Chapter 13: A Shrine Maiden Moves Into the House.
....
Two days of proximity had given Yanami Anna enough data to update her model of Lala.
Setting aside the romantic rival classification — which she was maintaining with professional dedication — Lala was, by most other measures, genuinely good company. Cheerful, warm, the kind of person who made a room feel more inhabited without trying. Under different circumstances, without the fiancée label that had been attached to her on day one, she'd probably have had most of the school's male population competing for her attention.
That afternoon, both of them received the same message from Kihara: filming went smoothly, heading home early.
Yanami Anna cancelled her after-school street food expedition. She walked home with Lala instead, the two of them maintaining the kind of comfortable semi-conversation that didn't require continuous attention.
They found someone standing at Kihara's gate.
Green hair, long. Blue and white shrine maiden attire. A hand-drawn map, held up and compared against surroundings with the focused uncertainty of someone who had been following directions for a while and wasn't sure they'd arrived.
Lala walked up immediately. "Excuse me — are you lost?"
"Ah, yes. I haven't traveled much lately, and even with the map I wasn't sure if I'd found the right place."
The girl answered while glancing curiously at Lala's tail. There was no youkai energy coming off her, so Sanae couldn't immediately categorize the tail as youkai-related or just a very committed accessory.
Lala took the hand-drawn map. Yanami Anna held her phone's navigation app next to it for comparison.
After approximately five seconds of triangulation, the answer was obvious.
"Oh — you're looking for Kihara!"
"You two know him?"
Sanae noticed the shift immediately. The blue-haired girl's expression had changed the moment Kihara was confirmed as the destination — gone from neutral to the specific wariness of someone monitoring a potential threat.
Completely missing the discreet tugs at her sleeve from Yanami Anna, Lala smiled warmly. "Of course! I'm Lala Satalin Deviluke — I just became Kihara's fiancée. And this is Yanami Anna, his childhood friend."
"Fiancée..." Sanae processed this. She had done a divination about his romantic prospects before coming. She'd been prepared for complexity. She still felt this was a lot. "I read his fortune before I came. Even so, this seems..." She caught herself and shifted to a proper greeting. "Lala-san, Yanami-san — hello. I'm a shrine maiden who once performed blessings for Kihara. My name is Kochiya Sanae."
Yanami Anna returned the greeting politely and maintained her security posture.
Her reasoning, running in a separate thread: a shrine maiden. Appearing at his gate. After previously performing blessings for him.
She was familiar, from her extensive research reading, with the genre convention in which a male protagonist removes a sacred sword from a shrine's offering and is subsequently required to marry the shrine maiden. She had consumed enough source material to know that variations of this plot existed and were not inherently implausible.
Therefore: this polite, gentle-looking shrine maiden had come down from her mountain for a reason. That reason was probably Kihara.
Wait, she thought. If there's already a fiancée situation AND a shrine maiden situation, those two will inevitably compete with each other for positioning. Which creates a window. While they're focused on each other, I can move. The strategic angle here is actually favorable.
Yanami Anna, who had just mentally promoted herself to Romantic Campaign Strategist, sent Kihara a message telling him to come outside.
He came out, saw Sanae standing at the gate chatting with Lala with the ease of people who had been talking for several minutes, and stopped.
He waved. "Sanae. I didn't expect you to come in person. Is everything alright at the shrine?"
"Kihara!"
The reunion after the consciousness-swap incident hit Sanae with a warmth she hadn't fully anticipated. She crossed the distance and hugged him.
The impact of a well-proportioned shrine maiden making full contact with his chest at jogging speed provided Yanami Anna with several additional data points confirming her she came down to take him hypothesis.
Sanae kept her actual explanation quiet, voice low near his ear: she was the first to make the crossing; several youkai were still at Kaguya's side receiving cross-world orientation briefings; her cover in this world was a young woman who had recently relocated to the city.
She stepped back, hands clasped behind her, and smiled. "I haven't found accommodation yet. Could you put me up for a while?"
"No problem. The house is big — if you get tired just sleep."
Yanami Anna inserted herself between them.
"Wait. You two just had a private conversation, and now she's suddenly moving in? What did I miss?"
"She just moved here and hasn't found a place. She can stay here in the meantime. Is there a problem with that?"
"There are several problems with that—!"
Lala tilted her head. "Helping someone in need is the natural thing to do. Anna, are you misunderstanding something?"
"The both of you— don't you have any situational awareness? Kihara is a young man in his prime, and you're just going to let Sanae-san move in? What if something happens?"
Kihara gave her the look. "So that's what you think of me."
Yanami Anna registered that she had just thrown a rock that had arced directly back toward her own foot. She reversed course quickly. "That's not what I meant! I'm saying — what if the paparazzi get photos of her coming and going from your house and manufacture a scandal? Your career is still in its early stages. If something like that damages your reputation, I can't just sit by and watch!"
This was a reasonable argument. It landed.
Sanae reached into her sleeve, produced a paper talisman, and pressed it to the outer wall. She turned around and put her thumb up.
"That should handle it. With this Idle Visitor Dispersal talisman in place, any paparazzi will find themselves completely unable to approach."
"...Is that real?" Yanami Anna studied the slip of paper on the wall. Lala's abilities could be filed under alien technology. A paper talisman was squarely in the unexplainable category.
"I'm a shrine maiden. Creating talismans with specific effects is within my abilities." Sanae's smile had the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were.
"If you don't believe me — walk a hundred meters in that direction, then try to come back."
"Fine. I'll test it."
She sprinted the hundred meters and turned around.
The walk back should have taken under a minute. Instead, Yanami Anna found herself walking the same stretch of street in a loop, the way a dream sometimes closed corridors into circles. Every approach route reconverged on the same section of road. She tried going backward. Same result.
She took out her phone.
"Help! I can't get back to your house! Tell Sanae-san to undo it!"
"Done. Try again."
Yanami Anna looked up, walked forward, and arrived at Kihara's gate without incident.
Sanae was standing precisely where she'd been, hands folded in front of her, expression radiating the specific composure of someone who had never doubted the outcome.
"Convinced now, Yanami-san?"
"Completely." She nodded several times with genuine enthusiasm. Then she took Sanae's sleeve and pulled her gently to one side.
"Actually..." She pitched her voice low. "Do you have a talisman for that? One you put on someone, and they fall in love with the first person they see?"
Sanae stared at her.
"...?"
Thank you for reading.