Chapter 86. Break up? (4/6)

Just as I resigned myself, I heard someone call out to me, “Ran!”

Don’t you ‘Ran’ me! It’s too predictable damn it! Just let me die in peace this time you shit assassin who couldn’t even do your job right in my last life! You’re supposed to be a professional, right? If so, why did you screw everything up and say something so unnecessary at the end!

When I opened my eyes, that girl had her eyes locked onto me with a serious expression. There was no panic on that beautiful face of hers. Her eyes were calm. She wasn’t flustered by this situation. A normal high school girl would have just frozen up in shock. But not this failure of an assassin.

She lowered her body to the ground and kicked off with her right leg faster than I’d ever seen her go before. 

In a flash, she’d closed the distance and appeared in front of me with her arm stretched out.

As fast as she may have been to react, she came up short, with me just barely out of her reach.

As my body began to descend over the edge, I thought it was over. She’d done her best. But your best wasn’t always enough.

I stared at the edge of the roof slowly receding into the distance when her face suddenly appeared.

She didn’t hesitate and dove straight down, parallel to the wall headfirst. Like a lunatic who’d given up on life, she kicked off the underside of the edge during her descent to increase her downward speed. She quickly caught up to me.

I was shocked. Was this girl trying to kill herself before I died?

“Are you an idiot!” I screamed at her.

“You’re the idiot, idiot!” She clenched her teeth and right when we were at the second story she kicked hard off the wall directly behind her. She forcefully transferred some of her downward momenta into horizontal momentum and headed toward me at a diagonal. She immediately hooked her right arm under my arms, changing both of our moments.

I quickly ran the calculations inside my head in a flash using a few simple physics formulas and understood what she was doing. Her end objective was simple, to spread out the average force exerted over our bodies by increasing the length of time that force is applied. It was the impulse-momentum equation.

She shouldn’t have learned any of that yet though. Was it her instincts that told her how to minimize the fall damage? 

She’d acted at the second story as the midpoint to minimize the burden placed on her own body as well. The longer she waited to act the more damage would result. It was an optimization problem one could solve using derivative and integral equations.

She made one final action that caught my attention. Right before we reached the ground she let go of me. Our combined mass became singular and split. If this was an idiotic story, the protagonist would do something stupid like trying to catch them in their arms and remaining that way, but in reality, such an action was the dumbest thing you could do. Her quick-witted decision was the ideal method to minimize damage sustained to both parties.

The final split-second decision she made reduced the average force we’d experience upon impact by about half.

The change in time for the impulse was increased by how much snow was compressed along a diagonal trajectory rather than simply vertical.

At the instant of impact, we slid across the snow horizontally a short distance. A certain degree of pain still spread throughout my body, but it had been greatly cushioned by the now knee-deep snow from the night before.

I confirmed the status of my own body and realized aside from pain and my slightly rattled-up internal organs, nothing seemed to be broken. After narrowly escaping death thanks to Rosa, I broke out into a cold sweat. I’d sort of just accepted my fate just now, but I’d seriously almost just died and it hadn’t even been because of Rosa. Rather, a simple gust of wind almost did it.

Honestly. It kind of ticked me off. Sort of like, ‘Screw you nature! Don’t fuck with me! I decide how I die, not you!’

I’ve never considered myself to be suicidal, I’d just rather be the one to choose my own demise. To exit the stage of this world at the time of my own choosing in the method I saw most fitting.

And a gust of wind definitely was not that. If I’d been pushed off by Rosa I could have accepted it, but for it to not only not end up that way, but for her to risk her own life to save me… I was sincerely pissed.

“Nature’s always just trying to shit all over what I want.” I couldn’t help but spit that line out.

“Dumbass, don’t stand so close to the edge next time if you don’t want nature to shit all over your face. You were just begging nature to do it.”

“Pffthahahaha! True.” I couldn’t help but burst out into laughter.

“Hahahahaha!” She similarly started laughing.

For two people who almost died, we definitely didn’t look the part the way we were laughing to ourselves with our backs flat on the ground, bodies buried in snow.

It took several minutes straight of uncontrollable laughter before the two of us finally settled down.

