A/N
Random: I don't have a fixed writing schedule, and I doubt I'll ever have something like that. All I do is write a chapter until it's done, upload it, and then start another one whenever I feel like it. Since I knew exactly what to write for this chapter, I got started on it immediately and was able to put it out the next day. But sometimes I'll be gone for a week without an update. It's like playing a gacha game and rolling the gacha for it, except here it doesn't cost you anything but your time and patience.
Itsuki's pencil scratches the lines on her notebook paper, jotting down various kanji as she studies for her Japanese Language Arts midterm. With a few reference and study-help books stacked up neatly on the side of her desk and a perfect posture sitting on her chair, the youngest quintuplet, sporting her reading glasses that she frequently dons to aid her nearsightedness, studies quietly and diligently on her own in the city library. The small amount of air conditioning keeps the temperature inside the library at a steady 21 degrees Celsius, and the study area that Itsuki has chosen is in a rather remote corner of the library, reducing the likelihood that she'll need to deal with any significant amount of foot traffic near her area, as is unfortunately the case with some of the self-study areas in the middle or closer to the entrance of the library. And with the Audio Technica headphones that she's borrowed from Miku for today to completely isolate herself in her studies that now play classical music such as Mozart's K.299 Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major into her ears, Itsuki is making good progress on her midterm studies.
Well, she certainly hopes so. Her test scores have a tendency to disagree with her sense of accomplishment at times.
Ever since she and her sisters studied with their classmate and tutor here at the library the previous Saturday, Itsuki has taken a liking to studying here and decided to come here directly after school to study here for the whole day, only leaving to buy and eat dinner at a nearby family cafe before returning to resume her studies. The change in environment is a welcome one; having only ever studied at home, studying at the library provides a fresh change of pace that Itsuki felt like she's needed. It's not to say that she's sick of studying at home, but more that this change in locale and atmosphere goes a long way in helping her mind gear itself towards the expressed goal of studying. That, and oftentimes she'd need to deal with her sisters screwing around downstairs, and no thanks to their rooms' lack of soundproofing, she can easily hear what they're up to if the rest of the quintuplets are making any amount of significant noise.
If anything, she's most irritated at the fact that she didn't think of going to study at the library herself, and that it's taken all these months and years and a classmate of hers whom she's only known for not even two months yet for her to connect the dots and give studying at the library a try.
Itsuki's pencil decelerates slowly as her mind, bearing the burdens and stress of studying for hours today, begins to falter as this thought seeps into her mind. Her smartphone that's sitting next to the stacked books does read 21:32, after all, and she's been here since three-thirty.
Her tutor and classmate...the close-up sight of Uesugi Fuutarou's deep black eyes flashes before her own, causing her hand to finally stop its penmanship. Blinking hard for a moment to perish the memory, Itsuki feels her eyes unfocus from her notebook, causing it to blur in her vision, even with her glasses on, but her tired mind doesn't think to correct them to refocus on her studies as the nebulous thoughts she's been keeping suppressed in the back corners of her brain slowly begin to surface.
Ever since that Saturday morning, when her sisters convinced her to pose as Miku and go wake their tutor up, Itsuki has been feeling a little...touchy at any mention of him. It's nothing drastic; it's not like Uesugi-kun's name is now all of a sudden some kind of jump scare that makes her turn around thinking the boy in question is standing right behind her - though she supposes that given his other profession, perhaps that is more likely than she thinks. Wait, is she confusing a mage for a ninja? If mages exist, do ninjas exist too? Is there even a difference, for someone like her who knows no better? Better yet, does any of this even matter?
In any case, she hasn't let this recent sentiment show itself to her sisters, so to the rest of the Nakanos, the extent of her run-in with Uesugi-kun while posing as Miku only goes as far as what they've intended it to be: a playful little joke at Itsuki's expense and nothing more. Maybe Itsuki would've held this against her sisters and her tutor a bit more, if that's all it was to her as well.
But it's not.
Itsuki has never deeply concerned herself with social matters like some of her other sisters do. Hanging out with friends, gossiping about cute boys and dating, subjects of that nature - while she understands that such is the nature of many girls her age or in her approximate age group, especially when they live in a modern metropolis like this, she herself has largely quietly shunned them in favor of things that she felt mattered more, like studying and getting good grades. It's not because she's a nerd, either, who focuses everything on studying because that's all they know - how can she be a nerd with her grades being what they are, too.
