Chapter 80: Eshune: Mom, Don't Blame Me For This!
.....
Hanabata came back to herself
approximately five minutes after the chaos concluded.
In the interim: Maidena, whose nervous system had apparently processed more stimulation than it had budgeted for in a single afternoon, had passed out from sheer accumulated mortification. Hitamuki was crouched beside her, gently patting her hand and looking concerned.
Tokishikko sat slightly apart from everyone else, a residual flush still visible on her porcelain cheeks, bottom lip caught between her teeth, arms folded, one leg bouncing against the ground with the irregular rhythm of unresolved feelings.
"Fifty," she said, to no one in particular.
"Fifty what?" Kihara asked.
"Fifty times." Her gaze was pointed at the middle distance. "That's how many times your weapon made contact with my face during the chaos. I feel like that should count toward the sit-up deficit. Mathematically."
"For the record — that was my oversight."
Kihara turned to include the group. "Going forward, the magic division and physical division train in separate sessions. Morning and afternoon."
Hanabata, who had taken stock of the situation and arrived at a thorough understanding of what she was responsible for, walked up to Kihara and Tokishikko and bowed ninety degrees — the deep, formal kind, held.
"Senpai. Tokishikko. I am genuinely, deeply sorry. I don't know how it happened — one moment I was using reinforcement normally and then I just—" She straightened, distress written clearly across her face. "Thank you for restraining me. I don't know what I would have done otherwise."
"Speaking of which." Kihara looked at Tokishikko sideways. "You've known about this whole time. Both you and her household staff."
Tokishikko's expression shifted into something approaching guilty. "I mean... I couldn't exactly be the one to tell Hanabata, could I? 'Hey, good news, you go berserk and it turns out you're also a happy drunk' isn't a conversation I know how to have gently. And her maids clearly decided it wasn't their problem either." She gave a small shrug. "So I guess that just leaves you."
"Great."
He walked over and helped Hanabata straighten up, offering a few quiet words that brought the tension in her shoulders down by several degrees.
Maidena rejoined the living shortly after. Whatever her brain had experienced in the past twenty minutes had apparently triggered some form of protective self-editing, because she surfaced with the slightly dazed expression of someone who'd blacked out mid-episode and remembered nothing. She assumed she'd simply overtaxed herself.
Kihara looked at her for a moment. He did not correct this assumption.
The sun was leaning toward the horizon by the time he called it. He walked each of them home, one by one, in the amber light of late afternoon.
"What?! You're moving out — why?!"
Eshune dropped her chopsticks, pushed back from the dinner table, and crossed the room to attach herself to Kihara with the grip strength of someone who had decided her feelings constituted a legal injunction.
"Did you give up on me and Mom?! Is that what this is?!"
"Eshune, stop. Where Kihara lives is his own decision." Enome's voice was measured, composed. Her eyes, directed at Kihara over Eshune's head, were not particularly composed. Something in them had gone very quiet and slightly hollow. "That said — you've been here for over a month. If you're leaving, you could at least tell us why."
"I bought the empty house next door."
A beat.
Eshune's expression executed a transformation of theatrical precision — tears to sunshine, instantly, with no intermediate state. "Oh. Oh, that's it? Next door? That's fine then. That's completely fine. Carry on."
"I've been coming back late and waking you up. And staying in someone else's house indefinitely isn't — I needed my own place."
He paused. "Also I'll still be fifteen meters away."
"That house is expensive, though." Enome's brow creased slightly — she handled the payroll, she knew his salary to the copper. Even an Ace Guardian's wages in a starter-village posting didn't add up to a property purchase. Not without significant outside assistance. "How did you manage that?"
"The Nokinsu family butler found me two days ago. They sold it to me at a price that was effectively a gift."
"I see." Enome's expression cleared. She patted her chest lightly. "That's a relief then."
Eshune, however, had gone very still.
She helped out at the guild occasionally. She knew who was in Kihara's current trainee roster. She knew, specifically, that a young lady of the Nokinsu household was among them.
A villa, transferred at gift pricing, within two days of that girl joining his squad.
Eshune understood courtship tactics. She understood them rather better than a girl her age had any particular reason to, mostly because she'd spent years quietly studying everything that might one day be relevant to her mother's happiness.
This was an opening move.
The Nokinsu family was playing a long game, and they'd just placed their first piece.
I need to move faster.
She'd grown up with just the two of them — her and her mother, filling in each other's gaps, building something complete out of what could have felt like not enough. She knew, better than anyone, that opportunities like this one didn't linger. The window opened. The window closed. People got busy, got tired, talked themselves out of things, and then one day the window had been shut so long it had painted itself into the frame.
She was not going to let that happen.
