"Wake up, samurai. I've got a city to save - and you're gonna help me do it."
A young man with a bowl cut, unkempt wifebeater, and torn jeans stirs uncomfortably and is compelled to wake up, finding himself in a dimly lit room of some kind with only a single lit incandescent lightbulb hanging directly over his head like the Sword of Damocles. He looks as though he ought to be in university, yet instead here he is, somewhere where he doesn't remember going to and still feeling a painful throb in the back of his head.
After a few lethargic minutes that he spends to regain enough of his senses to carry a cohesive conversation, the man tries to move his arms but finds that he cannot, for they are tied behind his back to this plastic folding chair that he's forced to sit on, as are his ankles to the chair legs.
"Who the hell are you? Where am I?" the young man croaks tiredly. Having been out for an undetermined period of time, he can feel the exhaustion in his limbs, that his body hasn't exactly gotten the best of rest while he was out. He can't seem to remember how he knocked out exactly, either.
"Sorry, I wasn't aware that you were the one who's supposed to be asking questions. How does it feel, sitting in that chair like a little bitch and still having the balls to be asking questions like that like you run this damn place? Must be nice being that fucking stupid."
"Bro, what the fuck do you want from me? I ain't got money, and I don't know shit. You're not gonna get anything from me, I'm tellin' ya right now," the restrained man growls roughly, struggling a few times to try to break his limbs free, but the knots are too well tied to allow such an easy escape.
"No, I think you do know something. That's why you're still alive right now and not dead as a fucking rat in some ditch outside the city."
Hearing a few ominous footsteps, the man on the chair looks up just in time to find a boy younger than himself, sporting a black cap, black hoodie, and black dress slacks with a black half-kilt trailing behind his legs, step into view of the light. Just like his clothes, the young boy's eyes are also black - perhaps an even darker shade of black.
"That's why you're here, Ichikawa," Uesugi Fuutarou murmurs in a small voice that demands great authority and no questioning. "You will answer my questions and tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. At any point that I feel you are not doing this, there will be consequences. Do you understand? Good, I hope you will."
"Bro, I don't even fucking know who you are - "
As Ichikawa is groaning his protest, Fuutarou doesn't even let him finish - he talks right over the captured hoodlum, calling out without taking his dull black eyes of his prisoner,
"Yo, toss me the bat."
Uesugi Isanari, leaning against the wall in the darkness observing the interrogation under way silently as a bystander at first, reaches next to him and grabs a metal baseball bat that's leaning against the wall near him, tossing it over to his son upon the latter's request. And before Ichikawa realizes what's going on because his sluggish mind doesn't process the word "bat" fast enough, Fuutarou catches the bat, pivots on his left foot, pulls the bat back, and swiftly swings the bat down on Ichikawa's left knee.
The swift CRACK of a human kneecap getting split down the middle bounces off the cold, hard walls of the interrogation room and continues to ricochet, much like the screams that Ichikawa now releases from the bottom of his gut with the pain.
"What did I say? What did I FUCKING say?" Fuutarou hisses intensely, dropping the bat onto the ground and leaning forward to his interrogation victim. He forcefully seizes Ichikawa by the scruff, forcing him to look back at him through strained and narrowed eyes that are contorted with pain. "Did I say you could be the one asking questions around here? What is this, kindergarten at the playground where the fucking teacher's telling everyone to share the goddamn swing set? Or are you so fucking stupid that you never learned how to fucking listen to your teachers when you were in school? Better question, did you even go to fucking school with a small-ass brain like that in your fucking head? Little piece of shit, stop fucking screaming already, it's just one knee and you still got the other one."
Kicking aside the bat where he's dropped it and watching it roll off to the other side of the room, Fuutarou turns his attention back to Ichikawa, who's trying his best to comply with Uesugi's demands, now that he's learned the hard way not to go against his interrogator's demands.
"O-Okay...I'll...I'll try to answer whatever...but I don't know anything, I swear...!" he chokes and grunts amidst sharp gasps of pain, which at least have put all of his cognitive senses on full blast so he is now very responsive, at least compared to how he was a few minutes ago.
"No, you do, motherfucker." Fuutarou narrows his own eyes down at Ichikawa. "Yesterday night, May 10th, Friday morning. You and two buddies of yours kidnapped a high school girl named Matsui and took her to an alleyway in the southern district of the city, where one of your buddies assaulted her and you stood by watching, taking pictures, and recording the entire incident. You then were instructed by the other buddy of yours to go get some drugs from your vehicle and bring it back to your group in the alley."
As his interrogator rattles off the happenings of that night, Ichikawa finds himself trembling harder the more he listens to Fuutarou.
"Y-You followed us there...?! But there wasn't anyone we saw that night who was following us - "
Without missing a beat, Fuutarou raises his right foot and curb-stomps Ichikawa's right foot. The sheer force that Fuutarou puts into his stomp is not one that should come from someone like him with a somewhat scrawny and lanky build, because the horrendous jolts of pain that fire up from Ichikawa's foot alert him terribly that his foot is now broken.
"You seized a high school girl and dragged her off into some random-ass corner somewhere in the city just so that you and your boys could whack off for the night? You couldn't even go downtown and buy a hooker for a night? Drug trafficking's supposed to be a lucrative business right now, isn't it? What, with the fucking police raiding caches all around the city every fucking week!" Fuutarou now pitches his escalating voice into a roar so that he can be heard over Ichikawa's refreshed waves of shrieks from having his right foot broken down the middle too, and finding the screams of his victim to be old news real fast, Fuutarou swiftly pops Ichikawa in the face with his right fist to first cut the screams short, then firmly grips the hoodlum's neck in a chokehold with a single hand so that the most amount of noise he can make are mere gurgles. "Having to listen to your dumb screams is getting on my fucking nerves, bitch. I deal with people screaming at me almost every fucking day; I don't need your dumb ass to add to that."
Roughly letting go of Ichikawa, Fuutarou pulls back as a small blue rune remains where his hand has left his neck like a choker. Ichikawa for his part coughs violently, finally getting a chance to breathe properly.
"I - I already - told you that I ain't got shit for cash! If it were - if it were really that easy to just go downtown and fuck a whore for the night, ya think we wouldn't'a already done that?!" the interrogated man coughs back hoarsely, but then he panics at the sight of Fuutarou approaching him again with a raised fist, threatening silently to punch him out again. "I-I mean, we didn't have any cash on us! We're not rich, me and my boys are just grunts in our gang, dude! We just do all the dirty work!"
"Yeah, and apparently part of your dirty work involves using a high school girl's tits as a goddamn cocksleeve, is that true?"
"Look, we figured we might as well have some fun with her while we had the chance! For what it's worth, I don't know what you did to him, but Kobayashi wasn't into that, so it's not like we planned from the beginning to do that to her!"
Raising an eyebrow, Fuutarou folds his arms slowly and menacingly.
"You said 'while we had the chance'. What do you mean by that? Explain why you needed that girl in the first place if dragging her into an alleyway to 'have some fun with her' wasn't on the agenda at first."
"Look, all we were told to do was find that girl, take her somewhere where no one would be, and then inject her with some needles, with some 'a that Heisei shit. It's - it's all the rage right now in the city, surely you know that!"
"Yeah, I certainly do. Thanks to punk-ass motherfuckers like you, it's a fucking weekly occurrence, soon to be a daily one if this keeps up."
"That ain't my fucking problem, dude, I'm just here to make some goddamn money! Makin' it out here in the big city's fucking tough, bro! I ain't no - no bourgeoisie like you!"
