Five Equal Angels

by Hieda no Akyuu

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

45. Fault

The shifting of pages and the jotting of a pen quietly dribble across the room of the second quintuplet in the Nakano penthouse. Nino is studying on her own in her bedroom, hunched slightly over her open mathematics textbook and her notebook on which she is working out practice problems that her tutor has assigned her and her sisters to do as review after their lesson today. Speaking of their lesson, it was on the shorter side of things for today, only about two hours when their lessons could easily stretch for four or five; it has become quite commonplace these days for Fuutarou to stay and eat dinner with the quintuplets, so often has he stayed long hours to teach the girls in order to ensure that they have understood the material he's taught them for the day. It's gotten to the point where the girls don't even need to ask him anymore, and Fuutarou will join them for dinner, and in the event that the girls haven't already ordered delivery, he now actively helps Nino cook in the kitchen, and frequently with Miku too.

Today, however, Fuutarou said that he was on some urgent business and so needed to keep their lesson relatively short, hence the two-hour tutoring session for today. While unusual, the quintuplets have figured that it is some more magework-related business and have let Fuutarou do as he must, and with the free time on their hands, Nino has made an early dinner for everyone for the expressed purpose of hanging out with her friends in an online video call.

That was a lie, of course. Why on Earth would someone like Nino want to hang out in a video call with her friends when they could easily just hang out in person in the city? No, that was just a cover-up: the real reason was so that she can do what she is doing now: study.

Even Nino is shocked at herself as she turns the page in her textbook to move on to the next practice problem. In just a little over two months, Nino went from a snarky schoolgirl socialite who didn't give a damn about studying for anything to a...still snarky schoolgirl socialite who now actually cares about studying, at least enough to go do it on her own. Hell, the only thing that she used to bother studying for was English, as she found it the easiest to study for, naturally, English being her best subject and all. But now she's taking the time to study all of her other subjects - she's even studying math on her own, which has traditionally been one of her worst subjects because she absolutely hates math and finds it too complicated with all its annoying formulas and the exacting, rigid nature of its questions - and never mind that she's studying on a Friday night, when she ought to be living her schoolgirl life out to the fullest by going to karaoke with friends or something!

It's funny, because Nino still finds math to be as annoying as ever. Even if she's become more willing to study, her willingness alone can't alleviate her annoyance with math as a subject of study. While the questions and material themselves may have changed over the years, Nino's sentiments towards math as a subject have not changed one bit, and she still finds herself overcome with dreariness and irritation every time she sets her eyes upon a new math problem. No matter how much she's changed in these last two months, that alone can't adequately explain why, despite her annoyance with studying math or any of the other subjects she hates (which is everything except English), she still wills herself to trudge through her responsibility as a student to study.

Nino watches with her calm blue eyes her right hand etch numbers onto her notebook. By this point, the fierce resistance that she had once put up against Uesugi Fuutarou in his responsibility to tutor the Nakano quintuplets has all but sputtered out. For all the bravado that she mustered against Fuutarou, claiming that she had only joined everyone for studying with him for the sake of their midterms and things would go back to the way they were, Nino finds herself attending Fuutarou's lessons anyway - even studying with him when sometimes the others like Ichika or Yotsuba, the ones who traditionally studied with him, may be absent, all because of the fact that she's the sole reason why Fuutarou has even managed to keep his job as their tutor in the first place. And she'd feel bad if she said all those things and gone to such an extent to help him keep his job and didn't end up going to his lessons afterwards.

But of course things aren't that simple; while she no longer publicly opposes Fuutarou's work as their tutor, Nino still harbors the embers of her original feelings of resentment against him. After all, even if he's become a daily fixture of their lives, in Nino's mind, Fuutarou is still most definitely an outsider, an outsider whose only reason to be so involved with her and her family is because their father hired him to do so. By now, Nino has come to accept that these lingering feelings of resentment are irrational if directed at Fuutarou himself; if there's anyone she ought to vent these feelings at, it would have to be her father. But the fact of the matter is that she sees Fuutarou every day, not her father, so it is exceedingly easy to place her resentment on Fuutarou rather than her father.

She's still got a promise to uphold, after all.

And yet, for all the so-called resentment that she still harbors towards him, for however much she's known for being a hothead and speaking whatever's on her mind without a care for what others perceive of her, she has successfully kept it bottled up inside. Nino, the same girl who has just about as much patience as a hungry Itsuki at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, is refraining from doing the one thing she does best.

Nino is changing, and she knows it. But this isn't how she wanted it to happen...it feels humiliating, changing like this. Letting an outsider become part of their daily lives like this, studying subjects she normally never bothers studying for...she's not even trying to stop her sisters from interacting with their tutor anymore like she used to. Is she growing complacent? But then again, was she ever in a position to choose? Maybe it needed to happen this way...how else is a girl who's fixated on keeping her family as rooted in their past as possible going to force herself to change?

Change is scary, that's all Nino knows. Right now, just like how she's drifting through her math problems, the second quintuplet finds herself drifting through the days, going through the usual motions and routine of school, friends, tutoring, and studying. Maybe it's just cathartic; Nino has oftentimes reacted to things she doesn't like by plunging headfirst into them to do them out of spite, which was one of the only ways to get her to study when she was younger.

That's right; that's where her resentment lies. Perhaps she doesn't hate Fuutarou anymore for butting into her family like he has. But what she does fault him for is instigating change in her that she did not want, at least not so soon. She wanted grow up her way, not his.

But again, does she have any right to choose?

Having done a section of math problems, Nino flips the textbook to the rear pages where the answer key lies, grading her own work and grimacing at the number of questions she's gotten wrong as she marks them with red pen. It certainly doesn't help that she's still absolutely trash at this subject...though, she is much better off than how she was at it two months ago.

Closing her textbook and making a mental note to herself to ask Fuutarou to help her with these questions either tomorrow at school during lunch or as part of tomorrow's tutoring session, Nino stretches out her arms and decides to take a break from studying, setting down her pen and getting up from her seat to head downstairs for a snack. Because Nino is now consistently studying with the rest of the quintuplets and their tutor but is not as used to studying for long stretches of time like perhaps the rest of her sisters are, Itsuki recently taught her that having a snack would help her brain better handle these long studying periods because of the sugar that snacks would provide. While Nino's first impression of this advice was one of incredulity, seeing that it's Itsuki saying this, the second quintuplet decides to make use of this advice for once and reaches the living room to gain access to the kitchen and its snack cupboards.

"Heya. Coming down for a snack or something?" Ichika, studying on her own at the dinner table downstairs, asks her younger sister as Nino passes her.

"Yeah. Do you want anything?"

"Hmm...see if there's any of those cola gummies left. The Haribo ones."

Opening the cupboards, Nino frowns at what she sees, which is nothing.

"...we don't have any more snacks left? What the hell happened to all them?" Nino wonders aloud, closing the cupboard doors and turning to Ichika behind her. "Didn't we have snacks just a few days ago?"

