Chapter 0: And So, the Curtain Rises

Everyone was always low energy around this time of day. It was a regular weekday, not very long before sunset. Those with jobs were, of course, still at work, while the homemakers were about to start cooking dinner.

Most cafés would be filled with students on their way home from school, but Café LycoReco’s prices were a bit higher than the chain cafés, so there were never many young customers there, regardless of the time. That allowed for a particularly languid atmosphere in those late afternoon hours.

There were three customers, all of them regulars, who didn’t need any fussing over, which only exacerbated the lethargic mood.

“You can take a break, Takina.”

Takina looked past the counter at the café’s owner, Mika, who was pouring a cup of coffee. He set the steaming cup on the corner of the counter for her.

If Mika had asked Takina if she’d like to have a coffee, she’d refuse, saying she couldn’t during business hours, remaining poised with a tray in her hand in the middle of the store, ready to serve anyone who might come in. Anticipating this, Mika had stopped asking recently and skipped straight to pouring one for her.

Takina would feel bad about leaving the fresh coffee untouched on the counter, with gentle wisps of steam rising from it, and it would feel disrespectful to drink the beverage in its stylish cup while standing. This left her no choice but to sit down. It was a perfectly natural way to start her partially involuntary break. Taking an unscheduled break during her shift would normally rack her with guilt, but this wasn’t her choice, so she didn’t need to blame herself.

Takina took the cup in both hands, its gentle warmth calming her. She touched it to her lips and took a sip. The aroma of the hot coffee rose to her nostrils as the liquid danced on her tongue, and then she swallowed. The slight acidity was soon followed by bitter notes, intensely aromatic and rounded off with a final, gentle sweetness.

Takina moved the cup away from her mouth, letting out a soft sigh of contentment. She remembered that, shortly after coming to LycoReco, she had read in a magazine that the experience of drinking coffee began even before it reached your mouth and ended only when you exhaled after taking a sip. It hadn’t made much sense to her at the time, but now she completely understood what that writer meant.

Inside the café, the air was thick with the refreshing smell of freshly roasted coffee beans, while the outside of the building looked like an old-fashioned, wooden Japanese house that oozed a sense of history. The afternoon light filtered through the stained-glass windows, bathing the interior in soft, warm hues. Even the quiet clinking of cups on saucers—not fancy but tastefully selected—added to the pleasant ambience. And the coffee was not too strong but not weak, imparting just the right amount of bitterness and acidity underscored by a subtle sweetness. It was served neither scalding hot nor lukewarm, but at the optimal drinking temperature, which naturally elicited a single heartfelt conclusion: The coffee was delicious.

It was so comforting that Takina could almost swear that the warm breath she let out after her sip of coffee also carried away all the stress that had accumulated within her body.

The delightful experience began even before drinking the coffee, and its magic lasted long after the sip was taken. The mild flavor and warmth brought with it a unique sense of serenity. Takina closed her eyes, savoring the moment.

Good coffee had the power to flip a switch inside people and make them go from “work mode” to “rest mode” in just a few seconds.

Takina didn’t have to open her eyes to know that Mika was working with incredible efficiency, his movements delightfully elegant. The familiar sounds coming from the kitchen all but confirmed it. As her sense of time began to unravel, Takina was starting to daydream when a loud, cheerful voice interrupted her reverie.

“I felt totally bamboozled!”

“You too, Chisato?”

“Well, yeah! The movie’s over three hours long, so, like, you go in prepared for that, right? The ‘intermission’ screen comes up in the middle, and I think to myself, ‘Okay, looks like there’s going to be a break, so I might just as well go to the bathroom,’ you know?”

“Oh yeah. Absolutely.”

“But the ‘intermission’ was only two seconds. What a cruel joke!”

“Yeah! I was already getting up from my seat, in bathroom mode, and like, what was I supposed to do? It was too late! I had to go! For the first time in like a decade of watching movies, I had to suffer the humiliation of taking a bathroom break right in the middle!”

Takina opened her eyes and looked over at the slightly raised tatami area where Chisato Nishikigi was chatting loudly with three regulars.

“In the country the movie’s from, they apparently have a proper intermission.”

“Whaaat?! How’s that fair?!”

“Someone should complain to the Japanese movie theaters so they leave the break in.”

“But theaters over here need to ensure a high daily turnover of viewers to stay afloat…”

As if she weren’t a waitress at the café but a customer herself, Chisato sat relaxing with Gotou, a gentleman of unknown occupation nearing retirement age; Yoneoka, a writer; and Kitamura, a student. In fact, the three regulars seemed to be entertaining Chisato, not the other way around.

Takina thought she should reprimand her. She was irritated that her quiet coffee time had been ruined. Chisato suddenly turned her head, sensing Takina’s glare.

“Oh, you must be feeling left out, Takina. Come join us!”

“No. I don’t go to the movies anyway.”

Time stopped for Chisato. She froze, her eyes open wide and mouth agape. Takina thought her friend looked like a fish freshly pulled out of water, but within an instant, Chisato recovered. Unbelievably fast, she crawled on all fours off the tatami and across the floor to the counter where Takina was sitting. She grabbed Takina’s ankles, then knees, then hips, and finally shoulders as she pulled herself up until the girls were face-to-face.

Chisato’s bizarre movements made her look like something out of a zombie flick. A chill shot down Takina’s spine. If she had a gun on her, she would’ve reflexively aimed it at Chisato.

“You don’t go to the movies?! Why?!”

Chisato shook Takina by the shoulders violently, like someone desperately trying to get the last drop of a beverage out of an empty can, staring at her in utter disbelief.

“…Chisato!” Mika chided from behind the counter, but she didn’t hear him.

Concerned that Chisato’s brain seemed to be dissolving like a melting cube of butter, Takina grabbed Chisato by the wrists to stop the shaking.

“Let’s turn this around. Why are you surprised that I don’t go to the movies?”

“Because… Because, er… Takina, you know where you are, right?”

“Inside Café LycoReco.”

“No, no, a geographic location!”

“Tokyo.”

“No! I mean, yeah, but narrow it down more!”

“Sumida, a little north of Kinshicho Station.”

“That’ll do! And why are you here?”

“Because Commander Kusunoki ordered me to.”

“Er… Right…”

Takina didn’t know where the conversation was going, but even she could tell that Chisato wasn’t satisfied with her answers.

“What’s your point?” she asked.

“You see, Takina. You’re very blessed right now. You’re working at an amazing café, you get to wear a cute uniform, you have a nice, pretty girl who’s so happy to have you around for a coworker—”

“The pretty coworker’s here. What do you need?” asked Mizuki Nakahara, emerging from the staff room; she was working the late shift.

“I said ‘girl’!”

Mizuki pouted, protesting that girls were girls no matter their age, but she soon retreated. Meanwhile, Takina wished Mizuki was more committed to work and started her shift early.

“So, um, what was I saying? Oh, right. I’m your pretty coworker. You get to eat delicious food every day, you’re great at your job…”

“I would like to be given more responsibilities, though.”

“Okay, yeah, we can think about that! For starters, how about you do the cleaning all by yourself today?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know! I know, but let’s talk about that later! So on top of everything I already said, you’re living in one of the best places in the world!”

“Because there are a lot of good restaurants?”

“It’s not about the restaurants!”

Chisato looked up to the heavens in exasperation. Meanwhile, the noisy conversation attracted Kurumi. She emerged from the back of the store yawning as if she’d only just woken up, carrying her laptop. She sat at the other end of the counter, opposite Takina.

“Based on the context of the conversation thus far, I believe Chisato wanted you to realize how close we are to a bunch of theaters.”

“Yes! That’s it! Incredible! How did you know that?”

“I heard the entire conversation from my bed. That’s how loud you are.”

Mika put down a cup of hot chocolate in front of Kurumi, as if he’d anticipated she’d want it. She accepted it matter-of-factly and took a sip immediately. Then she exhaled with an ahhh.

“Did you just wake up? It’s almost sunset,” said Mika.

“I won’t let something as insignificant as the sun dictate my daily rhythm,” replied Kurumi.

Takina was watching those two when Chisato moved her face in the way, not willing to let Takina ignore her. Takina couldn’t escape Chisato’s big eyes.

“So what’s the point of you living here, Takina?”

“Like I said—”

“The point is to take advantage of all these movie theaters!”

“I disagree.”

“Being able to walk to the movies instead of having to go by train is a mega advantage! A huge quality-of-life boost! So why…? Why aren’t you going to any?!”

“I’m not sure what to say…”

“’Cause you don’t really watch movies, right?” Kitamura suggested cautiously.

Takina pushed Chisato’s angry face out of the way to reply to the student.

“I do watch movies. Chisato keeps foisting all sorts of Blu-rays on me.”

Chisato twisted her body to look at Kitamura. Her hand shot up.

“I make sure she watches some movies!” she proclaimed.

“Then something else must be stopping Takina from going to the movies,” said Yoneoka, the writer.

Chisato turned back to Takina, awaiting her answer.

“Well… For starters, it’s so expensive.”

“Don’t be st—” Chisato started, but she bit her tongue.

“Also, movies are generally about one hundred and twenty minutes long,” Takina continued. “Which is fine, but you’re supposed to arrive early and take a seat before the start of the movie, and the movie doesn’t even start when it’s supposed to because previews run first. You also have to factor in the time needed to travel to and from the theater, which adds at least another forty minutes. Altogether, you waste almost half the day on a single trip to the movies.”

“Why don’t you see it as a bargain, only two thousand yen for half a day’s worth of entertainment?”

“It doesn’t take a long time for movies to become available on streaming services or for physical copies to become available for rental. Both options are more efficient ways to see a movie—”

“You don’t get it! You just don’t get it, Takina! Argh, damn it! I’ll have to educate you! Let’s go! I’m taking you to a movie theater right now!”

“Whoa, whoa! Chisato?” Gotou asked with a smile, amused by Chisato’s impulsivity. “What about the café?”

“It’s self-service now! Get whatever you want!”

“Better think again,” muttered Kurumi, typing away on her laptop, but Chisato didn’t seem to hear.

Chisato dragged Takina out of the café…only to drag her back inside moments later. Hotheaded as she was, she realized the plan was flawed—she and Takina were still dressed in their kimono uniforms, and they didn’t have their wallets on them. Not to mention, it was highly unlikely they’d happen to arrive just as a movie was about to start.

Kurumi snorted.

“Well, that was quick. How was the movie?”

“Very funny! Kurumi, book seats for us! For any movie starting soon!”

“I knew you were going to ask, so I already looked some up. There are two movies you can make it in time for if you leave now: Revenge of the Samurai in Space and Shameless Japan: the Movie. Yeesh, these titles…”

“Oh, I’ve already seen both of those…”

“You went to see movies with those crazy titles? What made you think that’d be a good idea?”

Ignoring the question, Chisato walked over to Kurumi to look at her laptop.

“Oh, wait a sec. Isn’t Forty-Nine Golden Days in theaters now?” she asked.

“You don’t mind going later? Okay… Here, found it. It’s showing tonight at nine o’clock.”

That’d mean they could go after finishing their shifts. Takina was fine with that.

“Okay, we’ll take it! Book us seats! Next to each other!”

Ding-dong rang the bell at the front door. Takina got up from her seat and went over to greet the customer with a smile.

“Ah… Sorry, Chisato. It finishes after eleven, so minors aren’t allowed.”

“If we dress the part, they’ll never guess we’re underage!”

The newly arrived customer cleared his throat loudly, obviously trying to get Chisato’s attention. She finally noticed him and turned around…cringing as she realized her big mistake.

“I’m afraid I can’t let that slide,” the man said. It was Abe, a police detective in his late forties. He smiled wryly and scratched his head.

“Mr. Abe?! What are you doing here?!”

“I came in for a coffee… Is that not allowed?”

“Oh, no, that’s fine. It’s just that your timing couldn’t be worse… Urrrgh…”

“Ha-ha-ha! You girls were going to the movies? If you can’t get into the late showing, why not just go tomorrow?”

“When you want to see a movie, you have to go as soon as you can! You never know what life’s gonna throw at you. Never waste a chance to see a show!” Chisato frustratedly protested as Abe made his way to a counter seat. He ordered an iced coffee, which Mika started preparing right away.

“And this is another downside of movie theaters. You can’t just watch a movie when you’d like to.”

“It’s not the same, Takina. Listen, I know it’s easy to just stream movies online. Sure, the convenience is a plus, but it’s different! Not saying you shouldn’t stream movies ever, but… How do I put it…?”

“You can even watch movies on your phone if you have time to kill,” Yoneoka remarked.

“True. Where was I…? Right. Regardless of any movie’s plot, being able to watch it whenever you want means it doesn’t have as much of an impact, you know? You don’t appreciate it as much.”

“Oh, I got it,” Yoneoka said with a triumphant look on his face. “It’s just like with women! You can have a good time with an easy woman, but you won’t care about her as much.”

“I guess that’s kinda similar, but you also sound like a total sleazebag, so negative points for you.”

“Me, a sleazebag?!”

Kitamura and Gotou laughed.

“In any case, the movies just aren’t in the cards today, Chisato. Please just accept that.”

“Tsk! Fine… It’ll have to be tomorrow. Kurumi…”

“On it… You two are lucky. Tomorrow’s the last showing of that movie in Kinshicho. There’s only one showtime at five thirty.”

“That’s our only chance? Quick, book the seats!”

“You got it.”

“One for me and one for Takina! In the middle, slightly closer to the screen. That’s the best. Oh, and I have a membership, so use that. I’ll give you my number…”

“You’re so fussy, Chisato. Here, just buy them yourself.”

Kurumi handed the laptop off to Chisato, who started filling in each field on the website. Takina sighed, watching her friend type slowly, thinking how unfair it was that her schedule for the next day had been changed without her having any say. What about work? She had a shift tomorrow, too. She furtively made eye contact with Mika, who was just serving Abe’s iced coffee. His lips curled upward slightly, as if to say they’d just have to manage somehow. He had a soft spot for Chisato, and he wasn’t the only one. The regulars, too, happily condoned Chisato’s freewheeling lifestyle… Everyone was easy on her.

Feeling exhausted by it all, Takina sat down at the counter again to finish her coffee, which was starting to get cold.

The only thing bitter at Café LycoReco was the coffee.

•

It was half past three in the afternoon, almost exactly a full day since Chisato’s big speech about the wonders of the theater. There were two hours left until their movie.

That day, the café was completely empty. Kurumi was lying on the tatami floor with her laptop, Mika was using the free time to clean the kitchen, Mizuki was sitting at the counter browsing a bridal magazine, and Takina… Well, Takina was enduring another one of Chisato’s lectures.

Chisato was explaining how movies fell into two groups: ones you should watch the trailer for and ones you shouldn’t. Some Japanese movie studios released trailers riddled with spoilers just to sell more tickets, and that sucked. Some would go as far as to release a trailer featuring the very last scene…and so on.

Then she went on about how it was actually not stupid to pick which movies to see based on the actors since, especially outside of Japan, famous actors would often decide whether to play in a movie or not based on how good the script was and the director’s talent. You could treat them as a marker of quality…and so on.

Takina was wiping the tables without a word while Chisato followed her like a shadow, blathering nonstop. It had been like that since morning, and after hours of this, Takina was getting very fed up. For her, it was like being haunted by a very persistent cinephile ghost.

“And then you have the people who believe dubs are superior and the people who think watching in the original language with subtitles is better, and people from both sides are constantly going at it, neither willing to back down. It’s a brutal—”

“I feel much better educated about movies now. Thank you. Can you please do some work for a change?”

“What work? We have no customers. There’s nothing to do!”

They had nobody to serve, but Takina thought Chisato could follow her example and do some cleaning or finally learn how to brew coffee properly. She would certainly find something to do if she’d only bother to look.

“By the way, do you want to come with us to the movies, Mizuki?”

Takina almost forcefully redirected the conversation to Mizuki just to get Chisato off her back…but Mizuki didn’t even raise her eyes from her magazine.

“What? A movie? In a theater? You’re supposed to go to those with a guy.”

“That’s not true!” Chisato snapped, her attention shifting to Mizuki.

Takina, mildly relieved to be free of Chisato’s attention, looked over at Kurumi, who was still sprawled on the floor. Takina’s eyes asked Kurumi to come with.

“I’m not the outdoorsy type,” Kurumi replied.

There probably weren’t many people in the world who considered seeing a movie an outdoor activity… In any case, that was decidedly a no.

The landline started ringing. Mika came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands.

“Boss, would you like to see the movie with us…?”

“Thank you for the invitation, but I have to look after the café,” he said with a kind smile, picking up the receiver.

A few seconds later, his expression darkened.

“I see. Hold on a minute. Chisato, we have a new assignment. Get ready to head out.”

“Huh? Is it from the boss man? He needs more of the good stuff?”

“Sorry, but… It’s from the DA.”

Mika held out the receiver for Chisato to take. Her face hardened.

“Hello, I’m currently unable to come to the phone. Please leave a message after the beep…,” she said in a robotic voice.

“Just hear them out.”

“But we’re going out soon… I don’t wanna…”

Chisato took the receiver from Mika and put it to her ear. Takina came over to listen in, too.

“Is this Chisato?” Kusunoki’s voice came out of the earpiece.

“Erm, I’m sorry, but we’re about to go to the movies…”

“I have a job for you. Nothing too big, so don’t worry.”

“Ms. Kusunoki, didn’t you hear what I just said? I’m going out—”

“I just sent you the data. Take a look. Your target is…”

Takina thought it was impressive how Kusunoki completely sidestepped Chisato’s whining. It pleased her that finally somebody was firm with Chisato, unlike all the other people who let her do whatever she wanted.

The job was a bit unusual. The target had been shot twice at close range by a Third Lycoris but escaped with his life. He was an industrial spy from another country in Asia. He was on the run, armed with a gun he carried for self-defense, and was in possession of important documentation which was in the nation’s interest to retrieve.

“He may do us a favor and commit suicide at this point, but we can’t afford to be lazy and hope our enemies will do what’s right. I want to make sure he’s taken care of.”

“Why don’t you have the girl who botched the job go after him?”

“He’s ex-special forces. He may be wounded, but it’s possible he’ll fight like a cornered rat. Sending a Third Lycoris after him would be too risky.”

Lycoris agents primarily took advantage of the fact that nobody suspected a young girl of being an assassin. Open combat wasn’t their specialty. They did, of course, undergo combat training just in case things didn’t go according to plan—or to be able to fight as a last resort. However, a Lycoris would be seriously disadvantaged in a fight against former military types who were trained specifically for combat, had more experience in the field and better combat gear, and were also stronger physically. That was asking too much of a Third Lycoris.

“I’m well aware you’ll probably let him get away and use the cleaners to cover up the mess, but I’ll tolerate it. You can even bill us for the cleaners’ fees on the condition that you retrieve the data the target stole as well as any weapons he’s carrying.”

“A compromise? How new and scary for you.”

“I’ve got an armed, dangerous, desperate man on the loose in the city. This is not the time to be picky.”

Assassination was the DA’s bread and butter, but that wasn’t their goal, only a means to an end. The DA’s mission was ostensibly to keep the peace, or to convince the people of Japan at least that their country was safe and sound. That meant keeping the most serious and violent incidents out of the public eye. What mattered most was preventing this from blowing up, so Kusunoki was willing to compromise.

“Right… Okay, I get the picture, buuut I’m going to see a movie with Takina—”

“He slipped away from our agent eight minutes ago in Yokogawa, Sumida.”

Chisato’s eyes widened. The guy might as well be right outside their door. A dangerous individual was on one of the streets their customers took to get to the café, where heaps of kids would be walking home from school. All those people, just living their ordinary, peaceful lives…

“Chisato.”

“Argh, okay! Fine! We’ll take care of it!”

Chisato’s agreement sent everyone inside the café into motion. Mizuki went to flip the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. Kurumi got up from the floor, sat with her laptop at one of the low tables, and began typing furiously. She checked the data from Kusunoki and put her AIs to work scanning the footage from CCTV cameras around the city to locate the target.

Mika got out his smartphone to contact someone—presumably the locals who knew about Café LycoReco’s secret dealings—both to warn them and to gather information.

After putting the receiver down, Chisato and Takina rushed off to quickly get changed out of their café getups and into Lycoris uniforms. They slung on their “school” satchel bags, containing guns, ammo, and various other equipment.

Takina undid her twin ponytails, letting her long black hair down. She took out her trusty gun to inspect it. She loaded the magazine and pulled the slider back to load the first round into the chamber. Then she pulled the slide back ever so slightly to check that the first bullet was loaded properly in the chamber. Once she was satisfied, the gun went back in her bag. Chisato did the same.

“We’ve only an hour to finish this, Takina.”

“Of course, before the evening rush. It would be difficult to locate and capture the target once the streets get crowded…”

“Not that! The movie!”

“Oh…right.”

They came out of the staff room and headed to the front. Kurumi had dimmed the lights to display their mission briefing on the wall with a small projector. She showed them a map with the location where the Third Lycoris engaged the target and the route the target took to flee. Next to the map were photos showing the target’s face and clothing…then the projection changed to display other info.

They began talking about tactics. Since a Third Lycoris had been on this job, the DA already had a drone in the air, which had been tracking the target until he entered a building about two minutes earlier. A special ops veteran, he’d been trained to be wary of drones and satellite surveillance. Given how much time had passed, it was highly likely he’d already slipped away from that building.

“This will be tricky,” Takina said grimly. “We’ll be lucky if it’s over in just an hour.”

“We’re gonna wrap this up in an hour, nonnegotiable! The movie’s leaving theaters today!”

“Ah, there it is,” Kurumi muttered, looking at her screen. “You can relax, Chisato.”

“Whatcha got?”

“Someone’s uploaded a pirated version of Forty-Nine Golden Days to a site on the dark web. I’ll download it for you…”

“Oh no you don’t! Get that site shut down and the uploader arrested, pronto! Downloading content you know has been uploaded illegally is also illegal! You are not downloading that!”

“Er… Okay.”

“Argh, I’m so upset! Kurumi, is that everything you got on the target? Then we’re off, Takina! Time’s a-tickin’! Roll out!”

Not waiting for an answer, Chisato ran out the door. Takina followed after her, wishing Chisato could be this motivated when it came to their ordinary work, too.

•

They completed the mission without too much trouble. A short exchange of fire had occurred, but it was a run-of-the-mill job for the Lycoris from Café LycoReco. Overall, it was easy… Well, it would have been if it weren’t for the self-imposed time limit.

Normally, when carrying out a mission of this sort, Kurumi, Mizuki, and Mika would provide support while locating the target. The team would lure the target into a safe capture location or wait until the target moved somewhere more suitable on their own, then Chisato and Takina would engage them. This time, though, it was more like a demented game of tag or hide-and-seek.

Once the girls found the man, they pulled no punches, and once he was down and they were waiting for the cleaners to arrive, they secured the data and weapons. Anyone who stumbled upon the scene probably would’ve mistaken them for muggers. They packed the “loot” into a bag and mailed it to Kusunoki at the DA’s headquarters using a convenience store courier service.

Then they provided the badly battered target with some first aid, wrapped him up with duct tape (making sure to stay as inconspicuous as possible), and handed him over to the cleaners. It was all done in a terrible rush. Their methods that day weren’t just a bit slapdash—they were bordering on reckless and irresponsible.

By the time they were finished, it was five PM.

“All right! We’ll make it with time to spare if we hurry!” Chisato shouted, breaking into a run with Takina next to her.

The screening was at five thirty. They would probably start letting people in ten minutes before. They should have been able to make it even if they walked from Yokogawa, but it was always best to have some extra leeway just in case. Running was smart.

The movie theater they were going to was in Olinas Mall, a stone’s throw from LycoReco. The girls would have to slow down to a walk inside the mall, so they were running as fast as they could while still outside. The theater was on the fourth floor and the elevator would take her there faster than the escalator. Chisato knew that from firsthand experience, so she immediately made for the elevators. There were two: One stopped on the second floor, and the other on the third. Unfortunately, they were both going up. Chisato and Takina might have to take the escalator after all…

Chisato touched her index finger to her narrow chin, looking sharply at Takina.

“Takina, we must make good use of every moment we have.”

“You’re going to the restroom?”

“Bingo!”

Nothing was more upsetting for a movie fan than having to miss out on a part of the screening to go to the bathroom. So Chisato hurried down the corridor next to the elevators. She returned just as an elevator arrived. The two girls got on and went to the fourth floor. From there, it was less than a minute’s walk to the theater’s entrance. Chisato went to get their tickets. Takina followed, seeing as she didn’t have anything better to do.

“I really want to show you how awesome going to the movies is, so I’ll treat you to popcorn and a drink.”

“Wait, aren’t they pricey?”

“You don’t get it, Takina! Popcorn is a part of the experience! It’s tradition! Like drinking bottled milk after bathing in a public bathhouse! Or getting instant noodles from a stall in winter! Or churros at a theme park!”

Chisato mimed drinking or eating each of the items she mentioned, looking terribly serious.

“I have never personally done any of those things, but I assume that, under certain circumstances, they add value to experiences.”

“Sure, why not! That sounds about right. Wait, you’ve never done those things? I’ll help you fix that! We could start with a visit to a bathhouse… Anyway, back to popcorn for a second…”

“Ah, so you weren’t finished…”

Chisato went on about how, if you really thought about it, popcorn isn’t well-suited to be a movie theater snack. While not as bad as potato chips, it was noisy to chew, it rustled in the bucket, and it had a strong smell. But movies and popcorn, and theaters and popcorn, had a long history together. They simply couldn’t be separated anymore…

Her hand hovered above the ticket machine’s screen as she carried on at length, explaining that it all started during the Great Depression, when cheap, delicious popcorn was sold on the streets. It was popular with the masses, who then brought it inside theaters. The theater staff were actually happy about it since, in those days, guests would often throw whatever they had been eating at the screen if they didn’t like the movie, and popcorn—even thrown with a lot of strength—was highly unlikely to fly all the way to the screen. Even if by some chance it reached it, it wouldn’t cause any damage. Over time, people began associating popcorn with movies. Theaters selling poor-quality popcorn (or, worse, not offering popcorn at all) began to lose customers. And so popcorn and movies became inseparable.

“That’s very informative, but please get the tickets printed already.”

“Hey, I wasn’t finished! I’ve got to tell you about how much food and beverage sales contribute to theater revenue, and—”

“I understand. Popcorn is very important. Please get the tickets printed.”

“Well, someone’s crabby.”

“How much patience do you think I have? Please hurry up.”

“Okay, okay. Now, the booking confirmation number… Huh? Why isn’t it…? What? ……………Oh!”

Takina hadn’t been partnered with Chisato that long, but she knew her well enough to understand immediately that those words were the sort of thing Chisato uttered when there was real trouble.

“What’s wrong?”

Chisato had frozen in front of the ticket machine.

“Takina… What time is it?”

“Five-twenty. I imagine they’ll be letting people into the theater soon. You need to hurry if you want to buy popcorn… Chisato?”

“There’s been a bit of a mix-up.”

“Is it not today…? No, this is the last day they’re showing this movie, isn’t it? What could have gotten mixed up…?”

“It’s today…but not at this theater.”

“What?”

“It’s in the other one! On the south side!”

There were two movie theaters in Kinshicho, both belonging to the same chain, so they used the same website for bookings…which sometimes led to tragic mistakes.

Forty-Nine Golden Days was about to be screened in the other theater. Usually, mistakenly going to a different movie theater in the same area wasn’t that much of a problem, as theaters tended to be next to or opposite each other, but that wasn’t the case in Kinshicho. One was in Olinas Mall north of the Kinshicho Station, and the other in Rakutenchi, a shopping mall to the south of the station. Between the two lay the expansive Kinshi Park. They were seven hundred meters apart.

Takina finally realized the gravity of their predicament. The distance was significant, the streets near the station tended to be crowded, and the route led them through a narrow footpath under the railway, which was bound to slow them down.

“We won’t be able to get there before the movie starts. How many minutes after the start do they allow people to ent—?”

Takina stopped abruptly when Chisato grabbed her hand.

“Okay, partner. Let’s go!”

“Wait… What?!”

Chisato pulled her, forcing her to run back to the elevators. She mashed the call button. The elevator arrived almost immediately.

“Chisato, I think we should just—”

“No! We’re not giving up!”

“But why hurry? It always starts with commercials anyway…”

“The previews are part of the movie experience!”

“You can just watch them on YouTube later.”

“No, it has to be at the theater! Loud! Intense! It’s! The! Best!”

Takina wasn’t convinced that loudness and intensity made advertisements and movie trailers any more worth watching.

“I…see.”

“Trust me! Okay, first floor. We’ll take the shortest route from here. Through the park!”

They speed-walked through Olinas holding hands… Rather, Chisato was holding Takina’s hand in a vise-like grip, forcing her to keep up.

Kinshi Park was adjacent to Sumida Gymnasium and its sports grounds, which included a tennis court and a baseball field. There was no shortage of people exercising in the park, but the two Lycoris in their “school” uniforms, running at the speed of professional track-and-field athletes with their skirts fluttering in the wind, made for an unusual sight. Not put off by the unwanted attention, Chisato—with Takina in tow—ran through the park at breakneck speed, managing to wave at a large dog they spotted on the way. They passed the train station and charged into the shopping mall, where the other theater was located. The elevator had just stopped on the first floor, so they jumped in and rode it to the sixth.

By then, Takina was slightly out of breath. Chisato was a fast runner, and Takina had to give it her all not to fall behind. Meanwhile, Chisato hadn’t even broken a sweat. It was proof of Chisato’s extraordinary abilities in a setting completely unrelated to their secret work.

“Two minutes left…”

Chisato’s brow furrowed.

“We can make it…!”

“It’s not as if our lives are on the line.”

“Man, Takina, you still don’t get it. Listen, watching a movie in a movie theater is like—”

“Sixth floor, Chisato.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you later!”

Chisato jumped out of the elevator as soon as the door opened and made a beeline for the ticket machine. Then she…didn’t head to the screening room, instead going to the counter.

“What are you doing, Chisato…?”

“Popcorn and drinks!”

She was dead set on getting refreshments, and nothing could change her mind. She quickly ordered a “set for two” that turned out to be two massive buckets of popcorn in two different flavors.

“I got us cola and oolong tea. Take your pick. Then there’s salted popcorn and caramel popcorn. We can share! Oh, and the salted one is actually made with a butter sauce. How awesome is that?!”

“Let’s go.”

The mellow smells of caramel and butter wafted from the big buckets, mixing in the air and producing an aroma so tempting it was as if the epitome of everything humans could ever want now sat in their hands. The girls hurried to the screening room, the delightful scent of popcorn trailing them as they went.

The lights were already lowered, but the movie hadn’t started yet—they were showing a commercial for a wedding venue in the nearby Kameido area.

“Notice the difference, Takina? From the moment you walk in. That distinct silence, thanks to some serious soundproofing… Well, not right this very moment, but still.”

“You mean because of the very loud commercial playing?”

“Anyway, it’s perfect here, sound-wise. When the only noises you hear are the ones you make yourself, it feels so special, like you’re outside of time and space!”

Takina could see her point. She did register that there was something unusual about the soundscape, but not in a bad way. She could hear hushed conversations among the sparse audience, the munching of popcorn, the light tapping of ice cubes against the sides of the cups… All those little sounds seemed exaggerated because of the lack of ambient noise.

“Aaand the seats! Don’t you get excited sitting in a seat made purely for the enjoyment of movies? Ours are over there… Wait, what?”

Two familiar faces sat in the direction Chisato was pointing.

“Look who decided to show up,” said Mizuki, who was sitting in the row behind Chisato and Takina’s with Mika and Kurumi.

“But…why?! You said you’d only go to the movies with a guy!”

“Oh, I did say that, didn’t I?” Mizuki laughed. She was holding a can of beer in one hand. “But I was watching this show on TV with a hot actor I like, and he said this movie’s good. If I met him by chance, I’d want to have something to talk about, you know? So here I am.”

“…But your chances of meeting him are abysmally low,” said Takina.

“Shush. The moment you stop believing in miracles, you’ve lost your youth.”

Takina didn’t feel like talking to Mizuki anymore. She looked over at Kurumi.

“You’re wondering why I’m here? Well, I shut down any pirated movie sites that had this movie today, so the only way I could watch it was by coming to the theater.”

“Oh, you did what I asked you to! Thanks!” Chisato said with a wink.

She and Takina sat down… Chisato, though, impatiently turned around to talk to her friends at the back, kneeling on her seat like a little kid.

“If I’d known Forty-Nine Golden Days was a splatter movie, I’d have watched it earlier, but it’s hard to tell from the title. It makes it sound more like some old-timey drama,” said Kurumi.

Chisato giggled and cracked a sly smile.

“You didn’t realize the title is a play on words?”

“Doesn’t it just refer to the plot? A guy who should by all accounts be dead uses the forty-nine days until his spirit leaves his body to slaughter as many people as he can? What else is there to it?”

“You didn’t think very hard about it, huh? Think again about how the title is written. Forty-nine isn’t written in Arabic numerals but with the Japanese characters for four, ten, and nine. Now what does it look like?”

Kurumi gazed at the ceiling, thinking for a few moments about those characters: 四, 十, and 九.

“Ah! Ten looks like a plus sign. Four plus nine is thirteen. And the Japanese character for ‘golden’ is also used in the word for Friday. So it’s ‘Friday the thirteenth’!”

“Bingo! It’s a Japanese spin on American cult horror films.”

“Interesting,” said Takina, who also hadn’t sussed out this connection.

“And why are you here, Teach?”

“I didn’t want to be the only one left out.”

Takina smiled at Mika’s guileless response.

The advertisements ended and the previews began. Takina tapped Chisato to stop her chatting with the others.

“Chisato, the trailers are starting.”

“Oh, already? Let’s see… Huh, they made a sequel?! Seriously?!”

The grown-ups behind Chisato shushed her. She hurriedly covered her mouth and sank into her seat.

“You should watch the movie at home if you wanna talk through it.”

“Don’t you know it’s normal to react loudly in movie theaters abroad?”

“This is Japan.”

“True.”

“And it isn’t particularly easy for us to go overseas.”

“No, we have to go someday. We’ll watch a movie in a theater in some other country and make a huge racket. I’m sure it’ll be a good time!”

“Wait, so which one is it: Do you go to the movies to make a racket or to quietly focus on the film?”

“Either or. Both are fun. I also like to watch movies at home!”

Chisato was greedy, spoiled, and self-focused… She acted childishly, yet she’d surprise people on occasion with a very philosophical take on things… To Takina, Chisato Nishikigi was a profoundly strange person.

“Okay, not long now… Takina, you should know that besides the sound, the seats, and the popcorn, there’s another factor that makes watching movies in theaters so special.”

“The big screen?”

“Oh… That’s an obvious one. Yeah, there’s that, but there’s another thing that trumps the rest. And that’s…the time you spend in the theater. Think about it! The two hours here are two hours reserved solely for watching a movie. Isn’t that a luxury in this day and age?”

She was right—in modern times, it was hard to get two whole hours to focus on a single activity. In the movie theater, you’d have your phone switched off, you’d make sure you wouldn’t need the restroom, and you’d have two hours free of interruptions… It really was a luxury.

“That’s why movies you see in a theater become lasting memories, and you enjoy them more than if you just watched them at home. The special environment and having good company make it even more fun. It’s definitely going to stick with you! And going to a café or a restaurant after to discuss it with friends is just as fun!”

“Really?”

“Trust me! You’ll see for yourself. Something to look forward to… Oh, this trailer looks kinda interesting… It’s coming out next month, huh? Takina, let’s go see that one together!”

“I was more interested in the trailer before this one.”

“Let’s see both!”

“…Okay, if you want,” Takina easily agreed, surprising herself. Suddenly feeling self-conscious and needing a distraction, she helped herself to one of the drinks Chisato bought for them. It was the cola.

Both the LycoReco staff and the café’s customers were always indulging Chisato’s whims. That much was obvious to Takina… But it only occurred to her then that perhaps she was already one of them. When she was having her coffee at the café the other day, she mused that the only thing bitter at the café was the coffee, while the people were anything but—and she was one of those people, wasn’t she?

“Oooh, finally!”

The previews were over, and the room fell silent as the movie was about to start. Out of the corner of her eye, Takina saw Chisato quietly clapping her hands, holding them close to her chest. She could see Chisato’s smile as clearly in the darkness as if a spotlight had been shining on her. With that smile still on her face, Chisato suddenly turned toward Takina.

“It’s starting!”

No one could see this smile radiating happiness like a sunflower in summer and not smile back. Takina fought to remain expressionless, but she couldn’t help grinning a little.

“Yes…,” she said.

She and Chisato turned toward the screen.

And so the story began.

Chapter 1: Safety Work

There was a repeated trend of problems cropping up just as the café was about to close for the day.

The veil of night had just settled over the city, and the Café LycoReco staff were preparing to close up when…she arrived. The bell at the door chimed as a woman in a light hoodie entered—it was Itou, the thirty-something regular who worked as a manga artist.

“Welcome!” Takina greeted her, stealing a look at the clock. They were closing in thirty-one minutes.

Like other cafés, LycoReco stopped taking orders about half an hour before closing time. There was more leeway on board game nights, but there was no such event that day. They hadn’t yet flipped the OPEN sign on the door, but just to be sure, Takina looked to Mika for guidance. He gave her a slight nod.

“Please take a seat.”

Itou would always choose either one of the tables in the tatami area or, if they were all taken, a table on the second floor. She treated the café as an extension of her office, bringing in notebooks, pens, and other stationery or a tablet, so she needed quite a lot of space. Surprisingly, she went to sit at the counter. None of her usual supplies seemed to be accompanying her.

Takina discreetly looked at Itou’s face while handing her the menu. The manga artist was visibly exhausted. Maybe she had come in just for a break, tired from work.

“We’re closing soon, so this will be last call for orders. Is that okay?”

Itou nodded slightly, yet she wasn’t opening the menu.

“Erm…,” Takina trailed off.

