*insert joke here*

Henry left the occult club and looked to his left. Indeed, the next room was the non-euclidian club.

He opened the club's door and was greeted by a second, slightly smaller door. He opened that door, and a third door appeared.

“It’s one of these, uh.”

He kept opening the doors, which kept on getting smaller and smaller. After the twelfth or thirteenfth door, he began wondering if this wasn’t the clownery club. After about thirty doors, the opening had become so small that he couldn’t even fit his hand inside.

“I don’t have time for this! What time is it? …It’s twenty-three past five! I don’t have long before the school closes!”

Feeling mocked, he slammed the initial door closed. Not even a second later, the door was opened by a boy in white clothes, now showing the inside of the room.

“It wouldn’t be that easy!” The boy said.

“Nothing is… Hi, I’m looking for… sliding blocks? I was told they were in your club room.”

“You’re really bad at this.”

“What? …are you talking about my social skills? Is it that evident?”

Henry was confused, but he noticed that the boy was inviting him in by pointing at the hallway. The boy pushed him from behind and helped him leave inside the club.

The cubic room only had two walls, as white and straight as Henry. There was a tree growing on one of the five corners of the room. Its trunk was the same gray color as the pavement, which was checkered like a large chess board. He was not able to distinguish where the tree ended and the ceiling began.

“This room is glitchy…”

“I told you to be careful!” Henry heard the boy’s voice solely in his left ear. He was too scared to answer.

He could feel that the hands of the boy in front of him were pushing his back, but when he looked behind, he could only see the windows of the room. He led him back to a table with four legs (but only three of them touched the ground, as you can imagine) and slid a chair down like a projector screen.

As Henry sat over the chair, he looked up at his legs and felt a seven-sided, rectangular box sitting off his lap. He placed it down the table above him and closed the box up to reveal a set of spheres tightly fit inside of pyramidal holes. Each ball had the piece of a drawing on its topside face, arranged in a random order.

“Hey, there’s no need to scream!” The boy spoke up.

Henry looked at him feeling overwhelmed. He had not spoken a single word. Although, a strong feeling that something was wrong struck him the moment he entered the “room”. He wouldn’t be surprised if he had screamed without noticing.

“W-what is this?”

“Through the door!” The boy winked.

Henry looked around to see if he may be missing something, some context to understand what the boy was talking about. But looking around the room only made his head spin. There was no one else beside them.

“I-I’m going to try and solve this…”

"Didn’t I tell you already?"

He decided to ignore the boy.

Skeptical, he picked a piece and slid it to the right. And he did slide it to the right. He was the one controlling the hand, after all. He clearly saw both the piece and his hand slowly move to the right. And yet, before he could notice, when his hand had stopped, the piece had moved to the left.

"W—...?" Normal speech couldn't accurately portray his confusion. “What kind of otherworldly being is this puzzle for?!”

“Hello! Do you need help with something?” The boy answered him.

“What? …I would really like it if you told me the hint Gimei gave you?”

"Frankly, I doubt you’ll be able to later."

“That doesn’t help!” Henry cried out, stressed and confused.

“A lrig evag su siht xob emos emit .oga sI ti ?sruoy” The voice echoed.

“S-sorry…” Henry’s voice became very small.

He tried solving the puzzle over and over again, accidentally crossing his eyes multiple times but never getting anywhere. He had to stop when he noticed his hand moving in directions he didn’t know existed.

“What do I do?! What does "doing” even mean in this situation?!”

“I think I know what you’re talking about. Come inside!”

"Dude, I can't right now."

“Sure! Where music is the cracking of bones and applause is screams, a mountain waits for you.”

"I told you I— Wait! …That's the hint for the next number, isn't it?!"

“Go ahead.”

"I will take that as a yes! The cracking of bones and the screaming are an evident sign of the chiropractor club! Perfect! Now I won’t have to do this impossible puzzle!"

“Careful!”

“The number is eight, I don’t need to check it.”

He stood down and looked in the window. A bright moon dazzled in the night sky.

“A bright moon in the night sky?! How long have I been here?! I need to leave!”