"Well, you do realize that we've been going through them pretty regularly this whole week whenever Fuutarou-kun was over to tutor us," Ichika shrugs. "And no, before you say it, it wasn't Itsuki's fault this time. Though she did eat quite a bit of them while we were getting tutored."

Rolling her eyes a little bit, Nino sighs lightly and considers her next course of action.

"Think I might head down to the Family Mart to pick up some snacks then. Is there anything else you want besides those Haribo gummies?"

"Uhh...well, a frappuccino sounds real nice right about now, but the nearest Starbucks is pretty far away..."

"Yeah, I'm not going there this late at night. Don't they deliver nowadays or something?"

"Oh yeah, that's right, they do! Thanks for reminding me ~ "

"Just don't stay up all night because of the caffeine and then crash so hard we can't wake you up in time for school tomorrow."

"Ahaha, don't worry, don't worry ~ "

"That just makes me even more worried."

Leaving her older sister to order a frappuccino via a food delivery app, Nino heads back upstairs to change her clothes and returns to the first floor, ready to leave.

"You didn't have your part-time to go to today?" Nino asks, checking her light layer of makeup in her phone screen that uses its front camera to capture her face in real time like a mirror.

"No, not today. I'll be going tomorrow, though."

"Hm. I don't think you've ever told us about what your part-time was, have you?"

Ichika smiles bashfully. "No, you're right, I haven't. It's nothing big, though, so there's nothing to worry about it."

"Guess not. Not even Uesugi-kun's worried about it too much these days either."

"Yeah, that too."

"Where's Yotsuba, by the way? I know Miku and Itsuki are studying in their rooms right now."

"Oh, she had to go help the sewing club with something; she said she'd be coming back late at night, like at around eleven or so."

"That late? Geez, that girl, she's not even worried about city curfew for minors?"

"Well, she runs super fast, so it's not like she'll be causing trouble for anyone, right?"

"That's a dangerous way of thinking, isn't it..." Nino passes the couch to head to the front door, but just before she rounds the corner into the short lobby hallway, Nino stops and turns to face Ichika again. "By the way, I've been meaning to ask, but...didn't you tell us that you had some kind of...'secret plan' that you told us about after we took our midterms to get Uesugi-kun to stay as our tutor? What was that all about?"

Ichika looks up in surprise. "Huh? W-What's with that, all of a sudden?"

"I don't know, it just...I just remembered it suddenly after talking with you. It's been two weeks since then, so...I'm just wondering if anyone became of that, you know?"

Smiling a little, Ichika sets down her own pen. "It wasn't anything big, and besides, as you can already tell by now, I don't need to use it anymore."

"Well, yeah, I guess not, but...I'm still a bit curious about it, you know? Since you sounded so serious back then."

"Hm, I suppose I can tell you now, now that I don't need to do it. Basically, I've been working at my part-time for long enough now that I've got a bit of money saved up. My plan was to hire him myself if Dad really did end up firing him for us failing our midterms, or most of them, anyway. But since you were able to give Dad the slip, I ended up not having to execute Order 55."

"What the hell is Order 55...? But anyways, that was your plan? I don't know how much you've saved up, but are you sure Uesugi-kun would be happy with what you're offering? And besides, despite being a broke-ass motherfucker, he's still a goody-two-shoes at heart, so is he even going to let you do that?"

"Well, I was prepared to use some of my Big Sister charm on him if need be ~ " Ichika giggles a little.

"...that sounds shady. I thought I was supposed to be the drug user of the family."

Ichika's giggle escalates sharply to a burst of laughter, which causes Nino to frown deeply over at her older sister.

"I mean, you're not wrong. Though I guess that doesn't really count anymore, now that Fuutarou-kun's confiscated the rest of your drugs from you, right?"

"Yeah, I don't have any of it anymore." Nino shrugs widely. "I've learned my lesson, I'm not going back to any of those shady-ass drug dealers anymore."

"You certainly don't need to, yeah, not when we've got Fuutarou-kun around now."

Nino folds her arms at Ichika as the former leans against the corner of the room. "Don't act as if we can rely on him all the time. Just because he's bailed us out here and there doesn't mean he'll always be able to do that."

Ichika's smile fades a little. "You're not just saying that because you still have something against him, now, are you?" she asks.

"I do, but that's besides the point. You've seen how busted up he gets sometimes; there might even come a day when something happens to him, and...he dies or gets so badly injured he can't teach us or protect us anymore."

"Yikes, that's a bit...extreme, don't you think? I know you don't like him a lot, but still..."

"I'm just being real here, Ichika."

"And I get that, but, like...what's the point of that, exactly?"

"...what do you mean?"

"Like, as in..." Ichika takes a deep breath to collect her thoughts. "...what's the point of being real about something like that when there's nothing we can do about it? We can't fight, we don't know magecraft; all we are are a bunch of high school girls just trying to live our lives. Let Fuutarou-kun worry about what happens to him; I'm sure he wouldn't want us worrying about him either, and I'll bet you my next paycheck that he'd get pissed at us for wasting our time doing that when he wants us to be using that time to study some more instead."

"So what if something does happen to Uesugi-kun, huh? What if he has to stop being our tutor because he's gotten too hurt or, worse, he gets killed out there? Then what?"

"Then Dad will just hire someone else, I guess." Ichika's smile is long gone by now as her icy blue eyes reach out to Nino's across the living room. "That's what you want, isn't it? Someone other than Fuutarou-kun who doesn't do his job as well so that you can sit pretty here in this house knowing that our little family's gonna stay the same as it has been? Don't you think I've forgotten about that promise you made to us when we were kids, after Mom died, Nino."

Starting to clench her teeth together, Nino pushes off the corner of the room to stand properly on her own two feet.

"That's not what I'm saying, I never said I wanted Uesugi-kun to die or have something happen to him. What I said was, is it really wise for us to rely on someone like him when realistically, we should be looking after ourselves?"

"The thing is, we already were, Nino. You don't see that? We already were taking care of ourselves."

"Then why can't you answer my question of what we're going to do if Uesugi-kun's gone?"

"Because that's something I can't answer, and I bet you can't answer that, either!" Ichika's voice starts to rise. "Don't you see? This whole magecraft stuff is all crap we don't have any idea about! You say that we should be able to look after ourselves, and ideally, yes, I agree! But if another incident like what happened at that warehouse happens, are we going to be the ones who fight off bad guys and protect ourselves? Obviously not, not when Dad already hired someone like Fuutarou-kun to handle that responsibility for us! What, were you planning on becoming a mage too, Nino? Is that why you don't like him, because he won't teach you that?"

"W-Wha - No! That's - that's bullshit, I don't even wanna know more about that magecraft nonsense!" Nino blurts out with a kneejerk reaction. When was the last time that she and Ichika got into an argument like this?