Chisato looked in from the staff room.

“Oh! Hello, Ms. Itou! Welcome to LycoReco! We never see you this late! What happened? Do tell! Are you stuck with work?”

The arrival of a customer lured Chisato out. She walked over to Itou like a bored puppy finally finding someone to play with. You could easily imagine an invisible tail wagging behind her.

“Work… Yeah… Work…”

Chisato could tell Itou wasn’t herself, so without changing her chipper expression, she slipped behind Itou and began massaging her shoulders.

“Wow, so many knots! You’ve been working hard!”

“Yes, I have been…”

Itou wasn’t perking up at all. This was serious. Chisato looked to Takina for support.

Without knowing what exactly was troubling their customer, there was pretty much only one thing Takina could do. She opened the menu in front of Itou and asked, “What can I get you?”

Her mind raced. Coffee would provide a shot of caffeine and could help with fatigue, but she also wanted to recommend something sweet. What did they have…? Right, of course, they had that new limited-time dessert.

“Today’s special is—”

“I need your help.”

Itou was a regular, but like most of their customers, she only knew Chisato and Takina as waitresses. The only help she could possibly want from them would have to be something regarding the café’s offerings…but Itou spoke in a gravelly tone with urgency in her eyes…

This wasn’t normal. Takina involuntarily tensed up. Chisato, though, didn’t even change the pace at which she was pressing Itou’s shoulders. She was still smiling just like before.

“You need our help? Sure! What can we do for you?”

“Chisato…you know how to use a gun?”

At that, even Chisato froze. Her face turned serious.

“Um… Why do you ask…?”

“She wants you to model for her manga. What else?” said Kurumi, who’d just come into the room. She shot Chisato a look, saying, “Don’t be dumb.” She was carrying her laptop, so her plan was most likely to sit in the tatami area and work on some project of hers.

But neither Chisato nor Itou turned to look at Kurumi. Itou continued, her expression humorless, “I need a teenage liquidator skilled in assassination.”

“Assassination?! Wait, what are you talking about? When did I ever—?”

“Please, Chisato! There’s no one else I can turn to. I need you to shoot a girl dead from a certain megacorp.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Itou, but I couldn’t possibly—”

“Kindhearted as always, Chisato… That’s precisely why I’ve come to you.”

“Oh…”

“It is for a manga, right?!” shouted Kurumi.

“…That’s the vibe of the story I’m working on,” Itou finished sweetly.

“Oh, phew!” Chisato said, laughing. She glanced over at Kurumi, who muttered grumpily, and lay down on her tummy on the tatami mats and opened her laptop.

“So you want me to model for your manga? Sure, sure!”

“Thanks… And yes, it’s for a manga. I’d like to model a character after you. Or rather, I’ve already created this one character inspired by you, and I’m now belatedly asking for permission…”

That’s not very fair, thought Takina. Artists should seek permission prior to using someone for their work. But perhaps she didn’t know enough about the reality of the manga industry. What was common sense to one person wasn’t necessarily universal. Takina learned that firsthand when she left the DA to join Café LycoReco. The men’s underwear incident the other day was a perfect example. Takina was confident in her training to blend in with society, but once she actually started living among ordinary people, she began to realize there was so much she still didn’t know.

Walking around town not in uniform, choosing which stores to go into and what to buy, eating pancakes loaded with cream with a dizzying amount of sugar and fat while enjoying a pleasant spring breeze… Those were pleasures she could never have imagined back when she was at the DA.

Perhaps Chisato became the best First Lycoris in history because she knew about all sorts of things like that—because she had experienced them—and incorporated them into her daily life. And if so, then maybe what Commander Kusunoki wanted Takina to learn at Café LycoReco was in fact…

“And I would also need Takina.”

Hearing her name, Takina straightened her back.

“Yes? How can I help?”

“You’ll be the young lady with ties to a powerful business conglomerate. A high school student who secretly takes care of the corporation’s dirty business. Everybody in the underworld knows your nickname…Midnight Princess.”

“A depressingly uncool nickname,” Kurumi commented, earning a puzzled look from Takina, who didn’t think it was nearly that bad.

Chisato brought her index finger to her narrow chin, looking at Takina intently.

“Takina the Midnight Princess…,” she mused. “With a slick, detached aura and stylish looks, she’s the epitome of a cold beauty… A sophisticated lady well-versed in the secret workings of the criminal underworld…”

Takina shot her a flat look.

“The thing is,” said Itou, “there’s one problem with this job, which I’d like you to take into consideration when helping me today.”

“And that problem is…?”

“The deadline. It’s tonight.”

Everyone except Itou looked at the clock. Takina didn’t know the specifics of how manga artists worked, but she could tell from Chisato’s face that this was a hopeless situation.

“Sorry, I’m a little confused here. Your deadline’s tonight, and you’re only asking us to model for you now…? Oh, I get it! You’re working on a single piece of artwork, right?”

“No, it’s a thirty-six-page manga.”

A heavy silence fell over the café. Everyone was frozen except for Takina, who kept looking from one person to another, puzzled as to how much time it would normally take to illustrate a thirty-six-page manga.

Kurumi frowned and sat up with her legs crossed.

“No matter how you slice it, that’s physically impossible.”

“It’s doable. I’ve already finished most of the inking, and I have backgrounds ready, too. What’s left is the showdown between the two heroines… I just can’t come up with the right composition and facial expressions to really make them pop. That’s why I came to you…!”

“You want to model your heroines on us, with our natural charisma and beauty!”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Consider it done!”

“Thanks!”

Takina still didn’t quite understand what was expected of them, but since Chisato accepted this request, she’d have to take part, too. She guessed the task might take until morning, since after they changed out of their café uniforms into Lycoris outfits, Chisato went to get their sleepover essentials. Meanwhile, Takina returned to their customer, who folded her hands as if in prayer.

“Thank you… I really appreciate you doing this for me…”

Mika set down a cup of coffee and a plate with a dessert in front of Itou.

“Why don’t you try this while you wait for Chisato to get ready?” he offered.

The dessert was exactly what Takina had thought of earlier.

“What is this…?”

“A grapefruit daifuku,” Takina explained, laying down a moist towel for wiping hands next to the plate. “With chunky red bean paste inside. It helps reduce fatigue.”

Japanese-style red bean paste sweets were low in fat, making them easier to digest. The skin of adzuki beans was rich in vitamin B1, which facilitated the conversion of sugars into energy and aided the recovery of muscles, which also helped with problems such as a stiff neck. Smooth red bean paste did not have the same effect, as the skins were discarded in the production process. It had to be chunky paste.

The citric acid in the main ingredient of this particular daifuku—grapefruit—also had a fatigue-reducing effect.

It was the best dessert to serve to the tired Itou.

“A grapefruit…daifuku? This?”

The customer’s confusion was justified. Normally, daifuku were round, but this one was shaped like a crescent.

To make daifuku with grapefruit inside, you could either cut out a small piece and make a bite-sized daifuku with it or make a bigger one stuffed with many grapefruit chunks. The problem with the former was that it would make for an unsatisfying red bean paste to grapefruit ratio, and with the latter, the fruit chunks would easily fall out while eating, the juice spilling all over. The solution was to make a daifuku in a crescent shape, with a whole piece of grapefruit, minus the peel and the internal translucent membrane, wrapped in a layer of mochi with a dollop of the red bean paste. This was a proud Café LycoReco original.

“This one’s for you, Takina. And give this one to Kurumi,” said Mika, handing Takina a tray with a coffee and two grapefruit daifukus. They had an even shorter shelf-life than the strawberry variant, so he was probably just using up unsold stock that would have had to be discarded otherwise.

Takina carried the tray to the tatami area, noticing out of the corner of her eye how Itou’s face lit up when she took a bite out of the daifuku. That was a satisfying to see.

“Wow… I can’t believe how delicious this is…!”

Itou’s reaction was especially gratifying to Takina because it was she who prepared the pieces of grapefruit that morning.

She sat down next to Kurumi at a low table and sipped her coffee, enjoying a moment’s break. If they were going to be up all night, she’d really need that coffee. Then she turned her attention to the daifuku. She’d eaten one that didn’t turn out well that morning, but it would be her first time eating a fully presentable grapefruit daifuku. It wasn’t too big—she could easily hold it between three fingers and finish it in two or three bites. The outside was soft like a baby’s cheek and had a dusting of starch on it. Takina picked it up carefully so as not to squish it, but it turned out to be quite firm thanks to the grapefruit segment inside.

The crescent shape made it easier to eat than round daifuku. Instead of eating it in big bites, you could gracefully nibble it, starting from one of the narrow ends.

It was still one of Takina’s early days at Café LycoReco, but she already knew that the owner, Mika, was a very delicate man. Sure, he was of a tall stature, with an athletic build, and he had an air about him hinting that he was a veteran of countless battles, but he was delicate and meticulous when it came to work, especially when it came to making desserts. Not only were the sweet treats he crafted truly delicious and remarkably compatible with coffee, but they were also thoughtfully designed to make the entire experience of eating them pleasant and relaxing.

The grapefruit daifuku was a prime example of this. There was no need to open wide to eat it, so even customers with carefully applied makeup could enjoy it without worrying.

“Let’s see,” Takina said to herself.

She brought it to her mouth, holding it in her right hand while keeping her left underneath to catch any starch that might fall. She felt the starch lightly cling to her tongue and lips. The mochi layer was so soft she felt guilty about biting through it, and then she reached the moist chunky red bean paste and the juicy piece of grapefruit inside. The way her teeth cut through all those layers was very satisfying.

Takina covered her mouth daintily with her hand to hide the bits of starch while she chewed. Crushed between her teeth, the grapefruit vesicles popped open, freeing the juice. The invigorating firmness of the fruit, with its crisp scent and pleasant tartness, danced with the delicate red bean paste, resulting in a bold and exciting texture.

Then came the refreshing sweetness unique to citrus fruits, and the rich sweetness of the red bean paste…two types of sweetness that didn’t detract from one another, nor did they clash. The delightful contrast simply elevated both.

Unlike many Japanese desserts, this one didn’t make you feel thirsty as soon as you swallowed a piece. The aftertaste could be said to resemble jelly.

Japanese desserts were rarely refreshing or juicy, while fruit was rarely filling to eat, but this dessert combined the best of both worlds in every single bite, satisfying both the body and the soul.

But the surprises didn’t end there. Mika had put even more consideration into devising this treat.

Usually, white bean paste was used for daifuku with citrus. White bean paste was supposed to look more elegant when paired with fruit, and it was thought to subtly enhance the sweetness of the fruit filling…but Mika had chosen chunky red bean paste for this crescent-shaped grapefruit daifuku. It was immediately clear why after a sip of coffee.

White bean paste and citrus fruit paired well with green tea, but Café LycoReco’s focus was coffee. Hence the red bean paste. The refreshing sweetness of grapefruit and delicate white bean paste would pale in comparison with the richness of coffee, but chunky red bean paste had a depth of flavor that let it stand on equal footing.

Mika didn’t say anything, but Takina noticed that the coffee he had served with the dessert was a little stronger than usual, less astringent but richer and bitterer, which paired extremely well with the daifuku.

“Mmm. This is good,” said Kurumi.

She shoved half of the daifuku into her mouth and chewed happily. Takina could never get tired of watching the way Kurumi’s cheeks jiggled when she ate.

Neither of them had eaten dinner yet, so they were quick to finish the desserts. Takina felt like she could eat another one, but she knew they had no more left in stock, and besides…

“Sorry to keep you waiting! Let’s go!”

The enemy of calm had returned. Resigned to her fate, Takina got up from the table.

“Are you ready, Ms. Itou?”

“Yes.”

Itou stood up. Takina thought that the artist seemed far less despondent than when she’d entered the café.

•

It was a ten-minute walk from the café to Itou’s workplace, which was also her home. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with tatami floors. The building looked old from the outside, but Itou’s apartment wasn’t shabby at all. That said, it was terribly cramped, mainly due to the countless cardboard boxes filled with books, other miscellaneous items piled up by the door, and the bookshelves lining practically every wall.

The innermost room contained a desk and an office chair, with a protective mat underneath. On the desk was a monitor for a desktop PC, a keyboard, and an LCD tablet. Chisato eyed the setup curiously.

“You’re a digital artist, Ms. Itou? But I’ve seen you drawing on paper at our café before.”

“I use both. I’m not ready to go fully digital yet, but doing everything on paper is too much of a drag nowadays. Besides, it’s not so easy to buy screentone sheets anymore. I still ink lines manually, but backgrounds and other finishing touches? Those I do digitally.”

“Interesting!”

Chisato was taking it all in with evident excitement, but to Takina, who didn’t know the first thing about manga, it was as if they were speaking a foreign language. She stood quietly in the corner of the room so as not to get in the way, but as Itou kept humoring Chisato’s endless questions with thorough explanations, she eventually lost patience.

“Can we talk about what you need us to do?” she interrupted.

Itou and Chisato looked at her in surprise, shaken out of their bubble.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t had a proper conversation with anyone in a while, and I got a little too into it! It’s so fun talking to you. You’re really a gifted conversationalist!”

“Aw, thank you! And you’re so friendly and easy to talk to, Ms. Itou. I wouldn’t expect that of a manga artist!”

“You’re too kind! Also, the stereotype of most manga artists being cheerless introverts isn’t actually very accurate.”

“What, really?!”

“I’m in the minority, working alone. Popular manga artists hire assistants, so they have to know how to get along—”

Takina couldn’t help raising her voice.

“Your deadline’s approaching, isn’t it?!”

Itou sat down on the floor with her legs tucked under her, back straight.

“Yes, sorry again.”

Chisato sat down on the floor behind her, looking just as contrite. Takina ignored her.

“So what do you need us to do?”

“I would like to humbly request that you be the models for my characters. I have indeed modeled them after you to begin with. I simply require you to pose for a scene that I am having difficulty with, and allow me to take photos.”

“…What’s with the mega politeness?”

“Hmm, it just seemed right…”

“Can you describe the poses?”

“Okay, so, you’ll be holding guns, like this… Wait a moment. I’ll get the replica guns and my rough sketches to show you!”

Itou hurried out of the room, leaving Takina alone with Chisato. Takina put her hands on her hips while Chisato looked down at the floor.

“Chisato.”

“Yes?”

“We haven’t come here just to hang out. We have a job to do, and that’s it.”

“Okay, sorry.”

“Sorry for the wait!” Itou returned with two guns she had fetched from the closet.

The first one was a small five-shot revolver of an unknown make. The second was a Kalashnikov with a stylish polymer handguard, grip, magazine and buttstock, a red dot sight, and an enlarged charging handle. It was a custom modernized AK.

Itou was carrying the rifle by the handguard in a strange way, but Takina was far more concerned about how she was holding the revolver with her finger on the trigger. She had to fight the urge to say something because she didn’t want to be a nag. But when Itou tried to point the revolver at Chisato when showing her the gun, Takina reflexively got ready to push Itou’s hand away, only for Chisato to make the first move.

“Ah, so I’ll be taking the revolver?”

Chisato put her hand over Itou’s and nimbly snatched the revolver from her before the muzzle pointed her way. The way she did it looked perfectly natural.

As a Lycoris, if you accidentally pointed your gun at someone during training, the instructor would either immediately knock you down or yell at you to drop your gun—at gunpoint, of course. Getting shot in that sort of situation would be completely justified.

It didn’t matter that Japan was a low-crime country, that they knew Itou well, and that she claimed the guns to be harmless replicas—every gun had to be treated with the same degree of caution as a real gun in the hands of an enemy.

There wasn’t a single country in the world that was completely free of guns, and there had been instances in the past where real guns had been mistaken for mere toys. When guns were involved, an innocent mistake could cost lives.

There was a saying: “Think of the gun as if there were a lethal beam coming from the muzzle at all times.” This mental exercise was meant to reinforce the rule to never point a gun at anything you didn’t intend to shoot, and Takina fully agreed with it. An accidental discharge could always happen, no matter how careful you were. It could even happen to a well-maintained gun with brand-new cartridges. Guns were tools for killing, so it was vital to take into account the ever-present possibility of something going wrong, be it a mistake or a freak accident.

“Yes, you’ll be a slightly eccentric assassin using a revolver,” Itou said.

She didn’t seem to have registered that Chisato had disarmed her. Chisato did it with such skill, it was like a magic trick. Not only did she do it without hurting Itou, but the movement was also so seamless that as far as Itou knew, she had voluntarily passed the gun to Chisato.

“And Takina will be using this AK.”

The magazine was already seated, and the selector was set to automatic fire, which again set off alarm bells in Takina’s head… However, she had managed to not say anything earlier, and she wasn’t about to start now. She quietly took the rifle from Itou.

The AK had a good weight to it and felt just like the real thing, but when Takina removed the sleek, modern magazine, she confirmed that it was the sort used in air rifles. She pulled back the charging handle and peeked inside the chamber. At a glance, it was apparent that, despite its realistic appearance, it was constructed in a way that made it impossible to fire bullets.

Chisato was also examining her revolver. She removed the cartridges, making sure that both the gun and the ammunition were fake, but it was the way she did it that deserved a special mention—she was chatting away, looking at Itou, not the gun, and swiftly carrying out the inspection by touch alone.

Chisato was a natural at blending Lycoris tasks into everyday life. She got the job done, and outsiders were none the wiser. She was truly a master of the trade, concealing special ops work within the comforting casualness of ordinary situations.

As for Itou, she didn’t remark on Chisato’s gun inspection—in fact, it had seemingly gone completely unnoticed. Itou was too busy explaining the story setting.

“Chisato, your character in the story is called Chise. She’s a teenage ‘cleaner,’ a contract killer, with a strong sense of justice. One day, she accepts a job that has her sneak into the hideout of arms dealers, taking advantage of lax surveillance in Japan. Her target is the ringleader. She shoots a dude who looks like he might have been the boss, but it turns out it probably wasn’t him, so she starts searching around and comes across a beautiful young lady who looks totally out of place. Assuming the girl is a hostage, Chise puts the search for the gang’s boss on hold to help her escape, and then…this happens!”

Itou fetched her tablet from the desk and showed it to the girls with a completely innocent look on her face.

On the screen was a scene from the manga where Chise, modeled after Chisato, was pinned against a wall with the muzzle of an AK pressed against her stomach. The character modeled after Takina, called Tamaki in the story, was holding the rifle low and close to her body, so that the stock was poking out from between her side and bent arm…but the front end of Chise’s revolver was also pressed against her temple.

“In an instant, the characters’ true nature and conflicting allegiances are revealed! It’s the most important scene in the manga!”

Takina was honestly impressed by how a professional manga artist could clearly convey what the characters were thinking and what they’d just done even in a rough sketch that hadn’t been cleaned up yet. It looked like Chise had let down her guard. She’d turned her back on Tamaki, or was in the middle of doing so, telling her to follow. Then Tamaki snatched a rifle that was propped against the wall and a magazine, which she quickly shoved in—although it might have already been attached—and racked the charging handle to load the first round into the chamber. She knew the sound would alert Chise to what she was up to, so while she was getting the gun ready, she rushed the other girl, jabbing her with the muzzle. Tamaki had made the right choice to use her body weight and charge at Chise instead of simply swinging with her gun-toting arm.

The range at which a gun was most effective differed depending on the model, type of ammunition, and customizations, but generally, close quarters was disadvantageous. An AK was no exception, but Tamaki made the most of it by using the rifle as a blunt weapon. Even if the magazine turned out to be empty, she could deal significant damage to Chise by thrusting the barrel at her with full force. And if she did have rounds loaded, with the barrel pressed into her stomach, Chise would have no way to evade. So either thrusting hard or firing a round would do the job. Tamaki had taken the optimal course of action.

However, Chise had sensed danger and managed to press the muzzle of her revolver against Tamaki’s temple just as her opponent jabbed her with the rifle, leading to a stalemate.

In reality, it would be unlikely for the opponents to just freeze in that position. Even at such close range, Tamaki could rely on the automatic fire of her rifle, and the impact of her thrusting the AK into Chise’s stomach would’ve made it difficult for the latter to take aim at Tamaki’s head. However, there could’ve been factors at play that made the two characters more cautious. For example, if they had to survive at all costs to fulfill some other objective… Or, considering the story setting, maybe it was more likely that the Midnight Princess wouldn’t want to risk her life in an encounter with some small-fry assassin, so she’d stop. In that case, it really was a pivotal moment in the story. Itou wasn’t exaggerating the importance of the scene.

However, it struck Takina as unrealistic that Chise, being a professional assassin, would’ve chosen to use an impractical weapon such as a revolver, which was slow to reload and had low capacity. Perhaps Itou was aware of the reach, but she chose to ignore that because she really wanted to have that scene in her manga. Or was it because even though a person’s temple wasn’t soft enough for the muzzle to really dig into, it might be sufficient to push a slide back and leave a non-revolver out of battery and prevent it from firing…? No, that was probably overthinking it. Besides, a stand-off device, like the compensator on Chisato’s gun, would prevent the risk of the slide being pushed out of battery. Itou wouldn’t have such intimate knowledge about guns anyway, surely…

“So this is where I’m at a loss,” said Itou.

Takina cocked her head, puzzled.

“I think this scene is very clear,” she said.

“Thanks, Takina. But that’s not enough. I want it to be really powerful… That’s why I’d like you to pose for me while I take photos from different angles to use for reference.”

“…I see.”

Thinking that drawing manga was a far more complex matter than it seemed, Takina sprang into action. She quickly strode over to Chisato, pulling the charging handle to the rear and letting it slam home. Then she rammed into Chisato, pressing the gun barrel into her stomach. With a thud, Chisato smashed into the bookshelf behind her. Dust flew into the air.

Takina had been sure that Chisato wouldn’t see that coming, but Chisato being Chisato, of course she did. Just like in the manga, she pressed the muzzle of the revolver against Takina’s temple.

“…Weren’t you going to take pictures?” Takina asked when Itou just stood there, wide-eyed.

Coming out of shock, Itou hurriedly took her phone out, but she came to her senses just as she was about to start photographing the girls. She looked at Chisato with worry.

“A-are you…okay? Takina hit you pretty hard…”

“I’m totally fine! Sorry about the mess. I’ll clean that later.”

Takina was quite sure that Chisato was unhurt. She had attacked almost as if dealing with a real enemy, but the moment the AK’s barrel touched Chisato’s clothing, Chisato moved backward with it, hitting the shelf only with the impact of her own movement. Since they had been in contact with each other as they moved, it looked to Itou as if Takina had smashed Chisato into the bookshelf.

It was true that Chisato suffered no damage, while Takina almost lost her balance, having met no resistance, as if she’d tried to ram a store curtain. She just barely managed not to trip, but if she had been seriously going to smash into her opponent and fire the AK, being so off-balance would’ve made it difficult to control the recoil. In a true combat situation, Chisato would’ve deftly dodged the AK’s muzzle and blown Takina’s brains out. The only reason she didn’t sidestep the attack was because she was trying to pose exactly like in that scene in the manga. For that, she opted to thrust herself backward, into the bookshelf.

“…Well, that was impressive, Chisato.”

“Right?!”

“This is it! That invincible look on your face, Chisato! This is one-hundred percent Chise! And Takina’s slight annoyance as she looks up, that’s totally Tamaki! These are the expressions I wanted for my characters! You two are the best!”

Itou circled them, snapping photos with her phone.

“By the way, Chisato, I can fix this in my draft, but if you could hold the revolver properly, that’d be great,” said Itou.

Takina glanced at Chisato’s right hand and inwardly groaned. Chisato had already pulled the trigger, but she was holding the hammer down with her thumb. As long as she kept her finger on the hammer, it wouldn’t fire…but if she moved her thumb just a little bit, or if it slipped due to Chisato getting hit or jostled, it would fire immediately. At the same time, given the revolver’s relatively small size, she could keep her thumb in place while still having her index finger firmly on the trigger. Even a sudden impact wouldn’t cause it to slip off accidentally.

Ultimately, if Takina had a real AK and fired it at Chisato, Chisato’s thumb would come off the barrel, and the revolver would fire. Takina had to freeze because if she fired, she’d get shot right away. She assumed that Chisato must have been expecting her to notice that.

By holding down the hammer, Chisato changed the essence of the scene. It wasn’t an ambushed assassin’s desperate last-ditch effort. She had the upper hand: refraining from shooting first but making it clear that her opponent would be killing them both if she chose to fire.

“Tee-hee-hee! There’s a reason I’m holding it like that!”

Chisato explained to Itou why she had her finger on the hammer. The manga artist was quite impressed. “That’s even better than what I had in mind!”

It was just make-believe with toy guns as they reenacted a scene from Itou’s manga, but even in this setting, the gap between Chisato’s and Takina’s skills was apparent, and Takina couldn’t help feeling a bit dejected.

Itou decided to incorporate Chisato’s clever trick into her manga, and she added a new panel with a close-up of Chise’s hand. She could barely contain her excitement at how it changed the power balance and the characters’ emotions in that scene.

“Can you please hold this pose? Ideally, I’d like to make a rough sketch of you in addition to taking photos.”

The girls could hear Itou’s pen gliding on a page of her notebook. And so the girls stood motionless for a while, Takina looking up at Chisato, feeling frustrated, and Chisato looking down at Takina with a smug smile.

“Oh, can I ask what happens after this in the story?”

Itou kept sketching as she answered Chisato’s question. She told them that after the deadlock, Chise and Tamaki slowly move away from each other, keeping their guns aimed at one another. Then they begin to fight, both determined to kill the other…only to be interrupted by the arrival of the police. Neither can afford to have her identity revealed. After exchanging names and swearing to finish their duel the next time they meet, they split and escape from the burning building. Later, Chise moves to a new high school and discovers that the student council president is none other than Tamaki. They’re both shocked to see the other. They strike a gentlemen’s agreement—or rather, a ladies’ agreement—promising not to attempt to kill each other at school. That’s the start of a new chapter in their school life, with danger lurking behind every corner.

“I thought it was a one-shot you were working on, but this sounds like it might have a continuation?”

“Sharp as always, Chisato! Yes, it is a one-shot, but if the reception is good, I’ll get to make it a series!”

“Amazing!”

Itou was planning to have Chise apply to join the student council to keep an eye on Tamaki, a move that Tamaki would support as well. They’d begin to spend a lot of time around each other, and everyone around would assume they were good friends, but at night, Chise and Tamaki would fight fiercely, their objectives irreconcilable. By the time they’d get to know each other pretty well, a common enemy would appear, and they’d agree to join forces as an exception.

“Oh, I love this! Deadly rivals buddying up! That really gets me going!”

“Yes, exactly!”

“I know how that goes! They form such a strong bond that when one of them is in mortal danger, the other saves her, saying, ‘No one gets to kill you except me!’”

“That’s it! And the rescued girl will put on a brave face, saying she wasn’t asking for help. It’s a popular trope for a reason!”

“Absolutely!”

Chisato and Itou were getting even more worked up. Before long, Itou was done with her sketch, and Takina and Chisato were relieved of their modeling duties.

“We shouldn’t stay too long, Chisato. Let’s go home.”

“Whaaat? But I brought our sleepover stuff! Oh, we can’t leave without helping clean up!”

Takina agreed with that, and they might as well make something to eat, too. While Itou sat down at her desk to work, Takina began putting things away, starting with the rifle. It bothered her to leave the magazine in, so she detached it.

“But why this particular AK?” she wondered out loud.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

Chisato, who was also removing dummy ammunition from the revolver, looked up at Takina.

“Well, my character is secretly an arms dealer, correct?”

“That’s right,” Itou confirmed.

“And you explained earlier that this AK was from a shipment of guns the gang was selling.”

“Yes. It was left out as a sample of what was inside the container.”

“Then it’s very strange for it to be a modernized version.”

Itou stopped sketching and swiveled around in her chair to face Takina.

“Why’s that?”

A modern AK wouldn’t stick out if the criminals were small-time smugglers, procuring only a handful of weapons every so often. Presumably, the weapons were stolen. The problem was that, in Itou’s story, Takina’s character was using an AK from a bulk shipment. Such a large number of guns would normally be obtained either through illegally diverting military supplies from some war-torn region. It could also have been purchased from an unscrupulous arms manufacturer dealing on the side, or made at a secret weapons factory. Either way, modernized AKs were expensive, so it was uncommon to see them moved in large numbers. Above all, arms dealers, whose business was completely unregulated by nature, didn’t care about supplying weapons of the highest quality. And the priority for the buyers was to get their hands on whatever guns would get the job done. There was little reason to pay more for weapons that were modified to look cooler, handle better, or be easier to customize and mount attachments to.

Customizing a weapon was something a user might do to suit their taste or to fulfill specific needs. Needless to say, it was rarely done for a large stock of guns for sale. While not totally out of the question, a container full of custom modded AKs would be like seeing a classroom in a rural area filled with kids sitting in gaming chairs—technically possible, but definitely bizarre, and some sort of justification would be needed.

“You can, of course, have the character use anything you want in your story, but it’s strange that it’s not a standard AK.”

“No… That’s no good, is it…?”

“Hold on!” interrupted Chisato. “I think it’s totally okay to keep it as it is! You wanted to draw this weapon. You like the look of it. That’s all the justification you need! And besides, it’s not like you’re writing historical records or anything, so a little mistake like that doesn’t matter one bit… Er…”

Chisato noticed how Itou winced at the word mistake. She closed her eyes and mouthed “oops.”

“A mistake… Right, it is a mistake. And commenters are ruthless about mistakes like this… They’ll roast me! Argh! I went through so much trouble using my connections to borrow these model guns! Just my luck!” Itou groaned, cradling her head in her hands.

“D-don’t worry. It’s not a big deal! Right, Takina?! People won’t notice!”

“I noticed.”

“Takinaaa!”

“Isn’t it better to point it out now, before Ms. Itou finishes drawing that scene?”

“That’s…that’s true! It’s a good thing you brought this up when I only have a rough sketch!”

“So it’s fine, then? Phew! It can just be fixed! Isn’t that great, Takina? I was worried for a moment…”

“But now I have to get a standard AK somehow.”

Chisato looked at Itou quizzically, the smile freezing on her face.

“I can’t draw guns without a model.”

“But you can find loads of photos online…?”

“Yes, but they won’t be at the angles I need, and if I do find a usable photo to copy, I’ll be accused of simply tracing it… Besides, now I’ve found the best angle while working with you. I don’t want to change that.”

“How about…CGI?”

“I don’t have a program that can do that.”

“What options do you have, then?”

“I just need a replica. I’ll have to find somewhere to borrow one from…or, worst-case scenario, buy it. I need it for other scenes, too.”

Takina glanced up at the clock. Chisato and Itou had been chatting away for so long, it had gotten pretty late. The evening had quickly given way to night.

“Even if you ordered it, would it get here in time?” asked Takina.

“It’s too late, isn’t it…?” Itou conceded.

“How about Don Quijote?! They’re open late! There’s the one near the north exit of Kinshicho Station, and there’s a Kameido store right next to it. You can make it if you go now…!”

But Itou shot down Chisato’s idea right away, saying that those stores didn’t sell toy guns like that. She must’ve already checked. They were local stores, so she probably went often, browsing for items that might serve as a useful reference.

“If there’s nothing we can do, then why don’t we just call it a day and go to sleep?! Let’s do it! Let’s have a stress-busting sleepover!”

“But then I’ll miss my deadline…”

“Ah… Right…”

Chisato had been determined to lift the mood, but Itou took the wind out of her sails. Even Chisato’s energy couldn’t rival the gloom of a person truly backed into a corner.

“Is an extension out of the question?” asked Takina.

Itou smiled at her patiently.

“You can sometimes get a slight extension. There’s usually a bit of a buffer. But not in this case… The artist whose manga was going to be the feature piece in a certain magazine has a slipped disk, so it’s an emergency.”

“A slipped disk is an emergency?”

“No, the magazine not getting the manga in time is, though. They asked me if I could fill in, but if I don’t make my submission tonight, they’ll probably have to publish something they can quickly get off some amateur artist.”

“But…your manga’s pretty good, so I’m sure you can get it published somewhere else even if you miss this chance!”

“Yes, possibly… But it’s not easy to get on a magazine’s lineup. And my finances aren’t exactly great. I don’t have any ongoing series…”

Itou’s effort wouldn’t go to waste, as she could try to get the manga published again in a few months’ time, and if it got good reviews, she could turn it into a series, which was what she really wanted. But she’d have to go from publisher to publisher, pitching her manga until someone decided it was worth a shot, and while she was promoting that project, she’d be unable to devote much time to anything else. She might do some illustrations here and there or some one-shots, but those were unlikely to get published outside of magazines. Consequently, they wouldn’t earn her much money—and, of course, she had to consider the possibility that her submissions would be turned down.

In other words, if Itou was serious about turning her current project into a series, she’d have a few tough months ahead of her… unless she submitted this manga on time and it was published in the next month’s issue of the magazine. Then, if it was well-received, she’d get a contract for a series, and if it didn’t stir any interest, she’d know to drop that project and move on.

Chisato and Takina were stumped by the gravity of the situation. They exchanged looks.

“I’ll have to do the best I can and hope that’ll be enough…” Itou said, dispiritedly turning back to her tablet.

Takina thought that Itou needed to clarify her priorities. If her primary goal was to make the deadline, she should just send the manuscript off as it was. If her priority was to avoid criticism about the unorthodox AK, she should hold off until she could get a suitable model to use as a reference. Itou seemed to be leaning more toward the first option, but she was stalling by hesitating. At least, that was how Takina saw it.

When you just can’t make up your mind, she thought, you should list out the pros and cons and make sense of things outside of your head. Just as Takina was about to suggest that, Chisato’s phone went off.

“Sorry, Ms. Itou. Excuse us for a moment!”

Chisato motioned for Takina to follow her to the entrance hallway. The girls stood close to each other so that Takina could listen in on the call. Chisato put Mika on speakerphone with the volume lowered.

“An urgent job came in. Can you take it, Chisato?”

“Urgent or not, we’re already working on a job here! By the way, Teach, do we have any AKs in the basement?”

“Definitely not.”

“Thought so…”

“Well, you’re putting me in a bind, Chisato. I can’t easily turn down this new request… I would really like you to take it.”

Takina and Chisato exchanged glances. Mika was being unusually vague, which made them think that the request wasn’t from the DA but from one of his acquaintances who knew what the café was a front for.

“…What sort of task is it?”

“Will you take it?”

“Let me hear what it’s about first.”

“A certain young man who’s a member of a criminal organization has taken a gun out of a gang’s secret safe and is somewhere in the city.”

“Oh, that’s pretty bad. But then again, we can’t abandon Ms. Itou…”

“Incidentally, the gun in question is an AK-47.”

“Chisato!” Takina raised her voice without thinking. Chisato nodded.

“Sounds like we can nail two birds with one stone! Teach, you can tell the client we’re taking the job! Takina, let’s go!”

“Sure!”

Chisato told Itou to draw the AK last, then she and Takina left the artist’s apartment. There was no time, so they listened to the briefing while on the move through the night-shrouded city.

“I sure am glad I didn’t outright say no!” Chisato mused.

•

The man who made away with the gang’s stashed rifle was in a sorry state when Chisato and Takina were done with him. They handed him over and returned to Itou’s home with the seized AK. It wasn’t an Izhmash, but an unlicensed copy made somewhere else. It didn’t have a serial number, and it looked quite old. The wooden handguard showed signs of wear, and the metal parts were sticky from grease, which had been generously applied to prevent corrosion… All in all, it was perfect for Itou’s manga.

Now the problem was how to bring the assault rifle into the nice, safe apartment building without raising anyone’s suspicions. The girls promptly removed the magazine and squeezed it into an empty compartment of Chisato’s satchel bag. She found a discarded newspaper outside the apartment building and wrapped it around the rifle’s body, securing it with the paracord Chisato always carried. With a trash bag on top of that, the gun was concealed.

“Doesn’t it look even more suspicious like this…?”

“High school students walking around with a rifle doesn’t happen in real life, right? It’ll be fine.”

“It’s even more suspicious for underage girls to be out late at night.”

“I’d call it early morning, not late night. And being out early in the morning is totally wholesome!”

“Ah, like sports club members doing morning training? What sort of drill involves carrying outsize trash around?”

“You’d be surprised! Anyway, let’s hurry! Ms. Itou’s waiting!”

Itou’s apartment was on the fourth floor. Given what they were smuggling in, it’d be awkward to share the elevator with anyone, so they took the stairs to be on the safe side.

Itou had left the door unlocked. Chisato flung it open.

“Sorry for the wait! Your AK’s here! Enjoy!”

“Chisato, what time do you think it is? You’ll wake up the neighbors!”

From the hallway, they saw Itou, who’d fallen asleep at her desk, startle awake. She turned toward them. There was an imprint from the corner of her tablet on her cheek and dark circles had formed under her eyes. The imprint was obviously new, but so were the circles… Or had they just been concealed with makeup earlier, which came off when she splashed her face with water to keep the sleepiness at bay?

Itou trotted over to Chisato like a puppy, happy to see its owner come back. And when Takina handed over the parcel, Itou tore through the trash bag and newspaper like an impatient doggie given a wrapped treat.

“Whoa! It’s an old model, like you see in the movies! But…why is it so greasy…? It smells like some factory machine…”

“Oh, um… We borrowed it from a gun-enthusiast friend who likes the models to look super realistic!”

“Ah, makes sense. But…there’s no magazine?”

Takina got the magazine out of Chisato’s satchel. Hidden behind Chisato, she swiftly removed the remaining bullets. Luckily, there were only three.

“Here it is.”

“Thanks! Wow, old-style magazines have a rugged look to them. Why’s it so light…?”

“It’s empty,” Takina explained. “It weighs about one hundred grams. Fully loaded, with thirty rounds, it would weigh about six hundred grams. Although it can vary depending on the type of ammo… What is it, Chisato?”

Chisato had been poking Takina under the ribs. She lifted the finger she’d been poking her with to her lips. It seemed she wanted Takina to shut up.

