Hey, we've managed to convince Nino and Itsuki to join us for midterm studying this week. And no, before you ask, this isn't a joke, we really did manage to get them to join. I know you're also not planning to listen to us and keep working tonight like you usually do, so on Friday, why don't you stay the night with us at our place? That way we can make sure that you'll give yourself a full night's rest. If you refuse, I'll call Dad and tell him that our tutor is starting to underperform at his job, so don't forget to keep your Friday night open ~
As if she'll ever get a hold of her father with a direct call, Uesugi Fuutarou snorts to himself quietly amidst the high-altitude winds buffeting his body. And too bad Ichika is blissfully unaware of the fact that Fuutarou already reports his tutoring progress to the girls on a regular basis to her father to keep him up-to-date with everything that's been going on so far.
Lowering his phone, the young mage, having resumed his nighttime duties, stands on the edge of the helipad located at the top of the Pentagon high-rise. Rather than taking the elevator down to the ground floor like he usually does, tonight he has taken the elevator up to the roof to return here. His black half-kilt dances behind his legs as a result of the whipping winds that seem more violent than normal tonight, but that doesn't concern him much. He merely pinches the tip of his black cap's visor and pulls it down to ward against the wind, if that can even be described as such.
The wind is trivial in comparison to what he must handle tonight. As he gazes off into the distance towards the city downtown, Fuutarou can spy the faint yet telltale strobes of police lights, indicating his next target.
Rather than using his phone, Fuutarou pulls up his smartwatch, pulls it up somewhat to his face, and speaks,
"Uesugi Isanari."
The smartwatch receives his verbal command and dials the number silently, the small square screen switching accordingly to a dialing in progress screen, then to a call connected screen.
"Read ya loud and clear, kid."
"Have you been monitoring the progress on that police raid that's going on downtown?" Fuutarou asks.
"That I have. It's a big one this time - looks like they've found a really big cache."
"Isanari, tell me I'm not the only one between us that sees that as a huge red flag right now."
"You're not. All this time, the police's only uncovered small stashes - and mapping out their hits and raids throughout the city, they've almost always been contained to lesser traveled parts of the city, the outskirts, or the boondocks. Not only is this raid tonight the biggest one we've seen yet, just judging by how many goddamn police cars are in the area, but it's smack in the middle of downtown."
Fuutarou narrows his eyes in the direction of the police lights far off in the heart of the city. Even in light of the worsening drug trafficking problem that the city is being plagued with, there is no reason for there to be a commotion like this. With how vigilantly the city police has been in cracking down on drug trafficking wherever they can get their hands on it, it is very strange, to say the least, for the police to simply stumble upon a huge cache one random night like tonight, and right in the middle of the city, too. And even stranger is the fact that police drug raid history has kept them out of the heart of the city - until now.
"Ping that location on Dragon, I'll want a better look at this before I get there," Fuutarou orders his father as he raises his wrist so that his magically modified smartwatch can plant a comms rune next to his left ear to maintain the call. Turning around, he raises his hand towards the large red H on the roof. "Fate is in Heaven."
Obeying his activation command, the large surveillance rune he's planted over a month ago on this high-rise reactivates and glows into view. Once fully reactivated, Fuutarou uses his smartwatch to pull up the map of the city once more, though on a simple two-dimensional magic panel rather than its full-size, three-dimensional magic hologram, and with it, he drags the map over to the general area where he believes the police lights to be congregated and awaits his father's ping, which pops up on his map for him to zoom in on. And once zoomed in, he selects a specific surveillance rune in close proximity to the sirens to activate remotely, just like the one near him.
With the ping that Isanari has given him, Fuutarou double-taps the marked location, and the magic panel provides a live feed, complete with ambient audio, for its owner to view. Police cars and their lights are everywhere on this street; he figured there would be sirens aplenty, but then again it wouldn't really make much sense for the police cars to leave their sirens on in the middle of the city, as they'd add an even more annoying disturbance on top of the disturbance they already cause with their presence and lights alone.
The building that the policemen seem to be most concentrated outside is a net cafe, judging by the signs beside the building. Many of the buildings downtown have underground levels, frequently buildings like net cafes, bookstores, arcades, and merchandise stores, so whatever's drawn the police there tonight, it's probably downstairs - and Fuutarou needs to know what's caused this commotion before the police dismantle the evidence and clean it out, if they even choose to do it themselves.
"Isanari, I'm going in. Keep eyes over the AO," Fuutarou says, and not even waiting for him to confirm this, he steps onto the glowing rune on the helipad. Positioning himself in the very center of the large surveillance rune, the young mage waits five seconds once he's standing still before the rune, glowing stronger and stronger, suddenly emits a burst of white-blue light, leaving nothing behind once the flash of light is gone, not even itself. The roof of the Pentagon returns to normal.
