Five Equal Angels

by Hieda no Akyuu

Alternate retelling of the original manga. With more than just tutoring skills at his disposal, Uesugi Fuutarou is hired to guide the Quintuplets to graduation, but this time there is more to it than just tutoring and more at stake than simply avoiding academic failure.

80. Purge the Evil

In the middle of the night, when the rest of her sisters are deep asleep, Nakano Nino paces back and forth impatiently in the darkness of the living room, phone in hand and arms crossed while occasionally throwing looks up at the big clock that's built into the wall over the flatscreen TV, which reads back to her 1:54 AM. She's been like this for the past hour, basically ever since the rest of her family checked into bed, but Nino alone has been pacing about like this, wide awake, clearly waiting for someone or something to arrive or happen.

Naturally, that someone is Uesugi Fuutarou.

The reason why she is pacing about like this alone in the middle of the night is because she knows that something has happened to Itsuki, who has apparently failed to return home tonight. Itsuki had told her sisters that she had to meet with a few schoolmates because they had requested her help with a school project of some kind. While this didn't appear to set off any alarms in her sisters, Nino immediately knew that Itsuki was up to something, because how often does she ever meet up with friends from school? Come to think of it, does she even have any friends whom she's made at school yet? Nino is willing to bet that this isn't the case, but to keep her suspicions of her younger sister low-key, she let Itsuki go about her business, and sure enough, the night has all but confirmed her suspicions.

However, rather than alert the rest of her sisters and let them know the possible situation, Nino fabricated a lie to the rest of her family that Itsuki had a change of plans and was now going to stay over at her friends' place for the night in the interest of their school project since it was more urgent than Itsuki expected, and to Nino's subdued surprise, no one else seemed to be bothered by this, either. In fact, the fact that none of the rest of the quints even questioned Nino as to why only she got this fabricated text message from Itsuki informing her of her change of plans rather saddens Nino, since she's the one who once yearned for the quintuplets remain the way they once were, even though she's told herself to get over such feelings by now.

At the very least, she can count her blessings that the situation has become quite convenient for her, because all of what Nino has done tonight is to set up a night outing with their tutor, Fuutarou. Ever since Nino changed her mind and feelings about him, the second quintuplet has also been quietly contemplating her fate as a mage, and with the past week or so of self-study, their tutor's absence has helped Nino expedite making her final decision, since he isn't around to unintentionally distract her.

This decision is to fully embrace her newfound identity as a mage. Nino has a few reasons for this - for one, she understands that the Mystic Eyes that she and her sisters possess are potentially very powerful. If nothing else, she grasps that they will have a serious impact on their lives, and thankfully for her, she's learned this the easy way just watching what Miku's own Mystic Eyes have done to her with her chronic nightmares. There may come a time when her own Mystic Eyes will fully awaken, and when that happens, like Fuutarou warned her and Miku that one night, it will be impossible to ignore them like she has been for the past several years, whether she knew about them in the first place or not.

Two, Nino has always been the kind of person to get out there and work or fight for what she wants; she's the most belligerent quintuplet, the one who's most prone to conflict and standoffs both physical and social, for a good reason, after all. If there's a popular phone accessory that she wants and it only goes on sale at select stores downtown, she'll get her ass up early in the morning and camp outside one such store to make sure she gets it. If there are obnoxious boys trying to hit on her sisters, she hunts them down and bullies them until she knows they won't ever bother her siblings again.

She tried doing this to Fuutarou as well when he first became their tutor, but he's the first guy whom she hasn't been able to bully out of their lives, and little wonder, too, now that she knows who he really is and what he's capable of. This unprecedented failure, combined with the fact that she'd been slowly developing feelings for him over the past half a year that she's known him, has thrown her off her game such that she hasn't been acting the way she normally would as of late, a subtle change in her behavior that Nino herself is keenly aware of and has not been happy with, though she's been able to keep this a secret from the rest of her sisters. Good thing that she did, because that's helped her keep a low profile when telling her sisters that Itsuki would be spending the night elsewhere.

In any case, Nino isn't comfortable staying this way; she wants to return to how she was before she and her sisters got to know Uesugi Fuutarou, but she also knows that doing so isn't fully feasible, because that would involve getting rid of Fuutarou, which she's long since given up on, and not that she'd want to anymore. She actually could just go back to how she was easily, but she isn't satisfied with just that, because that would mean that she and her sisters are still relying heavily on Fuutarou for their protection and safety, and while she's grateful to him for this, Nino still wants to seize initiative whenever the need arises like she used to, and that involves not only accepting but also fully embracing magecraft as an integral part of her life so that she, too, may be able to tap into whatever mysterious powers that lie within herself and her Mystic Eyes.

And tonight presents an ideal start to this journey of sorts; Nino figures that if she can tag along with Fuutarou and search for Itsuki with him together, it'll give her an opportunity to hit the ground running, which has always been how she's learned new things while growing up. Of course, Nino is also keenly aware of the fact that she's putting her own sister's safety in jeopardy just to put her own last-minute plan into motion, which is why she's pacing back and forth waiting for her tutor's arrival so that they can start looking for her right away. It's either that, or those several cups of coffee she's made herself and drank while waiting for Fuutarou to show up are working a lot better than intended.

Just before the clock can strike two, the front door opens up and closes quietly. Hearing the door, the second quintuplet immediately breaks her pacing and hurries a few steps into the short hallway leading in from the shoe lobby and in the process accidentally runs headlong into him, as he is also in a rush to meet her.

"Whoa! Careful," the young tutor hisses quietly, reacting swiftly and grabbing her back with both arms so that Nino doesn't end up getting pushed down to the ground from his momentum. In his haste, he does end up giving Nino a makeshift hug as her face dives into his chest, but before Nino can realize her situation, Fuutarou relinquishes her to get down to the urgent matter at hand. "What's the problem? Why'd you call me?"

