Disclaimer: I don't own Infinite Stratos in any sense.

Discord: A3dTszc

(See A/N at the top of Chapter 1 for context)

'Wow. This is really annoying,' Ichika thought.

Ichika looked across the table at Houki and noticed that she, too, was looking really frustrated. The two of them were sitting down at a lunch table in the cafeteria. However, they were not alone by any means. They were completely surrounded, in fact. Many of their classmates had swarmed them the instant they had been spotted. Or more accurately, as soon as he had been spotted.

"Hey Orimura-kun, do you want to grab some coffee sometime?"

"I have the best grades in my class, I can help you study!"

"My grades are better than your grades, Shizuka, so I'd be way better at that than you."

"Why don't you come sit over here with me and my friends, Ichika?"

Everyone was trying to talk to him for some reason. It was annoying. His classmates back in middle school wouldn't have even dared to try something like this.

'I guess that's the crappy thing about coming to a new school.'

The violent reputation as a delinquent that he had worked so hard to build up was just gone now.

Finally, having had enough of the situation, Houki stood up, let out a frustrated hmph! and turned and walked away. A pair of random girls Ichika had never seen before took Houki's newly vacant seat without hesitation.

Ichika just stared blankly at them as they chattered on.

Ichika closed the door to his and Houki's room after walking inside.

A complicated expression crossed Houki's face as Ichika took a seat on the bed across from her and looked in her direction. She turned away with a red face, looking frustrated.

Ichika just stared at her for a while.

"...What?" Houki eventually asked after the silence dragged on for too long.

Ichika said nothing.

"...Aren't you going to hang out with your groupies back in the cafeteria?"

Ichika said nothing.

"Stop looking at me like that!" Houki shouted.

"Are you scared of spiders?" Ichika abruptly questioned.

Houki blinked at the random inquiry.

"W-what does that have to do with anything?"

"Is that a yes?"

There was a moment of silence.

"No. I'm not afraid of spiders, Ichika." She had a 'what the hell are you talking about' look on her face as she explained this.

"Sweet," Ichika replied. "I'll be right back, then."

"Wait… what's going on?" Houki asked, seeing her friend get up to leave the room. "Ichika?!"

Ichika closed the door on her as he walked out of the room.

Houki replayed the conversation in her head a couple of times to see if she could make any sort of sense of it.

It was just completely random. But despite that, a small feeling of nervousness rose in her at what Ichika had asked. He had asked her if she was afraid of spiders, and then left as soon as she had said no. Saying he'll be right back. That worried her a little bit now, if she were being honest. What was he going to do with that information? She had no idea what Ichika was planning at all.

"What can I do for you, Orimura?" Chifuyu asked, as her brother sat down in her office.

"Can we bring pets to school?" Ichika asked.

"No."

"Okay, bye." Ichika stood up and left the room.

Chifuyu raised her eyebrow at the weirdly short conversation. She had not expected him to just leave after two sentences.

Confused, she tried to figure out what Ichika was planning this time. It made no sense to her why he would ask something like that. She was pretty sure that her brother didn't have any pets, but now that she thought about it a little bit more, she realized that she couldn't really be sure of that. It wasn't like she spent all that much time at their home. But even if Ichika did pick up a pet at some point, she didn't understand why he would want to bring it to school of all places.

A random thought struck her in that moment. Ichika was pretty famous, and was pretty active on social media. Chifuyu knew that a lot of people liked to show off their pets there as well. So maybe she could just Google her brother's name with the 'pet' keyword and get a result. It'd only take five seconds or so. So she pulled out her phone and typed it in.

"...Are you kidding me right now?" Chifuyu asked herself with raised eyebrows as she scrolled through the images.

It looked like she had just dodged a bullet or two by turning her brother down. There were hundreds of pictures of Ichika carrying around unusually large spiders in various photographs taken over the years. If she had said 'yes' to her brother's question…

Chifuyu could predict exactly what Ichika's plan had been, now. He clearly didn't like to be bothered by other people. And nothing would get across the message to leave him alone better than carrying around a pet spider everywhere he went. Especially if that spider was giant, and hairy. So she could easily imagine the sheer pandemonium that that would have caused if he had followed through.