But the surveillance rune that Fuutarou activated prior to disappearing has simultaneously begun glowing at the same time as the one on the high-rise, and the instant Fuutarou is whisked away front view from the tower, he finds himself standing on the rune in the heart of the city. His eyes are still flashbanged somewhat from the teleportation as a mild side effect, though the temporary blindness does fade away quickly. Still, it's something he can work on to further optimize the teleportation feature he's added to his rune system.
Once his sight returns to normal, the teenage mage finds himself on the attic floor of an apartment building near the congregation of city police cars. There are people living in the apartments underneath, but this attic floor is rarely used and is only accessible from within the apartment itself, at least to its own residents, making it an ideal spot to plant a surveillance rune.
Leaving the surveillance rune behind that fades back into the wood flooring and out of sight, Fuutarou heads down the stairs all the way to the bottom, descending about eight flights of stairs to emerge out onto the street. He double-checks his Presence Concealment rune to make sure it's active for his objective tonight and crosses the street to approach his target building. Policemen in vests are standing on the partially blockaded street, directing traffic wherever needed, and Fuutarou, with his Presence Concealment active, carefully weaves his way through the street to avoid getting hit by cars in the process.
The policemen standing guard around the perimeter of the NO CROSSING lines set up around the street do not even bat an eye at the teenage boy dressed in all black and a white dress shirt underneath walking up to them and simply ducking underneath the yellow police tape to let himself into the building. The policemen and policewomen inside the tape discussing the situation do not seem to even acknowledge Fuutarou's existence either.
"This is going to make headline news later today...the commissioner's going to have to hold a press conference about this soon," one of the policemen groans.
"Sure seems so, right. And the press's been hounding us for weeks already, going on about why we can't seem to get a handle on this situation..."
"Can't the commissioner just cease all the press conferences? That way we don't have to deal with them."
"Can't do that, rookie. That'll make the situation seem way worse than it is, and it'll give a big opportunity to the press to ridicule us to no end, saying that we're incompetent motherfuckers who don't even care to do our jobs right."
"I mean, they wouldn't be wrong, now, would they?"
"Hey, watch where you're saying that. You're lucky we've been in the same unit for a while, so I can let that pass. Don't you let some of the other senior officers catch you saying that."
"Fuck if I care, man, this is bullshit. All we've been doing is conducting raids and stuff like this - taking away these crooks' drugs and shit isn't going to stop them from just bringing in more."
"Weren't you suggesting that the commissioner just ought to cancel all the press conferences, though?"
"So that we can concentrate on doing what we ought to do to stop all this drug trafficking that's been going on! But we aren't even doing that, and like she said, it's not like we're gonna stop press conferences any time soon!"
"Then what are you saying, rookie?"
"I'm saying that all these raids, all these busts - they're not solving the problem correctly. Every drug cache we find and confiscate is just another band-aid we slap onto this problem. It's just temporary. If the crooks lose one cache, they'll just set up another in some other part of the city. At first, we hoped that by busting their caches enough times, they'd stop bringing in drugs for a while because maybe they'll take a while to restock, and with enough hits, maybe they'll even be discouraged from trying to circulate or sell in the city. But that hasn't happened! They just keep bringing in more, and we don't know how!"
"Well, we have been cracking down on their drug labs too, you know. And doubtless, there're more labs we haven't found yet that could still be producing."
"Yeah, but even with that in mind, it's just really weird, you know? Something's off about this whole situation, I can't shake it..."
"Eh, relax. If it's this raid tonight that's got you on edge, don't let it, it'll be just another raid like all the others. It's just that it's in the middle of the city, which is weird, but our boys haven't found anything out of the ordinary yet. I'll take you boys out to dinner tonight, it'll be my treat."
"Gonna be a late dinner, then, which how this's shaping up to be. Figure we'll be here awhile..."
As the senior police deputy and her junior officers begin talking about dinner plans after their duties, Fuutarou, who's stopped nearby before entering the building to eavesdrop, finally steps into the building proper.
As he suspected, the police restriction tape is placed to bar entry downstairs to the basement, and so he slips underneath the bright tape and heads down the stairs - so long as he doesn't do anything blatant that will net the attention of those around him, he will remain essentially hidden in plain sight.
Fuutarou reaches the basement and lets the voices of police officers down here guide him to where he needs to go. The lower floors above him are storage floors for the net cafe above, but the basement is filled with a much different kind of stock: boxes and bags and cartons of contraband drugs. Several more police officers are standing by, surveying the area as investigators are busy snapping photos of all the evidence.
"This's easily the worst drug trafficking situation the country's ever seen," Fuutarou hears one of the officers mumble quietly to his partner as he passes them. "We can't let word of this leak out. It's already bad enough that we've found something like this in the middle of the goddamn city..."
"Honestly, we shouldn't have sent so many officers here. It's making a big commotion, the press's bound to get wind of this even though we've barred them from entering this area within a three-block radius for tonight."
"Not to mention what social media's going to do with this, too...ugh, this's already a nightmare, and it sucks knowing it can get even worse..."