"Then there's even less merit behind all this stuff you're telling me right now! What was the point of telling me that useless crap? Just to be a Debbie Downer? Moreover, why do you have such little faith in him, Nino? Is he not doing his job properly or something? You get into an argument with him at some point lately? I get that you don't like him and you never have, but lately you've been cooperating with him, studying with us and all that jazz, right? And now you're talking about what's going to happen if he dies or something? Talk about a mood whiplash much! If that's the kind of thing you think about when it comes to Fuutarou-kun, I think I much prefer how you were before you started studying with us, because at least then you were genuine to yourself!"

Nino doesn't even last until the end of Ichika's miniature tirade. Turning heel swiftly, the second quintuplet stomps away to the shoe lobby, pulls on her plain sneakers that she wears for short trips, and slams the front door behind her as she escapes to the elevator lobby.

Listening to the front door slam shut, Ichika slowly drops her gaze back down to her own textbooks and notebooks that she's been using to study. At first, she reaches for her own pen, but her hand freezes, then turns and raises up to her face so that Ichika can bury her face into her hands.

She didn't mean to yell at Nino. There was no reason for her to. Even if Nino had some questionable thoughts regarding their tutor, there was no reason for her to antagonize Nino like this. So why did she react like that? That's not like her. The Ichika her sisters know and love is a gentle, neutral big sister whose word holds logic and reasoning as its high regards - it's no wonder mathematics is her best subject. But that was not that. That wasn't the Ichika her sisters know - that wasn't the Ichika she herself knows. But how exactly is she going to explain that to Nino when she comes back?

Hearing one of the doors upstairs open slowly, Ichika pulls her hands down from her face as Itsuki peers over the second floor railing.

"...Ichika? Is everything alright...?" the youngest quintuplet asks cautiously, eyeing the first floor warily in case there have been things thrown or spilled. "It sounded like you and Nino were having an argument, which is, um...a bit rare...?"

"Yeah, we were, sorry about that. We must've disturbed your studying, huh?" Ichika apologizes, looking up at her youngest sister above her as Miku also joins them, wondering what the commotion just now was all about.

"When's the last time the two of you yelled at each other like that? Usually the two of us're the ones who grind gears with Nino..." Miku notes, her Audio-Technicas hanging around her neck like usual.

"I don't even remember myself, frankly. Sheesh, it must've been years..." Ichika clears her throat quickly. "Anyways, again, sorry for bothering you two, I'll make sure to apologize properly to Nino when she gets back home."

"She ran away again? That must explain the front door slamming..." Itsuki sighs. "The lack of soundproofing in this house really is biting us."

"You can borrow my headphones again if you want, Itsuki," Miku offers, but her sister shakes her head.

"It looks like I will not need it. Just text Nino to come back home on time, Ichika."

"Yeah, I will, don't worry."

Ichika listens to the pair of doors close as her two younger sisters return to their own studies in their rooms as she prepares to do the same. But now that her eyes are back on her Language Arts textbook and her right hand holding her pen is resting back on her notebook, Ichika can no longer focus on studying.

Even with most of the lights on the first floor turned on that make it as bright as day, Ichika can still spy the faint golden light reflected down on her notebook paper underneath her hand.

---

Having escaped the Pentagon high-rise, Nakano Nino looks up to find herself in front of a supermarket called Izumi. She must've walked much further than her intended destination of the Family Mart convenience store in her anger, but Nino doesn't mind. Now that she's at the supermarket, she might as well take advantage of this and head in to pick up some groceries that she was intending on grabbing at some point in the near future.

She enters the supermarket and takes a shopping cart with her to begin performing her usual rounds of the market, starting with the produce section. She's done this so many times, buying groceries for her sisters to cook dinner for them almost every day for the past three or four years ever since she became proficient at cooking, that she can practically put herself on autopilot and let her muscles do the thinking as they stock the shopping cart.

This leaves her mind with enough freedom to dwell on her argument with Ichika, as much as it goes against her better judgment to do so, but she can't help herself, with the bitterness still lingering in her chest.

Everyone's been changing, and it's not just her. All four of her sisters around her, they've been changing. Miku has been noticeably growing out of the shell that she'd built around herself since middle school; Yotsuba has gotten herself involved in sports and probably is in contact with more people than Nino herself, who's supposed to be the resident socialite of the quints; and Itsuki is not the same Itsuki that she knew six years ago, with her speaking with that polite keigo tone since who knows when and trying her best to act grown-up when she's supposed to be the crybaby of the bunch. While these changes all come at varying degrees, with some of them having occurred long ago, Nino still can't shake the sense that her family is changing, or dare she say, "growing up".

Ichika is by far the worst offender in Nino's eyes. After their mother died, Ichika was the first to cut her hair, perhaps the quintuplets' most signature physical feature, when they entered middle school, and she did so without even telling any of her siblings, which naturally came as a great shock to the rest of them. She was the one who began to drift away from the quintuplet nucleus first, making friends with their classmates at school and starting to hang out more and more with them rather than her own sisters, even before Nino started doing the same. Honestly, had it not been for Ichika drifting away from the quintuplet nucleus like this, Nino herself may have never established the popular girl archetype for herself either, but that's a story for another time.

There's also that part-time job that Ichika's been going to ever since their last year of middle school. It wasn't even until a month before they transferred to Asahiyama High that the rest of the quintuplets found out, and only because Ichika had returned home late one night, much later than she had any business doing, and she had to explain to her sisters why she was out so late. She also seems quite keen on keeping the nature of her part-time job a secret, so they have no idea what she's even working as or where she works. Does she think that just because she's the oldest quintuplet, she gets to do whatever she wants? Their father is providing for everything they could possibly want, so it's not as if money is a factor. And even if Ichika was planning on re-hiring Uesugi-kun as their tutor in the event that he did get fired by their dad, it's not as if Ichika was saving money specifically for an occasion she could have never predicted a year ahead of time.

Nino kept these sentiments she had against Ichika to herself, because at the end of the day, Ichika still prioritized her sisters over the new friends she made at school. It was bound to happen, with the five of them being split up into different homerooms when they entered middle school and all, so it wasn't realistic to hope that they would still continue being able to live like back when they were in elementary. But all she's been doing is keeping them locked away; the embers of resentment still glow, stoked by years of neglect and ready to reignite with just the right spark.

And tonight, that spark came in the form of the attitude she had when they were arguing briefly back at home, and not to mention the things she said to her. Even if Ichika didn't intentionally do this, Nino can't spit out the bad taste in her mind that Ichika was talking down to her, as though she were using her superior position as oldest quintuplet to denounce Nino. She already hates it enough whenever their dad does this; now she has to deal with Ichika acting this way too? And it doesn't help that this isn't how Ichika usually acts; yes, she's had arguments with the rest of the quintuplets before, but such fights are rare; Nino recognizes that it's perhaps due to the shock of Ichika throwing out some fighting words of her own that she's feeling especially resentful of her tonight, but that doesn't really do anything to help alleviate the resentment.

