There was really no telling what went on inside Kujou Katora's head sometimes.
Some of the time she was remarkably dependable. And then... other times she was utter nonsense.
Thwack.
Su Yuzu reached out, crooked a finger, and flicked Kujou Katora squarely on the forehead.
Kujou Katora looked up at Su Yuzu, who was working hard to keep a stern face, then wrapped both arms around her own head and slowly slumped down across the table.
Anything at all that concerned Miss Yuzu, she took to heart.
Still... unlike the occasionally unreliable Kujou Katora, Miss Hayabusa, seated at Su Yuzu's side, had already worked out exactly what Su Yuzu meant.
"So what Miss Yuzu is saying is..."
"Asaba Maki is the witness Tsukimisato Somehana intends to use against you?"
"She might even be the physical evidence," Su Yuzu said, weighting every word.
Su Yuzu knew as well as anyone that paper cannot wrap Fire forever, and that one lie usually needs a great many more lies to patch it over.
Perhaps one day she herself would be the "Throne" of this era.
Perhaps even the fact that she had long since fallen into the Abyss would be dragged out into the open.
She and Soga Yura had already laid their contingencies for the day that truth came down on them.
But... that day should not be today.
Still less tomorrow, or any day in the near future.
Su Yuzu understood that once such a day arrived, even if she never ended up like Kirishika all those years ago — forced to change her name, forced to abandon her home — her life would still turn troublesome and thoroughly abnormal.
Troubles beyond counting would come rolling in like a whirlpool, and she would be sitting at the center of that terrible churning mass.
Although... her life already seemed "magnificent and turbulent" enough as it was.
Even so, Su Yuzu wanted the initiative to stay in her own hands.
Miss Hayabusa simply watched her, gaze serious and tangled.
Unlike her own superior across the table, who was clutching her head against the tabletop and thinking about nothing whatsoever, Miss Hayabusa had caught what lay underneath Miss Yuzu's words.
The Investigation Bureau's charges.
Miss Yuzu had not denied them.
So then... of the two charges laid against her, which one was the true one?
That Miss Yuzu had long since come to the very lip of the Abyss, that she stood a single step from it — or worse, that she had fallen in long ago, and the Miss Yuzu sitting here was nothing but an Aberrant wearing a human disguise.
Or that Miss Yuzu had genuinely sheltered and colluded with Aberrants.
Or perhaps both.
For the Fourth Action Division, either charge on its own was more than enough grounds to arrest the girl on the spot.
They wouldn't even need the tedious formal indictment the Investigation Bureau went through.
That was the Fourth Action Division's privilege: in any matter touching Aberrants, they could act first and report afterward — or even... not report at all.
But Miss Hayabusa kept looking at Su Yuzu.
And she found herself back on that day, on the shore of Lake Kasumigaura, when she had been willing to spend her life to send Miss Yuzu and Lady Kujou back to the Tokyo metropolitan area.
The rage on Lady Kujou's face that day was an anger Hayabusa had never witnessed before or since.
So much so that once they returned, she'd been sentenced to kneel on a washboard.
And Miss Yuzu, in that moment... the wind had rested on the girl's shoulders, and above the wind blazed a scatter of stars.
Miss Hayabusa remembered it now — just before she blacked out, she was almost certain she had heard a very gentle voice.
"Get some rest."
"Leave everything after this... to me—"
Later, of course, the Combat Records that Keigunen Private Academy submitted to the Investigation Bureau stated that while Su Yuzu faced the Third Sequence Leviathan's daughter alone, the Soga clan's Eldest Young Lady, Soga Yura, and the Sakura family's only daughter, Sakura Mai, arrived in time and successfully disposed of the Leviathan's daughter.
But Miss Hayabusa had always carried the smallest sliver of doubt.
Doubt about the truth behind the Events.
Was that really how it happened?
Was it really as the report claimed — the Soga clan's Eldest Young Lady arriving in the nick of time, and that was the only reason nothing went wrong?
Then why had the composure in that girl's voice, right before Hayabusa lost consciousness, left her with an entirely different impression?
Miss Hayabusa looked at Su Yuzu.
And Su Yuzu looked back at her, smiling.
Miss Yuzu... was different.
Miss Hayabusa did not voice the question in her chest. She chose silence instead.
Between her boundless hatred for Aberrants and her debt to the girl who had saved her life, she had already made her choice.
"We need to make a trip to the Tokyo Metropolitan Investigation Bureau's Second Affiliated Hospital."
"Mm." Su Yuzu nodded in confirmation.
She reached out and stroked the head of the Kujou Katora sprawled across the table, gently, the way one pets a big dog.
"Sorry about this~"
"I was planning to play g♀mes with Raptor this afternoon."
"But it looks like... I'll have to ask Raptor to come with me to the Second Affiliated Hospital instead."
"No problem at all!" Disappointed as she was, Kujou Katora always put Su Yuzu's business first.
Those wretches actually dared to press charges against Miss Yuzu.
Weren't they afraid that when Soga Retsu returned from the Abyss Battlefield, he would turn the entire Tokyo metropolitan area upside down?
Charges?
Never mind that Miss Yuzu couldn't possibly be an Aberrant — even if she really were confirmed as an Aberrant awaiting full transformation, what exactly could they do about it?
She was Su Yuzu.
She was Soga Yuzu.
"Such a good girl~"
"Raptor is such a very, very good girl~" Su Yuzu cupped Kujou Katora's face in her right hand and rubbed it softly.
It was a tone too syrupy even for coaxing a small child.
But for coaxing Kujou Katora, it landed just right.
Sweet enough to be cloying, and enough to fill her with Shame — Shame that swelled through her like a tide, like floodwater breaking its banks.
"Though... before we go to the Bureau's Second Affiliated Hospital..."
Su Yuzu smiled. "There's one more person we need to bring along."
The Investigation Bureau's patrol car came to a stop in front of the gates of the Second Affiliated Hospital.
"So..."
"What are you actually here to do?" The young female superintendent stole a nervous look at Superintendent Hayabusa in the passenger seat, then another at the rearview mirror, where Su Yuzu had Lady Kujou Tamed into perfect docility.
"That's a secret~" Su Yuzu winked at her.
The young female superintendent bit down lightly on her lip, and then, meeting those dangerous crimson eyes in the mirror, decided she had lost her mind entirely.
Su Yuzu stepped down from the patrol car and looked toward her destination.
The clouds had just broken open, sunlight pouring through. Right around noon.
The Second Affiliated Hospital wasn't a particularly tall building, but its glass curtain wall threw back the summer sun in rippling sheets of light.
"I'm joking~"
"I'm here to find someone."
And just then Su Yuzu regretted that, for the sake of a small point of principle, she had never simply Recruited Raven.
Even keeping her on as a stockroom clerk would have been fine.
At a moment like this, she could have pulled up Raven's status with a single tap.
Su Yuzu tipped her head back and looked at the cross mounted on the hospital.
And in the highest office of the Investigation Bureau's Second Affiliated Hospital, a woman in a white lab coat and black stockings sat behind the glass curtain wall with one leg crossed over the other.
She watched the girl who had appeared at the hospital gates, and the corners of her lips lifted.
"How clever."
"My Yuzu-hime."
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