She was going to need to start keeping a closer eye on him. Even seemingly innocuous requests from him could have catastrophic consequences.

"Well, well. And what do we have here?" Cecelia asked, as she walked up to Ichika. "I do hope that you're ready to be defeated in our duel tomorrow."

Ichika continued eating his dinner without a word. He didn't even acknowledge the fact that Cecelia was there.

"Hey!" She slammed one of her hands onto the table, fed up. "How dare you ignore me, you commoner! Do you have any idea who I am?! I am Cecelia Alcott! Britain's representative contender! And you will show me some…"

Cecelia paused her tirade dead in its tracks upon noticing an extremely disturbing sight.

Several moments passed by in complete silence.

Ichika looked up at her after noticing this.

"Is there a problem?" he asked. "Weren't you saying something?"

Cecelia was white as a sheet.

"W-what is that thing?" she asked.

"What thing?"

"T-that thing," Cecelia pointed at the object, fear in her eyes. "On your shoulder."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Ichika lied. "If that's all you wanted to ask though, you can leave now."

"B-but…" Cecelia tried to speak up.

Ichika sighed. Then, like the rational and sane individual that he was, he reached into the jacket of his school uniform, and pulled out the 9-inch leg-span, Giant Huntsman Spider that he had stashed there earlier, and placed it gently down on the back of Cecelia's hand. Then he innocently looked up at her, matching her gaze, as if nothing of importance at all had just occurred.

'What now, bitch?'

The spider was about the size of a dinner plate. It was also very, very real.

Nothing more needed to be said.

Cecelia screamed. Loud.

She didn't bother him again.

Ichika grinned to himself.

Genius. Absolute fucking genius, this idea of his! He had had a problem these last couple of days. All of his classmates kept on swarming him. So like the engineer that he was, he had tried to look at this problem analytically and objectively in order to solve it.

Option A was to start swinging. Beat the crap out of a bunch of them, and reclaim his old reputation. But some of these girls had IS suits, and Ichika didn't want to get into a fight on that scale just yet. Not until he got his own personal IS and figured out how to use it, anyway.

So instead he had taken Option B instead.

It was important to note, however, that Option B was very different from his human race terminating Plan B. Operation Chick-Magnet, was Option B, and that was very different.

Magnets had two sides to them. There was the side that attracts, and the side that repels. Ichika had been interested in the repelling side in this analogy, though this was perhaps unclear from the name alone. Most people would probably misinterpret his intentions if they just heard the name of the operation, thinking that he was trying to attract women. To the contrary, he wanted them nowhere near him. So he'd use a magnet to push them away.

In any case, while brainstorming for this plan of his he had asked himself a simple question. 'What is something that is almost universally feared by all girls everywhere?'

Spiders had come to mind almost immediately. And conveniently, Ichika had some experience handling them. He had used them in the past back in middle school as a similar deterrent strategy to get people to leave him alone, and it had worked wonderfully. But he had only made use of them back then in a limited fashion, mostly against bullies. He had never thought to actually bring one everywhere he went.

Unfortunately, however, Chifuyu had said that pets weren't allowed at the school. So he had needed to put on his lawyering hat in order to figure out how to smuggle them in without breaking any official rules. So that had taken a bit of time. But after perusing through the school rules and documentation, he had figured out a workaround. And as soon as he had covered his ass, he had brought in two of his favourite spiders.

A 9-inch Giant Huntsman Spider, which he kept hidden in the jacket of his school uniform, and a half-pound Goliath Bird Eating Tarantula, which he kept on his right shoulder. That particular spider was currently curled up on itself. So it mostly just looked like a hairy mass of some sort. Which was probably why Cecelia hadn't been able to recognize what it was at first glance, and why Ichika had needed to pull out his backup spider to scare her off.

