The Story of the Seven

CHAPTER 3 - So Maybe He Isn't Loony After All?

You know, time does fly all to quickly. I was just dosing off, when abruptly jolted wide-awake by my too-friendly neighbor.

"Wuh!?"

"Man, wake up already. It's 7:00 in the morning. Didn't you promise that you were coming with me to the recruitment center?"

With a bang and a clatter, I shot up to my feet.

It's already 7:00 in the morning?

Last time I checked, it was still 11:00 at night!

I hastily put on my clothes and followed Toukichi out of the hospital.

I can check out with the doctor to get officially discharged later.

With those thoughts in mind, I hustled as I followed Toukichi as we got onto the subway and headed off toward the "recruitment center".

We had to run a little to make it into the train on time, especially since we had to run past the first two women-only cars.

"Was I always this out of shape, Toukichi? We barely ran around 100m, and I feel winded already 🥵"

"Don't ask me, I met you at the hospital. But true, I used to be much more fit than this."

"Maybe if there weren't the women-only cars, we could've more leisurely gone on the train without getting tired."

"Don't say that; the women-only cars are there to protect women, so it's a necessity. Got it?"

"Oh, right, sorry."

I mentally scolded myself for carelessly blurting out such an inconsiderate phrase.

"You know, kid, you got to be careful about what you say. Recently there's an increase in radical men's rights activists, which is a sure bad sign. You don't want to be grouped together with those bumbling fools."

"That really is true. Men have such a privilege in society nowadays; now we must work to make sure that both women and men have an equal amount of privilege."

As we were seriously discussing about the importance of recognizing equality between the genders, we arrived at a rusty-looking station.

"This station's certainly seen better days."

"This station's in this sorry state due to government negligence, that's all."

We walked out onto a lonely-looking pavement, then walked through an alleyway. As I was getting spooked by the lack of a single soul in sight, we reached the end of the alleyway.

Past that was ...

"!!!!!!😲"

"I was also surprised when I came to this place, too."

"Am I dreaming?"

"No, welcome to the slums."

Slums.

A dirty place full of poor people scurrying around for food, dilapidated buildings with graffiti everywhere, trash strewn on the streets.

That was my image of the slums.

Until now.

The sight I see now made me regret of my prejudice, made me think that I was naïve for mistaking stereotypes as truth.

What I saw was a nice residential/commercial district.

On one side of the street was a two-story building, the first floor a café; the second floor a bar. Further down the same side of the street was a small tavern and inn, with a sign reading,