Memorial

Sumire and Lieutenant Takahiro Washio, a man who was about fifty-one years of age and had eleven years in the fire brigade, crawled into the burn building right behind Hideaki, with Tomoko feeding in hose right behind them. “It’s right in there,” Hideaki told them as he pointed to the next burn room and then stood to the side. “Go in there and get it!”

Sumire could, of course, barely see where she was due to the intense smoke. She could also feel the heat within the building as she inched closer to the fire. Takahiro asked her, “Suwabe, are you alright?”

“Yeah,” she assured him as they got to the opened door to the room and began to crawl in. The fire was slightly more intense than the one that Rumiko had dealt with. “Hit it right now?!”

“Yeah! Open up on the nozzle!”

Sumire did as ordered and pulled back the bale on her nozzle, spraying into the room and darkening down the fire, which immediately reduced everyone’s visibility to zero due to the steam from her putting out the fire. Sumire inched closer as she continued to flow water, allowing Takahiro to move up and Tomoko to move into the room to search for a window and open it for ventilation. She told Takahiro, “Lieutenant, do you see anything else?”

“Keep spraying it! It’s not out yet!” Takahiro told Tomoko as she crawled into the room, “Break the first window you find to vent the smoke!”

“Got it,” she replied as she put her left hand on the wall and searched around for a fake window to open.

In Sumire’s mind, she thought about her past and how she got the scars on her face that had defined her for so long. To her, being able to put out a fire was cathartic and satisfying. “So this is how they felt when my house burned all those years ago,” she thought to herself. “If not for them, I’d be dead…”

Tomoko then opened up a fake window to the outside, telling Takahiro, “I opened up a window!”

“Good,” he replied. He then patted Sumire on the shoulder and told her, “Change to a fog pattern and spray out the window! The fire’s out!”

“Got it,” she replied as she turned the nozzle off, turned it to change the pattern, and then pulled back on the bale again to flow water out of the window to vent the room.

As Hideaki watched from nearby, he said to Takahiro, “Have Suwabe get closer to the window! She’s a bit too far back!” He also thought to himself, “To think, just seven years ago, she was on the other side of this… The doctors never thought she would live, let alone come this far, after what happened to her.”

…

Outside, Sumire and Rumiko were talking among themselves, relaxing and drinking water in the sweltering summer heat. Both of them had taken all of their gear off except for their boots, which were rolled down. As they watched several other firefighters practice setting up hoses from the outside of a building and flowing water into a nearby creek, Sumire told Rumiko, “That felt amazing.”

“How did you do, Sumire-chan?”

“I think I did pretty good for my first time. How about you?”

“Lieutenant Yamada told me I was great,” Rumiko replied with a confident smile. “I didn’t get corrected once on either the drill tower or the burn building.”

“I got some minor corrections, but nothing too crazy.”

Rumiko then wiped sweat off of her forehead, looking up at the sky and remarking, “It’s way too hot out. I pre-hydrated a ton before I got here, but even then, I was exhausted.”

Then, Yui walked over, having heard Rumiko’s remark, and said to the two of them, “Get used to it, girls. When you get your first fire with an SCBA in the summertime, it’s gonna really suck.”

“Trust me,” Rumiko assured her. “My sister already told me.”

“It’s not so bad for me anymore,” Yui added. “To be fair, I mean… I run almost every day, so that helps a lot. Having a dad who’s the brigade’s captain also helps a lot, too. I got a lot of pointers from him early on.”

“I gotta ask,” Sumire then said to her, curious about something but not knowing how to exactly approach it. “Um… So you dive a lot, right? Uh… How different is SCUBA gear from an air pack?”

Confused, Yui asked her, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, um…” Sumire felt a bit self-conscious about being unable to explain what exactly she meant. “I’m sorry, it’s probably a dumb question anyway, Kitagawa-senpai…”

“No, no, no, there’s no stupid questions, especially in firefighting…” Changing her mind slightly, Yui clarified, “Well… Almost. There’s almost no stupid questions in firefighting. That’s what I meant to say. What you asked isn’t stupid, Suwabe.” She then began to explain the differences between SCBA and SCUBA as she took her air pack off and put it on the ground. “SCBA actually feels lighter than SCUBA gear. Weight isn’t as much of an issue when you’re underwater, so there’s no pressure on manufacturing companies to make the bottles lighter like there is with SCBA. When my grandfather was a firefighter years ago, the air packs they had were made of steel like they usually use in SCUBA today, and they were very big and heavy. They often were only pressurized to 150 bars, hence why they were so big. It’s not like the bottles we have today which are 300 bars, made of carbon fiber, and are a lot smaller.”

