April 5th, 2011: Super Beef Bowl Nostalgia Who: Souji and Mitsuya. What: Meeting up with an upperclassman and an old friend. When: After school on Tuesday, April 5, 2011. Where: The Super Beef Bowl.
The aroma of grilling meat and steaming vegetables that came from the Super Beef Bowl was a welcome and familiar scent to Souji. The smell, as well as the building with its large and bold signs, was an ingrained part of the landscape of Hirosaka, but if he closed his eyes, he could imagine that he was back in Inaba and standing just outside of the Chinese Diner. Even the undercurrent of chatting and laughing people sounded the same. As bittersweet as it was to think about the small town he came to know as his home-away-from-home, it did help that Hirosaka had remained, for the most part, unchanged.
Except for the nightly disappearance of trees at nine in the evening, that is.
As Souji went to open the door of the restaurant, he couldn’t help but to think about that other new world, Yggdrassil, and the haunting words of the entity called Ameno-Sagiri:
‘Your world will be engulfed by the hollow forest.’
Those words sounded eerily prophetic now. Was that what was going to happen again? Did Yggdrassil, so similar to the TV World and its effects on Inaba, have an influence already over the city? Were those figures he encountered responsible for this as well, or was another entirely new force or person to blame?
It was no use. Although Souji had been puzzling about this since the first Yggdrassil night, he had no answers. He, and the others who had also experienced that night, would have to wait until the situation changed.
For now, he was going to take Chie’s old advice and do his thinking on a full stomach. But he was also going to put that thinking on hold because he was meeting an old friend today: his upperclassman, and now university student, Mitsuya. He was used to experiencing sudden and absurd events, and then going right back out to do something normal, like hanging out with a friend. Souji wondered, as he stepped inside the Bowl, how Mitsuya had changed in the year he had been gone.