The cold air being vented down onto the refrigerated produce, however, does eventually begin to calm her heated thoughts and feelings as she continues to stock her shopping cart, and Nino slowly becomes able to think through their argument with more clarity. Through her bitter resentment, Nino recognizes that what Ichika was saying to her isn't wrong; for all the talk she gave about the quints being self-sufficient and not having to rely on him, wouldn't that imply that the girls are strong enough to handle themselves in a time like this, when she and her sisters all have magical targets on their backs? Clearly that's not the case. No, it's just Nino's own pride at fault here, the promise that she made to her sisters that she'd be the one to protect them all, to keep them all together as a family after their mother died.

Nino wants to be strong enough and competent enough to be the glue that keeps the family together. She thought that by learning how to cook and taking up the responsibilities that a mother would traditionally have in their household, she would be able to do just that. But not only does she feel like she hasn't really been able to do so, with her sisters all slowly drifting away from their little bird's nest to lead their own lives, but now, the situation has changed: no longer are her enemies just some punks at school who've bullied or harassed her sisters, and no longer does her strength as a cook remain so relevant when the kind of strength that is needed these days to protect her family is actual physical strength and combat prowess.

Could Miku be right? Back when the two of them had their latest argument after their midterms, down in the living room early in the morning after one of Miku's panic attacks? The two of them are mages, just like their tutor, and they've seen what he's able to do. Would Nino have to take that leap of faith and become a fully-fledged mage like Uesugi-kun in order to continue upholding her promise to her sisters? But that would be contradictory, because that would mean that she herself will change past the point of no return and abandon Nino's original vision of them sisters always being together. She herself isn't even interested in magecraft at all; she's perfectly happy with how her life is without it. How would the rest of her sisters, barring Miku of course, react to her and Nino possibly learning magecraft on their own?

"Don't you think I've forgotten about that promise you made to us when we were kids, after Mom died, Nino."

Ichika's words bite into her memory with impunity. If Nino does decide to learn magecraft, Ichika will most certainly call her out on this, right? Citing how Nino herself has changed enough to forsake her own promise that she made to the quintuplets when they were nine years old.

If Nino wants to keep her sisters together and safe, then she'll need to do more than just cook and go grocery shopping for them, and the natural outlet available is magecraft, which is exactly what she does not want, because it would threaten to destroy the premise of her words to her sisters six years ago. But she doesn't want to feel like she and her sisters must rely on Uesugi-kun so much either, due to the lingering resentment that she has towards him and the fact that something may happen to him during his line of work. This is a goddamn Catch-22 if Nino's ever seen one.

Tossing an extra plastic bag that she accidentally pulls off the bag roller near the apples into her shopping cart with irritation, Nino feels her resentment towards Uesugi-kun burning stronger and stronger. Ichika, she can forgive; they're quintuplets, after all, and no matter how bad their fights get, they always make up and move on, though of course some fights they have have been harder to move on from than others. At the end of the day, Uesugi-kun is the outsider; as much as she might not like it, if her sisters change on their own accord, then she will just have to accept it, no matter how difficult it is for her to do so. But change instigated by someone they didn't even know until two months ago? That she can't accept; she refuses to accept it.

...is what she'd like to say, but her behavior towards him lately would suggest anything but.

Why has she become so indecisive? Since when has she developed all these contradictory feelings? It's like she can't make up her mind about the problems she has, and she's just letting herself be swept away by the currents that everyone else is creating around her. This isn't like her; this is not the Nakano Nino who's the popular girl at school, charismatic and outgoing. As a matter of fact, the longer Nino dwells on this, she feels like she's been regressing, which makes her feel even worse when comparing herself to the rest of her family.

In any case, it's Uesugi-kun's fault. Why is she even playing along with him and his tutoring? Why did she get complacent? Nino changes her mind now; just because she saved his job doesn't mean she should feel obligated to attend them herself. As a matter of fact, it's because she saved his job as their tutor that she should be able to choose whether or not she wants to attend his lessons. She doesn't owe him anything; it ought to be the other way around.

"Niiiiiiiii...NO!"

Startled into jumping a little when she feels a pair of hands suddenly press down on her shoulders, the second quintuplet twirls around with wide eyes to find her younger sister Yotsuba grinning from ear to ear at her.

"Ahaha ~ did I surprise you?" she asks cheerfully, pleased to see Nino's reaction, but to her surprise, Nino doesn't immediately start telling her off for acting like a kid; instead, she just frowns irritably back at her as she ties the bag of apples and places it in her shopping cart.

"Oh, it's just you. Ichika told me where you went; didn't you say you were coming back home late? At like, eleven or something?"

"Ah, yeah, um, we finished early, so I figured I'd stop by here to pick up some snacks for everyone on my way back home. I noticed before leaving earlier that we didn't have any snacks left, since we ate them all this week while studying."

"That so. Coincidentally, I noticed the same thing...it's part of the reason why I'm here."

"Huh. But..." Yotsuba ponders the situation for a moment. "Isn't there a supermarket closer to home than this one, though? The Tokyu one? Why'd you come all the way here?"

"I heard from my friends that they were having a few sales here that Tokyu doesn't have, so there."

So Yotsuba looks around the produce aisle, since sales in produce would be what Nino would probably look for the most. Aside from one or two pertaining to watermelons and apricots, neither of which the quintuplets eat much of, there aren't really any major sales going on at the moment.

"Nino," Yotsuba says slowly, "is...something wrong? You can...talk to me about it if you want, since it's just the two of us here."

Starting to stoop down to grab a heavy bag of rice, Nino gets up again to look at her younger sister funnily.

"...you, of all people, asking me about what's on my mind?" she snaps lightly back to her. "Where'd this come from?"

"Er, what...do you mean?" Yotsuba begins to feel uneasy.

"That's either Ichika's or Itsuki's job, isn't it? Asking the rest of us what we're feeling, telling us to talk about the problems we're having." Nino turns back to the bags of rice before her, stooping down a second time to pull one up to the shopping cart. "Not to mention, you're the one who - never - bothers - talking about what's on your mind."

With a heave, Nino sets a bag of rice down in the shopping cart bay.

"You could've left that to me," Yotsuba mutters, watching Nino rub her arms.

"No need, I was planning to get all this done by myself anyway."

"Then how were you going to carry all this back home?"

Nino freezes. She hadn't thought that far ahead.

"...I would've just, like, called a taxi or something, I dunno..." she grumbles, letting the thought trail off.

Following Nino as she pushes the cart out of the produce section, Yotsuba trots forward a little to walk side by side with her older sister.

"My own behavior aside, if you don't want to talk about whatever's on your mind, that's fine. I felt like something was off about you just now and figured I'd ask you about it, since I don't remember the last time just the two of us hung out like this," Yotsuba says earnestly but quietly.