Leaving the policemen and investigators to their own devices, Fuutarou quietly and discretely conducts a little investigation of his own. Most of the drugs are the usual suspects - cannabinoids like marijuana and hash, opioids like heroin and opium, stimulants like cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine, club drugs like methylenedioxymethamphetamine, rohypnol, and gamma-hydroxybutyrate, dissociative drugs like ketamine, PCP, and saliva divinorum, hallucinogens like lysergic acid diethylamide, mescaline, and psilocybin, and other miscenallenous drugs like anabolic steroids and inhalants.
But one curious investigator, Fuutarou notices, is taking pictures of a few unmarked metal cases sitting on top of a few other boxes in the far corner of the room, and when he approaches him from behind, he hears the investigator muttering something to himself.
"...I've seen these before...in another raid...metal cases just like this...but no one's been using them...no one's been buying them...at least, not that we know of...so what are these even doing here...? What even are they...?"
It would appear that even the police are now privy to the existence of liquid Heisei. After so many raids on drug caches like this, they were bound to learn of it, but it seems like they don't know what it's really being used for. Not that he has a full picture of what its full purpose is yet either, but Fuutarou doubts the police will ever come to learn what it really does. They might bring in a few samples for testing, but it's a magical compound; whatever they find won't tell them anything unless they hire a magical investigator or freelancer like himself to do it for them, and he'd know about it if they did something like that. So the most they'd probably be able to discover is the connection between the liquid Heisei and the powder Heisei, but the logical conclusion they'd make is that the two drugs more or less do the same thing. Unless, of course, they come across a victim of liquid Heisei...which he'll have to account for, now that he thinks about it. But then again, how would they be able to determine the cause of death in a case like that when the cause is magical?
But while it's certainly in circulation by this point in the city, Fuutarou has only run into a few more cases of liquid Heisei-induced deaths. And he always gets to them before they can be discovered by the general public, thanks to his vigilant scouring of the city every night, though he knows that he probably can't keep that up forever, and certainly not when Ichika is compelling him to spend a night with her and her sisters.
Taking a step back out of the policemen's and investigators' ways, the young mage, surveying the stash, deliberates on the implications of tonight's police raid. He came here in the hopes that maybe some of Shirazumi Rio's gangsters would be here, or maybe even Rio himself or herself or whoever. If only some low-ranking gangbangers were here, then they would've most likely been arrested by the police here, but there is no sign of any violent struggle or resistance anywhere, so the stash must have been found unguarded and unattended, which is also very strange. The best case scenario would have been to meet Rio directly so that he can confront them directly, but clearly that isn't the case here.
A huge cache of drugs like this, located in the middle of the city...left totally unguarded, and inviting all these police officers to flock to it to investigate and confiscate it...
Then, it hits Fuutarou like a ton of bricks.
His eyes snapped open, the young mage quickly but quietly casts a rune from his fingertip that he raises into the air, and the small outline of a rune, invisible to those who cannot perceive magic, rapidly expands through the air away from his fingertip like a single ripple created by a drop of water, scanning the room for any signs of magic presence.
The scanning rune locates the Heisei drugs, of course, which reflect a small magic signature back - but that's not what catches Fuutarou's alarmed attention. It's a significantly bigger, unidentified presence that he senses in the center of the room, inside a large and heavy cardboard box wrapped with layers and layers of duct tape.
Ordinary magical objects or runes should not be giving off such a huge magical signature like this - only those with concentrated amounts of magical energy. And in this context, in this part of the city, with so many police officers in the vicinity, with no gangsters around, there's only one thing it can be.
Hurrying over to it at the risk of breaking his Presence Concealment field, Fuutarou drops a knee next to the big, thick cardboard box wrapped with lots of duct tape. The cardboard box appears to have a magical jammer somewhere on it, a device that blocks magical presences from emanating properly from its source, which would explain why Fuutarou wasn't able to detect it upon entering the basement initially. But it's just a box - there aren't any external devices on it. Then, Fuutarou realizes that it must be the duct tape - that's why there's so much of it wrapped around the box itself when there isn't any reason to put that much on it normally.
Thankfully the box is sitting by itself next to a few other boxes of ordinary contraband drugs, so he can pick it up discretely without compromising his position. Checking the room, the police officers talking nearby are close to the stairs leading up to ground level, but with some careful movement, Fuutarou figures that he should be able to carry the box and still slip through. It'll be cutting it close, especially when his Presence Concealment field will just barely cover the large rectangular box along with him, but this is the safest course of action if there really is a magical bomb inside this box.
Following through with this plan, Fuutarou gingerly lifts the large box. This would be impossible for a lanky guy like him to do normally, at least not without the help of magically augmented strength, for the box is easily far too heavy for him to be lifting it up at this awkward angle from the side without such magical aid. Once he's got it up in the air, he slowly readjusts his grip on it so that he can hold the box more efficiently and easily, making as little noise as possible and dodging investigators who walk by him in the process to avoid having them bump into the box and give him away.
