Hot Springs Trip, Part 2

WARNING: This chapter contains depictions of enjo kosai/compensated dating.

In the women’s bath, the girls all stayed together and talked among themselves. “Man,” Yoko remarked to the others with a relieved sigh. “This is just what I needed. This was a damn good idea, Hana.”

“Thank you,” she replied. She then checked her own water-proof watch on her left arm and made a mental note of the time.

“Wow,” Tenko then said as she looked at her watch. “Where did you get that? Is it really water-proof?”

“Yep,” Hana nodded. “I got it for my birthday. I figured I’d test it out here.”

Ruka asked her out of curiosity, “So is going to an onsen a common occurrence for the group?”

“Not too common,” Hana explained. “Occasionally, we’ll go together if we all had a really rough battle. I figured we could use a trip since we’ve had a rough month and a half between that boy getting killed and Ayano-san getting hurt.”

“Fair enough,” Ruka agreed.

“Ah, this is great,” Sayaka said to herself in the water. “It feels so refreshing.”

Hana looked over at Sayaka, who happened to be sitting a bit of a ways away from the rest of the group and was deeper in the water than everyone else, and asked her, “Why are you sitting away from us? We don’t bite.”

Sayaka, blushing slightly, replied, “Oh, uh, I just am, I guess. Eh… You know…”

Yoko chuckled as she stood up from the water and looked at her with a grin, revealing her body to Sayaka in full and causing her to blush even harder. “Don’t be shy,” she said to her nonchalantly. “We’re all ladies here.”

“She’s got a point,” then said an older woman in her early fifties nearby who noticed the group. She looked at them and chuckled, saying to the girls, “My apologies for butting in. You all just remind me of my own teenage years.”

“It’s fine,” Hana assured her.

“I had a friend who was like your one friend over there for a while when we first started going to hot springs together,” she remarked. “Whenever me or anyone else we know stood up, she would look away and get all flustered. It was the funniest thing really.”

“Miyako,” then said another woman from the deck of the onsen. “We’re heading out.”

“Oh, right,” said the older woman. She then turned to her friend and told her, “Coming.” As she got up, Sayaka looked away as soon as she got a look at her body. She then waved at the girls and told them, “Have a good day, girls. Enjoy the water.”

“We sure are,” Ruka replied with a smile.

When the older woman was out of earshot, Hana remarked to Ruka, “She had boobs almost as big as yours, Ruka.”

“I knew someone would bring that up,” Ruka replied with a lighthearted sigh.

Tenko then turned to her and asked, “What do you even eat to make them that big? It must be something different.”

“I don’t eat anything different,” Ruka shrugged, confused by her question as she sat up a bit in the water. “Like I said earlier to Fujimori, it’s probably because someone in my family tree had big boobs.”

Sayaka then gently walked over to the others, careful not to accidentally swim or cause waves as she did. “I, uh… I think you have a point, Fujimori-senpai…”

Yoko replied to her, “See? There’s nothing to be afraid of. Kishio isn’t concerned at all.”

When Yoko said her last sentence, she put a hand on Ruka’s shoulder almost on instinct. Ruka’s smile immediately faded as she turned to Yoko and almost said something to her to get her hand off before stopping herself, her mouth remaining open for several seconds that felt more like many minutes before she turned away and dismissed herself with, “N- Nothing.”

Yoko said as she got her hand off her shoulder, “What’s up?”

“You just startled me a bit,” Ruka said, lying to her about why she almost told her to stop touching her. “That’s all.”

“Ah, my bad.”

Sayaka then said to Ruka, “So, um… I, uh…”

Ruka replied to her, “What’s up?”

“I think you look nice,” Sayaka admitted, blushing intensely as she looked at her.

“Look nice?” Ruka, confused, replied to her. “Um, okay…”

“You, too, Miyashita-san,” Sayaka also said to her. “I’m sorry, I, uh…”

Hana calmed her down by placing a hand on her shoulder and smiling at her, telling her, “No need to panic, Miyamura-san. We get it. I appreciate the compliment, actually.”

Sayaka looked at her, once again seemingly caught in a trance. “Miyashita-san…”

Ruka chuckled and thought to herself, “There she goes again with the shoulder thing. I swear, any girl she does that to seems to swoon for her almost immediately afterwards.” He then turned to Sayaka and told her, “Listen, I’m not offended, okay?”

“You aren’t?”