No, her studies and her propensity to study stem from her own little desire to become her siblings' surrogate mother after their actual mother died six years ago. Back when their mother was still alive, Itsuki, looking back, knew that she and her sisters, for the most part, took their mother's care for them for granted, and it was only after she passed and while Itsuki was growing up without her that she developed her renewed admiration and respect for her. If only she could show her mother how she feels about her now.
Studying came naturally to Itsuki. Even from an early age, back when the quintuplets still rolled around as a cohesive unit of identical sisters, Itsuki demonstrated her willingness to sit down for long hours to study; none of her sisters could keep up with her own mental stamina when it came to this. Itsuki is the Yotsuba of the Nakano quints when it comes to studying; she won't lose an endurance test, no pun intended, to any of her siblings if studying were a subject that could be tested.
And so studying and her expressed desire to become that new mother for her sisters went hand in hand. Itsuki would study and become successful at school, and with good grades means a good chance to enter a prestigious university, and then from there, a good job. But this was only in part because that was the only quality she had - the start of junior high at Kurobara was when Itsuki truly began to immerse herself in her studies, and of course, to do this, she gave up many other things. Clubs, sports, extracurriculars...she didn't intend to give those all up, but when it turned out that her test scores in middle school didn't exactly match the efforts that she put into studying, Itsuki reacted by studying even more, even harder, because she refused to believe that hard work wouldn't be rewarded. Bad test scores? She just needs to study harder. Go back and fix the mistakes. Plug up the holes in her studying. And once she's done that, everything will be fine. Everything will be fine...fine...fine...?
Everything was not fine.
While Itsuki floundered with her studies, she witnessed her sisters growing up alongside her and...finding their own successes in the things they pursued. Ichika went out and got herself a part-time job, and from the sounds of it, she seems to be working hard and making the most out of it, so clearly she must be finding success in it that she values deeply. Nino went out of her way to learn how to cook for the family all on her own after taking inspiration from their junior high home economics classes, and now she can cook and bake whatever she feels like and can comfortably venture out to try recipes that she's never seen before. Miku is most similar to Itsuki in that they both ended up becoming rather isolated girls with the habits of studying, but Miku never studied anywhere near as much as Itsuki did since she became an otaku of sorts, watching her animes and playing her video games, and yet, confusingly, she's consistently gotten better test scores and grades than Itsuki all throughout school, as far as Itsuki can remember, so at this rate, Miku's the one with the highest chance of graduating school altogether, let alone go to university afterwards. And Yotsuba branched out to sports and physical activity, so where her academic abilities lack, her athleticism more than compensates for; sports clubs and teams always clamored to have her as part of their rosters, and inadvertently, Yotsuba would create as big, if not bigger, social networks as the ones Ichika or Nino had simply because of how many people she'd end up meeting and acquainting herself with, though being the cute airhead that she is, she'd never be able to take advantage of it in the same ways that Ichika or Nino can.
What has Itsuki done? Study.
Has she been successful? No.
Then why did she feel so confident when she told her sisters that she would "become their new mother"? That she would care for them like their real one did, in her place?
Maybe that could just be chalked up as a sisterly instinct. She could probably try to convince herself that she only said that as a coping mechanism, to ease the pain of losing the most important person in their lives at the time. But Itsuki doesn't want to let go of those feelings like that. Just calling them a mere coping mechanism and then letting them rot into nothing more than a quaint memory for her to look back on and laugh at - she doesn't want that. She wants to set out and prove to herself that she can do it, that she's strong enough to back up her own words.
So to see that all four of her sisters have a better shot at becoming that new motherly figure that Itsuki declared that she'd be, and to know that she, alone, had no redeeming qualities like the rest of them to show for all this time that's passed since their mother's death...it hurts. And it's not exactly something she can talk about to her sisters, because then she'd come off as a complainer. She'd sound like she's jealous at her sisters' progress, that she's envious that they've all found success when she hasn't, which isn't the case at all: she's very proud of all of them for finding things that they all enjoy doing and excel at.
She just wishes she could also join them in saying she's found something like that too.
Then again, though, as long as this could be kept within the family, she could accept it. Not all of them can become successful; that's just how life is sometimes. You'll have your winners, you'll have your losers. While she doesn't want to be one such loser and works as hard as she can to not remain one, Itsuki isn't going to let her sentiments bring her against her own family just because they happened to be winners in their respective situations and she wasn't. She chose to invest her time and energy into studying because that's what she wanted to do; she has nobody else to blame but herself. Maybe her sisters understand that as well and that's why they've never once brought this up to her directly; not even Nino's ever pointed out her lack of results proportionate to all the studying that she's done in the arguments that they've had. And so long as things continue like this, Itsuki feels like she'll still be fine, that she can hang in there and maybe, just maybe, finally be able to turn her grades around for the better.
