Miyazawa Otherside Picnic: Volume 10

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7183-6016-7
Verlag: J-Novel Club
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 10, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Otherside Picnic

Sorawo and Toriko have finished their training camp with a private military corporation at the Farm in the Mountains. Unfortunately, a comment by Runa Urumi has left a sour note between the pair... Sorawo also has a nightmarish ordeal involving lap pillows in 'Have You Heard of a Reverse Lap Pillow?' There's scenery produced by cognitive scientist Kozakura's ghost story maker and an artifact left behind by Satsuki Uruma in 'All Possible Ghost Stories.' The girls even go exploring for ammunition in the Otherside in 'Underground People.' See all this and more in volume ten of this sci-fi horror series!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miyazawa, Iori

Weitere Mitwirkende

Shirakaba

Mccann, Sean

Leseproben

Then, at that moment, Toriko moved. She leaned forward, and I felt her getting closer to my ear.

“This ear...”

Moving in so close I could feel her breath against it, Toriko whispered.

The wind blew past, shaking the grove of trees outside. It felt like the prelude to a storm.

The shoji doors shook, and the wind even blew into the tatami room itself, and yet Toriko didn’t react to it.

Was this woman, giving me a lap pillow in an unfamiliar tatami room, who seemed ready to bite my ear off, really the Toriko Nishina I knew...?

If I turned to look, the question would be answered immediately, but I was still paralyzed. I had no idea how I’d wound up in this situation.

However, I could guess what had led to this lap pillow. In fact, I was almost certain of it.

It had all started with a comment Runa Urumi had made while we were camping at the Farm.

She was supposed to keep that a secret!

2

During the UBL countermeasures training course at the Farm in Hannou, there was trouble on the very first night.

Toriko and I went to look for Runa Urumi, who had slipped out of her tent, and found her on the second floor of the building called the Cattle Barn. She was sitting in the middle of an endless white void that might have been in the interstitial space, creating a floor plan—a floor plan of my family home. She had an emotional outburst, and started articulating all her adolescent troubles, but between me, Toriko, and the self-professed magician who had taken on the role of her guardian, Tsuji, we managed to get her to settle down.

So far, so good, up until that point. The problem was what happened after—Runa’s tongue slipped.

“But you did cry, while using my lap as a pillow.”

It was the worst information leak possible for me. And Toriko was beside me.

“What’s this about a lap pillow?” she’d asked me with a straight face.

“I don’t know what to tell you... A lap pillow is a lap pillow...” I blurted out a nonanswer. Toriko looked at me without any emotion.

“What do you mean?”

I explained. I’d wandered into the other world alone, and encountered a mujina impersonating Toriko in the Mayoiga. I don’t know how I escaped, but when I came to, I’d found myself at DS Research, in Runa’s room of all places, and she had been patting my head as it rested in her lap.

“Hmm,” said Toriko. “So that’s how it was.”

“Y-Yeah. So, I don’t have anything to feel guilty about, okay?”

“If you have nothing to feel guilty about, why are you so flustered?”

“I’m not flustered.”

“Hmm.”

“What...?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’?”

“Huh?”

I might’ve snapped at the pressure Toriko was putting on me, and it could’ve devolved into a fight from there. Fortunately, Tsuji couldn’t bear to watch us any longer, and she spoke up, preventing that from happening.

“Could you save it for later, you two? This place is scary, so let’s get back first.”

Now that she mentioned it, she was right. We were still in the mysterious white void that had spread out inside the second floor of the Cattle Barn. Tsuji rushed Toriko and I, who had an awkward vibe between us, and Runa, the cause of that awkwardness, down the stairs in a hurry.

Once we had passed through the dark first floor of the Cattle Barn and were outside, there was an obvious change in the atmosphere. The area around Torchlight’s tents was lit with LED lamps with the light turned down. There were two operators, on night watch perhaps, next to a bonfire with the embers still burning, and they looked at us with surprise. When we had come through here on the way in, the courtyard had been pitch-dark, and there hadn’t been any lookouts. Things must have already gotten strange then. The Cattle Barn, which had become a Chimera House because of Runa’s renovations, might have become a passage to the interstitial space.

