Thank you, @Piers, for joining the memberships.
I'm truly grateful.
....
Chapter 78: Vanilla Ice Cream and Dark Chocolate Ice Cream.
....
Beep. Beep. Beep.
"I mean, I knew I couldn't compete with Miss Enome, but..." Tokishikko stared at her phone screen and muttered quietly to herself. She had the distinct feeling that the words TOTAL DEFEAT had just descended from the sky and landed squarely on the head of every girl at the table.
Hanabata scratched her cheek with a delicate awkwardness. "To be fair — I heard that after Senpai became a Guardian, quite a few of the female Guardians tried to pursue him. Every single one got turned down. Maybe after experiencing that many times, using Miss Enome as his answer is just... the honest one."
"Hm~?" Hitamuki tilted her head.
"Hanabata, did you already know about Shishou before you became a Guardian?"
"Yes." The admiration that lit up in Hanabata's eyes was immediate and completely unguarded. "He's actually part of why I wanted to become one. Fastest promotion to Ace Guardian on record.
Assassin class, but fights head-on against Warriors without losing ground—"
"Okay, okay, stop stop stop." Tokishikko held up a hand. "If we keep going we're going to end up in full fan-club-at-school territory and nobody wants that. Let's not."
Maidena, who had kept her distance from anything Kihara-related prior to joining up — partly out of personal principle, partly because Finizask doctrine didn't exactly encourage casual interest in young men — absorbed all of this with fresh eyes. "So Senpai is an Assassin. I assumed he was unarmed like Hitamuki — a Fighter or something."
"He carries a blade," Hanabata said simply.
"You just don't see it until it's already moved."
Tokishikko pushed her empty dessert plate aside and leaned forward with the energy of someone who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it. Voice dropping, eyes bright: "Okay, can we stop talking about job classes? I want to know what everyone actually thinks about him."
"He's my Shishou who takes training seriously and always knows what to say!" Hitamuki answered immediately, tail wagging once for emphasis.
"He's..." Maidena hesitated. A small crease appeared between her brows. "Reliable. When it actually matters."
Tokishikko stared at both of them.
She'd been subjected to what she privately considered targeted professional humiliation this morning. She had assumed — reasonably, she felt — that Kihara operated the same way across the board, and that these two were sitting on months of accumulated grievances.
She blinked. "He didn't make you fight him and then talk down to you the whole time?"
"Talk down—?!" Maidena's face went red with startling speed. Her imagination had apparently taken that phrase somewhere it hadn't been invited.
Hanabata looked at her childhood friend with the patient exhaustion of someone who had been doing this for years. "Tokishikko... I think Senpai was just giving you accurate feedback. That's not the same as humiliation."
"Calling my magic completely off-target is not feedback, it's a verdict."
"Hmph." Maidena's chin went up. "Typical Black Mage — you've always been natural at twisting things to suit your own narrative. Senpai is nothing like what you're implying."
"Oh, really? Because White Mages invented playing innocent, so I'd be careful throwing accusations around—"
"Ahwawa— please don't fight, you two—!"
Hitamuki threw herself physically between them, arms outstretched, head swiveling back and forth. She had no idea that Black Mages and White Mages came with a factory-installed mutual antagonism — she just saw two new friends apparently about to have a falling out over something she didn't fully understand.
A beat of irritated silence.
"...Fine. I'm not wasting energy on this."
"Same."
The assessment sessions had made one thing abundantly clear: Tokishikko and Maidena, as spellcasters, had the physical conditioning of people who considered walking to the bookshelf a workout. The diplomatic way to put it was non-combat specialists. The honest way was disasters waiting to happen the moment anyone asked them to run.
So today's training split by category: magic users on stamina work, physical fighters on combat drills.
Hitamuki and Hanabata were, blessedly, the self-directed type — Kihara pointed them at a training exercise and they got on with it. He directed the majority of his attention toward Tokishikko, who had an ongoing relationship with effort that could best be described as complicated, and Maidena, who seemed constitutionally incapable of being in the same space as Tokishikko without the atmosphere deteriorating.
Both of them had changed into lighter training clothes and were currently doing pre-workout stretches, nominally helping each other.