Both of these species of spiders held the title of being the biggest spider in the world. Only, they held them in different respective categories. The Bird-eater was the largest by mass, while the Giant Huntsman was the largest by leg span. So Ichika had not held back at all in his choices. The bigger, hairier, and faster they were, the better.

Cecelia had run away in horror. It was amazing. An absolutely genius strategy. And to top it all off, Houki had said that she wasn't scared of spiders. So the two of them would be able to talk in peace now.

Ichika opened up the door to his room and stepped inside.

"So where did you end up going?" Houki immediately asked, suspiciously.

"To pick up this guy of course," Ichika replied, showing off his bird-eater to her.

A lot of things happened in short succession after revealing his giant spider to his roommate.

Houki immediately screamed in terror. It was a sudden, carnal, hair-raising, "I'm being ripped apart by an ax-murderer," scream. The sort that you heard all the time in horror movies.

Ichika had never heard her shriek so loudly before, or in such a stereotypically feminine way. It was so unlike her. He had never seen Houki truly scared of anything before, so this turn of events actually surprised Ichika quite a bit.

Houki immediately rocketed to the opposite corner of the room in an instant, stumbling over her own feet. She violently smashed into the desk on her way over, and knocked everything off of it onto the ground apart from the very real, steel forged katana that she picked up amidst the scattered items, and immediately unsheathed. Then she wedged herself deep in the corner of the room, in an attempt to maximize the distance between the two of them, even if only by an extra few centimeters. Or more accurately, maximize the distance between Houki herself, and Ichika's spider.

Then she aimed the katana at the spider from several meters away, and focused her gaze on the thing like a laser.

"Oh?" Ichika broke the silence. "I thought you said you weren't scared of spiders."

Houki stared at him in disbelief.

"Ichika… kill that thing right this instant," she demanded. "I'm serious."

"Why?"

"What do you mean why?! Look at it!"

Ichika raised his bird eater and looked it dead in the eyes.

Then he looked back at Houki.

"What's the big deal?" he asked. "It isn't harmful to humans."

"Isn't harmful to…" Houki began, in total disbelief. "There is no way that thing isn't harmful to humans."

"It isn't, though."

"I can see it's teeth from all the way over here. And I can hear it growling."

"Growling? I don't think spiders do that." Some probably did. But only when they wanted sex, Ichika was pretty sure.

"I don't care! I want that thing dead right now and as far away from me as possible!"

"What happened to not being afraid of spiders?"

"Ichika…" she began, frustration and terror clear in her voice. "There are spiders, and then there are monsters," she explained. "That thing in your hand is without a doubt the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life. I didn't even know that spiders could get that big."

"I see," he said.

It certainly was a beefy fellow, Ichika admitted to himself, seeing her point.

"So you would be fine if I brought a smaller spider instead?"

"No! I don't want any spiders in this room!"

"Not even small ones?"

"Rule of thumb?" she replied. "If I can hear it walk, it's too big!"

"But the smaller ones are usually more dangerous than the bigger ones," Ichika pointed out. "This one just has its size going for it. On the inside, it's a marshmallow and has a heart of gold."

"Why did you even bring it here?!"

"It's my solution to getting swarmed by all of our classmates every time we sit down in the cafeteria. I tried it out on Cecelia earlier," Ichika recounted. "And I gotta say… worked like a charm. She isn't going to be coming near me anytime soon I'll tell you what."

"You used that thing to scare away Cecelia?" Houki asked, a strange expression going across her face.

"Actually I used this thing to scare away Cecelia," Ichika emphasized, pulling out his second spider.

Houki didn't scream this time, but her focus switched over to the huntsman spider, and she nervously gulped.

"I put this guy right on the back of her hand," he said. "Should have heard her scream and take off after that. She was even louder than you. Probably blew out her vocal chords. Nearly fainted, too."

"I have no doubt." Houki could easily imagine how effective that would be at scaring someone away, and she prayed to god that Ichika would never attempt that on her.

