Chapter Four

Soft.

Munyu~ munyu~

Death isn’t so bad.

To be perfectly honest, it’s quite comfortable.  My entire body feels warm, and right now it feels like I’m resting on a soft pair of tits.  At least, I imagine this is what a soft pair of tits feels like.  The only time I’d ever felt them was when my friend Niku invited me over to his house to show me his waifu.  She was a sex doll that cost hundreds of thousands of yen.

What was her name again?  Juli?

Thanks, Niku.  They felt great.

Ah, I’m tired.

I think I’ll rest for a while until it’s time to reincarnate.

…

…

munyu~

~~**~~

After what felt like an eon of resting, I opened my eyes and found that my head was nestled into something warm and inviting.  Both of my hands were holding onto something soft and squishy, and I could definitely feel my partner wanting to pass along the old biological blueprints for some reason.

It felt good right now, actually.  

My hands freely squeezed the softness they were attached to.  Each time they did, the feeling was transferred to my partner downstairs.  I was dead, so there’s no way I still had a body, but it felt so good.  I enjoyed masturbating when I had the time, and it felt just like that, only since I wasn’t using my hands, the sensation was a bit more enjoyable for some reason.

I wonder if in my next life, I will be lucky enough to have sex?

Well, may as well reap the benefits of being a good person in my last life and enjoy this feeling until the end.  As I enjoyed the sensation of groping something and being stroked off in return, I could feel the familiar sensation of wanting to ejaculate.  I held it back as long as I could, so that it would feel intense… that was proving more impossible to do as an additional sensation of my balls were being gently rubbed as if in the palm of an expert juggler.

Nnnhhh…!

Unable to hold it back, I exploded involuntarily when my body had surpassed its physical limit to resist.  I felt my nonexistent balls empty over and over into the warm void.  Only when it was all done, and I was too tired to grope, was I pulled out from my heavenly dream, and into a nightmare.

“Jesus Christ, Subaru.  Are you trying to knock up my hands?”

I heard the one voice I never ever wanted to hear again.  Furthermore, what did she mean by ‘knock up her hands?’

My eyes opened up, and all I saw was darkness.  It felt like my face was pressed against something so I pulled it back.  There before me, lying on my bed, was Yamasaki Shoko in all of her naked glory.  My face had been buried between her tits, and both of my hands were sunk into her breasts, which were bigger than I had imagined.

“...Yamasaki-san?”

She leaned forward, and our lips met.  She pushed her tongue inside of me, and stole my precious first kiss.  I was too confused as to what was going on right now.  Was I not in heaven?  Did I end up coming to hell with Yamasaki-san instead?  I wasn’t looking forward to this kind of punishment, but I was aware I had no choice at the moment but to accept it.  The kiss didn’t last long, and tasted a bit like pasta.

As she pulled away from me, she sat up and was holding out her hands.  “Don’t you jerk off regularly?  What the fuck, how can a shitty virgin like you have this much cum?”  

My eyes were coming into focus quickly, and I could see a layer of what looked like white half-opaque glue all over the palms of her hands.  She kicked off the blankets, making me realize for sure I was on my own bed in my apartment now, and stood up.  I could see her bare ass now.  A beautiful round caramel bubble that attached itself to a pair of equally caramel thick thighs.  

She walked out of the room quickly.  When she disappeared, I reached down to find my partner was sticky with my release.  Oh… oh god no… I was also completely naked.  I couldn’t feel my pants around any part of my leg, and looking down revealed that I was definitely shirtless.

Was…

Was this not the afterlife?

No way.  I was definitely hit by the laser beam shot out of one of those portals in the sky.  I remember for sure getting hit by it, the searing pain hitting my back squarely, and passing out from pain after having tried to protect her one last time, even though I shouldn’t have.

None of this made sense at all.

I sat up as well, mostly to take stock of the situation, and found that when I pinched myself in the arm, it hurt.

“What the fuck…?”

A few moments later, Yamasaki-san returned into the room, and I was greeted with the full frontal view of one of the most popular and beautiful girls in our school.  I was looking at my lifetime nemesis in all the glory her physical form had to offer.  I’m pretty sure my jaw was hanging open.