Sumire asked her, “How many times have you dived with SCUBA gear, and when was the first time?”

Yui laughed, replying to her, “I’ve lost count of how many dives I’ve done. I did my first dive with gear on when I was eight years old. By the time I began putting air packs on when I was fifteen, I was very used to carrying that kind of weight on my body. Going back to your first question, the other big thing is that most SCUBA gear doesn’t use full-face masks like air packs do. We usually only get a mouthpiece with a regulator attached to it. They have full-face SCUBA, but that’s more for deep diving and specialized diving. I have the training for it, but most people who do it recreationally don’t.”

“Wait, the regulator is right at your mouth? It’s not on the side?”

“Yes. In fact, a lot of air packs are the same.” Yui held up the mask that came with her pack to show to them as an example. “Harukawa still uses belt-mounted regulators, using a low-pressure tube attached to your mask to connect to it, but most paid fire departments nowadays use air packs where the regulator mounts right on your mask, and you have to either turn it into place or push it into place. The Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department is probably going to switch to mask-mounted regulators when they get their new air packs next year.”

“What about us?”

“Mask-mounted regulators cost a bit more,” Yui explained. “The price of air packs and the extra training you need to use them are why quite a few volunteer fire brigades don’t even have them at all, and the ones that do often stick to belt-mounted regulators. A lot of brigades just don’t see the cost benefit when a paid fire department is serving the same area as them, especially in bigger cities. Yoshimatsu and its suburbs are rare in that every volunteer fire brigade the paid fire department covers also has SCBAs and volunteer firefighters trained to use them. Ironically enough, Yoshimatsu’s volunteers got them the last, and we were the first. My grandpa told me the city volunteers resisted until the late 1990s due to costs, while we got ours in the mid-1970s.”

Impressed by how much history she knew, Rumiko said to her, “Wow, Kitagawa-senpai, you know a lot of history! It’s so cool!”

“When your family has ties to the fire brigade going back to the Second World War,” Yui explained. “You’ll get told a lot of good stories.”

…

August 3, 2023

In the evening, a large crowd gathered in the emptied-out apparatus bay of the fire station. The crowd consisted of almost all of the volunteer fire brigade’s fifty members, many of their family members, and the family of Tenko Inami, which included her now elderly parents, her older brother, and her older brother’s wife and two children. A table was laid out in front of the closed right apparatus bay door, and on the table was a picture of Tenko in a more formal fire brigade uniform, her burned and charred helmet, and a large bouquet of flowers, with a spare set of boots on the ground and a coat laid out on a chair between them and the table. On each side of the table were two firefighters dressed in black three-piece formal uniforms.

To start the ceremony, Chief Taichi Mikazuki and Assistant Chief Fumio Ueda, the older brother of Michio, stood up and turned towards the crowd as all the firefighters lined up in neat rows both next to and behind the family of Tenko, with Hideo being right next to her parents. Taichi spoke first, beginning a prepared speech he held out before him. “Thank you all for coming to this ceremony. I wish we all could gather here under happier circumstances, but alas, this is an important obligation we must do. Thirty years ago today, our sister firefighter Inami Tenko made the ultimate sacrifice while battling a fire at a ramen shop in our village. She did so while attempting to save the life of the owner of said ramen shop, who also tragically perished several days later. She died doing what she loved to do, and she died while in the service of her fellow man. She was only seventeen years old, just a few weeks from turning eighteen, in fact, and yet she displayed a level of bravery that even many older adults do not have. She joined the Hinamizawa Volunteer Fire Brigade as a student firefighter because she wanted to help people and protect the village she lived in, and in her time with us, she did plenty of just that.”

Hideo thought to himself as Taichi spoke, “I just need to hold it together until the ceremony is over…” He had been Tenko’s boyfriend until her death, and the ceremony was sure to make him very emotional.

