Chapter 79: The Maiden's Mortified Shriek.
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"I can't... I genuinely cannot..."
"I've already done two sets... my core is dying..."
"Three sets in a row is physically impossible for a human being—!!"
Tokishikko's eyes were glistening at the corners. One hand came up to cover half her face as she directed her most pitiable expression at Kihara.
"You— you," Maidena sputtered, her silver-gray brows knotting together in a tangle of embarrassment and outrage, cheeks pink as she shot a sideways glance at Kihara before whipping back to glare at Tokishikko. "How do you say things like that with absolutely zero shame — it's just sit-ups!!"
"I just ran three kilometers and got less than ten minutes of rest before being told to do sit-ups!"
"So? I finished my set just fine."
"Ugh. Youth really is wasted on the young."
The provocation landed cleanly. Tokishikko, constitutionally incapable of losing to Maidena in any category, swallowed her complaints and began hauling herself upright with the labored determination of an earthworm attempting vertical movement.
Not far away, the ground was trembling.
Hanabata's weapon was a war hammer — massive, built to devastate — and yet in her hands it moved with a lightness that defied its own mass, like watching someone perform surgery with a battering ram. Each swing carved another crater into the packed earth of the training ground, the impacts rolling out in rhythmic concussions that you felt in your teeth.
Hitamuki danced through it all.
She had no business surviving this. The hammer strikes were relentless, overlapping, barely leaving space to breathe — and yet some deep, instinctive part of her had come fully online in a way it hadn't before, her body reading the rhythm, finding the gaps, slipping through them on reflex rather than thought.
This was what real pressure did.
"Phew~ Hitamuki, your evasion is incredible."
"Thank you! Your attacks are incredible too!"
"I'm going to get more serious now. Be ready!"
"Yes!!"
Hanabata centered herself, drew a slow breath, and let her mana circulate — a steady, controlled amplification of her natural physical ability. Not Berserk. Just more, precise and deliberate, the kind of enhancement that required actual discipline rather than simply releasing the limit and letting chaos handle the rest.
Hitamuki mirrored it. Mana reinforcement: every close-combat class learned it eventually. Hitamuki was learning it now, in the middle of being hit at, which was arguably the most efficient classroom available.
"Must be nice," Tokishikko said mournfully, watching the distant combat from her position on the ground. The near-cramp in her lower abdomen had earned her a brief reprieve, and she was using it to feel sorry for herself properly. "They just get to fight. And we're out here doing gym class."
"Still forty-five sit-ups left on your count," Kihara said.
Tokishikko's face lit up with the relief of someone about to receive good news.
"So I thought— "
"You haven't done them yet."
The light extinguished itself.
She stared at him with eyes that contained genuine, personally-felt betrayal. "I. Know.
That." Each word arrived individually, through clenched teeth, accompanied by a look that suggested she was mentally locating the softest part of him to bite.
She rolled back down and forced herself through three more, grimacing through the fire in her abdomen.
Maidena opened her mouth.
Whatever she'd been about to say was preempted by a commotion from Hitamuki's direction.
"Full power — let's GO!!"
"Ahwawa — Hanabata, what's wrong with you—?!"
The orderly, disciplined rhythm of Hanabata's attacks had dissolved entirely. Her hammer was still moving — faster than before, if anything — but the organized cadence had been replaced by something feral and completely unpredictable. She swung wide. She swung low. She spun. She charged a tree. The ground under her feet spiderwebbed.
"Boss." Tokishikko's voice had gone very careful. "I forgot to mention. If Hanabata uses magic reinforcement for too long, she also gets mana-drunk."
"That's the kind of thing you say at the beginning!!"
There was no time to pursue it further, because Hanabata had located Kihara with the targeting instincts of a very large, very enthusiastic natural disaster and was bearing down on him, war hammer raised, footsteps fracturing the earth beneath her like something significantly heavier than a teenage girl had decided to go for a jog.
"Senpai... I don't have the strength to stand up..."
"Boss, I also lack the physical resources to flee. Feel free to save yourself and leave us."
"If I leave you here and Hanabata goes through you, tomorrow I'm being arraigned for manslaughter. Stop suggesting it."