Itou was too preoccupied with the rifle to notice Chisato’s hushing. She asked Takina to repeat the earlier pose with the gun, took new photos, and returned to her desk.

Shooting a look at the artist, who was busy drawing, Chisato put her hands on her hips and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Problem solved. To be precise, problems solved.”

“Yes. Should I make us something to eat?”

“Oh, yeah! Ms. Itou seems to be on her last legs…”

“Of course,” Takina said with a smile. “I’ll make something easy on the stomach…”

“Protein feast time!”

“Huh?”

The girls looked at each other blankly.

“Hold up, Takina. Ms. Itou’s battery’s out. She needs something nutritious to recharge her!”

“Sure, but what were you thinking of feeding her in her weakened state?”

“An extra-large serving of meat! With…garlic! And loads of ginger! We need vitamins, too, so fruit with a heap of whipped cream for dessert!”

“That’s pure abuse.”

“What?!”

“An exhausted person should be served something easy to digest and gentle on the stomach.”

“Hmph. Like what?”

Takina touched her fingers to her chin, thinking.

“For example… Hmm… Rice porridge?”

“A hospital meal? Nope, nuh-uh! That’s a massive, gargantuan no! Not enough calories and not satisfying at all!”

“And how is your thoughtless suggestion better than mine?”

“Just look at Ms. Itou! At her fierce determination! What she needs isn’t a dish that’s like a comforting hug. She needs a dish that’s like a big, friendly push toward her goal!”

“What you suggested is more like a punch in the gut, not a friendly push.”

“And your idea is just plain useless!”

Chisato was getting on Takina’s nerves, and Takina was about to snap back at her when she noticed with surprise that Itou had come over to them.

“Girls, I’m very grateful that you’re trying to help, but…can you please keep it down? It’s late.”

““Sorry,”” they said in unison.

After Itou sat back down in her chair, Takina and Chisato conspiratorially brought their faces closer to each other.

“I say each of us makes a meal, and Ms. Itou will be the judge!”

“That’s fine by me.”

“Okay! And when Ms. Itou rejects whatever you cook for her, I’ll eat it!”

“Huh… Er… Ah, of course. Better than it going to waste.”

At first, Takina wasn’t sure what Chisato was getting at, but with some effort, she managed to understand her rationale. And then she thought more about the implications. Takina was confident she was going to win, which would presumably mean she’d have to consume the violent assault on the digestive system that Chisato made. They were finished with work for the night, but still, Takina wasn’t looking forward to having such a heavy meal.

“All righty! Now, what will I cook…? Ms. Itou, can I see what’s in your fridge?”

“Sure. Use whatever you want.”

“Great… Huh? Wait a minute…”

When Chisato opened the fridge, she was shocked to see there wasn’t much food inside besides a wide range of condiments, yogurt, natto, kimchi, and cheese. Clearly, Itou liked her fermented foods. Oh, and there were eggs, too—at least they could be used as an ingredient.

Chisato opened a cupboard next to the fridge. Inside, she found a big stash of ready-made rice pouches, cup noodles, more instant noodles in square packets, and dry pasta.

Was the occupation of manga artist so demanding that it was impossible to find time to cook proper meals, or was Itou simply not the type to spend a lot of time in the kitchen? Either way, Takina and Chisato were speechless for a moment.

“I think the only dish I could make with these ingredients is an egg rice porridge.”

“Yeah… Wait, you’re going to use the ready-made rice?”

Takina thought for a beat. Somehow, she, too, felt a bit repulsed at the idea of turning ready-made rice into rice porridge, but why? She couldn’t articulate it.

“I’ll have to go with natto and rice or fried egg and rice.”

“…It won’t be real cooking, then. Especially if we use ready-made rice.”

“Yeah. That’s just putting stuff together. Ms. Itou could do that herself.”

“Should I go out and buy some ingredients? There’s a twenty-four-hour supermarket a short walk from here, I think.”

“Hmm… Nah.”

Chisato was normally proactive about challenges like this, but they’d already finished a big Lycoris job that night, and she was getting too tired to work up much enthusiasm for the cooking contest.

“I know what I’ll make,” said Takina.

“Oh yeah? And what’s that?”

“A very simple dish.”

“Okay. You get on with it! I’ll make… You know what, I’ll do some cleaning instead.”

“Just don’t make too much noise.”

“I know, I know!”

They turned away from each other. Takina rolled up her sleeves, tied her hair with the rubber band she always carried, and washed her hands.

First, she took three eggs out of the fridge. Then she got out an earthenware pot that she had spotted earlier at the back of the cupboard. It was the size you’d normally use to cook udon for one person. Takina set it on the stove, poured some water into it, and lit the fire under it.

While she was waiting for the water to come to a boil, she cracked the eggs into a bowl and whisked them. The whisk had a silicone coating on the metal wires, so Takina could whisk at full speed without worrying about noise.

The water started boiling before she was done with the eggs, so she turned the heat down and added some powdered dashi stock. She’d have preferred to make fresh broth from katsuo flakes, but she had to make do with what was available. She added a splash of soy sauce, and since she found a pepper mill, she ground a little bit of pepper in, too. That would have to do for the broth. She tasted it, and it wasn’t half bad.

Takina resumed whisking the eggs. She whisked and whisked, aerating the mixture until it turned into a light and fluffy cream. Then she added a pinch of sugar to add depth to the flavor and whisked it some more. It was time to turn up the burner under the pot to medium heat. The earthenware pots took longer to heat up, so Takina waited patiently, continuously whisking the eggs. The broth started bubbling vigorously.

“The food’s almost ready. Should I serve it now?” she called out to Itou and Chisato. They both said yes, so she carefully trickled the egg mixture into the pot, turned off the heat, and put the lid on.

Without wasting a moment, Takina got a tray out and set down a ladle, three bowls, and wooden spoons, which she’d found in a drawer. She looked for a pot stand to no avail, so she grabbed a small wooden chopping board and put that on the tray, too, with the earthenware pot on top.

“It’s ready… What are you doing, Chisato?”

Chisato peered up at Takina curiously. She was lying on Itou’s bed, reading manga.

“You said you were going to do some cleaning,” Takina reminded her.

“Oh, yes, but you know how it is with cleaning. You can’t help picking up something to read.”

“In other words, you’ve been slacking off this whole time.”

“N-no! I was just about to pick up these books that fell on the floor and put them back on the shelves, but then I started reading this one…”

Chisato tried to laugh it off, which only made Takina want to rebuke her more, but the food she made had to be served right away. Otherwise, it would be no good. It was a simple, delicate dish.

“Let’s leave it at that…” Takina said, setting down the tray on a low table. She waited until Chisato and Itou sat down before lifting the lid. Puffs of steam rose from the pot to the accompaniment of an appreciative oooh and ahhh.

The pot was filled to the brim with cloud-like egg custard. Each wisp of steam carried the mellow smell of egg and the savory scent of katsuo broth. It was an uncomplicated dish, presented in a way that aroused curiosity, with an appetizing smell and a deeply satisfying taste. It turned out even better than Takina expected. She began to fill the bowls, feeling quite proud of herself.

“It’s so fluffy!”

“Yeah, super fluffy! Takina, what’s this dish called?”

“Fluffy eggs.”

“Yeah, it sure is, but what’s the name of this dish…?”

“Fluffy eggs.”

“It’s fluffy, and it’s got eggs in it, no arguing there, but doesn’t it have a name…?”

“How many times do you want me to repeat myself?”

“Chisato, I think that’s the name of this dish?” Itou cut in. “It’s simply called ‘fluffy eggs.’”

“Oooh! Is that right, Takina?!”

“Yes… Why was it so difficult for you to understand?”

It was as if they were on different wavelengths. Takina had this problem often when talking to Chisato.

“It’s a dish invented in the Edo period. I learned the recipe in Kyoto,” she explained.

A teacher from Shizuoka had randomly shared this recipe in a Japanese culture class one day. Takina had actually never made it before, but her custard looked pretty much the same as what she remembered seeing in the reference pictures, so it seemed like a success.

Itou, Chisato, and Takina each picked up a wooden spoon and a bowl. Takina prodded the jiggly yellow cloud of custard, and her spoon easily sank into it. She turned the spoon around and scooped out a piece. She brought it to her mouth. The smell made it hard to believe that she’d used processed stock granules that were more MSG than fish for the broth. It was still hot, so she blew on it before taking a bite. The sensation on her tongue felt almost like she was eating warm foam. She tasted the rich broth, but as soon as she squeezed the soft custard with her teeth, the mellow umami and sweetness of the egg filled her mouth. The custard was nutritious, warm, and comforting. The pinch of ground pepper she’d added to the broth reined in the sweetness, preventing it from running rampant. And while it was comfort food, this dish wasn’t lacking in sophistication. Takina was very pleased.

“Wow! How did you get this texture? I’ve never had anything like this before! Takina, this is really good!”

“The taste is so delicate! I can’t put my spoon down!”

Takina fought back a self-satisfied smile. She thought only a person lacking refinement would feel smug about having made a simple dish like that.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said, feigning indifference.

“The flavor’s familiar. It’s like chawanmushi but…somehow, it feels like a completely different dish!”

Chisato’s observation was on point. Both chawanmushi and fluffy eggs were made with eggs and broth, so from the digestive tract’s point of view, they were the same thing. However, chawanmushi had a very different, silky texture, and the flavors were experienced differently, too. The broth and egg mixture wasn’t completely combined in fluffy eggs, which made their individual flavors easily distinguishable. The dish was so unique, natural curiosity invited people to eat more.

“This might be better for when you’re totally drained. A plain chawanmushi would just look sad, while the fluffy eggs don’t need anything else,” said Itou.

“But you do have to whisk the eggs for a long time,” Takina told her.

Itou smiled apologetically.

“There is a trick to make it easier, though,” Takina continued. “I added a little bit of sugar to the eggs. It helps trap the air in them, speeding up the process a bit.”

That was the purpose of that secret ingredient. Sugar ever so slightly increased the viscosity of the egg mixture, helping to keep the air bubbles in. Strangely enough, adding sugar right at the start made it harder to achieve a foamy texture. The sugar had to be added after the eggs were whisked for a while.

It didn’t take the girls and Itou very long to polish off the fluffy eggs. It wasn’t a very filling meal, so they all felt like they could’ve eaten more…but at the same time, they were aware of the undesirable effects of eating so late, and nobody complained.

Binge-eating at night carried many dangers. Young women were especially wary of them.

“That was delicious! Thank you, Takina!”

“You’re welcome.”

“And thank you, too, Chisato!”

“No probs!”

“…And what did you do to help, Chisato?”

“Let’s not focus on the details! I…I helped by adding good vibes while you were cooking!”

“You were just reading and lazing around in bed.”

Chisato sulked. Itou laughed.

“You two make a good team.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes! People with opposite personalities work surprisingly well together.”

Takina looked at Chisato, who winked at her, trying to be cute. Takina ignored her.

“And thank you for getting me this model gun.”

Itou fetched the rifle from her work desk.

“Did you find it helpful?”

“Of course! Thanks to you, I’m almost finished!”

“That’s good to hear.”

“The crucial scene is pretty much complete now. I just have to fix the rifle in a few other panels…and it’ll be ready to send off!”

“You work fast, Ms. Itou! Congra—”

Bang! The end of the rifle’s barrel erupted. The recoil made Itou drop the gun to the floor. Everyone stared at it in shock. It had gone off—Takina’s ears were still ringing from the blast as she looked around to see where the bullet went… Itou’s tablet fell off the desk, little shards flying. Smoke started coming out of it.

“What…? What was that…? Did the toy gun just…fire…? My tablet… It’s…shattered? How…? The manga… All the data was on that tablet… I don’t understand…”

Chisato wasted no time. She put her left arm around Itou’s back, pushing her gently with her right arm to make her lie down on the floor. She looked at Takina, who understood the unspoken request. Together, they lifted Itou, Takina holding her legs, and Chisato her shoulders. It didn’t take them long to bundle the artist into her bed.

“Chisato… Tell me my manga draft isn’t lost…”

“Listen, Ms. Itou, you’re dreaming. It’s just a dream. Just a dream… You feel better now, right? Everything’s fine. Perfectly fine. Just close your eyes and let yourself drift off…”

Itou was still looking at Chisato, so the girl put her hand over Itou’s eyes and quickly tapped a few points on the woman’s chest with the fingers of her other hand. Itou’s breathing immediately slowed down—she was asleep.

Chisato wiped sweat off her brow.

“Mission complete,” she said.

“What?! It’s a disaster! How could you have forgotten to remove the round in the chamber?!”

“How is this on me? I thought you removed it!”

Takina retraced the events in her head. While Chisato was getting that newspaper to wrap the rifle in, Takina removed the magazine. When Chisato came back, she put the magazine in Chisato’s bag and handed the gun over to her… That was it—Chisato assumed all the bullets had been removed, but Takina hadn’t pulled back the charging handle to empty the chamber after she detached the magazine. She had been in a hurry, but that, of course, was no excuse.

It wasn’t a Lycoris mission, but since it involved a firearm, Takina should’ve still made sure it was safe before handing it over. The safety had been on at least, but still… Itou was an amateur, so they should’ve taken every precaution.

Takina had to admit she’d made a mistake.

“I’m sorry…” The moment it dawned on her that she was at fault, she apologized.

“Um, hey, it’s also partially my fault since I didn’t check the gun after taking it from you! Um… Well, at least nobody got hurt! That’s important! But what do we do now…?”

They tried tapping on the broken tablet. It wouldn’t turn on. The bullet had gone right through it and buried itself in the wall. Some poking with a pen revealed that it was stuck in a steel girder or something like that inside the wall. Fortunately, it didn’t go through to the next apartment, but the girls had another big problem on their hands.

“What should we do, Chisato?”

“You need to ask?”

Chisato whipped out her phone and called someone.

“Hello, hello, hello! I have a job for Café LycoReco’s chief computer specialist! I’ll be coming to get you, so get ready!”

•

Twenty minutes after the call, Chisato arrived with Kurumi in tow. Kurumi reluctantly picked up the tablet.

“Sorry to bother you this late.”

“Don’t be. This is prime time for me. But I’d like to stress my field is cyberspace. I’m not an electronics technician.”

“Same thing, no?” Chisato waved dismissively.

“That’s like saying driving and repairing a car require the same skill set.” Kurumi shut her up.

“So there’s nothing you can do?” asked Takina.

“I can salvage the data. That’s not a problem. The case is busted on the back and the sides, and the charging port’s done for, but the SSD is fine. Actually, most of the internals are fine. I might be able to fix it… Let’s see…”

Kurumi searched the room. She found an old PC in a closet, got it out, and started taking it apart, probably to cannibalize some pieces of wiring as a temporary replacement. Despite her protests that repairing electronics fell outside her realm of expertise, she’d brought tools all the same. Takina was impressed.

A mere fifteen minutes later, Kurumi managed to power the tablet on. She disabled the security lock in the blink of an eye to verify that the data was intact. Just to be safe, she swiftly copied the data to her laptop.

“All right! Now we just need to wake up Ms. Itou and have put the finishing touches on her manga!”

“Chisato, the sun’s coming up already. There’s not much time left.”

“Gotcha. Ms. Itou…? Wakey, wakey! It’s morning! Your deadline’s, like, right now!”

Chisato lightly slapped Itou on the cheeks, but the artist wasn’t waking up.

“Dang, no response.”

“She’s out cold, eh?”

“Did you hit the back of her head to knock her out, Chisato?”

“No, of course not! You could kill someone if you do that! Ms. Itou! Your deadline! Your deaaadliiine!”

Itou continued to breathe evenly in a deep sleep. Perhaps when she showed up at the café, she’d already been deprived of sleep for many days.

Deciding there was no alternative, Takina grabbed Itou’s feet and pulled her off the bed in one swift move, as if taking off the bed sheet.

“Whoa, Takina! That’s kinda drastic!”

“Drastic times call for drastic measures.”

No matter how deeply someone was sleeping, they’d instinctively wake up when they sensed they were falling, or if there was a pronounced, abrupt change in position.

“Ow… Huh? What time is it…?”

“The sun’s just rising, Ms. Itou. See? It’s morning!”

“…Zzz…”

“It’s no use…”

“You had me come all this way. Don’t tell me it was for nothing.”

“We could try lifting her up overhead and then dropping her back on the floor?”

“Are you trying to kill her?!”

“Got any other ideas?!”

Chisato frowned and folded her arms.

“Argh, fine, last resort! Hold on, guys.”

Chisato got her phone out and made a call.

“Hi, Teach! Yeah, we’re still at Itou’s… Could you please bring us super-extra-strong coffee? Something that’ll wake up the dead! Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You will? That’s amazing. Thanks!”

Chisato ended the call and wiped her brow.

“Mission complete!”

“This predicament hasn’t been resolved yet. Is the boss still at the café at this hour?”

“Yeah, well, we’re on a late-night job, so he’s staying up until we finish, I guess?”

Their boss tended to worry too much about them. Rather, he was overprotective. Takina and Chisato had left, prepared to spend the night at Itou’s house. There was no need for Mika to wait for their return at the café.

But Chisato had called, certain that Mika would still be there.

They’re like father and daughter, thought Takina. The child never doubting their parent’s unconditional love… Or maybe Chisato just happened to see Mika at the café when she went to grab Kurumi earlier, and that’s how she knew he was still there.

When considering the facts at hand, there was a perfectly logical explanation for most things.

A little while later, Mika appeared at the door with his special brew in a flask. Right away, Chisato shook Itou to rouse her, and when the artist still seemed barely conscious, Chisato pinched her nose to force her to open her mouth, and she started pouring the coffee in.

“It looks like you’re torturing her,” said Takina.

Mika shot her a hurt look.

“It’s good coffee, I promise,” he said.

“I don’t really think the flavor is the main issue with this picture.”

“Obviously,” muttered Kurumi.

Despite her concerns, Takina too was hoping the coffee might wake Itou up… And before long, Itou’s eyes shot open. It wasn’t the taste of coffee that woke her up, though, but the temperature of the beverage.

“Hot, hot!” she screamed, writhing in pain, fully awake. Her aching mouth was probably full of drool.

What really struck Takina was the chagrined look on Mika’s face, but his pride had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

It was only after the fact that it occurred to Takina they might as well have used hot water instead of coffee.

In any case, Itou was awake, and she went back to her battered tablet to finish her work. The girls told her that she’d dropped the heavy metal model rifle on her tablet, smashing it, and that she passed out from shock. Anything else she thought she remembered was just a dream…

Chisato found a megaphone in a closet. She grabbed it with both hands and began chanting as she walked back and forth.

“Ms. Itou! You can do this! Keep going! Allez, allez! Go, Ms. Itou, go! Allez, allez! Allez, allez!”

Kurumi appeared with another megaphone.

“Wooooo,” she joined in.

They were making a racket, but Itou wasn’t saying anything, so Mika and Takina let Chisato and Kurumi carry on while they sat down quietly at the low table.

“Ugh…! I can’t fail now, after you’ve done so much for me… I have to finish in time… But argh! There’s just not enough time!”

“What time is your deadline, exactly?” Takina asked, looking at the clock. It was already half past nine. It wasn’t unusual for businesses to be open already.

“It was technically last night… But practically speaking, I have until my editor arrives at her desk, which is usually around ten.”

“Late, like a CEO,” remarked Mika.

“No, Teach, that’s totally normal in the publishing industry,” Chisato corrected him.

“Oh, well, sounds like you need me again,” said Kurumi, opening the laptop she brought with her, along with the tools. “How does this editor commute to work?”

“Huh…? She drives… Why do you ask, Kurumi?”

Without answering, Kurumi asked for the editor’s name and phone number. She was typing something very quickly.

“Don’t mind me, keep working… Hmm… Found it. Your editor will have to take the train today.”

Kurumi didn’t say more than that, but Takina guessed she was going to hack into the editor’s car. That sounded far-fetched, but it was probably child’s play for Kurumi.

She had bought Itou a little more time.

“Should I make coffee for everyone?”

“Heading back to the café, Boss?”

“No need. I took this eventuality into account and came prepared with the tools of the trade and freshly ground coffee.”

“You think of everything, Teach!” Chisato cheered.

“With so much support from everyone, I’ve gotta give this my all!”

“Wooooo,” Kurumi cheered, still typing on her laptop.

“This has turned into a top priority mission for Café LycoReco,” remarked Takina.

Everyone from the crew nodded. Kurumi turned away from her screen and looked at them, cocking her head to the side.

“And how much are we getting paid for this?”

Chisato patted her on the head.

“Don’t be greedy. We’re doing this just to help out!”

“We can ask her to buy us lunch at a cheap restaurant,” whispered Mika.

“But…this has snowballed into a high-effort request. Lunch is hardly enough to justify this. Standard Lycoris work would be much more—”

“Yeah, buuut!” Chisato cut Takina off. “Which is more fun?”

No one chose what job to do based on which one was more fun. This much was common sense to Takina. But she did consider Chisato’s question…

“This task required more effort.”

“I’m asking which was more fun!”

“I don’t know.”

“Lies! Just say what you think!”

About an hour later, Itou finished her draft of the manga and sent it off to her editor (who was lamenting her broken car) hot off the presses, so to speak.

The Café LycoReco crew, along with Itou, celebrated this happy conclusion, but everyone was pretty tired. They agreed to let Itou take them out for lunch the next day, and said their good-byes.

Meanwhile, at Café LycoReco, Mizuki was about to start a nightmarish shift, running the café all by herself… But that would be a story for another day.

Chapter 2: Dog

The other members of the gang called Kousuke Mizukawa “Dog.” Kousuke didn’t know why. He supposed it might have something to do with the fact that he ended up joining the yakuza without ever dabbling in minor street gangs, with no history of delinquency and no notable admiration for the yakuza way of life.

One day, a yakuza member took a liking to him and brought Mizukawa into the gang. All because of his slightly unusual way of fighting… He was taken in like a stray dog. Mizukawa had to agree; it was a fitting analogy.

In any case, they didn’t call him “Dog” because of his appearance. Mizukawa didn’t look like the stereotypical yakuza. He was twenty-two with a slim build and poor posture. He was androgynous and wore cheap glasses, the kind any student would buy. He seemed an intellectual type, with nothing threatening about his aura. There was certainly nothing bulldog-like about him.

In some countries, calling someone “Dog” would be quite offensive, but not so much in Japan. It just made you wonder why someone would say that. Perhaps they called him that because he wouldn’t understand what was so bad about it.

Well, if that was the case, then they were right. He didn’t understand it, so he simply let it go. That was his way of dealing with life. Rather than investing a lot of energy into thinking about something headache-inducing, he saved his brainpower for more immediate issues. He was a doer.

He always did what came naturally to him.

Fifteen members of the gang told him no, they insisted, they yelled… Eventually, they tried to stop him with force, but he defeated them all with an extendable baton. He didn’t feel great about that. They were protecting both their own interests and the organization’s. Sure, they might’ve simply been scared minnows who’d rather turn a blind eye to trouble than deal with it, but still.

Mizukawa, though, wouldn’t be stopped.

“Excuse me,” he said, opening the sliding door without waiting to be summoned in.

Inside the room, a bald, seventy-something-year-old man was sitting on a futon spread on the floor. This was the boss. He was holding a sword still in its scabbard.

For a few seconds, they just stared at each other, the ticking of the clock on the wall seeming louder than it should be. Mizukawa glanced at it. It was past eleven PM… Not great.

Mizukawa knelt on the floor beside the boss.

“I think you know why I’m here. I’m going, and I need your secret treasure.”

The old man sighed, laid the sword on the floor, pushed off the blanket, and sat cross-legged, facing Mizukawa. He had once been a strong fighter, supposedly, but to Mizukawa, he was no different from the decrepit elderly wheeled into hospitals every day. It was creepy how much the boss looked like a withering tree. Mizukawa knew the boss had started suffering from hearing problems a few years earlier, perhaps the origin of his sharp decline.

“Do you have to do this?” the boss asked.

“I see no reason not to.”

“Do you really need to take that with you?”

“It’s how I do things.”

“That’s the thing with you, isn’t it…?” The boss crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. “You are who you are, Mizukawa… Okada told me, ‘I’ve found this weird stray, and he’s fun. I wanna make a guard dog out of him.’ Then he brought you to me.”

That was when Mizukawa first joined the gang, six years earlier. He got into a fight that day, and when Mizukawa was fighting someone, his immediate intent was to kill. He didn’t do any glaring, yelling, or posturing. Right off the bat, he was ready to kill, or to at least irreversibly maim his opponent. He’d go for the eyes, cut or rip off the nose or ears, crush the balls… That was how he handled things.

Coming from a rough background, he had learned to fight that way to survive before his sudden growth spurt in his late teens. If someone gave him any trouble at all, he immediately struck them with everything he had, and that instinct stuck with him.

That eventually brought him there—to the boss’s residence. It led him to fighting his way through a bunch of other gang members who might’ve been his seniors. He went on the attack and put everything on the line.

“This is it, then? You’re not changing your mind? I suppose I know the answer already.”

“No.”

“I’m afraid I’m against it.”

“Of course, you have to protect our people… I won’t take up your time. I’ve come to ask you to expel me.”

“That wouldn’t change a thing. If you take that outside, it’s over for us.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to do this for the man I owe everything.”

“Such devotion to that fool Okada. I don’t mind that…but can’t you be a bit smarter about this?”

“Okada just got killed. I don’t think it’s smart for us to pretend like nothing happened and keep working security for the parlor.”

He was referring to the underground casino owned by the gang. Okada had been in charge of it.

Mizukawa, with his underwhelming appearance, would be useless as a bouncer, so instead, he was taking care of various odd jobs at the casino. But one day, he caught a customer shamelessly cheating and, without even saying a word, cut off four of the man’s fingers right then and there. People remembered him after that and gossiped about how the cuts were so clean. The offending customer got his severed digits neatly reattached at the hospital, which happened to be right next to the casino.

From that day on, none of the customers felt brave enough to try to cheat the casino, and likewise, there weren’t any the dealers brave enough to try to cheat the customers. Mizukawa didn’t know if that would actually be bad for business. As far as he was concerned, he did his job. He was known as a man who did his job.

The gang’s illegal gambling den became renowned for its trustworthiness, and its popularity skyrocketed.

“You graduated from stray dog to guard dog. But it’s never been our family you’ve been guarding. It was Okada. Not that I didn’t know that from the start.”

“I’m just a mangy mutt. I’m not some clever guard dog worth a damn.”

“Okada gave a damn.”

“He did, yeah.”

Mizukawa and Okada met six years earlier. Four foreign mafia types thought a miserable-looking, scrawny Japanese man would make an easy target, and they ganged up on Mizukawa, who was just a teenager at the time. Okada saw how Mizukawa beat them all, and that was how Mizukawa’s involvement with the yakuza began. He joined the family as Okada’s younger brother in return for their disposing of the corpses and hiding him for two weeks to be safe.

Mizukawa had never been fascinated with the yakuza. He wouldn’t have joined the group voluntarily. He did it only because of what he owed Okada. Mizukawa would do anything to please him, and when Okada didn’t like something, Mizukawa would eliminate it. Okada liked him, and keeping him happy became Mizukawa’s motivation to continue working. It all seemed so natural.

“Okada’s death was a bit of an accident. I’m in the middle of talks with the responsible family. But that won’t be enough to make you give up on this, will it?”

“No. I know you’ve sent the captain to talk to them, but I don’t see the point.”

Okada died in a territorial dispute. He tried to punch a member of the rival group just as the other pulled a knife to intimidate him.

A veteran brawler, Okada didn’t punch with just his arm—he’d thrust his whole body at the opponent. He wasn’t expecting a blade to come in between him and his target. So he ended up throwing himself at the dagger.

Mizukawa acknowledged the stabbing was an accident, but who was to say the gangster with the knife had no intention of hurting Okada? He took his weapon out, so he might’ve been planning to attack or even kill Okada, but fear seized him when the burly man charged him. In either case, Okada was dead, and Mizukawa wasn’t going to let that slide.

“Do you know what Okada’s last words were?” the boss asked.

“‘Let’s grab some ramen after this.’”

“Don’t be an idiot. That’s just the last thing he said to you.”

“Oh, right…”

It was times like this that his lack of sense and schooling showed the most. A wave of frustration washed over Mizukawa. He shifted his gaze from his boss to the clock. The conversation was dragging on longer than he was willing to tolerate. Once he made a move, the guy who killed Okada—Ijyuuin—would start taking more precautions. If that involved getting a firearm from his family’s safe, that wouldn’t particularly bother Mizukawa. But if he fled abroad, Mizukawa wouldn’t be able to chase after him.

“Just before he died, he called your name,” said the boss.

Mizukawa guessed that Okada was trying to tell Ijyuuin, “Mizukawa will get you!” Or perhaps he was issuing an order, like, “Mizukawa, avenge me!” Which was exactly what Mizukawa would, of course, do. He was going to avenge his brother. He didn’t have to be told what to do for that.

“Boss, let’s cut to the chase…” He stopped when he turned his gaze back to the old man, experiencing for the first time in his life what people called a chill running down their spine.

The boss wasn’t sitting cross-legged anymore. He was sitting formally with his legs folded under him. That was it. All he had done was change the way he was sitting. But while people would change from sitting on their legs to sitting cross-legged to be more comfortable, no one did the opposite. And what really sent alarm bells ringing in Mizukawa’s head was that he hadn’t heard or sensed the old man move at all.

He was about to be attacked.

It was just a hunch, but he was absolutely certain an attack was coming. He jumped, just as a blade swished below him. The old man had quickly drawn his sword, still seated. The attack was terrifyingly fast.

“Most people would stand up or lean away.”

The old man was now in a half crouch. He slowly rose from the floor, keeping his sword pointed at Mizukawa.

“You were kneeling, so how the hell did you jump up? What is with that body of yours?”

Mizukawa was about to jump away again the second he landed, but he changed his mind and straightened up slowly, his movements matching the boss’s. It was a miracle his legs were still attached to the rest of his body. He couldn’t believe he was still in one piece. The old man could have easily beheaded him if he’d wanted to.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

When he looked away at the clock, he had been defenseless, but it seemed the old man had been waiting for him to turn his head back toward him before attacking.

“I wanted to take out your legs.”

The boss had been anticipating Mizukawa standing up in fear. He was aiming for his legs, but swinging the sword with only one hand and in a seated position, he wouldn’t have struck with enough force to shatter the bones.

“Thank you, Boss…”

The old man wanted to spare him. A gesture of kindness? Did he have a soft spot for Mizukawa? Or was he simply wary of the trouble Mizukawa would bring?

The last possibility was the most likely. Disposing of a body was costly, and the gang wouldn’t want to risk having another corpse on their hands while the police were sniffing around. They were a long-established family, yet only a dozen or so members were guarding their boss in his residence right after one of their members was killed and another was threatening to rebel to avenge him. Anyone could tell their power had greatly diminished due to the pressure from both foreign crime groups and the police. In the past, disposing of bodies was a piece of cake, but that was then.

Their boss seemed almost religiously devoted to the doctrine of avoiding trouble as their family slowly weakened, but it made no sense to Mizukawa. If they were going to die out, he’d rather stay true to the yakuza way and go out with a bang.

For a moment, he wondered whether explaining his perspective to the boss was worth it, but he remained silent, not so much because having a katana pointed at him made him less chatty, but because he didn’t consider persuasion part of his skill set.

After all, he was just a dog, eating what he was fed, baring his teeth at enemies when the need arose. Dogs weren’t known for being good at talking. They weren’t meant to talk at all.

The thought calmed Mizukawa. His head cleared, and he was no longer intimidated by the threat before him. He couldn’t let the boss kill him, not yet at least, but he didn’t need to be so wary. They were indoors, and the old man’s sword arm was pitifully thin. Mizukawa figured his chances of survival were high.

The room was too small to swing a katana around haphazardly, and the ceiling was too low to swing overhead. A fully extended horizontal swipe was also impossible. The boss could either try to thrust the blade at him or use short slashes, but it would take incredible strength to critically wound an opponent with a little slash that had no follow-through. The real danger was getting stabbed. Knowing what to be wary of, Mizukawa felt confident he’d be able to make do.

The boss would have one chance to attack him, and it was unlikely he’d manage to inflict a severe injury. Meanwhile, Mizukawa could kill the old man, and he didn’t even need a weapon. His bare hands were plenty.

“Tsk! My mistake for taking in a half-feral dog.”

The boss stuck the katana deep into the floor and sat down cross-legged again.

“Why did you do that?”

“If I can’t stop you, I’d rather you not die for nothing.”

He sounded sincere.

Mizukawa relaxed and nodded a thank-you. Then he walked over to one corner of the room, pulled the tatami mat off the floor, and smashed the floorboards with a kick.

“What are you, a caveman?! They weren’t bolted! You could’ve just lifted them!”

But the damage was already done. Mizukawa bowed his head again, this time in apology.

He removed the rest of the floorboards with his hands, revealing a large metal safe lying face up. It had been placed that way to allow easy access from above. Mizukawa knew the combination.

“Damn that Okada. He never could keep a secret.”

“He told me the number in case of emergency. I’d say this counts.”

The lock clicked open, and Mizukawa opened the heavy door. There were stacks of banknotes and complicated-looking documents wrapped in plastic bags, but those things were of no interest to Mizukawa. The item he was looking for was at the very bottom of the safe.

“It’s in pieces?”

“It wouldn’t fit in otherwise. Sorry, but I don’t know how to reassemble it.”

“Not a problem. I do.”

“Tsk!”

Mizukawa pulled a bag out. It contained a large amount of rifle ammunition, packed together with some desiccant and disassembled AK-47s.

As far as he knew, these were the most powerful weapons in possession of his gang. He had to have one if he was to strike the enemy with full force.

There were four rifles in total, but Mizukawa needed only one, so he returned the other three to the safe.

“I was going to throw all that away. The times have moved on, and there’s no need for that sort of stuff anymore.”

“There will never be a time when weapons aren’t needed.”

Mizukawa lifted the bag with the rifle and ammo with both hands, bowed, and left the room. A memory flashed in his mind on his way out—Okada teaching him to bow to his superiors.

•

The ammunition had been stored in a bag with desiccant, but the rifle was preserved with a copious amount of grease. Mizukawa understood it was to stop the weapon from rusting, but it was no way to treat a gun. He wouldn’t have the time to thoroughly clean it and oil the parts as he put them back together.

He gave the parts a big wipe with a bunch of rags and started fitting them together. If it were a different firearm, he’d be lucky to get one shot out of it in that state, but he reckoned an AK would be fine.

While he didn’t spend much time cleaning the body of the gun, he was more careful with the magazine. It too was full of grease, and he had to get rid of that to prevent feeding issues.

After completing the assembly, he tested the rifle on full-automatic… It worked fine, except that the heat made trapped grease leak out from various gaps.

He’d mostly relied on what he remembered from a lecture he took abroad several years earlier to figure out how the parts fit together. Luckily, his memory served him well.

The lecturer said that military weapons had to be simple enough for any idiot to use them. People with no education would join the army to make money, but it wasn’t only out of concern for them. Prolonged, dangerous missions pushed soldiers to the limit, and they had to be able to fight no matter how tired or stressed they were. Fortunate for Mizukawa.

So he got his hands on a rifle and checked that it could fire properly. He’d gone through one magazine on full auto. The accuracy wasn’t great… Or rather, there was a problem with the sights. All the bullets were landing left of where he was aiming. On closer inspection, the rear iron sight was slightly right of center. Mizukawa didn’t have the tools to adjust it, though. The AK-47’s design was quite old, and anything beyond basic maintenance needed a specialized thingamajig, like a vise or a clamp, to adjust the sight alignment. While Mizukawa could try to force it into the right place with the tools he had on hand, it would mean making a lot of crude adjustments, hoping to get it right in the end…and he didn’t have time for that. He’d just have to remember that the sights were misaligned, so he’d always fire slightly to the right of where he was aiming. Or he’d have to fire at close range, where none of that mattered.

“This’ll do.”

He packed seven full magazines into a shoulder bag and slung it over his head. The rifle and spare ammo went into a travel bag. He lifted it off the floor, ready to go.

He’d been working on and testing the gun in a warehouse that belonged to his gang, but an assault rifle made a lot of noise when fired fully automatic. It was the middle of the night, so someone could’ve reported hearing gunshots to the police. Mizukawa hurriedly got into a car and left the scene before anyone came by to check what was going on.

While he was driving, his phone started ringing. It was one of his informants who managed to locate Okada’s killer, Ijyuuin. Okada put the caller on the speaker so he could keep driving while they talked.

“So he’s in Kinshicho?”

“Yeah, he’s partying at a nightclub.”

“Why Kinshicho, though?”

Both Mizukawa’s and Ijyuuin’s families had their territory in West Tokyo, but Kinshicho was on the eastern side of the capital.

“Probably wants to stay the hell away from you. He definitely suspects you’re up to something.”

“Why stay in the city at all, then?”

“You know who else has their turf there, right?”

There was a group in that part of the city with a good-natured middle-aged man as its boss. He was quite the character, preferring coffee over alcohol, appearing at local festivals in person instead of sending the youngest members of his group, and tending a booth. His gang was a weird one.

But that eccentric boss wasn’t the reason even Mizukawa, from the other side of the city, had heard of the Kinshicho gang. That gang was famous because of rumors that it had ties to some government entity. Ten years earlier, the Kinshicho family drastically changed their business model, moving away from violent crime. Presently, they had almost completely stopped causing trouble not only for the police but ordinary people in general, and yet, unbelievably, they managed to hold on to their turf.

Interestingly, the gang’s makeover happened around the time of the old radio tower incident, and there were rumors that half-jokingly said the two weren’t unrelated, that it was then when the gang made a pact with some secret government organization. Well, people said lots of things. It was one more urban legend, although this one had only spread in the underworld.

It made Mizukawa think that he might have more opponents to deal with besides Ijyuuin and his entourage of thugs. It wasn’t totally far-fetched that a bunch of armed cops might come to Ijyuuin’s rescue. But he could take them on, too. On second thought, he wouldn’t have to. As long as he took Ijyuuin out, nothing else mattered…

“Thanks for the info. Keep watching that club. Let me know at once if Ijyuuin comes out.”