So what happens when an outsider comes into the picture and is also another depiction of what Itsuki ultimately strives to be? Let's say...a certain Uesugi Fuutarou?
The youngest quintuplet jolts a little in her library desk chair, realizing what the time is on her phone and how late it's gotten. The library closes at ten o'clock at night on weekdays, and there's usually a PA announcement by one of the library receptionists giving the occupants of the library a half-hour warning to closing time, so Itsuki must've been zoning out when that announcement was happening. That, and clearly she's mentally exhausted to have let her thoughts wander about to this extent, so she stops her studying to pack up her belongings and put whatever books she's borrowed back in their respective shelves before leaving the library to head home. She contemplates calling a cab to take her back, as the library is a good distance from the Pentagon, but tonight, Itsuki decides, in the spirit of changing things up, to walk her way back home instead. This way, she can also delve a bit deeper into those thoughts she had while she was in the library still. So she sets off towards home, with naught but her own thoughts to keep her company on the walk back.
Itsuki actually would have willingly joined Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba in Uesugi-kun's study group much, much earlier; the only reason why she didn't at first during their first week together was because she felt incredibly miffed at the little prank that he played on her at the school cafeteria the day they first met, pretending not to know her when he turned out to be that very same tutor that she told him about. And not just that, he was even waiting for her and her sisters in their own home, which was nothing short of creepy. But she could forgive those shortcomings; she could move past those for the sake of working towards better grades, and if a tutor would help her do it, even if that tutor were one of her own classmates, so be it.
Uesugi-kun's sudden appearance at the warehouse and his subsequent rescue of her and her sisters turned her whole world almost upside down. Watching him fight those bad guys, even an ordinary girl who's only been in high school for a couple of days like Itsuki could tell that Uesugi-kun was a professional at what he was doing, or at least had been doing things like this for some time. Not in terms of his fighting technique or anything combat-related, since Itsuki doesn't much care for things like that, the things she found herself fixated on about him were his steadfastness, his lack of concern for the fact that his opponents were physically bigger than himself and outnumbered him, and his confidence in his own skills; she was captivated more by the psychology he displayed at the time and less by his physical finesse.
It was at that moment when she realized that this was a boy who was the same or at least similar age as her and represented what she wanted to become, what she had told her sisters she'd become. Clearly Uesugi-kun isn't the exact one-to-one model that Itsuki had in mind, but a mother cares for her children and protects them in times of danger, right? And Uesugi-kun did just that for them that night. Even if it is just mercenary work, even with Uesugi-kun being a mage-for-hire, as he described himself with his own words, Itsuki can't pry herself away from the distressing revelation that someone like him, her own classmate, the boy who was hired to be their tutor at first, was more or less what she, too, was studying to be. Just, minus the whole fighting bad guys part.
Whatever feelings of inadequacy she had kept suppressed for months, even years up until that point exploded beyond her control. It certainly didn't help that one of those gangsters punched her in the face, so she was already crying from that. That's why for the rest of the night, she kept quiet, even as Uesugi-kun was cleaning her up back at home and tended to her bloody nose that she ended up with. If that were one of her sisters, she could accept it, because she's her sister and they've grown up together and all; at the very least, she can take comfort in the fact that one of them can carry on the words that she gave to her sisters about becoming the one who'd provide for them all. But that wasn't one of her sisters; that was someone else entirely, someone they'd only known for a week at the time. And it had to be Uesugi-kun, of all people.
Maybe she really was an idiot. Talking about how she would be their new "mother" to her siblings...even if she said that when she was younger and didn't know any better, now, Itsuki can't help but feel like a giant idiot whose stupidity is accurately measured by the size of her ahoge. Maybe she really can't do anything on her own. Never mind her own clear inability to study properly to save her test scores, maybe Itsuki simply has nothing she can be proud of. She can't cook, she can't do sports, she can't make friends or network with people, and worst of all, she can't study...not well, anyway. Hell, it took the boy who was supposed to be her tutor for the past month and a half to suggest that they all go study at the library for one Saturday afternoon and actually studying there to show her that studying at the library is something she ought to do more often. All she's good at is eating a whole lot, being stubborn as heck, and being prone to crying whenever she gets teased a bit too much. And the last time she checked, none of her school exams test her on either of those.
