Web of light. Part 1-7. part 26

But the text would really be extremely, extremely entertaining. Judging by the letters, the manual was issued in a small printing house — even the print run was not specified, nevertheless it had a clear "chipboard" stamp on the title page and, as follows from the preface, it was intended for neither "combat groups and detachments within law enforcement units." Yeah, and here's the author: last name... Yakoin?! Ha! Surprise! I wonder if Je's training manual was simply stolen, or is it just a clan of detectives making them "for general needs"? Well, okay, the main thing was that it was the language of presentation. The author is a genius! And obviously he pulled a lot of straps in these "combat troops", otherwise he would not have been able to write a tutorial... No, not for morons! Morons are geniuses, even a garden snail would understand the text if snails could read Japanese. The author chewed up the principles of the ritual and its features so much that even a complete layman, even an oligophrenic, could understand and remember it against his own will! Aerobatics! Well, the comments also "burned":

"The Mystical House cannot be used as a field camping toilet! And I will personally find the smart guy who "guessed" and [unprintable]."

As a result, my mood improved noticeably at the end of the trip, my worries more or less subsided, and I mostly wanted to eat and sleep. That's the only reason I didn't jump when I found a cheerful group of Rinko, Mizuchi, and Hawk-Nose in my living room... And Shimomura Yu! The girls and the spirits were enthusiastically watching some kind of talk show on TV, completely occupying the sofa, crunching crackers (it looked like Shizuka was cooking), drinking homemade lemonade (Shizuka, you're the perfect hostess!) and they enjoyed life in every possible way. Seeing me, the warm group turned off the sound, and, looking at me through the eyes of a Shrek cat, timidly greeted me. Only the snake stood out from the general background — judging by her face, she could barely restrain herself from laughing. Damn it!

I went over, commandeered a large bowl of cookies, a glass of drink, and flopped into an armchair. Come on, tell me what's going on.

Interlude 18. In the city. Shimomuro Yu

When your father is an aircraft engineer, this can create sudden difficulties, for example, dad may call and ask you to stop by after school and buy a strictly defined varnish in a strictly defined store. Because he's at work, and he needs to "comerighttomorrow." Yu, in principle, was quite used to it, especially since such situations occurred relatively rarely — once every two or three months. Checking the letter her father had sent her on the phone, she boarded the bus and, looking at the landscape passing by the window, began once again to go over all the recent events in her memory. Magic... Yu used to just get carried away by this word, as soon as someone said it out loud or read another charming description of miracles in another book. Then she grew out of good children's fairy tales and started reading everything: a look at magic from different authors... To put it mildly, it was ambiguous: from "we can do everything with this" to "any magic is a painful agony on the way to death." And descriptions of various magical creatures... like the "native" Japanese yokai or European spirits and undead... Br-r! But Shimomuro read anyway— after she learned about one side of something, she wanted to study the subject or phenomenon from all sides... And mom laughed loudly, as soon as her daughter, once again, came across the description of a "slimming belt" or "super-resistant lipstick," she immediately began to ask "uncomfortable" questions, like: "If it doesn't wash off with water, then what should I wash it off with? With acetone?!". Mom saw her daughter's cute "husband's oddities", not suspecting how many times these "cute oddities" saved her future husband's life, forcing technicians to check and replace fuel pumps for the tenth time, break off pieces of skin in unexpected places for laboratory research and check whether the cockpit hood opens after the He's going to be assaulted with a gloved fist... and if with a mallet?

In general, the useful tendency absorbed from a young age to consider any object or phenomenon from all sides almost discouraged the young Yu from interest in the "beauty of miracles", but then, unfortunately, the first volume of "Harry Potter" fell into her hands. The almost forgotten feeling of "magic" has returned, no matter what you say, and the talent of the writer greatly influences the perception of the description by readers. For several years, thinking about his hobby caused Shimomura only a warm feeling in his chest and positive emotions. And so, the first real encounter with the subject of a hobby suddenly awakened a persistent feeling that "maybe I don't need it?" And there was a reason.

Yu didn't really remember what happened in the Magic Club room back then, and getting the camera footage from Hiroe when she didn't want to give it... After five minutes of conversation, Yu walked away from the short-haired bitch, and all her self-control was barely enough not to run headlong: Kaname is just terrible! At the same time, she managed to say neither yes nor no to the question "did you see what I saw?". Kami, yes Shimomura will now bypass this one... You can't find an epithet... Ten meters away!

The conversation with Chidori's classmate Shizuka also ended in nothing: "Does magic exist?" "What do you think?" "I think so," "Then what's the question?","I want to know what I saw," "If you think you saw magic, then you saw it, you know!" Shizuka had a very utilitarian view of many subjects, extremely materialistic, if you can use such a term when talking to ... well, probably, after all, a girlfriend comes up on the subject of the supernatural. Useful — useless, dangerous — not dangerous. That's it! And in response to the reasoning "I wonder how it works," the girl with the invariable braid, braided with blue ribbons, chuckled, looked at Yu strangely and said:

"I recently discovered that if you make assumptions about the workings of even the simplest things, like the earth under your feet and the sky above your head, you can make mistakes no less than in complex ones."

And then she refused to "pound water in a mortar."

There was still a third participant in the events, Kuzaki Rinko from a parallel class, whom Yu decided to "catch" without witnesses when she went to the Kendo club. And today she succeeded.