Out of the blue, Fuutarou starts to chuckle, causing his tense and murderous expression to lighten up, even for a little. But the way his chuckle is produced wouldn't convince you that his facial expression is any lighter.
"Bourgeoisie aside...alright, you took that girl so that you could inject her with some shit. But you know what I'm gonna ask you next: why the fuck would you wanna do that? Because right now, from what you're telling me, it really sounds an awful lot like a fucking date rape, doesn't it? One of you asks out this high school girl late at night, drags her off somewhere, shoots up some Heisei into her, and then brings his other boys over to have your way with her."
As he speaks, Fuutarou seamlessly transitions his right hand behind his back, where a small blue storage rune appears out of Ichikawa's line of sight so that he can fluidly draw Kobayashi's dropped Glock 26 subcompact, disengage the safety with a small but no less ominous click, and aim it straight down at Ichikawa's crotch.
"Tell me why I shouldn't just bust a cap in your nuts right fucking now, you little shit," Fuutarou growls seethingly, his voice so packed with vile contempt and disgust that even the hairs on the back of Isanari's neck rise to attention, despite not even being the one that Fuutarou is interrogating. Ichikawa, on the other hand, is flung into full panic mode at the sight of his interrogator pulling a piece on him, especially down at his balls.
"I-I-I ain't t-tryin'a lie, bro, you gotta believe me!" he shrieks, but this time not in pain, though of course there's still a hefty amount of it lingering from his broken left kneecap and his broken right foot. "Our j-job for that night was just to give her those Heisei needles! Yeah, okay, we - we probably shouldn't have - "
"PROBABLY?"
"W-W-We SHOULDN'T have - !" the hoodlum begins to break, screaming out his correction upon kneejerk reaction. "We sh-shouldn't have done anything to her, but we did, okay?! There!"
"And why? You're not telling me why, motherfucker! Any fucking idiot can just go to you dipshits, grab a few needles, and shoot themselves up into a fucking coma whenever they goddamn want, so that Matsui girl sure as hell didn't need you bastards to come over and shoot her up for her!"
"I don't know! I seriously don't know, dude! All I know was that Kasai got those needles saying that our boss wanted us to go use them on one of our customers! He didn't care who, just anyone that we felt like! So we just went with whoever was supposed to be our next customer and she happened to be it! But I can't tell you anything beyond that because I literally don't know! I don't know if those needles got some kinda different kind 'a Heisei or what!"
A small, evil smile comes over Fuutarou's lips as he lowers his captured handgun.
"Oh, then if that's the case...it's a good time to find out what it does, don't you think?"
Blinking a few times up at his captor, Ichikawa feels his breathing stifle on its own as dread replaces the panic in his body, which then evolves into terror. Fuutarou nods over at his father, who then pushes off the wall against which he's leaning to drag another heavy-sounding chair across the room, into view of the dim light of the incandescent light bulb hanging over Ichikawa that has seen countless scenes like this one, far too many for such an ordinary, dingy light bulb like itself. Ichikawa's terror goes nuclear as soon as Isanari moves out of the way to reveal why the chair sounded far heavier than it should: his buddy Kasai is also strapped to the chair like himself, but his open eyes are unfocused and glazed, like the eyes of a corpse even though he is still breathing. There are no signs of torture or physical abuse on him like what Ichikawa has gone through so far...which terrifies the restrained hoodlum even more as he can't help but stare with eyes wide and screaming internally with abject horror at what will come next.
Without saying another word to sugarcoat what he's about to do, Fuutarou, after slipping the gun into his left pocket after re-engaging the safety, produces the ziplock baggie of the Heisei needles Ichikawa had been tasked to bring back on that night, withdraws one needle, and injects it. He doesn't inject it into a muscle, though - he injects the drug directly into Kasai's jugular vein.
With the second captured hoodlum's already vegetative state, nothing happens immediately, but judging by Fuutarou's reaction of standing by and waiting intently, it would seem that something should soon happen - and it does. Slowly but surely, the veins, arteries, and capillaries, beginning from the area of the injection point at the jugular vein, fade to black, a deep black that, even in these suboptimal lighting conditions, throbs visibly to the three other men in the room who behold it. The blackness spreads like diseased molasses, inching its way throughout the rest of the body, and during its slow and silently horrifying progress, the blood vessels in Kasai's limp eyeballs also blacken, marring the white albumens. Soon after, without warning, the blood vessels inside the eyes burst, causing a leakage of black blood to leak out of the sockets and drip down onto the drugged man's lap.
But it doesn't stop there. While the drug continues to circulate painfully slowly to reach every corner of the body, many of the blood vessels in the earlier afflicted areas, just like the ones in the eyes, also begin to burst, producing nasty black bruises that begin to cover Kasai's body, and nearby those bruises, the sweat pores become clogged with black blood. Such blood also begins to leak out of the nostrils, then the corners of the mouth - about five minutes after the initial injection, the eyes of the man are completely black, with the boundary between the pupil and sclera barely even noticeable by this point.
Needless to say, Kasai is no longer breathing.
"Fascinating," Fuutarou smirks sarcastically before turning to his absolutely terrified prisoner whose fear has finally numbed the pain in his broken kneecap and foot. "Looks like you weren't lying when you said you didn't know what this did."
Tears are already gushing out of Ichikawa's own eye sockets as he finally manages to tear his gaze off the internally disintegrated body of his fellow gangbanger back up at the young mage.
"...d...don't...don't to that...to me..." he finally manages to whisper. "...I've...I've told you everything, man...I don't know anything besides that, I swear..."
"No, you know something that I still want to know," Fuutarou replies coolly, now fully turning to Ichikawa and ignoring the decomposing corpse behind him. "Who do you work for? Who's your boss?"
The fear, ironically, puts Ichikawa in a more rational mindset now that he's not trying to resist interrogation or deal with the pain from his own afflicted areas, and he lowers his head in an effort to recollect.
"He's...he goes by...Shirazumi...Rio, I think..."
"Shirazumi Rio," Fuutarou repeats quietly, matching his victim's tone. "What does he look like?"
"I...I don't know...we...we never really met him much...we've probably only met him like...once or twice..." he mumbles feebly. "I can't...I can't remember..."
"You don't need to remember what he looks like."
"...huh?"
As Ichikawa looks up in slight confusion, he finds Fuutarou's right hand right in front of his face. And before he can react, the hand presses firmly against his cranium, eliciting a cry of shock at first that quickly mutates into a gargled choking, which in turn fades into silence.
A few moments is all it takes to render the tortured hoodlum braindead, and Fuutarou pulls his hand away. Ichikawa's eyes, still open and listless, remain staring and glazed in their sockets, much like Kasai's eyes before the injection.
"So, kid? What'd you find?" the young mage's father asks with a wry smirk of his own.
"Kasai didn't know what Rio looks like, but Ichikawa did. He met him before, back when he initially got recruited into Rio's gang." Fuutarou looks up from Ichikawa's corpse and stares into the opposite wall intently, as if in deep thought. "I know what he looks like, at least. But Ichikawa wasn't lying when he said he and his boys were just low-tier grunts in Rio's network; they didn't know anything else. Nothing on Rio's gang's HQ, if they even have one at all, or where his last known whereabouts are."
Isanari steps back into the dim incandescent light as his son is talking.
"So what's the plan now?" the father asks.
"I need to update Dragon with the profile of Shirazumi Rio; I'll do that once we're done cleaning up here. Once Dragon's got his profile, we can set the network to history scan; if he's a decent mage, he'll know about it and make sure to keep himself off the radar, but it's worth at least checking to see if he's a competent enough mage or not to remember to do that. If we're lucky, he'll be an idiot and let himself get tracked wherever he goes throughout the city, but that probably won't happen. And in the meantime, I need to meet with Mr. Nakano."
