Mari had been in a bad mood lately.
The annoyance deep inside her wouldn’t go away. She would then get annoyed at how she let herself get annoyed, and the cycle of annoyance would repeat.
It caused her to have trouble with whatever she tried to do, leading her to make all kinds of mistakes.
This morning she accidentally cut her finger while cutting cabbage.
And then when she tried to put a band-aid on it, she accidentally got it stuck onto her other fingers, making a complete mess of it.
“I can’t do this anymore!”
She ended up inadvertently screaming out.
As a hairstylist, cutting her fingers was the one thing that shouldn’t ever be happening.
No pro would ever be caught dead doing anything like that.
Mari had been working as a hair stylist in a beauty parlor that was thirty minutes away by bike for two years now.
Even though her dream had finally come true, she couldn’t get herself to be happy.
Just the previous day, she accidentally yelled out in frustration while cutting the hair of one of her patrons who kept moving their head each time they flipped a page in the magazine they were reading.
She knew what was the cause behind the annoyance.
It was Yuusuke.
Mari had no idea how to deal with him.
Just half a year ago, Yuusuke was a completely normal child.
No, he was way cuter and smarter than any normal child.
But Yuusuke had undergone incredible growth over the past half year.
He was only five years old yet he already looked like a high schooler.
Mari had no idea how to handle him like that.
It was clearly not normal.
The suspicion that had risen with Mari’s mind eventually changed into certainty.
Yuusuke was not a normal person.
Is it because he was born between a human and an Orphnoch?
It would have been best for her to ask Naoya directly since he was the one that had brought Yuusuke, but that wasn’t an option for her anymore. She couldn’t ask Takumi or Keitarou about it either.
Mari was living alone with Yuusuke.
Takumi had disappeared three days after the first Christmas they shared with Yuusuke.
“Hey, Mari, you’ve got some rice on your mouth.”
Those were Takumi’s last words to Mari.
He said them to her while they were all eating dinner with Keitarou, Naoya, and Yuusuke.
Upon finishing breakfast, Takumi picked up all the dishes and began washing them.
After finishing washing them and returning them to the cupboards, he suddenly vanished.
An anxious panic arose in her chest as Mari searched around the house.
The front door was wide open and Takumi’s shoes weren’t present.
The guitar Mari bought for him on Christmas was left in his room, and he never returned.
Not too long afterward, Naoya disappeared as well.
The very same Naoya that had always acted like a lively perverted idiot at one point suddenly became quiet.
He wouldn’t ever leave the house and always spent the whole day looking at the sky out from the window.
“Are you not feeling well?”
Mari and Keitarou asked him out of worry, but he only responded with a vague smile.
After a week of looking at the sky, Naoya simply disappeared.
“Food’s ready, Naoya.”
Naoya wouldn’t respond no matter how many times Mari called out to him, so she went to his room out of worry. Upon opening the door, the room was completely empty, with the wind from the open window flipping the pages of a comic book left on the desk.
Keitarou left the house about a year ago.
Since she actually knew why Keitarou left, Mari was able to accept it better than Takumi and Naoya’s disappearances.
Keitarou’s parents had been running a dry cleaner in Africa for several years now.
Since they washed the people of Africa’s laundry practically for free, it was easy to see that Keitarou’s dream of making the entire world’s laundry clean was influenced by them.
But his father had collapsed.
Keitarou’s father could have come back to Japan if he was sick, but he claimed that his dream wasn’t that weak and insisted on continuing his work at the dry cleaner in Africa, which led the mother to call Keitarou.
Of course, she called him to help with their work.
After wavering over what to do, Keitarou finally decided to set off to Africa.
Keitarou spent the entirety of the few days before his trip embracing Yuusuke and crying his eyes out.
As the person who Yuusuke was fond of the most, he was absolutely heartbroken over leaving him behind.
At the very end, he insisted that he would bring Yuusuke with him to Africa, and got into a heated argument with Mari over it.