“Nah, I’m fine.”

Hana told Sayaka with a warm smile, “You yourself are pretty, too.”

“Thank you…” It was as if Sayaka’s eyes were glittering with emotion in response to Hana’s compliments.

Yoko asked the others with a chuckle, “So, getting off of the topic of boobs, what’s the deal with Yamanaka-kun?”

Hana replied, “Oh, him? Last I heard, he dumped his girlfriend and is looking for some new girl to be with.”

“He came up to me and Hana not too long ago and talked to us about it,” Ruka added. “I heard he’s already had sex with some girl.”

“Oh, I know for a fact he’s fucked some girl,” Yoko clarified. “He isn’t a virgin anymore by any means, and everyone in my grade knows. His ex-girlfriend is in my class.”

“I don’t get why girls keep falling for him,” Ruka sighed.

“He’s good-looking,” Yoko admitted. When everyone else turned towards her, dumbfounded that she had said such a thing, she got defensive and replied, “What? Someone can be hot but a total asshole. Besides, I heard he’s really good at talking to girls, so that’s another way he gets them.”

“If only he channeled that energy into something more positive,” Hana wondered out loud. “Or, at least, if only he channeled it into staying committed to one girl.”

“Even that might be asking too much from him,” Tenko remarked, prompting laughter from everyone else.

…

An hour later, Hana was in the changing room by herself, having gotten out of the onsen early and gotten dressed. She took a deep breath as she finished putting her clothes back on and said to herself, “Calm down, this is just for the transaction.” She then opened up her purse and pulled out her phone, but as she did, something fell out of it that she quickly swiped off of the floor and put back in. She then dialed a number on the cellphone and waited for an answer. “Come on…”

“Hello,” Hideo said on the other end of the line.

“I’m out of the bath,” she said to him. “Where are you?”

“I got a room in the inn,” Hideo explained. “Room Fifteen on the third floor.”

“Room Fifteen on the third floor,” Hana repeated back to him. “Got it. I’ll be right there.” She then hung up and put her cellphone back before pulling out the same object she had dropped just seconds before to see if it was damaged. As she held it up, it became clear what the object was. “Always come prepared,” she said to herself.

Then, she heard a woman enter the changing room, prompting her to quickly put the condom away in her purse. “That was pretty nice,” said the woman to someone else walking in with her. “I really needed that after a hard week at the office.”

“Shit,” Hana thought to herself. “That was way too close.”

…

In the men’s bath, Kumiko and Yoshiro were still talking among themselves about various things, having gotten along well. “So I get up there,” Yoshiro said while holding back laughter. “And Hana-senpai says ‘wait a minute, this is the wrong house.’”

Kumiko laughed in response. “No way, you got sent to the wrong house?”

“Yep,” Yoshiro replied with a chortle. “Dispatch messed up and sent us to the house across the street. Thankfully, it didn’t delay us that long, so we still found and killed the Class Four, but still. I heard a dispatcher got her ass reamed out for that later.”

“As she should have. That’s bad.”

“It was awkward as Hell trying to explain to the homeowner at the wrong house what was going on without revealing too much,” Yoshiro explained as he tried to hold back more laughter. “He… He thought we were otaku cosplaying characters from some magical girl anime!”

Kumiko shared in his laughter, the two of them trying their hardest not to laugh too loudly. “I mean, I can see why he thought that.”

“Yeah, but it’s just so funny to think about.”

“You know, it does feel nice to wear the outfit, at least for me.” She smiled as she told him, “It feels reassuring, especially for an outfit with a skirt like mine. Do all the magical huntress outfits have skirts?”

“No,” Yoshiro shook his head. “You don’t have to have a skirt. Most do, but not all. One of our past members had regular pants with her outfit instead of a skirt.”

“A past member? I had no idea you had a girl who left.”

“Well,” Yoshiro explained. “She didn’t leave. She actually died.”

“Oh…” Feeling bad for asking about it, she told him, “I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “She was our third member until she got killed in a battle against a Class Two. For a few months afterwards, it was just me and Hana-senpai until Ikezawa-san came around, followed by Fujimori-senpai soon after.”

“Man, that sucks.”

“It sure did. I still think about it quite a bit, actually. She died taking a blow meant for Hana-senpai, so she thinks about it a lot, too.”

“Wow, really?” Kumiko took a deep breath and then looked out over the whole onsen. “You guys are pretty close-knit for a group of magical huntresses. My old group wasn’t anything like this.”