Isanari nods sagely, pointing at the video camera that's been clandestinely installed on a tall bipod in the shadows, recording the entire interrogation scene, including the drugging of Kasai. "Make sure to take the footage with you."
Nodding back, Fuutarou slips the baggie that he's been holding that still holds two more Heisei needles into his small blue storage rune before getting started with his dad on cleanup and body disposal.
"I don't gotta have a secret lie, or an alibi, everybody knows why I'm here - "
Humming some more nondescript English lyrics to himself, with his own pair of Audio Technica headphones on, Uesugi Fuutarou carefully browses the ready-made food section of the local Izumi supermarket that is on the way to the Pentagon, the high-rise where the Nakano family's penthouse is located. Equipped with his messenger bag and dressed in his usual street clothes of his own high school uniform, the young tutor and mage scans each product with bloodshot but stubbornly vigilant eyes, as though exerting a Herculean effort to pick out the very best of the foods the supermarket has on offer.
"You seem to be looking for something in particular, boy!" a jovial middle-aged woman in an Izumi supermarket apron, having noticed Fuutarou browse through the shelves and deciding to attend to him as he's the only customer at the ready-made food section at this time of the day, calls out heartily to get his attention. "If we don't have what you're looking for, tell me what you want and I can tell you if we can't make it for you here! We've got some time on our hands."
"Do you, ma'am? I see, thank you very much," Fuutarou nods with a professional smile in thanks as he pulls off his headphones and pauses his music to give her his full attention and, of course, to demonstrate proper manners. "Actually, I'm not looking for anything in particular...mainly because I don't really know what I'm looking for..."
"Mhm, and that'd be a bit of a problem, huh? But I totally get you, sometimes you're just so hungry that you don't know what to eat, right? This ol' girl was your age once; some things never change no matter what generation it is," the clerk nods sagely, mainly at herself, though.
"Well, it's not meant for me. I just wanted to pick something up for a few friends."
"Ah, grabbing something for your friends now? You're quite the thoughtful boy. Kids these days on their phones and talking about whatever the heck, always only buying things for themselves - I've seen it all!" the woman scoffs scornfully. "But I digress! In that case, I recommend something that you can share easily. And among that, we have..."
Looking around quickly across the supermarket wares, the clerk spies the food she's thinking of and gestures over to it as she and Fuutarou follow her lead.
"Dango!" she announces proudly. "Can't beat dango as a snack, especially in your case when you want to share it with friends also. And you're in luck - we made these fresh early this morning!"
Picking up a pack of Mitarashi dango, Fuutarou scans it for himself, slowly growing thankful that he's decided to talk with the lady behind the counter.
"We had concerns given to us by customers that the dango that used to be made here before I got hired was too sweet. My aunt used to run a dango shop in this city and she had me work there during vacation time. Those were the good ol' days, yes they were ~ " the lady sighs nostalgically. "Sadly the shop closed down while the city first began rapidly expanding; they needed the space for development and so it had to be demolished. My aunt and uncle were properly compensated, of course, but sometimes I miss working there, you see? So when I heard management talking about their dango problem, guess what happened next?"
"You requested to switch positions to make dango?"
"That's right! Make 'em how my aunt used to, how dango was supposed to be made! And I'll agree with the customers, the ones they sell at convenience stores and other supermarkets are far too sweet. But these - " the lady taps the small plastic dango packs on her side of the counter. "These are the real deal. Five dango, three in a pack, with just the right amount of soy sauce glaze - not too much so that all you can taste is the glaze, but not so little that you can only taste the dango. Just right texture and firmness - not too firm that you have to work to eat it, but not too soft that it melts too fast in your mouth. This is the quintessential Japanese snack, perfect for palettes of Japanese generations then, now, and henceforth!"
"I'll take two, please," Fuutarou announces abruptly, picking up another pack of three quintuplet Mitarashi dango.
"Thank you, thank you, you're far too kind beyond your years. Plus, you've let this old girl reminisce a little about her glory days, so here!"
The lady grabs a third pack of dango, rummages behind the counter for a moment before standing back up to slap a little "PAID" sticker over it, and hands it over the counter to Fuutarou.
"That's on the house; all I ask is for you to enjoy it!" the lady laughs heartily. "Oh, and of course, make sure to tell your friends about us, too!"
"I will, thank you."
Bidding goodbye to the clerk, Fuutarou takes his leave so that he can go pay for two of the dango packs. That lady reminded him of his boss over at Revival an awful lot...
"F-Fuutarou?"
About to pull his headphones back on, the young mage lets them rest again around his neck as he turns around in the aisle that he's walking through to reach the cashiers on the other side of the supermarket to turn towards yet another familiar voice that's called out his name.
"...we seem to be running into each other quite a bit these days, Miku," the young mage replies, raising a hand briefly to greet one of his students. "What're you doing here?"
The third quintuplet, holding a shopping basket by her left elbow, also lowers her own Audio Technicas upon calling out to him and happily smiles after successfully getting his attention.
"I came by to pick up some groceries for Nino. I also drank one of the drinks she was keeping in the fridge on accident the other night, so she wants me to pick up another drink for her. What about you? I didn't expect to run into you in the supermarket, of all places..."
"Yeah, this isn't usually a place where we'd meet, huh," Fuutarou nods in agreement. "But I was just grabbing a snack for you girls for today's auxiliary tutoring. You weren't going grocery shopping to skip out on today's tutoring, were you?"
"Mmmmuuu! I haven't skipped a single tutoring session yet, and that's the first thing you say?" Pouting like always every time they interact, Miku raises her fists to her chest to display her indignance at her tutor.
"I mean, I can never be sure, right? Yotsuba even missed a tutoring session earlier this week for the first time because apparently someone in the basketball team had to miss practice for one reason or another and she couldn't just leave them alone. And with Ichika going off on her own for her work, you're the next to go, if we follow the patterns."
"I won't miss a tutoring session like the others! I have to set an example."
"Why, because you're the one who scores the highest?"
Miku nods assertively.
"That so. Well, just know that if in case you do have to miss a day for whatever reason, you have my word that I won't get as mad at you for it."
"But you'd still get mad at me for it, huh?"
"Of course! That's a day that I'm not getting paid to do my work. You think I'll let you off the hook for something like missing a full day?"
"Then I can only imagine how you'll treat Nino and Itsuki for never showing up."
"Oh, don't worry, I've got my own special little treatment for them when they do finally decide to show up..."
"I get the feeling that whatever you've got planned for them's only going to chase them away again."
"Perhaps..."
The two of them walk towards the cashiers as they talk, and Miku makes a detour for the refrigerated drink section so that she can grab a drink for Nino, with Fuutarou close behind in tow.
"Hm...I forget which one she wanted," Miku murmurs to herself before shrugging quickly. "I'll just get her this..."
"...matcha soda?" Fuutarou asks incredulously, narrowing his left eye in hesitation. "I've seen those around for a while, but..."
"We're quintuplets, Fuutarou, so don't worry. She'll like it."
"Wait just a goddamn minute, weren't you the one who told me not to have so much faith in your whole quintuplets gimmick?"
Remembering her own words that she's spoken to the boy in front of her back at Honolulu the past week, Miku quickly turns around to hide her blushing face, causing Fuutarou to chortle in amusement.
"Miku, for as much as I'd love to think that the five of you are all one and the same, asking your sisters to drink matcha-flavored soda is, uh...how should I say...a bit out of the realm of possibility for them."
