*****
Hisao
*****
I, Hisao Oota, stood clad in black protective gear, holding a bamboo sword in front of me firmly with my two hands. Standing opposite of me was a taller figure in matching gear. My opponent was Watanabe, vice-captain of the Kendo Club. We stood several feet apart, eyes locked through our helmets. Over our heads were sounds of clashing wood and battle cries from our peers.
"Yah!" With my own battle cry, I lunged at Watanabe and our swords met with a sharp clack.
But despite the way it looks, me standing in an arena, dressed in armor and sparring with a leading member of the Kendo Club in a building commandeered by said club, I was not a member myself. I'm a member of the Community Service Club.
Megugami High's Community Service Club, as the name suggested, was a club where its members did community service related stuff. Me and my clubmates did volunteer work like picking up trash at the park, reading picture books to little kids at the local library, or helping out our school's other clubs when they're shorthanded like the Kendo Club was right now.
That said, I have absolutely no idea why Mirai, the Community Service Club's president keeps sending me of all people to the Kendo Club. This is nothing to be proud of, but I am terrible at sports. Well, not exactly terrible at them. But I definitely wasn't good at them either.
Pow! After receiving my attack, Watanabe pushed me back. A split second after our swords detached from each other, Watanabe's sword smacked against my torso with a side swipe.
An exasperated sigh escaped from Watanabe and he pulled off his helmet to show me his frowning face.
"Come on, Oota," he said, calling me by my family name. "At least try to put up a fight. You've practiced with us for almost a year now but you've barely improved at all!"
"That's a bit harsh, don't you think, Watanabe?"
We turned to see the president and captain of the Kendo Club walking up to us.
"I'd say Oota's improved a bit since he started out," he said. "He's putting up a better fight against the newbies now."
Watanabe pointed out, "That's only with one newbie, and that newbie never held a sword in his life before he joined last month. And that's not good enough. If we want to get to the nationals, we need to practice with people who can actually make us sweat. Especially at an important time like now. I don't know why Mirai keeps sending us this weakling."
"Well, it's not like we're the only ones who ask the CSC for help," said the captain, using the short name for the Community Service Club in English.
"Still, I think any of the other members are a better fit to help us out than Oota, don't you think?" said Watanabe.
The captain shrugged and said, "No choice. We'll just have to make the most with what we get."
I said nothing and just listened to the two talk about me as if I wasn't there.
But then the captain turned and called out, "Oi, Miyamura! Sakamoto!"
Two kendoists paused their duel and one replied, "Yeah, Captain?"
The captain said, "Switch out. Miyamura, you're with Watanabe. Sakamoto, go with Oota."
Honestly, I was a little offended, but there was nothing I could really say to my defense. Besides, I had already gotten used to it.
After my time with the Kendo Club was done, I cleaned up, got changed and then headed to the clubroom where I planned to just chill with some smartphone games until it was time to go home. I was walking down the hall when I heard a loud noise up ahead.
"Whoa!"
A guy had tripped over a bookbag left lying on the floor. Around him, some students giggled.
One of the guys laughing said, "Sorry, man. You okay?"
He might not have meant to, but he sounded a little bit mocking. The guy who had tripped certainly thought so. And probably because of that, there was a misunderstanding that snowballed in the worst possible way.
The guy who tripped glared at the guy who laughed and then accusingly screamed, "You did that on purpose!"
The guy who laughed, scoffed and said, "No, I didn't. But leave it to a Yamimura to make false accusations."
I thought it was just an accident and the guy who tripped was jumping to conclusions too. But the guy who laughed definitely could have handled things better.
Unsurprisingly, the guy who tripped, called a Yamimura, yelled, "You calling me a liar, Soushu scumbag?"
The guy who laughed, a Soushu, fired back, "You see any other lowlife Yamimuras around here?"
No one was laughing anymore and for good reason. We could all see where this was going.
The Yamimura lunged and lunged at the Soushu and grabbed the Soushu by the front of his shirt. I spotted electricity crackling around the Yamimura's free hand as his fingers balled into a fist.
Seriously!? I thought. Right here in public!?
I wasn't really surprised to see a human generate his own electricity like a Pokemon. Truth is this town is full of people with some kind of superpower. Hell, everyone in the Community Service Club had a superpower, me included. But that didn't mean it was okay to just whip our powers out in the open. Superpowers are supposed to be a secret to the rest of the world after all. Not to mention really dangerous to use in public places. Someone will definitely get hurt if nothing was done.
Sadly, sights like this has become very common lately. Fights were always breaking out either on the streets or here at school. It stemmed from a political rivalry between three families and their supporters, the Yamimuras, the Soushus and the Shirogamis. The conflict between the Yamimuras and the Soushus was especially heated and spread down to the kids who barely had anything to do with the politics other than whose family is with who.
Those three families, by the way, are all superpower users.
It looked like things were about to take a dangerous turn if nothing was done, so I rushed back down the hall and hid behind a turn where I prepared to deploy my own superpower, a nifty kinetic type power called Psychokinesis. With this power, I can control psychic energy however I wanted. Like, for example, before things really got dicey, I was going to make a wall between the Yamimura and Soushu and separate them.
By the way, superpowers, or psychic powers, could be separated into two broad types: Kinetic and Sensory. Kinetic powers are powers that are physical, like moving stuff around with your mind, shooting lightning out of your fingers or (in my case) make a force field. Sensory powers are more about sensing things like seeing things most people can't, reading people's mind or seeing the future. Traditional psychic powers, basically.
