(56) Day 3 Private Room (17.3 m < 17.5 m)

Being a special exception for Magnification Week, Yae and I were permitted to stay together during Day 3 at the ryokan. Yae certainly couldn’t stay with me if I were with the guys in the regular sized hotel. She’d bulldoze the nearby buildings if she rolled in her sleep. As for if I stayed with the other girls in the Kogei room, I’d end up toyed with by our schoolmates and smothered until dawn by a possessive and protective Yae who’d try to keep me away from them.

“Ehehehe~! We get the whole room together to ourselves,” Yae was certainly excited after she closed the door to our private room and set me down on the tatami floor. It was a six tatami room according to the receptionist who had given us the key. Tatami were around 1.8 meters x 1 meter normally but at 10x their size, each tatami was 18 meters long and 10 meters wide. That meant the six tatami room was 108 x 60 meters in length and width.

I mentally thought I had walked into a large warehouse – like the cargo warehouses I had seen before in cities like Yokohama. But in terms of height, this room had those warehouses beat. That made sense because, at over 17 meters, even a tall warehouse’s roof would be stomach high to Yae at best.

“This whole space is reserved, huh?” I sounded impressed because of how spacious the place was to me, but I likely wouldn’t have been impressed if I looked at things from Yae’s perspective because a 6 tatami room wasn’t too big to her.

Yae’s walked to the opposite end of the room where she saw the luggage she had given the health committee before. It had been properly Magnified and brought into the room for her. As she unzipped her luggage, she told me. “It’s a bit small, but it’s pretty cozy.”

“Small?”

“Uh… You know what I mean, Touya.”

I guess I did. There was a singular futon in the room that had been placed lengthwise in along the room as well as a desk and a table with a television. The TV table and futon only had a half meter distance from each other while the desk made it difficult for there to be a second futon to be put out. The hotel room was like a warehouse to me, but it certainly wasn’t that big compared to what Yae was used to at home.

“Talk about first world problems,” I laughed. The sizes of our rooms at our home had definitely spoiled us. “Well, since I can’t be Magnified, I can’t relate right now. I’ve got plenty of room to run around and stretch here.”

“This hotel really makes me forget that I’m Magnified. It’s got everything we need to feel normal. If this is how the rest of our time here is like, I’m all for it,” Yae giggled and dove into the futon that was reserved for her. I jumped at the subtle shaking she caused before chuckling at her hugging the pillow and shoving her face into it. “This futon feels just right and the pillow smells so nice!”

Watching Yae stretch her body like a cat under the blanket certainly made me feel like I was having a sleepover with her. I said nothing, though, as I made the trek towards her and saw the tag on the futon. It was made to be a lot bigger than a standard one for very obvious, ‘growing’ reasons. I wondered if Yae had realized it yet – that she was at a greater scale than Hotel Ten Scale – but she either hadn’t or did not care about it.

“Uwaaaah~ It feels so good to just lie down after such a long day!” Yae exclaimed. She continued rolling around on the futon. She was like a dog getting to play in the park.

“Whoa, easy there, Yae,” I laughed, half happily and half nervously. I was a little concerned I was getting a bit too close that she might land on me. I stopped being worried, however, when Yae finally stopped. I became distracted instead. “U-uwoah…”

Boing!

“Oh, good. There’s a place for me to charge my phone. It only has 5 percent battery left after all that happened today,” Yae paused to connect her phone charger into the outlet. Her arms stretched over me who was staring straight ahead for such an unreasonable amount of time that she noticed. “Touya? Is something wrong?”

I was too absorbed to say a word. Her yukata had gotten loose from her dive earlier, exposing more of her breasts. It was hard to pull my gaze away from the two giant fleshy spheres. They not only jiggled but her left breast bounced off her right with Yae’s subtle motions.

“... And you called me a pervert earlier,” Yae giggled, realizing just what I was staring at. She was blushing and embarrassed, but because we were alone and she was in a good mood, she did not panic.

“You were the one exposing yourself here…,” I told her, backing up. I was the one getting flustered. With her at 17.5 meters tall, her breasts were around a meter and a half in diameter. I could wrap my entire body around one and still not cover the entire thing.