Nino quickly snaps back to focus, a little bummed that she wasn't able to relish this accidental close contact with her tutor, but she can worry about that later. "It's Itsuki. I don't think you have, but have you seen her?"

Snapping his own eyes wide open in alarm, the young mage swiftly pulls out his phone, raises his smartwatch, and uses his custom-made tech-runes to triangulate Itsuki's exact position.

"I assume the answer's no," the quint murmurs quietly, tossing a worried look up at the second floor above them. "Aren't you supposed to always be keeping an eye on us or something?"

Fuutarou shakes his head just as quickly. "I've been busy for the past few days; I'll admit I haven't been monitoring you girls every now and then to make sure nothing's happened. Just so you know, if something does happen to you, I won't know until I specifically look at your signals. That's why I've been meaning to update my tracker runes with an alarm system of some kind so that it can tell me if it senses that you girls are somewhere you shouldn't be, but I just haven't had the time for them. Also, why didn't you just tell me that Itsuki's missing? I don't want to be mean, but the earlier you let me know what's going on, the faster I can look for her; we have to assume the worst for Itsuki in cases like these."

"I know, I know, I'm...I'm sorry." Nino takes a sharp, short breath. "It's...it's because...I've decided that I want to come with you."

"You know what I'm going to say to that, Nino."

Fuutarou's immediate, firm response to the quint's request severely saps her of the confidence she's done her best to muster during the past hour that she's spent building it up to be able to ask him in the first place, and Nino shrinks a little before her tutor.

"Itsuki may already be in deep shit, and we don't know for how long she's been missing so far and I can't seem to find her ass no matter where I look," the mage hisses under his breath, his tone appropriately growing tenser and tenser the more time he spends scanning his 3-D modeled map of the city. "Her signature's not showing up anywhere, which most likely means that Shirazumi got to her already and found the tracker rune I have on her to disable it or hide its signal or something, or they're in an area with heavy magical interference. But I should be able to see that area...and there's no area like that showing up in the whole city..."

Clicking his tongue in ever-increasing annoyance at the situation, the young mage zooms completely out on his 3-D map to contemplate the potential areas of interest of where Itsuki might have been abducted to, assuming that this is indeed the case. Meanwhile, Nino doesn't give up yet and braces herself to dive back into the fray with Fuutarou.

"I know that this is going to be dangerous for me, but - but I don't particularly feel like just rolling over whenever something like this happens. I don't want to feel useless when one of my sisters gets fucking kidnapped! I want to be able to do something about it like you can! And I should be able to, right? Seeing that we're supposed to be mages and all just like you!"

"Yeah, a mage without any powers but a pair of Mystic Eyes that don't even do shit yet," Fuutarou scoffs back quietly, making sure to keep his voice down like Nino's. "How are you going to talk about wanting to do something when we don't even know what your powers are? I'm not saying that's your fault, but the fact of the matter is that - "

"But I'll get them at some point, right...?!" Nino interrupts her tutor and hisses back at him. "Maybe...maybe they'll like, I dunno, awaken in the middle of the night like tonight! I've watched a couple of those animes that Miku and Yotsuba like watching together!"

Fuutarou takes a few precious seconds away from his own time that he needs to use to try to track down Itsuki's unknown position to glare directly into Nino's eyes, which she has switched to her violet Mystic Eyes, but not even her magical eyes can withstand the blistering judgment of the seasoned young mage's own, and Nino feels her own Mystic Eyes bleed away like a wounded and bruised wolf limping pathetically out of sight.

"So let me get this straight," the young mage says slowly, and now his voice has switched to a guttural growl, a kind of voice that Nino has never heard before and sends paralyzing chills down her spine just listening to it. "You purposely didn't tell me that Itsuki was missing as soon as you could have just to ask me if you can tag along with me because you've got that anime logic right now that you're just magically going to gain your powers as a mage tonight of all nights, is that right?"

Nino doesn't answer that one, not that she needs to.

"God-fucking-damn it, Nino. How the shit am I supposed to believe that this situation isn't any different from the last one we had where you and Itsuki blew up at each other?"

"W-We didn't do anything to each other this time, at least...!"

"Maybe not, but that doesn't exactly help right now, does it? Because now I can't help but feel like you're just throwing Itsuki under the bus just so that you can have a shot at maybe awakening your Mystic Eyes or somethi - "

"Okay, fine! Fine, I'll tell you the real reason why I called you here on my own!"

With pursed lips and a full-face blush that Fuutarou can't see due to the relative darkness of the living room which is illuminated only by the stray electronic lights scattered around from various sources, Nino takes an advancing step towards Fuutarou to add as much emphasis as she can to her trembling words as she blurts,

"I want to be with you for these types of nights. I know that sounds really cringe, but - but I know for a fact that you've spent quite a few nights with Miku, you can't lie to me!" she declares in the loudest voice she can utter at this time of night. "I could've easily crashed in on those, but I decided not to since I wanted to respect Miku's privacy with you. So let me have this in exchange, Fuutarou! Let me go with you and see for myself exactly what it is that you do to keep us safe! I know that by asking you that, I'm potentially putting Itsuki in danger and certainly you in more danger since you have to keep me safe too, but...but by now, by now you should already know how I feel about you, right? You're not an idiot, you're not that dense!"

Merely rolling his eyes once he senses that Nino is at the end of her rather flimsy argument, Fuutarou zooms into another possible location to analyze the area with a more detailed scan to see if he can pick up any trace amounts of Itsuki's signature.

"I do know how you feel about me, yes, but is that it? That's the best you got to justify all the other shit you had to pull to ask me this?"

"I-It's the best I got, yes, I'll be honest...!"

"It sure sounds like it. I assume that because the others are sleeping right now, they don't know that Itsuki's missing. Why? Or rather, how?"

Nino gulps, which almost echoes through the first floor of the Nakano penthouse with how loud it is.

"...I...I t-told them that, uh...that Itsuki texted me and...and told me that she was staying over at a friend's house to study with her for a change of pace..."

