CHAPTER 3

α—5

Monday. Morning.

After I spent the whole of Sunday relaxing, both my feet felt light.

As we began to approach the middle of April, I’d managed not to accidentally head for the freshman classrooms, and as I sat promptly down in my designated seat, I faced the black-haired figure behind me and addressed her.

“What’s wrong? Mid-semester slump hitting you early?”

Haruhi had arrived at school before I did, and she was slumped lethargically over her desk. “No.” She raised her head and groaned, even yawning. “I’m just a little short on sleep, is all. I was up late. I’ve been really busy with things these days.”

Now that she mentioned it, what did she do on her day off? Listen to late-night radio?

“I don’t have to tell you about my private life.” She sneered like a crocodile. “I helped a neighborhood kid study, cleaned my room, made plans for the week—all kinds of stuff. Although I do listen to the radio sometimes. Also I had to create materials.”

I thought of the bespectacled little professor-kid as I asked, “Materials? What materials?”

“Hmph, you’re such a child. Always asking, ‘What’s that, what’s that?’ Why is it that boys’ mental age never seems to go up, no matter how old they get? Childlike curiosity is cute and all, but when you give me that prying face, it makes me not want to tell you anything. You’re old enough to be figuring out what I’m up to on your own.”

Was I somehow mistaken, given that the more I thought about the kinds of things Haruhi seemed likely to do, the less it seemed like she belonged at school at all?

“Kyon, listen. You’ve been in the brigade for a year. You need to learn how to read your brigade chief’s intentions and act on them ahead of time. It’s why you’re still such a low-level member. In my mental staff performance chart, you’re charging into last place.”

Haruhi grinned triumphantly, then opened my first-period Modern Japanese notebook and began drawing some kind of freehand graph on it with a mechanical pencil, just out of my view.

“To explain it in a line graph, it’s like this.”

The longest bar was Koizumi, and the ones labeled Mikuru and Yuki were about the same length. Mine was only good for about five millimeters of brigade service. Not that my feelings were hurt.

“The computer club president would be about here, and Tsuruya would be around here. Look! Even non-members are doing better than you! Your manuscript for the newsletter was a total joke.”

Was this because I wasn’t living up to my reputation as the first and oldest brigade member? The computer club president was kind enough to have bestowed five computers upon us, and I’d never outrank Tsuruya in a million years. Out of sympathy for the computer club, why not raise his bar a little higher? It was a small price to pay.

Haruhi looked like a home-team fan booing an opposing player for using delay tactics. “You idiot. Have some spirit! There’s only a month to go until the SOS Brigade’s one-year anniversary. We’ve got to start racking up some heroics! What kind of example are you going to set for the new members? Let me say right now that seniority isn’t going to get you anything!”

So she was using Nobunaga Oda’s tactics. Capturing famous enemy commanders was all well and good in the warring states period, but at this high school, only the student council had the power to defy the SOS Brigade as the cancer that it was. And Koizumi controlled the current student council president, and while Tsuruya didn’t seem to know it, her family backed Koizumi’s Agency. If the president’s corruption were exposed, I wondered if I’d be promoted up from foot-soldier status. Not that I wanted to be.

Haruhi seemed to want to continue her lecture, but the bell ringing and Mr. Okabe striding swiftly into the room cut her off.

Anyway—Haruhi was still trying to recruit new members? Goal aside, how did she plan to accomplish that?

There was no point in thinking about it, though. I was more worried about having run into Sasaki, Kyoko Tachibana, and that weird alien girl Kuyoh on Saturday morning. That time traveler guy hadn’t been there, but he seemed likely to reappear, so that was another problem—but so long as he didn’t pick a fight, I resolved to leave him alone for the time being.