"To be honest, I didn't really understand what it was. And I don't want to understand. I don't really understand why you need all that "mysticism" if you can just live normally," Kuzaki replied with some annoyance.

And then it's a bummer.

* * *

..The store was located on the territory of a huge paint and varnish warehouse, which, in turn, turned out to be on the territory of the river port. Warehouses, containers, a continuous stream of trucks, movers and people in overalls scurrying back and forth. What can I say, it's good that there was a separate free "minibus" running through the warehouses, otherwise Yu would only have been looking for the store there for an hour. The store, by the way, was also not just a store, but a sample collection point for checking purchases before a wholesale shipment of hundreds of cans or dozens of tank trucks. I still had to pay for the Shimomuro sample, but judging by the invoice, it was for delivery to the city.

The minibus took Yu back to the main gate of the warehouse terminal. Phew! Yu went to the bus stop and was displeased to see that the bus she needed would arrive only in 45 minutes. Maybe on the crossbar? Shimomura opened her phone, found a suitable option, and boarded a nearby bus... in order to jump up on the seat in just two minutes: She could have sworn that in the narrow passage between the warehouse fences she caught a glimpse of a familiar school uniform and a familiar braid with blue ribbons.

Damn reflexes! Before the situation reached the girl's consciousness, she had already jumped out of the bus at the bus stop, and it was gone. The curiosity that she so successfully inherited from her mother, combined with a certain amount of adventurism, sometimes pushed Yu to completely reckless actions. And if common sense kept her safe from something dangerous, then in potentially safe situations, her impulsive reaction often prevailed. The horror! Is she going to keep an eye on Shizuka? No, no, that's crazy... but then, it turns out, she jumped out of the bus in vain. And even at a completely empty bus stop, from where the terminal workers leave in the evening to return in the morning. Besides, she's here on business, and Shizuka lives somewhere near the school, so she has to go back alone too. But it's more fun together... And I wonder what she's doing here. And even if she lingered for a long time, she would not find a friend in this tangle of alleys and fences.

Walking through the warehouses turned out to be quite unpleasant: narrow one-way alleys in the canyons of fences, sidewalks are not everywhere, huge steel monsters of trucks with trailers, containers... And the classmate seemed to have disappeared through the ground. And where to look for her now, around what bend? And there's no one to ask... although a group of road workers is working here, blocking the road perpendicular to the alley with red and orange fences, they have dug a decent hole and are doing something. There's nothing to do, you'll have to ask them...

In her observations, Shimomuro Yu did not take into account the fact that a blocked section of road in warehouses, where there is almost no free space, creates a significant distortion in the logistics of cargo movement. And the delivery time for some goods is half an hour around the city, and you can do whatever you want, driver. Therefore, a twenty-ton truck with a trailer, suddenly "surfaced" from around a nearby bend, was traveling at a speed of under forty kilometers per hour and clearly did not have time to stop. Then, for Yu, everything merged into a single blurred strip: the cabin of a heavy truck approaching in a desperate creak and whistle of pneumatic brakes, a guy in a construction helmet jumping over the fence and the freezing fear of imminent death... but, contrary to all the laws of physics and inertia, the worker managed to be the first. A blow to the stomach, when he intercepted Yu's body by the middle, knocked all the air out of the girl's lungs, the inertia from the jerk tore off her glasses, but Shimomura miraculously held the branded bag with the cherished bottle in her hand... It just wouldn't let go. The problem was that there was almost no gap between the fence and the side of the truck — one-way traffic and the sidewalk on the other side, but an unexpected savior... he just pushed off the asphalt and took off like a bird to a four-meter height. Yu remained hanging on his arm, blinking absurdly and gasping for air with an unruly mouth, while the driver of the transport stopped after a dozen meters and quarreled with the "fucking acrobat" — however, not for long, just a couple of phrases were exchanged, the loser driver perfectly understood what problems he had just been saved from. However, the Hawk-nosed man, and it was him, also had no time to explain himself to the police, and almost no one saw a fraction of the supernatural forces manifested anyway. The truck started moving, and the spirit easily jumped down from the support pole right into the middle of the road. He put Yu, who was still dazed, on the asphalt, picked up the glasses that had survived the whole mess, and put them on her nose.... and he swore with gusto! Blood trickled down the girl's left leg from long shallow cuts in several thin rivulets: barbed wire coils ran along the top of the fence.

When Shimomura was able to think more or less normally after a few minutes, her leg had already been treated and wrapped with bandages along its entire length. And they even gave me painkillers — construction crews in Japan have pretty strict requirements for having a first-aid kit at the work site, safety precautions, after all. Yu found herself sitting on a concrete block, squatting in front of her... A human?.. and he looked anxiously at her face.

"You're a spirit, aren't you?" Yu asked, still "out of her mind," and the Hawk-nosed Man nodded dejectedly. Well, what was it worth for a girl to fall into a stupor and not remember anything? And now it was kind of stupid to deny it.

"What's your name?" Yu asked, and when she heard the "passport" name "Shinji" in response, she looked at her rescuer skeptically. A uniform, a walkie-talkie, a traffic controller's baton in his belt... Suddenly, she found it very funny! The adrenaline rush of the surf washed away the timid obstacles of common sense, and Yu burst out laughing a little hysterically, to the point of tears.

"You know," she laughed with difficulty and forced a smile at the spirit, "I was expecting something more pretentious. For example," she looked at the man once more and giggled again, "Wearing a Yellow Helmet!"