References to other anime and constant fourth wall breaking in the Gintama light novel? It’s more likely than you’d think.

(AKA, a translator’s pop culture nightmare WHEN SHE DOESN’T GET THE REFERENCE AND SLOGS THROUGH THE INTERNET FOR CLUES)

Even after the summer, the pool was meant to be kept full of water just case of a fire. If there was ever a fire in the school building, then the firefighters could use the pool water to put it out.

At the very least, that was the explanation Hasegawa gave to the Odd Jobs Club members as they walked towards the indoor pool.

“I understand why you would leave water in the pool all year, but I suppose it became rather murky?” Takechi asked.

Hasegawa nodded in reply. “Well, yeah. Saying that it’s dirty is too flattering. Well, you’ll get it once you see it.”

He had started draining the pool water three hours ago, but it was about time for it to be completed.

“It’s not like the bathtub at home after all. It’d obviously take this long to drain.”

As he spoke, they arrived at the pool in single file.

At the head of the line, Hasegawa opened the iron doors leading to the pool, revealing the top of a cement staircase by the poolside.

Standing there, Matako was lost for words. “What… the hell is that?”

The pool was 25 meters long and divided into 8 lanes. There was no water in sight. It had been completely drained out. Well, it’s not like they could really see the bottom of the pool. Empty cans, plastic bottles, stuff that looked like random sticks, paper, scraps of fabric, folding chairs, even what looked to be steel lockers and other piles of trash covered everything.

“Geez… Gets worse every time I look at it,” Hasegawa said with a great sigh. Matako could not blame him a bit.

“Is it like this every year?”

“Yeah, pretty much. If it was just the pool itself then I’d be fine with cleaning it on my own, but there were people who secretly slipped this stuff into here. It’s as you can see.”

Matako shook her head. She was a delinquent herself and already had a questionable limit when it came to morals, but even she thought this was terrible.

“This looks like a lot more heavy-lifting than we expected, I’d say,” Bansai commented.

Takechi nodded. “Indeed.”

“Let’s hurry up and get this over with then,” Takasugi stated. “If we just stand here and stare, then that garbage isn’t going anywhere.”

With that, their leader headed down to wade through the trash. Matako and the others followed after him.

Both the Odd Jobs Club members and Hasegawa had already changed from their school uniforms to their gym outfits. On the top they wore short sleeves, while on the bottom they rolled up their pant legs.

As Matako got a closer look at the piles of garbage in the center of the pool, the more surprised she became at how assorted it was. There was an amazing amount of variety and the stuff that was thrown away.

She could, at the very least, understand the empty cans and plastic bottles because that was something typical, though not forgivable. But the bicycles and the steel lockers should have been dumped as industrial waste, not at the bottom of a pool. Just who had the nerve to do such a thing?

As she was tossing some of the smaller, more manageable pieces of trash into a bag, she heard Bansai’s voice cry out, “Alright, I did it, I’d say!”

Did what? No way, there was no way that he was able to finish tidying up all the trash already…

As Matako peered around to see what he was up to, Bansai had tied a wooden box to a pair of skis and then tied a plush toy shaped like a dog to the box. There were two tree branches stuck into the toy dog’s head, forming antlers.

“That one time Chopper pulled the sleigh away into the night sky!”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, SENPAI?!” Matako screeched.

“The desire to create can be stimulated even by materials like these, I’d say.”

“Enough fooling around! You’re supposed to be throwing this junk away! It’s just trash!” Matako yelled out angrily.

“Heeeey! Look at mine,” Hasegawa called out to them.

Hasegawa stood in a large wooden box willed with assorted used papers, and held an empty champagne bottle high up over his head. “That one time I entered a rich man’s bathtub filled with money and drank champagne without a care~”

“I’m looking but I’m not seeing! Aren’t you the one who asked us to clean in the first place?! If you don’t help then what’s the point?!”

The next one to say something was Nizou. “I made something too…”

“Seriously, this isn’t the time to play around–”

Matako promptly cut off as she saw what Nizou had done to himself. Somehow he had managed to plaster a huge amount of wasted materials onto his right arm, making it appear huge in size.

“That one time the Benizakura took me over!”

“DON’T JOKE ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE THAT!!” Matako yelped. “Nizou, seriously, quit bringing that crap into the light novel! And all of you saying ‘that one time’ is seriously pissing me off!”

“That irritating light just won’t disappear…!” Nizou choked out in a weird voice.

“Don’t use that voooooooice! You’re scaring me, you’re seriously scaring me!”

And then finally, Takechi spoke up.

“For my art piece, I have used these naked human mannequins to–”

“CONTROL YOURSEEEEEEEEEELF!” Matako screamed and slammed a perfect drop kick onto Takechi’s ‘art piece’ and smashed it to pieces.

“It wasn’t even that terrible, Matako-san. I call it ‘The Changing Room of a Middle School Stu–‘”

“Don’t you dare say it out loud! Are you trying to get this light novel banned?!”

“You guys made some pretty pointless stuff, huh,” Takasugi’s voice came in from somewhere.

As expected of her Shinsuke-sama. Now he’d help her get these idiot club members in line and stop them from doing weird things–is that she was hoping, but that same Takasugi too was building something before her eyes. Using the pieces of metal waste, he had created a perfect replica of Pegasus Bronze Saint Seiya’s armor.

“Whoa, something totally perfect came ouuuuuut! Shinsuke-sama, you’re amaziiiiiiing!”

“By the way, it’s the final form of the armor after Athena’s blood has been spilled on it.”

“Thank you for explaining minor details to me, Shinsuke-sama!”

Matako had thrown away her snappy comebacks in favor of endless praise. An annoyed voice spoke up by the poolside.

“Tch, as expected we should blow these idiots up, huh.”

“Who said that?!”

Matako glared at the poolside where three male students stood on the edge.

The one who had spoken was Hijikata Toushirou, who stood on the right. Kondou Isao stood in the middle, and Okita Sougo on the right.

The three members of the Public Morals Committee stood on the poolside, looking down at them all.

I’m ashamed to say it, but that Saint Seiya reference took me forever to figure out because they don’t actually say the words “Saint Seiya” anywhere in the text. Instead of Saint Seiya armor, I got青銅聖衣 and I barely figured it out.

Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t recognize it in Japanese anyway. I’ve only ever watched Saint Seiya in Chinese dub as a child.