No sooner had one wave subsided than another rose.
"You didn't just now realize that Otae isn't some manly guy, did you?" Sogo Doma turned back, looking rather embarrassed at the few... idiot squad members who had slipped through the net.
Otae: "???" Huh? What did that mean? When had she ever become a manly guy? Utaha Kasumigaoka's eye twitched as well.
"..." So Ozawa and the others had really been serious just now. These guys had actually mistaken the woman before them for a cross-dressing man—but were they blind?
Though Miss Otae was indeed rather flat, her face looked nothing like a man's, did it?
Toshiro Hijikata was even more embarrassed. Although this misunderstanding did not have much to do with him, it had all been caused by that bastard Katsura! If Katsura had not insisted on working at that transgender bar, and if he had not looked more feminine than actual women when dressed as one—at the very least, far more feminine than this Otae whom Boss Kondo was obsessed with—
Ahem... Even so, Toshiro Hijikata had never told the squad members that Otae was a manly guy. He had not even directly responded to it. At most, he had stayed silent and not denied it, but he had never admitted it either!
In the end, the idiot squad members had simply become too accustomed to Katsura's cross-dressing and imagined on their own that Otae was a manly guy. What did that have to do with Toshiro Hijikata?
Besides, he had not denied it for the Kondo Group's reputation and the squad members' self-esteem! If they learned about Boss Kondo's perverted behavior—the squad members who regarded Boss Kondo as their role model would break down and cry. They really would cry!
So Toshiro's silence and refusal to deny