That was interesting, but I didn’t feel up to going back and investigating. It was already two in the morning. We decided to head back and get some sleep. Maybe because of her emotional outburst earlier, Runa was calm, and meekly headed into her tent with Tsuji. After seeing them off, Toriko and I returned to our own tent.

Amid an awkward silence, we crawled into our own sleeping bags, and turned out the light.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

As I stared into the darkness of the tent uneasily, Toriko suddenly spoke.

“I’ll ask you about the lap pillow later.”

“...”

“Good night.”

“Good night...”

It crossed my mind a little later that I should have protested and said, But the moment for that had passed. It was because I’d been intimidated by Toriko. Yeah, I knew it was never good to let the other side take control of the situation—no matter what that situation was.

Torchlight’s training continued the next day. The incident with Runa didn’t cause a major hubbub, so the camp continued for the planned two nights and three days and then ended. It was awkward between me and Toriko the whole time. We never squabbled in front of other people, though.

Even though Toriko had said she’d ask about it later, she never brought up the lap pillow. Not even once the camp was over and we’d gone home.

Even after several days had passed, she hadn’t asked me anything.

Just when I was starting to wonder if she’d forgotten...Toriko called.

“So, about working on the skeletal building.”

“Huh?! Oh! Right.”

“Want to go tomorrow? It should only take a little more before we open up a route down to the bottom floor.”

Oh, right. We had started on the roof, putting holes in the floor that we had lowered ladders from, and continued working downward until we had found stairs on the seventh floor. Cautiously climbing down them, we had found we could go two floors before coming to a spot where they had collapsed on the fifth. But there had been a hole in the floor there, so it was all good. We’d lowered a ladder from there, and been able to reach the fourth floor. Now we just had to punch holes in floors four, three, and two, and we’d have ourselves a route down to the ground floor.

No, we didn’t even need to open the last hole; we could just hang the ladder from the edge of the floor. That might be safer. That meant there were only two more floors to go, and based on past experience, we could do it in a day.

That being the case, we’d be talking about how we were almost down to the ground, but I hadn’t been expecting Toriko to bring it up now, so I was taken aback.

“Tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah. Your summer break is short, right, Sorawo? I was thinking we should do it while you’ve got time.”

“Ohh, sure. That makes sense.”

If the Torchlight training camp hadn’t come up, then I’d been planning to use my just ten day summer break working on the skeletal building. So there shouldn’t have been a problem, but...

“Um...”

“Hm?”

Yeah, there was no way I could ask her that. I loudly cleared my throat, and then started over.

“Okay. Good with me.”

“Usual time all right?”

“Sure. Was there anything we were short on?”

“We should be good to go. I mean, we bought more ladders and brought them in just recently.”

“Got it. I’ll just check the batteries. So...see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, see you tomorrow.”

The call with Toriko ended easily, without me ever saying anything like, I set down my phone, and cocked my head to the side for a little while.

No, that couldn’t be it. I mean, really.

Or was she trying to pretend it never happened?

Would Toriko do something like that? It’d be one thing if I was trying to dodge the issue.

As I was turning it all over in my head, it started to feel silly.

I mean, why should I have had to agonize over it like this? I really hadn’t done anything wrong. Thinking back over it with a clear head, I had just been out of my mind. There was no need to feel guilty about it.

I stopped thinking, pulled the batteries for electric tools out of the bag of construction stuff, and started checking if they were charged.

The next morning, we met up on time in Jinbouchou, went through the usual elevator procedure to enter the other world, and got to working on the skeletal building. This was a ten-story building, and we were working on the fourth floor, so we had to lug the heavy electrical tools down the ladders on each floor, which, yeah, was kind of a lot of work. I appreciated having stairs from the seventh floor down to...