Nino doesn't answer right away, opting instead to take a look at the seafood section to see if she ought to bring home some fish.

"...I got into an argument with Ichika just before I left home to do some grocery shopping," Nino says with a calm voice, still scanning the seafood aisle for anything she feels like buying.

"Argument with Ichika? That's...that's pretty rare."

"Yeah. I'll admit that it took me by surprise. You already know how I usually argue way more with Miku or Itsuki."

"That you do...though lately you haven't really had fights."

"Not like we won't have them in the future, though."

"Ahaha..."

Deciding against buying seafood, Nino puts her hands back on the shopping cart handlebar and proceeds forward down the rear of the supermarket, stopping by the meats to pick out a few entrees.

"What did you argue with Ichika about, if you don't mind me asking?" Yotsuba inquires once Nino has given her orders for meat entrees to the uniformed and masked employee behind the counter.

Watching Nino's expression when she asks this, Yotsuba observes her older sister's gaze dropping down to the windowed counter, down at the section of spicy marinated pork.

"Uesugi-kun," Nino finally answers. "We argued about him. Specifically about what we'd do if he isn't able to tutor us anymore."

"Huh? But...he's still tutoring us now, right? Did he mention something about quitting anyway?" Yotsuba asks, confused at the implications that Nino is giving.

"No, no...let me explain, it started when I asked Ichika about what her whole 'super secret plan' was that she talked to us about briefly during the weekend after midterms, remember that?"

"Oh yeah, that, right. I totally forgot about that, whatever happened to it? Ichika hasn't really done anything out of the ordinary since then, I don't think...?"

"Yeah, because she was planning to rehire Uesugi-kun as our tutor if Papa really did end up terminating his tutoring side of his contract."

"Oh, okay, I get it. Since you pulled a fast one on Dad, Uesugi-san kept his tutoring job, and so Ichika didn't need to pull out her secret plan that she talked about to us."

"Right." Nino slowly folds her arms across her bountiful chest, her blue eyes also rising to stare at the numbers on the price chart across from her on the wall shortly beyond the counter. "Then, I started talking about what we'd do in the event that something happens to Uesugi-kun that causes him to not tutor us anymore. Say...he gets really badly hurt while he's out doing his other work...or maybe he even dies."

"Die - " Yotsuba's breath briefly freezes up.

"Don't you start acting like Ichika on my ass too, Yotsuba," Nino snaps at her, turning her neck sharply at her younger sister. "I'm not trying to imply anything, I don't actually want him to get hurt or anything, I'm just saying this hypothetically speaking. In any case...Ichika took that badly, and so she chewed me out for it, and I'm still a bit triggered about that."

Sighing, Nino puts on a fake smile for the supermarket employee who weighs her orders to price them and wraps the plastic containers in their own bags before handing them to the second quintuplet.

"Don't worry about me, I'll get over it soon enough," she tells Yotsuba, placing the meat entrees on the shopping cart's upper shelf, where infants can be placed to ride. "Oh, and this might seem like it's a whole 'nother subject, but..."

Stopping in the middle of the aisle on their way to the snack rows, Nino turns to face Yotsuba seriously, and the latter also reciprocates, sensing her seriousness.

"Have I been changing over the past two months?" Nino asks quietly, her intense blue eyes meeting Yotsuba's apprehensive ones after she tussles her long peachy-red hair once. "And if so, how? Be honest with me."

Her eyebrows furrowing, the fourth quintuplet slowly presses her lips together in hesitant thought.

"...I'm not sure if...I'm the best one to ask for something like that, but..." Yotsuba swallows some of her saliva back, "...lately, I've been noticing that you haven't really been hanging out with your other friends at school as often. And whenever Uesugi-san is over at our house, you aren't as loud or obnoxious towards him as you once were."

Nino's eye twitches when Yotsuba says "loud or obnoxious". As self-conscious as she is about her own behavior towards their tutor, it still irks her hearing someone else say it to her face.

"Nino, is it safe for me to assume here that...there's something about Uesugi-san that's bothering you? You did say you were arguing with Ichika over him, right?" Yotsuba asks tentatively.

"For the dumbest quintuplet out of us five, you sure are perceptive sometimes," Nino darkly smirks. "Yes, it's about him. As you can see, I've got a serious fucking bone to pick with him."

"But you've been studying together with us, right? Even after you said you were only studying with us up until midterms," Yotsuba says. "So I assumed you had a change heart or something, especially when you saved Uesugi-san's job for him. What's going on, Nino? Please tell me."

Nino clenches her teeth.

"It's all his fault," she hisses under her breath. "It's all his fucking fault. Coming over out of the blue to tutor us, spending God knows how many hours with us - face it, Yotsuba, you look forward to Uesugi-kun coming over to our place now these days, right?"

"Er, well, that's - "

"Don't lie to me, I know you do! You fucking camp the front door sometimes like a goddamn dog, waiting for him to show up!"

Blushing at this, Yotsuba forces herself to avert her eyes. "Y-Yeah, I do that sometimes, but...but what's it to you, Nino? He's our friend, isn't he? And someone who obviously cares about us a lot if he's willing to do everything that he's done so far for us. Is that so weird?"

"To me it is! And it's not just you; Miku and Ichika are both like that too, and now Itsuki's been getting along with him just fine, like she's always been with the three of you from the beginning studying with him."

Nino takes an aggressive step towards her younger sister.

"All of you are changing. And Uesugi-kun's to blame," Nino declares. "If he'd never entered our lives, we wouldn't even be having any of the problems we - "

"That's not true!"

Steeling her own resolve, Yotsuba stands up to her older sister, both figuratively and literally.

"If he didn't become part of our lives, we probably wouldn't even have our lives right now," she answers firmly. "You're acting weird, Nino, I don't like it. This is, how should I say...this is different from how you were acting from before. Because in the beginning, you didn't like him suddenly becoming our tutor, and I get that, we all didn't. But now, there's something more to it, isn't there - "

"Excuse me, ladies," a passing employee approaches them after hearing the quintuplets' argument, "if you're going to argue, I'd like to ask that you do it outside, please."

Rendered self-conscious of their own noise levels, the two sisters apologize quickly and hurry over to the snack aisle, where they load their shopping cart with a large assortment of snacks that each of the quintuplets like. For the rest of the supermarket trip, the two siblings stay silent, only talking to each other when necessary, and they emerge from Izumi carrying a total of six plastic shopping bags, though Yotsuba is carrying four of them due to her superior strength, and with just one hand, too, since she's carrying the big rice bag on her left shoulder.

"Do you want to call a cab for this? I can handle carrying these back home, but I don't know about you..." Yotsuba asks her sister out of concern, but Nino shakes her head.

"This'll be a good way to cool myself off before we get home. That, and maybe Ichika'll be asleep by the time we get back. Besides, you're the one who needs the cab more."