“… You want to touch, don’t you, Touya?” My body language had said enough. Yae knew what I was thinking. She tilted her body forward just a little more so that I was in the literal shadow of her boobs. Her left boob was the ceiling above me just as her right one was the curved wall in front of me. If I just reached forward or even up, I’d be able to touch them. And If Yae so chose to, she could let them collapse onto me by rolling over.

“Uh… Well, I mean… I just… Yes,” I couldn’t lie no matter how strongly I resisted saying it aloud and it was even more difficult while also trying to hold my hands back. “Grk!”

“Well, there’s no way I’m letting you,” Yae ended her teasing and grabbed me by my yukata’s sash, pulling me away from her chest. She knew she had the advantage mentally now and not just physically, so her confidence was leaking out. “This is payback for calling me a pervert, you pervert.”

My ankles dragged across the tatami as Yae pulled me. As she did, though, I noticed the obi of the yukata was becoming undone.

“Uh, Yae?”

Yae had noticed, but she was completely fine with it. In fact, an idea had popped up into her mind as she pulled even harder. Jokingly, she announced, “Aaaa~reeee~”

“Uwaaaaoooooh!” my body spun and spun and spun as the obi unwound from the force of Yae’s pulling. Obi-mawashi was an old gag that had been old shows Ayame-san had showed us when we were kids. We had tried it before for fun when we were seven, and now, a decade later, we were doing it again. The only difference was that it was now on a completely different scale. Back then, we had to put in a lot of effort to cause the other to spin, but with Yae so large, I essentially became a toy top that spun into I got too dizzy and lost my balance. “Blargh!”

“Wow. I didn’t think that would work with the yukata obi,” Yae blinked. She held the obi of my yukata in between her fingers like it was a stray piece of string.

“Oof… The world is still spinning…,” I groaned. “You pulled so strongly that I guess you gave me enough of a yank to send me flying…”

“The roles are reversed now, aren’t they?” Yae giggled, letting go of the obi meters above my head until I flew down next to me. “I think the old gag was the man pulling the woman’s obi.”

“Something like that…,” I nodded. I tried standing up but I paused when I looked down at my own body. Most of my yukata had come apart, especially on my right side. It was surprising the note I had taken from the Hazuki girl earlier was still clinging to the cloth on the left side. “Gah… You really stripped me there, Yae. How does undressing me as payback for calling you a pervert not prove you’re a pervert?”

“I-I-” Yae couldn’t answer that, but she did have one way of retorting. “You’ve got that bodysuit on. You’re not naked!”

“And so do… wait, you aren’t?” It was true that I was wearing the formfitting clothing Ranko-san had given me, but I realized that, because I had been staring at Yae’s bare skin earlier, she wasn’t wearing it.

“I didn’t have the time to put it back on when running after the occult club girls,” Yae explained. “It’s okay. Senpai got the staff to bring it here so it’s right on my suitcase.”

“You really should put it on or else Ranko-san’s data will get messed up, whatever it is,” I stood up and straightened out my clothes.

“Okay, I’ll put it back on. But you better look away, Touya. Go to your room and wait until I call you.”

“My room? Oh right. Where is it anyways?” I followed Yae’s pointing finger to the TV table where I saw a staircase on one side. It would’ve taken me a few minutes to walk over to the stairs and climb up it, so Yae lifted me up onto the table like an elevator lift. It was then that I saw that the wall had a literal hole in it where something had been placed. “Whoa, is this it? This looks pretty cool. It’s what they call a ‘stackable studio’ right? I guess they made a slot for one to be put in here so it’s more of an ‘insertable studio’ here.”

Two steel boxes that resembled shipping containers had been placed in a square pocket in the wall. The entirety of the walls that faced the room was made of glass so I could see how fancy the furniture was in the room before I entered through the door.

“Ooh. I can see you in there. It’s a lot like a dollhouse,” I could see Yae giggle through the glass. I understood where she was coming from though. People and homes were doll-sized to her giant form, so even the king-size hotel bed in my room looked like a model to her.

“Wait, can you see into the bathroom too?” I realized upon stepping into the bathroom that there was a glass wall as well.