I was just about to make the wall spring up between the two boys. But suddenly, we were all interrupted by an angry shout that made everyone jump out of their skins.
"HEY! BREAK IT UP!"
I turned to see a middle-aged man wearing a black necktie marching through the hall while wearing an angry scowl in his face. He was followed by another man in a sports jersey who joined him in separating and detaining the out-of-control students.
With the teachers showing up, everyone quickly dispersed. The Yamimura and Soushu followers weren't so lucky and were quickly caught before they could get away. As the ones who started the commotion, they were sure to get an earful from their parents later.
Confident that the teachers had everything under control, I decided to book it and find another route to the clubroom. It took longer and further than I would have liked, but eventually I made it to what was pretty much like my own personal sanctuary.
Like any other clubroom, the CSC's room was small, box-shaped with six classroom desks clustered together for a round table conference. One back corner of the room was occupied by a white board, pushed aside to allow natural lighting from the windows. Low shelf cubbies took up a whole side of the room, atop of which a huge mascot elephant head laid staring blankly back at me with soulless, plastic eyes.
"You're the only one here, Yuna?" I asked the girl sitting on the left side in her lonesome. She's my cousin and around the same age as me.
Yuna looked up from her phone and nodded. She quickly typed a short sentence which was then read by a female robot voice.
"I heard yelling."
Because of an accident a few years back, Yuna lost both her mother and her voice. After being released from the hospital, she's been living with me and my family.
"Oh, it's nothing," I assured her. "It's just the Yamimuras and the Soushus going at it, AGAIN. The teachers already took care of it."
Yuna rolled her eyes and made a face that said, "Ugh!" And then she said through her phone's app, "I feel sorry for Yamimura and Soushu."
The Yamimura and Soushu she was talking about were the actual children of the Yamimura and Soushu families. Discord between their two families aside, it seemed like both Yamimura of Yamimura from Yamimura and Soushu were trying to reign in the chaos. More often than not, whenever trouble brewed between the two groups, they're the ones trying to stop the fighting.
That said, they were as antagonistic to each other as their gangs were and probably avoided each other on purpose.
Suddenly, Yuna turned to the door.
"The others are almost here," she said.
It wasn't that she got a text from them or anything. Like I said, everyone in the club's got a special power. Yuna's is a sensory type that lets her pinpoint where a person is. She's basically a human sonar and GPS tracker.
And no sooner did she announce the others' approach, the door flew open and in burst a guy a year older than us who laughed maniacally and said, "Mwa ha ha! Rejoice, servants! Your Demon Lord has returned!"
That was Mirai, the president and founder of the Community Service Club. And as you could see, he can be a bit dramatic. Well, VERY dramatic.
He was followed closely behind by two girls.
The shorter girl with the straight bobbed hairstyle was Isaneko. She looks and acts all prim and proper most of the time, but don't let that fool you. Beneath that act, she was a wicked and mean trickster who reveled at others' misfortune. Misfortune that she sometimes caused herself.
With a smile, she looked at me and asked, "Is something the matter, Oota? It looked like you had something to say about me."
A chill ran down my spine and I quickly stammered, "N-no! Not at all!"
I swear, if I didn't know any better, I'd think Isaneko was a mind-reader, which she is not. As far as I knew, the only power she had was telekinesis, the ability to move things with her mind.
Behind Isaneko, the tough-looking taller girl shivered too. She's Omoyo, another member of the Community Service Club. With her power to sense the emotions of others, she must have picked up on Isaneko's wicked nature surfacing.
Isaneko looked at me with her nose turned up and went, "Hmmm? Well, whatever."
She shrugged her shoulders and then walked over to the head table. The chair slid out on its own as if pulled by an invisible ghost, and she sat down.
The head table, by the way, was usually where the leader sat. In other words, it was Mirai's seat.
Mirai, however, didn't seem to mind and took over the desk at the right. He remained standing and waited until everyone else sat down.
Once we were seated, he slammed his hands down on the table and said, "Alright, my four Demon Generals. Let me hear your status reports."
Our club meetings are usually very brief. We let each other know what happened with our volunteer work, listen to any announcements Mirai has, and then, if there's nothing else to talk about, we do our own thing for the rest of the afternoon. You already know how I was going to spend that time. If I got no homework, I just streamed TV shows or played games on my smartphone all the way until the end of the day.
That was my daily life in a nutshell. I go to school, sometimes help out other clubs, do homework and then watch videos or play games in my free time. Pretty normal, boring stuff apart from, you know, the superpower thing. And the local political turmoil.
When it was time to go home, we all packed up our stuff and headed out together. The world was bathed in yellow afternoon light by the time we got out of the building.
We were all headed the same way as the sun sank down into the horizon, taking the same twists and turns we've taken almost every day. I could hear scattered chattering from our surrounding peers. But that eventually faded the further down the road we went, until there was just the occasional bird song and the rustling of leaves against the wind from nearby trees. It was almost as if the Community Service Club members were the only humans left in the world.
Truly, just another peaceful, ordinary day. Well, mostly anyway.
But then something happened to shatter that peace. And it started when Omoyo suddenly screamed and stumbled as if someone had hit her in the head.
"Aah!"
Mirai rushed over to her in alarm and cried out, "What's wrong? Keep it together, Homura!"
He reached out a helping hand, but Omoyo refused it.
"Forget about me!" she shouted. "Someone's in trouble. I think they're being attacked!"