"I'll be fine, don't worry about me. But I do hope you and Ichika will make up, though. For you to act like this after an argument, it must've been really serious; you're never quite this angry after you have a fight with Miku or Itsuki."

"I know." Nino keeps her eyes down at the ground as they walk along the lonely sidewalk of the late evening. "You don't need to tell me."

Yotsuba shifts her grips on her shopping bags uneasily. "...I also...hope you can make up with Uesugi-san, too. And now that I think about it...you're feeling this way because of the promise you made to us back then, right?"

Nino snorts under her breath. "At least everyone seems to remember that," she remarks dully.

"So it is about your promise." Yotsuba, in contrast, gazes up at the empty black sky, devoid of stars underneath the filter of light pollution coming from the city. "Nino, please understand...Uesugi-san doesn't know about that. He doesn't know about the effects he's having on us by becoming part of our lives, much less how he's affecting you and a promise you made to us six years ago that he has no idea about. So...no matter how unreasonable it is for me to say this, please try not to be so harsh towards him. This isn't his fault. He's just trying to do his job."

"But did it have to be us? Did he have to tutor us?" Nino gripes back.

"I mean, compared to what he must normally do as a mage, tutoring sounds like a much safer and consistent avenue of income for him, right?"

"But that turned out to be only half the story; he's also doing his usual mage bullshit and going around making sure that we're safe and stuff like that. So as far as his usual mage stuff goes, whatever it is, it doesn't seem like he's doing anything different! So if that's the case, what I'm asking is, did he really need to agree to tutoring us on top of that? He couldn't just protect us from the shadows like he does anyway and never have to be a direct part of our lives? We couldn't just get a normal tutor to help us out with our grades? Why hasn't anyone else thought of that, huh? Even Uesugi-kun said it himself once we were done with midterms and we were heading back home! How, because he's been splitting his time and effort between both tutoring us and protecting us, he hasn't been able to tutor us to the best of his ability!"

Unsure of what to say to this, Yotsuba mulls quietly over her possible responses and decides to go with this one as the two quintuplets pass a few young men chatting noisily while heading in the opposite direction.

"Well...since Dad hired him, I'm sure...I'm sure Dad had a good reason...he's not the type of person who'd hire just anybody..."

"Then I think Papa made a huge mistake, and he shouldn't have hired Uesugi-kun to tutor us at all. Protecting us, sure, fine, I get it, let him do his mage thing or whatever for all I care. But as a tutor on top of that?" Nino shakes her head vigorously. "Nuh-uh, no way. Even people like Papa can make mistakes from time to time, you know? He's only human after all."

"Hey, excuse me, miss? Hey!"

Hearing someone call out to them from behind, Nino and Yotsuba stop and turn to see who it is, and one of the young men that they just passed is hurrying back over to them and stops before them.

"Uh, by any chance, could you two be the Nakano girls?" he asks quickly, catching his breath a little.

Rolling her eyes at yet another guy trying to hit on them, Nino grumbles sideways to Yotsuba, "Yeah, maybe we should've called a cab."

"Yes, we are, but...we're kind of in a hurry, so if you could make it quick..." Yotsuba says with an awkward smile.

"Oh yeah, it'll be quick, alright."

Nino and Yotsuba both briefly stare into the man before them pointing directly at Yotsuba's face, his hand in the form of a finger gun.

A blur of motion distorts his fingertip, and Nino hears Yotsuba shriek with shock when a loud THUD smashes into her face. Turning on reflex to see what's just happened, Nino finds Yotsuba knocked down onto the ground on her back, holding her face like someone's just punched her there, with her bags scattered in front of her on the ground.

"YOU FUCKING LITTLE BITCH!"

The embers of resentment finally ignite properly, fueling Nino's body as she drops her own shopping bags and lurches forward, disregarding the danger that the two quintuplets now find themselves and throwing the hardest punch she can at their attacker. Thinking that Nino's punch won't be all that strong, their assailer merely raises a hand to block it, but Nino's fist pushes straight into it and punches him in the face through his hand anyway, jamming his own knuckles into his eyes.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!"

The man's friends catch back up to him by this point; there are three of them in total, with one catching Yotsuba's attacker from the force of Nino's savage punch and the other hurrying up to Nino and brandishing a switchblade knife at her.

"You girls better play nice and come with us. You don't want none 'a this, now, do ya?" the young man with the knife snarls at Nino, whose burning anger allows her to disregard the fear of a knife being pointed at her.

"Go fuck yourself, asshole," Nino growls back with such intensity that the man with the knife instinctively takes a step back, but he steadies himself and scoffs at her.

"You deaf, bitch? I said come with us, or you're gonna get it," he repeats himself as Yotsuba manages to get back up on her feet, though she's still rubbing her nose that's beginning to bleed. "Or does my buddy here need to shoot you a few more times for you to get it instead?"

The other two thugs return, with Yotsuba's attacker pointing his hand at them in the same finger gun gesture. Nino eyes this gesture again.

"...you're a fucking mage, aren't you?" she hisses at him.

"Well, shit, she knows," the man with the finger gun clicks his tongue in annoyance. "Even more of a reason to bring them in. No need to hesitate, boys, just grab 'em. Shank her a few times if you have to, just don't kill her or stab her too deep."

Nino immediately yells, "Yotsuba, RUN!"

"W-What do you - ?!"

To the fourth quintuplet's abject horror, Nino dives straight for the enemy mage, as he takes priority with his ranged attack that could stop Yotsuba from escaping. Her fist once more sails straight for him, this time pounding him in the gut before he can defend himself with the kind of movement Nino employs, which is definitely not the kind of movement one would expect out of a freshman in high school. Knowing that she does not have the luxury of time on her side, Nino then rams her shoulder into the enemy mage, knocking him backwards and then mounting him to try to punch him in the face, but the mage's friends both pull her off their buddy, and the one without the knife plants the tip of his shoe into Nino's side, causing her to retch painfully in reaction.

"Wait, stop, please, don't - !"

Instead of running away as instructed, Yotsuba dives into the fray herself, grabbing the guy who's just kicked her sister in the side and trying to pull him away to protect Nino, but the thug jams his elbow hard against her chest, knocking the wind out of her and sending her collapsing on her rear on the ground, wheezing and coughing violently.

Hearing Yotsuba's cries again, Nino redoubles her efforts through the pain in her side; reaching out with her hands, she grabs the weaponless young man by his left ankle and tugs, knocking him off balance and forcing him to break his fall with his hands, but the numerical advantage is just too much, for the mage simply stands over her and fires a magic bullet at her point-blank at her own face. The impact of the shot not only slams against her forehead, but the resultant force also smacks the back of her head against the hard sidewalk ground beneath it, dealing a double dose of pain and severe disorientation that almost completely incapacitates the quintuplet.

"STOP! STOP IT, PLEASE! DON'T HURT HER ANYMORE!" Nino can hear Yotsuba shrieking at the top of her lungs. It shouldn't be that late at night, and they're making a ton of noise, so why isn't anyone coming to help?