“I first met Tenko when I was a lieutenant,” Taichi continued. “It is no exaggeration to say she lived and breathed the fire service. To lighten the mood, I have a story I like to tell about her from when she had a few months in the brigade.” He cracked a faint smile as he recalled a funny event that she had been involved in. “She had just come back from a Basic Firefighting class on a weekend, and we happened to get a call for a garage fire as soon as she and two other girls and this older guy who also just got in going with her got back from class. We roll Engine 31 and Utility 35 pretty fast, and when we get there, we find nothing. The paid crew from the Harukawa Fire Station is also deeply confused. None of us can find anything until the sun peers out from the clouds and steam starts to come off of the roof. Turns out the homeowner thought the steam meant the garage was on fire.” The story earned several chuckles from among the crowd. “Tenko was on Engine 31 with us since we only wanted one of the four new guys to be on the first-out fire engine, and she was all excited to finally go to what she thought would be a real fire. Turns out she would end up being the one who saw the steam first.”

From within the crowd, Tomoko and Rumiko looked on, with the former thinking to herself, “I’ve heard this story at least seven times, and it still amuses me every God damn time.”

“Over the next two years, Tenko proved herself to be a very good firefighter. She received an award from Harukawa Girls’ Academy for saving the life of a student who went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after drowning in the pool in her second year, as well as participated in the Miracle of March Eleventh. For the younger people here who may not know what the Miracle of March Eleventh was, that was a day just five months before her death when a drunk driver crashed into a car carrying a whole family of five around midnight, leaving their cars in a ditch in the town of Inoue for almost an hour before a passerby noticed them and called 119. She worked with our brigade’s light rescue as well as a heavy rescue unit of the Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department and volunteers from the Inoue Volunteer Fire Brigade to free all five members of the family, who were trapped in their car. Despite all of them suffering severe injuries, they all beat the odds and survived, as did the driver, who later went to prison.” Taichi then paused briefly to take a deep breath. “I was present when she died, and what I saw haunts me to this day. However, I know that… I know that the last thing she would want is for us to just give up and let our fears and our grief win.”

Several people within the crowd could see that Taichi was starting to get a bit emotional as he finished his speech, with Hideo nodding along silently. “She wouldn’t want us to mourn her forever,” he thought to himself. “I can almost hear her voice in my head telling us to move forward.”

“We will honor her legacy as we have done in the past thirty years, and we’ll do so every time the siren goes off. I said it before when we held her funeral all those years ago, and I’ll say it again: The best way for us firefighters to honor her sacrifice, not to mention the sacrifices of all firefighters who have died in the line of duty, is to get back on the fire engine when someone is in their time of need and help them in any way we can. Our fire brigade has seen tragedy before. Tenko was not the first of our firefighters to die, and not even the first student firefighter to die, but we will work as hard as we can to make sure she is the last name we have to add to that memorial plaque out front. Of course, we can’t totally stop death, but that doesn’t mean we cannot try to at least slow it down. Now… We will begin the next stage of our service by observing a moment of silence.”

The whole crowd then bowed their heads in a moment of silence as Taichi and Fumio turned towards the table. As they both joined in and bowed, Fumio thought to himself, “And to think, Harukawa Girls’ Academy wants to end the program around the time of this anniversary… How heartless!” He and the rest of the brigade found it highly inappropriate that such discussions had started roughly around the time of the anniversary of Tenko’s death.

After the moment of silence ended, Taichi then began to give out orders as Fumio quietly pulled out his phone and sent a text to someone at the dispatch center for the Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department for the next part of the ceremony. “Harukawa Volunteer Fire Brigade… Present… Arms!”

All of the firefighters in the crowd rendered salutes at the same time, followed a few seconds later by the sound of radio tones and the subsequent ringing of pagers emanating throughout the apparatus bay, which was followed a few seconds later by the siren on top of the fire station roaring to life. A dispatcher read out a replication of the original call that had gone out thirty years prior, reading off of a script of the radio transmissions from the night Tenko died. “Harukawa Fire Station, Harukawa Fire Brigade, West Yoshimatsu Fire Station for one engine and a battalion chief, respond to 3-1-3 Kawase in the Village of Harukawa for a reported fire at the Yagami Ramen restaurant with one man possibly still inside. Your time is 1922 hours.” Following a brief intermission of a few seconds, the same dispatcher then played an alert tone over the radio before saying one final message. “Exactly thirty years ago, on August 3, 1993, Firefighter Inami Tenko of the Harukawa Fire Brigade died in the line of duty at the same fire that was previously mentioned. May she rest in peace, and may her friends, her family, and her comrades in the fire service be in our hearts today. We will never forget the sacrifice she and so many others before and after her have made. This is the Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department Dispatch Center signing off at 1825 hours.”