Mari criticized Keitarou, saying that he only wanted to do that for his own sake and not for Yuusuke’s.
Keitarou eventually backed down.
But in exchange for leaving behind Yuusuke, Keitarou insisted on a bizarre condition.
He wanted Yuusuke’s laundry to be sent to him in Africa.
Mari soon understood the meaning behind that condition.
Keitarou was saying that even if they were far apart, he still wanted to wash Yuusuke’s laundry with his own hands.
It was certainly a pain, but Mari accepted Keitarou’s request.
Mari would occasionally play the guitar Takumi left behind whenever she was alone.
She would try to remember the melody he played on that Christmas day while clumsily strumming each individual note.
She would reminisce about Takumi as she played the guitar.
About Naoya, about Keitarou, about all the fun times they shared together.
The time they spent living together was warm and nostalgic.
She would then think about how Yuusuke’s rapid growth and shudder with unease.
Tell me, Takumi… How should I raise Yuusuke?
Just half a year ago, Yuusuke was a normal child like any other.
But one day, he began undergoing a sudden growth.
Mari had to buy new clothes for him every day for a week.
Needless to say, the laundry she sent to Keitarou grew larger in size.
She tried contacting Keitarou since she guessed that he’d be worried, but with Keitarou being in such a rural area of Africa, she couldn’t find much success.
When Keitarou finally came into contact with her one day, she explained everything to him.
“Oh, he’s just in his growth spurt. It’s normal, don’t worry about it,” he said happily.
Mari’s mouth was left wide open.
“No, idiot!” Mari yelled. “What kind of growth spurt has a kid growing twenty centimeters in just a month?! It’s impossible!”
But Keitarou continued to insist it was a growth spurt, telling her that there was nothing to worry about, and that he couldn’t wait to see Yuusuke again, and other excited thoughts before Mari called him an idiot one last time and hung up.
He had always been a pretty carefree person, but a few more screws must have had gone loose after crossing over to Africa.
Yuusuke had a few friends in the neighborhood who were the same age as him, but one day, Mari saw him playing with them at the sandbox in the park and immediately banned him from going outside.
It was because it was clearly not normal.
There was no way anyone would consider him to be the same age as his friends. To the neighbors, it would look like a teenager was playing with a bunch of little kids.
Even the children interacted with Yuusuke as if he was someone strange.
Mari grew worried about the Anti-Orphnoch Committee.
Five years ago, the Orphnochs’ existence was officially made public by the government, and the establishment of the Anti-Orphnoch Committee was announced.
The goal of the Anti-Orphnoch Committee was of course to eliminate the Orphnochs, and their activities relied on wide-ranged investigation and reports from civilians.
Once an Orphnoch’s existence was confirmed, Kaixas would be sent out to defeat them.
Kaixas were now mass-produced and they operated on an extremely large scale.
It was like a witch hunt from the middle ages.
Anyone the civilians reported that would be found even the slightest bit suspicious would either be arrested by the committee or slaughtered by the Kaixas.
Mari feared that Yuusuke might get reported to the committee. That was why she forbade him from going outside.
While Yuusuke’s body may have grown to be an adult’s, his mental age was still no different from a five-year-old’s.
And that bewildered Mari as well.
Yuusuke always fawned over Mari.
He would beg to have books read to him, or to play games with him, or to sleep with him at night.
While Mari was worried about his body, deep down she grew to become scared of him as well.
There was no doubt that Yuusuke had Orphnoch blood running through him.
In that case, there was no telling when he would transfigure into an Orphnoch. There was no telling when he would lose his human heart and attack her.
Mari feared Orphnochs.
It was pointless telling herself that Yuusuke was still Yuusuke. No matter what logic she built up, she simply found him terrifying.
Mari felt herself being torn apart between her love and fear for Yuusuke.
Kamen Rider Novel Translations 