Sarah observed that in that case she could always ask Joe to accompany her instead.
Yashiro accompanied her. He was, on reflection, worried about what would happen to him if anything happened to Sarah.
The next day she injected herself with E3 and took the lead towards the warehouse, having first handed over the two doses she had promised him. Her power, she explained on the way, was the ability to know where threats were — enemies, traps, anything that intended harm — and she could hold as many as two hundred of them in her head at once.
Yashiro was impressed by that, and even more impressed by her flat refusal to say anything further about it.
Unlike Aki and Yukina, once they were inside the warehouse the two of them stayed on high alert. They found nothing on the upper floors, and Yashiro argued that Sarah could write up what she had found and call it a day. Sarah thought it would be better to find the transceiver, which meant going downstairs.
Yashiro argued they would be extremely lucky to find it, particularly as he was not willing to spend any E3 on the attempt. Sarah insisted on going down anyway, even though she could not sense a single enemy below them, and Yashiro decided that the young lady could stand a test of courage.
After further inspection they came into a room full of caged animals. Yashiro found the lights and turned them on, and the cages turned out to hold police dogs — Kumi the Shiba among them — and a great many other animals besides.
He let the dog out, and Kumi led the two of them straight to a closet. Yashiro opened it and found the panda that had recently been stolen from the zoo, which had been twisted into something horrific.
Before either of them could deal with that, they were attacked by a child, a boy called Yusuke, whom they reasonably enough did not take very seriously.
Then Sarah registered something else approaching — something she identified as a dark lord. Yashiro injected himself with E3 and told her to make sure she did not eliminate the incoming enemy if they also turned out to be a child.
This was not out of any awakened conscience. It was the academy regulations, which suspended a student's brave activities for two weeks if they eliminated an opponent under the age of fifteen, no matter what the circumstances had been.
While they were braced for it, the opponent who came through the door turned out to be Wedge — who freaked out at the sight of Yashiro badly enough that he grabbed Yusuke and fled the room.
The braves did not waste any time going after him. Wedge tried to lose them and could not; the two of them stayed on him through the building, with Yashiro in particular set on eliminating him this time. In what looked like the back rooms, Wedge finally remembered to stop and ask Yashiro whether he had changed his mind about joining them.
He had not. Wedge prepared for battle, and while he did, he revealed what all of this had been for: his master had tasked him with kidnapping animals in order to build a loyal army out of them. A huge variety of animals. Including the panda — which, behind them, was quietly waking up.
The operation had taken far longer than expected, so Wedge had already decided to abandon the facility. He simply intended to conclude his business with Yashiro first. To make matters worse, Sarah caught something coming in from above, and it was the panda.
Wedge fled the scene. Yashiro had already finished dealing with the threat of the man's remote hands, which left him with the problem of how to finish off a chimera, and that looked like a very tall order. He advised Sarah to back off.
Sarah instead worked out that the chimera was much weaker than it looked, and went in to slay it, and Yashiro delivered the killing blow.
Three days later, Yashiro learned from Joe, who was scrolling through the news, about the aftermath of the rescue operation, in which Sarah had taken the credit. Joe thought the demon king might send more people after Yashiro over it. Yashiro was indifferent.
Eventually Sarah came in and paid him the promised amount, which delighted him, right up until Ed took the vast majority of it against what was owed on his tab, in the manner of a tax collector, leaving Yashiro with effectively nothing. Frustrated by this turn of events, he took his anger out on Sarah, who went outside as requested and, before she did, thanked him for letting her handle the situation herself.
Elsewhere, Ishino was dealing with a thug of his own. He got severely injured in the process, and he eliminated the thug in the end. He made certain his pursuers were off his back, but he could not afford to rest, because one of Arthur Pendragon's maids came out of the dark to find him. Her name was Kay, and she had a request on behalf of her lord: that Ishino work alongside five of their men to take down a dark lord — the same dark lord Ishino himself had been after for quite a while already. The bounty would be split between all five of them, and he would be supplied with as much E3 as he wanted.
Ishino turned the offer down. As a freelancer, he was free to choose whatever jobs he liked. Unable to convince him against his will, Kay decided to respect his decision, and disappeared as quickly as she had come.
A few days later, Yashiro kept coming back to his texts with Ishino, and from there to how traumatic this line of work could be. It was to forget the things they went through that he and the rest of them kept turning up at Ed's bar in the first place.
Lost in thought, he instinctively looted a dead brave he passed, noticed the photograph of the man's daughter in among his things, and was disappointed to find only about eight thousand yen on him.
When he got to the bar, Yashiro was surprised to find Malta sitting there, six months since the last time the two of them had met. Unfortunately for Malta, he was not going to see Joe or Ishino tonight — the former was still working, and the latter had been missing for a few days.
To Yashiro's surprise, the reason Malta had dropped out of sight lately was that he had got himself a job with a company willing to make contract employees out of people like him. What sort of job? Standing in a long line to buy rare items that the company wanted.
Just as Yashiro was thinking his old friend had genuinely escaped the brave business, Malta revealed that he had been fired — after gouging his boss's eyes out and robbing his place.
Why? Because the boss had asked him to sell some gaming hardware to a poor old lady.
Once they had laughed that off, Malta mentioned the real reason he had come: he wanted to see if there was a buyer for his ticket to see King Rob in Japan.
This intrigued Yashiro enormously. He wanted that ticket. To men like Yashiro and Malta, King Rob was a superhuman.
His hopes and dreams were dashed when he heard the price. Thirty thousand. Worse, Malta made it clear that he would sell it to Joe or Ishino instead if Yashiro could not afford it, that the money had to be in his hand right now, and that if Yashiro needed a gig in order to pay for it, now would be an excellent time to go and find one.
Fortunately for him, the three schoolgirls he did not like were already out looking for him.
Their task this time was helping them prepare for their upcoming swordplay test, which would determine whether they stayed at the academy or left it with nothing. Yashiro rejected Aki's approach to asking him entirely, and then relented to Sarah's, because she promised she would not tell anyone he had helped them — particularly not her father, who was watching for her downfall.
Seeing how determined they were to hire him, Yashiro argued that they could not possibly afford him, and was immediately proven wrong when Aki produced a large sum of money in her hand. Left with no other option, he named a price considerably higher than the one he actually needed, and the girls agreed to it. Sarah gave him fifty thousand in advance and promised the rest later.