Panty and Stocking: Backlace to School

Chapter 4

Panty and Stalking quickly formed their basketball team. Aside from themselves, they had the blue-haired boy who had thrown down the challenge and two members of the school's actual basketball team, Mike and Larry. The other students had taken to the bleachers to cheer them on.

Arrayed before them were the rabbit mascot and several manifestations, barely humanoid and all black with weird mystical red patterns across their bodies. They were an intimidating sight for any human to be up against.

The jump ball was between Panty and the rabbit who loomed far taller than her. Yet even at this disadvantage, she crouched down and looked at him with confidence. She gave a confident grin while the rabbit looked down on her with arrogant disdain. The clash of their egos could almost be envisioned as a spark between them.

A student who had haplessly been assigned the role of referee approached with the ball and threw it up into the air. Both Panty and the Rabbit leaped for the ball while the forwards on both teams rushed each other. Unfortunately, the rabbit was able to leap far faster than Panty and managed to spike the ball over her head. The ball was quickly retrieved by one of the ghost entities that moved in perfectly as they shared one mind.

The blue-haired boy moved in to intercept the shadow player but hardly even caused it to pause on its way to the basket and an easy jump shot scoring two points for the ghost team.

Panty's team quickly called a time-out and regrouped. She glared at the blue-haired boy with anger, "You suck at this!" she exclaimed.

The boy shook his head and crossed his arms defensively. "I never said I was good at basketball—I never play it."

Panty grew in anger and shouted at him, "Then why did you challenge him to a basketball game?!" She grabbed him by the collar and shook him with fury.

Unable to fight back against the angel, the boy tried to explain, "Because he is a basketball coach who never won a game."

Panty stopped shaking the boy and looked at him questioningly.

The boy blinked a few times in confusion before slowly trying to explain, "Uh—his regret. The reason he became a ghost... it was because the students here never won."

Panty tilted her head to the side with bewilderment as though the boy was speaking a foreign language. She turned and looked to Stocking asking, "What is he talking about?"

Stocking gave a disappointed sigh. "It sounds familiar, but—" She seemed almost as lost by the concept as her sister.

The boy looked utterly dumbfounded. "The 'unfinished business'—the whole reason human souls become ghosts..."

Both Panty and Stocking exchanged another glance before looking back at the boy and simply shrugging.

The boy became ever more insistent and threw his hands out to the sides in exasperation, "Hold on! You two are the premiere ghost hunters in the whole world and this is like—the very first thing anyone learns about ghosts..."

Panty closed her eyes and brought her hands up behind her head with a dismayed groan. "And here I was thinking you were cool—but you're just another geek boy." She opened one eye and brought a hand down to waggle a finger at him, "It isn't that complicated. I wait for a big monster to appear and then I shoot it."

Stocking nodded in agreement, pointing at the boy as she added, "You are overthinking this."

The boy took a deep breath before looking up and groaning, "No wonder things always turn out the way they do..." He then looked back, gathering his confidence to face the Anarchy sisters as he explained fiercely, "He wouldn't have accepted a challenge to a game of Ultra Kombat Tag-Team Arena VI, just basketball!"