And once he's secured the big rectangular box, Fuutarou heads for the stairs back up to the ground floor.
Or, that would be the plan, if one of the police officers near the stairs didn't decide to lean a little to his left right as Fuutarou is passing him.
"Huh? Wait, what was - "
Knowing his cover is immediately blown with that stroke of bad luck, Fuutarou does not hesitate and instantly books it up the stairs with the huge box on his left shoulder, now that he's carrying it with just one arm. With his Presence Concealment shattered, the policemen turn to look at the escaping Fuutarou and cry out in alarm.
"All units, someone just got down to the basement somehow and is trying to escape with one of the packages! Detain him immediately!" Fuutarou can hear one of the police officers shout into his radio as all three of them race up the stairs. The box is large and unwieldy, but Fuutarou manages to hold onto it as he bursts through the police tape barring entry into the lower floors and back out onto the streets.
"Hold it right th - " the female senior police officer cries out, standing in Fuutarou's way with her junior officers, and all three of them have their police batons drawn and ready, but Fuutarou simply runs straight through them, using the large box he's carrying as a battering ram of sorts to force his way through. He doesn't need to worry about disturbing the possible bomb inside the cardboard box either, since magical bombs like this require a magical detonation method and will not detonate upon physical abuse. Knocking down all three officers to the ground thanks to the length and sturdiness of the big box, Fuutarou pulls the box out of his vision so that he can keep seeing where he's going and leaps over the police car in front of him that's parked next to the sidewalk and out to the middle of the street.
Spying an alleyway dead ahead, Fuutarou continues to dash across the street, reaching the other sidewalk with police officers chasing after him, but they cannot keep up with his magically augmented sprinting that leaves them figuratively choking on the dust that he kicks up in his wake, and suddenly turning a corner into another alleyway, Fuutarou converts the distance that he's put in between himself and the chasing officers into time that he in turn uses to create a rune beneath his feet. The rune glows quickly with more whitish-blue light, and after a second or two, he pushes off with his feet, launching himself all the way up onto the roof of the building he's behind and landing safely out of the officers' sight before they can reach him and see where he's gone off to.
As the officers down in the alleys below voice their confusion and shock at their suspect's apparent and abrupt disappearance, along with the box he was holding while making his escape, Fuutarou sets the box down quickly and raises his hand, palm up.
"Threefold Blossom, activate," he chants in a low voice rapidly.
A pair of small blue runes appear above his palm, and sliding up and down past each other over his hand, they leave in their paths an oddly shaped block of bright blue light, light that solidifies into the shape of a knife with a six inch blade, a blue pommel and hilt, and a white handle. The knife drops into his hand once solidified, but Fuutarou opts to catch it as it's falling instead and kneels down next to the box to cut it open.
Inside the box are even more metal cases, presumably filled with even more liquid Heisei syringes, though obviously Fuutarou can't check that first. Instead, he tears open the box even more and begins pulling out the metal boxes inside until he finds what he's looking for: a small burlap sack nestled in far down into the cardboard box, in between two tightly packed stacks of metal cases. Now that the duct tape is torn aside and unable to continue jamming the burlap sack's magical signal, he can sense the magical signature pulsing, practically in the same vein as the ominous ticking of a bomb with a timed fuse.
Locating the magical bomb, Fuutarou simply pushes the metal cases aside, not caring for the contents within. Once enough of the metal cases are pulled aside and cast onto the roof of the building beside him, he pulls out the burlap sack and rips it open with his knife to see what kind of a bomb it is.
It's an alarmingly large burlap sack, and thus it contains an even more alarming six whole blocks of M112 military-grade C-4, housed as two stacks of three inside their sack. An old smartphone is taped with some more duct tape against the blocks of C-4, the phone connected to the plastic plate underneath the M112 blocks via blasting caps to dictate their time of detonation.
This is enough plastic explosives to level this entire block of the city, and then some, if not just two whole blocks outright. Fuutarou figured Rio or whoever's devised this trap would use a magically-based bomb, and he was horribly mistaken. They didn't even bother with that, they're just going to blast this place with good old plastic explosives.
The only thing magical about this bomb is its method of detonation - the smartphone taped to the explosive has a small rune that he can sense tied to it, which he forcibly reveals by placing his hand over the phone and channeling magical energy of his own over it. Whoever rigged this bomb, just like himself, also practices magitech - a millennial term coined in the past decade by modern mages to describe those who have learned to combine magic and modern human technology and put magic to use that way.
So Fuutarou immediately sets to work, knowing that the bomb can blow at any moment. The detonator rune is the key; if he can disable the detonator rune, then the C-4 explosive is effectively defused because it'll have lost its means of detonation. Thinking quickly, with sweat beginning to pop on his scalp, the young mage, having closed his eyes with his hand over the smartphone detonator, works feverishly to successfully disarm this C-4.
