Dead Hours — The Last Working Microwave，第 10 頁
作者：Inkroost · 發布於
文字記錄
A finger punches a long time into the microwave display: thirty minutes. The tracksuit regular turns back with a matter-of-fact expression while the frozen brick rotates inside the humming machine. Kaito’s face goes completely blank. No reader-visible dialogue is present. The page lands the cruelty of the escalation: the remaining microwave is not just occupied, it is captured for half an hour.
圖片說明
The tracksuit regular sets the microwave to thirty minutes, leaving Kaito blank with despair.
關於本章
3 A.M. One of the store's two microwaves dies with a pop and a curl of smoke, leaving a single working unit — and a slowly forming queue of night-shift oddballs who each need to heat something, each taking longer than the last: a salaryman's coffee, a student's family-size gratin, an old man who keeps opening the door to check and restarting, and the tracksuit regular microwaving something frozen solid on max time. Kaito just wants to heat his own bento and watches his turn get pushed further and further back, holding the cold box in the same dead-eyed spot as the queue grows. At dawn the delivery guy fixes the 'dead' microwave in two seconds (it was unplugged) — but Kaito's shift is ending and Rin has already eaten his bento cold on camera, because it was never getting warm anyway. She wins, he gets nothing.