"But I'll tell you what," he said. "You clearly don't like these guys very much, so let's compromise." Ichika stared at Houki for a moment or two before a vicious glare went across his face.

A small amount of fear went through Houki's heart after seeing Ichika's expression.

"I hate people," Ichika claimed. "I hate almost everyone in this whole school with the exception of you and my sister. Everyone else can go die for all I care."

"I hate it when they all try to swarm around me," he continued. "So I will continue to bring these guys around with me to scare them off."

"So think of them like mosquito repellant," Ichika suggested. "I'll bring them with me in public, and then I'll put the spiders away once I come back here. Sound fair?"

"You aren't keeping them here in this room," Houki demanded. "I won't let you keep these monsters roaming free in here while I'm asleep."

"I figured you might say that," Ichika claimed. "That's why I brought this." Ichika went through his bag and pulled out an oddly shaped, four rotor electric drone as well as a pair of small containers.

Ichika placed the spiders inside these two containers, and latched said containers together. Then he hooked them up to the drone with a harness and then walked over towards the window.

Houki, wanting to stay as clear from the monsters as possible, moved to the other side of the room immediately to get out of Ichika's way.

Ichika opened the window of the room, pressed a button on the drone, and powered it up. The drone carrying the two giant spiders then whizzed out the window and into the night.

Houki stared at Ichika in disbelief for several moments after observing this all happen.

"Uh…" Houki began, lamely. "Did you just... fly those things away on a drone?"

"I did."

Houki didn't really know what to say to that. So she settled on asking a simple question.

"How do you know where they'll end up?" It didn't look like Ichika was piloting the drone remotely.

"The drone isn't remote controlled if that's what you're asking. It's hooked up to an online network and is flying them back to their artificial habitats at my house."

It had been a bitch to figure out how to slip a drone through the school's security perimeter, but Ichika had figured it out in the end. The school was mostly set up to protect against military grade equipment. So a tiny, singular drone equipped with stealth technology could get in and out relatively easily, provided that Ichika first hacked into the school network and fucked around with the system's database.

"The system is designed to automatically transport them wherever I need to. It's all automated, and knows what to do. So they are out of the room for now, and I'll bring them back tomorrow when I need 'em."

"Right!" Houki declared, with very fake enthusiasm lacing her tone. "Of course! Your spider transportation network, silly me. Of course you have one of those. I mean why wouldn't you?"

"Exactly, Houki," Ichika replied. "Now you're starting to understand why―and you're being sarcastic."

"What gave it away?"

"...I know I said earlier that this generation could use more sarcasm, but I really only meant that you should be sarcastic to everybody but me, you know."

"Just… make sure I'm awake when you bring those things back." Houki didn't feel like getting into an argument about how insane Ichika was being. She never made any headway in those.

"Of course. I won't let them back into the room until you're up."

Houki had her legs curled up to her chest, as she sat in the darkness, on her bed, in the fetal position. She was still desperately trying to calm down her racing heart from seeing those… things that Ichika had brought into the room. And he had sent them away almost two hours ago. Ichika had even fallen asleep since then.

'This will make things… difficult,' she realized.

She liked Ichika. A lot. And she had known about this for a while. She had no intentions of admitting that aloud to him any time soon, but in her heart, she knew that this was true.

He could be really weird sometimes. And he had apparently gotten much, much weirder over the past few years in particular, but that was part of his appeal. She was in love with him, and she had it pretty bad.

But now Ichika planned on carrying those... things around with him?

Houki gulped nervously. This… would be a challenge. Those monsters served as a gigantic obstacle between the two of them now. Unless Houki could figure out how to either get Ichika to get rid of those things, or to get over her own fear of them, she'd never be able to get Ichika to understand her feelings. She wouldn't even be able to spend any time with him. Certainly not while they were in public, anyway.