Yoshiro boasted, “And that’s why we’re so successful in our hunts.”

“Speaking of the group,” Kumiko then asked him. “What’s the deal with Kishio? She joined before me, but it’s like she’s been here a while.”

Yoshiro’s joyful expression immediately went away, replaced by one of contention. “Well, with her…”

“What is it? Did she piss you off?”

Yoshiro explained as best as he could, “She… She’s been a magical huntress about as long as Hana-senpai has, but for the longest time, she was a loner around here. She operated solely by herself and built a reputation as a magical huntress who could take on any magical beast in her way due to how reckless and careless she could be in battles regarding her own self-preservation.”

“So she went into battles all gung-ho?”

“Oh yeah,” Yoshiro nodded. “Gung-ho might be a God damn understatement. She fights like a mad dog, and yet Hana-senpai was really drawn to her. She explicitly sought her out and even had a sword duel with her to make her join.”

“And who won the duel?”

Yoshiro proudly replied, “Hana-senpai, of course. Kishio got stabbed pretty good in the abdomen, but Hana-senpai had enough healing dust to make the bleeding stop. She still has a scar from the wound, but nothing else.”

“I’m a bit shocked she got such a good blow on a girl like her.”

“I’m not. Hana-senpai is an excellent swordswoman, and she’s a lot more disciplined than Kishio.” Kumiko chuckled at Yoshiro’s constant praise of Hana, prompting him to ask her, “What’s so funny?”

“Are you sucking her metaphorical dick or something?”

Yoshiro blushed immediately. “No, I’m not!”

“I think someone has a crush,” Kumiko playfully told him with a smug expression on her face.

“Shut up,” Yoshiro replied to her, embarrassed.

…

Shortly thereafter, Yoshiro was walking in the rear yard of the onsen, which included porches for the various hotel rooms in the inn. He had gotten fully dressed, and was playing a mobile game on his phone when he saw Ruka walking over to him in a yukata. “Oh, hey.”

“Hey,” Ruka replied. “I see you’re dressed already.”

“Yeah,” Yoshiro sighed. “I took my yukata off a few minutes ago and just put my regular clothes on.”

“Have you seen Hana at all, by the way?”

“No,” he shook his head. “What about you?”

“She got out a bit early and said she was gonna get some food,” Ruka explained, repeating what Hana had told the girls in the group when she left the women’s bath.

Yoshiro then happened to look up at a balcony on the third floor and noticed someone who looked rather familiar looking down at them. “Wait a minute, is that…?”

“Oh yeah,” Ruka realized. “It is.”

Yoshiro waved at the person on the balcony, yelling to them, “Hana-senpai!”

Indeed, Hana was standing on the balcony, dressed in a similar yukata to Ruka. She looked down at them and gave them a faint smile. Instead of a response back, however, she remained silent as she looked at them.

Ruka said to her from below, “Hey, Hana!”

At that moment, Hideo walked out of the room and onto the balcony as well. He whispered something unknown to Hana, at which point the two of them turned around and headed back in, with Hana giving the two of them one last look before she walked back into the room.

Ruka’s eyes widened in horror as she soon realized what Hana had done. “No… She cannot be serious… She…”

Yoshiro knew exactly what Ruka was getting at and warned her, “Hey, come on, that’s not guaranteed! She could have just been negotiating with him! Don’t assume the worst, Kishio!”

“Fuck that,” Ruka said as she began to walk away. “I need to stop this.”

“No!” Yoshiro then put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, unaware of her aversion to being touched.

Ruka yelled at him in a fit of rage as she violently ripped his hand off of her shoulder, “Let go of me! Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever fucking touch me!”

“Woah, hey! Calm down!”

Ruka retorted, “You better not do that again! Now, I’m gonna go find Hana!” She then began to once again walk away.

Yoshiro then yelled, “Kishio, stop!”

At this point, Ruka stopped dead in her tracks and turned around with a look of contempt in her eyes. “What the fuck do you want?! Let me find her!”

“We can’t just interrupt her,” Yoshiro warned her. “Look, he’s a tough guy, okay?! If we try to actually stop him, he could kill us or go after other people we know!” He then took a deep breath and told her, “Besides, we don’t know what he’s doing with her anyway.”

Ruka clarified with him, “So you weren’t kidding about him being in the Yakuza?”