The best way to do this is to wrest control of the rune away from its original owner by reprogramming it to accept his own magical energy signature as its primary detonation authority. This would not work on a true and experienced mage, those who have blood ties to magic and have practiced magecraft enough to stop people like Fuutarou from trying something like this, because their magic bloodlines would only respond to their own kind and would never, at least theoretically, bend to the will of anyone else. But Fuutarou knows this isn't the case because true mages would never stoop so low as to use something like C-4, a piece of modern human technology, to commit an atrocity like what is about to happen if he doesn't disable this bomb.
By reversing such control from its original owner to himself, this means that Fuutarou can analyze the rune, which would be left perfectly intact and be completely accessible because the rune will act as if he were the one who created it. That way, he can reverse-engineer the rune and begin scanning for a specific signature to track down the culprit behind this attempted act of terrorism, whether it be Rio or someone else entirely. The only problem is that it is normally very time-intensive, time that he obviously does not have at this very moment.
So instead, after attempting to directly hack control over to himself on the off-chance that the rune wasn't very well constructed, which does not work, Fuutarou changes gears and goes with the far simpler option: constructing another rune to put on top of the detonator rune. If he can place a jamming field around the detonator that stops all magical signals from reaching the detonator rune itself, the rune will never know when it will be instructed to blast the blocks of explosives. The jamming tape is a similar concept, but it works in reverse so that the detonator itself cannot be magically detected externally. Fuutarou hesitates as he sets up a blank rune over the smartphone's rune - he knows he probably can make a small, temporary jamming field, but the question is how.
He doesn't have to think long, because he remembers the Presence Concealment spell that he knows how to cast over himself in order to infiltrate areas undetected, as long as police officers don't suddenly bump into him out of the blue. If he can render himself undetectable to other people, including other mages, that means that he's able to mask both his physical and magical signatures. Couldn't he apply the same principles to a jamming rune, just in reverse?
But try as he might, Fuutarou can't seem to make a rune like this, one that can reject all incoming magical signals. He's never come across a situation like this where he'd need to make a magical jamming field to prevent a bomb from receiving a magical signal, and while he's trained for a possible scenario like this, he didn't think it all the way through that he'd need to learn how to create a magical jammer.
And the bomb is still active all this time, ready to go off at any moment.
So he turns to his last resort - grabbing the knife that he's conjured to rip open the box and has since set down on the roof to concentrate on trying to disarm the C-4 detonator, Fuutarou raises the knife over the phone, over its exposed detonation rune.
Normally he would never do this, attempting to destroy a detonator rune altogether. There is too much risk involved - the detonator rune can be rigged to explode upon destruction, for instance, and depending on the explosive it's intended to trigger, it could detonate the bomb it's attached to along with it.
But since this is C-4, even if the detonator rune will go off, the rest of the bomb won't, so the city block here will be spared. Fuutarou assumes the rune is rigged to blow upon destruction or tampering, but this is a bullet he'll have to bite - if it doesn't outright kill him first.
Hopefully the girls don't miss him too much. They haven't known him for that long, so they'll get over it. Well, at the very least, he won't have to worry about Nino or Itsuki doing so.
These weapons you've been entrusted with are special. They can do things that you wouldn't expect them to. So if there ever comes a time when you're out of options...
Well, this is one of those times. Time to put this one to the test.
Squeezing his grip around the knife handle, Fuutarou plunges the weapon into the smartphone, directly through its rune.
Yawning, Nakano Nino, after having used the toilet, brushed her teeth, and washed her face to prepare for bed, tiredly reaches the top of the stairs, looking forward to go to bed. Well, at first - as soon as she puts her hand on the doorknob, Nino stops, shuddering a little as she remembers the searing pain that she was feeling in her eyes the other day that woke her up in the middle of the night. It hasn't happened again since, but...
"Nino? Are you not yet asleep?"
Surprised to hear one of her sisters at this late an hour, Nino turns to her right to find Itsuki, also in her pajamas, ready to go to bed, peeking out at her on the second floor of the penthouse, where all five of the quintuplets' bedrooms are located.
"I was just about to go to sleep, why aren't you asleep yet?" Nino asks her youngest sister instead. "It's kinda odd for you to be up at this hour. What time is it, even? Isn't it, like, already almost midnight? We have to be up in seven hours, you know..."
"I-I could say the same about you! Since, well, you need to be up the earliest out of us five so that you can fix our breakfasts..."
"Uh huh, that's exactly it. I hope you haven't forgotten about what we agreed to earlier before I made dinner."
"I have not, Nino!"
Nino chuckles quietly, since the rest of their sisters have turned in early tonight from all the studying they've been doing lately.
"Then that's good. Good night, Its - "
"Uh, Nino, please wait!" Itsuki says suddenly, pulling Nino's attention back to her before the latter can slip into her own room. "I know it is already very late, but...if you do not mind otherwise, can we talk for a moment...?"