“Sure thing. The club’s name is—”

•

Mizukawa left the car by the roadside. He wouldn’t be coming back for it. The club his informant directed him to was on the southern outskirts of Kinshicho, on the top floor of an eight-story, multi-tenant building, which actually suited the style of the adjacent neighborhood, Sumiyoshi, much better.

Before going in, Mizukawa looked around for any signs of danger but found none. Everything felt just like any other midweek night. There was no particular tension in the air, nor the foreboding heaviness hinting at the cops or yakuza lying in ambush.

“…The hell?”

Everything seemed normal. Too normal. Ijyuuin knew Mizukawa was coming to kill him. He should’ve surrounded himself with as many members of his gang as he could for safety…

Mizukawa called his informant.

“Yeah, he’s still inside,” the informant confirmed. “Just drinking with a woman next to him.”

“Okay, sounds like you’re in the club, too. Just one question.”

“Sure.”

“You sold me out, didn’t you?”

“………Ijyuuin’s here. I’m not lying, dude. Watch your back, yeah?”

The call ended. That weird pause was a dead giveaway that he wasn’t talking freely. That and his insistence that he was telling the truth. The man was clearly being threatened, used to lure Mizukawa into the club. He managed to get that across despite being watched. For that, Mizukawa was thankful.

“Let’s do this.”

Mizukawa got the AK out of the travel bag, which he discarded on the street. There was still some loose ammo inside, but he reckoned that the seven magazines inside the shoulder bag—two hundred and ten rounds in total—would be enough.

He took a magazine out of the shoulder bag, inserted it into the AK, then racked the charging handle, loading the first round into the chamber.

“This is for you, brother.”

The elevator could have easily been a trap, so he opted for the emergency staircase instead. He was wary of getting attacked from above, but there didn’t seem to be anyone waiting to ambush him. He was making his way up at a steady pace.

Mizukawa knew he was being lured in. He could feel it with every cell of his body. But he didn’t have a plan B, and he doubted he could come up with a smarter plan anyway. He lacked the brains, so his only option was to accept the risk and charge right into the trap with his gun at the ready. He’d made up his mind, and that was that.

At the top floor, he turned the doorknob with his left hand, holding the AK in the right. The door wasn’t locked. He let it swing open. The interior was quite dark. Tranquil music played, and the air smelled of some expensive fragrance.

Mizukawa stepped inside. He kept walking farther in, ready to shoot at any moment, the stock of the AK braced against his shoulder, looking from the rear to the front sight with his right eye while taking in his surroundings with his left.

He was silent, stealthy. None of the yelling like in old yakuza movies—that just wasn’t his style. He never felt the urge to roar to try and intimidate the enemy. He left his ego out of it.

“It’s too calm…”

A trap, definitely. He couldn’t hear any noise besides the music. No sign of staff or customers so far—that wasn’t normal. But it wasn’t all that bad either, as far as Mizukawa was concerned. He’d memorized Ijyuuin’s face, but it wouldn’t be easy to pick him out from a crowd. He’d be running the risk of his target noticing him first. To prevent that, he originally planned on opening fire as soon as he spotted anyone who might be Ijyuuin, killing everyone, but it seemed there’d be no need for that, which was a plus. Lots of things could be said about Mizukawa, but he wasn’t a bloodthirsty psycho.

The club occupied the entire top floor of the building, but even so, it wasn’t that big. There were a few seating areas with sofas and counter seats at the bar, which was illuminated with blue lights. Mizukawa finally spotted someone at the table farthest away from him.

“You’re a naughty boy, Mr. Ijyuuin!” said a hostess to a man sitting next to her on the sofa.

There he was, dressed in a suit: Ijyuuin. He was wearing sunglasses, but it was unmistakably him.

“Oh, who’s that? Is he one of your friends, Mr. Ijyuuin… Whuh?!”

Mizukawa didn’t waste time. He’d found his target, so he pulled the trigger. The rifle spit out ten 7.62 rounds in seconds.

That should’ve made mincemeat of Ijyuuin…but not only did the bullets miss, hitting to the side of him, but they also landed high as the gun jerked up with each shot. Mizukawa tried to prevent that by holding the gun more firmly, but it didn’t work.

He’d forgotten about the misaligned sights and aimed too accurately, fully focused on his target. And he’d also forgotten the instructor’s explanation that with the AK-47, you had to aim slightly below your target when firing fully automatic. That model, and others based on it, tended to jump up from the recoil due to the design of the stock.

The hostess clutched Ijyuuin by the front of his shirt and yanked him around like a ragdoll… She pulled him down onto the floor, and while she was getting back to her feet, Ijyuuin curled up, shaking and whimpering in fear.

“Don’t just open up without a word! Aren’t you a yakuza?! Where’s your war cry?!”

It wasn’t Ijyuuin shouting, but the woman.

Whatever. Mizukawa didn’t care. This time, he was sure he wouldn’t miss his target. But the moment he took aim, he sensed a sharp glare from his side. He turned his attention to the bar. A waiter dressed in black had appeared behind the counter… No, it wasn’t a waiter, but a young, black-haired girl dressed like one. She was pointing a handgun at him.

“Shit!”

Mizukawa lunged sideways onto the floor to dodge. The girl fired. The bullet grazed his arm. When he landed on the floor, he opened up again, aiming not at the girl but at the top of the counter where she was standing. Only five bullets came out. He’d used too much ammo trying to kill Ijyuuin.

The girl behind the bar was armed, and although she was so young, he could tell she was an assassin. A trained assassin, from the look of it. She meant business.

Which meant Mizukawa had to keep moving, or he was as good as dead. That applied to any close-range gunfight where cover was lacking, especially when outnumbered. Stay in one place too long, and he’d get surrounded and end up a goner.

Mizukawa took out a fresh magazine from the shoulder bag as he rolled behind a sofa. He used the new magazine to knock out the empty one and rocked it into place. Then he pulled the charging handle back to load a fresh round into the chamber.

In his head, he repeated to himself that the sight was misaligned to the right and that he had to aim slightly below his target. Next, he switched the selector from full auto to semi-auto. He was burning through ammo too fast on full auto. He hated the vulnerable few seconds that came from changing magazines.

Should he take out the girl behind the counter first? She was just a kid, but it’d be a mistake not to take her seriously. He thought about her face when she shot at him—she didn’t wince or even show the slightest sign of nervousness. He’d be less worried about her if she had a maniacal smile on her face, like killers in popular thrillers. This girl shot at him with the same energy as flicking on a light switch. She’d been trained for this. Mizukawa didn’t think it’d be possible for him to kill Ijyuuin with this girl around.

“No need to shoot, Takina. Leave him to me!” said the hostess who’d been entertaining Ijyuuin.

Was she an assassin, too? Unlike this other girl, the one pretending to be a hostess looked like an ordinary girl to Mizukawa…

“But, Chisato—”

“Leave him to me. Stray bullets are the biggest danger here. Get this guy out of here.”

Takina and Chisato. Mizukawa, with his poor memory, had a habit of repeating people’s names in his head after he first heard them. Okada drilled it into him that it was rude not to remember names.

Mizukawa started to get up from the floor, keeping his rifle pointed in the direction of the girl dressed like a waiter—Takina. He peeked out from behind the sofa. He saw that Takina was also aiming at him, holding the handgun nonchalantly in one hand. She placed her other hand on the counter and swiftly jumped over it.

Mizukawa broke out in cold sweat. The girl kept both her eyes and the gun steadily focused on him as she jumped. It might not sound like much, but it spoke volumes about the quality and degree of training she must have undergone.

“Who the hell are you?”

Takina didn’t answer him. She kept the gun aimed at him as she walked to the kitchen. She dragged a tied-up man out of there. It was Mizukawa’s informant. He tried to say something when he saw Mizukawa, but he was gagged, so his words came out as incomprehensible mumbling. Takina dragged him away to the elevator. When Mizukawa lost sight of them, he finally lowered the AK.

“Okay, my turn! What was your name again? Mizukawa?”

The woman called Chisato was dressed in a glamorous, figure-hugging dress made from a thin fabric, paired with high heels… Actually, she must have been about the same age as the other one. Early twenties? No, possibly still a teenager. Mizukawa noticed she had a young complexion and hardly any makeup on. And she didn’t seem like a lady of the night.

The girl reached into her handbag and took out a handgun with spikes on the barrel.

“I knew you weren’t a real hostess.”

“Really? What gave me away?”

“That outfit. It doesn’t suit you.”

She looked offended and touched an earpiece hidden by her hair.

“Mizukiii! He’s criticizing my outfit! It doesn’t suit me, apparently… Huh? Sorry, but I’m still in my tender teenage years! I’m young, unlike you!”

“You’re a killer working for the local gang’s boss, the coffee aficionado?”

“Huh? Oh, you mean boss man? No, no. He’s just our regular customer…although today’s job did come from him.”

“I got the killer part right, then.”

“Sorry, but nope! You couldn’t be further from the truth!”

Then who was she? Why was she protecting Ijyuuin? What was going on? She did give off the feeling that she was part of a larger group. Mizukawa felt as if he could almost figure it out, but he was still drawing a blank, so he stopped thinking about it. There was a saying that an idiot pondering things was just wasting his time. Or maybe it was that other saying that applied, wasting time on pointless pondering was what idiots did?

“We protect. Killing’s not on our menu.”

Ijyuuin must’ve paid a lot of money to the local boss to get his help. These girls probably decided to set up this trap for Mizukawa because they weren’t able to find him once he started acting on his own following Okada’s murder.

“So if you’re really set on killing Mr. Ijyuuin, you’ll have to kill me first.”

“Fine.”

He didn’t care what happened to him in the end as long as he managed to kill Ijyuuin. Mizukawa knew he should ignore the girl and focus on his target, but for some reason, he had a feeling she wouldn’t let him do that. It was just a hunch, but he was sure it was right.

Mizukawa made up for the lack of education and experience with his innate talents, one of which was intuition. He’d survived so long by relying on it.

Chisato smiled.

“Now, that’s a good doggy,” she said.

They walked to the middle of the floor, keeping their eyes on each other, their weapons pointing down. Chisato smiled smugly, like a gambler who was sure they had a winning hand.

They were about eight meters apart. Armed with a handgun, she had a slight advantage in such close quarters.

Mizukawa used his left hand to push his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose.

Strangely, the atmosphere wasn’t heavy. Mizukawa had an apathetic attitude, but he must’ve looked menacing. Chisato wasn’t trying to match his aura, nor was she intimidated by him. Like a blade of grass bending in the wind, she was letting Mizukawa’s scary vibes blow past her… Or rather, it was as if she wasn’t detecting them at all. It made him feel stupid, as if he were fighting a cheery sunflower with dead seriousness.

He couldn’t sense the right moment to shoot. What was up with this girl? It seemed like he could kill her easily, but at the same time, something told him she was invincible.

Chisato’s smile turned wry, as if she was losing patience. She tensed her slim, lithe body ever so slightly.

“Come at me,” she said, and they both moved at once.

Mizukawa let her take the lead. He’d had enough of the staring contest. They might just as well start fighting when she wanted.

Mizukawa crouched, lifting the AK to his eye. Chisato walked toward him. He fired, conscious that he had to aim slightly off to the right to compensate. He missed, probably having aimed too far to the right. Correcting himself, he fired again, and again in close succession…still missing. One more shot. And another. He was firing faster and faster.

Sweat dripped down his back. He knew there were people claiming AKs were inaccurate, but there was usually a good reason for that—maybe the AK was a shoddily made copy, maybe it was so used that the rifling had gone, or maybe it had been poorly maintained. It had nothing to do with the design of the original AK-47.

The weapon Mizukawa was using was an AK-47 copy manufactured somewhere in Asia that he had assembled himself, and he was effectively an amateur. It was in bad need of maintenance, too. Still, it was a rifle with a stock, and his target was just a few meters in front of him. He should’ve been able to hit her with his eyes closed. But he kept missing, and what was even more bizarre was that she was walking toward him, closing the distance. He stared at her in disbelief, and then he understood—she’d been dodging the bullets. She wasn’t walking in a perfectly straight line toward him, and she would lean slightly this or that way when he fired, perfectly dodging every shot with those minute adjustments. How could that even be possible?

“I’ll be honest, you gave me a fright at first. You fired at a completely different point than you were looking and aiming your gun at. Your AK has a bent sight, huh?”

Chisato raised her gun, still walking toward him. She was holding it like she was about to put it down on its side in front of her face, not like a yakuza punk wanting to show off, but in some sort of proper stance which even at a glance seemed rock solid.

“Damn it!”

Mizukawa didn’t know why he was struggling so much to hit Chisato, but she was intentionally dodging the bullets. If he couldn’t hit her no matter how carefully he aimed…he’d fire at random. As soon as he switched the selector to full auto, Chisato made a move he wasn’t expecting. She crouched low and slid on the floor to quickly closing the remaining distance, firing at him as she did so. Mizukawa felt a flash of pain in his left shin. The impact knocked his leg out from under him, and he staggered backward. He fell to his knees but still had the presence of mind to pull the trigger, spraying on full auto. But Chisato wasn’t anywhere near where the gun was pointed. She was below the barrel, right next to Mizukawa. They were so close they were almost touching. Chisato crouched low, making herself small, and then stood up quickly, her shoulder bumping into the AK’s barrel from below. The bullets hit the ceiling lights. A chandelier came crashing down.

Looking down, Mizukawa saw that Chisato was pointing her gun, with that brutal-looking muzzle, at his stomach. She’d kill him if he didn’t move, but even if he somehow dodged now, she’d get him with the next shot. That was what his mind told him, but instinct took over. He bent his neck to the side to keep his head as far away from her gun as possible and tackled her, ramming her with his upper body. She fired, right next to his ear. He felt splitting pain in his head, as if someone had thrust their fingers right into his brain, but he couldn’t dwell on that.

“I’ll get you!”

She took half a step backward, but that was still well within his reach. She was the one to strike first, though, kneeing him square in the jaw. Mizukawa saw stars but maintained consciousness. He fell forward and crashed into the floor, but the impact thankfully restored his vision. He instinctively lifted his head right away, looking up…straight into the muzzle of Chisato’s gun.

He let go of his rifle and rolled to the side just as Chisato fired. The bullet hit the floor right next to his face, releasing a cloud of red dust.

“Huh?!”

What was that red stuff? He had no idea. But at least he dodged that bullet. He was still alive, which meant he could still fight.

Mizukawa dived behind a sofa. It only then occurred to him that his left leg wasn’t shattered despite being shot in the shin. It was hurting like hell, but he wasn’t bleeding. He’d seen her gun up close. It was a .45 ACP. She’d shot him at close range. How come he wasn’t seriously injured?

He touched his shoulder where Takina’s bullet grazed him. Through a rip in his clothes, he felt that the bullet gouged out some of his flesh. Blood was seeping from the wound.

So it was only Chisato’s ammunition that wasn’t normal.

“You’re not using real bullets?!”

“Oh, you noticed? I’m using plastic frangible rounds. You could call them rubber bullets, I guess?”

His shin wasn’t broken. The pain was rough, but it was just pain. He could move just fine. As soon as that sank in, Mizukawa gathered all his strength, lifted the sofa up into the air, and chucked it in the direction he last heard Chisato. He thought she might try to dodge to the left or right, but she slid on the floor, passing under the incoming sofa. That dashed Mizukawa’s hope of stalling her just long enough for him to get to his AK.

Chisato slid across the floor, coming fast toward him with her gun pointed at him. He wouldn’t be able to dodge. He was going to die… No, he wasn’t. She was using rubber bullets. That wouldn’t kill him. It would just hurt, but it wouldn’t kill him on the spot…

Mizukawa steeled himself for the pain that was to come, reached for the extendable baton he carried at his belt, and charged at Chisato. She promptly shot him in the abdomen. It felt like being kicked by a giant, but he ignored it. He had to move before his body fully registered the pain.

He roared, raising the baton. It was still folded, but the force of a downward swing would extend it. It was his special attack, coming at his foe with the shortened baton, only for it to suddenly extend just as he brought it down. The shorter length helped him execute the move faster, and his opponent wouldn’t be able to accurately judge the baton’s reach.

Chisato braced her feet against the floor and fired again while rising to meet him. She got Mizukawa in the solar plexus, but he was already mid-swing, and it was too late to stop him. Chisato got closer. There was no fear in her eyes, even though a police baton could break bone, even though her opponent was a towering man with a thick layer of both muscle and fat…

Common sense didn’t seem to apply to either of these assassin girls.

Chisato was coming close again, so Mizukawa flexed his lower body to steady himself against the momentum of the swing, bending his back. He had been hoping to stop Chisato from getting too close, but unbelievably, she hurtled toward him even faster, like a rocket. He couldn’t keep her at the right distance.

When she looked up at him, she was so close he could feel her breath. His baton whiffed and hit nothing. The force of the swing bent his arm, curling it around Chisato as if he wanted to cuddle her. They looked at each other, as if about to kiss… Then Chisato pushed the muzzle of her gun into his stomach.

“You can rest now,” she said and fired.

Mizukawa felt the gut-smashing impact of the shot all the way to his back. He got knocked off the floor a bit. The pain threatened to wrestle his last bits of consciousness away from him.

He collapsed, not even onto his knees but face-first onto the floor, like a downed tree. Blood was sputtering out of his guts, and he could do nothing to stop it. It was pooling around him. He reflexively moved his head to the side, struggling for air.

With great effort, he managed to stay conscious, but he couldn’t move anymore. Crushing pain, nausea, and a choking sensation were coming in waves.

“Is it…is it over?!”

It was Ijyuuin. He fearfully walked over to Mizukawa and looked down at him.

“Yup. He won’t be able to stand up now,” Chisato said nonchalantly. She touched her earpiece to talk to someone. Her backup, probably, or maybe the other girl, Takina.

“Heh. Serves you right, Okada’s mad dog. His death was an accident. Our families were in talks… But you’re one crazy bastard,” Ijyuuin said.

He reached into a breast pocket and pulled a knife from a holster. The blade had red stains on it. Okada’s blood? Was Mizukawa going to be killed with the same dagger that took Okada’s life? That wouldn’t be so bad, as far as he was concerned. He actually found the idea surprisingly comforting.

But he still couldn’t come to terms with letting Ijyuuin live. He had to kill him, no matter what. That resolve allowed him to regain command of his body despite the fresh waves of blinding pain. Mizukawa’s fingers twitched. The moment Ijyuuin stabbed him, he was going to snatch the dagger and drag Ijyuuin to the afterlife with him. His best chance was right after Ijyuuin stuck the blade into his body. He was ready.

Would his body move the way he wanted it to? He couldn’t be sure, but if he was going to die anyway, he had to try. He should be able to move. He should be able to. He’d make his body move, no matter what. He could do this. He was going to kill Ijyuuin. That was all he wanted.

“You’re Mizukawa, right?”

Ijyuuin grabbed Mizukawa by the front of his shirt and yanked him up, forcing him to kneel. He pointed the dagger at Mizukawa’s stomach.

“I’ll send you back into the arms of your beloved brother!”

Mizukawa couldn’t help but smirk. He was going to grab Ijyuuin’s wrist, snatch the dagger, and slit the bastard’s throat open.

“Die—”

Ijyuuin’s words were drowned out by a gunshot. Mizukawa saw something like a red flower burst open next to Ijyuuin’s head. It was Chisato’s rubber bullet. A plastic frangible round. The force of the strike bent Ijyuuin’s neck at a right angle. He fell sideways, pulling Mizukawa down with him.

Back on the floor, Mizukawa didn’t understand what was happening as he stared at Ijyuuin’s eyes, rolled back into his head. He heard the tapping of Chisato’s unhurried footsteps. She raised the tip of her high heel, then flipped Ijyuuin onto his back with a sharp kick. She stepped one foot over him and fired down at him with no hesitation. Another red flower bloomed at Ijyuuin’s solar plexus.

“Why did you…shoot him…?” Mizukawa couldn’t help asking.

Chisato cocked her head at him as if the question was silly.

“I told you. Our job’s to protect.” She smiled, holding her gun with the slide open. “We’re here to protect Kousuke Mizukawa.”

Mizukawa didn’t understand. The only person who might have made such a request was his boss. He must have made arrangements while Mizukawa was putting together the AK. The girl and her group must have wanted to avoid a gunfight out in the open or having to chase him around the city, so they dangled Ijyuuin as bait and used the informant to lure him in.

He remembered how Chisato called him a “good doggy” at the start of their fight. But people outside his gang shouldn’t know about his nickname. He should’ve realized it right then and there.

“I get your need for revenge, but killing’s no good, Mr. Mizukawa. It only leads to bigger problems, like yourself becoming a target. Your boss didn’t want any killing.”

His gang was in no shape for an all-out war with other yakuza. The boss didn’t have long left in the world, and he probably wanted to live the rest of his life in peace.

“In the end, everyone just wants to protect their own ass… So they keep fence-sitting…”

Chisato smiled at him gently.

“Did they tell you what the last thing Mr. Okada said was? ‘Stop…Mizukawa.’”

“What?”

“Your boss told me. I think Mr. Okada wanted your pals to stop you from going after the other guys only to get yourself killed.”

“Is that what he meant…?”

“Well, it’s open to interpretation, but that’s what it sounds like to me. Now do you feel less inclined to throw away your life just to get your revenge?”

“Chisato!” cried Takina, returning to the club. She’d changed into a school uniform. It suited her much better than the waiter’s getup. She picked up Mizukawa’s AK off the floor.

“Kousuke Mizukawa’s safe, so our job is done. Don’t stay here just to chat with him…”

Chisato smiled at Takina, silencing her with a look.

“A good master wants their dog to be happy,” she said to Mizukawa. “They wouldn’t want their dog to die for their sake. Take my word for it!”

She waved and walked out of the club with Takina.

All that was left inside was a man with a dagger stuck into the floor beside him…and one dog.

Groaning, Mizukawa sat up, moving jerkily like a broken marionette. He definitely had some fractured ribs and other internal injuries, but he was still able to move. He crawled over to the dagger, stretched his hand, and grasped its hilt. He just had to pull it out, and then…

“I’m a dog, eh…?”

Dogs did what they were trained to, but Okada never trained him to kill. All he taught the awkward Mizukawa was…how to live like a man.

“What…do I do now…?”

He no longer had a mentor who’d give him the answers…

“Mizukawa! You there?”

He looked up and saw his boss stepping out of the elevator, wearing a suit. It’d been a long time since Mizukawa saw him dressed like that.

“Still alive, I see.”

“…Yes.”

Mizukawa’s boss noticed Ijyuuin on the floor. Without a second thought, he stomped hard on the man’s crotch. Ijyuuin’s mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out. All he could do was cover his crotch, convulsing.

“We’ll tell them his injuries are all that girl’s work,” the boss said with a grin. Then he turned on his heel. “Mizukawa! We’re leaving.”

After a long silence, Mizukawa replied, “Yes, Boss.”

Chapter 3: Cough

It was Saturday, five PM, the end of the busy time at Café LycoReco. That was when it happened. A very minor, yet impossible to ignore, event.

“Kweh!”

Takina Inoue couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard that rather unremarkable noise. It was the sound of somebody’s slightly wet cough. It was followed by an audible throat clearing, as if something had been blocking the person’s airways. To be more precise, it was the kind of cough that signaled that somebody was sick.

Takina looked around, searching for the source of the cough among the customers and staff scattered around the café. There was one young and one old couple seated on the second floor. In the kitchen, Mika was washing the dishes while Mizuki was assembling a parfait.

Yoneoka, a writer and a regular at LycoReco, was sitting at a low table in the tatami area. Kurumi noticed him staring blankly at his laptop earlier—it had crashed, and she was fixing it for him, restoring any salvageable data.

Another regular, Detective Abe, was sipping his coffee at the counter.

Lastly, Takina’s gaze fell on Chisato, who’d just come out of the restroom. She was pressing her right hand to her throat, looking up in surprise.

It was clear who the culprit was.

“What’s the matter, Chisato? Caught a cold?” Abe asked her in a friendly tone, holding his cup in one hand.

“Hmm, dunno? I think it’s nothing!” Chisato replied chirpily with a laugh.

“Sure, it’s nothing. You know the saying, ‘Idiots don’t catch colds.’ Mr. Abe, here’s your limited-edition kiwi parfait!” said Mizuki as she came over to the counter and placed the parfait down in front of Abe, whose middle-aged face lit up with a childlike joy at the sight of the dessert.

“You’re speaking from firsthand experience, right?” Kurumi laughed mockingly, removing the SSD from Yoneoka’s laptop.

Mizuki yelled at Kurumi. Takina ignored their loud, pointless banter, turning her attention to Chisato instead.

“When did your cough start, Chisato?”

“Not sure… I guess I woke up with a funny feeling in my throat?”

Mika came out of the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Maybe we should make an appointment with Dr. Yamagishi? Call her and she’ll see you right away, even at this time.”

Takina didn’t know this “Dr. Yamagishi,” but she guessed she was Chisato’s usual physician.

“Hey, why is everyone making a big deal of it! It’s totally nothing to worry about!”

Mika raised the inner corners of his eyebrows, thinking that Chisato was being stubborn like a little child.

Takina thought to herself that Mika was always overly protective when it came to Chisato.

“I’m perfectly fine! Anyway, we’ve got our board games meetup tonight! And I’m going to—”

“You’re going to lie down,” Takina cut in.

Approaching Chisato from behind, she put her hands on Chisato’s shoulders and started pushing her toward the locker room.

“Let’s take you to the back. I’ll set up the futon for you. Have a lie-down. Come on, Chisato, hurry up.”

“H-hey! I’m fine, honest! Takina, you’re being really pushy… Takina? Are you listening? I’m not sick. It’s just my throat being a bit scratchy today…”

“You will lie down. This isn’t a debate.”

She practically shoved Chisato into the locker room.

“Uh, okay?” Chisato said, turning around so that Takina’s hands slid off her shoulders. “You worry about me so much, Takina.”

Chisato booped Takina’s nose, grinning. Takina, though, stared back at her coldly.

“I’m not worried about you,” she said.

“What? You’re not? But then why do you want me to lie down?”

“Because you’re a liability. We’re a café. You can’t have a sick person serving food and beverages to customers.”

“Oh… Right…”

“Now please go to the back and get some rest.”

“Okay…”

“Or would you rather go home? Can you get home by yourself?”

“I don’t want to go home… I don’t want to miss game night…”

“Then go and have a quiet lie-down. And take your uniform off.”

Takina went rummaging through the lockers, which held all manner of clothing.

“Your sleepover bundle is here, correct? Is this the one? This is yours, isn’t it? Now hurry up and get changed into pajamas. I want you to get a proper rest. What are you waiting for?”

“You sound kinda draconian, Takina. I think this is madness…or is this Sparta?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay. You get changed now.”

Nagged by Takina, Chisato gingerly changed out of LycoReco’s Japanese-style waitress uniform into the pajamas she had in her sleepover bundle while Takina prepared the futon for her in the tatami room at the back of the café. Once she was done changing, Chisato followed Takina into the tatami room.

“Get on the futon and rest. If you don’t feel better by evening— Chisato! You look flushed!”

Takina stared intensely at Chisato’s face. Since she was going to nap, Chisato had taken out her hair clip and removed her makeup after changing into her pajamas. Her cheeks were slightly reddened…

Without warning, Takina put her hand on Chisato’s forehead, and then she touched her own forehead to compare.

“You have a fever…I think…”

“Really?”

“Do you want to go home after all?”

“No, no, no! It’s nothing, honestly! It’s just… Right! I’m just blushing! You saw me undressing, and I felt a bit shy!”

“I wasn’t watching you.”

Chisato pursed her lips and folded her arms, looking as if she was thinking hard of some other excuse… In the end, she drew a blank. She unfolded her arms, letting them dangle.

“A bit of rest is all I need to beat this bug,” she said, finally admitting to being unwell.

“Possibly. For now, lie down, and we’ll see how you feel later.”

Takina knelt down by the futon, pulled back the cover diagonally, and patted the mattress. Chisato obediently lay down.

“Did you do anything that might’ve made you sick?” Takina asked while tucking Chisato in.

“Don’t think so.”

“Maybe you slept naked?”

“Oooh, that’d be sexy!”

“You didn’t eat anything you found on the ground?”

“What, like a stray dog?!”

“On the subject of stray dogs, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a feral dog.”

“You might come across a lost pet dog in Tokyo, but strays and ferals get put down for public safety and so they don’t spread rabies. It’s been this way since the war.”

“Yet there are so many feral cats around.”

“Yeah. Dogs get unfairly discriminated against!”

“You’d like to have feral dogs roaming the streets?”

“No, but it’s not fair because cats can spread rabies, too.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought it only affected dogs and humans.”

“Right? It’s because people call it the mad dog disease!”

Chisato told Takina that the disease could actually be transmitted by any mammal, but people most often contracted it by getting unexpectedly bitten by infected dogs on account of dogs being the animals most commonly living near humans.

Takina thought about stray cats, how they were unlikely to suddenly approach and bite you. If anything, they tended to run away from humans.

“But thanks to the rabies vaccine and the extermination of feral dogs in Japan, humans and their pet dogs are safe from rabies.”

“Well, that’s enough about dogs. It’s not really interesting to me.”

“But it was you who brought this up!”

“I wasn’t expecting you to turn it into a lecture.”

“I’m teaching you important stuff here! Rabies is still a serious risk in many countries abroad!”

“But all of us Lycoris are regularly immunized against transmissible diseases.”

Lycoris agents frequently encountered criminals from abroad, so in addition to the standard immunizations administered to children as part of Japan’s free vaccination program, they’d also receive a number of vaccinations against less common diseases from a young age. Many of them had adverse reactions to receiving so many vaccines at once, but it was necessary.

Criminals who entered the country illegally would, of course, not have passed any medical checks, and since the Lycoris often fought at close range, it wasn’t unheard of to come into contact with the targets’ blood.

“See, this is the wrong way of thinking, that it’s fine as long as you’re safe. Vaccination programs are only effective if everyone gets immunized.”

“Yes, you’re right. Now take a nap.”

“Okay, okay. Come to think about it, it’s been two nights since I last slept on a futon.”

“What?”

“Two nights without it, and it already feels like a luxury.”

“Did you not sleep in your bed?”

“No, because the other day we were helping Ms. Itou until morning, remember? It was actually almost noon when we finished.”

“Yes, but we didn’t have to come in to work after that… Did you not go home to sleep?”

Chisato laughed awkwardly.

“I went straight to a movie theater.”

“And after the movie…?”

“I absentmindedly walked over to the café. Muscle memory. Mizuki was zombified after running the shop all by herself, and she pounced on me and wouldn’t let me go until evening!”

“And then…?”

“By then, I was seriously tired. I went home, started getting changed out of my clothes, and ended up falling asleep on the sofa…”

“I knew it. You did sleep naked after all.”

“I wasn’t like, buck naked! I was still wearing panties…”

“Now you’re going to tell me you also ate food you found on the ground?”

“Come on, I wouldn’t do that!”

Takina sighed inwardly at Chisato’s lack of sense… And then she thought about something unpleasant. She put one palm on Chisato’s forehead and bent down low over her, like a bowing waitress at a traditional inn, bringing her face close to Chisato’s hair.

“H-huh?! Sorry, Takina, b-but what are you doing? What is it? Hello? Are you listening?”

Takina almost buried her nose in Chisato’s hair. She was sniffing it.

“Hmm… You don’t stink,” she said.

“I-I did shower before coming in, you know!”

“Your hair smells really nice.”

“………………………Thanks…?”

If Chisato hadn’t showered those two days, despite having been on a big mission involving a gunfight and a lot of running around, that would have been pretty disgusting. She’d have all sorts of dirt on her, in addition to dried-up sweat.

Not only would that be a problem for their café, but it would also not be good for Chisato to be so unhygienic. Takina had been prepared to force her into the bath or at least help her clean herself with warm, wet towels… Thankfully, that wouldn’t be necessary.

“…Huh? Chisato?”

She suddenly felt like her hand was cooking on top of Chisato’s forehead. She moved back, taking her hand off Chisato’s head, and looked down at her friend’s face searchingly.

Chisato was avoiding her gaze, looking the other way. Her face was much redder than before.

“Oh, this isn’t good. I think you’re running a fever. Please just stay in bed for the rest of the day. If your symptoms get any worse, Mizuki can drive you home or take you to see a doctor.”

“O-okay…”

Chisato closed her eyes, her face turned away from Takina.

“What’s wrong?” asked Takina.

“Nothing.”

“Well then, I’ll be back later to take your temperature. Don’t worry about anything. Oh, I’ll go and get you something to drink first.”

Takina stood up and was about to leave the room, but she hesitated before closing the door behind her. She and Chisato weren’t old friends, but she knew Chisato well enough to know that she would ignore everything Takina had said if she wasn’t firm with her.

“Don’t do anything unnecessary, okay?”

That was a tall order for Chisato.

“Okaaay.”

“Don’t leave the room.”

Takina closed the door. She just about managed to catch Chisato grumbling quietly, “This really is Sparta…”

•

Chisato’s temperature kept slowly rising, and when Takina checked it a bit over two hours later, it was at 37.9 degrees Celsius. That temperature qualified as a low-grade fever, but it was no reason to panic.

Rather than see it as Chisato’s cold worsening, Takina thought her body was finally fighting the infection now that she was properly resting.

“You should stay here for the night,” she said. “I’ll feel more at ease. We’ll be staying late anyway.”

After taking Chisato’s temperature, Takina took the now-warm towel off Chisato’s forehead and went to cool it down with cold water in the sink.

“Oh, but I don’t want to miss the board games…”

“You’ll have to take a rain check. You might have a temperature just from being so worn out, but what if it’s a nasty cold? Do you want to spread it to everyone at the café? Can I ask you to just stay in bed tonight?”

“…I can’t say no with you looking like that.”

Takina was wearing a flu mask and thin rubber gloves. Besides a sports drink in a plastic bottle, she’d also brought a disinfecting alcohol spray. She left them on the floor next to the futon.

Overwhelmed by how seriously Takina was treating her cold, Chisato lost the will to resist.

“Meh!”

She picked up a large tablet from her bedside and placed it on her chest to stream some movies. She was borrowing the tablet from Kurumi, but she was logged into her own account, as was evident from the history.

“I think it’d be better if you slept,” said Takina. She wrung out the towel she’d been soaking in cold water and placed it on Chisato’s forehead.

“Doesn’t matter if I sleep or watch movies. Other than my eyes and brain, my body’s resting.”

“I think sleep is supposed to help your immune system.”

“Dunno about that.”

“Well, I’m not a doctor, so I’m not going to press this point any further…”

“Trust me, it doesn’t make a difference. If I’m staying in bed, I want to put this time to good use. Now, what to watch next…”

“What was the movie you were watching earlier?”

“Oh, that was Contagion. It’s about a global panic set off by a super dangerous virus spreading worldwide.”

“Why would you want to watch that when you’re not well…?”

“In a way, isn’t it the best time to watch it, for added immersion? It’s not even 3D, it’s a 4D experience!”

“And that’s fun for you?”

“It makes me feel better in comparison!”

“Please be serious.”

“Okay, okay. Hmm, it’s been a while since I’ve watched this one. Okay, I’ll watch this next… It feels wrong to stream it when I have the Blu-ray at home, though…”

“But you’re not at home, so you shouldn’t feel bad about streaming it. What is the title?”

“28 Days Later. It’s about a virus that turns people into zombies spreading through the world—”

“Chisato.”

“Okay, okay. I won’t watch that.”

Giving in, Chisato chose to watch Crank, starring Jason Statham, instead.

“Is it good?” asked Takina.

“Sure is! The fast buildup of tension is so energizing! And the sequel, that hits me hard for some reason!”

“You like movies with actors who don’t have much hair.”

“No, I don’t have a fetish like that!”

“But in thirty percent of the movies you foisted on…ahem, you kindly let me borrow, the main character has little to no hair.”

“Really? I guess that’s just the macho aesthetic in action movies? Maybe too much testosterone causes hair loss? Also, over there, it seems like there’s a lot of men who just start shaving their heads once they reach a certain age. That must be why.”

“You’re saying it’s a coincidence?”

“Yeah. Although I don’t mind it at all.”

The movie protagonist broke into a frantic run, drawing Takina’s eyes to the tablet. For a while, she and Chisato watched the movie together in silence.

“What is this movie about?” asked Takina.

“The lead guy gets injected with a weird poison that’ll kill him if his adrenaline level isn’t constantly high, so he has to do all sorts of crazy stuff.”

“And how does it end?”

“If you keep watching, you’ll find out.”

“No, I don’t have time for this. I have to prepare a light meal for everyone before game night. Don’t worry. I’ll make food for you, too.”

“Oh yeah? What are you making?”

“Well, what do you feel like eating? If it’s something I know how to make, you can request anything. Or I can go out and buy you something.”

With a temperature of almost thirty-eight degrees Celsius, a person could often lose their appetite and would be willing to consume a jelly drink at most, but if Chisato felt like having something more substantial, that would probably be better for her. Especially if she felt unwell from pushing herself too much recently.

Chisato paused the movie, took the towel off her forehead, and sat up. She placed the towel on top of her head as you’d do in the bath, and she got to thinking with her arms folded. She was probably imagining different foods, trying to decide what her body would tolerate.

Takina waited patiently.

“I want something from Spice Café.”

“What café…?”