“No,” he shook his head. “I wasn’t. Trust me. I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

Ruka looked up at the balcony and sighed. “God damn it… Look, I know she can make her own decisions, but I don’t want her doing this with some creepy older man. I get it, though. She might not even be… Be…” She then took a deep breath and ripped the metaphorical band-aid off with, “She might not even be having sex with him at all.”

“Exactly,” Yoshiro told her. “We’ll have to wait until she’s done.”

Ruka looked at him and warned him, “Please, don’t make me regret waiting.”

…

Later on in the night, as the rest of the group talked among themselves about the day they had in the lobby of the onsen, Yoshiro was looking for Hana, who had not yet come down to join them. The onsen was almost deserted at this point, with virtually no one in the actual baths. Meanwhile, Ruka kept the others distracted by talking to them about other things such as battle tactics and past clashes with magical beasts. “When it comes down to it,” she told the others, focusing on Tenko in particular. “Having a firearm as your main weapon can be an asset, but when you go up against a larger magical beast, it may not be enough, at least not to quickly stop it. Smaller calibers aren’t the best when it comes to stopping power against particularly large magical beasts…”

Yoshiro happened to be near the women’s onsen when he saw Hana walk into it, her expression a rather blank and empty one. Worried about her but not wanting to intrude on anyone else inside just in case there were other women and girls still bathing or getting changed, he stood outside and began debating internally about what to do. “I don’t want to march in and make an ass or pervert of myself,” he thought to himself. “But at the same time, her expression worried me… Do I risk it all and head in, or wait for her to come out and talk to her?” He took a deep breath and checked the time on a wall clock nearby.

He then turned around and saw Hideo leaving the men’s changing room in his normal clothes. He seemingly did not notice the teenage boy looking at him as he looked around and chuckled, a smug look on his face as he then walked away and presumably left the onsen, saying to himself, “Perfect…”

Yoshiro then turned back around and took a deep breath, making a final decision. “Fuck it,” he said to himself quietly before he opened the door to the women’s changing room and looked inside. To his relief, he found no one else to be inside as he quietly shut the door behind him and looked around, finding that a shower was on. He walked over and saw Hana standing under the shower and washing her body. Blushing madly at the thought of seeing Hana naked, he turned around.

However, Hana noticed him, and told him, “Yoshiro-kun.”

Yoshiro turned back around and replied, “Wait, how did you know it was me?!”

“Women’s intuition,” she jokingly replied in a half-hearted tone of voice. “I personally don’t mind, but… Other women might. Why are you here anyway?”

“I, um…”

“Yes?”

“Why were you with that Yakuza boss earlier, Hana-senpai?”

Hana stopped washing herself and replied, “Ah, I see.”

“You know,” Yoshiro theorized, not wanting the worst possible answer to be true. “Maybe I’m overthinking it. You two were just talking about the new weapons we’re gonna get, right? Or was it about how much money he’s gonna give us? I just assumed the worst, didn’t I?”

“No.”

With a single word from Hana, Yoshiro gasped in shock. “You…”

“What you’re thinking in your head is exactly what I did with him,” Hana confirmed as she rinsed her hair under the shower before running her hands through it.

Disgusted and horrified, Yoshiro demanded from her, “What the fuck?! Why did you have sex with him?!”

Hana turned around, baring the entire front of her body to him, although at this point, he did not seem to care about seeing her nude body despite his feelings for her. “For those weapons and cash you mentioned,” she told him. “You should know better than anyone else in the group how expensive it is to maintain it. Hell, even being a loner magical huntress or magical huntsman costs money. Weapons break. Outfits get outdated. Improvements are needed. Ammunition gets spent. None of that is free, and the payouts we get from killing magical beasts can only go so far, especially if you want to fight higher-class ones and survive.”

“I know, but-“

“So I found someone who was as interested in me as I was in his resources,” Hana added. “Believe me, I knew that he had a reputation for sleeping with young women and even teenagers. I think it’s morally abhorrent just like you do, but still… I have to make sacrifices.”

“I know you do, but you can’t do this!” Yoshiro stepped into the shower stall, not caring about getting his clothes wet. “Why can’t we just get money the old-fashioned way? We’ll just fight more magical beasts!”

“That would take time we don’t necessarily have,” she explained as she turned back around, showing her back to him. “And the more we fight, the greater risks we take of losing a civilian or even one of our own.”