To my dismay, Yae’s answer was an affirmation. “Uh… Yes.”

“…” I saw a button on the wall of the restroom right next to the light switch. I pressed it.

Click!

“Touya! It turned dark!”

“Of course it did. Privacy is important,” I was thankful that the button had done what I thought it would. “Instead of privacy shutters, I guess they have privacy glass. I wonder how much it costs because it looks like this also has a one-way mirror effect. I can still see through it actually.”

“What? Then I can’t change if you can look!” Yae was startled and searched her belongings for something she could use. She found her school uniform skirt and put it in front of the glass like a curtain. If I hadn’t turned on the lights in the room, I’d have been incomplete darkness. “Sorry, Touya, but I’ll have to cover your room up for a minute, okay?”

“That’s fine by me, Yae,” I chuckled as I looked around. The Western-style box was my private room just like the 6-tatami room was Yae’s. My belongings had also been brought into the room before we had arrived, so my changes of clothes and my toothbrush were available for me to use. They weren’t the only things that had been brought to the room either.

On the desk in my room, I saw a pile of documents, brochures, and papers scattered. Skimming over them, I confirmed what they were. “… This is what Ranko-san said she’d send me…”

I could hear Yae’s yukata drop to the ground as she started to change her clothes. “Oh? Do you mean about the internship? Or the job?”

“Both…,” I answered. There were papers talking about salary, benefits, insurance, and many other aspects of working that I wasn’t too certain about. Ranko-san and Yurika-san had been serious. “… I don’t want to think about it right now, but I guess I should look at it later considering they’re making us wear these weird things.”

“Do you want to talk to my mom about it?” Yae suggested.

Asking Ayame-san was tempting. There were a lot of things about being a civil servant that I didn’t understand, and I was fairly certain Ayame-san’s job had something to do with the government. Even so, I shook my head. “No, it’s fine. I can ask Ayame-san about the complicated things after we get back if I’m still second guessing myself, but I think I should focus on whether or not I even want the job first.”

“Is there anything I can do to help, Touya?”

“It’s alright. Don’t worry, Yae. This is something I have to think of for myself,” I sighed and flipped through a few of the pages. “Job title: Alteration Research and Development Scientist. Job Description: Design, test, and analyze Alteration technology through investigations, experiments, and trials… So that’s what they want me for. This is a real position.”

“Do you need some time to look through it?”

“… Yeah… Sorry, Yae. It’d be cool to mess around since we’re finally alone, but this is pretty important. I’ll probably turn in early tonight so I can read through these.”

From running into Sumire to Ranko-san’s job offer, there were way too many things going on this week that I felt I was getting a headache. Regarding the offer, I definitely wanted to come to a decision as soon as I could. I was afraid that if I was too wishy-washy about choosing, the opportunity would slip by me and I would regret it. Yes or no – I had to be decisive.

“If I do this, what about my deal with Mom and Dad? … And what about our promise, Yae? And what’ll happen if I just say no? Ugh, just thinking about this is giving me migraine.”

My head swirled with thoughts. I hadn’t felt this confused and lost since the last ‘career choice’ survey the school had given us. I continued mumbling to myself as I flipped through the papers.

“... Touya.”

I don’t know how long I was lost in thought, but it was enough for Yae to finish changing.

“Hm?”

“… I finished changing. Come back outside,” she told me. She didn’t ask. She was being a lot more firm.

Anxious about what I had been reading, I left my room stumbling. “You’re done, Yae? What should we do no-Uwoah!”

The moment I took a step outside of the insertable studio, I discovered that Yae’s hand had been lying in wait. I felt my feet leave the table as Yae grabbed me. The next thing I knew, my head, torso, and legs were pressed against the plush cushion of Yae’s boobs.

Pomf!

“Mgff?!” I was startled for a moment, but Yae held me calmly. The warmth from her body flowed into me as the calm pace of her heartbeat rhythmically resounded.

“Touya,” Yae called my name. With my body in direct contact with her, I felt her voice reverberate through my entire body. “It’s okay for you to go through with whatever you choose. This is your future. I want you to be happy so I’ll support you all the way. Don’t worry about me and our promise.”