Nino steps backwards out of her own doorframe to face Itsuki again. "Does it have to be now? We should really get some - "
"It will be quick, I promise! Please?"
Having always had a soft spot for her sisters whenever they ask something of her in earnest like this, Nino is unable to bring herself to refuse Itsuki a second time, so scowling, she sighs and gestures to her younger sister to follow her into her own room.
"Fine, but let's make this quick, okay?"
So Itsuki trots after her older sister and closes the door to Nino's room behind her as Nino jumps up onto her bed to sit on it while Itsuki takes her chair.
"So? What's this about all of a sudden? It better not be about the filet mignon I cooked for dinner tonight and how differently you want me to season it for next - "
"It is not about the food! Why is food always the first thing that comes to everyone's minds whenever I wish to speak to people...?" Itsuki grumpily pouts.
"Who knows, maybe the mirror can say more than I can. But anyways, that aside, what did you want to talk to me about?"
Brushing off the food joke, Itsuki takes a deep breath.
"I have been...thinking about this ever since dinner, and...I would like to know where you stand in all this right now," the youngest quintuplet says slowly. "But...what is your stance right now...towards having Uesugi-kun as our tutor? Please, be honest with me."
Hearing this, Nino feels her impulsive desire to question why Itsuki is asking her something like this in the first place, but because Itsuki is asking her an earnest question, she decides to return this earnestness in kind with a serious answer.
"I'm...not opposed to him being here as much as I used to be before," Nino mutters, turning for a moment to pull over one of the bigger stuffed animals, a big bunny that's half the size she is wearing a deep blue trench coat whose side reads "RHODES ISLAND" so that she can hug it tightly in front of herself. "Would I still willingly let him be my tutor? Hell no, but...at least it's nice knowing that...the others are learning from him, I guess..."
"Does that have anything to do with how you have been secretly studying at night, by yourself? Like what Ichika said?"
"Sh-She only brought that up so that she could force me to join them for tutoring!" Nino hotly blurts out on impulse, but she purses her lips to calm herself down. "...but it's not because of Uesugi that I'm studying, okay, don't get this all mixed up. I'm studying because of all of you. You, Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba. You're all studying hard - it wouldn't be fair to the rest of you if I were the only one slacking off not doing anything."
Nino hugs her big stuffed bunny plush a bit more tightly.
"...don't dwell too much on that, Itsuki. I can handle myself. Even if Ichika didn't force me to join them tonight, I would've still done my best to study on my own so that at least we can all graduate together. That's all I care about. That's all that's ever mattered to me," Nino murmurs, raising her blue eyes back at Itsuki's sitting across from her.
Itsuki's facial expression doesn't change at this.
"...then you still remember the promise you gave us, after Mother passed away," she says quietly, and Nino shifts a little on the side of her bed hearing this.
"First Miku, then you...color me surprised that you both still remember what I said back then," she sighs softly into the back of the bunny's neck.
"O-Oh? Did Miku also mention something like that recently...?"
"Yeah, but...but it was a while ago. Back when Miku and I had a little talk..." Nino's voice trails off as she remembers the context for that particular conversation.
Itsuki, pausing to give Nino time to fully express her thoughts, picks up the slack when Nino chooses not to continue them. "Then...I can trust you on this still? That you are only agreeing to study under Uesugi-kun's tutelage for these midterms, and these midterms only?"
"That's exactly it. No matter what kinds of scores I get, after midterms are done, I'm going right back to how things were until today. I don't care what happens to Uesugi after that...that's got nothing to do with me."
Suddenly, Nino raises her head from behind her stuffed bunny.
"Then what about you, Itsuki? You've asked me how I feel about this whole situation, so now it's my turn to ask you. You've been studying by yourself all this time, and unlike me, your self-studying was never a secret."
Tensing up a little at being the one to get put on the spot, Itsuki listens alertly as her older sister gives her a small little glare back while she speaks her piece.
"We started out in the beginning when Uesugi first got hired as our 'tutor' being the two to be outright opposed to him, right? And because of that, you've been studying by yourself in your room or at the library. But during our Golden Week vacation, there was a point where you could've actually started letting him tutor you, and the only reason why that didn't happen was because of Uesugi himself, because he didn't like your reasons for wanting to join or whatever. Now that all this's happened tonight, I should ask you: what do you feel about Uesugi and his tutoring? Do you still feel the same way that you did in the beginning like me?"
Biting her lower lip visibly, Itsuki lowers her gaze once Nino pitches this question to her, formulating her response. Once it's complete, she looks back up at her older sister.
"Because I asked you to speak truthfully on this matter to me, I shall do the same for you," she says slowly, steeling herself internally for what she is about to say. "It is mainly my own pride that is keeping me from joining the others for Uesugi-kun's lessons. That, and...the reassurance that you provide to me that you also refuse to accept Uesugi-kun's tutelage."
Nino leans in towards Itsuki a little. "What, are you saying that if I were to go study with Uesugi, you would've followed suit no matter what? Then what was the point of me threatening you earlier tonight if that's the case?"
