A few days later, Yashiro established that he was still broke, and decided the blame for this lay entirely with Yukina. His biggest concern now was finding a gig before the end of the month, so that he could afford the basic and unavoidable business of staying alive. He briefly contemplated selling off the extra E3 doses he was holding, and then contemplated taking a job for some dark lord, both of which were illegal.
He was still lost in that when a message came through, and he decided to make for Ed's bar.
He was not pleased by what he found there. Aki was sitting at the table, happy as anything, next to his four-eyed friend. When Yashiro asked her what exactly she was doing in his bar, it was Ishino who admitted that he had invited her.
Given how thick Aki's skull was, Yashiro concluded that the best available approach was to ignore her entirely, and it was in the course of ignoring her that he learned Ishino had a job for her — one connected to her last encounter with Amber Thorns.
To his surprise, Aki had already accepted it, on the grounds that her ability to read people's thoughts was her greatest asset.
Seeing that Yashiro refused to get involved with any of it, Ishino began to wonder aloud whether Yashiro had been losing his edge ever since Malta stopped coming around. Ishino had a job of his own to get to later. Aki insisted on being told who Malta was and refused to leave until someone told her. And Ed, from behind the counter, was now calling Yashiro noisier than his own disciple.
Yashiro decided to leave the bar — but not before Ishino asked him to serve as Aki's bodyguard during the investigation.
He refused. Then he heard the figure: a hundred and fifteen thousand yen. His heart changed instantly. It helped that he was in debt to Ishino for that exact amount, which would at least make them even.
When he tried, out of habit, to reject the offer anyway, Ishino reminded him of a number of felonies he had committed, and Yashiro took the job against his will. In casual clothes, too. Aki thanked him for coming, indifferent though he was, and offered an opinion of his disguise outfit that could have been sold to a television programme. Yashiro thought it best to proceed with the mission regardless.
Before long, Aki pointed him at a club, and Yashiro remembered a report Ishino had given him about the place taking delivery of E3 — though Ishino had flatly refused to tell him what question Aki would be asking there later on.
To his surprise, Aki injected herself with E3 on the spot. It increased her effectiveness at identifying culprits in public places, which made sense to Yashiro.
In only a matter of time, the two of them believed they had found their targets. What Yashiro had not expected was how quickly Aki became uncomfortable — her ability proved close to useless in a crowded room, with too many minds pressing in from every direction at once.
A few days later, Yashiro was playing cards with Ed, to whom he lost as always, and then turned to the television instead of doing anything productive with his afternoon. He was still following the case of the missing panda.
Someone, allegedly, had stolen a panda out of the zoo. Worse, the security camera footage had failed to confirm the removal at all, which implied the work of an ether perception user. Yashiro was still turning over the question of why a person would steal a panda when he was taken aback by Sarah walking into the bar with a personal request for him, and dismissed her.
Unsurprisingly, Sarah stayed.
Like both her comrades, she had come to ask for help. She was a second-year student, and that meant she had to fulfil a period of public service — which in this academy meant searching for missing people in notoriously dangerous areas, or eliminating dangerous monsters. To make any of it count, Sarah needed either a teacher or an outside professional brave to oversee her.
The academy's teachers had all refused. None of them wanted to be connected to her family ties, and her father had been against the idea of her becoming a brave in the first place. That was not the point for Sarah. What she cared about was passing this assignment, to prove something to the school.
She added that the professional brave who took part would be paid by the academy in two doses of E3, which Yashiro found disappointing.
Sometimes, Sarah went on, the client attached to the job paid a separate fee, as was the case here. The client was the Metropolitan Police. Four police dogs had been targeted for kidnapping. Three of them had been recovered. The Shiba was still gone. Thankfully, the tracking device on the Shiba's collar put him somewhere very dangerous, in a place where there was likely a stray dark lord.
Her task was simple. Sarah only had to check the place and write a report. But she also believed that going as far as recovering Kumi the Shiba — or even just his collar — would get them a hundred thousand yen as a bonus.
Yashiro gave it some thought and refused the mission, on the grounds that he, like most professional braves, could find better paying jobs that did not require anything like that much risk.