"Yotsuba, for fuck's sake, I told you to ru - "

Nino's voice is cut off as she feels a slicing pain she's never felt burrow into the top of her right shoulder.

The man with the knife sharply pulls out his knife from where he's stabbed Nino, scowling down at her as the second quintuplet, rendered silent by the throbbing pain now spitting blood from her right shoulder, grasps it with her left hand.

"You thought we were just screwin' around when we said you'd get some 'a this? You're lucky you didn't get it in someplace worse!" The thug waves his bloody knife around a little. "Oh? You're not talking all of a sudden now, are ya? You had such a potty mouth just before this, now you get shanked a little and it's gone?"

Nino's left hand tightens over her open stab wound on her shoulder. She can feel the warm, moist sensation on her palm that also seeps into her blouse and in between her fingers.

Blood.

Blood.

Blood.

Blood.

Blood.

Is blood supposed to feel this hot?

Nino suddenly feels someone hug her tightly from behind, and Yotsuba, fully in tears now, cradles her in her arms as she looks up at their attackers.

"Please, stop, stop it! Don't hurt her anymore!" Yotsuba sobs. "What do you want from us? Did you really need to attack us like this?!"

"Hey, don't make this sound like your sis gettin' hurt was our fault, my dude here fuckin' told you two to come along nicely, and then this bitch right here decided to go after my fuckin' throat," the enemy mage spits down at Nino, and she feels the spit spray hit her on her right knee. "We gave you a choice, and you decided to slap it away, so how the fuck else do you expect us to react to that?"

"Hey, Boss said we only needed to bring people back alive; he never said we couldn't do whatever we wanted with 'em first," the thug with the knife points out. "And we found the fuckin' jackpot since he's been looking for them. How 'bout we have some fun with 'em first?"

The mage inhales sharply with irritation. "Bro, we've already made so much noise here, and my Presence Concealment ain't that good either; I'd rather just get the fuck out with these bitches, you know? You can have your fun with someone else later."

"Ah c'mon, bro, it'll be fuckin' quick."

"Yeah, probably 'cause you're a damn quick shot, hahaha!"

"Shut the fuck up, ya pencil-dick motherfucker!"

Lunging at his ally, the man with the knife sinks his blade into the mage's chest with an awkward backhanded grip, ripping it out and watching with satisfaction as the mage stumbles backwards with his own hand over his wound.

"Dude, what the fuck, bro!" the third thug now steps in, confronting his ally with the knife. "That was a joke, motherfucker, and you know he's right, we can't stay here long!"

"Fuck that little shit, I've just about had it with all the dumb jokes he cracks all the time, I'm fuckin' sick of 'em! Let's just kill him right here so that we can split our bounty two ways instead of three, dude. I know you got shit goin' on, you need the cash. How about it?"

"Hey! Don't you fuckin' fall for that shit, I'm the only one here who's a mage; without me, you can't even report back to Shirazumi-san! And you know damn well he's gonna try to off you too so that only he gets the bounty!"

As their attackers descend into a civil war of sorts and argue heatedly among themselves, Yotsuba looks down at Nino, who's still looking shell-shocked as ever with her left hand tightly pressed over her bleeding wound.

"Nino...Nino, are you alright?" she whispers.

Nino manages to angle her face up to her younger sister so that her hair isn't in the way, and Yotsuba finds herself staring down into a pair of burning purple eyes.

"...do you think I'm alright, you bitch?" she croaks. "Why the fuck didn't you run, Yotsuba?"

"Because there's no need for her to now."

The two quintuplets look up at the same time, just in time to see a boy clad in black step past them. In his left hand are two cards, the queen of hearts and the two of spades.

The injured mage, who's facing in the direction of the girls, also notices a newcomer approaching them and points at him.

"Shit, someone just got into my - "

The two of spades forever silences him as it plunges into the middle of his throat with a soft but sharp thud; as a result, his knees wobble and give way, forcing him to collapse slowly as he clutches at his throat, unable to breathe as the card is jammed too deeply into his trachea.

The weaponless delinquent also reels over suddenly, finding a plastic playing card now lodged firmly in his gut. As he stumbles backwards and lets his back hit the nearby window of a fine arts and crafts shop, the man with the bloody switchblade turns to defend himself, but Fuutarou is already on him. Grabbing the wrist of his opponent's knife hand with his own two hands, Fuutarou swiftly pulls the young man's hand all the way backwards, letting the chilling cracks of breaking bones, snapping tendons, and bursting blood vessels pierce through the warm night air.

The young mage doesn't let the gangster scream in pain for long. Snatching the switchblade that's fallen out of his hand as a result of his broken wrist before it can even hit the ground, Fuutarou tosses the bloody switchblade to his right hand, steps behind his opponent, and subsequently buries the full length of the switchblade into the back of its own owner's head. Both Nino and Yotsuba can clearly see the shock of the man's eyes when the blade enters his skull and almost the exact moment of death when his eyes go slack in their sockets.

Pushing the standing corpse away, Fuutarou tosses the used switchblade aside to face the last gangster, who's managed to pull the bloody plastic playing card that the former has plunged into his gut at range, pulls out of his pocket a short collapsible baton that he extends and charges at the young mage with to attack him. Fuutarou merely raises his hand to meet it in midair before it can strike him on the head, and once it's in his grasp, Fuutarou magically amplifies his strength to snap the baton in half. Even before the gangster can realize what Fuutarou just did to his weapon, the young mage twirls the broken half of the baton that he has around to smack his next opponent upside the head with its blunt tip, and while he reels from this too, Fuutarou swoops down and uses both hands to sweep the guy completely off his feet by pulling the back of his lower right leg up. In the split second that he's rendered airborne, Fuutarou presses his right hand against the thug's face and drives it home, smashing the back of his head into the sidewalk cement with such force that a small quantity of blood immediately smears against the cement where the skin and bone beneath his hair have shattered.

With two of the quintuplets' attackers taken care of, Fuutarou turns to the enemy mage, who is still feebly struggling to breathe. Having managed to pull the card out from his throat in a desperate attempt to get some air, he's now groveling on the ground, hacking and coughing feebly as he's inhaling more blood than air, essentially drowning in his own fluids.

The young mage stoops down a second time and pulls the dying mage up into the air, his hands holding the gangster by the head. The gargling and choking slowly ceases, and like the first man Fuutarou killed, his eyes soon go slack and slowly begin to go fish-eyed as his life is extinguished.

The quintuplets watch in stunned silence as Fuutarou simply drops the corpse where he stands and pulls out his smartphone to make a call, eyeing carefully the scattered groceries that have escaped from their bags as the call connects.

"Uesugi here. Send cleanup on this marker, I've got some clients to evacuate."

Having issued his order, Fuutarou pockets his phone quickly and walks over to Nino and Yotsuba, picking Nino up and pulling her back onto her feet without a word.

