"I am never watching another horror movie again."
Mio stumbled out of the theater on legs that had forgotten how to work, genuinely grateful Yumiko was right there beside her.
She hadn't expected this. An unupgraded punishment card, and it had hit her that hard. If she ever let the thing level up, she'd probably be crying in the theater like a lost child.
She reconsidered some recent life choices.
"Mio." Yumiko studied her with something between concern and genuine curiosity. "You were actually scared, weren't you."
"...I know I want to say that was all acting." Mio exhaled. "But yeah. Real scared."
"But you weren't like this before. That other film we watched together—"
"I've been watching a lot of horror stuff at home lately." Mio offered the excuse casually, the way you'd flip a coin without caring where it landed. "Must've built up."
Yumiko accepted this without question—though she gave Mio a look of mild exasperation. "If you were scared, you could've said something when I suggested it. We could've picked something else."
"I didn't know it was going to be that bad."
A fragment of one scene flickered through Mio's mind unbidden. She shuddered—actually shuddered, goosebumps rising on her arms—and immediately, firmly, changed the subject.
"What are we doing next?"
"Hungry?"
"No." (Emphatically no. The film's more creative segments had handled her appetite thoroughly.)
"Arcade, then. There's one nearby."
The arcade was exactly what Mio needed: loud, bright, full of screens containing exactly zero ghosts.
Yumiko moved through it with easy familiarity, already trading bills for tokens. Mio watched her.
"You come here a lot?"
"Sometimes. Tobecchi and the others drag Hayama here. I tag along." Yumiko counted the tokens, then paused, looking uncertain. "...What do you like to play?"
Mio smiled. "Anything's fine, honestly."
"Then—" Yumiko pointed. "—how about that?"
A two-player on-rails shooter. Side by side, cooperative, the kind of setup designed for exactly this sort of thing.
"Works for me."
Mio was not new to arcade shooters.
Before all this, she'd had a friend who operated one of these places. The machine had been practically in her backyard. She'd spent years at it, telling herself she'd use it to impress her future girlfriend someday.
The girlfriend never materialized.
The technique, however, was flawless.
For the first few rounds she played the attentive-but-slightly-struggling novice—missing a few enemies here and there, just enough to keep Yumiko engaged, never so many that the game became unwinnable. Each time Yumiko cleaned up after her, Mio rewarded her with genuine-sounding delight: "Yumiko got it—!" or "You saved me again~"
Yumiko was good, to her credit. She took point naturally, covered the gaps without making it feel like charity, and—yes—looked distinctly pleased when complimented.
Then she went quiet.
Mio noticed the silence about two seconds before Yumiko spoke.
"The monsters you keep missing. You're doing it on purpose, aren't you."
Mio blinked. Then: "...You caught that?"
She ran back through her own performance and found the mistake immediately. As the stages got harder, she'd kept the miss rate consistent—which was too consistent. A real novice would've started buckling. And her hands had been completely steady the whole time, which she really should've disguised better.
Amateur error.
The game continued. Mio quietly dropped the act.
The difficulty spiked immediately.
"We're at the final stage," Yumiko said, voice a little strained. "You can stop performing now."
"Yeah, fair."
With both of them actually trying, the final boss went down clean.
Yumiko set her gun down and flexed her hand—working out the stiffness from her wrist. Before she could say anything, Mio latched onto her arm with practiced devotion.
"Yumiko carried me the entire way! I can't believe you cleared this dragging along a beginner like me~"
"You are not a beginner." Yumiko stared at her. "You were actively covering for me during that last stretch. Don't think I didn't notice."
She paused. "...Do you play here a lot?"
"Not really." Mio shrugged. "Friend used to run a place like this. I dropped by whenever. Practiced a bit." A small pause. "Was going to use it to impress someone someday."
She sighed—just slightly.
"...Never really got the chance."
"Anyway." She straightened up. "The technique got blown, but you get the general idea, right? Worth filing away."
Yumiko thought about it. "Probably can't use it on Hayama. He already knows what I can do."
"Never mind then."
They burned through the rest of the tokens on a handful of other games—Mio leaning into the helpless-novice role with varying degrees of success, Yumiko alternately calling her out and going along with it—and eventually drifted in front of the claw machines.
Mio knew claw machines.
She knew them the way someone who'd spent years around arcade operators knew them—the margins, the calibration windows, the unwritten math behind every try again. The business of it.
She had been about to steer them away when Yumiko grabbed her arm.
"Wait. Let me try this one."
Mio opened her mouth.
Yumiko was already analyzing the machine with quiet, unsettling competence. "I come here enough to know these average about ten attempts before a catch. There was a couple working this one before us—I counted. Seven or eight tries, nothing." She picked up the joystick. "Should be close to the reset."
She inserted the coin.
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