“Orders arms,” Taichi then commanded the firefighters of the brigade as the siren on top of the station wound down. “This concludes the ceremony for Firefighter Inami. Thank you all for coming and honoring her legacy, her bravery, and her sacrifice.”

As the rest of the crowd began to mill about and talk casually among each other, Taichi and Fumio walked over to meet up with Tenko’s parents and Hideo. The latter said to the three of them, “Thank you all for coming.”

“Thank you for doing this for our daughter,” said an older man, who was Tenko’s father. “It means the world knowing that even after all this time, you all still care so much about her.” Her mother nodded, on the verge of tears and unable to speak as a result as her father hugged her. “Especially you, Taichi-san. You were there when she passed away, and you rarely, if ever, left her side until her burial.”

“It was the least I could do,” Taichi explained.

Hideo then said to her parents, “Even after all these years, I still cherish the time I spent with her. Though our time together was far too short, I still love her and miss her.”

Tenko’s father smiled, telling him as he patted him on the shoulder, “Even thirty years on, you haven’t changed when it comes to how nice you were to her, Hideo.” This comment caused Hideo to wipe away tears from his eyes as he remembered the relationship he had with her all those years ago.

Tomoko then also walked over to them, introducing herself with a bow and saying, “Hello, Inami-san.”

“Hello, Morishima,” Tenko’s mother said to her as she smiled. “I’m so glad you and your sister made it here.”

“All of the student firefighters made it here,” she told her. “We all wanted to honor our senpai from so long ago. Even to this day, we keep up the tradition of calling her Inami-senpai as a way to honor her.”

“I must apologize in advance for bringing the mood down,” Tenko’s father then said to her. “But… Well, I mean, I don’t think the mood can get dragged down any further than it is.” His witty remark earned a few chuckles from those around him.

Hideo added, “It’s easy to see where Tenko got her sense of humor from.”

“Indeed,” her father agreed. “But to get back on point, I heard they want to get rid of the Student Firefighter Program at Harukawa Girls’ Academy.”

Hideo, Tomoko, Taichi, and Fumio all looked at each other, with Fumio sighing and admitting with a somber tone, “It’s been discussed, and the principal is seriously considering it.”

“The school administration ordered the Student Council to meet about the matter last Saturday,” Tomoko explained. “We voted to oppose the idea of abolishing the program. Off the record, I, uh…” She took a deep breath and admitted, “I had some choice words to say about the proposal, especially with how poorly-timed it was given the anniversary of Inami-senpai’s death.”

Tenko’s father replied, “Choice words, huh? Did you say how much of an asshole the principal was for that?”

Her mother turned to him and remarked, “Come on, you don’t need to be that vulgar around here.”

“It’s fine,” Taichi assured her. “Because I agree with your husband. The principal is an asshole.”

Tomoko asked her parents, “Do you mind if I speak about him in a very… Impolite way?”

“Speak your mind,” Tenko’s father assured her. “Whatever you have to say, I probably agree.”

“Fuck him,” Tomoko bluntly put it. “It is extremely disrespectful to your daughter to propose such a terrible idea so close to the day she died, and especially to mention her by name. I gave him a chance when he became principal at the start of the previous school year, and he’s completely screwed it up with this shit.”

Tenko’s father nodded in complete agreement with what she had to say. “We’ll be sending him a letter detailing our feelings about him using our daughter’s name in such a proposal.”

Tenko’s mother nodded and told her, “Thank you for sticking up for us. Tell the rest of the Student Council we appreciate their support.”

“Absolutely,” Tomoko nodded.

Her father explained to the others, “I can tell you right now as her father that if she was still alive… Let’s just say she’d have a few words with Principal Furutani about abolishing the program.”

“I agree,” Hideo nodded. “She’d be angry as Hell.”

