But they had barely taken a few steps.
A thunderous roar erupted nearby, straight out of a hot-blooded battle anime.
"Kohei! We're going to win this time!!!"
"Right! Iori! We have to take the championship!!!"
At those rousing cries, Lin Xiao and the others peeked over curiously.
Kohei Imamura and Iori Kitahara stood face-to-face, each wearing nothing but boxer briefs, their hands clamped firmly on each other's shoulders.
Most absurd of all, their art style seemed to undergo a bizarre transformation. Their once fairly handsome faces twisted grotesquely, deep shadows cutting across their features as veins bulged. They looked like a pair of Oddities!
Iori gritted his teeth, tears of humiliation streaking from the corners of his eyes. "The Diving Club's reputation is so bad now that the Student Council slashed more than half our funding! Are you kidding me?!"
"All we did was embrace nature with our naked bodies! What gives them the right to cut our funding, damn it?!"
Kohei's eyes turned bloodshot as he roared like a demon. "That's why we have to win, no matter what! With the Music Festival prize money, we can buy the strongest Water of Life and the latest magical-girl figures!"
Iori nodded fiercely. The two clasped hands and shouted the purest, most shameless villainous declaration in unison:
"That's right! For the prize money! Even if we have to use the dirtiest, sleaziest tricks to sabotage the other teams, we're going to wiiin!!!"
Beside the two half-naked men pulling faces like lunatics stood Chisa Kotegawa.
The only member of the club wearing normal clothes, she folded her arms and stared at them with the dead eyes of someone looking at unrecyclable trash. Her face was a picture of disgust and despair.
"..."
Out in the corridor, Miyuki Shirogane, Hachiman, and the others