"W-Well, because you said that this is only a temporary matter, I will still be studying by myself!" Itsuki says quickly.
"But if I were to go study for good with Uesugi, that would mean that you'd be the only one who isn't, and so you don't want to be left out from that," Nino repeats coolly.
"It is..." Itsuki hesitates, "...complicated..."
"Well, now that we're already here talking about it, I'm curious to know what's going on with you," the second quintuplet shrugs, leaning back to sit back up on the side of her bed. "Like you said, I took the time to lay it out to you straight, how I feel about everything that's going on right now. Now it's your turn, Itsuki. I don't care how long this takes; if you say you're gonna do the same for me, then I'll expect the same. So spill it, Itsuki."
For a good few minutes, Nino gazes silently back down at her youngest sister as the latter once more nervously puts together what she will say. And again, once she's done, Itsuki returns Nino's gaze to begin.
"My own studying is...inadequate, Nino. I do not think it is unreasonable for me to believe that...all five of us knew this of ourselves, that we...we were not studying enough, we were not studying hard enough, we simply were not studying at all...but my case is different from the rest of yours'. While that could be said of the rest of you, the same cannot be said of me. Studying enough, studying hard enough, merely studying at all...that is not the issue that I have, that was never the issue I had. No matter how much I study on my own, my scores do not seem to be improving. All the mock tests that I have given myself, ever since Uesugi-kun started teaching our sisters, they have barely risen above the score I got on the mock exam Uesugi-kun gave us during that very first week. In comparison to everyone else, who have all shown notable improvements in their own scores ever since Uesugi-kun began teaching..."
"Well, everyone's scores are still near failing or barely passing, so..." Nino smirks a little.
"Even with that in mind! Even with that in mind...even if their scores are still bordering the passing threshold, the improvements in their scores that Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba all show...they speak for themselves. They show that they are improving, while I am not. I am still stuck with similar scores that I got from the start, and that is all I have to show for my own studying."
The youngest quintuplet's neck begins to sag, so her gaze gradually drops more and more the longer she finds herself talking.
"In the beginning, I believed that so long as I tried my best, I tried my hardest, my test scores would reflect my efforts. So long as I put in my very best effort into studying, I could improve my scores and thus my grades all on my own - and therefore be able to reject Uesugi-kun's tutelage because I would have no need for it. But as the weeks passed, and with our first midterms being next week, I am forced to see that mere effort is not enough; hard work alone is not enough. There is something that I am missing, or a problem that I have that I cannot identify and solve on my own, that is stopping me from achieving the same improvements that everyone else is showing. I realized this when I first saw everyone's scores slowly begin to improve noticeably, and I scrambled to try to figure out what it was that Uesugi-kun was doing right, what Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba were doing right that I was doing wrong, or simply not doing at all. I even contemplated spending one of their tutoring days listening in on them, similar to what you do, sitting with them at the dinner table while Uesugi-kun is here teaching, but again, my pride prevented me from doing even that. And so I remained in my room, continuing to study by myself, telling myself that I would surely also start improving too, that I would not be left behind, that I would not be outdone by my sisters who, before Uesugi-kun began to teach them, hardly ever studied on their own...well, with Miku as the one exception, perhaps..."
Nino notices Itsuki's hands on her lap curl up slowly but surely into fists.
"...but that has not been the case. I can accept Miku showing such improvement, because after me, she is the one who studies the most among the five of us. But Ichika and even Yotsuba...while my own test scores could still hold up better than theirs as of now, at this rate, I am not confident that that will remain so. So at this point in time, I am forced to accept that Uesugi-kun's tutoring, whatever it is about it, is providing the key to better grades that I lack and cannot find on my own...or at least, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to find it on my own at the rate that I am going."
"And how you rejected Uesugi not once, but twice is stopping you from joining everyone else, huh...?" Nino mumbles quietly.
Itsuki closes her eyes momentarily, tiredly. "I do not know what your first impressions of Uesugi-kun were, Nino, when we first met him. But I met him first out of us five during lunch at the beginning of the school year in the cafeteria, where I asked him if he was interested in tutoring me, and he accepted. At the time, I did not know that he was the very same tutor that Father hired to teach us, and so that meant that he knew who I was and did not tell me that he was that same tutor. So when we met him together in the house later that same day, I felt betrayed, because he intentionally did not tell me upfront that he was the tutor we were expecting later that day. Thinking back on it, I should not have been so judging of him - yes, his being in our house despite being a stranger to us was surprising and odd, but it appears that Father trusts him enough to have let him do something like that, and perhaps there were reasons of his own that he could not disclose to me his status of being our tutor during lunch that day. I do not know if I would have still accepted his tutelage, but thinking back on my behavior then...perhaps I could have chosen to act a bit differently..."
While Itsuki is briefly recounting the events of their first encounter with Uesugi Fuutarou, Nino uncomfortably dwells on it too in her own head. She might have punched him a bit too hard...