An idiot and a crybaby. Truly a far cry from what she'd envisioned herself being as a kid.
Itsuki hears herself sigh heavily in the brisk night air. She'd already been by that place last week, but maybe...just to find some motivation for herself again, maybe she ought to go back.
She would love to have her thoughts end there, but they don't. Even when she's done everything she could to purge the concept of him from her mind, Uesugi-kun always comes back with a vengeance, and at the risk of sounding like some kind of weird secret admirer, Itsuki can't stop herself from bringing him back into her mind. No, more accurately, it's the other way around: Uesugi-kun always finds a way to worm himself back into her thoughts. In the aftermath of the warehouse incident, Itsuki remained separate from the usual study group of Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba because of the sentimental complications that arose; they were so bad in fact that she even went so far as to refuse to acknowledge his existence at times unless she just physically couldn't, like running into him in the hallway at school or something of the sort. But as time went on and those turbulent emotions she had netted from that fateful weekend finally began to subside, she began to see the amount of work that he was putting in as her sisters' tutor, that despite revealing his "secret identity" as a mage to them, he was still committed to working as their tutor.
What got her to finally change her mind and prepare herself to accept him as her own tutor was their Golden Week vacation to Honolulu. With Raiha along for the ride, the quintuplets naturally spent a lot of time with her, and Itsuki, having met her before once and gotten along surprisingly well with her, was one of the ones who socialized with her the most. Some of their conversations naturally drifted towards Raiha's brother, and through these such conversations Itsuki learned a bit more about her tutor, the parts of him she as a classmate and student of his wouldn't normally come to know. Things like how Uesugi-kun always works long hours at night, to the point where sometimes he wouldn't even bother coming back home, how Uesugi-kun might seem like a standoffish kind of person whose main concern in life is money and how to use that money to pay off his family's debts but in reality is a much kinder person than that, etc. Of course, Raiha didn't seem to know exactly what her brother was up to, but comparing her stories with what Uesugi-kun's told her in their own conversations throughout the weeks, Itsuki can't find any reason to doubt any of the things that Uesugi-kun's told her, just in case he's been deliberately feeding her lies anywhere along the way.
And then there was his whole run-in with their own father. That was just about the last thing Itsuki expected him to do, yet, just like at the warehouse, Uesugi-kun confronted Dr. Nakano with the same courage and confidence, and Itsuki was quick to notice it; perhaps in hindsight, that was a very Uesugi-kun thing to do. She could never even begin to imagine herself standing up to her own father like that to tell him of the grievances she and her sisters have with him and his almost comically packed work schedules, and certainly none of her sisters could either, and yet someone who isn't even part of their family has the guts to go up to their father and tell him what the quintuplets have always wanted to tell him. Yes, normally she wouldn't appreciate the fact that an outsider like Uesugi-kun is butting into their family business, but not only was he able to deliver a message that she and her sisters couldn't bring themselves to say, but at that point, unlike whatever Nino usually says, Uesugi-kun was clearly no longer a mere "outsider".
So that incident, coupled with her conversations with Raiha regarding her brother, gave Itsuki the willingness she needed to move past Uesugi-kun's previous transgressions against her and talk to him privately about accepting her as a new student. Unfortunately, that didn't quite go as well as she thought it would, as she discovered that Uesugi-kun was just as stubborn as she was, and that resulted in another troublesome stalemate that left her studying by herself again like always. But this time, while she certainly acted quite angry towards him that night, Itsuki was able to let go of that anger she had for him much more quickly. How could she stay angry like that? Sure, Uesugi-kun was being stubborn and wanted to do things his way, but what right does Itsuki have to critique him so when she's been doing the same thing for years and yet has nothing to show for it? And all she's been doing is study; who knows what Uesugi-kun has had to do all these years in comparison. And along those lines, Uesugi-kun has a lot more going on in his life and a lot more on his plate to deal with than she's ever had, so why was she demanding that he conform to her selfish reasons for accepting her as his student?