Maidena sat with her legs extended in a full split, white knee-high socks framing a line that was impressively, almost unreasonably straight. She folded forward with her arms outstretched — Tokishikko's hands on her back guiding the stretch — and pressed flat against the grass without apparent difficulty.
"Not bad at all for someone who claims to hate physical activity."
"Flattery won't get you anything. Your turn."
"Yeah, yeah."
They switched positions. Tokishikko's version of the same stretch was substantially less elegant — a lifetime of indoor hobbies had left her flexibility at a level that could charitably be called aware of its own existence. Her legs formed a cautious V rather than a line, and her torso managed somewhere around sixty degrees before filing a formal objection.
She used the position, naturally, to talk.
"You know, despite being completely insufferable," she said conversationally, "you've also got the whole clumsy-and-weepy-and-pocket-sized thing going on. I think there's entertainment value in you. I'm glad you're here."
A vein appeared on Maidena's temple.
She increased the pressure of her hands. Significantly.
"OW — OW — WHAT ARE YOU—"
Kihara was there in three steps, hands sliding under Tokishikko's arms and lifting her clean off the ground with minimal effort before Maidena could complete her attempt at spinal rearrangement.
"You two managed to turn a basic stretch into a conflict. Remarkable."
"Senpai—!" Maidena's expression shifted to aggrieved immediately. "She started it—"
"Ohhh~ going to tell the teacher, are we~?" Tokishikko swung her feet mildly from her elevated position.
"Tokishikko. Enough."
"Yes, yes, Boss has spoken, I shall comply."
She rubbed the region of her lower back that had nearly met its end, then turned around and spread her arms wide with the air of someone making a fresh start. "Fight's over. Come on, if you skip the stretching properly you'll pull something during training and then we'll both have to deal with the consequences."
Maidena stared at her. "...You're not even a little bit angry."
Kihara set Maidena down and gave the top of her head a single light pat. "Let it go. Go stretch."
"...Fine." She drifted toward Tokishikko with visible skepticism, arms coming up to link with hers.
"GOTCHA!!"
Tokishikko bellowed it like a battle cry, bent double with everything she had, and hoisted Maidena up onto her back.
Because their arms were hooked together, Maidena had precisely zero good options — move wrong and she'd hit the ground from an unpleasant height. She did the only sensible thing available and clamped her eyes shut while unleashing a stream of invective into the summer air.
"YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT — PUT ME DOWN RIGHT NOW—"
"APOLOGIZE FIRST. Say sorry and I'll put you down. Or I carry you like this all the way back into Bud Town and we let the whole street watch you be embarrassing. Your choice!"
"You scheming, underhanded, absolutely typical Black Mage—!!"
"APOLOGIZE—!!"
"NEVER—!!"
In the midst of all this, neither of them noticed the view they were providing.
Tokishikko's loose training top gaped open as she bent forward, the fabric falling away from skin as white and smooth as fresh cream, a faint trail of exertion gleaming at her collarbone. On her back, Maidena had abandoned dignity entirely in favor of survival — her training shorts riding up in the struggle, a sliver of pale blue visible at the hem, her legs kicking freely in the space between absolute territory and open air.
Kihara observed this development with the detached equanimity of a man who had decided to classify it as compensation for services rendered. He was not going to intervene. Tokishikko was not, as she'd threatened, going to carry anyone ten kilometers back to Bud Town — she simply didn't have the stamina for it yet.
He gave it about fifteen more seconds.
Fourteen. Fifteen.
Tokishikko took two steps. Her legs gave out.
Both of them went down in a heap, landing with a thud that scattered the nearby grass, and immediately resumed insulting each other from the ground in breathless, broken fragments between gasps for air.
Kihara waited for the noise to settle.
Then he walked over, crouched down between them, and produced the smile that both of them had already learned to find deeply alarming.
He'd caught a glimpse, in passing, of the sullen purple underwear visible through Tokishikko's black tights. He filed it away as further compensation.
"Stretching complete," he said pleasantly.
"Next up — three kilometers. Light warm-up pace."
Two pairs of eyes stared at him in identical horror.
"Three kilometers—?!"
"Starting now."
....
Thank you for reading.