And then there was that whole spiel of his about how much he hated other people. Houki had no idea what to think about that. Some part of her was happy about it. She had been worried that all of this attention from all the girls in the school would provide a massive amount of competition for her. Competition that she absolutely did not want by any means. So hearing about how Ichika wasn't interested in them, put this part of her at ease.

But the other part of her was worried about him now. He really didn't seem to like people. And Houki couldn't remember him ever acting like that. Not to this extent, anyways. He had always been antisocial, ever since they had been kids. But he had never expressed such hatred directly to her face. So that attitude must have been something that started within the past few years.

It made her wonder about what had happened. She had no idea about what could cause something like that.

Letting out a sigh, she gently tipped herself over onto her side in an attempt to fall asleep, still curled up like a ball.

She needed to figure this out.

Houki did not have a very good sleep that night at all.

Chifuyu looked up from her paperwork when she heard screaming from the hall outside. It sounded like dozens of girls were running for their lives.

"What the fuck…?"

Standing up, she stalked over towards the door and stepped outside. Her stare hardened as she started mentally preparing to face some sort of terrorist attack. Contingency plans started racing through her head as she rounded the corner to see what was going on.

Girls were screaming, and running away from something in terror. Nobody looked injured, however, so that was a good sign. Continuing forward, she eventually found the thing that caused it all.

She stared at the culprit in disbelief. Though there wasn't an ounce of such an emotion evident in her expression.

"Orimura… What are you doing?"

"Oh! Hey Orimura-sensei. You see, I'm just bringing these two fellows over to the front of the school."

"Why?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why did you bring those things here? Didn't I tell you that pets weren't allowed at school?"

"Of course! These aren't my pets though. I'd never break the school's rules."

"I see. So why do you have them?"

"They snuck through the window and fell into my lap."

Chifuyu's eyebrow twitched. That was the stupidest attempt at an excuse that she had ever heard. She could already see where this was going, though. Since she had denied her brother the right to bring any pets to school, he had clearly designed some sort of workaround to get around the rules. Wondering about how extensively Ichika had planned this scheme out, Chifuyu continued her line of questioning.

"So why didn't you kill them?"

"It's against my religion to do so."

"Against your… religion?" Out of all the things she had expected him to say, that had not been among them.

"Yes," Ichika confirmed. "You see, I'm a Jain."

"A... Jain?"

"Yes. A follower of Jainism."

"And when did you become a Jain exactly?"

"About four hours ago."

"I see," Chifuyu replied. "So what do the Jains believe that prevents you from killing those two spiders?"

"We believe that it is wrong to kill any living creature for any reason. As a result, I cannot bring myself to do so. You see I am absolutely… paralyzed by my pacifism. So rather than kill these two, I have decided to instead take them to the front of the school to release them into the wild."

"Don't you eat meat?"

She was pretty sure that you couldn't claim to be a pacifist while doing so.

"Well, if you want to get technical… then I guess you could say that."

"I guess your pacifism doesn't extend all that far then, does it?"

Just when it was convenient.

"It's a work in progress, I assure you," Ichika claimed.

The pair of spiders scrambled over Ichika's shoulders and one of them parked itself right on the top of his head.

"The front of the school is that way." Chifuyu pointed down the hall on her left, in the opposite direction that Ichika had been travelling in.

"I know," Ichika replied.

Seeing the eager grin on her brother's face, Chifuyu realized that there were additional layers to this plan of his. She pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation and continued her interrogation.

"You're going the wrong way," she pointed out.

"I'm taking the scenic route," he replied.

"There is no second route towards the front of the school if you go down that hall," she explained. "It's a dead end. If you go over there with the intention to end up at the front of the school, you will literally have to turn around and retrace your steps."

She couldn't even imagine where her brother was taking this. It made no sense, and his explanations were full of holes.

"I know," Ichika replied, confidently.

"So why are you going that way then?" Chifuyu asked.

"Eh. I'm not in a rush."

"Why aren't you?"

"Should I be?"

