Chapter 86: Please Jump Off That Cliff!
The trick to solving complicated problems is to tackle each task carefully, one at a time.
Human beings, by nature, aren’t particularly well suited to multitasking.
As a general rule, when several complicated jobs pile up in front of you, trying to dive straight into them while leaving everything tangled together usually gets you nowhere. Progress slows to a crawl.
If you attempt to handle several intertwined problems all at once—jumping from one to another without first untangling them—your thoughts inevitably become a hopeless knot, and before long you find yourself unable to accomplish anything at all.
When that happens, you break the work apart.
If one problem consists of three interconnected tasks, the first thing you should do is separate those three tasks into individual pieces. Then, solve them one by one.
By the end, all three tasks will have been completed, and as a result, the larger, more complicated problem will have resolved itself.
It’s simply a matter of steadily building up from the smallest steps.
The same principle applies to events.
If three separate events are happening simultaneously, the conventional approach is to split them into individual incidents and resolve each one in turn.
However…
That method has one major flaw.
If your goal is to untangle three interconnected events within half a day, then it’s a terrible strategy.
After all, it assumes you won’t touch the second event until the first one is completely finished.
As for me…
I’m actually pretty good at multitasking.
Society itself is nothing more than countless individuals interacting all at once. If you’re trying to manage something like that, you can’t afford to examine every single person separately. You have to keep track of multiple moving pieces simultaneously.
And so, Taketsuru and I were now walking toward the coastline, roughly ten minutes away from the villa, hoping to discover the owner of the mysterious voice echoing inside Taketsuru’s head.
“Taketsuru, we’re certain the strange voice is coming from somewhere out at sea, right?”
“Yeah. Probably? But… are you really okay leaving things like they’re back there?”
The hallucinated voice that had suddenly begun speaking to Taketsuru was suspiciously specific, almost as though it had singled him out from the very beginning. That was precisely why I believed approaching the coast would trigger some sort of reaction.
Why the sea?
Partly because of Taketsuru’s testimony.
But also because of the local legends I’d gathered only a short while ago.
According to the stories, there were two tales involving creatures that sounded suspiciously like monsters.
One was about someone eating mysterious wild grapes and wandering into a place resembling a Mayoi-ga—a phantom mountain village.
The other concerned a fisherman who, after a series of strange events, transformed into a serpent.
Of those two…
The first seemed unlikely.
It was still too early in the season for wild grapes.
True to their name, mountain grapes reached their harvest in autumn. Charging into the mountains during summer would most likely be an exercise in futility.
And if, by some chance, the event item had been replaced with a watermelon simply because both were fruit…
…well…
The watermelon wasn’t even cold yet.
If eating it advanced the event, then naturally I’d prefer to wait until it had been properly chilled.
After all, the average university student—a perfectly ordinary one, mind you—often held inexplicably strong opinions about food.
Meals were practically a staple event whenever two people who couldn’t understand each other were finally given the chance to bridge that gap.
With that in mind, the watermelon route could wait.
Our first priority was investigating the legend of the Sea God.
Especially since Taketsuru kept insisting he could “hear the ocean.”
Incidentally, when Taketsuru had asked, “Are you really okay leaving things like they are?” he had been referring to the ninja father and daughter.
The female ninja was, after all, still hanging out in the garden to dry.
Meiko had remained behind at the villa to keep watch over the subdued ninja pair.
From Taketsuru’s perspective, it probably looked as though I’d abandoned the ninja event halfway through gathering information.
I slowly shook my head.
“To tell you the truth… I’ve already seen the information I needed from that girl through the hallucination.”
“…Seriously? Then why’d you hang her out to dry?”
“Because it’ll be much quicker if I completely crush her spirit first and make her obedient… no, cooperative. That’ll take a little time, though. Leaving her out in the sun for a while feels about right. It’s a perfectly ordinary and reasonable decision.”
“‘Perfectly ordinary’…? Well… I guess it’s not uncommon for perfectly ordinary protagonists to solve problems by doing something absolutely nobody else would ever think of…”
It was heartwarming to see Taketsuru gradually coming to understand what constituted a perfectly ordinary university student.
Though fate had forcibly burdened him with the title of Hero from Another World…
…he was still my best friend.
The reason I was acting together with Taketsuru now wasn’t friendship.
It was efficiency.
At present, we were involved in roughly three separate event routes.
The Spirit Watermelon Bomb was still chilling inside the refrigerator.
The Bride-Stealing Ninja route was currently in its “drying the kunoichi” phase.
I’d already finished collecting information from the father.
If we focused solely on progressing the ninja route now, we’d inevitably hit a waiting period.