She was aware I was staring at her, but she said nothing.  Instead she rustled through her black duffel bag, and pulled out a particular kind of rectangular box, walking towards my bedroom window and opening it.  After a clicking sound, a nasty scent accosted my nose, causing me to cough for a moment.

“Come see the sky, Subaru.”  She said, and while like her I also didn’t have any clothes on, I didn’t disobey, as I was far too curious about what exactly had happened, both with the few moments before, and with the beams and portals in the sky.

Standing next to her, at the window, looking out into the night sky… all the portals that had once been firmly stuck in the sky, were gone.

“What… happened?”

A stream of gray exited her mouth, out through the window and dissipated into the darkness of the night.

“They fell.”

“Huh?  They fell?”

“After those holes shot their lasers, they fell out of the sky and landed all over Japan. There’s been some damage, but nothing too crazy.  No monsters have shown up, nor any reports of zombie activity.  They just fell out of the sky and landed on the ground.”

“But… I was hit by one of those beams, and I died.” 

“You didn’t die, but you came close.  You protected me.”

“I felt it burn into my back.”

“Yeah, that much is true.”

“So… I’m alive?  How long was I out for?”

“One day.  It’s Sunday night right now.  There’s been an order from the government; for the next forty-eight hours, the country is in lockdown.”

“Lockdown?”

“Yeah.  Aside from going to the hospital for a life-threatening emergency, or to the grocery store for food, everything non-essential is shut down, just like it was during the pandemic.  It’s probably so the police and the military can secure the areas around all the holes that fell.”

“...did any land close by?”

“Yeah.  You know the bench you found me on, in the park nearby?”

I nodded.  Another gray stream exited her mouth.

“It landed right on top of it.  I’d be dead twice now, if not for you.”

“Is that why you… did what you did to me on the bed just now?”

She laughed.  “Are you going to accept my body as payment, finally?”

I shook my head.  “I have no intention of ever doing so.”

“Subaru, even if I had ten bodies, it wouldn’t be enough to pay you with.  So if you ever get tired of being a lonely virgin, just say the word.  You don’t need to think too hard about it, in fact, you can forget about it entirely if you want, but what I did to you on the bed was something I had to, at that moment, for both of our sakes.”

I couldn’t quite trust or believe what she was saying, but she said it with such a look on her face that I couldn’t disregard it, either.

“Tell me something, though.  Do you see anything strange or unusual right now?  Something like… out of one of those RPG games?”

I looked around, but my vision was the same as usual.

“Nothing like that at all.  Why?”

“No reason.  I was just asking.”

The strange question, easily dismissed, returned us both to reality.  The conversation led to the situation with the lockdown, and obviously I would be putting her up until school could resume on Wednesday.

“Wait, you said it’s Sunday night?”

“Yeah.  If you’re worried about your job, someone named Hotoke-san called your phone.  Don’t worry, I explained what happened and you just need to call her back in the morning.  You aren’t in any trouble, and still have a job.”

The panic I was about to have was abated before it could form.  That job was my only source of income, and I’d be in dire straits if anything happened to it.  Ever since the pandemic, part-time jobs for non-graduates were hard to come by.  

“Oh yeah, there’s one other thing…”

“What’s that?”

“The deck of cards you were holding on to when you came outside…”

“What about them?”

“They got turned into ashes.” she said, tapping something in her hand out of the window.

Should I be happy that I pulled the least valuable decks I had out to use, instead of the quality first generation?  Right now, the state of my lost cards was the least important thing in the world to me.  I was alive, I still had a job, my apartment wasn’t destroyed, there were no monster hordes rampaging around the city, and there was no zombie apocalypse happening.

Of course absolutely none of that compared to the fact that I had somehow groped the soft and large tits of Yamasaki Shoko, and that she pulled my dick enough times while doing so, that I shot my load all over her hands.  Thankfully, I was good enough at denying reality well enough to suppress the absolute ridiculousness of the situation.

It’s not like I could ever tell anyone, and if I did, who would believe it anyway?

“Do you want to sleep some more, Subaru?”

“No.  I’m pretty awake now.”

“Good.  Go cook us something to eat.  I already ate some of your instant noodles, one of your konbini bento, and the last of the pasta you made.  I don’t even care what it is you make, but I’m… starving.”