"B-But you were the one who said you had faith in us! That all five of us would be able to study enough to pass our exams at the end of the year!" Miku swings around quickly, again her lips puckered up in yet, surprise surprise, another pout.
"But exams and matcha soda are two way different things. How the hell can you compare them? And also, I didn't know you liked matcha soda. Are you one of those people who loves weird drink flavors?"
"N-No! I just - I love matcha," Miku stammers, but she shrinks a little and averts her eyes, trying to hide her vivid blue eyes behind her peachy red bangs. "...I guess...that makes me pretty weird, huh..."
"I'd like to reiterate that I said the drink flavor itself was weird, not you," Fuutarou clarifies. "As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with liking weird drink flavors, I was just asking you if that were the case."
Miku nods in response to this, regaining a bit of her self-confidence. "I've...always liked matcha. I just never really liked sweet stuff...I don't get its appeal. Matcha just...suits me a lot better."
"Fair enough. But still, you should maybe get something other than matcha soda for Nino."
"It's fine. And besides, she didn't ask me to specify what to buy her, she only told me to go replace the drink that I took from her."
"Oh, it's like that, huh..."
"This is between me and Nino. Don't interfere, Fuutarou," Miku declares, folding her arms and turning to walk away, as if having the final say on the topic. As Miku heads for one of the cashiers, having already done all her grocery shopping before she ran into her tutor, Fuutarou turns, quickly grabs a grape-flavored Ramune bottle from one of the refrigerated shelves before joining his student at the register line.
"By the way, I've never seen you with headphones on before," Miku wonders aloud at her tutor as the two walk in tandem towards the Pentagon along the sidewalk, the high-rise now looming over them to indicate their close proximity to their destination. "I didn't think you'd be the type."
"After seeing me play the guitar back in Hawaii?"
"But...even still, how could I have known?"
"True. But I like listening to music. I'll have some nights when it turns out I don't really need to do much. So listening to music helps pass the time, but it doesn't distract me so much that I can't keep paying attention to my surroundings. It's a nice middle ground between me still being able to do my job and having something to keep me entertained," Fuutarou answers adequately.
"And what kind of music do you like?"
"I...actually don't have, like, a favorite genre. I just listen to whatever sounds good," Fuutarou admits, scratching the back of his head again. "EDM, artcore, melodic dubstep, progressive house, even classical music if I feel like it...since I'm fluent in English, I've also taken a liking to some American rap, believe it or not...not too much, though."
"American rap..."
Suddenly, Miku bursts out in a fit of giggling, unable to contain it. Fuutarou scowls down at her, wondering what's come over her this time.
"You sure you're not one of those people who just laughs at anything? What the hell's wrong with you?" the young tutor sighs heavily.
"N-No, Fuut...arou..." Miku manages to quickly get a hold of herself, gripping one of her grocery bags tightly while Fuutarou holds the second one for her for their walk back home. "I just...I just...imagined you as a, as like a...an actual rapper...well, I tried to..."
"Oh, and you think I can't pull it off, huh?"
"I-I just can't imagine you like one! That's why I laughed!"
"I can't imagine you and your sisters passing your exams at the end of the year at the rate you all are headed either, so there's that."
"Ack! Fuutarou actually went there! You meanie!" Miku lightly whaps her long cardigan sleeve against Fuutarou's right arm.
"Then it appears that we're even."
While slapping Fuutarou's arm, Miku looks up and gets a better look at Fuutarou's headphones, which, much like her own, have been resting around its owner's neck for all the time that they've been together since the two of them met at the supermarket.
"Hey, Fuutarou, are those...are those headphones also Audio Technicas?" she asks curiously.
"Yeah, they are," her tutor nods quickly, pulling off his headphones to get a better look at them. "It was a gift from one of my clients who didn't have the money on hand to pay me for a contract I completed for them, but they happened to have these headphones that were still in their box, brand new, so they asked if I could take this as a sort of alternate payment until they could get me my actual payment at a later date. I figured I'd give them a try, and here they are now. They're really nice, I like them a lot. Though by no means am I an expert on headphone equipment..."
Listening to Fuutarou recount this small little memory about his headphones, Miku feels another small but warm and therapeutic smile bubble up to her lips, and she hides them discretely with her sideburns so that Fuutarou can't see her facial expression easily. She's not quite sure why, but just the fact that they have similar headphones made by the same company, even if they aren't the exact same models, is enough to make her heart beat just a bit faster. It's probably because she finally has something tangible in common with him that she is feeling this way, but even if it's just a silly little thing that they share, Miku finds herself deriving much comfort out of it.
"Is that why you're okay with me wearing headphones during our tutoring?" she asks.
"Well, I don't really care if you have headphones around your neck like that, it doesn't bother me much. I know some people like wearing headphones as part of their fashion, so maybe you're doing the same thing, who knows. That certainly isn't my business, and that's no place of mine to comment on either since I'm your tutor, not your parent. Just so long as you don't actually have them on, then obviously we'll have a bit of a problem."
"Right, right."
The two of them reach the Pentagon square that leads to the front entrance into the ground floor, and riding off the small little joy that she's felt talking and walking with her tutor, Nakano Miku quickens her gait into a brisk little jog, hurrying ahead of Fuutarou and turning with a cute little spin to wait for him in front of the automatic glass doors into the elevator lobby.
"You seem awfully energetic today," Fuutarou remarks with a little smirk, but a rare one that is absent of his usual snarkiness and sarcasm. "What's the occasion?"
"Oh, nothing much." Miku brushes her long bangs out of her face and presents the young mage with the very same small smile that she first got earlier in their walk that has since fueled her normally secluded heart and her usually inactive body. "Besides, aren't you here to tutor us?"
"That I am. Let's get to it."
Joining Miku at the door, Fuutarou escorts her up to the thirtieth floor penthouse, where they enter and find the rest of the Nakano family already on the first floor, awaiting their arrival.
"Ah, good mooooorning, Uesugi-saaaaaan!" the ever exuberant Yotsuba cries out, having leapt out of the couch to see if they've finally arrived and trotting up to Fuutarou as he takes off his shoes to enter the house. "Miku texted us saying that she ran into you at the supermarket."
"That we did. And I picked up a little something for you all..."
He pulls out the dango packs from his messenger bag as he, Miku, and Yotsuba enter the living room with the adjacent kitchen.
"Oooh, dango? We haven't had that in a while, have we?" Ichika beams, gazing at the dango packs that the girls' tutor sets down on the glass table first. "Sure reminds me of our younger days, Mom used to buy us dango every so often from this one dango store back in the day; I don't think it's there anymore, though. Where did you buy this? Was Izumi selling this?"
"Yeah. I don't think I've seen them sell it there before, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me," Fuutarou nods.
Suddenly, a gasp is heard behind Ichika, and the girls and the lone boy look up to find Itsuki, having climbed down the stairs to head for the dinner table with several study books and a notebook in her arms, standing over her eldest sister behind the couch with her eyes locked down at the dango packs on the glass table.
Instantly reacting, and with impressive dexterity, Fuutarou swoops down and scoops the two dango packs, one in each hand, to safeguard them from the malicious jaws off Nakano Itsuki. Itsuki, for her part, looks positively heartbroken.
"Dango is for diligent students who attend tutoring lessons and study groups when they're supposed to," Fuutarou sternly declares, much to Itsuki's sinking dismay.
"H-Hmph! It's not as if I wanted any anyway!" she retaliates, turning away quickly to head back to the dinner table that was her original destination to set down her books, notebook, and writing utensils.