Still complaining, he scooped both of them up — one under each arm — and started moving, using the perimeter of the training ground as a circuit, keeping just ahead of Hanabata's pursuit. The only ways to end a Berserk state were total physical exhaustion or total mana depletion. He'd never heard of a Warrior being defeated by a monster during Berserk because their legs gave out — which meant running her dry of mana was the realistic option here.
Maidena, tucked firmly under his arm with his hand pressed flat against her side, marshaled her dignity to begin citing the Finizask doctrine on physical contact between men and women.
She glanced back at Hanabata.
Hanabata had just reduced a training post to splinters with a backhand swing, was laughing about it, and was turning toward them with eyes like a happy hurricane.
The doctrine could wait.
Life first. Theology later.
"Shishou, go ahead — I'll hold her off!!"
"Don't you dare — you'll just make it worse—!!"
"Heyah!! COUNTER!!"
The pale gold light wrapped around Hitamuki as she planted herself between Hanabata and the fleeing group, stance wide, arms ready—
Hanabata swung.
The hammer connected.
Hitamuki went up.
Counter was, technically, capable of redirecting incoming force back at the attacker. This was true. What was also true was that the technique scaled with the user's own power — and Hitamuki's current power, measured against a mana-reinforced Hanabata running on pure happy chaos, was not quite sufficient for the math to work in her favor.
She arced through the sky with the graceful inevitability of a well-kicked football.
And came down directly into Kihara's back.
The impact detonated between his shoulder blades.
His vision went white at the edges. The ground under his feet chose this exact moment to reveal that it was, in fact, a slope — and with his footing already gone and both arms occupied, there was exactly one outcome available.
He tucked in, prioritized coverage of the three of them, and went down the hill.
They rolled.
When the world stopped moving, Kihara's internal inventory reported the following:
Something had wrapped very thoroughly around his limbs and wasn't letting go. His face was buried in fabric that smelled of grass and exertion and something faintly floral underneath. He could not immediately determine whose anything was. There were soft things. There were several of them. Locations unclear.
"Senpai was holding the others while I was left all alone — that's completely unfair — I want a hug too!!"
The arms around him tightened. He felt rather than heard someone's giggle against his shoulder.
He attempted to lift his head.
The two impacts at his back — substantial, simultaneous, soft in a way that was going to require him to not think about it — pressed him firmly back down.
"Senpai~ hehe~ this is really comfortable~"
"—YAH!! Senpai, get your head off my stomach!!"
Ah. That's why the navel looked familiar.
He attempted to explain that he had no meaningful control over his head's current position. What emerged instead, from his current angle, was a gust of warm air that traveled directly across Maidena's abdomen.
Maidena's red eyes went perfectly circular.
The warmth hit her skin — then seemed to keep going, somehow, past the skin and into something less well-defended. His hair, in shifting slightly, swept a light, irregular path across her stomach. Here and then gone. Here and then gone. The inconsistent sensation made her muscles tighten instinctively which was the exact moment her body chose to remind her that she had just completed more sit-ups in one morning than she had in the entire previous month.
The cramp arrived like a verdict.
Her face crumpled. Her body curled forward on pure reflex — instinctively pulling Kihara's head in rather than pushing it away, searching desperately for some geometry that reduced the pain.
Hitamuki's fingers, caught in the fabric of Maidena's training shorts from behind, did not move in time.
The waistband went.
The shorts stayed mostly in place. What had been underneath, however—
Kihara's eyes reflected a pale blue sky framed by a landscape it had no business appearing in at this angle.
A long, involuntary exhale of warm air escaped him directly onto Maidena's cramping abdomen. Somehow, against all reasonable expectation, this helped — the heat eased the spasm slightly, and she made a small, confused, undignified sound that was equal parts pain and something else entirely.
Tokishikko had been sandwiched somewhere in the pile's lower geography throughout all of this.
She had been patient. She had been waiting for a reasonable opportunity to extract herself and assess the situation with appropriate detachment.
Something pressed against her forehead.
She processed this.
She looked at it.
Her face completed a full journey: white, then red, then white again, the color draining out of her in real time like someone had pulled a plug.
Then she produced the single most committed sound she had made all day:
"—BWAAAAAAUGH!!!!!"
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Thank you for reading.