For all this talk of Itsuki's emotional side of the past month and a half, it's a bit amusing that what flipped her opinion of Uesugi-kun around yet again was the fact that she was able to see the improvement in test scores that Ichika, Miku, and Yotsuba were all making when she took a look at the mock tests that they'd been taking with Uesugi-kun in secret, so at the end of the day, it all comes down to studying anyway. Even still, even if Nino didn't drag her into studying with her and everyone else, Itsuki probably would have asked Uesugi-kun to let her study with everyone else at some point; she just didn't know how she'd do it, or if she'd be able to bring herself to do it before midterms. So Nino ended up doing her a big favor, so Itsuki needs to think of repaying her somehow...just in a way so that Nino doesn't realize that she'd ended up doing a favor for her.
And...
Your eyes are exquisite today as always too.
Frowning deeply, Itsuki briefly shakes her head, rubbing her right cheek in a fret. Why? Why is she so bothered by that? In hindsight, Uesugi-kun was clearly only saying that as a joke; with how immediately he reacted and his exaggerated acting after Itsuki blew her own cover calling him "Uesugi-kun", he probably even knew that she was Itsuki just trying to pose as Miku and was playing along just to screw with her, so everything he said to her shouldn't mean anything. But every time her mind also trolls her for shits and giggles by replaying those words in her ears, Itsuki finds herself unable to resist getting a little flustered by them.
Isn't Nino supposed to be the one who likes this kind of thing? She usually goes around talking about how she loves your typical knight-in-shining-armor kind of scenarios, and she should certainly be no stranger to talking about dating and guys with her friends at school. Itsuki should be the polar opposite, as she has very little social experience in this aspect; after all, she sacrificed friends and social reputation just to study. So why is she acting like Nino and letting herself get all embarrassed like this just because her own tutor teased her a little bit? And Itsuki's always been the one to say that a tutor or teacher and student having any kind of personal relationship isn't proper because that would jeopardize the whole studying environment that's supposed to be between tutor and student. Why is she the one who's going against her own words? Perhaps it's just fate, that the one quintuplet among them who can't live up to her own words in terms of achievements would also fail to do the same for her own self-dictated social constraints.
To think that her heart even skipped a beat when she heard Uesugi-kun say that kind of thing to her...as soon as Itsuki gets home, she just wants to go straight to her bed, crawl underneath the covers, and curl up into a ball with her face in her hands over how embarrassing this all feels to her.
So preoccupied is Itsuki with her thoughts now, however, that she fails to register the rather loud blows of steel on steel ahead of her on the street; it takes a flying car launched in her direction to drag her back into reality, and when the car does land on the street next to her and tumbles shockingly loudly away, Itsuki jumps out of pure fright and can't stop herself from letting out an uncontrolled shriek of surprise, tripping over her right foot and falling on the ground, staring wide-eyed at the car that's just screeched down the street for some bizarre reason that she certainly can't explain.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Itsuki looks up with her wide blue eyes that are beginning to tear up to see Uesugi Fuutarou, her classmate and tutor, glaring down at her for just a split second before turning around faster than she's ever seen anyone turn around - just in time to also see a handful of large drops of blood fly at her face, followed immediately by a hair-raising tearing of skin, and a distinct -
PING!
Forced to shut her eyes because of her body's instinctual reflexes at Uesugi's blood that's lightly splattered her face, Itsuki, realizing that this is another dangerous situation that she's stumbled into, cries out first before raising her sleeved arm to wipe the blood off her eyelids,
"UESUGI-KUN!"
With teeth clenched and strength immediately leaving his right leg, only to be replaced by pain, Fuutarou resists the urge to reach down to cover his fresh stab wound over his right side in order to properly assume a defensive stance against the inevitably attacking Shirazumi Rio, and as such he doesn't have the time to inspect it to know exactly what's been hit.
Sure enough, Rio, seeing that one of his remote knife strikes has finally landed thanks to the girl who's unintentionally provided a decent enough diversion, redoubles his efforts and throws more such remote knife attacks in Fuutarou's direction, once more peppering his general area with more invisible runes from his parent red one that he controls.
Fuutarou can't possibly Parry them all, especially not when he's got a hole in his body somewhere on his right side and the pain messing with his concentration like such, so he uses the brief window of time that the remote knife runes need to wind up on him to turn around again and stoop down, yanking Itsuki up to pull her with him, away from the lethal runes that stab viciously into thin air behind him. After setting Itsuki standing next to the door of a nearby consulting office a few meters away, separated from her school bag, Fuutarou, who doesn't have the time or the energy to tell Itsuki what's going on, needs to trust that she can deduce what's going on on her own as he turns and bolts for the middle of the street, out in the open, to draw Rio's attention away from Itsuki, and thankfully with two-thirds of his current playing card deck still remaining in his storage rune, the injured mage can still draw aggression from the rival mage with them.