It struck her in that moment. Her eyes widened as all the disjointed pieces clicked. She felt a headache coming on. She couldn't believe the amount of effort her brother had put into this. It was just so dumb.

Ichika intended to 'take the spiders outside,' but never actually get there. He intended to be in a perpetual state of transporting them to the front of the school and would always find himself 'distracted' in the off chance he ever got close to his claimed destination. That way he could effectively keep them at the school for as long as he wanted to, even if the rules declared otherwise.

Because the school didn't discriminate against religions, he could claim to be a pacifist and refuse to follow any orders given to him that went against his faith. So in the off-chance that a pair of horrifyingly gargantuan spiders just happened to fall into his lap from an open window, and if they just happened to cling on to him, by total coincidence of course, he would not kill them even if ordered to do so, and would even have a legal defence backing him up.

And if it just happened to be the case that all of his classmates would run screaming, too terrified to be anywhere near him as a result… then that was just something that Ichika would deal with.

Of course, it was completely obvious to her that Ichika was simply trying to spoon-feed bullshit to everybody around him, and that literally none of what he claimed was actually the truth. But he had covered his ass, legally speaking. At least partially.

It wasn't a bulletproof defence, though. Chifuyu could just order her little brother to hand them over so she could kill them herself.

She could claim that she would take them to the front of the school in his stead. And that would get around the entirety of his long-winded, meandering series of explanations, excuses, and verbal bullshit, just like that. Then Chifuyu would kill the spiders herself when Ichika wasn't looking.

But seeing the unwavering confidence on her brother's face made her second guess herself. Was there more to it than even that? How did Ichika intend to deal with that scenario? What was his plan if Chifuyu actually did simply grab those two giant, hairy bastards and squashed them with her bare hands? Ichika couldn't hide behind his 'faith' if that happened, because he wouldn't be the one killing them. And that would leave his claimed pacifist nature intact.

So what was the plan then? Would he just acquire more of them? He could definitely afford to do that.

And that would be annoying, she realized, with widened eyes. If he smuggled in a new set every time his old ones got killed. It'd turn into an arms race. She'd try and stop him from smuggling new ones in, and he'd try and figure out new ways to continue doing so.

That really left her only one option. She'd just have to pull him aside and tell him, sincerely, to stop. She could put an end to the whole thing if she really wanted to just like that.

But she stopped herself just before she did this as another thought struck her. She carefully looked around the hallway and noticed the obvious. Nobody in the vicinity wanted anything to do with her brother anymore. In fact, the two of them were the only people still in the hallway at all. Everyone else had run off.

This idea of her brother's… when she looked past the absurdity of it, was clever. He had cleared out the entire hallway in a matter of seconds, non-violently, with something as simple as this. And this stayed her hand. Because she had just figured out what Ichika's ultimate aim was.

He had planned this. All of it. This entire confrontation had been going according to his script, all leading up to the decision that she would make in this moment. Ichika knew that this scheme wouldn't work without her approval, so he had needed to make it beneficial for her somehow, too. And Chifuyu had just now spotted the angle he had been going for, all along.

'You clever little bastard.'

"Orimura," she ordered.

"Yes?"

"Come with me."

"Yes, Orimura sensei."

Ichika grinned.

Both of them sat down in Chifuyu's office once more.

"Have you been spying on me?" Chifuyu asked, cutting straight to the chase.

"What?" Ichika asked in an obviously fake tone. "Of course not."

"Ichika."

"Okay," he folded. "Maybe slightly. But I have only been looking at the material that the paparazzi that follows you around publishes themselves. They are the ones spying on you. I just look at the stuff they publish."

She grit her teeth in frustration. She hated those people.

"So you know all about my… problem then?" Chifuyu cringed when she said that word.

The number of men that tried to hit on her on a daily basis was astounding. She had no less than 500 active stalkers from all over the world, all competing with each other to get with her. These were not simple fans that she was talking about. She had millions of those. These were the 500 fans that she had who were both absolutely determined to get with her, and who had the resources to fly around the world to follow her no matter where she went. Millionaires willing to spend all of their money to track her down and corner her. Fucking... fanatic, cultist worshippers.