Henry turned what he felt was 180 degrees and ran towards what could have been the door. But the more he ran towards it, the more it grew distant.

“Are you sure you can leave this with us?” The boy asked.

Henry tripped going left on a sudden set of steps (although his altitude before, during, or after climbing them did not change).

“We get that a lot.” The boy helped him crouch to his feet.

“How do I leave this hellscape?!”

“I’m not sure. It didn’t look like this when she had it.” He grabbed his hand.

He accompanied him to what was initially two desks stacked on top of each other, but quickly became recognizable as the door when they got closer to it. The moment it was open, Henry jumped out of the room.

“Come again soon!”

The voice of the boy echoed distantly, as if inside a cave. When Henry looked behind him, both the door and the club had disappeared. Ignoring the confusion, he ran to the first set of windows he could find and saw the sun getting closer to setting. He had no idea how long he had been inside the clubroom. The clock on his phone showed twenty-two past five.

Henry’s poor brain already had a hard time dealing with regular laws of physics, trying to understand what had happened would cause a short circuit in his head. He ignored the impossibility of the situation, and the fact that he was on a different floor than before, and marched straight to the chiropractor club.

Chiharu was in the chiropractor club, and he was hoping that she could give him a hand.

“If things go right, I might be able to advance two routes at once!” His rotten brain produced.

Like always, the harsh reality collided dramatically with his improbable fantasies. Chiharu was indeed waiting for him at the chiropractor club, but her role was the opposite of a helper.

“I’m here to stop you!” Chiharu stood with her arms crossed in front of the club door.

“Why?!”

“I would do it without a reason, but in this specific case, Gimei told me to.”

“Are you sure you're not doing that thing where you secretly want to help me but cannot be honest with your feelings and end up going against me solely because you can’t handle your emotions?”

A series of Japanese symbols that could be pronounced with the sound “go” started to emanate from Chiharu’s body. Her eyes suddenly disappeared behind dark and physically impossible shadows cast from who knows where. She looked angry. As angry as she did every other time Henry annoyed her. There was but one difference.
Now she laughed.

“You don’t need to convince me any further, Henry! I have been waiting for an excuse to beat you up. Now that I have at least one other person supporting me,” Her red eyes shined through the shadows, “I won’t hold back!”

“It’s my second day here…” Henry whimpered like a small dog.

Chiharu bent forward and leapt at him. She jumped with such speed it caused the ground she stood on to cave in and visible shockwaves of air to form around her feet.

Despite all of this, Henry managed to dodge the attack through the sheer power of “It would be anticlimactic if the protagonist died now”.

For the sake of both realism and immersion, we are going to justify Henry’s survival with the plausible but improbable excuse of:

Blinded by bloodlust, Chiharu put too much power on the attack, worsening her aim and making her miss the punch. Her arm penetrated through the wall behind him and got stuck.

His life saved by a plot-mandated miracle, Henry would not let this occasion go to waste. Taking advantage of her stuck arm, he began running as fast as his legs allowed him to.

He began feeling relief after turning a couple of corners without any sign of doom. But his hopes were shattered just like the walls he could hear crumbling in the distance. It didn’t take long before Chiharu reached him.

A hand punched through the floor and grabbed his ankle, making him fall face first. With a punch using her free hand, Chiharu rose from the ground like a scene out of a bad zombie movie, the only differences being that they were on the third floor of a school and that the zombie was a sixteen-year-old girl.

“Mitsuketa~” Her words were left untranslated for added dramatic effect.

Henry was powerless against such a force of nature. Lying helplessly on the ground, he had resigned to his fate. And his fate was on the knuckles of the girl currently thrwing him a punch.

But the power of “It would be anticlimactic if the protagonist died now” was strong.

An explosive sound thundered through the halls, and debris rained down like snowflakes in a winter storm. Dark! Fighter! Kimei! stood between them, holding the Moai statue. Instead of Henry’s face, Chiharu had punched, and consequently turned to smithereens, the Easter Island’s face.

“K-Kimei! You saved me!”

“Looks like I made it just in time! Is this villain giving you trouble?”

“Yes but… Aren’t you the villain? I thought you were trying to conquer the world?”