Constantly emitting crazed little shrieks and brief screams of sadistic enjoyment, Rio evades the several thrown cards hurled his way again and jumps onto another car in front of him to use that as a springboard, leaping up high into the air to attack Fuutarou from above. Uesugi takes advantage of Rio's inability to divert his trajectory midair and throws a pair of well-aimed cards through his pulsing pain up at his enemy, and both of them lodge themselves deep into the top of Rio's right thigh and center mass, square in between the base of his ribs. Even with these well-placed cards, Rio doesn't seem fazed at all and comes down on Fuutarou hard, slamming his feet and knife into the asphalt, which Fuutarou barely avoids himself with a pained backdash.
Rio is fully aware of the fact that Fuutarou's movement is heavily impeded thanks to the wound he's caused for him and dashes after him, closing the distance between them in one stride with his knife swinging upwards at him in an uppercut motion, threatening to split Uesugi's chin and bottom of his skull in half. Fuutarou tilts his head to the left, causing Rio's seven-inch blade to just barely miss his ear and shoulder, and Rio's overextension leaves him wide open for one of Fuutarou's own attacks, which he gladly exploits by once again plunging his own backhanded knife square into Rio's back. This time, he even aims for Rio's spine to rob him of any ability to walk, but in his own pain, Fuutarou barely misses the critical strike and pulls out his knife so that Rio doesn't counter-counterattack him.
Roaring with redoubled pain of his own, the red jacket-wearing mage pushes himself off the ground as more of his own blood drips onto the asphalt where he stands and pivots to savagely attack the high school mage yet again. The wounds that Fuutarou is slowly racking up on him are now finally beginning to show their effects as Rio himself, with this new deep wound in his back, is showing clear signs of exhaustion and pain, thus rendering his usually brutal and powerful swings to become slower and slower each time he uses them.
Even still, through their respective injuries, the two men exchange knife swings with dangerous intent and precision, filling the air of the otherwise empty street with dull clashes of stainless steel blades. However, both of them now focus much more on evasive maneuvers and feinting to conserve their now severely limited energies; oftentimes there are brief periods of time that both mages spend doing nothing but circling around each other, keenly watching each other's moves, and only committing to a swing or thrust if they feel that they can land a successful hit with it.
The only visible bystander in the area, Itsuki at first looks around to see if there's anyone else around who can help, but mysteriously, there seems to be no one in sight; not even the adjacent buildings appear to have any occupants inside for whatever reason. The gnarly impacts of steel blades eventually captures her attention though, and the moment she bears witness to the knife duel between the two mages, Itsuki can't get herself to tear her eyes off them. The sight of her tutor, wearing that strange black outfit that doesn't suit him at all, bleeding and sweating profusely, squaring off against a man clearly taller than him with a dulled but still very much so psychotic look on his face, both armed with dangerous-looking knives - Itsuki has never liked watching action movies and dislikes violence in general because it makes her uncomfortable, so why is it that she can't stop watching these two duke it out?
Thankfully she comes to her senses quickly, only having watched the two mages duel for about a minute, and Itsuki, biting her lower lip, quickly considers whatever options that she has as a spectator to help Uesugi-kun. What about the police? Would calling the police help? Given his identity as a mage, Itsuki can't imagine how on earth her tutor would be okay with her calling the police on them, but what else can she do other than stand around being useless, or even worse, a possible hostage for that evil-looking man in the weird red leather jacket? Not to mention Uesugi-kun himself is injured and bleeding.
Steeling her resolve, with the adrenaline that's now pumping through her own veins easing her decision-making, the youngest quintuplet carefully but quickly doubles back to her own school bag, making sure to keep her eyes on the two boys on the street so that the bad guy whom her tutor is fighting doesn't start going after her instead when she isn't looking. Reaching her bag, she finds her phone and, for the first time, presses the emergency dial button on the corner of her screen to connect her to the police.
As Itsuki keeps an eye on the knife scuffle while talking to the operator, Fuutarou reads an obvious thrust from Rio and, instead of dodging it as he has for the past minute or two, reaches out his left hand and times his Parry perfectly to safely negate the attack and steps forward to stab Rio in the chest again. But Rio also reads this riposte and swings his left hand outwards wildly to knock Fuutarou's arm away, and the lashing works out in Rio's favor, as Uesugi doesn't expect Rio to defend himself like this. Rio's burly arm slams into Fuutarou's arm, just below the wrist, and at the same time, Rio pulls his Parried knife downwards to slash as quickly as he can, catching Fuutarou by his own chest - and slicing his old cut back open.
