Chapter 452.<h4><b>Chapter 452. An Exciting Night with Two Girls Outside the City: The Alleged Haunted Castle. (2/7)</b></h4>
<span style="font-weight:400">“It was the maid cafe itself, it was only a maid cafe in name. There were no cute girls in maid costumes at all!” I mmed my fist against the wall out of frustration, albeit using some restraint to avoid making too big amotion, as I recalled the traumatic scene I walked in upon that day.
<span style="font-weight:400">“It was all... propaganda purported by the media. The images of the ce that they stered everywhere on their site and used in articles promoting their establishment were all a lie! A bloody fictitious lie to paint a pretty picture! Turns out they only wear those maid costumes for photoshoots as part of an advertising campaign to lure naive and gullible suckers in.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Weebs and otakus alike were nothing more than the unsuspecting prey whom’s foolish little dreams they greedily fed and thrived upon. It was the only maid cafe in our city after all.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“I’d originally only really went for the food and ordered it for pickup, but not only did the food suck, there was not a single maid costume in sight when I entered to pick up my order. One out of ten, would not rmend.”
<span style="font-weight:400">I’d only gone there for research purposes to write a scene for a story but...
<span style="font-weight:400">“I was too naive back then and the fond memories I had of anime turned out to be nothing more than idealistic lies. From the ramen and yakisoba to the maids. All of it.”
<span style="font-weight:400">I slumped down to the ground in an overdramatic fashion as my heart ached from the trauma of that day, where my final hopes and dreams crumbled to pieces and shattered.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Dawn… anime... lied to me. The one thing I thought I could maybe believe in... The ramen that would soothe my weary soul… There was no chicken soup for this particr man’s soul. Only half-cooked eggs that when eaten made me want to throw up.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“The eggs looked so good in the anime too. But that beauty hid an ugly underside. It speaks volumes about our society as a whole. That ramen was the perfect depiction and embodiment of our twisted society. We live in a society... Dawn. A society where nothing is ever as good as we’re led on to believe.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“It looked great on the surface, but it left a bitter taste in your mouth when you finally ate it. Dawn... don’t make the same mistake I did. Keep your expectations low so you don’t end up a traumatized survivor like me.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Ran…” Dawn fell to her knees and grabbed both my hands.
<span style="font-weight:400">I looked up into her serene eyes and asked, “What?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“I understand, it must have been so hard on yuh to tell your story. But… yuh only tried ramen and yakisoba from one maid cafe, right?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah… so?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Then… without trying another maid cafe how can yuh say for certain they’re all the same? What if it was just a one-off in your city and the others are better? We can go to the big city here again and try one! Yuh can’t give up after just one bad experience! Yuh have to stand up and never give in to despair!”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Stop! Dawn, you’ve been deceived by shounen, you need to ept seinen. The world is a dark ce, it’s not the blindly bright world depicted in shounen. You’re too naive.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“I want to believe.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Pfft! Hahahaha! Like seriously? What are you two even doing?” Rosa held her stomach and crouched down low to the groundughing herself to tears.
<span style="font-weight:400">Dawn released my hand, a slight blush on her cheeks, having gotten too caught up in our little melodramatic act.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Rosa, shhhh! If we’re too loud we might wake my dad up.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Ah. Pfft. Right…” despite quieting down, she continued to snicker while trembling. It seemed she found it even funnier when she realized she had to keep quiet. Somehow, things were always funnier when you knew you couldn’tugh. When reading or watching something funny in a library, it often made things funnier than they really were. I suppose the inappropriateness of certain things was something that made one want to instinctivelyugh.
<span style="font-weight:400">Like a long drawn out silent fart that slowly builds in volume over time in a library versus at a loud concert. That sort of low-hanging immature humor was hrious in the former case but not nearly as much in thetter case. The context of the situation could transform somethingpletely normal and mundane into something ungodly funny.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Let’s get out of here before Rosa dies from trying to hold back herughter.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Yeah.”
<span style="font-weight:400">I stood up, grabbed Rosa’s hand, and dragged her out of the house.
