Chapter 8: I Like You — And Everyone Else Too.
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"I'm... I'm his childhood friend. His parents passed away ten years ago. Are you sure you're not just some fake fiancée who showed up after he became a famous actor to take advantage of him?"
Yanami Anna's voice climbed as she spoke, the words accelerating past the point where she could reasonably claim composure. She stepped between them, physically inserting herself, and turned a look on Lala that could only be described as a full diagnostic scan — searching for inconsistencies, signs of calculated performance, anything that would let her file this neatly under confirmed fraud.
The more she looked, the less that helped. Because the issue wasn't that Lala seemed fake. The issue was that Lala seemed impossible. Human bodies did not distribute themselves like that. It defied reasonable expectations of what a person could look like.
Then the heart-shaped tail moved into her field of vision.
Yanami Anna grabbed Kihara's wrist with both hands and jumped backward.
"She has a TAIL!! She's not human!!"
"Strictly speaking, I'm really not human~ I'm from the planet Deviluke. An alien~"
"An... alien?"
"That's right! The tail is a Deviluke exclusive feature~!"
Yanami Anna reached over and pinched Kihara's cheek.
Stared at him.
Her eyes slowly lost focus. "...Didn't feel anything. Am I dreaming?"
"Why would you feel pain from pinching me?"
He pinched her back.
"OW ow ow I'm sorry I take it back—!!" She rubbed her cheek, then, in a seamless transition, pressed her fingers against her eyes and applied just enough pressure to produce tears, which she arranged at the corners for maximum effect. "Why do you have an alien fiancée?"
The concentrated jealousy hitting Kihara from close range was substantial. He considered the situation for a moment, then gave a brief summary of last night — the arrival, the guards, the rules of Deviluke royal marriage customs, the sequence of events that had produced the current outcome.
Yanami Anna's blue eyes ignited.
She grabbed his collar and shook him with the energy of someone who had been building to this for ten years and had just been informed that the game board had been flipped over.
"This isn't right!! Why is a light novel plot happening to YOU?!"
The reality of having become the childhood friend who loses — overnight, without warning, through no particular failure of her own — was pressing down on her with enough force to compromise her ability to maintain the dignified composure she usually managed in front of him.
Lala made a move to say something reassuring. Kihara caught her eye and gave a small nod of I have this. He turned back to Yanami Anna and pulled her into a gentle hold, one hand moving in slow pats across her back as the tears came in earnest.
"Anna." His voice was quiet. "I know you've always worried about me. Growing up without parents — you were afraid I'd be too eager for affection and end up getting taken advantage of."
She went still.
That was the first time she had heard this particular interpretation of her own behavior.
I didn't know I was that sophisticated, she thought, in the small private space behind her tears. The me who came up with that plan at eight years old was genuinely a genius.
Then he kept talking.
"But you don't need to worry. After years of your confession practice runs, I've developed a pretty rational relationship with the concept of romantic feelings. Lala is a genuinely good person — simple and honest. I can read her clearly."
"...I see." She lifted a face that had been doing its best impression of a rain shower, and assembled a smile that conveyed well that's fine then with the structural integrity of wet paper. "If you've made your decision, then I'm at ease. Can I say that thing one more time? Just once?"
"Go ahead."
"Kihara-kun. I like you the most."
"I like you too."
"...Huh?"
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened slightly, showing a line of white teeth and the pink tip of her tongue, the expression of someone whose emotional processing system had encountered input it wasn't ready for.
"Oh my~" Lala covered her mouth with both hands.
Kihara let the moment sit for exactly the right amount of time, and then added:
"And everyone else."
The emotional trajectory of the past thirty seconds — the despair, the false acceptance, the sudden impossible hope, the immediate removal of that hope — completed its full arc in one breath.
Yanami Anna's eyes rolled upward.
She folded.
[Master, that was genuinely cruel. You talked a young woman into fainting.]
[She spent years running fake confessions on me. Can't I help her build some emotional resilience in return?]
[I don't understand the logic, but I assume it's her fault somehow.]
[Shinobu understands me.]
"Kihara — is she alright?" Lala asked, with genuine concern.
"She'll be fine."
He looked down at the unconscious Yanami Anna and noticed, for the first time, that her uniform had acquired four small butterfly-bow accessories in blue and yellow — two on each side, arranged with care. The school-uniform-customization project had apparently concluded overnight.
"Lala, can you help me get her onto my back?"
"Sure!"
He adjusted his grip on her legs, settled her weight, and headed to school with one alien fiancée walking beside him and one childhood friend unconscious on his back.
In her dreams, Yanami Anna was surrounded by bladed stares coming from every direction.
A yandere figure with a cleaver was telling her, in a voice of quiet menace, that she was a fraud who had nothing inside her.
"AAHHHH!!"
She jolted awake.
Classroom. Desk. Morning light.
The bladed stares from her dream had not actually stopped — they'd simply transitioned from the dream version to the real version, which was every girl in the vicinity looking at her with expressions ranging from I can't believe her to I genuinely cannot believe her.
"Honestly, I didn't think Yanami-san would end up taking advantage of the position like that."
"Getting carried to school on his back and sleeping through it — is she really not doing that on purpose?"
The comments landed around her like small objects dropped from a height.
Yanami Anna sat with them for a moment.
Something wasn't adding up.
She felt like she'd had a very vivid dream about Kihara having an alien fiancée show up overnight. She felt like she'd cried about it and then fainted. She did not feel like a person whose worst nightmare had come true.
She looked at the classroom with fresh eyes.
She looked at Kihara's seat.
He was there, script open in his lap, looking perfectly normal. When he registered her looking at him, he glanced up and smiled.
Everything unknotted instantly.
Obviously it was a dream, she thought, with the relief of someone who has been handed a reasonable explanation and is not going to question it. I skipped breakfast to lose weight and fainted from low blood sugar. That's all this was.
She reached into her desk and produced the emergency chocolate bar she kept for exactly this category of situation.
Yanami Anna's Diet Theory, Principle One: food consumed in a good mood converts directly into weight-loss motivation rather than fat. Therefore: no problem.
She bit into it happily.
Ding dong~
The bell. The homeroom teacher walked in, set her materials on the podium, and spoke with the brisk efficiency of someone with an announcement to make.
"We have a transfer student joining us today. Come in."
The voice alone — just the footstep quality, the particular energy of someone entering a room — sent a cold current through Yanami Anna's spine before she could identify why.
It's nothing, she told herself. It's nothing.
That was a dream.
The sliding door opened.
Pink hair. Radiant smile. One hand resting lightly over her heart.
"Hello everyone~ I'm Lala Satalin Deviluke~!"
The sound of a metal chair leg scraping across the floor was sharp enough to cut through the room.
Yanami Anna was on her feet, pointing, at a volume several tiers above classroom-appropriate:
"It's YOU!! Kihara-kun's ALIEN FIANCÉE!!"
The sentence detonated in the middle of the classroom.
"Fiancée?? No way—"
"But Yanami-san is his childhood friend — she wouldn't just make that up—"
"Did she just say alien?!"
.....
Thank you for reading.