"So you lied to your sisters and put Itsuki in danger just so that you could ask me to bring you with me when I inevitably leave to try and track Itsuki down. Is that right? And how is that supposed to be much different from that other time again?"

While Nino can think of a few differences, she doesn't mention them, as it's probably not the best time to be talking back to Fuutarou right now.

"I'm more shocked that your sisters just believed you. None of them questioned you as to why Itsuki just decided to go off studying with a friend? I wasn't even aware that Itsuki had any close friends from school with how much she just studies all the time..."

"But isn't that what you want us to be doing?"

"Yes, but I brought that up to express my disbelief at the fact that your sisters didn't think that Itsuki having friends as a red flag at all."

"Just so you know, Itsuki will not be happy if she ever finds out what you've been saying about her..."

"I'm aware, but right now isn't exactly the time to maintain niceties, which is something you're having trouble grasping right now too. Not to mention, this just kinda came out of nowhere so even without everything else that's going on right now, I'm not really sure what to think, other than you're a fucking idiot, Nino."

Nino at first grimaces at this insult, but surprisingly, contrary to her conventional behavior, she merely grins faintly back at her tutor in a rare display of self-deprecation.

"I mean, you're not wrong. That's why Papa hired you to tutor us in the first place, right?"

Sighing deeply, the young tutor curls his upper lip under his bottom one briefly. "I was more referring to your social intelligence rather than your academic one, since you're supposed to be a lot better at the former than the latter, but whatever," he says before turning to Nino again, his 3-D map of the city still active above his left wrist. "We can worry about all this crap later, because right now I can't find Itsuki when I should've been able to by now. So you're one of my only options right now, Nino: do you have any idea where she could be, by any chance?"

Blinking back at Fuutarou, Nino mentally trips over herself as she clumsily understands that Fuutarou is allowing her to join him, albeit begrudgingly.

"Uh, I think - I, um..."

"If you don't know, just say that you don't know."

"I-I don't know. Sorry..." Nino fidgets where she stands. "And...and for the record, I'm just as worried as you are, okay? I texted you as soon as I realized that there might've happened to Itsuki! For all the shit you yelled about at me, you didn't even get my text message until just now!"

"I won't deny that one either, which is why I'm letting you tag along with me for tonight. Just don't expect this to be a regular occurrence, alright?"

Nino can't suppress her sudden joy upon hearing these words, and she trots after him with a sort of jubilee-induced awkwardness as he heads for the window doors that lead outside to the balcony and closes the door after her.

"We'll need to just head out this way since we don't have time. Careful - "

Without giving the quintuplet much time to brace herself, the young mage sweeps her off her feet in one fluid motion to start carrying her princess-style, and before she can put up much of a resistance, he immediately hops onto the balcony railing and bursts off into the air, soaring through the sky in the dead of the night. Understandably, Nino starts shrieking when she realizes what's going on.

"W-W-What the hell are you doing?!"

"We're headed up to the teleporter!"

"Then why the fuck aren't we just taking the elevator?!"

"Like I said, not a lot of time! I don't think you quite get how bad the situation is, Nino! I'd think you would, seeing that you've been in a few of these situations yourself!" Fuutarou hollers back while creating runes beneath his feet that he uses as stepping platforms to keep jumping up the rest of the Pentagon high-rise to reach the rooftop.

Nino scoffs at him as he lets her down the moment he steps onto the rooftop and hurries after him to reach the teleporter that he's set up here. "You do realize I was knocked the fuck out for one of them!?"

"You weren't for the other times!"

"I-It's not like they're gonna hurt Itsuki or anything! They're trying to kidnap us, right? So we should at least have some time!"

"Yeah, maybe that Shirazumi guy might care, but tell that to that to those bastards who fucking put a knife in your shoulder. Remember that? Do you see why I'm so fucking concerned right now?"

Finding herself silenced, Nino cringes at herself for forgetting that Itsuki could still be hurt at the hands of street thugs or Shirazumi's underlings, so engrossed was she in her own plan to convince Fuutarou to bring her along tonight as she and Fuutarou teleport away from the high-rise and to nearby places of interest that the young mage investigates. Since she obviously doesn't have much to contribute to the investigative effort, she keeps quiet and sticks close to her tutor as he quickly and efficiently scours each area of interest for any signs of Itsuki. The second quintuplet kicks herself for not being able to steer the conversation the way she wanted; even though she did accomplish her main goal of convincing Fuutarou to take her with him for tonight, she can tell that it was more because of the urgency of the situation that left him little choice more so than any sort of convincing argumentation on her part. Then again, though, as she was so painfully reminded of just before they departed, how is Nino supposed to have any sort of upper hand over Fuutarou whenever the topic is about magic? Now that she's thinking back over the arguments she did have, because what else is she going to do right now, she realizes just how ineffective they were, mainly because they would have done nothing to refute whatever Fuutarou said in counterpoint.

But after smoldering in her own embarrassment for a few moments, Nino snaps herself out of this brief melancholy; she can fret over this later, since right now, the whole point of tagging along was to observe how Fuutarou does things in his line of work. By wallowing in her own embarrassment, she's wasting precious time that she's been gifted to indulge in her own wish. Then again, what is she supposed to take away from her observations? She watches Fuutarou silently cast various spells and pull up his 3-D rendered map from the smartwatch that Yotsuba gave him to triangulate a potential match for Itsuki's signature, but she doesn't understand how he's doing any of this. The most she can do is observe his methods in the event that she might be able to mimic it in the future for whatever reason, but nothing she sees quite helps her with understanding the basics of magecraft as she'd hoped; not even bringing up her Mystic Eyes to observe Fuutarou in action with them does much of anything, as her Mystic Eyes feel the exact same throughout the entire process.