“We’ll be sending Furutani-san a letter too,” Fumio told her parents. “We believe the changes that we made after her death are more than sufficient to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, or at least drastically reduce the chances of one.”

“I still remember when the brigade bought those special cameras,” her father recalled before looking at Taichi. “You were chief for the first time, right?”

“Yep,” Taichi nodded. “We bought two thermal imaging cameras and let you see them before we put them in service back in 1999. We spent a lot of money getting them because we knew they would save lives. Now we have one on every fire engine, and even one on the ambulance, and we wouldn’t have pushed so hard to get them if not for her. It was six million yen well spent to get those first two cameras.”

…

An hour after the ceremony, Yui, Naoko, and Ayumi were relaxing at the village beach together. Yui had changed into a black bikini with a white t-shirt over the top, while Naoko wore a blue bikini with white dots and Ayumi wore a red one-piece swimsuit. “Man, that was sad,” Yui remarked to the other two girls as they sat on a towel and watched the evening sun slowly descend towards the water. “But it had to be done. I still can’t believe it’s been thirty years since Inami-senpai died.”

“I remember when my dad told me about it,” Naoko commented. “I was a little girl. I think I was like eight when he first brought her name up. He had your dad show me around the fire station one day, and then my dad told me about Inami-senpai when I saw the plaque with the names out front.”

“I still can’t believe there’s fifteen names on that plaque,” Ayumi pointed out. “That seems like so many.”

“Granted,” Yui pointed out. “Eleven of those names were from when the Americans bombed the area in 1945, including the other four student firefighters on the memorial. All the fire brigades got hit hard when they bombed the port and the factories in Yoshimatsu and the villages and towns surrounding it. I think somewhere in the range of thirty-five to forty firefighters died between the fire brigades and the paid fire department of the city due to the air raid. I can’t remember the exact number off the top of my head.”

“Holy shit,” Ayumi replied. “I didn’t know it was that many in the entire area, and all of that in one night?”

“Well, there were two waves of attacks that took place over a whole day, but yeah.”

Then, they heard a voice call out from behind them. They turned around to find Rentaro walking towards them. “Hey guys!”

Naoko asked in confusion, “Nojima-san?”

“I thought you had work tonight at the convenience store after the ceremony,” Yui said to him as she got up.

“It was a mixup with my boss,” Rentaro replied. “I’m actually working tomorrow. It’s gonna suck since I got class on Saturday early in the morning, but I’ll manage. What are you guys doing here?”

“Just relaxing on the beach,” Yui replied. “Wanna join?”

“Sure, why not? I didn’t bring a swimsuit or anything, though.”

“It’s fine,” Yui assured her. “I probably wasn’t gonna go in the water anyway.”

Naoko asked him, “How’s the Basic Firefighting class going?”

“I’m doing alright,” he replied to her as he sat down on the towel next to Yui. “I don’t know if Suwabe-san or Rumiko-san told you guys this, but they’re actually the only girls in the class.”

Ayumi replied, “Wait, really?”

“Yeah. I heard it’s rare to have only two girls out of thirty people in the class.”

“It is rare these days to have so few,” Yui agreed. “When I went, there were three student firefighters plus three other women out of twenty-eight people in the class.”

“I feel kinda bad for them,” Naoko added. “At least they have each other, though.”

“It’s been that way for a while,” Yui pointed out. “They’re like a package deal at this point. I rarely see Suwabe-san without Rumiko-san and vice-versa.”

“On another note,” Rentaro then said to change the topic. “How’s your family’s shop, Kitagawa-san?”

“We got a lot of business right now with it being the middle of the summer,” Yui replied. “We had to hire a third temporary employee for the summer this year, bringing us up to six when you combine my parents and me with our temp workers. With the pandemic winding down so much, people aren’t afraid to go out for the summer like they were in 2020, 2021, or even 2022 for some people. I still don’t know how the Hell we survived 2020 with how bad shit got during the lockdowns, but we survived.”

“That was such a strange time for me,” Rentaro said, recalling the past several years. “I spent pretty much my entire time in high school during the pandemic, given I graduated this past March. The only relatively normal part was the late summer of 2022 and the second half of my third year. I feel like I missed out on a lot.”

“Welcome to the club, pal,” Yui replied with a fist-bump, which Rentaro returned. “The Class of 2024 isn’t much better, I’m afraid.”