The renewed pain shocks the young mage into letting go of his knife, effectively disarming him, but it also jolts him back awake since the exhaustion of combat has been seeping into him. Reacting as fast as he can to get his opponent away from him, Fuutarou pumps as much mana as he can into his left fist and pops Rio in the face. Such a mana-driven hook repels Rio, and as he takes a step back in a slight stumble, Uesugi refocuses mana into his right leg and kicks his adversary in the left side, away from the side of the street that Itsuki's on to keep Rio as far away from her as possible.
Not expecting Fuutarou to be able to perform such a strong kick, Rio can't hold his ground and ends up flying across the street, smashing into the solid brick divider between buildings and collapsing in a heap on the ground. The knife he's dropped clatters onto the asphalt, also tumbling to a stop near the paint. But he doesn't stay down for long at all, and while Fuutarou glances down quickly to check the severity of the cut over his chest, Rio himself gets back up, heaving and wheezing briefly, as he reaches for a nearby crosswalk sign, grabs it with both hands, and with a massive grunt, rips it straight out of the ground.
Fuutarou narrows his eyes, still with his clenched teeth. Even if he were to go back for his knife, it wouldn't service him adequately in a situation where his enemy has such a huge range and reach advantage over him. He needs to fight fire with fire.
As Rio lets out another bloodcurdling roar and charges straight for Fuutarou to bash his head in with his crosswalk sign, the young mage parts his feet and chants:
"Twofold Blossom, activate!"
Itsuki watches breathlessly as she sees a spear or some kind of long polearm warp into view right into her tutor's grasps, just in time to match the firepower of Shirazumi Rio, who swings his newly acquired means of scrappy violence down onto the high schooler. Now similarly armed, however, Fuutarou leaps backwards as Rio ends up smashing the crosswalk sign's head into the street, denting it so badly that there's only half a sign left. With slightly bloody hands, Uesugi tightens his grip on his naginata, with its perforated red grip and sinister-looking black blade that's longer than both of the men's knives combined and then some. But he's in no condition to be handling a weapon of this size; exhaustion is one thing, but pain from an injury, especially a deep one like the one he got earlier in blocking it from reaching Itsuki, is another matter entirely. He needs to end this fight quickly.
Not caring for the fact that Fuutarou has armed himself appropriately in response to his makeshift weapon, Rio, thoroughly sapped of strength himself, stomps menacingly towards his enemy instead, brandishing his crosswalk pole at him. But as Fuutarou finds out swiftly when Rio enters his range and darts forward with a quick jab to test his skills with a polearm-like weapon, the mage with the red jacket is nowhere near as skilled with something like a sign as he is with his knife; Rio can block Fuutarou's first jab easily enough, but he doesn't expect a second jab to follow so fast and fails to react swiftly enough to it, and Fuutarou feels the first couple of inches of his naginata's blade make contact with flesh and sink into Rio's chest again, this time into his right ribs; in fact, the spear point is stopped from entering further by one of Rio's ribs.
Yanking his weapon out before Rio can seize hold of it, now armed with the knowledge that Rio is at a heavy disadvantage when it comes to polearms, Fuutarou seizes the offensive, making efficient use of what little energy he's got left in his tank by constantly employing quick jabs that put Rio on the back foot; he needs to reserve the heavy swings for an attack that he knows for sure will land and, better yet, will kill. Fuutarou's skill with the naginata and the distinct reach advantage it gives him is made terribly clear as now, Rio cannot even attempt to draw close to his enemy because the latter will simply zone him out with more quick jabs, and whenever he tries to swing his crosswalk sign at Fuutarou, the latter merely dodges the blows easily and continues applying pressure as though Rio hadn't even attacked.
"F-Fucking - annoying little - shit - ! Agh - "
As Rio is trying to curse at the younger mage, Uesugi capitalizes on an opening that Rio gives him when he tries to bat Fuutarou's naginata out of the way and raises his naginata, flips his grips on the shaft, and performs an overhead thrust that causes the spearhead to tear through Rio's right shoulder, though the combination of Fuutarou's relative lack of strength in his thrust and Rio's stoutly muscular build prevents the naginata from piercing all the way through. Still, Fuutarou quickly changes his spear grips again so that he can rip the weapon back out. In the same fluid motion, Fuutarou reaches up, pulls the naginata back down from the air so that he can get a secure grip right up next to the base of the blade, and lunges forward to swipe the naginata with a backhand motion, aiming directly for Rio's neck.