Uesugi Fuutarou, for his part, easily senses the magical signature that grows stronger emanating from Nino the moment she begins using them. His first thought is to immediately tell her to stop using it, as she could compromise their position to Shirazumi or other possible enemy mages as they roam the city to investigate the various areas of interest where Itsuki might be, but it shouldn't be a big deal since Fuutarou always has his Presence Concealment spell active, and it can easily hide Nino's magical signature since it's not very strong. That, and now that he's made this concession of letting her follow him around to try to find her sister, Nino will probably argue with him until the sun rises about how she should be using her Mystic Eyes, so it'll only be a waste of time and energy. Much better for now that he focus his effort on finding the youngest quint.

That being said, even after a solid hour of searching and scouring the city with the use of his extensive teleportation network, Fuutarou is unable to locate Nakano Itsuki, and after one last search of northern downtown, the young mage, having grown more and more irritated the longer the search has gone, puts his hands on his hips slowly and lets out a heavy, stressed sigh. He and Nino are standing outside the cafe that she and Itsuki dined at not too long ago, having come here on Nino's suggestion since by now he's all out of possible options. Nino, too, is by now completely silent, having long since turned off her Mystic Eyes ever since the severity of the situation started slowly sinking in half an hour into the search. She certainly didn't anticipate Fuutarou to be unable to find her sister at all, and now she is firmly gripped by a chilling, nerve-wracking fit of guilt as the level of jeopardy she's put Itsuki in tonight is far greater than what she'd intended.

"...F-Fuutarou, you...you can't find her...?" the second quintuplet whispers hoarsely at her tutor; the sight of him putting his hands on his hips like he's finally given up the search, with no sight of his magical tools on hand, is the last straw to cause her to speak up, and to her petrified horror, Fuutarou indeed shakes his head.

"Literally no sign of her anywhere, not from the places I've tried searching, and we don't have the time to turn over the entire fucking city looking for her," he explains quickly. "It's like she's just disappeared off the face of the planet. Shirazumi most likely doesn't know that I have trackers on all of you, so I can only imagine that he must've suppressed her entire signature altogether, or that he's keeping her in a place that's magically sealed off...probably the latter if I were to guess. But that doesn't help in us trying to actually fucking find her."

"But we still need to try! We can't just stop, now, can we?"

"I don't either, but what leads do I have? I've tried all the places I can think of, and I've even searched all the places you suggested, but we don't have anything to show for it."

The two teenagers fall silent in the middle of the dark street lit up moderately by the nearby streetlights and ambient lights from the stores and shops in the area. Nino begins to quickly contemplate calling Ichika to wake her up and let the rest of the quintuplets know, but what good would that do right now? What about calling her dad, since he should still be awake at this hour? No, she shouldn't do that; while Dr. Nakano probably does have the power and authority to assist in the search somehow, since he obviously knows that Fuutarou is a mage, that would basically be telling him that Fuutarou isn't doing his job of keeping his daughters safe adequately, and Nino can only imagine what kind of damage that would inflict on his contract involving the quints. Nino still vividly remembers that time from their midterms when Fuutarou was burdened with the threat of losing his contract if the girls didn't all pass their midterms, as she was the one who bailed him out of that situation. She's already gotten her sister into trouble, so she definitely doesn't need to make things even worse for Fuutarou now, too.

Fuutarou is also stressing the hell out but in a different manner from Nino, mentally going over all the places that he's searched for trace signs of Itsuki's signature to see if she's been in the area. It's only been an hour since they started searching so there's definitely still a lot of the city they've yet to search, but he should have hit all the high-traffic areas of interest throughout the city, and places where someone like Itsuki is likely to be, too. Nino told him that Itsuki didn't tell them exactly where she was going, just that she was headed to meet up with friends downtown, so not much useful intel there other than the fact that she should have last been seen downtown. They could try searching the rest of the city, but his teleportation network only stretches out so far, with the frequency of teleporters thinning out swiftly the closer to the outskirts of the city they go, so searching the suburbs and those outskirts would take exponentially more time as they would need to cover ground with their own feet rather than zip around using teleporters.

While he struggles to come up with a change in plans to better fit the ever-increasing urgency of their situation, Fuutarou feels a brief vibration in his pocket, coming from his phone. The last thing he needs right now is another text from Miku asking him to come visit her in the middle of the night...but to his small surprise, it's not from Miku. It's from -

...Ichika?

No, it can't be Ichika. It must be the other one.

She's in the abandoned sector - the old Mizuho bank tower. They're keeping her up near the top floors. Good luck

The Mizuho Bank Tower - Fuutarou's mind races to dig up what he knows about it. The abandoned sector is the outlying fringe portion of the city to the northwest; the old Daikazoku business park where his family's office is located is situated on the unofficial border that separates the rest of the city from the abandoned sector. The city's downtown used to be where the abandoned sector was, until the city voted to relocate its heart to its current location for a much more accommodating layout both domestically and financially that would allow for easy future expansion in either area. The haste with which the city did so, however, meant that much of the old city, as it is politely referred to outside of its much more informal nickname of the abandoned sector, is still left intact like a ghost town. One would think that such a place would be taken over by those of the criminal underworld or those who prefer a more anarchistic lifestyle, but surprisingly it has mostly remained empty, most likely because it's such a pain for most ordinary citizens to get to the old city and vice versa.

The Mizuho Bank Tower was at the heart of the old city, though it wasn't a terribly tall building; in fact, the Pentagon that the quintuplets call home should be far taller by at least a factor of two. It's one of the few still easily recognizable landmarks in the abandoned sector though, enough to the point where Fuutarou knows exactly how to get to it, despite not really having a reason to go there himself either.

Turning the screen off on his phone and pocketing it swiftly, Fuutarou taps Nino on the shoulder as he heads back into a nearby alley.

"Nino, follow me."

Hearing the renewed conviction in his voice, Nino immediately recognizes it and feels a tidal wave of relief crash over her. A frustrated Fuutarou, stumped and deadlocked, wasn't what she was used to, especially not during a crisis like this; this was the kind of Fuutarou she wants to hear, the tutor who knows exactly what to do and is moving in to do just that. She follows him back to the teleporter that they'd arrived at a few minutes ago, and he whisks the two of them away over to another one, this time in the heart of the abandoned sector.

