"Crack, crack, crack..."
"Creak, creak, creak..."
Amid the slowly dispersing curtain of smoke mixed with fine dust, the sounds of pebbles rolling and wood scraping softly rose across the forest clearing, now returned to stillness.
"H-How... how did it go?"
Slowly lowering his hands from where they had been crossed in front of his face, Spectacles Man, now crouched on the ground, shifted his eyes. He glanced at the cracked right lens of his glasses, swallowed hard, then looked at his companion beside him and spoke.
"I can't see clearly!"
Meanwhile, his companion was lying flat across a branch thick enough to hold a person, squinting toward the center of the clearing, where the smoke and dust remained quite dense.
He was searching.
"What happened? What did you see? You told me to detonate the Exploding Tag, but Matsuda is in there too! At such close range, even he wouldn't be able to withstand that explosion!"
As he searched, he could not help complaining.
"Are you sure it detonated, and that it worked?"
At that moment, Spectacles Man did not answer directly. He narrowed his eyes as well and looked toward the center of the clearing, where the smoke had erupted moments ago, where everything had happened.
Instead, he asked about the Exploding Tag.
Did it really explode?
Doubt filled his heart.
He had always been quite confident in his dynamic vision. Otherwise, he would never have been able to see Hada Ichiba's movements. His reactions were also exceptionally quick. Hada Ichiba had broken the classroom lights, suddenly plunging the front half of the room into darkness. It had created something like a momentary blindness without warning. Coupled with Hada Ichiba's speed, anyone without exceptional eyesight and lightning-fast reactions would basically have been unable to see anything at that moment.