“… Careful! She’s about to attack!”

Chiharu was looking at them, unmoving.

“I’m not doing anything… Weren’t you the one that told me to—”

“Hiyah!” Kimei threw what remained of the moai statue at her.

“How are you managing to throw a stone statue?!” Henry asked, slightly jealous.

“It’s made of polystyrene.”

Chiharu just let the light piece of colored foam bounce off her head and fall to the ground.

“Listen," Henry said, "Can I ask you something, Gimei?”

“I do not know who that is! My name is Dark! Fighter! Kimei!” She posed.

“Right, Kimei. Why did you send a battle shounen antagonist after me? I can understand solving some puzzles, but this is way beyond my capabilities. Or did you seriously expect me to fight?”

“I didn’t tell her to attack you!” She whispered to him, trying not to break character, “I only told her to make it difficult for you to enter the clubroom, like giving you a riddle or something. I didn't think she would go berserk like some sort of kaiju! That was all her.”

“Couldn’t you ask someone less… murderous?”

“There aren’t many people I can ask this sort of thing. Remember, this club is a secret! And she only knows about it because she helped me build the grotto.”

“She did?”

"I could never bring those supporting beams by myself! I initially thought of asking the coal mining club, but I had to keep the grotto a secret from the school, and since I couldn't get my hands on a forklift, I decided to ask Chiharu for help."

“But she’s not part of the club?”

“She wasn’t interested in joining.”

“Then why did she agree to build a grotto?!”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Then why did you agree to build a grotto?!” Henry asked Chiharu directly.

“It’s a girl thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh.”

“So, like… are we still doing this?” Chiharu was patiently waiting for her cue.

“Right!” Kimei got back into character. “We have to defeat her if we want to learn the number!” She assumed her fighting stance.

“I’ll take that as a yes!”

Running at incredible speed, Chiharu launched herself at Kimei, weaved past her, and punched Henry in the face. His body flew across the hall.

“Hey! Fight me, not him!”

“I don’t have a reason to fight you. Henry is the one I’m after!”

“T-the struggles of managing a harem…” Henry grunted from the floor, with his mouth cartoonishly turned sideways.

“Don’t underestimate me! OBLITERATING FURY OF THE ONE THOUSAND DRAGON GODS!”

Kimei ran at her and delivered an incessant flurry of blows to her chest and torso, to which Chiharu did not react in the slightest. She waited for Kimei to tire out and then pushed her to the ground with a simple shove.

“It’s time to end this.” Chiharu walked towards the boy still lying on the ground. “Any final wish?”

“Don’t kill me please?”

“Nice try.”

She dragged him towards the windows and smashed them open with his body. He was now hanging upside down above the void, held by the foot by a merciless Chiharu. Below him, a small, crocodile-infested lake.

“Isn’t this a bit too much?!” He screamed.

“It’s useless!” Kimei cried out as she desperately tried to push Chiharu away from the window, without any result. “She got too much into the evil character! Shw can’t stop herself anymore!”

“Say your prayers, Henry!” Chiharu’s eyes shone red.

“This is why I prefer slice of life stories!”

How is Henry going to get out of this situation? Is the power of “It would be anticlimactic if the protagonist died now” strong enough to save his life? Is anyone going to question how it is possible for a high school girl to be this strong? Do you even care? Does anything really matter at all? Am I real? Are you real? Hello? Can anyone hear me? Help?

Find out all of this and more, in the next chapter of Dragon RomComPar!!!

POSTFACE

- THINGS THE TYPING MONKEY WROTE

Miabmz moo: Gwc amzqwcatg axmvb bqum bw lmkqxpmz bpqa?

Go: A strategy board game where you place a colored piece on a grid and try to surround the opponent’s pieces to capture them. At the end of the game, the person with the highest captured pieces wins. Simple, right? It is so simple, in fact, that the number of possible board positions is many times larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

Go: That was the wrong go. The go in the story references a sort of onomatopoeiaou for menacing situations. It comes from the fact that if you go to a random person in the street and start saying go at them over and over, they are likely to call the police.

Mitsuketa~: Translator’s note: Mitsuketa means I found you.