"...wait, this is the abandoned sector. Did they take her all the way out here...?" the quintuplet wonders aloud quietly as the two high schoolers step outside of the teleporter hub, which was once the back room of a post office.

"Looks like it," the young mage nods quickly while taking a quick scan of their surroundings out on the old, cracked street that they find themselves on. "She should be inside the bank tower just across the street."

Nino looks up to get a full view on the old Mizuho Bank Tower. "I'm guessing they're holding her somewhere up there?"

"Yeah, but before we go."

Fuutarou takes a step in front of Nino to make sure she doesn't do anything drastic like run off towards the bank tower on her own.

"Are you sure you want to come along? I may run into Shirazumi here, and if I do, it's going to get dangerous. Even if he's not there, as long as there's a ton of bad guys in there, you're gonna be in danger, and it's already dangerous enough when we know Itsuki's being held hostage somewhere in there already. So are you sure you still want to stick with me?"

Nino gives him a strange look.

"...what's the point of even asking me? You know what I'm gonna say already, don't you? Besides, if you didn't want me to come along, you could've just ditched my ass back at home, so the fact that you decided to bring me along means you aren't against the idea, right?"

"Maybe not, but I'm asking you this because just like how you didn't seem to understand how much danger Itsuki is in at first, you also might not get just how dangerous things can get. I know you got shanked in the shoulder that one time, but depending on the situation, you'll be lucky if someone stabbing you is all that happens to you. Obviously I'll do my best to keep you safe, but I give no guarantees on that because anything can happen in a fight, especially when we're here to save Itsuki, too. You need to be okay with getting seriously hurt or even killed, wanting to get involved in this."

Hearing this, Nino reacts strangely by simply giving an amused croak.

"I mean, that's fine. I'm the one who made things get this bad to begin with by not telling you immediately what was happening, right?" the quintuplet points out. "Not to mention, I was the one who wanted to tag along with you in the first place. Whether I understand the danger of the situation fully or not doesn't matter; I just kind of have to be here by this point to take responsibility."

Fuutarou merely narrows her eyes down at the quintuplet.

"Big words for someone who's only ever pretended to know what the word 'responsibility' truly means," he says quietly. While his words alone sound as though Fuutarou's intention is to degrade Nino's own, Nino herself doesn't sense any malice in the way her tutor speaks them aloud, which somehow angers her more than if he did.

"I'm not trying to sound, like, more mature than I really am or anything! I'm not trying to be a hero, despite what I said earlier about me wanting to find out more about my own magical powers and stuff!" she hisses back. "My sister's in trouble, and I'm here to make sure that she'll be okay through all of this, that's it! And yes, I'm aware that it's partly my fault that things got to this point, so don't you dare remind me of that yourself! Besides, aren't you also supposed to be worried more about Itsuki right now? What are we doing, wasting time by yelling at me?"

"Because what would be the fucking point of rescuing Itsuki if something bad ends up happening to you too in the process?" Fuutarou points out.

"Well, shit, Sherlock, that's something for you to figure out, ain't it? Why're you asking me that?"

Uesugi Fuutarou narrows his darkened eyes down at Nino, who feels her body tense up suddenly on its own; the gaze that he shoots at her like this briefly depletes the air out of her lungs somehow, preventing her from breathing properly until he turns around.

"Fair enough, then. But when I tell you to do something from this point forward until we've hopefully resolved this situation, you will do it; I will not repeat myself. Are we clear?"

"Y-Yeah," Nino answers, barely able to get the word out after only just catching her breath again.

"Good. Stick to me and stay behind me, we're going to infiltrate the tower."

Adjusting his Presence Concealment rune to be performing at maximum capacity to provide them with as much magical stealth as possible, since he needs to account for two people's worth of stealth compared to the usual one, Fuutarou leads the second quintuplet into the old, abandoned Mizuho Bank Tower. Already starting to feel the pressure in the air at the gravity of their stealth mission, Nino feels her heart rate begin to rise considerably, with her heartbeat knocking more and more strongly against her chest, especially when they physically enter the first level of the old tower.

"Wait, Fuutarou, is it alright if I talk to you like this?" Nino asks first, having something come to mind that she desperately wants to ask her tutor first before they can get too far into the tower.

"Keep your voice down just like that, and it shouldn't be a problem, but I'd prefer total silence if we start seeing bad guys," the young mage clarifies. "What is it?"

"You usually just check places with your magical spell thingies or whatever without actually needing to go inside them most of the time. Why aren't you doing that here?"

"I don't have the abandoned sector mapped out magically to the same extent that I've done for downtown," he explains as the two locate the main lobby stairs that lead up to the second floor, where they'll be able to find the main tower staircase leading further up the building. "Normally, nobody comes here to the abandoned sector, not even bad guys, since it's just so far removed from anywhere else that actually matters, so there's never been a huge priority for me to develop this place on my own, as in set up surveillance runes and teleporters in this area. At one point I did want to do that, but I've kept needing to take care of more urgent stuff, so I kept putting it off. That being said, I do know this building somewhat just because I've explored this sector on my own in the past on the off-chance that I need to use this area for whatever reason, though it's been a while since then. And if Shirazumi's been using this place as a base of operations for God knows how long, this place might be different from what I remember..."

Fuutarou leads Nino to the main staircase as he talks, but when they draw close to its doorless entrance, he halts suddenly, throwing out an arm quietly to both cover Nino somewhat and stop her where she stands.

"Staircase is booby-trapped," he declares softly with an irritated scowl on his face.

Nino peers into the entrance of the staircase that is missing its door, but she sees nothing but an ordinary staircase. "How do you know?" she asks.

"Magical traps have their own little magic signatures, but depending on how well they're set up, you can typically only sense them when you get close." Looking around to check that the coast is clear, Fuutarou points into the staircase entry. "Try using your Mystic Eyes and see if you can see anything."