By the end of it, I had my hand over my stomach holding it from laughing too hard. It actually hurt to laugh. Both from the fall and from just how long we’d laughed for.

It didn’t help that a single gust of wind was colder than a fart straight out of Satan’s asshole. One might think a fart from him would be hot, but freezing cold temperatures could yield a similar burning effect. Both extremes of temperatures could burn someone.

Too cold and you’d get frostbite. Too hot and you’d be burned. The difference between frostbite and an ice burn was for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. However, burns from extreme colds were often considered much more serious when compared to their counterpart at the other end of the spectrum, burns from high temperatures. You typically didn’t notice such burns very fast compared to a burn from fire. The damage from cold could easily surpass the damage you would sustain from fire because you don’t notice it as fast. The simple difference was in how quickly your body identifies the pain and reacts to it. 

Cold tends to numb pain, it can act in a fashion that slows your pain receptors response time. Metabolic life is known to slow down in the cold to minimize energy loss in the form of heat. The body had just adapted in such an evolutionary fashion, in a way that was more biased toward responding to high temperatures. It was the speed at which heat was transferred that resulted in a person’s pain receptors responding. The bigger the difference in temperature, the more pain you felt as a result of the faster transference of heat. It was an exponential relationship dependent on the temperature differential.

For cold temperatures, there was a bottom limit of absolute zero, -273.15 degrees Celsius or 0 Kelvin. But the upper end of the spectrum didn’t have such a simple limit imposed upon it.

Thus, logically speaking, your body would obviously take precautionary measurements against such a wide range above its own temperature. Theoretically, the Planck Temperature, ten raised to the exponent thirty-two Kelvin, was the highest temperature that could be achieved, but for all we know, it could be even higher depending on how nature was built at the fundamental level. Well, all one needed to know was the number was big, bloody big to a stupid degree for the hot side of the spectrum.

Anyway, all that really mattered here was that the difference in temperature was what dictated the rate at which heat transferred between two mediums. The bigger the difference, the faster the rate of heat transference.

These were the most fundamental natural laws of thermodynamics. Everything else was simple biology. I’d learned all about such things in university. Yet… I was using this sort of knowledge for idiotic things like analyzing a gust of wind and comparing it to a fart from Satan’s asshole. Just how low had I sunk, to so seriously contemplate the cause and effect of a fart straight out of Satan’s asshole?

How bored was I really?

Only minutes ago, was I not talking about something rather important with Rosa? Breaking up and whatnot?

Just how did my mind wander so far off track from that, to… farts out of Satan’s asshole?

More like, why am I so stuck up on the fact that a fart came out of Satan’s asshole?

“Hahahahaha! Hahahaha! It’s so stupid!” I’d abruptly burst out into another fit of uncontrollable laughter.

“What’s wrong all of a sudden? What are you laughing about now?” Rosa asked.

“I can’t! I can’t breathe, Rosa! Hahahaha! Please! Stop me from laughing. Hahahaha! I’m seriously going to be a man who dies of laughter at this rate! Hahahahahahaha! Ha! Hahaha! Hahahahaha!”

“What are you even laughing about still? Pftft. Like, seriously. Stop. Hahahahaha! What the heck? Why am I starting to laugh too? Ran, stop laughing, there’s nothing funny anymore. Hahahaha! This is all your fault! I don’t even know why I’m laughing at this point. Hahahaha!”

“Because of a fart from Satan’s asshole.” I wheezed as I just barely spit that out.

“What the hell is that even supposed to mean! Hahahaha!”

“Hahahahaha! I don’t know either! Please help. I really don’t want to be the man who died because I laughed myself to death because of a fart from Satan’s asshole!”

I was actually crying from laughing too hard.

The tears were even freezing over.

“Are you thinking that the gust of wind that blew you over was- hahahahaha! What the hell! This is all your fault! Now I can’t stop laughing!”

“Rosa, if I die because of this- hahahaha!”

Neither of us could stop laughing by this point.

This entire ordeal suddenly just felt like some stupid joke. The seriousness was all gone. Blown away by the wind.