Episode 18

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This is the worst, Kirokugakari was ready to swear it.
She was hysterical.
She was outside of the office, and her people were in danger, and she had no idea what to do. And she needed to write.
Holy hell how she needed to write and she couldn't. She saw so much right now, she couldn't make out a single character. There was just so much, she couldn't extract any of it. Her hand wanted to move but didn't. It was torture.

This stress was torture.

Fukuzawa and Ranpo were both staring at the monitors, Akiko was doing whatever, it didn't really matter.
Kenji was pretty preoccupied with testing Junko's counting abilities, for the past hour he's been throwing rice on the floor, telling her to count the grains, and she answered correctly every single time. Such was her clarity when she wasn't taking anything. But that clarity came at a cost that had Kirokugakari very worried. She didn't want anything bad to happen, obviously, but a part of her silently prayed someone would show up to distract them all soon. For now, Junko looked fine. But she always 'looked fine'. The difficult part was telling when she's actually horribly not-fine.

"President, it may be time to send out my apprentice." Ranpo said suddenly, Kirokugakari jumped in surprise.
"The enemy finally arrived? How many?" Fukuzawa asked.
"Just one."

"Guess I'm up

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"Guess I'm up." Junko collected the exactly 107 grains of rice from the floor, put them back in Kenji's burlap bag and simply walked off.
"Be careful out there, Jun-chan!" Kenji waved at her, she waved back without a word.

"Be safe, you stupid idiot." Kirokugakari mumbled.

•••••

Junko examined the man that stood there calmly and observed that he was wearing gloves. That put her mind slightly at ease. Still, it was quite a bold move to come there on his own. He bypassed all the traps the agency has laid out, tampered with most of the surveillance cameras, and now he looked pretty full of himself.

"Just one person? I'm being belittled." Chuuya smirked slyly, eyeing the girl that just stepped before him.

"M-my apologies, I'm the only one around at the moment..." she lowered her head apologetically.

Same height as him, blonde hair, gorgeous eyes...
"Hey, you're Dazai's girl!" Chuuya suddenly realised who she was.
"Uh... excuse me?" she tilted her head, confused.
"Heard about you, your ability... you make concrete, don't you?"
"I... suppose so..."
"Had a subordinate with that ability."
"Tell him I said hi."
"Oh, he's dead." a wicked grin spread all over Chuuya's face, "but you already knew that, didn't you."

The atmosphere became even more intense. Junko started getting a little more dizzy, too.

"How do you figure?" she asked in a low voice.
"Well, you know, seeing as you were there." he said casually, waving a hand in the air, "or did you forget you used to be our property, two timer?"
"I-uh-sorry, two timer?" she stuttered, moving past the trigger he just mentioned.

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