That kunoichi was astonishingly stubborn.
(If she’d been a little more honest to begin with, this entire event probably wouldn’t have happened.)
So rather than waste that downtime, it made far more sense to begin tackling the remaining route involving Taketsuru’s mysterious voices.
Incidentally, Meiko hadn’t been thrilled when I told her she had to stay behind.
Given that she’d already been saddled with enough unnecessary stress thanks to her ninja mission, I couldn’t really blame her.
Still, if anyone was qualified to guard members of the Kikkōryū Clan, it was another ninja.
More importantly…
Taketsuru was safe.
As far as raw combat ability went, he actually surpassed the average ninja.
Even Meiko seemed willing to acknowledge that now.
Reluctantly, she gave her approval.
The Hero from Another World now possessed the official endorsement of an actual ninja.
She had, however, added one condition.
“If some kind of event starts while you’re gone, don’t just charge ahead on your own. Stop and consult me first.”
If circumstances allowed it…
I’d do exactly that.
As for Kuwajima…
She’d spent quite some time debating whether to accompany us to the coast or remain at the house.
The moment she learned we weren’t actually going swimming, she immediately chose to stay behind.
Apparently it was simply too hot.
She’d also sternly warned us,
“If you’re staying behind, don’t you dare eat the watermelon. And if you absolutely have to, eat the fresh one the caretaker picked today instead.”
Hopefully nobody would ignore that.
Meanwhile, Niwashita-san announced she’d grown tired from all the driving and wandered off for a nap at her own leisurely pace.
Come to think of it…
She might actually have been the freest person among all of us.
“By the way, Taketsuru… don’t you think this whole ‘split into two groups while one stays behind at the base’ scenario usually ends with the base getting attacked? At least, according to light novel textbooks.”
“…Why would you say something like that?”
“I was just thinking… if that happened, the event progression would become incredibly efficient.”
“Quit getting excited about it!”
My comment visibly unsettled Taketsuru.
Still…
There was little reason to worry.
Judging by the father’s attitude earlier, I seriously doubted he possessed the courage to pick a fight with Kirishiro.
Besides, his income seemed to come from ninja work about ten percent of the time and gardening the other ninety.
If anything, we were valuable customers.
Nobody wanted to antagonize their source of income.
Modern-day ninja really did have it rough.
“So… we’ve arrived at the coast. Feel anything?”
Standing side by side, Taketsuru and I gazed silently at the shoreline stretching before us.
It was the sort of place that looked tailor-made for a suspense drama.
A towering cliff overlooked a small strip of sandy beach far below, connected by a narrow descending path.
Behind us, black pines planted as windbreaks mingled with broadleaf trees, while beyond them the endless horizon shimmered beneath the summer sky.
Walk a little farther, and you’d eventually reach a proper swimming beach.
The kind of place where Kuwajima would probably be hit on within seconds.
But this section of coastline wasn’t suitable for leisure.
Jagged rocks thrust sharply from the water, making swimming dangerous.
As the crashing waves echoed against the cliffs, Taketsuru closed his eyes and listened.
Then he spoke.
“Yeah… it’s saying something like… ‘Kirishiro!! I’m sensing the aura of an incredibly high-ranking male god around here! My maiden instincts are going absolutely wild! Please, somehow introduce me to him!!’”
“…Sorry, Taketsuru. Could you repeat that?”
“Hm? Right, so… ‘It’s this huge, dependable water god kind of presence! Like a mature male deity with overwhelming generosity! I’m selling myself on maternal instincts too, so I think we’d be incredibly compatible!!’”
“…Taketsuru… could you wait just a second?”
I temporarily ignored Taketsuru and instead directed an intensely poisonous psychic transmission toward the hallucinated voice, which sounded so excited inside his head that it seemed on the verge of getting a nosebleed.
“How are you even broadcasting your thoughts like that!?”
The shrill scream echoed through my mind.
After bombarding it for a while, the voice finally quieted down.
I promised I’d investigate the area properly once I had some breathing room, so it needed to stay silent until then.
Only after restoring order did I return to the conversation.
“All right, Taketsuru. I’ve shut the hallucination up. One more time.”
“O-Okay… now it’s saying… ‘Walk straight ahead exactly as you are… then jump off that cliff! I’ll be waiting for you beneath the sea!’”
“So it was an evil spirit after all.”
There was certainly no shortage of supernatural entities that lured unsuspecting people to their deaths by inviting them into the afterlife.
Perhaps the first lesson I ought to teach Taketsuru…
…was how to fire aggressively hostile waves of intent back at annoying hallucinated voices.