“Oh, you haven’t been there yet? It’s in a residential area to the east of here. That’s the best I can describe it. Anyway, it’s just a little bit too far from the station, so it’s always super quiet there. The café’s in a remodeled traditional house. Their curry is to die for! The best of the best! They make a proper curry with their own spice blend, but each dish has a unique flavor, and they’re all amazing! I recommend the prawn curry and lamb keema. It’s not like your usual prawn curry where they just add prawns as a topping. No, no! It’s completely different! They use stock made from prawns, and it’s incredible! You’ll be in heaven when you have a taste. I guarantee it! And the lamb keema is spicy, but you can really taste the delicious lamb. The spices are a perfect accompaniment to it… Oh, but actually, my top recommendation is… Well, they’re not doing it right now. It’s a winter special. Anyway, it’s oyster curry. You’re going to be so surprised when you have some! Sure, it’s curry, and it’s spicy…but at the same time, it’s velvety like a creamy soup! It’s not just delicious. It’s got this rich umami! You won’t believe how good it is! You’ll feel like your body’s being filled with creamy deliciousness!”

While Chisato went on and on, Takina watched her with a stony gaze.

“Sorry, but no, you can’t have curry.”

“Why not?!”

“You’re not well. It will be too hard on your body to digest that.”

“But wait! Spices are used in traditional Chinese medicine, no? Which means they have healing properties!”

“That sort of tenuous reasoning is how you got sick in the first place.”

“No curry for me, then? Well, okay, but let’s go to Spice Café together sometime. For lunch. I’m dying to have their curry now!”

“We can go there when you recover.”

“Cool! You know, it’s best if it’s just you and me. They don’t really have many tables for more than two people. There’s always a line outside, so you can’t really hope a bigger table will free up just when you need it. You normally order one or two different curries… Oh, right, we’ll be going there for lunch, so we should each order two different ones and share them! That way, we’ll get to taste four different kinds in a single visit!”

“Yes, okay, we’ll do that.”

“Oh, and the rice! It comes with achar, which is like pickles, on top, and it’s not just to fill you up. It’s nice to get all those extras.”

“Chisato…”

“And the little dessert and coffee you get at the end are delicious, too!”

“I’m sure they are. We can talk about this some other time. What will you eat now? Something not hard to digest.”

“Um… Hmm… What else do I feel like eating…? Um…”

Chisato began thinking again, her gaze wandering as if she was following her thoughts around the room with her eyes. Her gaze stopped on the calendar on the wall.

“Oh…”

“Do you know what you want?”

“Yeah, but… Not sure I can ask for that…”

Chisato folded her arms and cocked her head to the side.

“But it’ll be extra work for you…,” she said.

“Is it something time-consuming?”

“Yeah. Sekihan.”

“Sticky rice is supposed to be bad for digestion.”

“But there’s no oil in the dish!”

“Yes, that’s true. It should be very nutritious, too… But if I start cooking that now, it will be quite late by the time it’s ready.”

“Oh, I don’t want you to make it yourself. It’s time-consuming because you’d have to get it tomorrow morning.”

“Sorry… Can you explain why?”

Chisato told Takina that she wanted red bean rice from a Japanese confectionery store on Kirakira Tachibana Shopping Street.

“But I could just go there now?”

“No, you see, they have a special early morning market day on that street tomorrow, and that’s when the confectionery store will be selling freshly steamed sekihan. I remember it being really good!”

Now Takina understood why getting the food for Chisato would be time-consuming—she’d have to get up early in the morning to go to that market.

“I can get it for you. It’s not a problem.”

“What, really?! You’ll buy me the sekihan?! You’ll have to be at the store super early! Oh, I’m so happy!”

“It’s no trouble at all, but we were talking about your dinner.”

“Oh right. The sekihan will be for tomorrow.”

“Well… I could boil some udon noodles for you. Will that be okay?”

They had quite a good amount of udon noodles in the freezer. Takina would only need to make some extra broth to feed both Chisato and the staff staying for the board game meetup. It would save her time. She was quite pleased with this idea.

“Oh, sure!”

“I might as well make udon soup. We should have a small clay pot somewhere. How about that? Hot udon soup with egg?”

“Sounds amazing! You sure you don’t mind cooking that for me?”

“I don’t mind doing that much for you.”

Takina had seen Mizuki make boiled tofu in a small nabe another day, so there must be at least one pot in the kitchen. Chisato would get her noodle soup served in that, while the other members would get theirs in wooden or porcelain bowls.

“I’ll go cook. You take it easy.”

“Okaaay!”

Chisato quickly lay down, pulling the cover over herself. She was smiling, her eyes darting to steal looks at Takina like a little child. The thought made Takina smile under the flu mask.

The wet towel fell off Chisato’s head when she lay down. Takina picked it up, placed it back on Chisato’s forehead, and stood up to leave.

“Thanks, Takina.”

It tickled Takina to have Chisato thank her like this, but she didn’t show it.

“I haven’t done anything yet. You can thank me later if you like the food.”

Takina left the room, closing the door behind her. She took off the face mask and the gloves and headed to the kitchen. They should have scallions in the fridge. She could fry them slowly, until they became melt-in-your-mouth soft on the inside, and use that as a topping for the noodles. Yes, she’d do that.

•

“What are you making?” asked Mizuki, watching Takina cooking something in a pot in the kitchen.

It was just before their closing time, and there were no customers, save the regulars staying late for the board games. With nothing to do, Mizuki chatted up Takina mostly to kill time.

“Oh, that’s unusual for you,” commented Mizuki.

Takina would normally make Kansai-style dashi broth, but since it was for stewing noodles, she wanted it to have more flavor. To achieve that, she made the katsuo broth richer than usual, and after adding soy sauce and a little bit of mirin, she also put in bite-sized chunks of chicken meat, which she had blanched in boiling water earlier to remove the odor.

“Oh, I see. We’re having noodle soup tonight?”

“Yes. But served in wooden bowls. We have enough for everyone. Can you bring them later? I chopped scallions for the topping.”

“Okaaay.”

“Oh, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

Takina took out something she’d found earlier in the fridge—kamaboko with a fancy pattern.

“Is this yours?” Takina asked Mizuki.

“Yeah, that’s mine. It’s for itawasa.”

“What’s that…?”

“Of course you wouldn’t know, being too young to drink. You slice the kamaboko thinly and dip it in soy sauce with wasabi, like you’d do with sashimi. It goes well with sake, especially ginjou grade!”

“Interesting. Could I use it? As another topping for the udon soup?”

“That’s not your regular kamaboko. It was pretty expensive…”

“Does that mean I can’t use it?”

Takina looked down at the kamaboko in her hand. Udon soup would look amazingly appetizing with a thick tempura prawn added to the soup, cooked until the batter absorbed the broth, becoming soft, but that would involve too much work, and it wouldn’t be good for Chisato to eat deep-fried foods while she was unwell. Then again, Takina didn’t want to serve Chisato an unsatisfyingly bare-bones version of the dish. Even just one or two slices of the kamaboko would liven up the soup…

“Oh, don’t give me that sad face! Argh, okay, fine! You can use it!”

Takina looked up in surprise. Mizuki waved her hand in the air to signal her surrender.

“You don’t mind?!”

“As long as everyone gets some of it.”

“Yes, of course!”

“Okay, I’ll leave you to it.”

Mizuki went back to the serving area.

The soup was ready, and Takina managed to secure kamaboko as the main topping. There were also eggs in the fridge, which she was going to add last. Was there anything else she could put in…? If her memory served her correctly, there was some shiitake. She found them in the fridge’s veggie drawer, removed the stalks, and cut a decorative cross in the cap of each mushroom. These would simmer in a strongly flavored broth made from water, mirin, soy sauce, and sugar.

It was also an option to cook shiitake directly in the noodle soup broth, letting their flavor seep into it, but Takina preferred to cook them separately so that their flavor would stand out better, making the dish more interesting.

“And now…the scallions.”

Takina had already finely chopped fresh scallions for everyone but Chisato. For her, she cut them into larger pieces and carefully fried them on the stove until they browned but weren’t burned. Delicately seared, they were delicious, but cooked too long and they wouldn’t taste good anymore.

Finally, all the parts of the dish were ready. Takina just had to assemble them and stew them in the noodle soup together for a little while. She had colorful toppings—shiitake mushrooms, kamaboko slices, and, last but not least, the egg yolk.

“Anything else…? Oh, maybe… Or maybe not…”

She found a packet of dried mochi cakes. On the one hand, mochi wasn’t good for digestion, but on the other, it was nutritious.

If Takina cut it into small pieces and cooked them until they were crispy, they would add a similar texture to the dish as tempura. And once they soaked up the broth, they’d get soggy but become incredibly delicious.

Ultimately, the mochi went in, too. A small amount surely wouldn’t hurt Chisato.

She put one mochi cake on the chopping board and proceeded to slice it with a kitchen knife, lining up the knife and then slowly pushing down with her body weight. The blade would slowly go through the hard mochi until it hit the chopping board. Takina repeated the process until she’d diced the whole mochi into finger-width pieces. She then laid them on a plate, taking care to space them sufficiently wide apart so that they wouldn’t stick to each other, and put them in the microwave for a few seconds.

The outside of the mochi was still hard, but inside, they were warm and soft. Cooking them in a microwave required care because if they stayed in there for too long, the insides would completely melt, and she didn’t want that. The main reason she microwaved the mochi was to make them roast quicker.

Takina transferred the delicately warm mochi cubes onto a crumpled aluminum foil sheet on top of a stove burner to roast them. Once they started swelling up, she watched them like a hawk. A few seconds could make the difference between a perfectly roasted mochi and a burnt mochi.

The slices swelled up and started turning golden brown. Takina waited until some dark spots appeared on the golden-brown parts, and then she quickly took the mochi off the stove and moved them to a plate. They tumbled on it, pleasantly crackling.

Everything was ready. Takina just had to combine it all in the pot.

“Okay.”

But before she did that, Takina wanted to check how hungry Chisato was. If she was starving, Takina could give her an extra half portion of noodles. If she wasn’t very hungry, she would take away a half portion.

Takina tidied up the kitchen, washed her hands, and redonned her mask and gloves. She headed to the tatami room at the back of the store…when she saw Mika come out.

“Were you checking on Chisato, Boss?”

“Ah, yes. Thank you for looking after her today.”

“But of course. Customers come here for your coffee, so you should stay with them while I take care of her. By the way, the udon is ready. Please tell everyone to help themselves.”

“Great, thank you.”

“I thought udon noodle soup would be good for Chisato.”

“Good idea. It warms the body.”

“Yes. But I’m not sure if she’ll be able to eat much.”

“Oh, she will. I’ve never seen her lose her appetite, no matter how she’s feeling,” Mika said with a smile.

Takina nodded.

“But let’s wait a while.”

“Why?”

Mika carefully opened the door to the tatami room. It was dark inside. Takina heard Chisato’s quiet, peaceful breathing.

“Let her sleep for a bit before bringing her food.”

“…Okay. It’s good I checked before finishing her portion.”

Mika nodded and went back to the customers. He wasn’t using his walking stick, but he wasn’t dragging his bad leg, walking quietly, perhaps worried about waking up Chisato.

Before closing the door, Takina peered into the room one last time. She’d been telling Chisato to rest, but Chisato had been resisting sleep until she finally couldn’t hold out. Her sleeping face was innocent and relaxed like a baby’s, her breathing even.

“Stubborn Chisato…,” Takina said.

She’d eat her dinner with the rest of the staff and bring Chisato her noodles later.

“Sleep well.”

She closed the door carefully so as not to make a sound and tiptoed back to the others.

•

“Ahhh! That was delicious! Thanks!”

Chisato gobbled up the udon soup so fast it was hard to believe she was sick. She drank the barley tea Takina had poured for her in big, greedy gulps, too. Takina hadn’t expected Chisato to eat every last bit of her dinner, raising the nabe to her mouth to polish off the soup. It should’ve made her happy, but she was simply too stunned to think about that.

“Ooof! I feel so hot…”

Chisato placed her hands down behind her and bent backward, away from the low table Takina had set up next to the futon. Beads of sweat were rolling down Chisato’s neck to her chest. Her forehead was glistening, too.

“You feel hot, but you’ll get cold if you keep sweat-drenched clothes on. Let me get you a fresh change of pajamas.”

“Thanks, Takina. There should be another pair in my sleepover bundle.”

“I’ll find it. I’ll bring you a wet towel, too, so you can freshen up.”

“I’d rather just take a shower.”

“Don’t be reckless. A wet towel will do just fine.”

“Fiiine.”

Takina took the empty dishes to the kitchen and returned with a steamy, hot, wet towel, fresh pajamas, and a change of underwear. She gave them to Chisato and sat down formally, with her legs folded under her, on the floor next to the futon.

“Thanks, but…”

“But…?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you waiting for? The towel will get cold if you don’t use it quickly.”

“Um, the thing is… I don’t feel very comfortable taking my clothes off while you’re watching…”

“But what if you lose your balance and fall over?”

“I’m not that sick!”

Thinking about it, if Chisato could go to the restroom by herself, she was unlikely to trip over while getting changed.

Takina turned around so that her back was toward Chisato.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

“I guess that’ll do…”

Takina waited, not thinking about anything in particular. The rustling behind her told her that Chisato was quickly changing her clothes, and then she noticed something next to the futon.

“Canned peaches?”

“Oh, that. Mizuki brought them. Straight out of the Showa era, right?” Chisato said with a laugh. “It’s nice of her, though.”

Mizuki must have visited Chisato when she woke up and Takina was busy making the noodle soup for her.

Looking around the room, Takina saw that someone had placed a device of some sort next to the sliding door. It was a small air purifier that also worked as a humidifier.

“That’s from Kurumi. No idea where she got it from! She set it up for me a little earlier.”

The sliding door wasn’t the main door to the room, but the door of the closet, which de facto was Kurumi’s room. It was kind of Kurumi to get the air purifier for Chisato, but she might have just been worried about catching Chisato’s bug. Takina had heard that people who worked from home had worse immunity compared to commuters who used public transport. For better or for worse, commuters were exposed to a huge variety of viruses and other pathogens, gradually building up immunity. Those who worked from home, though, weren’t regularly exposed to germs.

Just like with muscles, which would atrophy when not used, no matter how healthy someone’s lifestyle was, their immune system would weaken without stimuli.

But perhaps Takina was overthinking it, and Kurumi only had Chisato’s best interest in mind. Well, she couldn’t tell.

Takina collected Chisato’s slightly wet pajamas, underwear, and the towel she’d used to freshen herself up and took them away. Upon returning to the room, she found Chisato stretching on top of the futon.

“It was so nice to put on fresh clothes that I felt like stretching,” she explained.

When she was done, Chisato tied her hair into pigtails and lay down without Takina having to say anything. Which struck Takina as odd.

“All right, I’ll just rest in bed. You go and join in the games. They must’ve started already?”

Now it made sense—Chisato was being considerate.

“We have enough people today. They don’t need me.”

“Doesn’t matter if they need you. I want you to have fun! It’s not about just filling a spot so there are enough players. We don’t have game nights that often, so go and enjoy it!”

While Takina hesitated, wondering whether to go or not, someone knocked on the door.

“Come in!” Chisato called.

The door opened, and Mika peered into the room.

“Am I interrupting?” he asked.

When Takina assured him he wasn’t, he entered the room carrying a large Ikea bag, so full it was bulging.

“Some of our customers brought get-well gifts for you when they heard you were unwell,” he said to Chisato. “This one’s from Mr. Gotou.”

He reached inside the Ikea bag and pulled out a bunch of bananas.

Normally, it was easy to forget Gotou’s age—he wore a leather jacket and walked with a spring in his step—but the choice of bananas as a get-well gift was a reminder that the gray-haired man was up there in years.

“This one’s from Ms. Itou.”

Itou, the manga artist, got Chisato a cooling forehead pad.

“She always has these on hand, huh?”

“I’ve seen her use them when she’s struggling with deadlines,” agreed Takina.

“When she came in and heard you weren’t well, she quickly fished this out of her bag,” said Mika.

Chisato tore the packet open and stuck the pad to her forehead.

“Next, we have…vitamins from Ms. Kitamura.”

“Oh, nice! I’ll take some!”

Chisato opened the packet containing a week’s supply of vitamin pills, picked one out, and threw it into her mouth.

“Is this how you’re supposed to take them?” asked Takina.

“Dunno!”

Takina couldn’t believe Chisato would just put a gifted pharmaceutical product into her mouth without hesitation, without even checking what it was exactly or whether she was supposed to take it before a meal, for example. She read the information on the packet. Based on the list of ingredients, there was nothing to worry about in the pill, so Chisato should be fine… Still, Takina really wished Chisato wasn’t so careless.

“Here’s a box of jelly drinks from Mr. Yamadera. I’ll put it in the fridge for you… And Mr. Yoneoka got you three boxes of kinako sticks.”

“Nishijima kinako sticks!”

Kinako sticks were a type of old-fashioned candy made from glucose syrup and brown sugar sprinkled with kinako—roasted soybean flour—with a toothpick stuck into the bottom part. The manufacturer, Nishijima, had a factory in Sumida. It was in fact quite close to Kinshicho Station, so the locals were familiar with their products. Passersby always caught the smell of kinako—too mouth-watering to ignore. Anyone who happened to be hungry would inevitably get a terrible urge to head into the factory.

“Each box contains forty-five kinako sticks, and you got three… That is a lot. I also don’t think you should be eating these in bed…”

Kinako, honey, and unrefined sugar were undisputably nutritious, but Takina was mostly thinking about kinako powder dropping off the sticks and onto the quilt… Just thinking about it was almost unbearable.

The closet door slid open.

“Sorry, but that’s not for Chisato. It’s for me, for repairing the dude’s laptop.”

Mika threw the stack of three boxes to her, which she nimbly caught. Then the closet door slid closed.

For a few seconds, Takina’s, Chisato’s, and Mika’s gazes lingered on that door…

“Ahem. What else is there…?”

Mika moved on to the next gift without commenting on the blunder. They weren’t finished looking through all of them when Mizuki brought refreshments, but the low table was already covered with a pile of goodies. Mika picked out the things that needed to go in the fridge and left the room.

Chisato folded her hands in a gesture of thanks, looking at the gifts.

“I feel blessed! I really do!”

“I should have gotten you something, too,” said Takina.

“What? You’ve been looking after me, and you even made me a delicious noodle soup!”

“But I didn’t get you a get-well gift.”

“You already went above and beyond! And made me so happy! You’re the best! Thanks for everything, Takina!”

“…You’re welcome,” Takina said after a pause, feeling a bit embarrassed by the lavish praise.

“Oh, right! I’ve got to thank everyone who gave me gifts, too!”

Chisato jumped up to her feet, but she stopped when Takina grabbed her by the sleeve.

“No, that’ll do more harm than good. You’re sick, so stay in bed.”

“But Takina, it’ll only take a second!”

“You want to go to the customers looking like this?”

Not wearing makeup wasn’t a big deal, but Chisato was wearing a very thin set of pajamas with the top buttons of her shirt undone, revealing quite a lot of cleavage. It wasn’t outright provocative, but it would cause a stir among the male clientele if she suddenly appeared dressed like that.

“But I have to tell them thank you…”

“You can do that after you get better.”

“But I could just do it now, while everyone’s in the café…”

Chisato started thinking about her options, and Takina got worried that she might insist on getting changed and going out to the customers, so in turn, she started thinking about how to convince Chisato against it. After a while, Takina noticed that Chisato was looking at her intently.

“…What is it?”

“Well, how about this? You could record me on your smartphone and then show the video to everyone?”

Takina had to agree that Chisato’s incomplete state of dress wouldn’t matter if the customers only saw her on a small screen.

“That’s…fine, I suppose.”

“Yay! Let’s take the video now!”

When Takina got her smartphone out, Chisato stood with her legs wide apart, hands tightened into fists and braced against her sides, like she was about to whip out some karate or cheerleading moves.

“You look like you’re about to fight.”

“Oh, should I lie down on the futon for the video?”

“You don’t need to emphasize that you’re sick. Just don’t pose like you’re about to head into battle.”

“Hmm…”

Chisato thought for a moment, and then she sat down with her legs crossed on the futon with the pile of gifts behind her.

They were ready to start recording…but Chisato’s unbuttoned shirt was bugging Takina too much. She put the phone down again and went over to Chisato to do her buttons up.

“Oh, sorry. Forgot!”

“Don’t leave your shirt half-open. You’ll catch a chill. There you go. All good.”

“Thanks!”

“Are you ready to start?”

“Yup!”

Takina started recording a video.

“Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for the gifts! What can I say…? Seeing how much you all care made me so, so happy! I’ll do my best to beat this bug so you can all have your unrivaled, unbeatable, chart-topping beauty back in action as soon as possible! You’ll have to cope without me for a little while! Oh, and make the most of the board game night. Imagine I’m there with you! Okay, that’s it from Chisato Nishikigi! Over and out!”

Takina stopped recording.

“That sounds good, but what is that bit about a ‘chart-topping beauty’ about?”

“That’s just to say I’m the world’s prettiest?”

“The world’s prettiest?

“Yeah… What’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem. I was just asking because I hadn’t heard that expression before.”

“The customers will get it. Okay, go and show them the video!”

“Okay.”

Takina stood up and turned toward the door.

“And stay with them for the board games!”

Takina looked back at Chisato, who’d docilely gotten back into the bed and was watching Takina with a somewhat clever smile. It occurred to Takina that the video was also a ploy to get her to participate in the game night.

“I’m sure it’ll be fun!”

Should she be upset or happy that Chisato was trying so hard to get her to have fun…? Takina couldn’t stop a little smile from appearing on her lips.

“Yes… I’ll go now, but if you need any help, do let me know.”

“Will do.”

Takina was supposed to be looking after Chisato, but it ended up feeling like it was Chisato looking after her. Wondering how Chisato always managed to turn the tables like that, Takina headed to the café floor with the smartphone in her hand.

Several board games had been set up, not just on the low tables in the slightly raised tatami area but also on other tables around the café. Takina arrived during a break between games, when the players were regrouping before the next round. Perfect.

“May I have your attention please? I have a video message from Chisato for you…”

Everyone started laughing, to Takina’s great confusion. In the end, Gotou explained to her what was going on.

“Chisato was talking in such a loud voice, we could hear her from here!”

Everyone laughed again.

“No way!” they heard Chisato shout from the back room, which was met with another burst of laughter.

Chisato’s voice really did carry to the café floor when she was being loud.

The customers started shouting back at her.

“Get better soon!”

“Or Takina will steal your poster-girl position!”

“Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to get for you!”

“Don’t just watch movies all day!”

“Okay!” Chisato shouted in reply.

Takina thought to herself again that Chisato really was a mystery. She was a Lycoris, an assassin secretly purging society of evil. She was supposedly the most talented Lycoris in history, which should mean she had perfected everything they were taught as Lycoris agents… Yet she was fully a member of the local community, loving the attention, which she got lots of because everyone liked her and cared about her.

Without a doubt, Chisato was an exception to the rules, but whether that was a desirable quality for a Lycoris? That Takina wasn’t quite sure about.

“If Chisato’s still in bed tomorrow, I’ll have to buy her something nice to eat.”

“What do you think she’d like?”

“Hmm, got to think about it…”

“It sounds to me as if you were kind of enjoying the situation?”

“Uh-oh, you got us, Takina!”

“Looking forward to seeing what you get me tomorrow!” Chisato shouted from her room.

“Go to sleep!”

“Your job’s to get better!”

The exchange was followed by booming laughter, both from Chisato and the customers.

“Well, everyone, shall we start the next session?”

“Yes, let’s get to it!”

“Takina, would you like to join our table?”

“Come join us, Takina!”

“Huh? Oh, okay!”

Distracted from her thoughts when her name was called, Takina quickly went over to the table where she was invited.

The next round of games began. Kurumi held her cards in one hand, using the other to pick up kinako sticks. Mika started brewing coffee. Mizuki and Gotou were sitting together at one end of the counter, drinking. Takina rolled the dice, playing with a few of the regulars.

The hours grew late with everyone having a jolly good time.

•

It was early morning, only half past six, when Takina was already out and about. She was going to the morning market to buy the sekihan Chisato had requested.

The market’s location, Kirakira Tachibana Shopping Street, was a little far both from LycoReco and Takina’s home. Café LycoReco was to the south from the old radio tower, while Kirakira Tachibana Shopping Street was to the east of it. The walk may not have been quite three kilometers, but it was certainly more than two. It was early summer, though, which still felt quite a lot like spring, and the sky was clear. It was pleasant to walk in that weather, so Takina didn’t mind going the extra distance. She did choose the shortest route. This took her through back streets she didn’t normally pass through, which was actually quite nice. Not that there were any particular attractions on the way. Just some old, small businesses here and there, with shop fronts that made you wonder whether they were still open or had shut down for good.

In the quiet of the morning, Takina’s loafers rhythmically tapped against the ground. Her long black hair and her Lycoris skirt swayed as she walked. And, of course, she ended up going the wrong way.

When a street she was expecting to be straight turned out to be a winding one, Takina realized she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. There were many old streets in this part of town, which made it a bit difficult to navigate.

Takina checked her position on her smartphone map app and realized she hadn’t gone that far off the intended route. She decided to just keep going instead of backtracking.

A short while later, she arrived at an unusual park.

“Is this safe…?” she asked herself, looking up at a massive structure at the center of the park, which was empty at that time.

It was an enormous slide.

There was a giant concrete podium, resembling a stage, with a metal frame on top of it, which Takina estimated to be ten meters high overall. Two silvery metal slides extended at a rather steep angle from there to the ground.

Ten meters—that was as high as a three-story apartment building. Takina looked around at the surrounding houses. It seemed to her that the slide was taller than they were. The view from the top must have been nice. You could probably see the old radio tower really well from that height… But it must also have been quite scary at the top.

Making another slide like that was probably impossible, given modern safety regulations. Truly a relic of a time when regulations were far laxer, yet it was in a very good shape—proof that children still played on it and grown-ups kept up with maintenance. It was so well looked-after, the slide didn’t seem seriously dangerous despite its shocking height.

Chisato would probably be dying to go up, even if she was wearing a skirt.

“Well, I’m not going to do that,” Takina said to herself with a little giggle.

And so she walked away from Kyojima Minami Park. After that detour, she passed through a residential area, and once she was out of it, she finally saw a “Kirakira Tachiba Shopping Street” sign on a utility pole. She followed the signs to the grounds of Tamaru Shrine, which kind of merged with a local park. It was supposedly a place where you could pray for luck and fortune. Since she was passing by anyway, Takina pressed her palms together in front of the shrine. She wasn’t religious, but somehow, sacred places had a special atmosphere in the early morning hours.

Takina left the shrine and entered the shopping street from the south side. This downtown street seemed to be designed for pedestrians rather than motor traffic, yet strangely, it didn’t feel cramped. There were signs on the lamp posts with “Downtown Community Spirit—Kirakira Tachibana” written on them. The bright colors of the signs and the heavy advertising of the shopping street reminded Takina more of Kansai customs.

It was early, so not all stores were open yet, but there were people milling about, and some shopkeepers were loudly advertising their wares. Takina was interested in a stall selling warm soups, but she resisted the urge to walk over since she’d already made soup for the day, using leftover broth from the previous night. She forced herself to look away from the soup stall. Sekihan was what she had come for and she didn’t need anything else… That was what she had to remind herself.

Chisato would have probably told her to just buy some soup, justifying it in a way that didn’t make much sense to Takina…for example, by saying it was a special occasion. Maybe Takina should get something for herself, too, instead of only doing shopping for Chisato…?

Takina kept thinking about it for a while after leaving the soup stall behind her. In the end, she decided that it would be too inconvenient to walk over two kilometers with soup, even if it was sold in a sealed container. If she weren’t running this errand for Chisato, she might have gotten some soup and enjoy it on a bench near that shrine she’d passed by earlier.

“Today’s not the day…”

She couldn’t quite get that soup stall out of her head, but she continued north nonetheless. Then she saw a line of people near the north exit of Kirakira Tachibana Shopping Street. There it was—the Japanese confectionery store Sagami An. The end of the line was farther north, so Takina had to pass by the store before joining the end. She checked the products on display. They were selling sekihan in two sizes: small or large, both very cheap. One glance was enough to tell they were freshly made since steam was rising from the rice. Fresh, warm sekihan…

“Oooh…,” Takina said without thinking, salivating.

She’d learned in her classes that Japanese confectioneries had a long history of excellent glutinous rice recipes, and some considered sekihan to fall into the Japanese desserts category. And freshly made, it must have been really delicious. Takina was certain of it the moment she laid eyes on the red rice.

When she joined the line, an elderly gentleman in front of her turned his head to look at her. Perhaps it was unusual to see a schoolgirl in uniform waiting in a long line to buy sekihan early in the morning.

“Are you buying it for yourself…?” the old man asked her quietly.

Takina shook her head.

“No. My friend who’s not feeling well said she’d really like sekihan from this store.”

“Ah, I see. Sagami An’s sekihan really is delicious. You should buy the large portion. It disappears all too quickly.”

The large portion was indeed quite big. Takina had been planning to get the small one since it was just for Chisato… But if the sekihan was as delicious as it seemed, she might want to try some, too.

“I think I’ll take your advice,” she told the old man, who smiled and turned to face toward the front of the line again.

A while later, Takina saw the old man leave the store with two large servings of sekihan. He had a ring on his finger, so she guessed he bought one for himself and another for his wife.

It was finally her turn. With the steaming rice in front of her, Takina was practically drooling again. The shop clerk asked her which size she wanted.

“Erm, large, please… Sorry, can you make it two large portions?” she asked on the spur of the moment.

Seeing the old man walk out with two portions, she felt as if getting just one wouldn’t make her trip worth it. She could always leave the extra portion for Mika, Mizuki, or Kurumi to eat. It would surely not go to waste.

The shop clerk filled two plastic boxes with sekihan, sprinkled toasted sesame seeds mixed with salt on them using a spoon, and put the lids on the boxes, securing them with rubber bands.

“Thank you… Oh!”

When the clerk passed Takina the bag with the two boxes, she felt that the rice wasn’t just warm—it was really hot. Chisato was going to love this. Takina really wanted her friend to eat the sekihan while it was hot… Or rather, she wanted to eat it while it was hot. Her feet moved fast as she headed back to the café.

Takina’s phone vibrated in her pocket while she was walking—Chisato had sent her a sticker to show she woke up. Takina let her know she would be arriving at the café soon. As soon as she was done typing the message, she sped up to a jog. She had get to LycoReco before the food cooled down.

Takina was hungry and excited, too. She was glad she went out to buy the sekihan before eating breakfast.

•

A certain writer from the north once wrote that temperature was the most important factor when serving food. On that point, the sekihan was perfect by the time Takina arrived at the café. She wouldn’t need to resort to crude techniques like warming it up in the microwave.

She washed her hands, got a rice paddle out, and transferred the sekihan from the plastic boxes into rice bowls.

Chisato was just getting up. Takina warmed up some of the soup she had prepared the previous night and was ready to serve a proper breakfast.

“Wow! You really got me sekihan from Kirakira Tachibana! It’s been so long since I last had it! Thanks, Takina!”

“You’re welcome. Let’s eat.”

They sat at a low table in the tatami area on the café floor, facing each other. They politely pressed their hands together, then began their meal.

Takina started with the soup. She made it by cooking sliced carrots and daikon radish in broth leftover from the udon soup. The veggies had been sitting in the soup all night, absorbing the flavors of the rich broth. A charming blend of flavors.

After some soup, Takina turned her attention to the sekihan. It was just the right temperature. She picked some up with her chopsticks. From how they felt in her hand, she could tell that the sekihan was denser than regular rice.

The dish was simply sticky rice, colored by the red beans it had been steamed with, yet it looked irresistibly appetizing. Having sekihan for breakfast seemed like a real treat.

Takina couldn’t wait to taste it. She brought a chunk of the sekihan to her mouth, full of anticipation, and took a bite. It was warm and sticky. The first things she tasted were the aromatic toasted black sesame and a bit of salt, followed by the mushy red beans. Chewing gradually released their slight sweetness and umami flavors. A sigh, which sounded a bit like a soft laugh, escaped Takina’s mouth. As soon as she swallowed that first bite, she instinctively wanted more.

“…It is good,” she said, downplaying her appreciation for the food.

About as delicious as she’d expected. Better than expected, even.

“Mmm!” Chisato moaned, clutching her chopsticks. “This is it! Absolutely fantastic!”

Chisato’s reaction made happiness well up inside Takina’s heart.

“Thanks for this, Takina! You went so far to get it!”

“I didn’t mind. It was quite a pleasant walk, actually. It helped me work up my appetite.”

The sekihan was very good—that was a fact—but food tasted even better when you were hungry, and Takina was pretty hungry after walking to the store and back on an empty stomach. It was likely that food tasted much better to her than to Chisato, a thought she found a bit amusing.

“By the way, I went the wrong way and came across a park with a gigantic slide.”

“Oh, I know that one! It’s opposite a fish market!”

“Ah, that’s right. There was a fish market next to it.”

“How did you like the slide? Pretty scary, right?”

“I didn’t get on it.”

“…What?”

They sipped their soup, ate the rice with red beans, and talked without a break. A pleasant morning.

Having lived in that part of Tokyo for a long time, Chisato had a lot to say about it. Once she got to talk about a cake store that used to be on the shopping street Takina visited that morning, she wouldn’t stop. It was apparently a fancy place with a French aesthetic, out of place on a local shopping street, and they sold the most amazing croissants…

As Takina told Chisato what she saw on her walk to the store, Chisato got even more excited about every little thing she didn’t know about.

Even though their conversation flowed nonstop, they were suddenly surprised to discover that all of their soup and rice had disappeared, as if by magic.

“Aw, we finished it all already? That was quick!”

“It was better than I expected.”

“Right?!”

“I was worried it might be too much, but it wasn’t.”

“Yeah.”

Chisato glanced over at the counter. Takina followed her gaze…to the second box of sekihan.

The girls exchanged looks and smiled awkwardly.

“We probably shouldn’t eat the rest, right…?”

“Definitely not, Chisato. Remember that you haven’t been well…”

“No more, then…”

“No more.”

They held each other’s gaze in silence. It was obvious that each of them was hoping the other would suggest they shared the second box of sekihan, too. The fact that she had this urge and that Chisato could see it made Takina somewhat embarrassed, so she abruptly changed the topic.

“Oh, tell me, Chisato, how’s your temperature?”

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know.”

“Why don’t we check? The thermometer’s still in the other room, I think?”

The girls pressed their palms together in gratitude for the meal, and then they went to the tatami room at the back.

The bed was messy, so Takina straightened out the cover and pillow, then asked Chisato to sit down. She found the thermometer on the floor next to the futon and passed it to Chisato, who pressed it into her armpit. Takina stood up.

“I’ll go wash the dishes. Call me when the thermometer beeps.”

“You went to the morning market for me, and you’re doing all the chores… I feel well looked-after!”

“I simply want you to get better as soon as possible. Everyone’s wishing you that.”

“I feel blessed! Hmm… Maybe I should just stay in bed today and enjoy getting spoiled!”

“Don’t be silly.”

Chisato, sitting on the futon with her legs crossed, smiled meekly.

“But it’s kinda nice to have people fussing over you, you know?” she said.

Maybe it was. Takina never really had people fussing over her, so she wouldn’t know. She thought that you had to have a special relationship with people to feel comfortable with letting them pamper you while you weren’t well… It was a privilege available only to special people. Takina, meanwhile, wasn’t special, like most people out there. She wouldn’t mention this to Chisato, though. An extraordinary person wouldn’t understand ordinary people’s feelings.

“Please just try to get better. You wanted to go with me to Spice Café, remember?”

“Oh yeah!”

“So focus on recovering,” Takina said and left the room. “Oh, actually…”

She had checked out Spice Café on the way to Kirakira Tachibana Shopping Street that morning. The café and the shopping street happened to be close to each other. Takina thought that if she and Chisato were going to visit the café someday, they might as well walk over to the shopping street afterward. It seemed like a good plan to her—if they were making the trip to that area, they might as well visit both attractions.

The walk was pleasant for Takina even when she went by herself, early in the morning. But a walk with Chisato would be even more enjoyable.

Takina turned on her heel and opened the door she’d just closed, eager to tell Chisato about her idea.

“Chisato, what do you think about—?”

“Hrrrngh!”

Chisato was frenetically rubbing the tip of the thermometer… What was she trying to do?

At first, Takina was simply confused.

“What are you doing with that, Chisato…?”

“Yikes!”

Chisato looked up, startled. The guilty look on her face told Takina everything.

•

“Give her an inch, and she’ll take a mile,” Mizuki said with a jaded laugh, watching from a counter seat as Chisato ran around the café floor, serving customers. They were nearing the busiest time of the day.

Takina put her hands on her hips.

“Exactly,” she agreed, her voice betraying that she was really peeved.

She got Chisato to confess that she had actually been perfectly fine since having the udon soup after her nap the other day.

“Hey, guuuys! Can you do some work, too? I just recovered from a cold!” Chisato complained, but no one budged. Takina found her cries for help particularly unconvincing.

Chisato had admitted that once she felt fine, she waited for everyone to leave, and then she and Kurumi played video games until morning, eating kinako sticks. Knowing the true reason Chisato stubbornly rejected Takina’s offer to stay with her overnight was so she could play games made Takina rather upset.

But maybe she was overthinking it? After all, Chisato had told her she just didn’t want Takina to lose sleep on her account, as that’d be bad for her health. And Chisato would have felt guilty.

Takina could only guess at Chisato’s true motivations, but it was undisputably true that Chisato had deceived her. She had every right to be angry—at least that was what she believed. Chisato said she’d faked still being unwell to stay in bed after that all-nighter, but that was no excuse.

Chisato came over to the counter.

“I’m sowwy, mmmkay? I won’t do that again,” she said, puffing her cheeks angrily as if she was the victim there.

Again, everyone ignored her…with one exception.

Mika came out from the kitchen.

“Let’s not be so hard on her. Chisato apologized for what she did. Isn’t it time to forgive her?” he suggested with a strained smile.

“We need to be harder on her,” Takina objected. “We Lycoris are supposed to cultivate both mental and physical resilience, yet Chisato succumbed to a common cold, which proves that she’s been slacking off.”

“Takina has spoken!” Mizuki laughed.