"Then why were you looking over this way? You only have that kind of a look on whenever you're looking at food."
Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba are starting to giggle at the antics between Fuutarou and Itsuki, the latter of whom spins around a second time to stomp over to Fuutarou after setting her books down, her lips pursed together in full-impact pouting.
"Fuutarou-kun sure knows by now what Itsuki looks like whenever she's got food on her mind, huh?" Ichika chuckles, watching Itsuki confront Fuutarou and reach for the dango helplessly.
"And just what are you doing right now, Itsuki?" the young mage asks, holding the two dango packs high up over the youngest quintuplet's head and safely out of her own arms' reach. With Fuutarou markedly taller than all of the quintuplets and with a notably bigger wingspan, there is nothing Itsuki can do to physically reach the dango that remain high in the sky out of her reach; not even her tall peachy-red ahoge that Itsuki uses as leverage against her sisters at times whenever they're comparing heights to each others' cannot be of any assistance to her here.
"I changed my mind, I changed my miiiind! Please, Uesugi-kun, give me some dango! It's been so long since I had some!" the fifth quintuplet cries, finally breaking down and pleading with her would-be tutor.
"Really now? Because you said the same thing when Nino stopped by to give us Choco Pies the other day."
"I-I hadn't had Choco Pies in quite a while, either! You cannot blame me for that!" Resuming her irritated but nonetheless cute pouting, Itsuki glares back up at Fuutarou in a futile attempt to establish dominance in the conversation.
"But I can blame you for not studying with us," Fuutarou returns.
"YOU were the one who refused my offer last week! That is none of my business!"
"Maybe not, but it's none of my business what you feel if I decide to keep all these dango to myself."
"Aaaaah, aaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Itsuki lets out a small shriek of terror at what will become of her beloved dango as her sisters looking on watching the spectacle between them turn their giggling into stronger laughter. "Just - just one, please! And I will stop bothering you! I promise!"
"That's the weakest promise I've ever heard in my goddamn life, and I've heard some really bad ones in my short lifetime." Fuutarou gives Itsuki's books on the dinner table a quick glance. "And you're planning to study down here today? Don't you normally go study in your room?"
"T-T-Today I wanted a bit of a change of pace! Studying alone in your room all the time does get a little boring, after all!"
"Oh ho, that so, huh? You sure it's not because you wanna know what studying together with your beloved sisters feels like?" Fuutarou begins to gesticulate some fake lines that he pretends the other quintuplets he's currently tutoring would say, all the while keeping a firm hold on the dango packs that he pulls out of Itsuki's reach every time she tries jumping for one to snatch one away. "'Wouldn't it be nice if Itsuki came down to study with us?' 'I hope Itsuki's studying by herself okay!' 'If only Itsuki would come down and study with us, then we'd all make such good progress together!' Stuff like that, you know?"
Huffing and puffing but showing more endurance than Fuutarou honestly expected out of someone like Itsuki, the youngest quintuplet then resorts to her secret weapon: her eldest sister.
"Ichikaaaaaa, Uesugi-kun's being mean to meeeee!" she cries, heading for her sister and plopping down on the couch next to her to bury her face into Ichika's chest as Ichika herself accepts her with open arms and a motherly smile, befitting of the eldest quintuplet.
"Fuutarou-kun, even if she isn't going to study with us, she's still our sister. It wouldn't hurt to give her one, right?" Ichika smiles gently up at Fuutarou, who lowers the dango packs to listen to her. "Besides, you've got two there, so that's six total. We can all have one each and enjoy it together."
"That's certainly true," the tutor agrees, causing Itsuki to pull her face out of Ichika's bosom in excited anticipation to turn to Fuutarou. "But I also have to take into consideration that you've been missing a lot of study sessions as of late, and I can't just overlook that either if I was judging Itsuki on the grounds that she hasn't joined us yet, you know?"
"I know. But even in the face of that, I still want you to let Itsuki have one. Our whole study group thing is irrelevant here, why don't we just enjoy the dango all together as friends?"
"Sure. But even on that note, I don't think you can consider me and Itsuki to be friends."
"W-We are! Are we not? We have known each other for a full month now!" Itsuki interjects.
"That's right, that's right! We're all friends here ~ !" Yotsuba nods strongly.
"She's only saying that so that she can get some dango, though," Miku comments from the side in a deadpan tone. "Itsuki just wants a truce for now. But once she gets her dango, she'll break the truce, and she'll go back to war against Fuutarou...!"
"Uwaaaa, that's bad, that's bad! We can't have a war here! Then it'll be food fights every day and night!" Yotsuba cries out in shock.
"W-We will not be having any food fights! That would be an incredible waste of food! Not to mention incredibly bad manners!" Itsuki yelps back.
As the banter continues among Fuutarou and the quintuplets, Nino's room door opens and shuts behind her as the second quintuplet in question scales down the stairs.
"You all sure are noisy this morning, huh?" Nino remarks sarcastically, reaching the bottom of the stairs and heading over to join the rest of her sisters in the living room. "Is studying really that fun to you? Wait a minute, you're not even studying right now; what the hell's the point of you being here again?"
"The plan was to get started, but as you can see, Itsuki was attempting to perform a grand heist involving Izumi supermarket dango," Fuutarou explains with a straight face while simultaneously swinging the packs of dango in his hands this way and that, and that's what sells the exaggerated joke to the other quintuplets, save for those part of the anti-Uesugi Fuutarou coalition. Itsuki, unable to scrounge up the willpower to defend herself, so laden is she with embarrassment, can do little more than sit next to her eldest quintuplet sister, trembling and pouting down at the carpeted floor at her feet while Ichika pats her gently on the head reassuringly. "Why don't you join us, Nino? Just like how Itsuki seems like she wants to."
"I-I do NOT wish to join you! Not after all this embarrassment you have put me through!" Itsuki flicks her chin sideways angrily, her body language now blocking all future attempts from Fuutarou to communicate effectively.
"And God no, leave me out of your dumb little study group too. But in any case, if your plan was to share those dango with us, you better do it quick," Nino sighs with a slight groan towards the end of it as she turns to Yotsuba, pulling out her phone in the process. "Yotsuba, someone I know on the basketball team at school's looking for a few ringers for their tournament coming up. You've been looking around at clubs lately, right? Why don't you go give them a hand?"
"E-Eh?! But - " Yotsuba hesitates, flustered at suddenly being put on the spot by Nino out of the blue. "But - we're about to get to work, and Uesugi-san took a day out of his weekend come teach us - "
"Oh c'mon, it's a damn Saturday and you're still thinking about studying? Laaaame," the second quintuplet groans tauntingly.
"Excuse me, today's a special lesson that all the regulars here agreed to come to because I feel like they need it?" Fuutarou interjects, sensing some malignant intent coming from Nino right now in her actions and ceasing his silly dance with the dango packs.
"And you think I give a shit? Bite me, Uesugi," Nino spits back briefly at her would-be tutor before turning to her younger sister again, this time adopting a more mellow, pitying tone. "The basketball team only has five members, and apparently one of them sprained their ankles during practice recently, so unless they get their roster filled out, they can't attend the tournament that I'm sure all of them've been practicing so hard for. You've always been really good at sports, haven't you? We all know you're the most athletic out of us, and all the sports clubs back at our old school used to fight over you back then. You're not going to just let the basketball team forfeit out just because they don't have enough members, will you? No one deserves to go out of a tournament like that."
Inhaling and exhaling deeply, Fuutarou sets down one pack of dango and opens up another, which, to no one's surprise, immediately gets Itsuki's attention, who opens a single eye to glance in the direction of the sound of one of the dango packs being pried open.