The mage in the red jacket throws the weight of his body backwards to avoid the fatal strike but must take the hit on his chest again, as the polearm's blade length is too long for him to dodge unscathed. With the abandoned crosswalk sign rattling onto the street at his feet, Fuutarou regains his posture and corrects his naginata grip, watching Rio perform a few acrobatic backflips away from him, well out of the reach of his weapon, before stopping in place and glaring back at him with a twisted but thoroughly entertained grin on his face.
"Interesting. Interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting!" he shrilly laughs, licking the blood that's happened to splatter on his face around his mouth as though he's looking at a scrumptious dinner. "So the mage in this city knows how to fight. Good, that's good, that's very good. It'd be boring otherwise...it's no fun eating someone who can't even defend themselves...and they sure as hell aren't gonna tenderize themselves if that's the case, hahahahahahaha!"
As Rio is laughing like a maniac he is, police sirens now can be heard blaring in the distance, and all three people on the scene glance in the direction of the sirens.
"Ah crap, and of course the fuckin' police just has to come along right as things're gettin' good," Rio clicks his tongue irritably. "Consider yourself lucky, kid. Next time, you ain't leavin' again without havin' one 'a your hands missin' at least."
He also throws another dirty glance over at Itsuki, who feels like she's just been dunked into a tank of ice-cold water the moment her blue eyes lock with his crazed orange ones.
"And bring that girl along with ya again. Nino? Is that one Nino? Can't really tell right now... but she lookin' like a fuckin' snack, and I could use a good one these days. It's either that, or I can start huntin' 'em down on my own from now on, ahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! ! ! ! !"
Shrieking with maddening laughter even as he retreats, Shirazumi Rio bounds away from the scene, climbing up a nearby building by grabbing hold of the windows and ledges like he's straight out of an Assassin's Creed game before slipping out of sight. Once Fuutarou confirms that he's leaving the area for good, tracking his magical signature manually until he's out of range, Fuutarou releases his naginata, which dissipates into bright blue orbs of light that also evaporate out of view, and he does the same for the knife that he collects.
"Itsuki, get over here, we're gettin' outta here right now!" he barks at the quintuplet, who doesn't say a word and swiftly picks up her school bag to race over to him - at least, not until she reaches him.
"W-What about the police? Shouldn't you tell them what happened here, at least?" she asks him urgently, but she immediately silences herself when she takes one look at his silently furious face.
"Did you call them?" he demands quietly, and he closes his eyes briefly in acute frustration when his student nods and sighs exasperatedly. "God-fucking-damn it, Itsuki!"
"I-I'm sorry! I thought - I thought I would - "
Neither being in the mood to listen to her excuses, nor does he have the energy to spare to deal with her, Fuutarou puts his hands on Nakano Itsuki and swiftly sweeps her off her feet to put her in the princess-carrying posture. It's not an ideal carrying method when he's got a hole stabbed in him somewhere in his right side, but with the police about to arrive on the scene, the young mage is left with little choice. Itsuki yelps in surprise at Fuutarou's surprisingly forceful strength that one wouldn't think a rather lanky guy like Uesugi Fuutarou would be able to possess, and she yelps louder when he soars up into the sky after taking a moment to focus his mana into his feet for a boosted jump that lets him land on the rooftop of his own adjacent building.
"Hold on tight!" Fuutarou yells down at Itsuki through clenched teeth, and she complies, gripping her arms as tightly as she can around his chest just before Fuutarou, with a running start, leaps again through the night air to traverse across the rooftops of the city's downtown.
For a few moments, the quintuplet in her tutor's arms quietly feels the somewhat chilly night breeze blow against her as she and Fuutarou hurtle through the air from rooftop to rooftop to escape the scene unnoticed. But louder than the winds that buffet them are her tutor's terribly labored, gasping breathing - and with her head tucked in against his chest, Itsuki is forced to listen to it the entire time as her shoulder begins to ache with how tightly he's clutching her.
"Uesugi-kun, w-where - where are we going right now?" she finally calls out, unable to bear the silence between them any longer, but she cowers again and averts her eyes when Fuutarou once more glares down at her with pain-driven frustration.
"The hospital."