All too eager to do just that, the second quint blinks, bringing forth her violet Mystic Eyes, but to her dismay, she doesn't see any change in her vision. Wondering if she's somehow activating her special eyes incorrectly or something, she deactivates them and reactivates them, repeating this process a few times but unfortunately with no change in result. Eventually after a minute she gives up, shaking her head.

"I can't see anything. I can't, like, feel anything different about this either," she sighs.

"That's fine, whoever set these traps up is pretty good at them. Then again, these are just alarm traps, not ones that blow up in your face to kill you or anything like that, so they're pretty hard to detect by nature."

"So what do we do? We don't want to set them off, right?"

In response, the young mage turns around and takes a knee, assuming the position to give Nino a piggyback ride.

"Get on. I'm gonna have to do my best Jump King impression, except I already have the babe."

"W-What?"

"Inside joke, don't worry about it. Just hop on."

Nino does what she's asked, albeit a little embarrassed at needing to be piggybacked. As Fuutarou stands back up with Nino in tow, she does ask him, "W-Why do you need to carry me like this?"

"Princess carrying isn't ideal in a situation like this where if our cover's blown, we'll be in immediate danger because you're in front of me and therefore are exposed to enemy attacks," he explains again. "With a piggyback, not only am I physically covering you, but you can hold onto me a lot better in case things get rough, and you'll be able to see the exact same thing that I'm seeing. Better posture for me, too, but we'll be going into tangential territory..."

Letting his thoughts trail off, the mage leaps out of a large window panel that is missing its glass and uses his runes to leap his way up the side of the building, one floor at a time.

"You don't happen to see anyone yet, do you?" Fuutarou hisses out to Nino, doing his best to keep his voice down while also still making himself heard.

"No, nothing so far."

The two high schoolers scour each level of the building from the outside as well as they can before Fuutarou leaps up to the next floor, making absolute sure that they are most likely not skipping Itsuki on a previous floor. It takes them twelve out of the thirteen total floors to the Mizuho Bank Tower before they finally see what they are looking for, and Fuutarou, naturally spies their targets first.

"There, the broken windows. You see them?"

Stopping and kneeling down on a small rune in the middle of the air, level with the twelfth floor of the bank tower, Fuutarou takes a minute to catch his breath and observe the situation as Nino also narrows her eyes to make out the situation too as best she can.

"It's her, yeah, it's definitely her!" the second quintuplet cries softly, tightening her arms around Fuutarou's collarbone and neck.

Nakano Itsuki is seated in a rickety old plastic folding chair with magical runes tying her hands and feet together, though there appear to be no bonds fixing her to the chair itself. Fuutarou does his best to diagnose her condition from a distance of about sixty meters away; she appears to be physically unscathed, but unfortunately, due to the amount of time that she's spent being kept hostage tonight, there is a distinct puddle beneath her and the chair that looks like it's been there for some time. Not that she can blamed for this; while there may be restrooms inside, it's not like there is any plumbing or electricity to go with them, and with how long this building has remained abandoned, it's a hard call to make for a girl between pissing herself and using a rotten toilet that's been out of service for years.

"I hope you apologize to Itsuki when we get her out of this," the young mage mutters grimly as Nino just now realizes the darkly embarrassing situation her sister's stuck in.

"More like, I hope you kill every single one of these fucking bastards," she breathes venomously, and her sudden surge in anger in response to her sister's dismal treatment at the hands of her captors activates her Mystic Eyes briefly, which she has to suppress quickly. "Then what are you gonna do? How're we gonna approach this?"

Having analyzed the situation from their current perspective, Fuutarou contemplates his plan of aggression a bit further.

"I think stealth won't be an option; Itsuki's too heavily guarded with those guys there," he elaborates, pointing directly at the seated and conspicuously fatigued Itsuki, who is shivering in her chair in sharp discomfort from the chill of the night due to the altitude, despite it being a rather humid summer night tonight. "One of them is Shirazumi, the guy in the red leather jacket."

"Looks like he's on the phone with someone."

"Yeah, I see that. And I kinda wonder who..."

"We can worry about that later, though, Itsuki comes first!"

"Obviously. We need to just get in there, then, there's no other choice, so here's the plan: we're gonna charge straight through these broken windows and get right next to Itsuki. As soon as we bust through, you need to get off and pull Itsuki off the chair so that the two of you can stay low while I take care of the bad guys. Everyone but Shirazumi should be just trash, but I'm expecting to have another big fight with Shirazumi himself, so once I've thinned out their numbers, you need to grab Itsuki and take cover somewhere. If there's no cover you can find easily, just put as much distance between you and Itsuki and us, and I'll pull Shirazumi away from you two. Got it?"

Nino's heart rate, which had calmed and stabilized somewhat at the start of their mission, is now revving back up again as she listens carefully to her tutor's instructions, and she can easily feel the adrenaline that her brain is pumping into her bloodstream to prepare her for the action that is to follow. Still, to her own surprise, Nino manages to keep a cool enough head about the situation to be able to tell her classmate, "Yeah. Let's do this, Fuutarou."

"Good. Hold onto me as tight as you can, I'll need my arms for this."

Once Nino uses all four of her limbs to cling to her tutor as tightly as she can as instructed, Fuutarou preps his storage rune and takes off, running seemingly on thin air as his feet rapidly lay rune tracks beneath themselves to create a thin lane on which the young mage can run through the windows that are already broken. Even with Nino on his back, Fuutarou swiftly enters the twelfth floor, and the strength of his Presence Concealment rune is enough to get him in without initially alerting Shirazumi's guards patrolling the floor. Naturally, Shirazumi himself who is standing near Itsuki in the middle of the mostly cleared floor is the first to detect Fuutarou's invading magical signature.