I felt like my fighting spirit—the part of me that said, “Bring it on!”—was a stag beetle larva, and I was nurturing it through its chrysalis phase. He could bring whatever tricks he wanted. I’d make him pay dearly for every one. In boxing, a counterpunch was better than a jab. At least, that’s what they were always saying in the boxing manga I read. And Haruhi was the kind of person who repaid all debts, favors, and grudges two hundred million-fold.

The history of the world was eloquent. The sorts of things you should never do had been recorded and passed down since ancient times.

No—there was no point in wasting words.

There was only one thing I wanted to say.

If you make yourself an enemy of the SOS Brigade, don’t think you’ll get off easy.

At lunch break, I begged off eating with Kunikida and Taniguchi and headed to the literature club room, boxed lunch in hand.

No matter where you went in the school, there was no place more stuffy than there—it was like a humidifier had been left on, and I didn’t even have to bother to guess at what Nagato would be doing. She was following her usual movement patterns.

“Can I come in?”

Nagato sat in her chair reading some kind of western occult book and did not raise her head. “…”

“You gotta let me eat in here. The classroom is way too noisy. I was thinking it would be good to eat somewhere calm for once.”

“I see.” Nagato looked up, almost in slow motion, her gaze scanning me, then returning to her book.

“Did you already eat?”

“…” She answered me with a slight nod of her head.

It was pretty questionable, but investigating Nagato was not something done over lunch.

“So, about that alien Kuyoh or whatever”—I said, sitting on a folding chair and undoing the napkin wrapped around my box lunch—“she’s a minion of the guys who tried to freeze us to death last winter?”

Nagato used her hand in place of a bookmark as she returned her eyes to me. “Yes.”

“And you said she was similar to you, a humanoid something or other—”

“Probably.”

“And did she come here to observe Haruhi too?”

After a brief moment, Nagato answered. “I don’t know.”

Was that because their mutual understanding was imperfect? I wondered.

“Yes. It is clear that they are interested in Haruhi Suzumiya’s data alteration abilities. That is one of the reasons they dispatched a humanoid interface to this world,” said Nagato matter-of-factly. “They of the Heavenly Canopy Dominion—”

I stopped her upon hearing the unfamiliar words. “The heavenly what, now?”

“Heavenly Canopy Dominion,” said Nagato again. “That is the name the Data Overmind has provisionally assigned to them. This is a significant step forward. Until now, we had no concept of naming.”

Holding my chopsticks, I considered the meaning of the name “Yuki Nagato.”

“The name derives from their coming from the heavens, from our perspective,” she added in a flat voice.

“So where’s the Heavenly Canopy Dominion?” I asked, pointing at the ceiling. “Up there?”

“…” Nagato paused as though doing a seven-digit arithmetic problem in her head. “There.”

She pointed out the window, toward the ridge of hills beyond. I could tell that it was north, but I doubted what she was pointing at was something that could be seen with even a radio telescope. It didn’t matter what direction it had come from, anyway. Worrying about directions was for diviners.

“Nagato, do you think those jerks are going to toss us into another dimension like they did last time?”

“No indication of that is visible at this time,” said Nagato. She had raised her arm diagonally backward to point, but returned it to her page. “An interface capable of verbal contact has revealed itself. It is predicted that direct physical contact will predominate for some time.”

“That girl, huh…”

I thought about Kuyoh Suoh’s vague strangeness. I had plenty of bones to pick with the Data Overmind, but I had to admit it had good sense when designing interfaces. Nagato, Kimidori, even Asakura—I’d take any one of them over Kuyoh.

“I will defend against attacks from the individual designated Kuyoh Suoh. I will not allow harm to come to you or Haruhi Suzumiya,” said Nagato flatly.

She was the most reliable person I knew. But still—

Nagato reacted faster than my mouth could move.

“Or to Mikuru Asahina or Itsuki Koizumi.”

Or to Nagato herself, I said.

“…”

I looked very seriously into her fixed eyes.