“…!” my body stiffened up. I was stunned by how accommodating Yae had been for me. I did not mean just now either. Our promise was something we’d kept since the end of middle school – the reason why we never admitted to being a proper boyfriend and girlfriend for all of these years. Our promise: to wait until we graduated until we got together.

“I’ll wait even longer if I have to.”

… Yae could not lie, so she was confident that she could. But I had to think: could she really? Thanks to the sensitivity spray, I knew Yae’s patience had been wearing thin. She had her own needs and desires, but she had been holding back for me. I was the one holding up our relationship, and yet she was still willing to put it on hold even further for my sake.

I’m not sure if those were the words I needed to hear, but I stopped resisting and let my body be taken along with the slight movements of Yae’s chest. I felt like a child being babied by a mother while held cradled against her breast.

“… Thanks, Yae.”

I gave up and let myself be spoiled by her kindness. Yae sat back down on the futon and gently rocked me in her arms. More than my friends and classmates, more than Ayame-san, and definitely more than my parents… Yae was person I was closest to in my life. She was the one person I loved and will continue loving. It honestly stung in my heart to make her wait even longer.

“I’ll always be around for you.”           

And she would. I knew that. That was why I was disappointed in myself for ending our night alone together so weakly. That was why I was angry at myself for not being sure about to do. That was why I was frustratedly thinking to myself one thing…

‘I’m sorry.’

(57) Day 3 Midnight Rendezvous (17.5 m < 17.7 m)

“… The internship starts next summer… And it really is just a summer internship so then maybe senior year can be normal after all… Maybe I can at least take the internship and see how much I like it before thinking about the job…”

“Zzzzz…”

“I’ll still have to keep my grades up if I want to stay… Knowing them, I really can’t avoid that even if choose to take the job…”

“Zzzzzz…. Munya munya…”

“This job… But what I thought I wanted to do was… Is it really worth it?”

After my… embarrassingly heartfelt ‘hug’ and comforting session with Yae, we had both realized it was very late and would have to get up early the next day now that the ‘exploration day’ of the school trip had ended. Yae and I were also extremely tired from everything we had gone through today, so we were both extremely tired. Even if we did want to fool around, we both lacked the energy to.

That was why Yae went to bed and curled up in her futon like a burrito. I would have done the same, but I knew I had to go through the documents Ranko-san had delivered. I still did not know if I wanted to accept, so I pondered and organized by thoughts as I read. I developed a more streamlined understanding of my roadmap for the future.

“Mguuu… Tou… ya…”

Yae’s sleeptalking could be heard through the open door to my ‘insertable room’. I could not see her because the ‘curtain’ of her skirt had still been left over the glass. She must have been dreaming about me. Knowing that, I sinking feeling formed in the pit of my stomach.

Yae… My childhood friend was the girl who had confessed to me in middle school. I know how much she loved me, and I loved her back. It was surreal to think that this week long government program had brought these feelings of ours out in the open so easily… It concerned me. She wanted what was best for me and my choices and inability to make choices had been so hard on her. Did I really deserve such kindness from her? In my honest opinion, I probably didn’t…

… A lot of things had been happening these past few days. We hadn’t been given the time to relax, let alone breathe, with everything we had gotten involved in. And sadly, the job decision was not the only ‘event flag’ I had gotten while on the island.

“… It’s almost time, huh?” I turned my head to my bed where a large paper had been spread out along the sheets. The paper the Kogei girl had given me had a message. Unfolded, it was much bigger than I thought. It was like a map I could spread out onto half of the king-sized bed. The message written on it wasn’t anything complicated, though. It was simple.

[Midnight.]

That was all it said, but it came accompanied with a drawing. As expected of a student from Kogei – even a quick sketch had a difficult to replicate quality to it. It was a depiction of the hot springs and the port city in the far distance. I certainly did not think I had to venture out into the hot springs or the city when the springs were closed and all students were prohibited from leaving hotel premises at night. I also doubted I’d be able to take a bus out into the city this late at night. Well, I already knew where to go. The message was simple – find the location where the sketch had been made from.

With my destination known and a half an hour until midnight, I had to get going. Even if the place was still in the inn, the building was ten times my size so it would still take some time to get there. I turned off the lights and closed the door of the room before I quietly pushed past Yae’s skirt and walked onto the TV table.