<span style="font-weight:400">As soon as I climbed on the back of Dawn’s pickup truck to enter the token trunk, a loud tooty fart came from the direction of the stables. Caught off guard by the suddenness and the sheer volume, my hand slipped when climbing up and I fell into the trunk while bursting out into a fit of uncontrobleughter.
<span style="font-weight:400">God damn it! How did I fall for that low-hanging fruit? It was just the timing considering how I’d just been thinking about this exact topic.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Are yuh okay?” Dawn rolled down the window inside her truck and asked worriedly from the driver’s seat.
<span style="font-weight:400">Rosa who’d been holding in herughter the entire time cracked and startedughing hysterically in the passenger seat while covering her face.
<span style="font-weight:400">“I don’t get it? What’s so funny? Are yuh… justughing because of a horse farting?” Dawn asked cluelessly. The sound of a horse’s loud fart was probablymon for her to hear.
<span style="font-weight:400">Neither of us could answer. We wereughing for twopletely different reasons.
<span style="font-weight:400">Dawn, who couldn’t figure out the joke, seemingly found our iprehensibleughter funny and inevitably sumbed to her own fit ofughter.
<span style="font-weight:400">Our skit got Rosa, a fart got me, and ourughter got Dawn.
<span style="font-weight:400">…
<span style="font-weight:400">It took a while for us to finally hit the road because of how long we wereughing. Only when we settled down were we able to depart.
<span style="font-weight:400">Iid down in the trunk watching the moon and the stars while Dawn drove. In a way, it reminded me of my childhood whenever I traveled by car with my mother. Traveling by motorcycle was fun, but as we didn’t travel on it when it was dark out for safety concerns, I’d missed out on this feeling of nostalgia during our trip up until now. A motorcycle provided apletely fresh and different experience I was unustomed to, it wasn’t like a car where you could pull over anywhere at any time and take a nap inside.
<span style="font-weight:400">It’d been about an hour since we left Dawn’s ce and we still hadn’t arrived.
<span style="font-weight:400">“Rosa, are we almost there yet?” I called out and asked.
<span style="font-weight:400">“We should be. Keep an eye out for it though, I don’t know exactly where it is since it’s not on any map I could find online.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“What? It’s not on a map? How do you even know for sure it exists then?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“I don’t. I just saw the story about it online and wanted to go on a little adventure to check it out and see if it’s real or not.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“You’ve got to be kidding me. You should have said that sooner.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“If I did you would have resisteding with everything you had.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Of course.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“And that’s exactly why I didn’t.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Haaaaaah. Let’s just go back, there’s no way this ce really exists if it’s not on any maps. People make shit up all the time online. The story you read is obviouslypletely made up.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“We’re already all the way out here, don’t be such a downer. Just help us look out for it. It could be a good distance away down one of these rural roads.”
<span style="font-weight:400">I reluctantly sat up and looked out into the darkness.
<span style="font-weight:400">“It’s way too dark to see it if it’s far away.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Just keep looking. We can start heading down some of the rural roads every now and then.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“... that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. The odds of us finding a ce we don’t know the exact location of or road to turn off on is practically zero.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“So what? We’ll find it.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“What makes you so sure of that?”
<span style="font-weight:400">“My instincts.”
<span style="font-weight:400">“Your… uh… animal instincts?” Animal, was naturally code for assassin since Dawn was with us.
<span style="font-weight:400">“No, my womanly instincts.”
<span style="font-weight:400">Womanly instincts? Are you kidding me? If it was your instincts as an assassin I might ept it. But womanly instincts? Hah! Yeah, right. The only thing those are good for is for sniffing out liars and cheaters. I’ll die of old age before those womanly instincts find a ce that clearly doesn’t exist.
<span style="font-weight:400">…
<span style="font-weight:400">One hourter…
<span style="font-weight:400">I looked up with a deadpan expression.
<span style="font-weight:400">Scary.
<span style="font-weight:400">What the hell is with womanly instincts?
<span style="font-weight:400">Isn’t it too damn strong?