Bars, grocery stores, formal outings, even when she simply decided to walk down the street she wouldn't be free of them. She had no doubt at all that there were cars parked at all exits of the school at that very moment with some of these men inside, waiting for her to leave the building. And they were willing to wait all day for her.

She could not go anywhere in public without dozens of them following her around. Most of them kept their distance whenever Chifuyu brought Maya with her, but when she was on her own, these people all became fanatically determined. It was the one problem she had that she had never managed to figure out how to completely solve on her own.

Killing them all wasn't something she could just do without consequences. She had tried using non-lethal force on them in the past… Breaking the bones of several of them, beating a bunch of them up, but annoyingly, after they had been hospitalized from these incidents and recovered, they came back even more determined than ever. As if her beating them up had simply turned them on.

So that plan had failed.

Going to the police didn't help either. She had tried that too, hoping that they would do their jobs and take care of the problem for her. She didn't need protection from them whatsoever, as she could probably walk into any police station blindfolded, unarmed, with both hands tied behind her back, and still kill everyone inside in less than 60 seconds… But the police could stop these people without Chifuyu needing to go on a massacre herself.

If she tried to use lethal force on her own, then things might spiral out of her control if she didn't cover her tracks properly, or if she made a mistake. And she could end up having to go on the run if she did. Which was normally not an issue, as she knew exactly what she needed to do in order to completely vanish off-grid, but she'd have to abandon and cut off contact with Ichika to do it. And that was absolutely out of the question. She couldn't even risk that happening.

So she had tried going to the police, and it hadn't worked. Her stalkers were, for some reason, incredibly skilled at evading law enforcement. Some of them probably even had ties to them. So restraining orders and the justice system hadn't helped either. Not even slightly.

There was just no end to it. She was in this frustrating... stalemate situation with them. None of her stalkers would ever succeed in getting with her, that was for sure, but she also couldn't get them to leave her alone either. Not without risking her relationship with her brother, anyway.

A bunch of fat, greasy, horny, rich dudes were willing to go to the ends of the Earth to try and claim her and it was the most unconventional, weirdest problem she had ever found herself up against. As a result, she had yet to find a workable solution.

"I do," her brother admitted.

So her hunch was right, then. Even her brother knew about it. That was embarrassing. She had not wanted him to get anywhere near this problem of hers.

"Right. So how about you tell me exactly what your plan was with this stunt of yours."

She was pretty sure that she already knew, which was why she had pulled him aside, but she wanted to hear it directly from him.

Ichika sighed.

"It was twofold. I wanted to get everyone in school to leave me alone. That part was true. But I also really wanted to be able to keep those spiders here. That way, whenever you had to go somewhere where certain unsavoury individuals who should be set on fire would be present, I could, coincidentally, 'have a business meeting overseas,' at the exact same time."

"A business meeting where spiders were not allowed to attend," he continued. "That way, I'd need a family member that I could trust to look after these two spiders of mine in my stead, you see. So then, in my hour of need, my benevolent big sister could step in and say: 'I'll look after your cute friends for a little while Ichika!' But since you also needed to go out somewhere at the same time, and since you couldn't avoid missing such an event, you would have no choice but to bring them with you."

"If going out in public with my two friends just happened to scare shitless a bunch of disgusting people, people who should die by the way, preferably in fire in case I haven't mentioned that part yet, then that was just too bad."

Chifuyu continued to stare at her brother in disbelief as he explained all of this.

"So, to summarize, you want me to borrow," Chifuyu emphasized with air quotes, "your spiders whenever I go out in public, to get the men who follow me around to leave me alone?"

"That was my thought process, yes."

"A-and instead of telling me this directly," she internally cursed herself for the stutter, "you tried to demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy in-person first, at this school, to me personally, hoping that I would be more receptive to the idea after seeing it in action?"

"That is also accurate."