“Zzzzz… Ggnn…”

“Yae… Sorry, but I have to do this…”

… Sneaking out while Yae was asleep felt underhanded. I did not like doing things behind Yae’s back, especially because I knew I couldn’t lie if I was caught. Even so, I knew I had to go.

At the very least, being the smaller person in the Magnified room meant my footsteps were softer. My sounds as I descended the staircase bolted to the TV stand were drowned out by Yae’s breathing and snoring.

“… Too close…,” I whispered to myself when I got to the bottom. I realized Yae had moved her futon closer to the TV stand. She had rolled around in her sleep too, causing an arm as thick as a fallen tree to block my path. “… Maybe this is a sign to stay…”

My decision to head out, though, had already been made. The tatami muffled any noises I made so I did not have trouble walking up to Yae’s arm. Her head and arm were too close to the table and wall so there I was completely blocked in. If I wanted to head out, I had to get over her.

‘Just do it quickly and she won’t wake up,’ I thought to myself as checked how much noise my feet were making on the tatami. With a running start, I dashed towards the thinnest part of Yae’s arm – her wrist. I leapt over the human arm hurdle. I was not an athlete but all of the physical education classes paid off. I succeeded in hoping over Yae without brushing against her skin.

“Zzzzz….”

“… Phew…” I let out a breath of relief. Yae had been left none-the-wiser that I had just treated her like a track-and-field obstacle. She may have sounded like she had so much energy earlier, but she had been just as tired out as I had been today. She was sleeping like a log. I calmed down seeing her sleeping face that was turned towards me. I was sure she wouldn’t wake up.

With the tensest part done, I was able to head the rest of the way out to the normal sized door with ease. I opened the normal-sized door that resembled a mouse hole next it and headed out into the halls of the inn.

There were not many giant schoolgirls out because it was now curfew, but there were still Magnified hotel staff members working that I made sure to keep out of the way of. I did not want to get hit by the moving skyscrapers on wheels that were the towel carts. I stayed along the wall along a yellow marked pathway that also had painted arrows pointing to where the tram-system stops were. I did not take the system, though, because my destination was close enough.

Where was my destination? While it would have been difficult for me to figure out where in the inn would have a view of the hot springs and the city, there was one place I had already been to before that came to mind. The place where Yae and I had met Narumi-senpai and Takahashi had the same angle of the hot springs as the sketch – the footbaths.

…

………

Eventually, I made it outside to the hot spring veranda where, as expected, I saw a lone figure seated at the edge, gazing at the moonlit springs and distant city. She had a sketchbook in hand and a set of pencils beside her. I was hesitant, but the view of her from behind was nostalgic so I continued walking and approached her.

“… Oya oya? Trying to sneak around this late at night? You wouldn’t happen to be trying to sneak into the girls’ rooms, would you?” the girl giggled but did not turn her head. She maintained her focus on the landscape.

“With how long it took for me to walk all the way over here, the least you could do is greet me properly. You’re the one who told me to come here after all,” I put my hand on my hip and tried to sound assertive, but my nerves certainly did not maintain their calm. It wasn’t because she was over ten times my size but because of whom I was speaking to.

Sumire Yashiro – the girl who associated with the dangerous Kogei delinquent and the very same girl who Takahashi had encountered and was completely drained by – had obviously been the sender of the note.

Our middle school friend who moved away to study at a different high school, Sumire was the one Takahashi and I wanted to keep away from Yae and the only person who would send me a hand drawn note for a message. Whereas Yae was our quartet’s voice of reason, Sumire had always been the enabler whenever Takahashi and I butted heads over what we wanted to do. She was the type of person who enjoyed excitement and playing around… as long as she was only watching it from a safe distance. We all used to be best friends until she moved away.

After all of these years, there were things about her that hadn’t changed, but there were also things about her that I never knew either. And alone on this moonlit night, we properly met again.