I was also feeling hungry.  Dismissing her continued inability to use manners or say please at any point, I changed into some clean clothes from my dresser drawers.  I had asked about my old clothes and she pointed to a pile nearby.  the entire back of my shirt and pants, as well as boxers, had been completely burned.  I went into the bathroom to check my body, but there wasn’t a single burn mark anywhere on the back of my body to indicate that I had been hit by a high-heat laser beam.

“What the actual fuck happened?” I said to myself before vacating the bathroom and moving to the kitchen to start making dinner for us both.  I didn’t fail to notice the small package that contained my birthday cake was still in the refrigerator, untouched.  I wonder if she knew about it, and thought twice about touching it?  Of course, if it’s Yamasaki-san, she likely didn’t even check it at all.

I prefer beef over fish even though it’s more expensive meat to buy.  One of the few things I can cook without needing to watch one of the videos from KanaCafe is Hamburg steak.  So, digging out the crumbled beef, some breadcrumbs, a clove of garlic, and an onion, I began chopping the vegetables finely, mixing them in with the beef, adding various spices and then turned on the stovetop after putting a frying pan on it.  I had some rice going in the rice cooker at the same time to accompany the beef.

Yamasaki-san had joined me in the kitchen when the smell of the hamburg patty began flooding the house, though she was dressed only in one of my shirts and a pair of panties as if she was lounging around in her own room at her home and not at my home, in the company of me, a healthy male who turned eighteen just two days ago.  

Incidentally, she is two months older than I am.

“When did you learn how to cook, Subaru?” She asked me as she watched over my shoulder.  Yamasaki-san is also taller than me by just under ten centimeters.

“I follow this Insta account called KanaCafe, it has a blog with recipes and a number of WeTube videos that show the step by step process on how to make each dish.”

“KanaCafe?”  She looked it up on her phone and began scrolling until she uttered some profanity.

“No shit, she’s ShibuyaQueen?”

“Who?”

“ShibuyaQueen!  She’s the founder of the 「Black Label」 brand!”

That name was something I knew well, since underneath my mattress in a very sturdy case was a DVD featuring some of their actresses doing things much more indecent than what Yamasaki-san just did to me earlier.

“I had no idea,” I answered her, “I was just looking for easy recipes that I could make myself, since it’s more expensive to eat out every day than to cook for myself.”

I added a little bit of flour and water to the pan, turning the juice which formed after the beef was cooked into a thick brown gravy.  Yamasaki-san seemed quite impressed.  It wasn’t a difficult recipe to learn though, I figured it out perfectly on the third try over a year and a half ago.

The Hamburg steak patties were done around the same time as the rice cooker beeped.  I had made us two each, and let her know there wasn’t any seconds to be had, except for rice.  She insisted on getting the drinks again, and I’m partial to the feeling of the carbonation from a cola on my tongue reacting with the spices I put in the meat.

We went out to eat at the table in the living room, she sat cross-legged on the sofa, and I turned on the television to get caught up on the news I had missed while asleep for a whole day.  Everything she told me in the bedroom was the same as what the newscasters were saying.  School was closed until Wednesday morning, there was a stay-at-home order in effect with the only exceptions being to go to the hospital, or to the grocery store, or if calling for food to be delivered through a restaurant or one of those smartphone apps.  

Not even a national catastrophe can give a food-service worker a day off.  Speaking of that, I really need to call and apologize to Hotoke-san, my manager, as soon as possible on Monday morning.

When dinner was finished, I swear for a moment, I saw something appear that said 「Hamburg Steak Added to Tendo Subaru’s Deck」 yet it disappeared the moment I turned my head to look at Yamasaki-san and considered asking her if she’d seen it as well.  She had said something similar when we were in my bedroom just a little while ago, right?

Should I mention this after all?

I was hesitant to do so.

I was.

But when it appeared the second time, after finishing my cola.

「Cola Added to Tendo Subaru’s Deck」

I decided to ask.

“Y-Yamasaki-san… you said you saw something strange in front of your eyes, right?”

She sat up quickly.

“You see it now?”

I shook my head.

“No, but… I swear for a second something did appear, but it disappeared pretty quickly.” I answered.

She was quiet for a minute, gathering her thoughts before she spoke again.

“Subaru, you’ve played RPGs and stuff, right?”