Chisato pouted and mumbled under her breath, “Takina? More like Spartakina.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing!”

“Listen, you got unwell because you’re not taking care to maintain a healthy lifestyle. We can’t help staying up all night when we get assignments, but neglecting basic self-care and going to the movies right after a mission is the height of irresponsi— Cough!”

As one, Chisato, Mizuki, and Mika fixed their eyes on Takina.

“Huh…?”

Takina’s hand went to her throat. She had a funny feeling inside… And she thought she was feeling hot because she was angry, but maybe she did have a temperature…

“Er… Sorry, it’s just… Cough! Uh, excuse me…”

Mizuki let out a long sigh.

“Get your act together, both of you!”

Chapter 4: One’s Duties

The Lycoris—named after a flower—were Japan’s secret peacekeepers. Agents with the highest First rank were distinguished by red uniforms. Yet the Firsts weren’t the only central figures to the Lycoris organization.

Still, to be recognized as a First Lycoris, an agent would need to demonstrate abilities at an extremely high level. The requirements were so hard to meet that only a very small number of agents had been promoted to that rank across the organization’s history. Seeing that the Lycoris were active throughout Japan, it was impossible to base their operations around the extremely scarce First Lycoris agents.

The main force quietly removing criminals or other individuals who threatened to disrupt order in Japan were the agents in white—the Third Lycoris.

While their abilities were far from perfect, the Thirds possessed a quality that made them extremely effective as Lycoris agents. As long as they met the minimum requirements for the use of firearms, then they were able to carry out Lycoris missions with sufficient backup.

The lack of skill of the Thirds was offset by their sheer number. The organ supervising the Lycoris—Direct Attack—could readily deploy them without worrying about potential losses affecting the functionality of the organization, and so a lot of the missions were carried out by those of the lowest rank.

The Second Lycoris agents, as their name implied, stood between the Firsts and the Thirds in terms of their ability and numbers. They were the main force in the big cities, where the missions tended to be far more complex, demanding a finer set of abilities and agents working in smaller teams.

Lycoris from the lower ranks could work toward promotion by developing their abilities and passing certain tests, but they had no control over the one characteristic that made them so effective: being young girls.

They had to project an aura of weakness, harmlessness, and vulnerability, using school uniforms as camouflage, allowing them to blend in with the ordinary citizenry. It was this image that offered them the best protection and, at the same time, was their greatest weapon.

It was for this reason that the Lycoris were limited to handguns as their weapons, thin and not very durable body armor, and why they wore skirts, which definitely were not an advantage in battle.

The sacrifices had to be made for the agents to come off as completely non-threatening so the enemies would not see them coming until it was too late.

The need to maintain this facade was the biggest obstacle in advancing to higher ranks.

The girls had a very limited span of time they could devote to training, and extreme training could backfire. The agents could pass for schoolgirls only until their late teenage years. They could only be trained once they were old enough to follow instructions, so overall, they might have less than ten years to learn their profession. Proper combat training could only begin once the girls met the physical requirements, which happened around the time they became teenagers.

In the span of several years, the girls had to learn about Japanese society and its customs and about what girls their age would normally know and how they behaved so that they could masquerade as ordinary Japanese schoolgirls. And this was in addition to acquiring the highly specialized Lycoris skills and mastering the art of seeming harmless at all times.

Third Lycoris were deployed often because they could already be put to work after short training, compensating for their inexperience with the greatest asset of the Lycoris—their appearance. They were much younger than Second and First Lycoris, so their identity as little girls could be used to even better effect.

With their small hands, poor musculature, and low body weight, the Thirds couldn’t control recoil when firing .45 ACP—which was standard for the Lycoris—or even when using heavier 9mm subsonic rounds. But it wasn’t a problem if they got the job done with a single shot. Their tactic was to fire at the target from close enough that the attack would be guaranteed to hit and be fatal. It was this tactic that made it possible for Third Lycoris to successfully carry out extremely difficult tasks such as assassinating high-profile targets surrounded by bodyguards in public settings ever since the beginning of the organization.

To an outsider, it might seem that the Thirds were the epitome of the Lycoris, but Lycoris themselves would agree that it was the Firsts who deserved that title, that they were the Lycoris par excellence.

The First Lycoris—pretty young girls who didn’t rely on ambushing their target, had the skill and knowledge to overwhelm a target in battle using only very basic equipment, and possessed abilities that were totally at odds with their appearances. Yet missions that required them to unleash their full potential were few and far between. For the most part, they merely supervised lower-ranked Lycoris on their missions, and the task Fuki Harukawa, one of the rare First Lycoris, had been assigned that day was no exception…until an unexpected gunshot rang out.

•

It was another tedious mission. It was forty past two at night. Fuki Harukawa and Sakura Otome, a Second Lycoris who had only recently become Fuki’s partner, were hiding in a dark corner of a park in a rural area outside Tokyo. The park was quite large, but the playground equipment and other facilities were poorly maintained. For a long time, the girls had nothing to do except swat away mosquitoes, which would occasionally fly to them.

“Dunno why that is, but since I got paired with you, I feel like they stopped picking me out for missions so often,” Sakura complained.

“Seems like it.”

Sakura hung her head.

The navy-blue color of Second Lycoris uniforms was modeled after classic Japanese school uniforms. It faded into the darkness, offering good camouflage at night while also working as a disguise for the Lycoris in urban settings. Except that in Sakura’s case, her short hair with an undercut compromised the “ordinary schoolgirl” disguise.

Besides the un-schoolgirl-like hairstyle, Sakura was quite muscular. She had a very sturdy build for a fifteen-year-old and had to take extra care not to appear intimidating. She stood out even more next to Fuki, who was very petite.

Sakura wore uniforms one size larger than her usual clothing size, presumably in order to conceal her muscles…but Fuki wasn’t sure that actually helped at all. Maybe Sakura had been given bigger uniforms in anticipation of her growing into them soon.

“I had it in my head that here, at HQ, in a big city like Tokyo, you guys were dealing with shoot-outs on a daily basis…”

“There is more work here compared to Hokkaido,” Fuki assured Sakura. “But we also have more Lycoris. And since you got paired up with me, you shouldn’t expect to be in action often.”

“You don’t mean more often?! I thought getting buddied up with a First meant we’d be, like, dancing with bullets, fighting real nasty son-of-a-gun types!”

Fuki and Sakura had been partners only for a short time, but Fuki was already aware that Sakura’s abilities exceeded what she’d read about her in the files. Sakura loved action more than low-key jobs. She carried out her tasks efficiently, of course, but she clearly wanted more. And no wonder—her skills were being underutilized.

Sakura had large hands with long fingers, which already put her at an advantage compared to very young Lycoris struggling to hold a gun properly. And Sakura was a good shot, too. Not as good as Fuki’s previous partner, but still remarkable.

Fuki wasn’t sure if it was thanks to being raised in the great Hokkaido outdoors or what, but Sakura was naturally robust, with a dog-like love for being active. As a Lycoris, she was more suited to fighting than assassination.

Which is probably why they assigned Sakura to me, Fuki thought. In missions that did require the skill set of a First Lycoris, a partner who looked harmless but also lacked strength would only get in the way. Partners of Firsts had to be able to fight, even if they were only Seconds.

“We get called only when the shit hits the fan. If there’s no work for us, that means everything’s going well, so be glad for that.”

“Yeah, but I was supposed to contribute something, too!”

“You’re the shooter in normal missions?”

“A trained monkey can do that! I want to do stuff nobody else can…”

“The key to an organization’s success is members who can be relied on to consistently carry out routine tasks without question.”

“So you’re saying it’s the average people pulling all the weight…?”

“You’d be surprised at how rare such members actually are.”

Fuki folded her arms and sighed, gazing at the sky. Her previous partner also wasn’t one of those do-as-you’re-told members. She either refused to or was unable to follow instructions, and she’d do things she hadn’t been asked to… That ultimately made her a liability to the DA. Or rather, she was a liability to everyone around her.

Sakura at least followed her orders even when she wasn’t happy with them, which was something Fuki appreciated even more than Sakura’s competency. What annoyed her the most was people who did what they wanted without any regard for others.

Work was work. Tasks to be completed matter-of-factly. Emotions and personal beliefs shouldn’t come into play. That was how Fuki saw it anyway.

“Meh… Doesn’t sound like there’ll be anything for us tonight…”

On their headsets, they heard the Thirds report to HQ, and HQ responded with more instructions. The mission was progressing as planned, with no surprises.

The target that night was a man in possession of a single-shot homebrew firearm he fashioned out of shotgun parts, so it’d work with shotgun shotshells. Based on that one sentence, it might be inferred that he was a very dangerous type of person, but he actually used the gun only to hunt in the mountains.

The man had been a hunter for more than a decade. His friends tried to persuade him to just use a half-rifled shotgun with sabots or just a plain old rifle, but he was an oddball who wanted to use shotgun slugs to hunt bears solo.

While making a gun at home was already breaking the law, the man didn’t fit the profile of someone likely to cause trouble, so the DA just kept him under observation. If the hunter suddenly got some crazy idea and tried to shoot a person rather than a bear, or rather, if his actions indicated that he might be so inclined, Lycoris agents would be deployed to deal with him.

And in fact, out of the blue, something made the man leave his house in Saitama and travel to a rural area outside of Tokyo, bringing his homemade gun with him. Hunting was, of course, not permitted in that area.

The DA promptly took Fuki and Sakura off the mission they were on and dispatched them as well as two Third Lycoris, whose names Fuki didn’t know, to deal with this emergency.

The target had stopped his car in a parking lot five hundred meters from where Fuki and Sakura were on standby and turned his engine off. The parking lot wasn’t supervised. It was outside a public facility, disused for many years. Weeds were growing through cracks in the asphalt, and the entrance had been blocked with “no entry” tape and long-neglected road cones. Judging from the dilapidated look of both the parking lot and the park, they had probably been under the same management.

With woods around and fields empty but for rows of polytunnels, this was the perfect place for someone who was up to no good. Perhaps the man wanted to try out his DIY gun, but it would be a rather strange choice on his part to bring a gun for hunting big game in the mountains to an abandoned place outside a big city, considering the risks involved. Fuki’s higher-ups reckoned that the man was planning to kill someone, destroy something, or sell the gun, which necessitated that the Lycoris get involved. Fuki and Sakura were ordered to take positions in the park adjacent to the parking lot, where they had a good view of it, while the Thirds dealt with the hunter.

Ambushing a target sitting in his parked car was a job Third Lycoris could handle on their own, but if the hunter was going to sell the gun, whoever arrived to buy it off him would have to be taken care of, too. Potential additional targets, wary and arriving in their own cars, would have been too much for Third Lycoris to tackle.

New orders came in. It wasn’t the comms officer this time, but Commander Kusunoki herself.

“Get in position. Don’t let the target open fire. Eliminate him while he’s still in the car. Leave the body inside the car and tow it away.”

The Thirds quickly acknowledged the orders.

“Commander, do you have any orders for us?” asked Fuki.

But it was the comms officer who responded to her.

“We haven’t detected any other cars heading your way.”

In that case, there was no point in continuing to watch the parking lot entrance.

“Understood. We will move to a better position to support the Thirds.”

“Affirmative,” said Kusunoki this time.

Disliking inefficiency, Kusunoki always issued orders directly instead of having the comms officer relay them like a game of telephone.

Fuki signaled to Sakura with her eyes, and they started walking. There was probably nobody around who would’ve seen them, but they kept to the shadows nonetheless, heading to the rusty signboard by the entrance to the parking lot, behind which they hid. There were no streetlamps around, but the light of the moon was enough for them to scan the area when they peered from behind the signboard. Fuki could just about make out the front of the hunter’s car in the dim light. The distance between them and the car was less than a hundred meters.

The target’s car was a well-used kei-class Suzuki Jimny, a very common model. Based on the tires and suspension, it hadn’t been modified to be bulletproof, which would’ve greatly increased the vehicle’s weight.

The Jimny was parked facing the parking lot entrance, with a dilapidated building behind it, as if the hunter had looped around the lot before parking the car, which begged the question: Why? Fuki tried to think of a reason why he’d do that. To make it quicker to exit? But his car was the only one in this spacious parking lot. Also, the hunter would need to turn the steering wheel first to drive out of the lot, so it didn’t really save him any effort to turn the car toward the exit when parking.

“Huh,” said Sakura.

Fuki looked at her partner, who was staring at the car with one hand over her eyes, as if she were shielding them from the glare of the sun—pointless given that it was the dead of the night.

“We’d better be careful, Fuki. He’s in the driver’s seat, holding a gun… I can see the stock, so it’s either a rifle or a shotgun.”

Fuki couldn’t see those details, but she trusted Sakura, who had excellent eyesight, maybe because she grew up in the countryside.

A thought crossed Fuki’s mind that the hunter might be planning to kill himself, but she quickly rejected that possibility. If he wanted to commit suicide, he could’ve done it anywhere. There was no need to travel so far, unless this place was important to him for some reason… But if so, he’d have gotten out of his car and entered the building, surely.

Fuki’s eyes darted to the building at the back of the parking lot. It must have been sealed off before, but most of the windows on the first floor and the front doors were broken, so it was possible to get inside. Also, if this building really was important to the hunter, he wouldn’t have turned his car away from it. So that couldn’t be it.

The more Fuki thought about it, the more inscrutable the hunter’s objective seemed. She had a feeling that eliminating this guy was a matter of absolute urgency. His motives and intentions were unclear, which meant he was dangerous, especially as he had the means to kill in his hand that very moment. It was justified to describe the situation as scary.

“I wish the Lilybell could take this one,” said Fuki.

The safest and quickest way to get rid of the hunter would be to snipe him, but Lycoris agents weren’t trained to be snipers, and they didn’t carry rifles. The Lilybell, on the other hand, had a bigger arsenal at their disposal and were ludicrously well-trained to use a variety of weapons. To them, it wouldn’t make any difference if the target was inside a car. Shooting a stationary target from a distance was child’s play to them.

The Lycoris couldn’t simply ask the Lilybell to help, though. It would take a threat menacing society as a whole for the sister organization to take action. Preemptively eradicating dangerous individuals wasn’t something they did.

And Fuki was sure that Commander Kusunoki was convinced that this mission could be accomplished by her own underlings, the Lycoris. As long as their commander didn’t think it was impossible for her Lycoris to carry out the task, she didn’t hesitate to deploy them, even when their school uniforms no longer served the function of camouflage, given the place and time. While some might accuse Kusunoki of poor judgment, Fuki thought it was the opposite. She’d been observing Kusunoki since the woman became their commander and thought that—

“Beginning operation,” a Third Lycoris announced on their comms, interrupting Fuki’s musings.

Two Lycoris in white uniforms silently emerged from the shrubbery at the back of the Jimny. They crouched behind the car, holding .45-caliber Glocks with suppressors—standard equipment for Tokyo Lycoris. Keeping a crouching position so that they were below the car’s windows, one of them went around to the front of the car on the right side to where the driver was sitting, and the other went around on the left side, sticking close to the car’s frame, over to the front. Getting to the driver’s side, the Lycoris on the right stood up and fired through the window. Immediately after that first shot, the Lycoris at the front of the car stood up and fired, too. They had the target in crossfire and kept firing. After one of them fired five rounds, and the other six, they stopped.

They waited a few seconds, and then the Lycoris on the driver’s side opened the car’s door to look inside. Meanwhile, the Lycoris at the front of the car kept her gun aimed as before.

“That was neat,” Sakura said to Fuki, who had to agree.

If she was honest, she thought this mission was pretty hard for Third Lycoris. Their appearance only made them stand out like sore thumbs in this setting, and synchronizing their actions was extremely important in this case.

Firing through car windows changed the bullets’ trajectory, and even with round-nose bullets, the girls’ .45 caliber guns weren’t great for penetrating obstacles. In order to ensure the target was killed, they had to fire multiple times in quick succession, which wouldn’t be a problem for a big man, but they were delicate, very young girls.

Those two, though, did the job right. Fuki was especially impressed by how the girl at the front of the car waited a moment before standing up when her partner was already shooting.

The driver’s seat was on the right side, and most Japanese people were right-handed. Since the target was in the driver’s seat, it would have been harder for him to shoot to the right than straight ahead or to the left. Even if he did notice the Lycoris beside his door before she attacked, there’d be quite a delay before he could open fire at her, especially since he was using a rifle or some other long gun with a stock.

If the Lycoris who was in front of the car were to open fire first, the target might have still been able to shoot her back. He’d have a momentary chance to aim at her and pull the trigger even after getting shot. Anticipating this, the Lycoris on the right was the first to attack, with the one at the front following with a slight delay.

From where she was standing, Fuki couldn’t have seen exactly what had happened, but she guessed that the hunter panicked after getting shot from the right side and tried to turn and point his gun at the attacker when the second Lycoris revealed herself and started shooting from the other direction… The man’s chances had been very slim indeed with that setup.

“Those two are being considered for promotion,” Fuki told Sakura.

“Yeah, I can see why!”

The Third Lycoris in the driver’s seat stuck her head inside the car.

“Target eliminated,” she reported on the comms, stepping back and closing the car door.

Only then did her partner lower her gun.

“Well done. We’ll take care of the rest. Mission complete. Pull out,” responded Commander Kusunoki.

Even from a distance, Fuki could see tension leaving the two younger girls. They high-fived with their left hands, each still holding her gun in the right hand.

Fuki thought they seemed like good friends.

“Right. Another mission where we were only spectating,” Sakura said in a bored tone.

“And that’s fine. Be glad it all went well. Now let’s go—”

BANG!

The explosion echoed through the parking lot. Out of the corner of her eye, Fuki saw something at the front of the car: the headlight shattering into pieces. The impact had knocked over the two Third Lycoris.

Fuki immediately pulled out her gun from the satchel bag on her back, grabbing Sakura by the collar and pulling her down to the ground, where they were hidden behind the signboard.

“Take cover!” Fuki shouted to the Thirds without using the comms.

The younger girls were clearly shocked, but they quickly got up to their feet and started running, holding onto their guns. They both chose the same direction, though, which they realized wasn’t good, and they both stopped and looked at each other, confused. Their lack of experience showed. Their seniors would have known that if, by a stroke of bad luck, they happened to flee in the same direction, stopping was the last thing they should do.

Another explosion split the air.

The suppressor on the gun of one of the Thirds burst into pieces. The gun got knocked out of her hand, and the girl fell over.

Someone was clearly shooting at them. The bullet had hit the suppressor. The sound of the gunshot was unfamiliar to Fuki, so she couldn’t guess what gun the enemy was using, but it sounded very powerful.

“Fuki, they’re shooting from inside that building! I saw a massive muzzle flash!”

“You saw it and didn’t shoot back?! No need to be stealthy now! Wait, you haven’t even got your gun out?!”

Sakura hastily pulled her gun out and took aim, still on the ground where Fuki had left her. She stuck only her hand and her face out from behind the signboard and opened fire at the second- and third-floor windows.

Meanwhile, Fuki radioed the Thirds and told them to run.

“My…my fingers are broken…”

“Did I ask you to report your injuries?! Run away from here as fast as you can! Do you want to get killed?!”

Fuki ran out from behind the signboard. She started firing at random toward the building. Unlike Sakura, she had only a very rough idea of where the enemy was hiding, but that’d do. She was shooting in the enemy’s general direction to make a point that there were more of them than the enemy might’ve reckoned and to shift their attention from the escaping Thirds to herself.

You couldn’t really hope to hit your target if you weren’t even aiming, especially when there was quite a distance between you, but anyone who was familiar with firearms would take precautions nonetheless since a bullet might just happen to fly their way.

A single hit could be lethal, and stray bullets did sometimes land a lucky hit.

A gunner under fire would feel intense pressure. They’d be pretty much guaranteed to hide their head behind some cover, and then they wouldn’t be able to easily fire back.

At least, normal people would react like that. Fuki remembered her previous, crazy partner, who would calmly advance even as she was fired at, dodging the bullets, completely relaxed as she counterattacked… Surely, there couldn’t be any more nutjobs like her, though.

Still shooting, Fuki glanced over at the Thirds. They were running. After a few seconds, they disappeared into the thicket of shrubs and trees. As soon as they were out of sight, Fuki dived behind a tree growing in the middle of the parking lot.

Whoever was inside the building had only fired twice thus far, but Fuki didn’t jump to the conclusion that their enemy was down and out. She leaned her back against the wide trunk of the tree and let the empty magazine fall out of her Glock onto the ground. She loaded a fresh one and attached a suppressor to the still-hot muzzle.

With the moon as the only source of light, in the shadow of the tree, Fuki could barely even see her own hands, but that wasn’t a problem. She could replace a magazine with her eyes closed.

“You happy now, Sakura?” she said into her mouthpiece. “You got what you wished for.”

“…Yeah.”

“What’s the problem? You scared?”

“Wh-what? No, not scared at all!”

“Good,” Fuki said with a little amused smile. “Let’s get started. This is a job for us.”

•

As Fuki expected, HQ ordered them to kill the sniper. They had seen Lycoris at work, were armed, and had fired at people—there was no excuse not to put them in the “dangerous individual” category for liquidation by the Lycoris.

Of course, they wouldn’t have the benefit of initiative in this battle. Normally, the DA would recall their agents and use drones to observe and track the target before redeploying their forces. This time, command concluded that there was no need for that since they already had a First Lycoris—Fuki—on the scene… Or, as Fuki surmised, they didn’t follow their usual strategy because the enemy was a complete mystery, and the DA didn’t want to risk losing track of them, never to find them again. The Tokyo branch had various means of tracking their targets, but this incident was taking place in a remote area where surveillance options were limited. The higher-ups didn’t want to take any chances.

“It’s fortunate that you’re on the scene, Fuki,” said Commander Kusunoki.

“…Thank you, Commander.”

Fuki thought that the commander was indirectly trying to encourage her, conveying her belief that Fuki was up to the task. Kusunoki wasn’t someone who’d say something just to make conversation during a mission—there was meaning behind her every word. And if she saw the need to give her subordinate encouragement, the situation must have looked pretty bad to her.

Or was Fuki reading too deeply into it? Was the commander simply hinting that she was expecting Fuki to do her best because letting the target get away was not an option?

It could be both.

“What’s the plan, Fuki?” asked Sakura.

Fuki thought about the enemy. The DA had used their drones to check out the area before the operation to neutralize the hunter with his modded gun, and they hadn’t spotted any other cars or people. Yet there was a sniper in the building…

“Were they in the building from way before we started the operation?”

A vagrant? Maybe. But a vagrant with a gun? Shooting at someone who might not have wanted to bother them at all? It would have made more sense for a vagrant to lie low and wait for them to leave.

Fuki just couldn’t figure this out. The use of firearms was heavily restricted in Japan, yet a man with a hunting gun drove out here, acting very suspiciously, and there was someone else with a gun also hiding out in this derelict place. What in the world was going on?

If the hunter had come here to buy or sell a gun, the person hiding out in the building still had no reason to suddenly open fire at the Lycoris.

Whatever was afoot, it was something bizarre. Fuki didn’t think that the hunter and the other person were unrelated. The Lycoris had stumbled onto something they had no idea about… They’d have to be extra careful.

“Sakura, cover me. I’m going in!”

“Aye!”

Not a standard reply, but Fuki assumed it meant “roger.” If Sakura had been next to her, she’d have whacked her.

“Start shooting after countdown. Three, two…”

When Sakura opened fire, Fuki jumped out from behind the tree and sprinted to the building. She jumped in through a broken window. Sharp shards of glass were sticking out of the window frame, but Fuki’s uniform protected her, and she shielded her face with her arms. The shrill noise of shattering glass accompanied Fuki’s arrival inside the building. She fell on the floor, rolled forward, and kept moving until she reached the opposite wall. She pressed her back to it and quickly looked around, aiming her gun in front of her as she turned, checking for enemies. It was very dark inside the building, but she could make out shapes around her thanks to the moonlight pouring in through the window.

She was in a corridor. There didn’t seem to be anyone else there.

Fuki heard the commander’s voice in her ear.

“Reinforcements are on the way. Don’t do anything rash.”

“We don’t need reinforcements,” Fuki responded.

“It’s unclear what we’re dealing with. Better safe than sorry.”

Fuki kept her mouth shut this time, conceding that Commander Kusunoki was right. Her smartphone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out, wary and watchful. After unlocking it, she quickly turned down the brightness to the lowest level and checked the message she got. It was from Sakura. LET’S HURRY UP AND GET ’EM!

Sakura also wanted just the two of them to complete the mission, but if she’d said that over the comms, it could be constituted as countermanding HQ’s orders, so she texted Fuki instead.

Sakura gave off the impression of someone sloppy, but she did in fact pay attention to little details. Too bad their phones were also supervised by HQ, so they’d still read her message. They might just have a little laugh and let it slide, though. Sakura’s childish naïveté and go-getter attitude were no cause for concern.

Fuki put her phone away and lowered the headset’s volume to its minimum. In the darkness, she’d have to rely on her hearing, and she couldn’t predict when someone from her team might say something over the comms.

“Sakura, I’m on the move.”

“Oh, I’m coming, too!”

“Don’t approach in a straight line. You’ll get shot. Loop around and enter from the back.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you inside. Don’t shoot me by mistake!”

“As if.”

Leaving it at that, Fuki got a flashlight out of her satchel. She started walking but didn’t switch the light on. Being able to see clearly wasn’t worth giving away your position to the enemy and having them attack her first.

She was trying to find a staircase to get to the floor above. The signs on the walls and what was left of old posters told Fuki that the building used to be a local cultural center. It was made of concrete but seemed fairly old. Fuki saw massive cracks in the walls here and there, which made her wonder if the place hadn’t been abandoned when new earthquake safety regulations came into force.

She heard the commander’s voice in her headset.

“We have the floor plan. Refer to it as needed.”

Fuki crouched behind a knocked-over desk and took out her smartphone to check the picture of the floor plan. It looked very old, probably used for the planning permission application.

Fuki had been right about it being a cultural center. There were three floors, with the first one for official use, a large reception desk, and a spacious office space. There were rooms of various sizes on the second floor and a modest event hall on the third…

The floor plan alone wasn’t much to go on to guess at the present state of the interior, but the sniper was either on the second or third floor, and the only parts of the building with windows overlooking the parking lot were the corridors, so she probably wouldn’t have to search every room to find the enemy.

“Sakura, the muzzle flash you saw, which floor was it on?”

“Third. A corner window, on the right side when you’re looking from the parking lot.”

So Fuki could go straight to the third floor. The target might have moved, but she’d first look for them on the top floor, and if they weren’t there, she’d search from the top to the bottom.

“Sakura, look to the left, the eastern side of the building,” Commander Kusunoki cut in. “There’s an external emergency staircase there. Based on the drone footage, it’s usable.”

“Roger! Heading to the third floor!” Sakura replied.

Fuki looked at the floor plan again. There was only one staircase inside the building, and it was on the western end of it. The building was facing to the north, where the parking lot was, so if Sakura took the eastern staircase to the third floor, she’d reach the right side of the corridor.

“Okay then…”

On the staircase, Fuki would have no way to hide from the enemy if she encountered them there. In principle, being higher on a staircase gave you an advantage. There was no better ambush spot than at the top of the stairs. Fuki, though, had no choice. She had to head upstairs. It was her job.

She moved silently through the first-floor corridor, wary and ready to shoot at any moment. She was holding the gun and the flashlight in each hand so she could switch the flashlight on and fire at a target with minimal delay.

…It was quiet in the building, save for the faint sound of Fuki’s footsteps. Was the enemy taking care not to make any noise, or were they simply still too far away from Fuki for her to hear them?

The corridor was strewn with broken glass in some places. No matter how careful she was, Fuki couldn’t help making relatively loud crunching noises as she walked over it, warning the enemy of her approach. It made her stressed. She reminded herself that the target was on the third floor, though. She couldn’t let down her guard, of course, but there was no need to be so high-strung. The enemy wouldn’t be able to hear her crunching glass underfoot from two floors above… Or would they?

Fuki mocked herself for losing her cool. She evened her breathing to lower her heart rate.

She reached the stairwell. It was quiet there, too. The air stank of mold. Without any windows, it was pitch-black. When her eyes adjusted, Fuki saw that the staircase was a very common concrete type with a landing between two flights of stairs. She started slowly climbing it, keeping her back against the wall but not leaning against it so that she could react swiftly, pointing her gun and the switched-off flashlight toward where an enemy might be lurking above her.

She reached the landing between the first and second floors. It was empty. She kept moving to the second floor. Nothing to see there, either. She couldn’t sense anyone’s presence. If the sniper hadn’t moved, they should be directly above Fuki…yet she couldn’t detect any sign of them.

Making no sound, Fuki slowly took a deep breath and started walking again. Sakura reported that she had reached the emergency staircase. Fuki wished she could reply to her, but the enemy could be within mere meters, so she only tapped the mic twice to let Sakura know she had heard her. Both Sakura and the command center should be able to guess from the taps that Fuki was about to reach the third floor.

Fuki started walking to the landing between floors two and three, as alert as she could be in case of an attack from above. If the enemy was still on the top floor, they might open fire on her at any moment. Fuki approached carefully, step by step. Her heartbeat seemed almost deafeningly loud to her. She mentally yelled at her heart to keep it down. Another step. And another. She had four steps left to the landing, and then she’d reach the last flight of stairs, where she could aim the gun in the same direction she was walking, making it a bit easier. She took another step. And another… Then she felt something through her stocking. Something taut at shin-height.

A chill ran down Fuki’s spine when she realized it was a tripwire. She hadn’t triggered the trap yet, though, having stopped as soon as she felt it.

Had she let the enemy lure her in? Did they let the girls see that muzzle flash on the western end of the third floor to get the Lycoris to come up there? Expecting the enemy to be above, she naturally stopped paying so much attention to what was at her feet…

If the flash was to decoy them…Sakura was in trouble.

“Sakura! Watch out for booby traps on the staircase!”

Fuki knew she was taking a great risk by shouting into the mic, and sure enough, she immediately noticed movement on the third floor. Her insides tightened with the certainty that something bad was coming, and she could feel the enemy’s murderous stare on her skin.

Since touching the wire, she’d been frozen with her gun and flashlight pointed toward the third floor. She switched on the light. It was made for the army, so despite its small size, the flashlight emitted a surprisingly powerful beam of light.

“Ugh?!”

The groan came from a large man blinded by the light. She saw his thick arm sticking over the railing. He was holding something. The object was long and silver…

Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have affected Fuki’s next action—she pulled the trigger. The suppressor muffled the sound of her gunshot, but a loud blast shook the air.

Fuki and the shooter from the third floor had fired at each other simultaneously. The bright flash from his gun’s muzzle illuminated the staircase, showing the man flinching backward and Fuki dodge-rolling down the stairs. The edges of the steps hit her hard, but she didn’t have the time to register the pain. After tumbling down to the second floor, she fired three rounds toward the third floor as a warning to stall pursuit.

After those warning shots, Fuki dived into one of the bigger rooms on the second floor. Moonlight was pouring in through a south-facing window, making it easier to see. There were several art display boards standing in disarray around the room, two meters tall and one meter wide, with crappy pictures, presumably made by children, stuck to them. Fuki hid behind one of the boards. One of the last events before the building was abandoned must have been a kids’ art exhibition.

Fuki made an effort to calm her breathing.

“Fuki! You alive?!” Sakura came in on the comms.

“…Don’t worry about me. What’s your situation?”

“I’m on the emergency staircase just outside the third floor. No probs here.”

Fuki told Sakura that the target was waiting at the top of the internal staircase, that there was a trap before the landing between the second and third floor, that the target and Fuki had fired at each other when they came in contact, and that they both had retreated. She also added that the man was holding his firearm with one hand. She didn’t know what it was, but it was silver in color.

“Gotcha. Sounds like I should head in and attack from my side?”

It’d be easier if they could attack the target from both directions. Fuki was a little concerned about Sakura leading the attack, but as her partner, Sakura had to be competent enough—

“This is Command. A motorcycle is heading your way.”

“Wha…?” Fuki began, but she didn’t finish saying, “What about it?” The operator’s message continued.

“We checked the license plate. The vehicle was reported stolen three days ago. The rider is wearing a holster with the grip of a gun showing.”

An armed person on a stolen bike on a country road leading basically nowhere—this was no coincidence.

Fuki put the flashlight she’d still been holding into her skirt pocket and took out her smartphone to check the real-time footage from the DA’s drones. She saw the bike driving down an unlit country road. The rider was wearing full motorbike body armor.

She zoomed in on the rider, and a higher-resolution still image opened on the screen. The rider was clearly wearing a holster on their left thigh. The grip of a gun was sticking out of it.

Fuki closed the image to go back to the real-time footage. The bike picked up speed, as if the rider was in a hurry. Why, though? Fuki noticed the time displayed in the corner of her smartphone’s screen—one minute to three AM. And just as the numbers struck the hour, the motorbike drove into the parking lot. The rider took out a handgun from the holster on their thigh and started firing as they drove around. Fuki could hear the shots well from inside the building.

Zooming out, Fuki saw that the rider’s target was the Jimny. They fired several rounds at the driver’s seat as they drove past, and then the biker headed straight for the facility. They drifted, rapidly slowing down, but the rider hopped off the bike even before it fully stopped. The bike fell over and skidded on the ground, but that didn’t seem to worry the biker, who rolled as they landed, jumped to their feet, and ran inside the building, all without losing momentum.

“Hey, Fuki! What do you make of this?!” Sakura asked, confused. She must have been watching the drone footage, too.

The situation was getting ever more bizarre. The only things Fuki knew for certain were that now, in addition to the shooter on the third floor, they also had the armed rider on the first to worry about. And she was trapped between them on the second floor… While she and Sakura could attack the enemy on the third floor from both sides, she might fight herself attacked from both directions, too.

Of course, there was the possibility that the rider and the other shooter wouldn’t be on the same team, but that was no guarantee the new arrival wouldn’t attack Fuki.

“Seriously, what the heck is going on…?”

Fuki was stumped. Whatever it was they’d found themselves in the middle of, though, if she waited for the enemy to make the first move, she was putting herself at a disadvantage. She and Sakura had to act first. Of the two options, this one was smarter.

Commander Kusunoki had reached the same conclusion.

“Fuki, Sakura, don’t let them pincer you. Eliminate the target on the third floor first,” she told the girls.

Fuki had no objections to that.

She hadn’t heard footsteps on the staircase or on the broken glass in the first-floor corridor yet. She had a brief window of opportunity in which to act.

She gripped her gun more firmly and stepped out from behind the display board.

“Roger! I’m gonna enter the building—”

A loud blast made the window shake in its frame next to Fuki. The sound came from the outside, not too high above Fuki’s location. Given that Sakura got suddenly cut off, it could only mean one thing.

“Sakura?!”

“There was an explosion on the emergency staircase at the third-floor level! We can see flames…!” said the operator.

Fuki wanted to ask her what happened to Sakura, if they could see her, if they could check if she was all right, but she didn’t get to say anything because she had something more urgent to deal with—a person with a helmet covering their entire head peered inside the room. The tall man was clad head to toe in body armor. He slinked into the room and raised his gun, held in both hands, at Fuki. It was a black automatic handgun.

“Fu…”

The rider had arrived silently, with nothing to betray his presence, and he shot at Fuki without hesitation.

“Screw off,” she had meant to say.

Fuki sprang into motion. She didn’t dodge to the side or backward. What she did instead was to charge right ahead, toward the rider and his gun, pointed at her. She crouched low to the floor and lunged at him headfirst. It looked like she was going to crash onto the floor, but just before she did, she pushed herself off with her left hand and kicked with her feet to accelerate in that position as she charged at the enemy. She closed the distance of about seven meters in the blink of an eye.

The man hadn’t fired again at her yet.

Fuki twisted around, hitting the floor with her right shoulder first. She slid on her back in between the enemy’s legs, and as she passed under him, she fired twice. The second bullet missed, but the first pierced his right thigh.

“Aaagh!” he groaned. He collapsed onto the floor, blood gushing from the wound.

Fuki had slid past him, letting the momentum of the movement carry her for a while before she rolled back to standing. She ran back toward the rider, who had his back to her.

Still sitting on the floor, the rider, with a Beretta in his left hand, twisted around to fire several rounds behind him, where he expected Fuki to be, but she saw him turning and moved slightly to his left to stay in his blind spot. She got right up next to him and fired two shots at his back.

The man groaned and started to fall forward, but since he was sitting with his legs in front of him, he sprang back like a wind-up toy, ending up on his back instead.

Fuki thought she could see the man staring right at her from behind the helmet’s visor, but that only lasted a moment as she stomped down on the visor with her standard metal-reinforced Lycoris loafer, crushing the man’s face. At this point, the enemy was defenseless. She fired several rounds into his chest.

The body armor he was wearing was just regular motorcycle gear. The bullets penetrated it easily, and blood sputtered out of the holes as the man shook violently. Fuki had won this battle.

Fuki pulled her foot out of the man’s broken helmet and pointed her gun toward the corridor, wary of the other guy coming after her. She took a deep breath in and let a deep breath out.

The encounter with the biker lasted mere seconds… She managed to survive. The man attacked her when she least expected it, which had put her at high risk. His timing couldn’t have been worse… But it wasn’t just that. He had managed to get to her from the first floor without her noticing—that was the problem.

She looked at his shoes and immediately understood how he pulled that off.

“Ah… I see…”

He’d wrapped towels around his shoes. The soft fabric muffled his footsteps, even when he was walking on that broken glass. That was why she hadn’t heard him.

Looking more closely at his clothes, Fuki noticed that the man had used vinyl tape to secure the straps of his body armor and any metal parts that might have clinked against each other so that he wouldn’t make a sound as he moved. He had been prepared for fighting in the darkness of night.

Fuki couldn’t help wondering who the man might have been, but the most important thing to do then was to report to HQ.

“I encountered the rider. He attacked me, so I terminated him… What’s Sakura’s status?”

“We cannot locate with our drones. She’s not responding.”