She didn’t have any concern for herself, but I did, and so did Haruhi. I wasn’t about to let Kuyoh or anybody else from the Heavenly Canopy Dominion do anything to her. It was no fun being protected all the time. The amount I could do might have been as insignificant as a speck of space dust, but surely I could do something.

“…”

Nagato lowered her gaze to the pages of her book, and at that signal I picked up my box lunch.

There was no comparison with the day she’d first invited me up to her apartment, room 708. To think that a silence without any words to interrupt it could give rise to such a feeling of well-being.

Once afternoon classes had finished, homeroom had wrapped up, and we’d bowed to Mr. Okabe, he came down from the lectern just as my classmates were all noisily standing up.

The students who didn’t have cleaning duty had no reason to stay in the classroom, so just as I grabbed my bag and stood, gave my regards to go-home-club members Taniguchi and Kunikida, and made for the clubroom, I realized my mostly empty bag was much heavier than it should have been.

When I turned around, I saw that Haruhi had reached out and grabbed it. She had some serious grip strength.

“Wait just a minute.”

Haruhi was still sitting, and she glared somewhere in the vicinity of my ear.

“You know there’s a math quiz tomorrow, right?”

“Uh… I guess.”

Now that she mentioned it, I did have a feeling that the math teacher had mentioned something about it last week, but it seemed I was deficient in keeping such trivialities in my memory.

“So you did forget about it. That figures.” Haruhi sniffed in irritation. “You’re bringing down the SOS Brigade average with things like this. If you could just remember the basics you’d be able to get a decent score. Do that much, okay?”

What was she, my mom? Anyway, she had better let me out of my seat, or we were going to be in the way of the students on cleaning duty.

“How can you be such a slacker? Get your math textbook and get over here.”

Haruhi stood suddenly and dragged me over to the teacher’s desk. The students on cleanup duty were used to this and didn’t even bother looking at us, although their weird smiles did bug me.

Haruhi snatched my math book away and casually opened it on the desk. “Problem two on page nine is definitely gonna be on the quiz, so remember it. This formula too. This is an example question, so knowing Yoshizaki it’ll show up for sure. Where are the blackboard notes? Show me your notebook.”

I could only helplessly obey her rapid-fire orders.

“What’s this? You stop writing halfway through. You slept through the second half, didn’t you?”

So what if I did? She was sleeping during today’s classical literature class, I pointed out.

“If I decide it’s okay to sleep, then of course I’ll sleep. I don’t have to listen to understand that class. You just don’t get it, do you? Listen, you get annihilated by math and science, so that’s where you’ve got to put your effort.”

Haruhi underlined problems in my textbook with my mechanical pencil.

“I’ll tell you which ones you definitely have to do, so get those in your head. And don’t just memorize the answers. He’ll swap the figures around in the test. So to start with, this one, and this one…”

Thus for a while I stood there across the desk and took Haruhi’s special review session. Fortunately the students on cleaning duty understood and ignored us, so we did likewise. It was embarrassing. She could’ve at least done this in the clubroom, I said.

“That’s ridiculous. The clubroom is for doing club activities, not for studying. You’ve gotta protect the distinction between these things. Only a killjoy does boring stuff during time that’s supposed to be for fun.”

Haruhi looked bored as she pointed out the problems she guessed would be on the quiz, explained a subtle solution, and didn’t release me from the teacher’s desk until I’d gotten all the problems right.

“I guess that about does it.” Haruhi rolled my mechanical pencil for about five minutes before my brain was about to protest at being forced to work past its shift. This was after the cleaning was over and my other classmates had disappeared entirely.

“If you’re still below the class average after this, there’s no hope for you. You’ll need surgery. Try to memorize this stuff before the midterms.”

I could make no such guarantees. I couldn’t be bothered with stuff so far ahead in the future. I shoved my poor, scribbled-in textbook into my bag while looking down at Haruhi’s eyes, which glared up at me challengingly. I thought about saying something, but no words came, so I simply nodded up and down in an attempt to fool her.