Chifuyu had no idea what else to say. She was speechless. This was the weirdest situation she had ever been in. The weirdest plan she had ever seen. And she couldn't wrap her mind around how her brother had come up with it. Or even why.

But... she could also imagine how effective it would be. Provided that those spiders didn't run off on their own, and weren't incredibly poisonous, and whatnot. That they were trained.

It might actually work.

Chifuyu's eyes widened a moment later when the true depth of this plan of Ichika's struck her.

Ichika… He had been planning this out for years.

All of those photos on the internet of him playing around with those spiders... He had taken all of those photos and allowed them to be published in the hopes that one day, years later, Chifuyu would agree to this exact plan. He had anticipated her one day having this problem in the future and had come up with this scheme to solve it.

Everyone knew that Ichika had spiders as pets. Well, everyone that followed his presence online did, anyway. That meant that everyone who lusted after her, all of her stalkers, were bound to know about this detail as well. As they would have all done a creepy amount of research on her and her family in advance.

And the whole point of this plan of Ichika's was to give Chifuyu a believable excuse to tell them. She could genuinely agree to follow this crazy plan all while having a legitimate alibi. Whenever anyone asked her why she was carrying such disgusting creatures around with her, she could pretend to sigh in a 'what can you do' sort of way and explain how she had no choice but to look after them since they were her brother's and he was temporarily unable to do so himself. Because she was just that type of older sister who helped out her family like that. And they could confirm this excuse with a Google search.

All of this had been deliberately orchestrated by Ichika long in advance. Years in advance.

Once again, she had underestimated the sheer scale of the ridiculous plans that her brother conjured up just to try to help her out. And it made her wonder… just how many other crazy schemes was he working on?

After a few long moments of staring down her brother with an impassive face, Chifuyu, in an extremely rare show of weakness, broke eye contact and looked down at her desk. She cringed. Because she couldn't believe what she was about to say.

"A-alright."

Ichika immediately perked up, visibly.

Chifuyu wanted to get swallowed up by the Earth and die, in that moment.

"Alright?" Ichika parroted, "You mean…"

"Yeah," she confirmed. "It's a good idea. I'm surprised that you would go to such lengths for something like this."

Chifuyu was willing to try anything at this point. Even embarrassing, over the top ideas like this one that reached into the realms of absurdity.

"They annoy you, don't they?" Ichika asked.

"Who? Those men? Yeah." Though perhaps 'annoy' is putting it lightly. If she could get away with it, she'd absolutely torture them all brutally until they died.

"That's reason enough to go this far," Ichika replied, in what he probably thought was a heroic sounding tone.

"Right. So… are they, I don't know, trained?" That question prompted the weirdest conversation she had ever had in her life. And that included all the ones she had had with her lunatic friend Tabane.

Ichika smiled, and explained to her how he had modified their behaviour. How he had trained them to follow basic instructions. And how to best make use of the creatures to scare people away.

"So what do you think?" Ichika asked, eagerly. "You want to give one of them a spin? You have somewhere you need to go today right? It's the perfect opportunity!"

Oh, she had somewhere to go alright. Straight to the bar so she could get herself hammered and forget all about this conversation.

Chifuyu sighed in resignation. Her brother really was the spitting image of Tabane.

"Fine."

"Awesome! Give this one a go!" Ichika put the Huntsman spider on the desk, and it crawled over to Chifuyu. It scurried up her arm and parked itself right on her right shoulder.

Chifuyu didn't so much as flinch.

Ichika grinned. The possibility of his big sister being scared of either of these two never even crossed his mind. She was way too invincible for such simple things to affect her.

Then, just when Chifuyu thought this wouldn't get any weirder, her brother proved her wrong.

"His name is Robert."

"Robert?" So they had names now?

"Yes. Robert Bartholomew Flapjack. The Giant Huntsman Spider."

Chifuyu decided right then that she was going to need something significantly stronger than beer, later.

AN: I have no beta reader for this story. So there may be errors.