“Of course, who hasn’t played Drake Quest or Unending Fantasy?”

She paused.

“Anyway, there’s like this blue box in the corner of my vision that gets bigger when I focus on it.  It looks like one of those things that tells you all about yourself.”

“You mean a status screen?”

She shrugged.  “If that’s what it’s called.  After you pushed me down and got hit by the laser beam, I had to push you off of me, close the door and drag you to the bed.  Your clothes came off and it was too troublesome to dress you so I just put you on the bed and covered you up.  Anyway, I felt like shit after that, so I laid down next to you, and when I woke up later, that’s when I could first see it.  Since it appeared after I slept, I figured you might be seeing the same thing.”

I tried checking the corner of my vision, but couldn’t see anything like what she was describing.

“What I saw was a message that said something was added to my deck.”

“Your deck?”

“I know, it beats me too.  The message has only appeared twice so far, once when I finished eating, and once when I finished drinking.”

We both sat there contemplating stuff for a second.

She had reached out and began touching the air in front of her.

“What are you doing, Yamasaki-san?”

“What’s a buff?” She asked me with her eyebrows furrowed.

“Uh, in an RPG at least, a buff is a boost to your overall status.  A strength buff would make you a bit stronger, an agility buff would make you faster, a defensive buff would make you take less damage… that kind of thing.”

“Well I have one now.”

“What does it say?”

“Vitality Boost - Medium, as well as a timer that is counting down from five hours.”

“When did you get it?”

“When I finished eating, I think?  Is this because of the laser beams from the sky?”

“Possibly?  It doesn’t make any scientific sense though.” I concluded.

“What’s scientific about holes suddenly appearing in the sky, Subaru?”

She had a valid point.  With no historical record of anything like that, there’s no saying what those beams could have done.  Also, the fact that I’m alive and uninjured while my clothes and decks of Pocket Youkai cards were burned to a crisp…

“There’s no conclusive evidence at least.  But I’ll keep an open mind about it.  I wonder if this is something that’s happening to only us, or if it’s affecting other people?”

“Then, do we wait for people to say something on the internet?”

“We should probably do that.  If we say something first, there’s the possibility the JSDF might send someone to do experiments on us.”

“No fucking thanks!” Yamasaki-san cursed. “Let’s just keep this between us for now.”

With dinner done, I took the dishes to the sink.

“Do you have room for dessert, Yamasaki-san?”

“What kind of dessert?”

“A cake from my job.  It was my birthday on Friday, and with everything that’s been happening, I haven’t had a chance to eat it.”

“I’m totally in!”

The cake was already pre-sliced, so it was just plates and forks that I needed to bring out to eat it with.

“I’m also doing this as an experiment.  So you should do the same.  Let’s see if you get a buff from eating it, and I will see if the message pops up, okay?” I suggested.

“Right.  Damn that looks good.”

She was savoring the chocolate fudge cake that I had brought home.  I also like the carrot cake they sell at Giuseppie’s, but the chocolate fudge cake is my favorite.

“Itadakimasu~”  She said again, as her fork dug in and separated a piece which went directly into her mouth.

“Yummy~!”

She almost seemed like a decent human being for a moment as she ate the cake.  I almost let myself forget that she’s the psycho who’d bullied and tortured me for years.  I don’t know what I was thinking, letting my guard down even a little around her.  For the next two days, I need to remain on guard with her here.

With my piece of chocolate cake finished, it appeared a third time.

「Chocolate Fudge Cake Added to Tendo Subaru’s Deck」

“It showed up.” I confirmed.

“Nothing for me.” She responded in kind.

“No buff at all?”

“Nope.”

“Now that I think about it, nothing else I’ve eaten has done that so far, except for your Hamburg steak.  Maybe it’s because you made it, Subaru?”

Was she actually a perceptive person?  I don’t have anything like a status screen, so it’s not like I can check, I only have something called a Deck, but even if things are added to it, I have no idea how to use it, or see what’s in it.

I sighed.

I hope that this isn’t an isolated thing.  Maybe if other people have such things happening to them, there’ll be some kind of information sharing about how to access it?  With Yamasaki-san here, there’s no way I’m going to be shouting chuunibyou shit like "open status screen" or "show deck."  

Nope.  Not happening at all while she’s here.