"I feel the same, too, about my meeting with him during our Golden Week vacation. I know I talked about this with everyone once before at dinner after we came back, but...I feel that it bears repeating: I was so taken back by his refusal that I did not think to try to convince him, to try to change his mind, and instead rejected him a second time. I scolded him for being stubborn, for being hard-headed, when in reality I was no different from him, by my own admission..."
"I mean, it's not like you had much of a choice there, back then."
"Perhaps not, but that does not make me feel like any less of a hypocrite. And after Golden Week, we have all been noticing Uesugi-kun showing up to class looking more and more haggard, more exhausted by his other work. And despite his constant sleeping in class, he still carries out his duties as class representative without fail, and he has not missed a single day of tutoring our sisters. I was loathe to admit this at first, I admit, mainly during the week immediately following our vacation. But the feelings I had towards him because of that second rejection I gave him could not last forever. I told him back then that the longer he goes without being able to teach me or you, the more money he will be losing out on because of the nature of his contract - what little we know of it, anyway, and his refusal to accept me as a student for the reasons I had at the time would only serve to cement his suboptimal situation. He told me that he would simply find other ways to make up for the loss that you and I present to him for his tutoring job - and seeing him as of late, even I can tell that...he did not say those things merely to sound tough, or...stubborn."
Itsuki's hands finally begin to relax on her lap, loosening from the tight fists that they have been for a while now. The room falls silent following her testimony until Nino breaks it in turn.
"Can you answer me this, then, Itsuki?"
"Hm? What is it?"
"Even ever since a month ago, when Uesugi first started tutoring, I figured that even though you'd refused to let him tutor you, eventually there'd come a point when you would join the others and study together. I figured that you, along with Miku, are the two of us who study a lot, so naturally, you'd recognize that it'd be in your best interest to start studying with someone like Uesugi, who's obviously pretty smart, as much as I hate admitting that. Am I wrong in thinking that would've been the case, even if it weren't for what happened tonight?"
"I...I do not...doubt that. At the rate at which I am going now, certainly, that sounds like it would have been an inevitability."
"Even with Uesugi's whole family situation and stuff aside, right? Just looking at it from the perspective of our own grades?"
Itsuki nods, albeit slowly, confirming Nino's deepest-rooted fear. The fear of being left behind...the fear of being stuck in the past...the fear of accepting change...
Noticing Nino sink her face back down into the back of her stuffed bunny's neck, Itsuki slowly gets up from her sister's chair and seats herself next to her older sister...
...and gently puts an arm around Nino's shoulders to pull her in close.
"...what's this all about?" Nino mutters softly, still with her face glued to the back of her stuffed bunny's neck.
"You do not need to hide it from me."
"Hide what, exactly?"
"You are acting this way because of the promise you made to us six years ago, no?"
"How do you know?"
"What else could it be?" Itsuki rests her head softly next to Nino's. "We might all know about the promise you made to us back then...but I have always been your confidant. I know you just a little bit better than everyone else, even despite all the times when we may have our differences in preference or opinion..."
"Just a reminder that we aren't telepathically linked or whatever."
"I am well aware. But for some things, we do not need telepathy to know what we are thinking."
The two sisters remain like this for some time, time that the clock on Nino's bed cannot track.
"...aren't I supposed to be doing this? I'm the older one, you know," Nino says finally, dragging her face off her stuffed animal.
"Perhaps so, but I was always the one you went to whenever you felt angry about something. That is why I did this, because I figured...just for old time's sake..."
"...hmph. Old time's sake..." Nino repeats pensively after her younger sister. "Then...for old time's sake...why don't you spend the night here...?"
"E-Eh!? W-Well - " Itsuki pulls away from her older sister for a moment, blushing a little from the embarrassment. "Aren't we...are we not a bit too old for that now...?"
But Nino, seizing this opportunity, leans in closer to Itsuki with a devious smile. "You said for old time's sake, right...?" she pressures her youngest sister. "Surely you won't back out of this, would you...?"
Groaning a little, Itsuki turns around to grab a plush animal doll that's just as big as Nino's, but it's a kangaroo sporting a pair of shades and a big red hoodie jacket of its own with the word "BROOKLYN" across the from in big black letters. "Some things you just need to grow out of, Nino!" she pouts.
"Then wake up on your own in the morning, so that I don't have to wake you up for you from now on!" Nino counters.
"So that is why you want me to spend the night with you?! Simply so that you can wake me up at the same time as you do?!"
Nino clicks her tongue in disappointment. "Shit, I've been found out...! But even still...!" Itsuki spies a devious glint in Nino's eyes as the latter turns back to her anyway and chants, "You won't get away, you meat bun monster!" right before she tosses her big stuffed bunny aside and dives onto her younger sister.
"Meat bun - !? E-Eeeeek! Nino, Ninoooo, wait, stop, stop, stooooooaaahahahahaha ~ !"