The operator relayed to Fuki that there was an explosion as soon as Sakura opened the door to the third floor. Flames rose out of the building. The fire died down quickly, but they lost sight of Sakura.

Fuki sucked her teeth. As she suspected, there had been a booby trap at the other end of that corridor, too.

Lycoris agents were only taught the skills needed to assassinate targets in calm everyday settings in Japan. Even Second Lycoris weren’t prepared to deal with having to storm a target hiding inside a booby-trapped building.

“Fuki, can you show us the target’s face? Send us a photo so we can ID him,” requested Commander Kusunoki.

“It’s a bit crushed… But sure, I can take a picture.”

Fuki wanted to rush to the emergency staircase to look for Sakura, but her commander’s orders took priority. If Sakura got injured in that explosion, Fuki wouldn’t be able to tend to her anyway with an enemy nearby… It made more sense to just go with the orders, Fuki reassured herself.

The rider had died still clutching the gun in his left hand. Fuki took it off him, just in case. When she touched the man’s fingers, she noticed something unusual. The man was wearing fingerless gloves. His exposed fingertips were strangely hard. Fuki pinched one of his fingers to investigate.

“…Is this guy for real?”

The man had coated his fingertips with glue or something. Fuki guessed it was so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. It made her wonder if the man was wearing full-body motorcycle armor not so much for protection but to ensure he wouldn’t even leave a hair behind on the crime scene.

What didn’t add up was that, despite the meticulousness of his prep for this raid, the man was using a battered old Beretta without a suppressor. It was a Model 92F…no, Model 9. Intrigued, Fuki took a better look at the gun. She held it to the moonlight so she could read the inscription on the slide—U.S. 9MM M9. It was a model used by the US Army, unavailable to the general public.

Fuki cast the gun aside. She kept glancing toward the corridor as she removed the rider’s helmet. His nose was broken, and his face was all bloody, but he was clearly Asian… In fact, he looked like an ordinary Japanese guy. What convinced Fuki that the man was Japanese wasn’t even his facial features as much as the fact that he had judo ear. Also known as cauliflower ear, it was a condition often seen in people who did judo for a long time. Repeated bruising and rubbing caused irreversible swelling. This condition was also seen in people doing other contact sports, such as wrestling, but an Asian man in Japan with cauliflower ear was most likely to be a Japanese judo practitioner.

In any case, the man didn’t look like a US soldier. His equipment was too half-baked for someone who’d been in the army. A soldier who could bring his gun with him would surely have body armor, too. Also, the M9 was a model used by the US Army in the past, but had since been phased out. Old army guns could find their way into private hands. It wasn’t unusual for the army to lose track of its old supplies. And the US Army had bases in Japan.

That Beretta had clearly seen lots of use. It was perfectly possible that an unscrupulous soldier “rescued” it from getting scrapped and sneakily sold it to a Japanese buyer to make some money on the side.

Fuki took a photo of the dead man’s face with her smartphone. She sent it to HQ and waited for orders, thoughts racing through her mind. Was Sakura okay? Why did this guy, kitted out for a nighttime battle, appear out of nowhere? What connected the hunter and the armed guy on the third floor? Why did both of those men shoot unprovoked?

…What was this place?

She had so many questions, and the information she had available didn’t yield any answers.

HQ hadn’t come back to her yet with new orders. Should she act on her own initiative? But there were booby traps on the third floor, and that armed man was lying in wait there, too. Should she go to the emergency staircase instead? But the enemy was likely to keep a close eye on that entrance, too, after Sakura triggered his trap.

Both options seemed very risky, but of the two approaches to the third floor, she preferred the emergency staircase. If she went that way, she might be able to find out if Sakura was all right.

Just as Fuki made up her mind, the operator spoke again.

“We’ve found a match for the photo you sent us. We’re just about to get an ID on him… He was a detective working for Kanagawa Prefectural Police.”

A police detective? Then the source of his gun was probably Yokota Air Base. The detective might’ve confiscated it from a gang operating in that area. Maybe he appropriated both the gun and the motorbike from the same gang… That seemed likely, but it still didn’t explain anything about what the man was doing in the abandoned building.

The DA was probably looking into his background as Fuki spoke with the operator. They’d be able to access his personal information and check his private communications and such, but doing a full check on him would take time—time they did not have.

“Fuki, look out the window!” shouted Commander Kusunoki.

Fuki looked up from the dead body. She saw a thin dark line outside the window. And then the silhouette of a man. He pressed the soles of his boots against the window… Then she saw a massive gun barrel pointing straight at her.

“What the…?!”

There was a blinding muzzle flash, and the window shattered. The gunshot, as loud as an explosion, rumbled through the room.

The enemy had fired at the side of Fuki’s head. She fell to the floor as if someone had knocked her down. The bullet had grazed her. She didn’t actually dodge it—she fell onto the floor from shock when the bullet grazed her skin.

The moment she hit the floor, Fuki forced herself to roll sideways, in case the enemy was going to fire again. But he didn’t. Fuki managed to catch sight of him out of the corner of her eye. The large man was also rolling on the floor inside the room.

He must have rappelled down using a rope, then he planted his feet on the window, leaning back so he was parallel to the ground when he shot at Fuki. When the window shattered, he swung and leaped into the room.

As soon as both Fuki and the man stopped rolling, they fired at each other. Her gun was relatively quiet owing to the suppressor, while his fired with a loud boom. Both of them fired only to suppress the other, their bullets flying wildly off-target.

They both rolled again, to put some distance between them, until they stood in opposite corners of the room cluttered with display boards.

Crouching on one knee, Fuki raised her Glock. She couldn’t see the enemy—a display board in front of her was blocking her line of sight. It was the same for him, though.

Should she shoot now? Could she? Fuki thought about how many bullets she had left. She’d used too many on the rider. And she’d fired once just now. She tried to remember exactly how many rounds she’d fired…and figured out she had one bullet left in the magazine. She badly wanted to reload, but would she have the time for that?

She couldn’t see her opponent, and he couldn’t see her, either… He might sense her reloading and use that opportunity to open fire at her, but the likelihood of him killing her with his first few bullets was very low. She should just do it…

“…Are you a Lycoris?” the man asked in a low voice.

Fuki, who was about to change her magazine, froze.

The existence of the Lycoris was known to very few—some members of the underground, who’d had contact with Lycoris agents that they might have regretted, some members of public bodies which cooperated with Lycoris, such as the police and some politicians… Should any of them be indiscreet and tell an outsider about the Lycoris, it would sound so far-fetched it’d be written off as an urban legend at best. And if someone was determined to let society know that the Lycoris were real, measures would be taken to remove them from the picture immediately without anyone being the wiser.

This man knew about the Lycoris and recognized that Fuki was one when he saw her… That considerably narrowed down who he could be.

“Come on, girl, answer me!”

By speaking, the man was more or less revealing his location. Fuki made a slight adjustment to the direction she was aiming her gun at. Still, there was at least one display board in the way. She wasn’t quite confident that she’d be able to kill the man with one shot.

“Only one person, two at most, will leave this place alive. Why worry so much, just because it’s classified information? It’s not going to spread. You might as well talk.”

Fuki still hadn’t heard back from HQ, but they were surely listening in on their conversation… Fuki brought her hand to her ear to touch her earpiece, but it wasn’t there. It must’ve fallen off when that bullet grazed her, or maybe when she was rolling on the floor. Fuki sucked her teeth, annoyed.

“…Fine. Okay, I’m a Lycoris. So? You gonna tell me who you are?”

“The Lycoris are real after all? I knew it. There’s something wrong with how peaceful this country is. Always felt unnatural to me.”

“I asked you who you are.”

“A participant.”

“A participant?” Thrown by his answer, Fuki repeated what he’d said back at him.

“Ah, so you’re here on business? Let me guess, you’ve been marking that guy in the car? When the shooting started outside out of the blue, it really startled me. I thought maybe my watch was running slow.”

While the man talked, Fuki reached behind and got a new magazine out of her satchel bag. Made to hold the Lycoris’ equipment, the satchels had an opening at the bottom, allowing the girls to easily grab a fresh magazine. It was impossible to do that completely silently, but Fuki took advantage of the man’s chattiness to conceal the little noises. Removing the almost-spent magazine from her Glock and inserting a new one would, of course, also make some noise, so Fuki had to keep the conversation going.

“How do you know about us?” she asked. “And what do you mean by being a participant? What are you participating in?”

“Not so many questions at once.”

“Answer the first and the second.”

“What’s this? Am I being interrogated?”

“You wanted to talk.”

When she talked, he listened intently. He’d pick up on the sound of her changing her magazine. She needed to get him talking, and she couldn’t let him get away with a short answer, or he might finish before she was done reloading.

“Okay, for now, just my first question. How do you know about us?”

“I used to be in the Self-Defense Forces. That’s where I heard rumors about you lot.”

“First a cop, now a military guy, huh?”

“What cop?”

“The guy who arrived on the bike, the one who’s lying dead over there. He was a police detective.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Wasn’t he your buddy?”

The guy kept giving Fuki short answers. It was getting on her nerves. She considered chancing it and reloading anyway, but the guy would certainly notice it and take it as a cue to resume fighting, and he was likely holding his gun pointed right at her behind that display board. Visualizing that made her hesitate.

It would take her less than a second to discard the old magazine and stick in the new one, but the more she hurried, the more noise she’d make, alerting her enemy to what she was up to. To change the magazine as quietly as possible, she’d need more time.

In the end, she decided to get the man talking more.

“The dude who got shot in his car was a hunter.”

“A cop and a hunter? That’s funny.”

“I don’t see anything funny in that.”

“The cop… He was using a Beretta? I bet it was confiscated. Not as bad as a New Nambu.”

“Who the hell are you guys?”

The man fell silent. Was he going to shoot now? Fuki put her index finger on the trigger of the Glock in her right hand. She pressed the protruding bit on the trigger—the trigger safety—and started pulling the trigger back, applying the maximum pressure possible before the gun actually fired.

Would that last bullet in her magazine be enough?

“We’re all participants. In tonight’s game…”

At last, the man happily got talking. Fuki reduced the amount of tension on the trigger and listened, with a heightened awareness of the new magazine she was holding in her left hand.

The man told her there was an anonymous community he was a member of: a community of gun aficionados. However, they weren’t the type that discussed in detail the techniques, history, regulations, and ethics of gun use among different organizations. What they were interested in was actually shooting people.

“You’re a secret society of killers who like guns?”

“We are, and we’ve come up with this brilliant solution for our hobby. Nobody lives around here… Nobody to hear gunshots. So we agreed that those willing would come here at three AM on this day and we’d shoot each other to our hearts’ content.”

Fuki had finished reloading her gun, but she still wanted the man to tell her more.

“What a dumb hobby. Why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head?”

“That wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

“At least you don’t just shoot random innocent people.”

If those guys tried that, it would be a major incident for the safe country of Japan. The DA would immediately take action to permanently delete those guys. The official version would be that the guys’ victims had been hit by a truck or something along those lines to keep the public in the dark about the murders.

“You’ve got to be a psycho to enjoy one-sidedly shooting people who aren’t expecting it, or people weaker than you, running for their life… If you’re going to kill someone, it’s got to be someone who’s trying to kill you, too. When it’s a real fight, it’s fun, there’s meaning to it. Does that make sense to you? Everyone who turned up here for tonight’s game thinks this way.”

“It does make sense…”

It wasn’t that Fuki agreed with the man’s logic, but she finally figured out what was happening that night.

It explained why the hunter the Thirds eliminated was so obsessed with hunting bears with a shotgun—it turned him on to kill something that could well kill him, too. He had a burning desire to fight for his life. That was why he wouldn’t use a rifle, which would have allowed him to kill from a long distance, or even a half rifle, which still had a range more than twice that of a shotgun. The hunter would only use a shotgun, with a viable range of fifty meters, to intentionally shorten the distance between him and the bear he was hunting and make the shooting feel less one-sided.

And the motorcyclist, too, who arrived exactly at three AM and fired at anyone he encountered without hesitation. It was because he was here for the game—a game where people shot each other, no questions asked.

“You’re saying you want the thrill of a real fight… But, dude, you’re a coward. You set traps, and you’ve been squatting here from way before your game started.”

Fuki remembered about Sakura, but that wasn’t relevant at that moment. She had to push thoughts about her partner out of her mind. Worrying about Sakura wasn’t going to help anybody.

“You’ve got to fight with all you’ve got. You take full advantage of your knowledge and experience. The others did that, too.”

He was probably right. The cop arrived at the very last minute on a motorbike, likely with the intent of launching a surprise attack on whoever was already there. The hunter arrived early and waited for the others to show up. The reason he stayed in his car was probably because he was planning to blind anyone who turned up with the high beam and shoot them from the driver’s seat. Maybe he was also thinking of running them over.

Both of those guys were amateurs, though. The police officer used to following the rules to the letter, and the hunter, whose only past opponents were beasts, incapable of strategizing, readily accepted that there’d be no shooting before the agreed time. The ex-military guy, though, was different. He prepared the stage so he’d have more fun killing people.

“I wish you guys had just all killed each other, saving us the effort.”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re still a child or that you’re a Lycoris. You surely have tasted it, too, the elation when you eliminate a threat to your life. Didn’t you feel euphoric when you killed that cop and took that first breath of relief?”

Fuki could tell the man was smiling as he said that. She thought it was gross.

“No need to hide it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s an instinctive reaction all living creatures have. It’s how we’re all wired… The ecstasy of surviving a ‘kill or be killed’ situation, of winning, is our reward. It’s the best feeling in the world. It’s amazing, and you just can’t get enough of it. It’s the truth.”

He was talking with clear enjoyment, which made Fuki suspect something.

“This…isn’t your first time playing this game, is it?” she asked.

This guy had played and survived many times before.

“You can tell? That’s right. I’ve fought—”

Fuki got ready to shoot at him. She’d sensed that the man had lost focus when he started rambling on. He couldn’t help himself, wanting to talk about his experience, wanting her to hear him out.

It was her chance.

She adopted the modified prone position, a low shooting stance where she was down on one knee with the other leg straight in front of her, leaning to the side as far as possible. It was a stance used for shooting from under a car or through an opening at low height, but it had merits in other situations, too.

After Fuki rapidly fired two rounds, making a hole in the display board between her and the man, he responded. There was a loud boom when he fired. The board jerked up and nearly got knocked off the floor. An opening the size of a child’s fist appeared in it at what would’ve been Fuki’s chest height if she were still standing behind it.

Fuki kept firing in the direction she’d heard the man, aiming low first and going up with each bullet, making a series of holes in the board. He hadn’t shot again yet… He shot now. Another boom, and another big hole in the board, which fell over this time.

Fuki moved, keeping low to the floor. In the modified prone stance, both her feet were firmly planted on the floor, which made it easy to quickly transition to a different body position.

Fuki dodged the falling board, jumping out from behind it, and charged at the man at full speed. She’d heard a little clink just before his second shot. Her bullets left two-finger-wide holes in the board, so she knew his gun was much more powerful than her .45, and the dull, heavy sound of the hammer drop revealed to her what gun her opponent was using—a large-caliber revolver. Which was why she decided to run straight at him.

The man had fired through the window, then he fired to suppress her, then he fired twice through the board… Which meant he had one or two bullets left.

Large-caliber revolvers were powerful but had low capacity and were slow to fire. Their size also made them less maneuverable. Aside from some special models, revolvers spat a substantial flame out of the gaps between the cylinder and the frame when shooting, making them incompatible with the Center Axis Relock shooting stance optimized for close combat, which Fuki’s former partner was a big fan of.

With the enemy having only a couple of bullets left at most, the closer Fuki could get to him, the less of a threat he became.

She saw him, but he immediately withdrew behind one of the boards. She fired a few bullets at it, and he responded by blasting one at her through the board. Needless to say, he missed her, but the impact of the shot knocked the board over at Fuki. She rammed into it with her full strength, pushing it at the man. She clambered up onto it. The board hit something—the man’s shoulder or head. Now that Fuki knew where he was standing, she fired at him twice. He let out a short groan. Fuki was sure her bullets lodged themselves in his body after punching through the board.

Had she won? No, not yet. The man gathered his strength and hurled the board away, sending it and Fuki, who was on it, flying at the opposite wall.

Fuki kicked the board away and twisted in the air like a cat so that she hit the wall with her feet first. She kicked off and lunged back at the man, closing the distance between them fast.

For the first time, she saw him clearly in the moonlight. He was a big, muscular man dressed in a boiler suit with the top undone, with a massive gun belt and holster. His right shoulder was bleeding, but he was still holding a distinctly silver, large-caliber revolver in his right hand… It was an S&W M500, the most powerful .50-caliber revolver civilians could purchase. It could hold only five bullets, so the cylinder must have been empty, and Fuki wasn’t going to give the man time to reload.

But then she saw that the man was holding a Beretta in his other hand… Just like the cop’s gun. Or was it the cop’s gun that he had picked up? He was pointing it at Fuki.

He opened fire.

But Fuki was already holding her satchel bag in front of her, and she had activated the ballistic shield airbag, which could also protect her from explosions. The white airbag swelled up like a balloon, stopping the 9mm rounds with ease.

The airbag was effective only for a second, but that was enough. Fuki threw her satchel with the expanded bag at the man while she slid on the floor under it, keeping her body as low as possible.

Besides protecting the Lycoris from bullets, the white airbag, quickly inflating to a large size, was also good for blocking the target’s line of sight. The man didn’t see Fuki coming and was surprised to see her at his feet. Their eyes met, and in his eyes, Fuki saw fear. He took a step back and was about to raise the Beretta to shoot her, but she was faster, packing two bullets in his flank.

The man doubled over. Fuki put the momentum of her charge and all of her strength into a punch she delivered to his head, which was lowered to be well within her reach. The man fell over, spitting blood and teeth. Fuki tumbled on the floor and rolled up to stand. Without losing a moment, she fired at the Beretta in the man’s left hand. The shot knocked the gun out of his hand, taking some of his fingers with it.

Fuki took aim at the man’s head. She took in a deep breath. The man hunched up, cradling what remained of his left hand. His breathing was erratic, and he was making disgusting gargling noises. Fuki concluded he had no more means to attack her, and he was critically wounded.

“What were you using that stupidly big gun for?”

“I…like to shoot…people with…a big gun…”

“You’re messed up in the head.”

The man coughed up a lot of blood and stopped making those dreadful noises when breathing. He must have cleared whatever it was blocking his airway.

“It feels good to…shoot with the gun I like. To kill. To defeat… The disadvantages don’t matter… But the guns you use… Now that’s stupid… A 21? Glocks are all right, but that’s too big for…little girls…”

“Don’t worry about us.”

Fuki was indeed using a Glock 21. It used .45-caliber subsonic bullets, worked well with a suppressor, and was the standard weapon for Tokyo-based Lycoris. The larger caliber necessitated a wider grip, though, which barely fit inside the small hands of young girls.

From what Fuki had gathered, DA branches chose the Lycoris equipment based on what they thought was the most suitable, but all of the Lycoris active in Tokyo used the same gear. There might have been some specific cases where a different caliber gun would be given to a Lycoris, but even then, it would be a Glock. Uniformity helped to keep the costs down and simplified training of Lycoris, who were usable only for a very brief time after all. Lycoris rarely used other weapons during their regular missions, but they were permitted to use submachine guns, too, which used the same magazines as Glocks, which probably also contributed to the DA’s preference for those guns.

In any case, Fuki would have used any weapon she had been given without objections. She was confident that she could use any firearm effectively, so she didn’t really have a preference for any particular model.

“Ah… It’s an SF? Or is it Gen 4…? Or 5…? I can’t…see very well…”

The man was lying on his back, staring at the gun aimed at him. It was dark in the room, and the Glock was black, so he shouldn’t be able to make out its version.

Glock 21 was available in a short frame version—SF—which had a reduced grip size. This modification made it easier to hold. There were several generations—in other words, versions—of Glocks, and Glock 21 SF was based on a pre-generation 3 model, which was released a long time ago. Generation 4 or later versions of Glock 21 had narrower grips to begin with, with the option to add a back strap for users with larger hands.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s my job to use what I’ve been given, regardless of what you think.”

“If you’re going to shoot… If you’re going to die in a gun fight… don’t you want to be holding your ideal gun? Who wouldn’t? You don’t think so, Lycoris?”

“I don’t have a gun fetish like you.”

The man coughed and spat out more blood. His limbs started shaking. Fuki didn’t entertain the idea of standing there chatting with a guy she should terminate, and she had no interest in prolonging his suffering, either. She pointed her gun at his forehead.

“I’m happy…I get to die from a gun… In Japan, it’s like a dream come true.”

“Okay.”

“Lycoris, when you kill me…I want you to feel it. The sweetness of victory… The euphoria.”

“Shut up and die.”

She shot him. Target eliminated. The slide on her Glock stayed locked open.

Fuki took a deep breath, tension leaving her body. She looked up at the ceiling and closed her eyes, realizing only then how tired she was. The fight was finally over.

…She didn’t feel anything else. She waited a bit longer, but no euphoria ever came over her.

“…It’s not a game for me.”

Killing was her job. She didn’t do it for fun, and it wasn’t a choice. It had been decided that she’d be doing this job when she was so small she hadn’t even been self-aware yet. She wasn’t going to start enjoying it just because somebody told her to.

•

Fuki was retrieving her satchel when she heard the rhythmic whir of a helicopter in the distance. It was probably reinforcements from HQ.

“I told them we could handle this without help,” Fuki said to herself. She suddenly remembered Sakura. She didn’t know if her partner was dead or alive. She’d have to go looking for her. More work for Fuki. Her new partner sure was a headache…

Grumbling, Fuki detached the bulletproof airbag from her satchel and left it on the floor. She put the satchel on her back, feeling how much lighter it’d become, and hurried out into the dark corridor, heading for the emergency staircase on the east side of the building…when a hair-raising chill ran down her body. Acting on reflex, she threw herself onto the floor. She felt a blast behind her, and something grazed the top of her head.

“Did I get her…?” a woman whose voice Fuki didn’t recognize asked.

Fuki planted her hands on the floor and pushed herself up to look behind her, toward the voice. In the faint light coming in through the windows, she saw a woman in her thirties. The woman was holding a large revolver. She was dressed like the ex-military guy: in a boiler suit with a holster at her gun belt. The revolver was a Super Red Hawk made by Sturm Ruger.

“Tsk! Nothing but nutjobs today… Based on your kit, you’re a friend of the ex-SDF guy?”

Fuki tried to sound confident, but she’d broken out in cold sweat. She didn’t think there’d be another participant in the killing game, but now that she thought about it, nobody said there were only three of them that night.

But Fuki wasn’t sweating just because it turned out there was one more enemy to deal with. She had her gun in her hand…but the magazine was empty. She was going to grab a new magazine from her satchel and reload her gun while searching for Sakura, but the enemy found her just as she stepped out of the room after putting her bag on.

It was common protocol to reload before proceeding to the next task, but Fuki hadn’t done it this time. It was a shock for her to realize that. Had she been unconsciously impatient to find Sakura? Was that what made her rush out without proper preparation? She might’ve been more worried about her partner than she was willing to acknowledge to herself.

The woman at the other end of the corridor sighed. Fuki was watching her. The distance between them was ten meters, a bit too far for Fuki to charge at her. It was the ideal distance for her enemy to shoot her. The corridor was straight, so they were directly opposite each other.

“Did you kill him?” the woman asked. Her tone made Fuki suspect that the ex-military guy had been her boyfriend.

She remembered that the guy said at one point that only one or maybe two people would make it out alive. That should have struck her as odd. Their game was to kill everyone else, which would mean one survivor at best. Now she understood why the man said there might be two victors—he had a partner. Maybe that was his trick for winning the game several times: The others “played” solo while he didn’t.

“I asked you if you killed him.”

Something told Fuki that her answer would decide whether she lived or not.

“Yeah, I did,” she admitted. She moved to stand up, but the woman immediately shot at the floor next to her feet, so Fuki froze. The gunshot echoed through the building, followed by silence, in which the distant sound of the helicopter seemed louder than it should have been.

“Stay where you are. And throw your gun away. You’ve no bullets anyway.”

The slide lock on Fuki’s gun was open, a dead giveaway that the magazine was empty. Feeling annoyed, Fuki obeyed and chucked her gun away. She slowly sat on the floor with her legs crossed. The lady seemed okay with that.

It was quiet and still inside the building. The helicopter could be heard outside. The lady was watching Fuki, her Super Red Hawk aimed at the girl.

“Whaddaya want?” Fuki asked in an annoyed voice.

“Was he happy in his last moments? You shot him, didn’t you?”

“I did… He seemed satisfied, yeah.”

“That’s good. He wanted to die in a gun fight… I could’ve given him that…”

What sort of relationship did this woman and the ex-military guy have? Fuki had to resist the temptation to wonder about that. It was irrelevant to her current situation, and thinking about those people’s personal lives wouldn’t help her in any way. It would be a waste of energy.

The woman stood there in silence for a while, thinking about something. Fuki listened carefully to the sound of the helicopter. It was getting closer but was still some distance away. She might get shot at any moment. The reinforcements weren’t going to arrive in time. But then she heard another sound. It wasn’t entirely unexpected.

“…It’s over, huh?” Fuki said with a sigh. Still remaining seated, she put her hands on her hips to signal she was reluctantly giving up. Like a capitulating general, she thought.

“You accept defeat?” the woman asked.

Fuki noticed something twinkle in the woman’s eyes. Perhaps she was crying. The woman let out a long sigh, too. Throughout this, she didn’t take her eyes off Fuki even for a moment. She, too, must’ve undergone some sort of battle training…which was working to Fuki’s advantage.

“Shall we end tonight’s game?”

“Yeah, let’s end this… Aim above the stomach.”

“Fine… You know, with you sitting like this, you look like a samurai about to be executed.”

So not a capitulating general. The pose did in fact look a bit like that of a samurai awaiting beheading…but a samurai would sit formally with his legs tucked under himself, not crossed-legged. It amused Fuki how she couldn’t help focusing on such meaningless details, and a little smile appeared on her lips as she stared at the woman. Noticing this, the woman stared back at her.

“I like the look in your eyes. You’re fearless, more like a boy than a girl…”

In a dangerous situation, people instinctively stared back when they felt an intense gaze on them. Perhaps the function of that was to judge whether the other was about to attack. In any case, it suited Fuki to have the woman stare her in the eye…because she wouldn’t notice the slight movement of Fuki’s left hand.

Fuki almost imperceptibly changed the position of her hand, which had been on her hip, to slide her fingers into a pocket of her skirt. Inside the pocket was the flashlight she’d been using earlier.

“Shoot!”

Fuki pulled out the flashlight, switching it on so it beamed at the woman’s eyes. The light was very bright, and the woman screamed, bending away from it. There was a gunshot… Or rather, there were two, the loud shot of the revolver masking the quiet shot of a gun with a suppressor. More of the quiet shots followed.

It looked as if the woman was performing a bizarre dance. Blood spurted out of her body with each backward step until she fell over onto her back.

Fuki switched off the flashlight and picked up her Glock from the floor before turning around.

“You’re a good shot, Sakura.”

At the other end of the corridor was Sakura. She struck a victorious pose and then trotted over to Fuki like an excited puppy.

“We’re finally together again!”

“Wouldn’t have taken so long if a certain idiot hadn’t fallen into a trap.”

Sakura scratched her head and laughed. She smelled of smoke.

Thinking about it, the game the people who turned up there that night had been playing was about shooting people dead, and using a trap to take out some of the other participants would reduce the number of precious few targets. The ex-military guy’s traps were likely intended to alert him to an approaching target by making noise or to shock a target, stopping them in their tracks. The trap Sakura triggered used only gas, no shrapnel or flammable liquid. It wasn’t designed to kill, just to scare with a momentary explosion and flashy flames.

Sakura stank of smoke, but the fire hadn’t even singed her hair. The thing was, she got so freaked out by the sudden explosion, she rolled off the stairs and fell on the ground below, where she passed out for a while. It didn’t occur to HQ that Sakura might’ve fallen, and they couldn’t see her in the footage taken by the drone far above.

“I’m glad to see you’re okay, Fuki! But tell me, how did you know I was coming?”

“That was easy. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize the footsteps of my own partner?”

“Partner…,” Sakura quietly repeated to herself. She smiled happily. “I want to learn to recognize your footsteps, too, Fuki!”

“Train hard and you will.”

“Okay!”

Bright light shone in through the corridor windows. Fuki and Sakura saw that a medium-sized helicopter was approaching them with the cargo door on the side open. The beam of light was coming from there.

Fuki shielded her eyes from the glare. The light was very strong, but she made out the shape of a man with a rifle inside the helicopter. She couldn’t see much, but she recognized him at once.

“Teach…”

It was Mika, the owner of Café LycoReco who used to be Fuki’s instructor and was a very special person to her. He was the one who’d rushed to save her. The thought made Fuki experience an emotion which felt like a ticklish feeling all over her body. She clenched her teeth to suppress it.

Sakura spoke into her headset, explaining the situation. The helicopter crew must have heard her, because Mika visibly relaxed.

The helicopter flew up. Fuki’s first thought was that it was leaving, but it rose higher so that it could land on the old cultural center’s rooftop.

“Fuki, Commander Kusunoki says they can take us back in the copter if either of us is wounded.”

“I see…”

Fuki had no serious injuries, but her partner Sakura had had a trap explode in her face before falling off the stairs, so she probably should get checked out by a doctor… Fuki convinced herself that this was a good reason to go by helicopter, and they headed to the rooftop. The truth was that she simply wanted to see Mika again.

“What a luxury, to have a copter sent to pick us up!”

“They must’ve been worried about us. Be glad they care.”

“Sure!”

They came out onto the rooftop…where Fuki heard a voice that always annoyed her.

“See! Told you they’d be totally fine!”

Another girl in the rare First Lycoris uniform was waiting there, looking cranky. It was Chisato Nishikigi.

“That a problem?! Sorry we’re not hurt, I guess?!”

The helicopter had landed on the rooftop, but the main rotor was still rotating. Fuki and Chisato had to shout over the noise and the wind. They glared at each other with their faces close as if they were about to fight, but that was partly just so they could hear each other.

Helicopter rotors were slow to start from a complete stop, and it would be dangerous to suddenly lift off once the rotor blades flopped down, so they were kept spinning while on standby.

“Did I say it was a problem?! I told Kusunoki she didn’t need to worry about you and that I didn’t think you’d need my help! But she insisted!”

“Great, thanks! Now go back home, take a shit, and go to sleep!”

“Meh! I was hoping to see tears of gratitude when we arrived! What a disappointment! Right, Takina?!”

Chisato turned to look back. Fuki followed her gaze. Mika got out of the helicopter and walked toward them. Behind him, Fuki saw Takina Inoue in a seat in the cargo compartment of the helicopter.

At first, Fuki felt like complaining that Takina didn’t even bother to get out to greet them, but then she noticed that there was something off about Takina. She looked like she had no energy. To be fair, Takina always seemed as dispassionate as a Buddhist monk detached from worldly matters, but she seemed even more apathetic than usual. And she was pale, too… But maybe it was just bad light. Takina’s skin was naturally fair.

“Chisato…is it working out for you two?” Fuki asked in a quieter voice, but Chisato managed to catch that, maybe because they were in close proximity.

“Aye, sure is! We’re perfect. The best team ever! Takina just happens to be a bit under the weather today, though!”

Deep inside, Fuki was grateful that Takina came to their aid despite feeling unwell, but instead of that, she said, “Then what is she doing here?! Go back home!”

“How rude! You should thank her! She wanted to come and help you despite not feeling great!”

“Well, I didn’t ask her to do that!”

“Oh, shut up! Can’t you just shed a few tears and tell us how happy you are we’re here?!”

“Just because you came here to force your help on us?!”

“How dare you!”

“How dare YOU!”

“Wanna fight?!”

“Do you?!”

“Fuki…,” Mika called, approaching.

Fuki immediately stopped glaring at Chisato. She straightened her back.

“Yes?” she replied in a tone betraying no emotion.

“I heard what happened. It was a difficult mission. How are you feeling?”

“It was a string of unexpected developments…but we dealt with them without any problems.”

“I see. That’s good to hear.”

Mika was a big man. Big in size and with a big heart. Talking to him face-to-face, Fuki felt as if his aura was wrapping around her. She didn’t hate that. Quite the opposite.

It grated on Fuki’s nerves how Chisato was still trying to shove her face in her line of vision, making taunting grunts at her, like an agitated dog. Fuki wanted to throw her off the rooftop.

“Well, it’s time to leave. Come, Fuki. We’ll take you back.”

“…No need. Neither of us was injured. We can make our way back the usual way.”

“Whaaat?!” Sakura protested behind her, but Fuki ignored her.

“What’s the problem? Hop on! Don’t be shy! Or are you too proud to ride in my helicopter?! Is that it?!”

Fuki ignored Chisato’s prattling, too. The helicopter belonged to the DA, as surely did the pilot. She was just talking shit.

Mika held his gaze on Fuki for a few moments. A resigned smile appeared on his face.

“All right. Have a safe trip back… You’ve done an excellent job today.”

“Thank you for coming to offer us help, even at this hour,” Fuki said, bowing. She felt Mika’s big hand patting her shoulder.

Mika turned around and started walking back to the helicopter. Chisato followed after him like a shadow, but she looked back at Fuki one more time.

“You sure you don’t want to come with us? Aren’t you dead tired?” she asked, pouting sulkily.

She was probably actually worried about Fuki, but Fuki didn’t need her concern.

“I said we’ll make it back on our own, didn’t I? You get out of here already.”

The whole time they had been talking, Takina had been watching Fuki from inside the helicopter. Fuki returned Takina’s gaze just as Chisato sat down next to her. Mika took a seat opposite the girls.

Chisato Nishikigi, Takina Inoue, Mika… A partner who had left her, a partner she rejected, and the instructor who was so dear to her. The helicopter gained altitude and carried those three people so important to Fuki toward the old radio tower. Fuki kept looking in its direction until she could no longer see it.

Beside her stood the despondent Sakura.

“I really wanted to go back by helicopter…”

They could have done that. Nobody would object. But Fuki just didn’t want to get on that helicopter because she didn’t feel like there was a place for her among the others.

“No, we can just go back the usual way.”

They were there to do their job and nothing else. To do things the usual way. Their fate had been decided before they were old enough to understand it, and it was too late to imagine how things could have been different. The best thing was just to accept that.

Fuki stopped following the helicopter with her eyes. She looked up to the sky and sighed, slowly, with her eyes closed.

“Haaah…”

She felt as if a little bit of the weariness from the night’s work left her with that long exhale. She opened her eyes. Stars were still faintly glimmering above them, but it would soon be morning. Not long now. Just a little longer, but it wasn’t that time.

“Let’s go, partner.”

She turned to go back, her partner beside her.

Chapter 5: Common Occurrence

Her eyes shot open… At first, all she saw was darkness, but when her eyes adjusted, she saw there were wooden boards above her… No, that was the bottom of a bed. She was in a bunk bed, on the bottom.

Takina Inoue sat up. She was dressed casually in a shirt and knee-length shorts made from jersey fabric. Where was she? She tried to remember, but she couldn’t. Her brain felt foggy, maybe because she’d only just woken up. She looked around the room for clues.

“It looks like…a log cabin?”

It seemed so, with all walls made of logs. There was a window with the curtains drawn. Faint light was shining through the gaps—moonlight, Takina guessed. She thought she might remember where she was if she looked outside, and she pushed the covers off to get up from the bed when, suddenly, an upside-down head dangled in front of her.

“Takina, you awake?”

It was Chisato, looking down at her from the top bed. Takina pushed Chisato’s head aside and got off her bed. The wooden boards felt cold to her feet, and she wished she had sandals to put on. Looking around, she saw two pairs of sneakers lying on the floor—one pair hers, and the other presumably Chisato’s. She got her sneakers and put them on her bare feet.

Chisato, her head still dangling from the edge of the bed, grabbed the side of the bed frame and flipped onto the floor. Then she put on her sneakers, too.

“What is this place again?” Takina asked her.

“Huh? What’s the matter, Takina? Are you still half asleep? We’re in… Er… This is funny… I can’t remember?”

Chisato was also in her loungewear—a camisole and shorts. She had her hair in pigtails. If they’d been sleeping in that unheated cabin dressed so lightly, it must have been warm when they went to bed, but it wasn’t quite summer yet… At least, Takina didn’t think it was summer, but she wasn’t too confident. Her memory seemed so unreliable that if someone told her it was summer, she would have readily believed it.

“Hmm… Where are we, indeed?”

“Have you been awake all night?”

“Nah, I only woke up just now, when I sensed you getting up.”

“I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that… But this is weird. Why can’t we remember anything?”

Chisato pulled the curtains open. Pale light from the moon poured into the room. They looked out the window. It seemed they were in the woods.

The situation was becoming stranger and stranger. Takina couldn’t remember coming to this log cabin or even going to a forest.

Chisato opened the window and leaned out of it to take a better look around…and she suddenly dished out her powerful right straight punch at someone who had appeared just outside. Without a second’s delay, she stepped back, away from the window.

“Crap, that was a reflex…!”

The person outside groaned indistinctly when Chisato attacked, then disappeared from view…probably having sunk to their knees.

“Uh… Are they okay…?”

“You didn’t hold back with that one…”

“I felt like it really went in, in a gross way.”

It sounded like she thought she might’ve broken the person’s vertebrae.

Chisato fearfully approached the window… She wasn’t afraid of the stranger outside, but of the fact that she might’ve done something really bad without thinking. She looked down and froze in place, beckoning Takina to come closer.

Takina lined up with Chisato and looked out at the ground below…where a large man in tattered clothes was crawling.

Making no sound, Chisato pointed with her finger at something down below—a nata as long as a sword…no, a machete was stuck in the ground.

“Is that…?” Takina began, but, as if on cue, the large man grabbed the hilt of the machete, pulled himself up to standing, and swung the blade at Takina and Chisato, who were watching him from the window.