“Truth be told,” Rentaro said as he looked out over the water. “I don’t even know what I’m gonna do. I didn’t go to college at all this year so I could work full-time and get enough money to possibly go next year, but I don’t know if college is for me. I might just go to a trade school instead.”

“For what kind of trade?”

“Auto mechanic preferably. There’s just something about cars and how they work that really fascinates me, and my uncle owns a repair shop. I’ve worked on cars there almost my whole life.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot your uncle does that. How often do you work anyway?”

“Almost every day for at least six hours. I often work at midnight so I have time for classes and because nobody else likes working midnight hours. Last week, I did 54 hours.”

As Yui and Rentaro kept talking among themselves, Ayumi and Naoko turned to each other and began to whisper among themselves. “I think he might be trying to get with her,” Naoko told Ayumi.

Ayumi asked to clarify what she meant, “What do you mean by get with her?”

“I think he’s trying to ask her out,” Naoko explained. “He’s the youngest guy in the fire brigade that isn’t a student firefighter, so I’m not surprised. Nojima-san isn’t too bad to look at, actually.”

“Really? I don’t see the appeal.”

Yui then got up from next to them and said, “Wanna hit the water? It’s not too dark.”

Ayumi, unsure about swimming in the dark, replied, “I don’t know. The sun just set, so…”

“Screw it,” Naoko replied as she got up. “Why not?”

“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Yui replied as she took off her shirt and revealed the black bikini top she had on underneath. As she took it off, Rentaro looked away briefly and blushed, which Yui noticed. “Huh? Are you okay, man?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he insisted. “I can, uh… I can get my shorts wet.” He then took his shirt off. “Do you mind if I put this on the towel?”

“Go ahead.” Yui and Naoko then walked into the calm beach water, feeling the waves slowly crash into them while not straying out too far since it was still dark out. “Come on and join us!”

Rentaro soon walked into the water as well, after which Ayumi shrugged and said to herself, “Why not?” She then excitedly ran in, splashing Naoko and Yui as she did, to which all four of them laughed. “Sorry about that, guys!”

“It’s fine,” Naoko assured her.

As all four of them swam together in the water, they began to hear what sounded like shouting from nearby. Yui turned to Naoko and asked her, “Hey, did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “What the Hell is that?”

Rentaro then noticed something in the distance further beyond them in the sea and pointed at it, yelling, “Hey, look, over there!”

“Help! Help me!” A man was seen splashing around in the water about ten meters to the right of them and fourteen meters out into the water, clearly in distress as he seemed to try to grab something. “My dog jumped in! Help!”

“Oh shit,” Yui remarked. She then told Ayumi and Rentaro, “Ayumi-chan, Nojima-san, go back to the shore and call 119! Naoko-chan, come with me!” As Ayumi and Rentaro rushed back to shore to call for help, Yui and Naoko swam towards the man as fast as they could. “Hang on, sir! We’re coming!”

Ayumi reached the shore first, and as soon as she could, she ran across the beach to go back to the towel and grab her phone. Once she took it out of the pocket of the shorts she took with her to the beach, she dialed 119 on it, after which a dispatcher answered the phone with, “Fire department, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s a man drowning at the Harukawa Village Beach,” Ayumi explained. “I think he said he was trying to get his dog!”

“Okay, I got your phone number saved so I can stay in contact with you in case we get disconnected. Is he still in the water?”

“Yeah. Two of my friends are trying to get him and his dog now. We’re all firefighters, by the way.”

“Okay, and can you still see them?”

“Not too good. It’s a bit dark.”

In the water, Yui and Naoko reached the man, who was growing very tired while grabbing a hold of a Shiba Inu dog, who was flailing around and clearly panicking. “Sir, sir, we’re here! We’re here!”

The man tried to say something back to them, but his mouth filled with water and what came out of his mouth was indecipherable. Naoko said to Yui, “I’ll get the dog!” She then swam around the man and grabbed the dog, but as she did, the dog yelped at her and began to try to scratch her to break free, prompting her to tell it, “Stop! Stop it! Calm down!”