“Oya? Sorry about that. You being so much smaller compared to me just made it impossible for me to resist saying that,” the art school girl finally put her sketchbook down and turned around. She spoke playfully at first, but nostalgia filled her tone of voice as she turned her gaze towards me and brushed her hair behind her hair with her left hand. “It’s been a long time since I’ve last observed you properly, hasn’t it, Touya? Ever since I knew you were here, I wanted to talk to you again.”

“Yeah, it’s been since middle school, Sumire,” I nodded. She had a cat-like smile on her face that never left her. I anxiously swayed back and forth in place, uncertain if I should get even closer or not. She looked at me the same way a cat would a mouse. Sumire’s eyes unnerved me with how they remained fixated on me no matter how much I moved. This was not new however. Even back then, Sumire’s love of observation was intense. Those piercing eyes of hers were what led to her choosing the path of an artist in the first place.

I did not have to move to get closer to her. Sumire moved instead, scooting her enormous body and displacing the cool night air out of the way and onto my body.

“Ufu~! You did well figuring out where to go. I may be on the Digital Arts track but my eye for depicting what I can see is still pretty good with a pen and paper. Did you know right away that it was me when you got that little scrap paper?”

“That schoolmate of yours said Oyasumi so strangely that I was sure it was a nickname for you,” I nodded, affirming her suspicions. ‘Oyasumi’… ‘Oya’ and ‘Sumi’… Sumire always had a habit of saying ‘Oya’ so it wasn’t hard to figure out.

“Oya? It was that easy? I typically pass messages along on behalf of girls like Mashiro-san, so she was just returning the favor. I was certain you’d show up in the Sakuragawa girls’ room at some point, and I was right,” Sumire laughed. “Wasn’t she pretty and quirky? I quite like her. She’s a delight to watch when she gets excited.”

It seemed after separating from our middle school group and moving away, Sumire was having a good time at Kogei. The Sumire I knew back in middle school never made many friends outside of our little circle. That’s why I was a little relieved to hear her talk about her schoolmates so light-heartedly. She had new friends. Whether she was treating them as friends and not as ‘viewing entertainment’ though was another thing entirely.

Pat! Pat!

Sumire slapped her palms onto her legs repeatedly and looked expectantly in my direction. Compared to me who was on the defensive, she was extremely forward and assertive. Despite us not speaking to each other in years, she spoke as though there was no emotional distance between us at all. “Well, come now. Hop on. I called you here so we could catch up. Don’t worry: I’m so big that you’ll fit right on my lap with plenty of room to spare.”

She physically removed any distance as well. She wanted me to be directly on her.

Pat! Pat!

“Climb on, Touya.” She gestured again by slapping her legs a few more times impatiently.

“… I can’t say no?” I was absolutely reluctant to agree.

“Not at all, unless you want me to move you myself… like this~” Sadly, Sumire knew I had little choice. She was only waiting for me to climb up on my own out of courtesy. She knew could easily force me onto her if she actually wanted to. To prove her point, she blocked my retreat route with her palm and began shoving me towards her until I was pressed against her hip… or more specifically, she began shifting her yukata-clad body so that she could feel me against her butt.

“Mfff?!”

“You feel quite nice there. If you don’t want to sit down on me, maybe we can do the reverse,” she mischievously suggested. Her hand tilted and turned, pressing different parts of my body from my legs to my torso and then to my head into the plush rear end.

“Mffpff?! Mfffphm! Mffmph!” I struggled to push my face away from the yukata fabric hugging Sumire’s posterior. Was she being serious? I hoped she was joking, but with the way she was readjusting her seating position and lifting her massive butt a literal meter up, I thought she was trying to pull me beneath her. I felt I was going to be consumed by the shadow of her butt.

“Just kidding~ Ehehe~!” Sumire let me go without actually pinning me underneath her. She pulled her hair behind hair her ear out of habit again before ‘apologizing’ to me. “Sorry, Touya, but that reaction was amazing. Even though you should know you can’t fight back against my fingers, you struggled as hard as you could to break away. I just had to see what you’d do when up against ‘big old’ me.”

Although she apologized, I knew she wasn’t serious. I backed away reflexively now that I was free. “Your sense of what’s fun is as distorted as always, Sumire.”

She did not deny it. “Of course it is. I’m not Observer Sumire for nothing, you know?”