After a moment of brief but intense self-deliberation, Yotsuba, feeling terribly torn between her tutor and the basketball team in need, finally goes with her mind over her heart and turns to bow in apology at her home tutor.
"I-I'm so sorry, Uesugi-san! But I just can't - I can't just sit here when I know there are people out there who need my help!" the fourth quintuplet announces in a loud voice.
Keeping her head bowed because she expects Fuutarou to scold her like he usually does whenever she gives a silly answer to a question, Yotsuba slowly realizes that no such reprimands are apparently headed her way, so she just as slowly raises her head back up, only to find Uesugi standing in front of her, holding out the opened pack of Mitarashi dango to offer her one of the small skewers of five glazed dango.
"If you must go, at least take one of these with you," he says quietly, his voice carrying zero hints of disappointment or discouragement. "And...have fun out there. It's the weekend, after all."
Watching this particular exchange between the two, Miku subconsciously lifts a hand up to her own chest - maybe she's just imagining things, but...just now...it felt as though her heart just skipped a beat...
Yotsuba simply stands where she's raised her head back up, staring back at her tutor as though she didn't quite catch the words she's received from him, but as the words sink in, she lets out one of her trademark radiant smiles as she cheerfully accepts one of Fuutarou's dango.
"Thank you, Uesugi-san! And yeah, I'll do my best!" she pumps her arms confidently.
Setting down the pack of dango on the corner of the glass table beside him, Fuutarou claps his hands once in front of Yotsuba to pump her up while Itsuki sneakily eyes the opened dango pack that he's just put down.
"Breathe in! Breathe out! Back straight! Eyes open!" the tutor yells at Yotsuba, much like a football coach getting his team pumped up for their game. "What time is it, #428?!"
"IT'S YOTSUBA TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!" the fourth quintuplet roars, almost blasting out poor Miku's ears who's standing close by, who luckily manages to slap her hands over her ears to protect them just in time. "I'll be off, everyone!"
The other sisters bid her farewell as Yotsuba practically zooms like the Roadrunner out of their penthouse; she's probably already in the elevator before the front door even has a chance to close properly.
"That was...one heck of a way to send her off," Ichika chuckles, always one to enjoy Yotsuba's energetic outbursts. "You've been picking up after me, haven't you, Fuutarou-kun?"
"Kinda hard not to, when you do that every other day with her. Of course it was gonna bleed off onto me at some point," the tutor shrugs nonchalantly, picking his dango pack back up, much to Itsuki's silent dismay, before offering a dango to Miku. "You okay with dango? You don't like sweet stuff, right?"
"No, but...I'll still...take one," Miku stammers a little bit, doing her best to keep herself calm in the aftermath of her skipped heartbeat moment as she takes a stick of dango for herself.
Frowning deeply at this course of events that isn't turning out quite how she wanted it to, Nino then turns her attention to Ichika.
"By the way, Ichika, you too - didn't you say you had work at two today? It's already almost noon, don't you need to head out a bit early?" the second quintuplet points out to her sole older sister, who suddenly gasps lightly upon receiving this reminder.
"Oh my goodness, I totally forgot..." she murmurs to herself, holding her cheek as she checks her phone to double-check her texts. "Yeah, my ride should be here really soon, actually..."
"And you too, Itsuki. If you came down here to study at the dinner table because studying in your room all the time's getting a bit boring, why not go to the library and study there?" Nino suggests.
"That's...that is certainly a good point you make," Itsuki agrees slowly. "Very well, I shall take your suggestion. Thank you, Nino."
"No problem, my pleasure ~ " Nino giggles, nefariously winking over at Fuutarou, who has helped himself to a stick of dango as well and is chewing on the first one while setting the empty dango pack on the glass table to open the second one.
Having gotten up to go to her room to fetch her things for work, Ichika raises an apologetic hand at her tutor.
"So sorry about this short notice, I totally forgot to text you saying that I wouldn't be able to make this session," the eldest quint apologizes like Yotsuba before her. "I'll be sure to make it to next week's, I promise!"
Without a word, Fuutarou simply extends his hand holding the second fresh dango pack, and Ichika smiles thankfully, taking the last one for herself to accept her tutor's small token of generosity before quickly heading back up to her room.
Again, staying silent as he chews on his own dango, the young mage-tutor offers a dango to a surprised Itsuki as she stands up from the couch, having given up on her hope that she'd get some dango for herself to enjoy.
"I...I thought you did not want to share any with me," Itsuki pouts, though considerably more lightly than before.
"I didn't. And I still don't. But the fact of the matter is that Ichika is right; being able to share a snack shouldn't have anything to do with how we're studying. So for now, all I can do is wish you luck with your own studies at the library today."
Itsuki averts her gaze midway through Fuutarou's words.
"...please do not think that I will be swayed by this bribe," she tries to speak in as aloof of a tone as possible, but she merely makes herself sound a bit cranky instead. She snatches up a stick of dango for herself and removes herself swiftly from the living room premises, gathering up her books and notes and writing utensils to take back to her room so that she can pack them into her bag and head off for the library.
Once the remaining members of the household also bid farewell to their departing sisters Ichika and Itsuki, who head out together, only Fuutarou, Nino, and Miku are left in the living room.
Sighing through lightly pressed teeth that hold the now naked wooden dango skewer between them, Fuutarou closes his eyes tiredly, letting his exhaustion seep into them briefly as he arches his neck back where he stands.
"...so much for today's lesson, though, huh..." he murmurs calmly.
Having successfully sabotaged Fuutarou's weekend class for her sisters, Nino no longer feels the devious satisfaction she felt when she first convinced Yotsuba to leave to give the Asahiyama High basketball team a hand. She expected Fuutarou to get angry, to get upset that he'd lost almost all his students, to show some kind of despair at his dismantled situation. Instead, all she gets is a Fuutarou who seems to be none of these things, but instead just...tired.
He's not dumb, either. He must know that Nino must have instigated this on purpose; for Ichika, it couldn't be helped since it's her work that's in question, but Yotsuba would have never known about the basketball team's plight if Nino herself never told her about it. Yet Fuutarou isn't getting angry at her or anything or questioning her why she's gone off like this.
And to top it all off, once he rubs the bridge of his nose to get at least some of the exhaustion out of his eyes and after he reassures a concerned Miku that he's alright, Uesugi Fuutarou picks back up the second dango pack with one last dango skewer in it, walks around the couch, and quietly offers it to Nino.
"...why are you trying to give me one?" Nino tries to scowl as hard as she can to hide her growing discomfort at this current situation that she's at least partly responsible for.
"Same reason why I let Itsuki take one," Fuutarou says simply. "Besides, you're the one in the family who likes sweet stuff like this the most, right?"
"What if I don't want one?"
Fuutarou gives her the tiniest shrug Nino has ever seen a human being make. "Doesn't matter to me. All I know is that I won't be taking this last one for myself; if you don't want it, give it to one of your sisters."
Closing the dango pack with the one last dango skewer still inside, Fuutarou walks past Nino and sets it on the edge of the dinner table so that one of the quintuplets, probably Itsuki at some point when she returns from the library, will find and eat it.
Even though Fuutarou hasn't said anything wrong, Nino still finds herself getting ticked off anyway, and this is on top of the complicated feelings she was harboring in the aftermath of the sabotaged study session; her would-be tutor's words of "doesn't matter to me" have managed to get under her skin and embed themselves there like sizzling shrapnel from a detonated grenade. So when Fuutarou goes back to Miku to discuss with her what their study plans should be for today, now that they're missing both Ichika and Yotsuba, Nino turns towards them once more.