But by that point it is too late, for the high school mage already has the time to initiate his battle plan: having thrown several playing cards on his way in, Fuutarou puts one in each of the heads of Shirazumi's men standing guard near Itsuki, and the three of them crumple lifelessly to the ground just as he slides right in front of Itsuki to put himself between her and her captor. As planned, Nino swiftly lets go of her tutor, seizes her younger sister, and awkwardly pulls her off the chair to get the two of them down on the floor to give Fuutarou the space he needs to fight.

"What the f - "

With a vengeful glare in his eye, Fuutarou takes a powerful step forward in Shirazumi's direction to close the distance between the two of them, a large, dangerous blade-tipped polearm already materializing in his right hand, and thrusts the lance at the enemy mage, who, distracted by both his ongoing phone call and his surprise at their location being compromised, only barely manages to dodge the thrust by throwing himself backwards as quickly as his raw reflexes can allow.

"He's here, he's here! On me! Get 'im, boys!" the mage with the red leather jacket bellows, alerting the rest of his men in the old abandoned bank tower as he hastily gets up and dives out of sight, which surprises Fuutarou as he braces to take on Shirazumi's underlings. He expected Shirazumi to charge right back at him, given the kind of bloodthirsty mage he is, so the fact that he's still on the phone and ducked out of the way to keep talking to whoever's on the line with him intrigues him.

For now, though, the gangsters guarding this floor are rapidly converging on his position, demanding his attention first; Shirazumi will probably return once his phone call is done, and Fuutarou can worry about trying to secure that phone then. He swiftly rips out a handful of throwing cards from his storage rune and instantly guns down the first three enemies who run into his line of sight with their weapons drawn, if they happen to have any. The fourth one steps into view, having prepped a simple magic missile spell, and launches it in Fuutarou's direction, but it implodes in midair from Fuutarou flicking a fourth card at it, which shreds right through the magic missile and buries itself in the cranium of the novice mage who sent it, and his body slowly careens backwards - right out of the broken window through which Fuutarou and Nino entered and plummeting all the way down to ground zero.

A totally bewildered but relieved Itsuki, having screamed initially when Nino grabbed her and pulled her to the floor with her, turns in her sister's arms as best she can to see what is happening in the meantime, and she just manages to catch her tutor pivot a full one-eighty degrees with perfect fluidity to hurl his summoned spear at a charging opponent armed with a machete, and both quintuplets watch in awed horror as the spear rips through the man's chest and drags his body with it as it lodges itself into one of the few remaining support beams of the bank tower. The action doesn't stop just yet, of course: Fuutarou reloads his hands with fresh playing cards and rapidly dispenses them with flicks of his wrists so fast that to the quintuplets' untrained eyes, they literally look like blurs. One by one like dominos Shirazumi's men fall, dead from perfect headshots caused by a playing card plunging deep enough into their skulls to pierce and destroy their brains.

However, Fuutarou doesn't quite have enough playing cards to eliminate the rest of Shirazumi's henchmen, leaving exactly one survivor, who also happens to be closer to the girls than he is to the young mage. Noticing the quints, the henchman decides to try to go for them instead in an attempt to take them hostage and give himself better leverage against what is clearly a stronger opponent, but as he rushes towards them to seize them physically, Nino, who's already got her eye on him, immediately pushes herself off the ground to confront him.

"Nino!?" Itsuki cries out hoarsely, just now noticing what her older sister is doing.

Fuutarou, too, is about to flash-step ahead of Nino to intercept the last standing enemy besides Shirazumi himself, but he suddenly decides otherwise and stays put where he is, electing to observe what is about to follow.

"FUCKING - DIE!"

The last remaining henchman approaches Nino to grab her, but Nino in turn confronts him with a much more different intent. Her right hand already balled into a tight fist, the second quintuplet, with violet eyes that shine as bright as the moon outside in the empty black sky, aims quickly for the unarmed man's face and shoots, sending her right fist flying at her target with a violent condemnation.

When her fist successfully connects with the man's face, Nino feels the resulting shockwave of the sheer amount of power that went into this punch recoiling back up through her right arm, which is nowhere near as much as the amount of strength she put into her punch in the first place, or so she thinks. In tandem with this, the quintuplet also feels and hears a brutal crack - what she doesn't realize is the sound of the man's lower mandible being shattered on impact and the left joint of his lower jaw being punched out of its socket.

What surprises her more, however, is the sight of the man whose face she's just buried her fist into go flying backwards and slam into the opposing wall, in front of which he collapses face-down, clearly out cold after traveling through the air a good fifteen meters - even though his lower face where Nino's fist met it briefly sizzles for a moment before ceasing. Both Nino and Itsuki watch with their mouths agape as the last henchman is eliminated at the former's hands.

But none of the high schoolers have time to digest what Nino's just done: sensing Shirazumi returning to the scene right on time, Fuutarou adjusts his footing to place himself again between the girls he's been assigned to protect and their predator. He would prefer to attack him directly, but for now, he has other plans first.

"I didn't think you'd find this place, kid, I'll be honest," the enemy mage concedes with a clearly annoyed but still no less wicked smile of amusement while he strides into view from the staircase in which he's taken shelter, presumably to finish his phone call. "Nobody cares about this godforsaken place anymore, but on second thought, I should'a known you'd know about this place."

"Who were you on the phone with just now?" Fuutarou demands, but as expected, Shirazumi just laughs out loud.

"Kid, you're about to get into the fight of your life right now and all you care about is who I was on the phone with? You know that I can't overlook you disrespectin' me like that, right? So I think I'll just kill every single one of you right fucking now."

Bursting forth, Shirazumi Rio, already with his large knife in hand, charges straight at Uesugi Fuutarou, who is more than ready to meet him with his own knife, stepping forth to cross blades with his opponent.

"Uesugi-kun!" Itsuki cries out as the real battle commences, only for her cry to get immediately drowned out by the cacophony produced when two mages meet in battle.