Her smug boast of her own self-given nickname middle school made me wonder if she ever left the ‘chuunibyou’ phase of childish delusions. She wholeheartedly embraced it.

“Is it really ‘observing’ if you’re causing them to make those reactions?” I snidely pointed out.

Sumire put her finger to her lips as though she was pondering my question seriously. “I suppose I’m a bit more active than passive even though I prefer to just sit back and see the chaos unfold around me. But you’re one to talk, Touya. I’ve been listening to those health committee girls around town. It seems you’ve been quite the observer yourself.”

As much I prided myself as the health committee’s observer, I was not happy to be compared to Sumire in this sense. “It’s just my job. I’m only writing things down what I see so the others can understand how things are.”

“I’m jealous,” my old friend surprised me with her response. “Girls don’t get to be Reduced so I still haven’t gotten to see the perspective of you little guys.”

“… You want to be Reduced?”

“Well, not really. I’m quite content being the bigger person,” Sumire pushed herself off the wooden veranda so that she was standing in the hot springs down below. Even though her feet were now she was a few flights of stairs down, I was only able stare at her at her thighs if I looked straight ahead. I still had to look up at her. A smug smile formed on her face as pulled her yukata even higher up that it already had been earlier when she was putting her feet in the water.

“H-Hey, what are you doing?” I stuttered. Sumire had been wearing the yukata with a loose sash so it was easier for her to raise it over the knees and even above me. She purposefully stopped just before I’d be able see her underwear.

“Reduction and Magnification are so interesting because everyone’s reactions are so different when there’s such a huge size difference from the norm,” she continued, her smug smile widening even more now that she had seen me flustered. “It’s just a shame I’m only able to see half of it because of some dumb law. I’d like to see up girls’ skirts too and see how they react from below.”

“You want to what?” I did my best to look away as Sumire wiggled her hips, trying to force me to look up. “You’re more of a pervert than I remember.”

“You sure have a lot of guts calling a girl a pervert when I’m big enough to do something like this to you,” the girl winked and flapped her yukata even more forcefully. The cloth whipped across the air, generating a gust of wind that forced me to narrow my eyes. “How do you like that? I’ll blow you down with just a panty flash.”

“I stand by my statement: you’re a pervert, Sumire.”

“Ufufu~ So firm. I really do love you for those brave reactions of yours, Touya.” she laughed. “You know that I’ve always been this way. It’s just that my eyes opened after seeing how fun Alteration is. I can force plenty more reactions out of people without having to take a single step.”

Fun, she said… While she had made a point about the laws, she spoke of Alteration like it was just another way to play around. Ookojima Port had shown that size changing could be a part of everyday life, but I didn’t know of any public place that would treat it as a form of entertainment. Maybe some private businesses had made use of it, but anything under the government’s regulations had too many concerns about safety.

“Sumire, you and your friends aren’t abusing your school’s Alteration technology, are you? You and that other girl were talking about stomping on a guy so casually in the bath earlier.”

“I’m not, specifically. And, Reina-chan is just Reina-chan. That’s just how she is,” Sumire knew who was I talking about but she dismissed my question quickly. “You don’t have to worry about her. She’s a nice girl. I love her because she makes such fun faces when I make her mad.”

“So even people your size are targets for you…”

“You say that like I simply toy with people smaller than me, Touya,” Sumire pretended to take offence while maintaining her cat-like smile. “I’m an equal opportunity girl. Why else would I have groped Aoi in the middle of the road today?”

I stumbled. She what? No wonder Takahashi had been so drained after their encounter.

“G-groped?”

“Her shrieks were as fun as ever. And then she almost stepped in front of a few cars and she panicked and concerned,” Sumire giggled.

“Sumire!” I shouted. “That’s not something to laugh about. She could have caused a car accident.”

“Oh? You sound quite angry, Touya,” Sumire stopped giggling because I was being serious. “I understand. I suppose I was a bit reckless there. There are regular sized people all around me, so I should have been more cautious. I may have forgotten they were people at that moment.”

Sumire’s words concerned me. “How do you forget that they’re people?”

