When she woke... she was staring at a plain, unadorned ceiling.
Su Yuzu blinked.
Gentle morning sunlight filtered through the white paper stretched over the wooden lattice of the Japanese-style room, washing everything inside in warm tones.
The girl took stock of the furnishings.
It was a washitsu that seemed just a touch too spartan.
All four walls were nothing but paper-covered lattice, and the room itself stood empty.
Apart from the tatami beneath her, there wasn't so much as a low table. It was bare enough that Su Yuzu half-entertained the 'illusion' that this was a holding cell.
On top of that—
A washitsu should have terrible soundproofing, yet Su Yuzu couldn't catch the faintest sound from beyond its walls.
The silence around her was absolute, like the hush of a tomb.
She couldn't even pick up the sound of anyone breathing.
A bare, unfamiliar room.
A dead-silent world.
If she hadn't remembered exactly who had caught her red-handed in her own dorm room yesterday, Su Yuzu would honestly have assumed she'd been transmigrated all over again.
She had no idea that, at this very moment, the entire Tokyo metropolitan area had been turned upside down on her account.
The Soga clan. The Sakura family.
The Saotome family standing behind the little rabbit.
The Investigation Bureau, the Assault Department — even... the Shingai family.
Every one of them had been thrown into chaos by the Event of Su Yuzu's abduction.
But... the woman of the hour herself simply sat up straight and worked at remembering what exactly had happened yesterday.
Su Yuzu's last memory ended near Imperial Capital University, at the warehouse where an old statue of Kujou Iruka had been sealed away.
The woman whose long hair stirred without any wind, her hand coming away thick with dust where it had touched the statue.
Kujou Iruka did not love her past, nor did she miss it.
Quite the opposite — she despised it, and shied away from it wherever she could.
Su Yuzu had brushed against Kujou Iruka's taboo.
In Su Yuzu's last memory... inside that gloomy warehouse, the pressure erupting off the woman had risen like a churning tide, slammed down on her, and swallowed her whole.
She had been unable to breathe, like someone drowning, and then consciousness slipped away.
And when she woke, she was already here.
Running back through yesterday, Su Yuzu looked neither regretful nor alarmed.
As though... touching Kujou Iruka's forbidden ground had been no innocent slip on the girl's part at all.
Quite the opposite—
It had been loaded with Su Yuzu's little schemes.
And that was precisely the truth of it.
Kujou Iruka was simply too overpowering.
So overpowering that even Su Yuzu had barely any strength left to parry her.
From the moment Kujou Iruka lay in wait inside Su Yuzu's dorm room and opened those magnificent, blazing dark golden vertical pupils to lock onto her—
it had been something Su Yuzu had never experienced before: an almost crushingly passive position.
The only exceptions were when Kujou Iruka had grumbled at her for coming home so late, complaining about how long — how very, very long — she'd been left waiting, sounding almost sulky about it.
And the mental picture of Kujou Iruka standing guard in her room, holding that queenly posture on the sofa without twitching a muscle, which was equal parts eerie and hilarious.
Every other moment, Kujou Iruka had her utterly and completely suppressed.
Su Yuzu hadn't even been left room to struggle.
But... after she lured Kujou Iruka to that warehouse near Imperial Capital University and thoroughly ruffled her feathers, everything changed.
Su Yuzu had glimpsed Kujou Iruka's 'weak point'.
She had glimpsed the chance to reverse the ending.
Although... she rubbed at the ends of her hair. As things currently stood, the ending looked like a total loss for her.
She glanced down at her own clothes.
Only then did Su Yuzu register that, at some point, those had been changed too.
Her hoodie and hot pants were nowhere to be found.
In their place... a simple, elegant kimono.
And... only a kimono.
It was a proper women's cut, too.
When Su Yuzu raised her arm, she felt it at once — quite literally, wind coming in through an empty opening.
That was the so-called miyatsukuchi.
A proper women's kimono leaves slits beneath the arms on both sides of the body — the miyatsukuchi — so the wearer can adjust the fit, which makes it look as if the underarms are on display.
In other words, the infamous bare-underarm kimono.
Worn properly and neatly, of course, that poses no problem whatsoever.
But... going by Su Yuzu's experience helping Soga Yura get dressed,
sometimes the miyatsukuchi is convenient... and not only for the one wearing it.
The trouble was that the kimono currently on Su Yuzu clearly hadn't been adjusted or folded properly.
When the girl lifted her arm, the graceful lines of her body showed faintly through the slits along her sides.
Though~
there wasn't a second soul in that bare washitsu to appreciate the view.
Trailing the loose kimono behind her,
Su Yuzu rose and stood before the paper-and-wood sliding door.
The white paper stretched over the lattice looked impossibly flimsy. The lightest shove would have knocked the whole thing flat.
And yet—
it also felt like a boundary drawn in stark, unmistakable lines.
A line that sealed Su Yuzu off from the world outside.
And now came the moment to decide whether to reach out and touch that outside world — to find out where on earth this place was, and where Kujou Iruka had taken her.
Su Yuzu drew a deep breath, hooked both hands into the seam of the door, and hauled the slider open.
She'd thought she was prepared for anything.
And yet the instant the door slid aside, she very nearly failed to hold in a scream.
A pair of dark golden vertical pupils loomed directly in front of her.
Nothing at all like Kujou Iruka's magnificent, blazing ones.
Their owner watched her with a cold, inorganic stare.
Or rather... watched the inside of the room.
The owner of those pupils wasn't Kujou Iruka.
It was a girl who looked no older than sixteen or seventeen.
She wore an ink-black kimono painted with great, sprawling peach-pink oleander blossoms.
Su Yuzu understood: the girl in front of her wasn't actually wearing clothes at all.
What covered her was her Aberrant attire.
Which, as far as Su Yuzu was concerned, meant—
perfectly edible Catastrophe Crystals.
For a rather high-ranking Aberrant, the coverage of that outfit was unexpectedly generous.
But... once you remembered it was a kimono, the contradiction dissolved.
After all, there was only 'one layer'.
The girl before her was also nowhere near as young as she appeared.
As a rather high-ranking Aberrant, her true age might well have qualified her as one of Su Yuzu's elders.
The moment the sliding door opened, Su Yuzu flinched hard.
Because the Aberrant girl was standing far too close — as though she'd been posted in the doorway itself, close enough to be pressed against Su Yuzu's face.
Close enough that when Su Yuzu exhaled, she could feel her own breath strike the girl's lovely face and curl back onto her skin.
And yet, pressed that near,
not the faintest ripple crossed the girl's expression.
She simply stood there, unmoving, like a door god painted on a gate.
Worse than that... what truly made Su Yuzu's scalp crawl was that this pair of dark golden vertical pupils was far from the only one.
The instant she pulled the door open, pair after pair of dark golden vertical pupils lifted toward her.
For that one heartbeat, even the light of the sun seemed to dim.
Smothered entirely beneath the gazes of this gathering of Aberrants.
Cold sweat prickled its way down Su Yuzu's back.
She had never faced so many Aberrants at once. It seemed... Kujou Iruka had carried her back to the nest.
The nest of the Aberrants.
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