stairs as he'd gone out the window, but over the ringing in his ears, Hachiman hadn't processed it.

XXX

Hachiman sprints all the way to school. If he were in his right mind, this would strike him as exceptional and disconcerting, considering that he should have nowhere near the stamina to manage it. He should have fallen flat on his face and broken something when he tried to get out through the window, really. As it is, though, it's all beneath notice.

Hachiman only skids to a stop at the school gates, to one side of which a scooter is parked, and even then, it isn't willingly. Someone hooks their hand onto Hachiman's elbow, and at the speed that he'd been going, it sends them and him both crashing to the ground.

Hachiman lands mostly, inelegantly on his hands. It doesn't register for him that they're not so much as scuffed, and in the next breath, he's already getting his limbs in order to be sitting up straight. One more breath, and he would have been back up to his full height and racing off again, but once more, someone latches onto him.

At the hand pulling him back by his shirt sleeve, Hachiman's head whips around so he can glare at the offender that it's attached to.

"Whoa, there!" the guy, an adult with rectangular, frameless glasses wearing a business casual suit, exclaims. He tries to grin disarmingly at Hachiman, but all Hachiman can think is that this person is wasting his time, and that he sort of looks like a weasel. Regardless, the guy, who uses his other hand to cradle a camera hanging from his neck, goes on. "Sorry about that. I tried to get your attention, but you just didn't seem to hear me. I didn't think that you'd actually…"

Hachiman wrenches himself free, stands, and makes to take off. The stranger, though, hurries to stand also, and to place himself squarely in Hachiman's way.

His arms thrown out on either side of him, the stranger says quickly, "I'm a reporter! I was here for a special about the local high schools, but I can't just ignore—"

"I can," Hachiman doesn't quite snarl, but he has had enough, and with that, he shoulders past the reporter and runs. It was fortunate, some part of Hachiman acknowledges, that the reporter had grabbed onto the arm that he did. If it had been the other one, and if Hachiman's sleeve had hiked up, his inexplicable tattoo of nettles would've shown.

That would've been bad.

There's people staring, but Hachiman's blood is pumping and his adrenaline is going bonkers, so it's not important. The scenery passes him by in a blur, taking him onto the school grounds and then into the main building. He's headed, vaguely, to Class 2-B.

When he gets there, the door is closed, but not locked. Hachiman learns this when he slams the door open, panting and sweating with exertion, surely looking like the hounds of hell are at his heels.

He's in luck. The trio of boys who had gotten Kamiki the Younger for him before are still in the room, still at one of their desks, just beside the door. They'd evidently been playing cards, but at Hachiman's arrival, they all jolt. One of them drops his hand of… Magic: The Gathering? It's not relevant. Hachiman doesn't care.

"Where's Kamiki?" Hachiman demands.

They all blink at him. One of them, with the messiest hair, rubs the back of his neck and hazards, "She's on the track and field team, so she'd be at her club now, right?"

"Thanks," Hachiman blurts, already pivoting on his heel. He forgets to close the door behind him, but under the circumstances he's in, that's plenty forgivable. As he tears away down the hallway at top speed, the three boys from Class 2-B poke their heads out around the door jamb to watch him go, mystified.

Hachiman doesn't slow down until he's back out and rapidly gaining on the running track. Some members of the track and field club, who are taking a water break on that end of the field, perk up at his approach.

A group of three girls that he doesn't recognize, in particular, all light up with recollection at his face, and all three of them scurry over to meet him halfway.

"You're that guy who asked Miki about her cousin," says one of them, with her hair in a high bun, by way of greeting.

Even as he's sliding roughly to a stop, Hachiman's eyes go wide. "You're Kamiki's friends." His hands ball into fists. "Do you have any idea where she is?"

"I was going to ask you," informs him another, frowning. Her eyes are droopy and newly suspicious. "The last time we saw her, it was yesterday, when we all split up to go home."

For a moment, Hachiman is at a loss, as if in freefall.

"I don't know," he rasps, barely loud enough to hear. But then his teeth clamp together, and the rising hysteria is back, so Hachiman clings onto it. "I'll figure it out."

Hachiman couldn't explain a thing to them, so he just runs off.

He'll try to retrace Kamiki the Younger's steps.

XXX

Miki's friends all exchange nervous looks between them, concerned. They'd all just kind of figured that Miki was home sick, even if it wasn't like her not to notify anyone. They watch Hikigaya hurtle off uncertainly.

They aren't the only ones staring. One of their upperclassmen ambles up, squinting and with his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun.

"His form's pretty good," their upperclassman observes.

Another upperclassman nods, enterprising. "And he's fast."

Miki's friends can't help but feel that that's not really the point.

Even if it is true.