"Miku, you probably forgot about how I wanted you to buy me a replacement for that drink you took from the fridge that was supposed to be mine the other night? Go out and grab one right now," she demands.
"Already did. You think I'd forget about something like that when you'll yell at me if I did?" Miku scoffs back, reaching into her own grocery bag and tossing the can of matcha soda that she's bought for her, which Nino catches by reflex.
"M-Matcha soda...?" Nino balks at this strange drink that Miku has thought to be an appropriate replacement, having just about the same look that Fuutarou had back at the supermarket. "Wait, wait just a damn minute, you just bought something you like, didn't you?!"
"You didn't say exactly what drink you wanted; all you said was to get a replacement," Miku shrugs back at her older sister, taking a leaf out of Fuutarou's book on how to shrug as nonchalantly as humanly possible.
"Oh for fuck's sake, Miku - "
But before Nino can go on, Fuutarou reaches over into his plastic bag that's on the carpet next to the base of the glass table in the living room, pulls out the grape Ramune, and holds it up to Nino.
"Here, catch," he says, waiting for Nino to realize what's going on and quickly set the matcha soda can on the dinner table with the last dango skewer so that she can catch Fuutarou's Ramune bottle instead. "I figured you'd complain, so have that instead."
Not even bothering to observe Nino's reaction to his fortuitous offering, Fuutarou turns back to Miku, who gestures at him so that they can continue discussing their revised study schedule for the day.
"Since the others aren't here now, we can make this sort of like a personal lesson just between the two of us," Fuutarou suggests to the third quint, who nods in approval.
"Sure thing. I ran into some trouble with my science homework, and I want you to help me review for Japanese history."
"Japanese history? I thought you're confident in that subject."
"I've been reviewing on my own, but it turns out there're still things that I need to study again, so I want you to help me with that."
"Alright, got it..."
Listening to the two of them talk together like this, Nino's irritation begins to boil over.
"So, like...when the hell did the two of you get so friendly to each other?" the second quint asks aggressively, interrupting the conversation between the two, who turn around to look back at her.
"What, I can't get along with Miku for the sake of helping her out with her studies?" Uesugi challenges Nino back.
"And what's it to you? You don't even come to study with us, let alone study at all, so why should you care?" Miku also stands her ground, feeling bolstered by the presence of her tutor.
Crossing her arms, unwilling to let herself be talked out of relevance, Nino rounds the couch to approach the two of them herself.
"Oh, I get it, I get it," she coos tauntingly again, first heading for her own sister, who eyes her keenly back. "So plain as hell guys like this loser are your type after all, huh, Miku? That'd explain why you're letting him wrap you all around his finger."
"And you only care about looks," Miku fires back.
"And so what if I do? You're not trying to convince me right now with this whole 'it's what's on the inside that matters' bullcrap, are you?" Nino steps right up to Miku as if to bully her, but Miku holds position like usual and watches as her older sister point her long and slender fingers down at her chest, her fingernails poking the top of her right breast through her cardigan. "It makes sense, though, if I think about it - because there's no way you can step outside this house in such shitty clothes like this if you actually cared for looks at all."
"And you're telling me those disgusting pointy nails are supposed to be the trend right now?" Miku once more returns fire with a different but no less effective style of verbal savagery.
"I doubt you'd even understand 'trends' and whatnot in the first place, though."
"You're right, and I don't even want to get it, either."
Observing the argument between the quintuplet sisters for a minute, Fuutarou chooses to butt in once it seems like the two of them have arrived at an impasse.
"As much as I'd like to stay out of something like this, the fact of the matter is that I still need to tutor Miku since she's still here," he explains calmly to the two girls.
"Yeah. Nino, just stay out of our way; I don't get why you're trying so hard to butt in on us when you aren't even going to study with us at all," Miku frowns back at her older sister disapprovingly.
So Nino plays one last card that she's got up her sleeves: she turns to her would-be tutor.
"Let me guess: you haven't eaten lunch yet, have you?"
Sighing now that the topic of food is brought up once more, Fuutarou experiences a slight case of deja vu from the other day when Miku bought him McDonald's.
"No, I haven't, but - " he tries to say, but Nino talks right over him once she gets the answer that she's looking for and heads off to the kitchen.
"Then that settles it - let's have a little duel between me and Miku with, like I said before, 'what's on the inside'," Nino challenges. "We'll see who can cook better, me or my sister here. And if I win, you won't be teaching her, and you have to leave this house for today!"
Not quite following Nino's particular train of thought here, the young mage lets out a small groan.
"Miku, are you gonna play along with this?" he asks his sole remaining student, who doesn't answer at first. "Miku?"
"I'll finish this quickly."
Fuutarou glances over at the third quint, who, having silently accepted this grudge match against her older sister, is rolling up her sleeves as she, too, follows Nino menacingly into the kitchen.
"Just wait for me, Fuutarou. This'll be over soon..."
Saying nothing, the young tutor takes a seat at the dinner table, figuring he'd take the time while the two sisters are duking it out in the kitchen to check his texts and emails. For the next roughly half-hour, Fuutarou waits patiently at the dinner table while browsing through and responding to his work emails until Nino and Miku are done and bring him their work to present to him.
"Ja-jaaaan ~ !" Nino announces with a bit of cutesy flair as the cherry on top. "A dutch baby with seasonal veggies and uncured ham!"
Before her sits a small frying pan with exactly what Nino has described: a puffed pancake lined with scrambled eggs and containing fresh leafy greens and slices of fresh ham around the center, and with a layer of green onions to top everything off. The presentation, the texture, and the aroma of the dish - everything is top-notch quality, as expected of the cook of the household, and Fuutarou can't stop himself from salivating a little bit just looking at the dish that Nino's prepared.
But on the other hand...
"...o...omu...rice..." Miku can barely eek the name of her own dish out from off her tongue, markedly missing all of the dueling conviction that she had going into this food fight of sorts.
Looking down at what Miku has to offer, Fuutarou can easily see why she is now devoid of all that confidence she once had: a plate sits in front of her holding a pile of...something. That's supposed to be some kind of egg, right? Why is half of it burned to a crisp? Why is half the rice underneath the egg also burned to a crisp? And why did she even bother putting ketchup over everything like it's somehow going to help with how bad it already looks?
After a few moments of silence as Fuutarou takes the time to survey both of their foods, Miku finally swallows her pride and blurts out, "O-On second thought, actually...I think I'll just...eat this myself," as she gazes down in complete shame at her own clear failure of an omurice dish.
"Awww, but you put so much effort into that, Miku ~ !" Nino coos at her younger sister, managing to keep down a snort that almost bubbles up to the surface when she says the word "effort". "You should at least let him try it, what's the worst that can happen?"
Nervously looking back up at her tutor, the third quintuplet can't hold her gaze with him for longer than three seconds before she silently clasps her hands over her eyes, dreading what Fuutarou is thinking about her dish right now. This doesn't prepare her, however, for what Fuutarou says next:
"You're right, Nino. Both of you did go through the trouble of fixing me some food, and I didn't eat anything today yet other than the dango just now, so I'll be digging in."
Pulling in the two dishes towards himself to eat both before Miku can stop him, Fuutarou, having been given utensils by the sisters when they first arrived with the food, picks up the appropriate spoon to equip himself.
"Thank you for the food," the tutor recites as he begins to dig in. Nino looks on with supreme smugness while the polar opposite of abject worry can be seen on Miku next to her, creating quite the juxtaposition for Fuutarou who sits across from them at the dinner table.