After exchanging several swings of their blades, with Fuutarou mainly posturing defensively to deflect Shirazumi's more aggressive strikes, the young mage finds a hole in his enemy's offense and exploits it perfectly with a swift, powerful roundhouse kick to the gut. Shirazumi doubles over in surprise, and capitalizing on the critical opening he's made for himself, Fuutarou reverses the grip on his own knife in his right hand, takes aim, and plunges it down onto the back of the red leather jacketed mage's head. Shirazumi's instincts kick in to save him just in time by prompting him to pull his head away, resulting in a deep but ultimately nonlethal cut down the side of his head directly above his right ear.

Fuutarou won't let him off with just that, though: as Shirazumi stumbles backwards in a desperate attempt to put distance between him and his opponent so that he can regain his wits, Fuutarou fires off a playing card with his left hand, and it flies true, striking the cannibalistic mage square in the forehead. Shirazumi's mage armor does block much of the magical energy powering the playing card's momentum so it doesn't dig deep enough for a lethal injury, but somewhat amusingly, it still finds itself barely lodged in his forehead anyway. This is the least of the enemy mage's worries, though, as Fuutarou still does not let up and launches himself at Shirazumi instead, reversing their roles to ensure that this time, his knife can hit home. Still reeling from hits he's just taken in succession, the blonde mage tries to brandish his knife to keep the younger high school mage at bay, a feeble warning easily ignored by Fuutarou as he pushes aside Shirazumi's knife-wielding arm and plunges his own deep into his chest, burying it until the hilt physically slams against his body.

Still Fuutarou is not done: immediately ripping the blade out of Shirazumi's chest, he flicks it almost as if it, too, is just another playing card, but this time down at the grimy floor beneath him, and the knife stands where it is tossed, a part of its blade stuck into the ground. The moment it makes contact with the floor, however, a magical rune blooms from the point of contact and rapidly inflates until it hits the size of a circular dinner table for four.

"W-What the fuck is this...?!"

Sensing the sudden, massive spike in magical energy because of the newly constructed rune, Shirazumi redoubles his efforts to get away, but for some reason, his feet are rooted to the floor where he stood when he got stabbed. Once his target is secured and the magical rune is firmly in place, the high school mage jumps back a few meters away and throws out his right hand in their direction as the two awestruck quintuplets somewhere behind him, unblinking, watch the bloody spectacle with stilled breaths.

"Fate is in heaven, armor is on the chest, and accomplishment is in the feet," Uesugi Fuutarou chants calmly but clearly again.

A sudden burst of wind blows in a spiral around Shirazumi Rio, situated right where the magical circle is laid, and Nino and Itsuki both reflexively turn away from this sudden gust of wind. When they look back at the scene, however, Itsuki's captor is no longer alone: five bladed weapons of varying sizes and types, including the knife that Fuutarou dropped into the ground earlier, now stand amidst him, all with their bladepoints lodged into the floor to allow for the weapons themselves to stand in the fashion that they are. These weapons are the knife, the spear from earlier, a beautifully forged katana with a red handle grip, black hilt, and a single crimson stripe running up the length of the blade that almost seems to shine on its own accord, a sledgehammer about the length of the previous katana with a pointed back like a pickaxe, and another knife that is possesses no hilt and has a bamboo grip instead.

"By my authority, by the authority of Bishamonten and the Seven Gods of Fortune - "

Both the girls and Shirazumi look over in Fuutarou's direction to see what he's muttering about, but he is gone from where he was standing. The same moment that Nino and Itsuki are able to process this, they hear another one of Shirazumi's loud grunts of pain, and so they turn back to him and witness what they think is the image of Uesugi Fuutarou blur itself into multiple places in rapid succession like he's performing multiple instant-transmissions in a row. Each time his profile blurs in and out of view, another blade from the five that have been imprisoning the cannibal mage is removed from its place in the ground and is plunged into a different area in Shirazumi's body, making him begin to look like a bloody pincushion.

No sooner has the whirlwind of blades begun does Fuutarou reappear distinctly for the first time, with his final weapon being the same lance that he had summoned at the beginning of his assault on the tower's twelfth floor. Postured with his back facing his target, Fuutarou pivots again with a loud grunt of effort, packing all of his available energy into his weapon and the thrust it needs to deliver the killing blow - and the spear blade cleaves right through the center of Shirazumi Rio's face and erupts out the back of his head.

" - purge the evil from this land."

Blood flies in all directions from the body of Shirazumi Rio in wide, sweeping arcs, not unlike flying paint from the brush of a painter wildly strewing paint across a canvas with abandon. Nino sees the flying blood and reacts to it first, tucking her younger sister in so that she can block the flying blood with her back and shoulders and prevent them from hitting Itsuki. Once the blood hail has passed, Nino slowly turns around to find Fuutarou still standing where he last struck his enemy, but this time, Shirazumi's body, shredded like it tried going through a human-sized paper-shredding machine but failed, is lying on the floor in a pathetic heap, its right arm still twitching somewhat from clutching its knife so tightly at the time of death. The decapitated head of Shirazumi Rio is still stuck through Fuutarou's spear blade, which has not moved an inch yet, still clutched by a certain high school mage whose face and front are now coated with a moderate layer of his enemy's blood, his black eyes still glaring at the severed head that seems to stare emptily back at him.

Then, the head begins to disfigure, discolor, and disintegrate, morphing into a goopy liquid that the high school mage has seen before; the resulting brine drips off his spear and onto the floor, where it joins up with the rest of the messy puddle of depleted, liquefied magical energy that once constituted this second body double of Shirazumi Rio.

Quickly flicking his weapon to his right, causing the blade to discharge a small burst of wind to conveniently blow off the rest of the liquid magical energy, Uesugi Fuutarou walks over to the pile of clothes that have been left behind by the disintegrated corpse and retrieves the phone before the magical energy can get to it and ruin it. He slips it inside his storage rune at the same time as his conjured weapons dissipate out of view and turns to the girls.

"Let's get you two out of here," he sighs with a brooding tone.