Yoshiro’s mind immediately flashed back to the airplane-obsessed young boy who had been killed in a magical beast attack, as well as the Fox Knights’ lost third member. “You’re thinking of the boy who died… Or even of Morikawa-senpai, aren’t you? Tell me, damn it!”

Hana yelled back, “No, I’m not!” She then took a deep breath to calm herself down. “Sorry for yelling, but… I thought about this rationally. I decided on my own that it was less risky to get what I wanted and what we needed by sleeping with some rich pedophile gangster versus potentially getting more people killed. I chose this life, and that includes the ugly parts, too. Tell me, do you think I actually would want to fuck him if it weren’t for any of this?”

Yoshiro, at a loss for words, replied to her question with only, “I, uh…”

Hana let out a small laugh. “Of course not! I wouldn’t have touched him with a three meter pole if it weren’t for what he offered me regardless of his age, and given how old he is, forget it!” She then took a deep breath and admitted to Yoshiro, “I was the one who asked if he was actually interested, knowing he would never turn down an opportunity to have sex with a girl.”

“How could… Why…”

Hana then said to him, “If there is one thing I can do for those who have died, it is to put myself on the line so others don’t have to as much.” It was clear based on her tone of voice and her widened eyes that she was actually thinking of both of them and was deeply disturbed by what she had subjected herself to despite her statements to the contrary. “I chose to sacrifice my body and my own dignity so that other innocent children won’t have to die for the sake of my dreams! My aspirations of restoring my family’s power and rising to greatness are already smeared with enough blood, and if I can do anything to slow the blood flow down, I will!” By this point, Hana had bent down and was on her knees, lowering her head to hide a small flow of tears running down her face.

“Hana!” Yoshiro then rushed to her side, hugging her from behind as he began to cry. “Please, stop it! Don’t do this to yourself!” He tried to stifle his sobs, but to no avail, as his grip on her tightened. “Please, Hana-senpai, no more… I don’t want to see you hurt yourself. None of us do.”

Hana then got up and turned around, her expression having suddenly changed from manic and haunted to one of confidence and content. She smiled and told Yoshiro as she put a hand on his shoulder, “It’s fine, Yoshiro-kun. Listen, it won’t happen again, not with him especially. I took precautions, too.”

Yoshiro said as he wiped away tears, “Precautions?”

“I made him use protection,” Hana explained. “He doesn’t like to, but I told him that unless he did, the deal was off. I also told him that if he ever threatened any of my family or friends, I would expose him for what he did with me.” It was as if Hana had magically recovered in a matter of seconds. “I’m the one holding the cards here, and he’s the one who has the most to lose.”

“Are… Are you sure you’re actually fine?”

“I promise you,” Hana assured him as she turned the shower off. “I’m fine, Yoshiro-kun.” She then began to dry herself off. “By the way, you should probably change your clothes. They’re all wet.”

Yoshiro looked down at himself and saw that Hana was right. “Oh yeah… You’re right. My clothes are soaked.”

“And I’d advise you to leave the women’s changing room now,” Hana also told him with a smile. “There’s two more women still out in the baths that will be coming in very soon.”

“Oh shit,” Yoshiro realized as he began to rush out of the room. “You’re right!”

As he left, Hana sighed and continued drying herself off. She looked at a fogged-up mirror on the wall and rubbed it with her hand to see her reflection before checking her body to see if there were any marks from Hideo. After finding none, she sighed before saying to herself, “Anything for my dream. Anything…”

Outside, as Yoshiro walked down the hallway, Ruka saw him and grew confused upon seeing his wet clothes. “Uh, hey, what happened to your clo-“

“I slipped on the floor in the men’s changing room looking for something,” he explained away, lying to her. “That’s all.”

“Oh… You didn’t have to cut me off like that.”

“Hana-senpai’s all set, by the way,” he then told her, ignoring her comment. “She’ll be leaving with us soon. She’s fine.”

Ruka, thinking that indeed, she had only assumed the worst and that nothing had happened, replied, “Oh.., Well, that’s a relief. I guess we were just worried for nothing, huh?”

“I guess so,” he lied. As the two of them walked back to the lobby, he thought to himself, “I can’t tell anyone else about this, especially not Kishio. She’ll flip her shit if she finds out, and admittedly, she would jeopardize the deal Hana-senpai made, even if I think it’s still awful. For now, no one else can know what Hana did with Kawase-san.”