Meanwhile, Yui got behind the man as he began to grow weaker and weaker, grabbing onto his shoulders and beginning to slowly swim backwards towards the beach. The waves helped carry her to an extent as she told the man, “Calm down. We’re here to help, okay? My friend’s got your dog.”

The man coughed up water before telling Yui, “I… You… He jumped in…”

“I know, okay? Your dog is gonna be alright. You’re in good hands, too.” Because the man was rather large, weighing in at around 130 kilograms, Yui did find it a bit difficult to pull him as she swam closer to the beach. “Agh, damn…”

Rentaro then swam over to her and said, “Kitagawa-san, let me join in!”

“Here,” Yui said to him as she let him grab one of his shoulders. “God, he’s so heavy.” Realizing she had commented on the patient’s weight negatively in front of him, she quickly apologized out of embarrassment, “Oh, uh, sorry.”

“It’s fine… It’s all fine…” The man was clearly on the verge of passing out from how tired he was from his initial attempt to rescue his dog.

Meanwhile, Naoko was swimming as best as she could with the dog in her arms, but the dog kept scratching her body, albeit at a slower pace due to it getting tired as well. “Agh, shit! Damn dog!” She wanted to be gentler, but the pain from the dog’s claws caused her to curse at it. “Agh… God damn it…” Finally, about thirty seconds after Yui and Rentaro had dragged the man onto the beach, Naoko emerged as well, at which point the dog broke loose and ran up onto the beach before laying down, clearly exhausted as he panted heavily. Naoko took several deep breaths herself as she looked at her legs and saw several scratches, two of which were bleeding slightly. “Oh shit…”

Ayumi ran over to her, telling her, “I called for help! They’re sending the paid fire station! Do you need an ambulance too, Naoko-chan?!”

“No,” Naoko said as she shook her head, clearly tired. “I’m fine. The problem with that dog wasn’t saving him from drowning… It was… It was stopping him from going back out into the damn water.”

Another person then ran over to them, yelling, “Dad! Dad! Oh my God!” As Naoko and Ayumi looked on, they saw a boy they recognized run over to Yui and Rentaro, who were checking over the man. “Holy shit! Dad, are you okay?!”

“Yeah, ugh…” The man then coughed up one last bit of water from his mouth before telling his son, “I’m alive, at least.”

“Wait a minute,” Yui said as he recognized the boy. “Hirayama-kun, this is your dad?”

“Yeah,” said Enji Hirayama, a third-year at a high school in Yoshimatsu who lived in Harukawa. Because the village’s only high school was strictly for girls, boys had to go one outside the village. “I saw him dive into the water to get our dog, but then I lost track of him. I freaked out since my phone was dead and I couldn’t call anyone.”

“He almost drowned,” Yui told him. “But we got both him and your dog out.”

“Here’s your dog,” Naoko said as she waved over to him. “Hirayama-senpai, he’s pretty tired out, but he’ll be fine.”

Enji said with a deep sigh of relief, “Oh, thank God…”

“Go see the dog,” his dad told him with a cough. “I’m fine, Enji.”

Enji then walked over to Naoko and bent down to see his dog and pet it on the head. “Hey there, Bunji. I’m so glad you’re okay.” His dog, despite still being exhausted from its attempts to stop drowning, began wagging its tail, indicating his happiness at seeing Enji as he petted the dog’s head. “I’m here. I’m right here. Dad is gonna be fine, okay?” He then looked up to thank Naoko. “Thank you so mu-“

When Enji stopped mid-sentence, Naoko asked him, “Is something wrong? I know I got scratched up pretty good, but it’s not that ba-“

“No, no, no, not that,” Enji said as he blushed intensely. “It’s, uh…”

Naoko then felt a slight breeze and looked down at her body, and as she did, her eyes widened in shock and embarrassment. “Oh, uh… I…” Her bikini top had fallen off completely, the tie holding it together behind her neck having been weakened by the dog before it fell off when she got on the beach. Realizing she was completely topless, she quickly covered her bare chest as she looked around for her top. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!”

“No, it’s fine, I just…”

Naoko then saw it in the waves near the beach and ran out to get it, and as she reached the water, she quickly snatched it and put it back on as Ambulance 4 and Engine-Aerial 4 pulled up to the beach. She then looked at her hand and noticed she had wiped up some blood from one of the scratches on her body. “Ugh… I guess I could get checked out.”