“Whoa!”

Both girls leaned back to dodge the slash, after which they promptly withdrew farther into the room.

“Chisato! We’re under attack! We need to get our gear… But where is it?”

Takina looked around the room, but there was nothing besides their sleepover kit bag, which they normally kept at Café LycoReco. Their satchels with all the Lycoris equipment were nowhere to be seen. Takina checked their beds, even looking under the pillow, but she couldn’t find their guns.

“Chisato! This is really bad!”

“Nah… Looks like we’re safe for now.”

Takina turned around. Chisato was leaning so far out of the window, Takina could see only her legs and bottom.

The man with the machete had run off into the dark forest. Chisato pointed in the direction he’d gone for Takina to see. The log cabin was in a small clearing, but the woods around it were dense and pitch-black. The man had completely disappeared in the darkness.

Chisato withdrew back into the room and crossed her arms pensively.

“You know what this reminds me of…?”

“Horror movies about killers?”

“Exactly!”

“…Why are your eyes sparkling with excitement?”

“Why? Takina! We have a log cabin in the woods, and we have a psycho killer! This is what every girl has dreamed of at least once!”

“…I don’t think that’s a true statement.”

“Wait, what?! When watching a movie, did you never think to yourself, ‘In their place, I’d do this,’ or ‘They could’ve done that instead’?”

“I did sometimes feel frustrated with the characters. With the bad choices they’d make.”

“Like, ‘I’ve got enough of this! I’m going back home!’”

“They’re earmarking themselves as the next victim.”

“No, that’s more of a giveaway that they’re the killer!”

“Ah, yes, there were movies like that. Well, anyway, where were you going with that?”

“I was just saying, it can be so annoying how characters act in the movies. You can’t help thinking you’d do better than them, and this is it, our chance! We finally get to be in that situation ourselves!”

As Takina watched Chisato get overly excited, she finally made sense of what was happening.

“Chisato, I think this is a dream.”

“Exactly, that’s what I’m saying!”

Takina was fairly sure there could be no other girl in the whole wide world besides Chisato who’d think being targeted by a killer while unarmed was a dream-like situation. Normal people would at best be confused by a dangerous situation like this. At worst, they’d give in to despair.

“You misunderstand. I meant a dream as in what you see when you’re sleeping. I think we’re really asleep right now.”

“Yeah, I guess this can’t be real. We can’t remember how we got here, for starters. But anyhow! That’s fine by me!”

“I don’t see any positives in this.”

“You should! Dream or not, let’s make the most of it!”

“But it’s just a dream…”

“So? Do you want to just let the killer get you?”

“That…doesn’t sound very appealing.”

“See, it doesn’t matter if it’s a dream or reality. But there’s no point in being so negative! Listen, there are two patterns for slasher movie endings. The protagonists either manage to escape from the killer or defeat the killer.”

Even if it was a dream, Takina didn’t entertain the thought of dying, and if she didn’t want to get killed, she’d have to fight back or run away. She’d be acting the same as in real life.

“By the way, what is a ‘slasher movie’?”

“You don’t know? A type of horror where a killer hunts the protags.”

“How is that different from the splatter movies Kurumi likes?”

Takina was slightly more familiar with the term “splatter movie.”

“Oh, that can be a little confusing, but basically…”

Chisato explained that slasher movies were named so after the slashing action performed by a serial killer. The distinctive feature of splatter movies, on the other hand, was blood gruesomely splattering left and right.

“So there are a lot of movies that fit both categories, but if there’s only mild gore, with the killer cutting up victims without much blood shown on the screen, then that’s not a splatter movie.”

“The two categories indicate differences in content but belong to the same genre?”

“Yeah. It’s like with ramen. Jirou’s ramen and Hakata’s pork bone broth ramen are both ramen, but different types.”

“Both slasher and splatter movies are heavy on the violence…”

Now she understood the difference, Takina thought the fact that the splatter category existed meant there was an audience craving to see that sort of gore. People were strange creatures. How could they enjoy that sort of content…? But then it occurred to Takina that maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the splatter category existed so that people who wanted to see scary movies about killers but didn’t like gore would know which movies to avoid.

“…The world of cinema is certainly very complex. There is such a great variety of movies.”

“Yeah! Movies have so much to offer. Watching them is a long-lasting hobby!”

Dropping the topic for the time being, Takina started searching the room, keeping an eye on the window. The lights wouldn’t switch on—no surprise there. The lightbulbs were missing. And there was nothing that could serve as a weapon.

“We don’t have our phones, either.”

“No means of contact with anyone outside. That’s a common trope in this genre, after all. I bet the phone line’s been cut, too.”

They left the room to search the rest of the cabin. There were two more bedrooms. They opened the door to the first one. It had a bunk bed, just like their room. They found Mizuki on the bottom bunk. She was asleep, cradling a bottle of sake in her arms. The top bunk was unoccupied.

“Hey, Mizuki! Wake up!”

Chisato slapped Mizuki’s cheeks.

“Hngh?” Mizuki emitted an indistinct noise, sitting up on the bed.

“Mizuki, please listen carefully,” said Takina. “This is a dream.”

“Then lemme sleep.”

Mizuki slumped back onto the bed. Chisato sucked her teeth in annoyance. She grabbed Mizuki by the arms and forced her to sit up again.

Takina continued explaining the situation.

“A large man armed with a machete, hostile to us, is prowling the area around this log cabin. Do you understand, Mizuki? We’re in—”

Mizuki’s eyes shot open.

“I’m going to get killed?!”

She caught up fast.

“Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to happen—”

“Oh man… It’s always like this. The sexy, stylish beauty is the first to fall victim to the killer… Is this how it’s going to end, my beautiful life, nipped in the bud…?”

“As I was trying to say, you don’t necessarily need to die. If we take measures and fight back, we should be able to—”

“How awful… Alas, I was simply too beautiful for this world… The cruel fate! But what can I do?”

Mizuki picked up her glasses, which were next to her pillow, and put them on. She got out of bed and hurried to get changed out of her sleepwear. Takina was surprised by Mizuki’s sudden impatience to get dressed. She watched her coworker put on a very short skirt and a snug tank top. Even in the darkness, she could see that the pattern was unusually garish even for Mizuki.

“If a killer’s coming to take my life, I’ve got to be dressed for the occasion!”

Mizuki sat down on the bed again, crossing her legs as she tied her hair back. It slightly grated on Takina’s nerves that Mizuki was so preoccupied with appearances and nourishing her ego, but there was something bothering her even more than that.

“Are you…intending to just wait for the killer to come and murder you?”

“Heh,” Mizuki laughed defiantly. “It’s my role as the beautiful heroine.”

Confused, Takina looked at Chisato, who just seemed bored.

“Going by that logic, it should be me or Takina getting killed first… But we’re only teenagers.”

“It sounds as if you were accepting that one of us will be getting killed… Why is that, Chisato?” asked Takina.

Chisato had to explain to her that in slasher and other horror movies, the sexy character was the first to be killed—it was the iron rule. But the victim would normally be in her twenties or older, very rarely a teenager. Outside of Japan, teenagers were still seen as children, not as sexy young women.

“It’s different when all of the protags are teenagers. Then it’s usually either the one with the biggest boobs or a mean rich girl who dies first. Hmm…”

Chisato thought for a moment and then suggested checking the other room. If Mizuki was in the cabin, then there was a good chance Mika or Kurumi would be there, too.

“We probably need them if we’re to survive this.”

“And why is that…?”

“Tough, muscular black guys hold out against the killer until the end, and little kiddies have a surprisingly high survival rate.”

“…But aren’t those just stereotypes from the movies?”

“That’s how it works, Takina. All right, let’s go.”

They headed to the next room, dragging Mizuki, who was in sandals, along with them… But the third bedroom was empty. The bottom bunk did look as if someone had been sleeping in it until not long ago, though.

Chisato sniffed the pillow.

“Teach was here,” she said.

“But smelling people’s pillows…?”

“Hey, it works.”

Mizuki checked the top bunk. That bed didn’t seem to have been used.

“Okay. Let’s search the cabin for anything we can use as weapons and for food and water. Then we’ll—”

A scream outside interrupted her. They all recognized the voice as Mika’s.

Without hesitation, Chisato opened the window and jumped out. Takina followed after her.

The air was chilly outside. The grass Takina was flattening with her sneakers as she ran was slightly damp, which added to the impression of a rather cold night.

“Wait up!” Mizuki shouted, struggling to keep up in her sandals and impractical clothes, but Chisato and Takina left her behind, rushing into the dark woods.

It was pretty dark, but there was more light coming through from the direction they were going, where they’d heard Mika’s scream. They kept running…until they reached a lake. It was large and surrounded by forest on all sides. The girls saw Mika on the shore, at the bottom of a massive tree. He was sitting on the ground, with his back against the trunk, his head down, limp… A machete was stuck in his abdomen.

“Nooo! Teach?! T-Teach…? You can’t be…!”

Aghast, Chisato started running toward him, but her pace dropped the closer she got, until she was walking. She stopped a few paces away from him.

Takina lined up with Chisato and looked down at Mika without emotion.

“What’s this supposed to be?” she asked.

The man was certainly Mika. He was wearing a thin, tight undershirt which showed off his bulging muscles and sweatpants. The outfit didn’t seem so much like his pajamas, but what he might wear when exercising. He had clearly been fatally wounded, given the machete piercing his stomach…but the odd thing was that a large amount of blood was still spurting out of the wound. Blood was gushing out of Mika like water from a small fountain or from a broken pipe. The volume certainly exceeded the five liters that a human body holds.

“Ah, so it’s not a slasher movie, but a splatter one. The over-the-top type.”

Gore was a big part of splatter movies, which aimed to excite their audiences by portraying gruesome events with chilling realism or by featuring shockingly drastic developments, but there was another sub-genre where the gore was so over the top, it became comical.

“Comical…”

“Yeah, like this,” Chisato said, pointing to the blood ceaselessly gushing out of Mika.

“But you know, horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. And abroad, audiences in movie theaters sometimes burst out laughing at the scary scenes, apparently. So you get comedies pretending to be horrors… Or, no, you get movies that the viewers can interpret either as a horror or a comedy.”

“Really…,” Takina replied, gazing down at Mika’s body with Chisato.

The way blood was spurting out of him was so unrealistic, it did look quite funny, and Takina couldn’t muster any sorrow. The blood was puddling around Mika, forming a stream, which started to flow into the lake.

“Guys…! Hah… Haaah… I told you to wait for me… Hah… Haaah… Whoa, what? Is he…is he dead?!”

“Hey, what? You’re still alive? Hang on a moment… No way! Does this mean the sex symbol at Café LycoReco…was Teach?!”

“Ah, right. The sexiest character dies first rule…”

Now the girls thought about it, Mika was always dressed in a kimono, which covered up most of his body, but under it, he was totally ripped. It was obvious with him wearing a tight-fitting undershirt and soft sweatpants, which showed off his shapely legs. At a glance, you could tell he had an amazing body. He really was sexy.

“Know what…? This makes sense. Teach was always super popular.”

“Was he, really?”

“Yeah, he even had those obsessive fans. Well, actually, they were stalkers. But if he’s the sexy one, then what’s Mizuki’s role…?” Chisato gasped, suddenly looking worried. “At this rate, she will be the only one to survive! She’s the final girl!”

The final girl was another horror trope, common especially in slasher movies. It referred to a female character who was the only one to survive the final confrontation with the killer. The final girl character had to meet certain requirements. Usually, it would be a chaste, sensible, inconspicuous young girl, although there were exceptions, such as a single mother being the final girl.

“Are you sure about this? Mizuki is anything but inconspicuous dressed like this,” Takina said, looking pointedly at Mizuki.

“True, that,” Mizuki agreed.

“But she meets the chastity requirement, although not by choice, and she has it together… Also, she’s unpopular with the opposite sex.”

“Lies!” Mizuki shouted, but Chisato ignored her.

“There’s another characteristic. The final girl often has a genderless name.”

Between Takina, Chisato, and Mizuki, only Mizuki’s name could be used for boys, too.

“But then won’t we survive if we stick close to Mizuki?”

“Nope. The final girl is the only one of the killer’s targets who survives. Everyone else dies.”

For a very brief moment, a thought appeared in the back of Takina’s mind that they could resolve this problem by killing Mizuki outright… But, of course, she wasn’t going to do that. She mentally squashed that idea because if they tried to survive by playing the final girl card, she’d eventually have to fight Chisato. It made more sense to focus on taking out the killer instead.

Chisato started thinking about ways to survive. She put one hand on her chin and used the other hand to rest her elbow in, posing like a thoughtful detective.

“There’s another survivor trope besides the final girl, but…I don’t know…,” she said, stealing a glance at Takina for some reason.

Takina looked back at Chisato, who averted her gaze uncomfortably.

“What is it, Chisato?”

Suddenly, they heard the sound of an engine revving up somewhere deep in the woods. They fell silent. The sound changed to the whir of something spinning rapidly. What could that be? Given the circumstances, it wasn’t hard to guess—a chainsaw. The killer was coming back with a new piece of gear.

“I’m sorry, Boss!” Takina apologized, tugging on the machete that was stuck in his body, but it was either stuck too deep or it was being held tight in place by Mika’s powerful muscles, because it wouldn’t budge. She braced her foot on Mika’s shoulder and finally managed to yank it out.

The blade of the machete was about the same length as a short sword, but the metal was thin, making it light, which was a plus. The hilt, though, was so short it could only be held in one hand, and you couldn’t cut through bone without holding such a blade with both hands.

The sound of the chainsaw was getting nearer…and then they saw him, the large man from before. Illuminated by the moonlight, he was running at them, holding the chainsaw above his head. He looked to be almost two meters tall.

“Wooo! Here comes the chainsaaaw!”

Ignoring Chisato’s happy screaming and hopping, Takina stepped forward. She put her left foot half a step back and held the machete low by her left hip, gripping it with her right hand.

The man was close now. They saw his tattered clothes. He was wearing a mask that looked like the Gokigen drink mascot character, a child with a big forehead smiling with crinkly eyes.

Takina thought there was no point in trying to cut his head off. She might be able to cut through the joints, but with their height difference, she wouldn’t be able to cut horizontally. The man was holding a chainsaw over his head, so trying to strike him from above was also out of the question.

There was only one other spot worth targeting.

Takina crouched and shifted her weight onto her left foot. As soon as the man came within her reach, she pushed with her left foot to lunge forward, after which she put her full strength into spinning, turning her waist, arms, and the machete she was holding. The killer made to bring down his chainsaw on her, but the machine was heavy, which slowed down his movements.

The machete hit the killer’s right knee, but it was so tough, the blade didn’t go in. Takina applied more force as she almost brushed against the man…but the blade shattered, making her lose her balance and fall. Without losing momentum, she dodge-rolled away from the enemy.

The man revved up the chainsaw menacingly and turned to face Takina again, but his left knee suddenly buckled under him. Blood spurted out from the wound. Takina had damaged his joint at least.

“Takina, run!” shouted Chisato.

Mizuki was already running into the woods at full speed.

“I can land another hit! You run! I’ll catch up later!” Takina shouted back.

Though the machete broke, almost thirty centimeters of the blade was still attached to the hilt. As long as the enemy was using a chainsaw as his weapon, she could fight him. The blade was long enough to cut the chain of the chainsaw if she aimed it right. Then they’d both be unarmed. The man would still have an advantage over Takina, but his knee was injured, so she reckoned she had a chance.

“Takina! Killers of this type can’t be defeated normally!”

“What, really?!”

“That’s why we gotta run!”

Chisato ran off in the same direction as Mizuki earlier. Giving up, Takina followed after them. The man gave chase, but he was wobbling, so Takina got away without a problem.

She and Chisato were running through the dark forest for a while, but they started to slow down, realizing something was wrong. They stopped and looked around. Mizuki was nowhere to be seen. She was wearing sandals, so they should have caught up to her by then…

“We’ve lost her.”

The forest was dark, and it was all too easy to lose sense of direction. Mizuki might have been running in one direction to begin with, but with trees in her way, she might have been swerving to the left or right, and after many such subtle changes to her course, she ended up running in a completely different direction.

“Shall we try calling her, just once? Mizuki! Where are you?!” Chisato shouted into the woods.

They listened… No reply. Maybe she did hear them but didn’t answer so as not to give away her position to the killer. In any case, they couldn’t stand there waiting for an answer for too long.

Chisato let out a sigh, evidently giving up on Mizuki. Then they heard a car. The girls looked at each other and broke into a run, heading toward the sound. There was a clearing in the forest, and they saw asphalt—a road. They saw the taillights of a car driving away. It was no use. They weren’t going to make it. By the time Takina ran out onto the road, the car was already far away, the red taillights mere dots in the distance.

“Damn it! If you get in a car, you’ve practically won.”

It was a country road that had no lights. But if it was still in use, there must be a town at the end of it.

The girls started walking along the road, heading in the direction the car had driven away.

“Shall we talk about how to act in case we get attacked again? The enemy’s armed with a chainsaw, but I have this.”

Takina showed Chisato the broken machete she had held onto.

The chainsaw was heavy and cumbersome. It wasn’t easy to swing it left and right. No matter how big or muscular the enemy was, his motions were crude and obvious, and if the chainsaw hit the ground, a tree, or a rock, the blades would grind against it, and the man would have to fight to maintain control of his weapon.

Takina thought that even if the man managed to strike her with the chainsaw, the injury wouldn’t be immediately fatal, unless he struck her head. She’d have enough time to cut the chain, and then she and Chisato would have fair chances.

“Hmm, I guess that could work. Chainsaws aren’t weapons to begin with. They’re tools for cutting wood. But if this is a dream, it might follow horror logic.”

The reason Chisato told Takina earlier that she wouldn’t be able to kill the chainsaw guy there and then was also because it’s not that easy to slay the menacing murderer in horror movies. It wasn’t because the antagonist was particularly strong, but because it would be impossible to make a sequel if the character turned out to be popular with audiences, unless revival was an option in the movie’s universe.

“That’s…frustrating. It sounds like running away might be the better option here. You said there’s another trope besides the final girl that guarantees survival?”

“Huh?” Chisato stopped in her tracks. “Ah, that… Yeah, but it’s not as mainstream as the final girl. If anything, it’s an exception…”

Chisato was squirming, not giving her a clear answer, so Takina stood in front of her and looked her straight in the eye.

“Tell me what it is.”

“Well, um… The couple survives… As in, romantic partners…”

There was silence, so acute it was hurting their ears.

“That is a…difficult condition…”

“Right…?”

Chisato was fidgeting and stealing glances at Takina. As for Takina, she thought that given the extraordinary circumstances, extraordinary measures were perhaps justified, but she didn’t know what they would need to do in order to meet the definition of romantic partners. Married people would get a marriage certificate, but there was no such thing for unmarried couples. Would it be enough for them to declare that they were a couple? Or would they need to kiss first?

…Something wasn’t right. Takina’s contemplation was interrupted by the realization that something had felt wrong to her that whole time. It was a dream. Of course, there was that, but something else felt particularly odd to her, and she was looking at it right at that moment—it was Chisato.

And then she figured it out.

“Chisato, I have to tell you something. This is— Huh?!”

Something cut through the air between her and Chisato. They instinctively jumped away. The item rolled on the asphalt with a clatter… It was a pair of glasses, smudged with blood. They were Mizuki’s.

The girls turned in the direction the glasses came from… They saw the killer in the Gokigen mask standing with his legs wide apart, far ahead of them on the road they were following. He had his chainsaw with him. He raised it high, started the engine, and roared.

How was it possible for him to have caught up with them so quickly despite his leg injury? Takina was greatly confused. She looked to Chisato, who scratched her head, making a face as if she just remembered something bad.

“Dang, I forgot!” she said. “Killers in movies often have this teleportation-like ability!”

“How is this even possible?”

“It’s not teleportation per se. They just have some mysterious way of overtaking the protagonists and ambushing them, even if they’re slow.”

“…How convenient for them to be able to do that.”

The killer was slowly walking to them, the chainsaw at the ready. He was still about twenty meters away. They could easily run away from him now, but that wouldn’t help if he just teleported to them again…

Chisato grabbed Takina’s hand and brought her face close to Takina’s to gaze intently into her eyes.

“What is it, Chisato?”

“Takina, we have to do this.”

“Do what?”

Instead of replying to her, Chisato turned toward the killer. She raised her hand, joined with Takina’s, above their heads.

“Mr. Killer! Can you hear me?! We’re…actually a couple!”

“Wait, Chisato, why are you—?”

“Takina, play along! Tell him we’re girlfriends. We go on three. One, two, three! We’re girlfrie— Hey, why aren’t you saying it?!”

“Do you think that if we announce we’re girlfriends, he’ll just say, ‘Fine, I’ll leave you alone, then’?”

“Hmm… Well… Maybe I’m being too optimistic.”

Throughout this whole thing, the killer kept walking, getting closer and closer to them.

Giving up on her idea, Chisato let go of Takina’s hand, put her hands on her hips, and hung her head.

“Chisato, listen. I figured something out about this dream.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s my dream.”

“Huh? Are you sure it’s not mine? Because it’s right up my alley.”

“I know it is. You’ve probably influenced me to dream this… But you wouldn’t abide by the rules.”

That was what seemed so off about Chisato in this dream. She was self-centered, freewheeling, and unstoppable. Just because there were some rules didn’t mean she’d follow them.

She was enjoying being chased around by a killer, but real Chisato would quickly get bored with being on the losing side. In her dream, there’d be a dramatic turnaround at the climax. Maybe a divorced topless muscleman with sparse hair would suddenly jump out of a helicopter and duke it out with the killer. But nothing of the sort was happening in that dream. If it wasn’t Chisato’s, whose could it be? Who always followed the rules to the letter? Only one member of the Café LycoReco crew fit the bill—Takina Inoue.

“This is definitely my dream, and I don’t like these rules giving the killer an unfair advantage.”

“Well, okay, but he’s coming at us right now, revving up the chainsaw.”

“There are no immortal killers. If he’s alive, he can be killed. Anything that has a physical form can be destroyed.”

“I guess so, but…um…what are you thinking of doing?”

“We could fight him, but it’s too much effort. There’s a quicker way.”

It happened as soon as she said that—two beams of bright light appeared behind the killer. He couldn’t ignore that, so he turned his head to look, lifting the chainsaw above his head…and the incoming trailer truck rammed into him. The killer’s body bounced off the road like a ping-pong ball and rolled away into the woods.

Chisato’s mouth dropped open, almost looking as if she’d dislocated her jaw. She was staring in absolute shock.

The truck stopped. It had the name of a delivery company on the side, with a squirrel in the logo.

“You getting in?” asked Kurumi, leaning out from the driver’s seat nonchalantly.

“Yes, thanks,” said Takina. “Come on, Chisato.”

“No, Takina… You’re throwing all the rules out of the window! But wait. Actually, you do get ridiculous plot twist endings like this in B movies or C movies… Still, no, this just isn’t right…!”

Takina chucked away the broken machete before climbing up the side of the cabin. She opened the passenger door and extended her hand to Chisato.

“Let’s get out of here, Chisato.”

“Eh, I guess it is what it is!” Chisato reluctantly conceded. She took Takina’s hand and got into the truck’s cabin with her.

The cab had only one row of seating, but the seats were flat and very spacious, so the three girls could sit next to each other without being too cramped.

“Okay, we’re leaving!” Kurumi said, starting the engine.

Takina had been wondering how Kurumi managed to drive a truck despite her small size, but it turned out she was using something like a console controller instead of the steering wheel, and she was sitting in a booster seat resembling a movie theater chair to be able to see out of the windshield. The panel with the meters and such had “self-drive” displayed on it. That explained it.

“Hang on,” said Chisato. “Actually, this still fits the movie tropes.”

“How?”

Chisato took Takina’s hand and lifted it up.

“Because we announced we’re a couple!”

That did tick the box for one of the tropes, but also, they had been saved by a truck, which was what Takina had wished for. Besides, joining hands and having one of them proclaim they were a couple didn’t make it a fact. Even Takina knew that more was required to be considered a couple… But thinking about the word couple… Besides meaning people in a relationship, it also simply meant “two of something.” And two of something was a duo, like Takina and Chisato were a Lycoris duo. They were partners, and again, the word partners could also mean a couple… So did they actually semantically meet the requirements for “the couple survives” rule from the beginning? But if so, then it could have been Chisato’s dream, too, and the fact that she thought of a truck and one appeared was merely a coincidence…?

“Well, I don’t care anymore. I’m too tired for this,” Takina said ostensibly to Chisato but in fact more to herself.

She was soaked with sweat. It wasn’t just from running earlier. It felt hot in the truck, as if the heating was on. Her throat was parched, too.

Chisato wasn’t satisfied with Takina dropping the subject, but Takina really couldn’t be bothered to think about it anymore. They got rid of the killer and were alive, which was all that mattered as far as she was concerned. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. She must have been more tired than she’d realized, because she had the sensation of sinking into the backrest. Letting go of Chisato’s hand seemed like too much effort. Takina’s body seemed to be growing heavier and heavier, her consciousness fading. Only her awareness of Chisato’s hand in hers, of its warmth, remained sharp as she drifted off.

•

When Takina opened her eyes again…it was dark. She could see the ceiling, though, and it was a ceiling she was used to seeing. Where was she? She tried to remember, but she couldn’t, her brain feeling foggy, maybe because she’d only just woken up. She looked around the room for clues.

“It looks like…a Japanese-style room?”

It was the room at the back of Café LycoReco. The sun was shining in through a gap in the curtains… It was probably morning.

Takina was still feeling spacey when she heard a woman screaming. But it didn’t come from anyone around her. When she reflectively turned toward the sound, Takina saw it came from a tablet, propped up on the floor. On the screen, a blood-stained woman was running away from a creepy man with a chainsaw.

Ah, that’s why…

Her memories were still hazy, but Takina had the sense of pieces falling into place. She felt as if she’d woken up from a frustrating dream, but she couldn’t remember it anymore.

The previous day, Chisato had her revenge, forcing her to lie down in the Japanese room at the back of the café when Takina started coughing and having an elevated temperature. They got briefly called into action at night, but after that, Chisato forced Takina to watch movies with her. Takina could vaguely remember Chisato going on and on about those movies.

“And where’s Chisato…?”

Takina became aware of touching something warm with her hand, which was extended above her head. She craned her neck to look behind her…and saw a sleeping Chisato.

They must have spread out another mattress on the floor next to Takina’s futon to watch movies together, and they fell asleep like that, with their heads toward each other. Chisato’s hand was in Takina’s, perhaps by coincidence. In the dream, they were holding hands, too…

The dream? What was it about, again? Takina couldn’t remember.

She slid her hand from under Chisato’s and sat up on the futon. She’d been sweating a lot in her sleep, and she woke up thirsty. Looking around her, she saw an empty sports drink bottle and an unopened can of Gokigen brand juice drink. She reached for the can, opened it, and drank. It was a carbonated beverage with lactic acid. At room temperature, it tasted shockingly sweet…

“Oh, you’re awake?” Mizuki asked, coming into the room. Perhaps she’d heard Takina stirring. She was dressed in her waitress uniform, so it must have been very late morning, close to their opening time.

“Argh, look at this mess! Good grief… So much for her staying to look after you. She just wanted to have fun, as usual!” Mizuki complained about Chisato.

Takina looked at her friend. Chisato was half-smiling in her sleep. She must have been having a good dream.

“Um, I’m sorry I took up the room for the whole night.”

“Oh, don’t mention it. Stay in bed until you get better.”

“I might have sweat out the bug. I feel fine now.”

“You can’t be too careful with these things… Here, this is for you. Canned peaches.”

The canned peaches she’d given Chisato were still in the room somewhere…but Takina docilely accepted the gift, thanking Mizuki.

“Our regulars also brought you a pile of gifts. I’ll bring them later.”

“They brought gifts for…me?”

“Who else do you think they’re for?”

“Chisato…?”

“That idiot’s back to rude health. The gifts are all for you, Takina.”

Takina remembered what Chisato had said about it being nice to have others caring about you. She could kind of understand that now, but it also made her uneasy.

“Well, you don’t need to work today. Take it easy for now.”

“Thank you. I’d like to get changed, though… No, first, a shower. I’m so sweaty, my clothes are sticking to me.”

“Oh dear. Well, make sure you don’t catch a chill. I’ve got to go back… Oh, hang on.” Mizuki froze as she was just about to leave the room. She turned back. “Did that dummy sleeping next to you shower yesterday?”

“I don’t know… Oh…”

Takina knew for sure that Chisato didn’t shower the day she’d been unwell. Did she skip it for two days in a row…?

There was a strange tension in the air between Mizuki and Takina. With some apprehension, Takina crept closer to Chisato, buried the tip of her nose in Chisato’s hair, and sniffed.

“Oh yes, she did shower. She smells nice.”

Relief filled the room.

Afterword

Hello, Readers! It’s me, Asaura!

Thank you so much for buying Lycoris Recoil: Recovery Days and reading all the way to the end!

This book contains both stories serialized on Lycoris Recoil’s official Note page and an additional, never-before-seen chapter. Ideally, there would have been a QR code here for you to scan or some promotional insert, but things didn’t quite work out, so I couldn’t get that added. For those interested in checking out the Note page, please visit https://note.com/lyco_reco.

My original plan was to write different stories and publish them on Note, choose a few that fit certain themes, and make them into this book… In retrospect, I was being overly optimistic and didn’t plan carefully enough. Various things happened when I got started with Note later than I’d hoped, and I found myself in a situation where I had only three months until the book release date. Here we go again, I thought to myself, just like with the previous book. I had an inkling it’d go like that, a bad feeling, a vague sense of a looming challenge, and I didn’t have to wait long to be proven right.

Same as with Lycoris Recoil: Ordinary Days, this book, too, was a narrowly won battle. I have to thank you all for your support!

In any case, I’m still going to publish more stories on Note. It’d be nice if the plot I originally had in mind could be gradually realized…

And now, I should thank everyone who helped make this book.

First and foremost, the illustrator Imigimuru, who faced challenges even greater than mine…and is likely fighting brutal deadlines as we speak, stretched too thin due to being in such high demand. Your illustrations for this volume were amazing, as usual! You’re awesome!

I would also like to give a big thank-you to everyone involved in the Lycoris Recoil anime, the official Note page for the series, and the publishing house, which went beyond the call of duty (especially regarding the strict deadlines) to make this work!

Aside from the Lycoris Recoil novels, there are also comics and the anime, with the second season currently in production. I hope you can enjoy this series in all its different forms!

That’s it from me. I hope we’ll see each other again sometime! Bye for now!

Asaura

Post-Credits Scene: And So, Once More

The movie and the credits ended, and the lights came back on in the screening room. The soundproofing made the room like a dome, shutting out all outside sounds but enhancing the inside noises you wouldn’t normally notice, such as the rustling of clothes as people stood up from their seats, footsteps, the faint clinking of ice cubes inside paper cups, and the last bits of popcorn rolling against the sides of nearly empty popcorn buckets.

Takina thought it was as if they were in an intermediary world between the movie and the real world.

Chisato stood up gingerly, picking up her empty popcorn bucket and cup. She checked to make sure she didn’t leave anything on her seat. In the row behind her and Takina, Mika, Kurumi, and Mizuki also stood up and started walking down the aisles and out of the room. Takina and Chisato followed after them. As soon as they stepped outside, there was so much noise around them. Theater staff were calling, “Empty cups here!” and everyone around was suddenly talking as if they’d been unmuted. Quite a few people hurried to the restrooms.

“I was surprised by how many people stayed until after the credits. Why didn’t they leave after the movie ended?” Takina asked Chisato, who was walking beside her.

Chisato looked a bit thrown for a moment. She crossed her arms, staring at the ground.

“You always come up with these difficult questions…”

“Is it difficult…?”

“Well, I also stay until after the credits… Mainly to digest what I’ve seen? The production team specially chose the roll credits music, so it doesn’t shake you out of the world of the movie, and you can just sit there reflecting on what was good about the film, what you enjoyed about it, and let the experience sink in. I also like to check the names of actors I thought played well.”

“Ah, so that’s why you watch the credits.”

“I don’t, like, read them all. I just idly watch them roll. Oh, but sometimes you make surprising discoveries, like that a famous actor made a cameo appearance. I like that. Oh, and if there’s a post-credits scene, that’s the cherry on top.”

Takina hadn’t heard of post-credits scenes before. Kurumi, walking behind her, explained that they were bonus scenes at the end. They were shown after the credits. Sometimes, they were intended to get the audiences excited for a sequel, and other times, they broke the fourth wall with a character from the movie directly addressing the audience, saying, “It’s the end. Go home,” or they were just shots of the main characters doing something completely unrelated to the plot… But they could also show something crucial to the understanding of the movie.

“But this movie didn’t have a post-credits scene. Were you disappointed?”

“Nah, not really. If there is a post-credits scene, that’s great, but I don’t mind if there isn’t. Most movies don’t have them! I do always hope for something after the credits, though.”

To Takina, it seemed like yet another overly complicated aspect of moviegoing, but she would agree that if she was paying to see a movie, it made sense to stay until the end of the credits and get the most out of the experience.

They left the theater and headed to the elevators. While they waited, Chisato turned around.

“Guys!” she said. “You haven’t thrown away your tickets, right?!”

Takina guessed she meant the tickets for the movie. They weren’t the “tear in half” type, but printed slips.

“Shopping malls like this one offer little freebies to customers with movie tickets! I recommend the games arcade in the basement! If you have a ticket, you get one free go on a claw machine, even the two-hundred-yen ones!”

“Really? That sounds like a very good deal!” Takina exclaimed in surprise.

Chisato grinned as if that was the sort of response she’d been waiting for.

“It is! It’s a real bargain!”

“Only if you can land a prize,” Mizuki said with a smirk.

“As it happens, there are five of us… With five goes, we’re sure to get some plushies! It’s relatively easy to get prizes on the two-hundred-yen machines. And by the way, there are quite a few other places where you can use your movie tickets to get freebies. You’ll find a list on the theater’s website or in the pamphlets. If you’re serious about it, you can get all sorts of stuff for free.”

“I just want to go for drinks, really,” said Mizuki.

“And I want to grab something sweet to eat. Or have a sit-down meal,” piped up Kurumi.

“I think they have a spa on the top floor,” said Mika. “I’d like to go there. I’ve never tried a Finnish sauna before.”

“What, you’re all going somewhere else?”

Chisato sounded disappointed. Since they’d come to the theater together, she probably wanted to hang out as a group. Mizuki patted her on the head.

“What can you do? We all have different interests. And the spa here is for men only.”

“But let’s go to the games arcade together,” Takina cut in. “Even if we’re going to go our different ways after, we could do that together first. Let’s not miss out on our freebies. It’s better to go together than everyone at a different time. We’ll have a better chance of getting something.”

“Yes, let’s do that!” Chisato agreed with a smile. She pressed the elevator button. “Here comes team LycoReco! Mission start!”

•

“See? It’s absolutely fine to watch movies on a tablet or laptop, but watching in a movie theater with all the bells and whistles is pretty neat, right?” Chisato asked after they finished their meal.

“Perhaps, although the movie itself wasn’t good, if I’m being honest.”

“But they tried their best!”

“‘They tried their best’ isn’t a positive review, either, is it? I didn’t like the excessive amount of blood and gore… The killer itself wasn’t too bad as a character, though.”

“That’s enough to make it worth seeing, no?”

“I won’t disagree, but I’d have preferred it if I knew in advance what sort of movie it was, so I could choose whether to watch it in a theater or at home.”

“I’d say it’s always best to see a movie in a theater and hope it turns out good!”

“That’s a waste of time and money.”

“Okay, then. Maybe you should choose the next movie we go to.”

“All right, I will…” Takina stopped, alarm bells ringing. She was looking at Chisato, who was sitting opposite her, with the intense feeling that something was wrong. Chisato was drinking apple juice…with a big, self-satisfied grin. But why would she be grinning? Takina criticized her movie choice, so why did she look triumphant?

And then it sank in. Takina realized she’d fallen into Chisato’s trap. Without suspecting anything, she’d effectively agreed to go see a movie with Chisato again. They had a similar conversation before the movie started, but this time the suggestion to go again came from Takina. It was no coincidence—Chisato had clearly steered the conversation to make her say so. And she was grinning now, seeing that Takina had realized she’d been played.

“Oh, don’t spoil your pretty face with a frown! Joking, you look adorable either way!” Chisato said, still grinning but less smug.

The entire LycoReco crew had gone to the games arcade, and they had a pretty good time there. At Chisato’s insistence, they then went to a café near the arcade, where they chatted about the movie over coffee. Afterward, Mizuki went to a craft beer bar on the first floor, Mika to the spa on the top floor, Kurumi to a pancake place on the third floor, and Takina and Chisato to a different café located inside a stylish general store on the fourth floor, where they had a meal…

The movie wasn’t great, but Takina was really enjoying the day out, and it wasn’t because they managed to get discounted tickets. She was clearly having fun. She didn’t regret having gone there with Chisato. And that made her annoyed with herself.

“Heh.” Chisato’s smile suddenly softened. “I’m not going to force you to do anything. It’s up to you, Takina. But if you decide to go to the movies again, then—”

“Well, I definitely will. I told you I liked one of the trailers. I’d like to see that movie… But I’ll have to read about it when there’s more information to decide whether to see it in a movie theater.”

“Let me know if you decide to go, because I’d like to come along!”

Chisato was smiling, but it wasn’t one of her usual sunny smiles full of childlike joy. Sometimes she smiled that way at Takina, and when she did, she seemed like someone on a higher level, not as in Takina’s senior or the best Lycoris in history, but more like…an adult. At the same time, that smile made Takina feel like an immature child.

Suddenly feeling embarrassed, Takina looked away, propping her chin on the giant penguin plushie the LycoReco crew had obtained through the power of teamwork, which was sitting on her knees. It was so soft, half of Takina’s face got buried in it.

“Okay… Let’s go together,” she said in a muffled voice.