“Well, of course that’s because I’m a giant right now. If you were Reduced and I were normal sized, you’d be no more than a little doll to me,” Sumire answered matter-of-factly, putting her hand on her head and then holding it over me to make it clear how many stories taller she was than me. “Size is relative after all. It is important to remember the reality of our scales.”

“I think it’s you who needs to learn about that reality.” There was no doubt in my mind that people like Sumire were the reason why Magnification Week was necessary. Kogei’s Reduction Dormitory system seemed to have made it easy for all of the girls at that school to treat the size difference so lightly. She had to be shown that she couldn’t play around at her size.

“Ufufu~,” Sumire giggled but calmed down after hearing seeing my response. She did not find my reaction any fun at all so she turned her head towards the distant city lights instead. “… That face you’re making isn’t any interesting at all. You misunderstand, Touya. I’m just saying things the way I see it. You don’t have to worry about me doing something wrong. I wouldn’t be fooling around with any other boy than you.”

“You’re just saying that,” I wanted to believe her but at that moment, I did not. “Those guys at Kogei probably get messed with by you, don’t they?”

“Well, they aren’t as assertive as you Sakuragawa boys seem to be…” Sumire put her hand over her mouth before she spoke, trying to conceal her mouth as she looked up at the moon. I thought she was hiding her smile, but she had been fine without hiding it the entire time before. “Kogei’s an interesting place, Touya. If you saw it for yourself, then you’d understand.”

Sumire did not give me a clear response to my question, but from her vagueness, it sounded like she had been.

Because she continued to look upwards, I turned my head skywards to match Sumire and was swiftly drawn to the moon when it became blocked by the clouds. The veranda darkened now that its light was gone.

“Aww, it is getting late. I’m sorry, I was having too much fun playing with you that we hardly even got to talk,” Sumire realized as she took one foot out of the water. She had no trouble getting back up onto the veranda from the footbath. Her wet feet landed right next to me as she got out, forcing me to jump backwards several times to keep out of her way. Upon seeing that, Sumire’s default cat-like smile returned. “There’s still so much more I want to speak to you about, but I guess we should be heading back before we get caught. It sure was fun talking to you again, Touya.”

I wish I could have said the same but just chatting with Sumire had tired me out.

“About tomorrow, I’ll go find you,” Sumire decided tucked her sketchbook and pencils under her arm. “I’m sure you and Aoi have been racking your brains about how to deal with me all day, haven’t you?”

“I-” I froze. She knew.

“Did you think I wouldn’t realize?” Sumire giggled. It wasn’t the happy, mischievous type of laughter she had before but a more melancholic one. “I didn’t really leave on the best terms with you all when I had to move, did I? Let’s catch up – you, me, and Aoi since we’re all here.”

After saying those words, Sumire waved at me and walked off, her city-block sized stride taking her out of my view in mere seconds as though nobody had ever been outside. I was left alone to withdraw back to my room, my thoughts a mess once again after I thought I had sorted them out earlier.

That Sumire... She was having too much fun. Alteration made her love of observing people even stronger because she could see so many things happen that would never occur at normal size. That desire of hers to witness people reacting to different situations was what caused the cram school incident to happen in the first place…

That unspeakable incident… I was somewhat grateful that, in spite of all that we talked about, we never mentioned Yae at all. Was it because she hadn’t run into Yae that she thought Yae wasn’t with us? It was true that Sakuragawa only took one second year class at a time.

“Maybe if we don’t bring up her up, she won’t end up meeting her.” I tried to remain hopeful. That was the best course of action I believed I needed to discuss with Takahashi about. ‘… Then, nobody will get hurt.’

I was able to head back to my room before one o’ clock. Slowly stepping inside, I was thankful to see that Yae had rolled around in her sleep so that she was no longer blocking the way to the TV table. She was peacefully snoring, completely unaware of the fact that I had been sneaking around under her notice.

‘Yae…,’ I clenched my fist as I looked down at her sleeping face from the top of the TV table when I finished climbing up the stairs. Yae had already done so much for me by being patient with my choices. For her sake, I did not want us to go through anything similar to what happened at that cram school ever happen again. ‘You don’t need to know about any of this.’

That was what I thought. That was what I believed. I headed back to my room to rest up as much as I could. I knew tomorrow would be one hell of a day.