Chapter 8

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“Did you hear it, Shouma?”

Yamato’s expression suddenly changed as he rushed over to Shouma the next day.

“About what?”

Shouma tilted his head in contemplation when his friend put his arm around his neck. Yamato kept his voice down in one of the corners of their classroom.

“Tomami-chan. I heard she had been attacked yesterday by the rumored Random Assailant.” [1]

“Random Assailant?”

“Shh! You’re talking too loud!” Yamato put up his finger on his mouth.

Tomami was a female University student of the same department as Shouma and his friends.

She was a beautiful, neat and tidy girl whose white dress suited her. Tomami had long, black hair that reached to her chest. She was a girl on the so called popular side, she was perfectly fit for the term ’yamato nadeshiko’ [2], for which she earned an overwhelming support from some of the men.

Just like his friend, Shouma kept his voice down.

“What’s the rumour about this Random Assailant? This is the first time I heard about it.”

“What? Didn’t we talk about this yesterday?”

“I don’t remember…”

“It’s a bit early for you to get so senile!”

Just as Yamato let out an astounded squeak, his head dropped with a bonehead-like thud. At the other side of his lowered head there stood Yoshihiro, in his hand was a rolled-up textbook.

“Shouma was asleep when we talked about this.”

Yamato rubbed his head as he thought back. “Ah? Really?”

“Yes. Weren’t you the one who hit him and woke him up?”

Yamato looked up at the ceiling as if remembering something, then let out a small “Ah…”

“Oh come on… you are the one who’s slowly becoming senile.”

“Ahaha…”

“Oh, that time….” Shouma remembered how Yamato had woken him up yesterday.

“So you’d better watch out, too!”

Shouma had a feeling he heard those words in his slumbering consciousness just before he woke up. He now realised that the ’watch out’ was referring to this Random Assailant.

“…From our University to the front of the station. Also, I heard it appears around the Rokkou Hondori shopping street. It’s rumoured that it attacks men and women alike.”

“Is Washizu-san alright?” asked Shouma of his friend. Washizu was Tomomi’s surname.

When the question was put to him, Yoshihiro nodded lightly.

“Yeah, probably. She even came to the University today.”

“Huh? Even though yesterday she had been attacked?”

“Well, it’s not like she was stabbed, although she doesn’t look very energetic today. The girls have been talking over there for a while.”

Yoshihiro pointed behind him with his thumb. There were a few female students gathered there, talking quietly about something. From time to time one could hear the words like “scary” and “dangerous” popping out from their conversation.

Shouma turned his gaze back to his friends.

“You said earlier that she wasn’t stabbed, so then what did the random attacker do to her?

It was now Yamato who answered the question.

“That assailant, it strangles you.”

“Strangle?”

Then Yoshihiro took over the explanation. “It will come up behind you and choke you, or cover your mouth. At any rate, it seems to be the type that enjoys watching someone faint.”

“Eww…”

What a bad taste this attacker had.

According to his friends, the crimes were usually committed in the evening, between 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm. There was a possibility that there were other students besides Tomomi who had been injured.

“What a mess…”

Even though there weren’t any deaths at the moment, there may be one day if the perpetrator isn’t stopped.

“I really wish the police would do something about it.”

“If there’re that many victims, there’ll be plenty of evidence and testimony to catch the perpetrator.” said Shouma as if agreeing with Yamato.

Yoshishiro crossed his arms with a sullen expression.

“The police have their reasons for not catching it.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“The victim’s description of the attacker is vague and difficult to grasp. Some victims say ‘it was like a man’, while others say ‘it was like a woman’. The police can’t even narrow down who did this!”

Yoshihiro snorted a little in annoyance.

His father was a police officer. So when somebody pointed out the good-for-nothingness of the police, he seemed to feel affronted as if it was an insult against his own father and sometimes he reacted a bit too strongly. For these reasons he also was a well-informed man about these things.

“Nobody saw the assailant’s face properly, did they? Or if they did, they only saw his retreating figure. It’s strange isn’t it, even if it attacks from behind. There’s even men among the victims.”

“In the case of men, it’s like covering their whole face with something and suffocating them. There’s a rumour going around that the attacker came up with this to avoid being seen.”

“What the hell. Scary!”

Yamato shuddered at Yoshihiro’s words.

“You should both be careful. The women who were attacked seem to have some common characteristics, but the men don’t seem to have any mutual features or anything.”

“What kind of characteristics?”

“It seems that most of the female victims are dark-haired beauties. Girls with long hair are especially more likely to be targeted. See, isn’t that what happened to Washizu-san? Well, it’s hard to specify, because it also targets students who generally dye their hair.”

“What a mysterious criminal!”

“Well yeah. One would always choose what people one could attack. Men rarely get assaulted because they can resist and fight back.”

Yoshihiro let out a deep sigh.

(Mysterious…you say)

The fact that the victim’s testimony is so disparate, that no one ever gets a proper look at the attacker’s face and that the assailant didn’t choose who to attack, male or female. If one were to ask him, it is a story that could be found anywhere.

But it is quite strange to say the least.

“It doesn’t matter what it is. If you think it’s strange, then that’s the criterion.”

Shouma recalled what Tendou said to him from the other day.

(I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll just try to dig a little deeper into this case.)

As soon as Shouma set his mind to it, the school bell, which signalled the start of his next class, began to ring.

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Translator’s Notes:

[1] The author use the word ’torima’ 通り魔 in the story. Nowadays this word can be used to refer to random attackers and thrill killers, but the original meaning alludes to demons who brought misfortune to houses or just to the people who pass by them.

[2] The personification of an idealized Japanese woman. This metaphor combines ’Yamato’ which was the ancient name for Japan, and ’nadeshiko’ which is the Japanese name for Fringed Pink.

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