Nino's dutch baby is even better than it looks, probably because his hunger is his own biggest spice: the eggs are scrambled just right, the veggies are fresh and still a little moist from the water that Nino used to rinse them, on top of providing a little crunch to the meal, and the slices of ham, one side heated by the surrounding eggs and the other side crisp and cold, help complete the duality of the dish's homely warmth and exciting cold freshness, with the green onions topping it all off.
Miku's smoldering omurice is even worse than it looks, and having tasted Nino's dutch baby first, Fuutarou's palette is given a nasty shock as soon as he takes the first spoonful of burnt omurice. All he can really taste is burnt rice and eggs; he can't even really taste the other toppings that Miku added to the rice itself underneath the egg, so badly did she burn it all wholesale. Her dish looks like the remains of a campfire, and if that were to be given a taste of some sort, this would probably be what it tastes like.
Even still, Fuutarou's face remains unchanged the entire time that he works his way through both dishes indiscriminately, consuming both Nino's dutch baby and Miku's omurice in totality and leaving not one speck of food remaining on either plate or frying pan. The spectating quintuplets Nino and Miku, watching their classmate work his way through both of their foods, slowly but surely swap expressions of their own: Nino's self-assured smugness gives way to muted confusion and horror, while Miku's heightened concern transitions to quiet but enormous relief.
Being a naturally fast eater, Uesugi completes both dishes within eight minutes, taking a swig from his glass of water that Miku, not Nino, has brought him to help wash the food down.
"Thanks for the food again," he nods with satisfaction at a meal well eaten, holding his hands together in post-meal ceremony.
"Wait, wait - so - !" Nino can hold in her anger no longer and starts to blurt out her protests, but Fuutarou clearing his throat forces her to keep her peace for just a bit longer.
"Obviously Nino's dish is better; I think we can all agree on that even before I started eating," the young mage professes. "The dutch baby is good enough for a restaurant or cafe somewhere, I'd bet, that's how good it is."
Hearing these earnest words of praise, Nino lets go of some of the heightened irritation she's been feeling.
"And, Miku, either your sister's a terrible teacher or you just plain suck at cooking, or maybe it's both, but you need to learn to not burn stuff on the frying pan this badly if you want to make anything decent," Fuutarou critiques Miku's own cooking with the force of a thousand needles that stab Miku right through the heart, causing her to hang her head in total shame. "And given how well Nino cooks, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt that she's been doing her best teaching you and that it's not her fault that your omurice turned out like this."
"...I'm...sorry..." is all Miku can whimper dejectedly.
"So that settles it! That means I wi - " Nino begins to proclaim herself the victor, but Fuutarou raises a hand in objection.
"However, while the quality of the foods contrast quite a bit compared to each other, the fact of the matter is that they were still good enough where I was able to eat both without problems," Fuutarou clarifies, gesturing down at both the empty plate and empty pan.
Nino gawks in disbelief at her would-be tutor.
"Th-That's such a load of crap!" she cries out, becoming so filled with such disbelief that it causes her to stutter uncharacteristically for a moment. "'They were still good enough for you to eat' my goddamn ass, Uesugi! How the fuck was Miku's dish supposed to be at all edible?! It was literally all burnt!"
"It was, yeah. I still ate it, though."
"And I bet that's because you're so poor that you're used to eating shitty food like that! Not to mention you're obviously biased towards Miku right now!"
"I don't deny either of that. But eating shitty food most of the time I suppose worked out in my favor here - and with how you treat me most of the time, you wonder to yourself why I let myself be biased towards Miku a little bit?"
"Then won't your stomach be upset after eating all that?! You work at the hospital with Papa, even you said so! Surely you know how bad it's gotta be for your digestive system to eat all that burned crap!"
"I wasn't aware that you were looking out for me too. First you cook for me, now you worry about my health? Is there something else you'd like to tell me?"
"I-I'm just saying that because I don't want you to mess up our bathroom!"
"Don't worry, I don't plan on doing that since I'll be fine."
Again, another standoff.
"But - but shouldn't the quality matter? That's how we know who's better at cooking, isn't it?" Nino blurts out, struggling to find a new avenue of debate.
"Normally, yes, it does. But this isn't a proper cooking competition, because you baited Miku into a cook-off, which is something you know you're far superior than her in, so it was pretty much rigged from the start. So if all you care about was being better than your sister here in cooking, then you should've had the answer from the start, which means you certainly didn't need me to tell you that for validation. Therefore, for the sake of this little duel that the two of you had, I went into this to see if the two of you together could feed me enough for my lunch today, and as it turns out, the two of you combined were able to do just that."
Surveying the two remaining quintuplets, Fuutarou waits for either of them to say something, but when neither of them do for now, he takes the lead to continue his thoughts.
"To add to that, Miku accepted your little cooking duel here knowing that she was heavily disadvantaged going up against you, yet she still went in with the confidence that she could win, even if it was only at first. So if I look at this in terms of the amount of effort that went into these, you didn't need to lift a damn finger to make this dutch baby, Nino, because you can make a dish like this in your freaking sleep, while on the other hand, Miku had to put all the concentration and focus she had remembering what she'd learned from you just to be able to put something together to show for her efforts. So your dish might be tastier and much better quality, but I could taste the effort Miku put into hers much more. As it should, because Miku put her heart and soul into making this omurice, even if it turned out looking shit and tasted like shit. I can't say the same about your dutch baby, Nino."
Fuutarou's surprisingly in-depth and subtly scathing review renders both girls speechless, and both of them emptily stare back at the young tutor, who drinks the rest of the water in his glass to help cleanse his system.
Slowly, quietly, the hands of the third quintuplet rise up together and rest in front of her face as Miku is finally able to once again reveal her small smile of touched relief.
"That, and as soon as you came down to tell Yotsuba to go help out the basketball team, I knew that you wanted to sabotage the lesson I had planned for your sisters today," Fuutarou says quietly, though to the two quintuplets who are his audience, it comes out as a slight snarl. "So consider this payback. Thanks for the free food, it was great."
As Fuutarou is talking, Nino, spying this reaction from her younger sister out of the corner of her eye, glares absolute daggers down at Miku, then back at Fuutarou, who calmly stares back, having said his piece and waiting on Nino to speak hers.
"This is such bullshit."
Tearing herself away from the table, too pissed off to bother clearing the table like she normally does, the second quintuplet, irate and beside herself with smoldering fury, stomps up the stairs to her room, causing the house to echo with the giant SLAM of her door.
Having casually watched Nino remove herself from the first floor, Fuutarou sighs a little, running his hand up through his black hair again.
"Welp, looks like I did it again, pissing off your sister like that..." he says quietly. "And you shouldn't really take what I said seriously, Miku. Like I said just now, I only said that to get back at her for her sabotaging the lesson I had planned for us today. Clearly, though, I went overboard with that and hit a nerve with her, so I doubt she'll want to talk to me again for the rest of the weekend. If you can, tell her that I didn't mean to go that far with this..."
Miku nods, the afterglow of her relief having faded enough for her to respond. "Sure thing. But...even if what you said about my omurice wasn't serious...I'm...I'm still...really happy that you said that, Fuutarou."
"Like I said, you shouldn't be...I called your cooking shitty."
"But you're only talking facts. My cooking is terrible. I know I have to improve."
"Even still, though..." Fuutarou then gets up from the chair, stretching a little to get the blood flowing. "Let's get these washed, I'm sure Nino will at least appreciate us cleaning up after ourselves here, if nothing else."
"Oh, I'll...I'll help you wash them, then. If you don't mind..."
"Thanks..."