Mom, I'm sorry in advance. This is for both our futures. Don't hold it against me.
"Achoo!!"
"Miss Enome — are you coming down with something?"
"No, no. Just an itch." She waved it off with one hand.
Kihara studied her for a moment. "You've been staying up until midnight every night this week going through those reports, haven't you." It wasn't quite a question.
He stood, went to the kitchen, and came back several minutes later with a small bowl, which he set in front of her.
"Brown sugar, ginger, scallion. Old family recipe for warding off a chill. The brown sugar cuts the bitterness — it's not bad."
Enome looked down at the bowl. Then up at him.
"...Thank you."
Something tugged at Kihara's sleeve. He turned to find Eshune blinking up at him, the corner of her mouth glistening with unconscious longing.
"Kihara... I want some too..."
He laughed despite himself and ruffled her hair. "I'll make you milk tea tomorrow. You didn't get chilled — this one isn't for you."
"Okay~"
Enome wrapped both hands around the warm bowl and sat with it for a moment before drinking. The heat reached her palms, traveled up her arms, settled somewhere central. She hadn't taken a sip yet and already something in her chest felt less cold than it had a minute ago.
Her eyes, resting on Kihara as he settled back into his seat, had gone soft in a way she wasn't entirely monitoring.
The next morning: the magic division did not appear.
This was unsurprising. Two members of the magic division had discovered, overnight, that their bodies retained detailed records of everything they'd been asked to do the previous day, and were presenting those records in the form of an inability to get vertical without making sounds usually reserved for natural disasters. They sent messages. Kihara responded with something that was technically sympathetic and also reminded them they still owed forty-five sit-ups.
Physical division training moved to the morning slot.
The three of them arrived to find the abandoned training ground looking considerably better than they'd left it. The Nokinsu household had sent a crew overnight — the craters and gouges Hanabata had contributed to the landscape had been filled and leveled, and someone had additionally installed several training posts and practice dummies along the far side of the grounds.
Kihara filed this under noted.
Something had shifted in Hitamuki overnight.
It was subtle — not a dramatic transformation, not a sudden flowering of technique — but it was there. Yesterday's combat had pressed her into a kind of focus she didn't usually access, and some residue of that focus had apparently stayed. Her movements were fractionally cleaner. The clutter in her head was fractionally quieter. When something came at her, she was reading it a half-beat sooner.
She was still Hitamuki. She still had her moments. But the gears were starting to mesh in a way they hadn't been before.
The problem was that this improvement applied almost exclusively to defense. The moment Kihara asked her to initiate an attack, the wires crossed — left foot east, right foot west, body and brain conducting separate negotiations with each other while the target waited patiently to see how it resolved.
He adjusted accordingly.
Today: swap the roles. Hitamuki attacks, Hanabata defends and evades. Hitamuki needed to find her offensive instincts under pressure, and Hanabata needed an opponent whose attacks were unpredictable rather than overwhelming — which happened to describe Hitamuki's current striking patterns very accurately.
The additional benefit: Hanabata spending the session on defense rather than offense reduced her total mana expenditure, which theoretically postponed the inevitable.
Theoretically.
The pink floral pattern bloomed slowly in the depths of Hanabata's green eyes about forty minutes in.
Kihara saw it and accepted it the way you accept weather.
She brought both thumbs to the inner edge of her breastplate and pressed.
The chest armor launched itself off her torso with the force of a spring-loaded mechanism, caught Hitamuki squarely in the face, and sent her sitting down hard on the training ground.
Then Hanabata turned, a broad and beatific smile spreading across her features, and began to walk toward Kihara with both arms open wide and a very particular kind of momentum that he recognized as non-negotiable.
For reference: Hanabata Nokinsu stood at approximately 170 centimeters. Kihara, in his current body, stood at approximately 140. The geometry of the situation was not in his favor.
"Hehehe~ Senpai~~ didn't I do so well today~? Don't I deserve a reward~ Come on~ just one hug~"
He had enough time to take one step back.
She wrapped around him like a very large, very warm, very enthusiastic avalanche. His head was pressed firmly into something that left him unable to see the sky. Her arms were around him with the cheerful certainty of a woman who had decided this was happening and no further input was required.
"Senpai is SO CUTE!! I want to hold onto you FOREVER!!!"
From the ground nearby, Hitamuki pushed the breastplate off her face and watched.
"...Shishou," she said, after a moment.
A muffled sound emerged from the vicinity of Hanabata's chest.
"Should I help?"
Another muffled sound. Its emotional content was ambiguous.
Hitamuki considered the situation thoughtfully, tail swaying.
"I'll take that as a no," she decided, and began gathering herself up off the ground.
....
Thank you for reading.