"Do you have any other injuries that prevent you from walking or running?" Fuutarou asks in a low voice that demands swift response, and Nino shakes her head. Her eyes are averted, but this does absolutely nothing to hide her active Mystic Eyes that are still burning through their Mystic Eye Killers.

"And you?" Fuutarou's own sharp black eyes turn to Yotsuba, who shakes her head as well. "Good, let's the hell outta here. Leave the groceries behind, your lives are more important."

So the three high school classmates hurry away from the scene, leaving their spilled groceries behind among the bodies of the dead gangsters. For a good five minutes they walk briskly, with Nino still clutching her bleeding right shoulder firmly with her left hand and trying her best not to look at all the blood that must have leaked out by now.

"...Uesugi-san, where are we going right now?" Yotsuba asks urgently but in a hushed tone when he ushers them into an old building that's up for lease.

"I've got a teleporter in here that can take you girls straight back home, now hurry," the young mage answers.

Once they locate the teleporter rune inside this old building that Fuutarou guides them through, the mage activates it, and on his countdown, all three of them port out of the building into the familiar rooftop of the Pentagon high-rise.

Now safely within the grounds of the high-rise, Uesugi Fuutarou turns to Nino first, who's still grasping her open wound on her injured right shoulder.

"Sit down, Nino, I need to look at this," the mage orders, but to his silent surprise, Nino shakes her head.

"...d-don't worry about it," she mutters under her breath. Thankfully tonight's a rare night with very little wind even up here, so Fuutarou can clearly hear everything she says even with such a low voice. "I'll...I'll...handle this on my own."

"Nino...please let him treat you. Something like that...we can't treat it with just a band-aid. We don't have anything at home that can - "

"Shut the fuck up, Yotsuba!"

Nino's vehement outburst explodes onto the high-rise rooftop. Yotsuba, having never gotten yelled at quite like this before, can't help but wince and squeeze her eyes shut, only to open them up again to find her older sister glaring at her with those weird purple eyes that she's never seen before until about ten minutes ago.

"...Ni...no...?" is all Yotsuba can utter before Nino tears her eyes away and glares back up at her tutor and classmate.

"It's all because of you," she hisses with all the venom she can muster, created from the pain, frustration, and anger that she's been storing up and using the events of today as her catalyst. "It's all because of you that things are turning out the way they are."

Fuutarou narrows his eyes back down at Nino. "Mind explaining to me what exactly you're talking about?"

"Oh, you fucking said it."

Finally tearing her left hand off her wounded shoulder, the second quintuplet clenches her fists with such force that her hands and arms begin to tremble, although her right arm cannot tremble quite as much as her left.

"It's all your fault, Uesugi! Fucking coming in here just because Papa hired you to be our tutor, and now all of a sudden after two months, you're acting like you're part of the family now? I know what you're trying to do - you're trying to get all my sisters all wrapped up around your fucking fingers, aren't you?! Ichika, Miku, Yotsuba, and now Itsuki - they're all fucking head over heels for you, and they will be if things keep going on like this! You planned all this out because you're poor as fuck and you want access to our money!"

"Your dad's money," Fuutarou dryly corrects her.

"Which is as good as ours, so fuck you! You might be able to make the others fall for you, but not me, not in a million years! I've seen through your fucking tricks, your fucking agenda! Besides, you can't even do either of your jobs related to us properly! You can't even teach us well, seeing how we all failed most of our midterms except one apiece, and you can't even keep us safe with how you let me get stabbed in the shoulder like this! You fucking suck as a tutor and a mage, goddamn it! I can't believe I helped you keep your stupid post as our tutor by lying to Papa about our test scores!"

Pointing with her bloodied left hand directly at Fuutarou, who stands still, unflinching, Nakano Nino bellows with tears beginning to form in her eyes,

"It's all your fault that things turned out like this! I wish you'd never come into our lives, you worthless piece of shit!"

Hearing Nino fling these obscenities at their tutor, Yotsuba tightens up her own fists as her heart beats with a sharp pang of pain.

"Nino, don't say things like that to him!" she shouts at her sister angrily for the first time in a very long time.

Yotsuba's voice prompts Nino to again swing towards her younger sister.

"I SAID, SHUT - UP!"

A loud SMACK also joins the chorus of yells occurring here on the roof of the Pentagon. Nino, unable to use her right hand properly due to her injured shoulder, uses the momentum of her turn to savagely backhand Yotsuba across her left cheek with her left hand instead, and she glares at Yotsuba stumbling a little, holding her cheek where she's been struck by her sister.

Before Nino can confront her younger sister, however, she finds herself being grabbed by the scuff of her blouse with a single hand and lifted up off the roof and into the air by a foot or two.

"What the - let go of me, Uesugi - !" Nino growls ferociously, realizing what's going on, but Fuutarou disregards her threat and pulls her in closer so that there is nothing blocking the line of sight between their two pairs of eyes, one a dull black and the other a burning purple. "Don't get in my way, I was talking to - "

"Yotsuba? I believe you were speaking to me mostly just now," Fuutarou says with a small voice. For a boy who usually speaks loudly or at least clearly for the sake of his tutoring, listening to him speak like this, especially with this kind of context, is terribly jarring. "Finish what you were telling me."

"I was done, okay!? That's why I turned to Yotsuba!"

"And slapped her like that? What for?"

"What the fuck's that got anything to do with you, you fucking simp?!"

Fuutarou pulls Nino even closer, uncomfortably close to the point where most of Nino's vision is made up of Fuutarou's face.

"Apparently, according to you just now, I'm the reason why things are the way they are, even though I have no idea what's even going on with you and the others. And the next minute you're gonna have the guts to ask me what this has got to do with me? Because by your own fucking words, Nino, this has everything to do with me. Hell, we even talked about something like this a while ago, didn't we? The night when I walked in on you after you came out of the bath? So you'll excuse me for butting in like I always have and ask you again while I still have the patience for your bullshit: why did you hit her?"

Nino tries her best to gnash her teeth at Fuutarou while still being held up in the air, her feet dangling a few dozen centimeters from the ground now. "Because she was being annoying, damn it!"

"Oh? You used to be hella fucking annoying to deal with before midterms, and you didn't see me slapping the shit outta you."

"Of course not, you idiot, otherwise I would've had Papa fire your dumb ass instantly!"

"And that still wouldn't change the fact that you're acting like a little bitch right now. And while I don't give a fuck if you act like that towards me, since I've put up with it for the better part of the last two months, I'm nowhere near as big a fan of when you act like that towards your own fucking sisters."

"You don't even know what's going on, do you?! What makes you think you deserve to know?! This is between the two of us, damn it! This is a fucking family matter! Stay the hell out!"

"Please, you two!" Having finally recovered from the shock of getting slapped, Yotsuba rejoins them and pleads with her tutor. "Uesugi-san, please...just...just put her back down. I'll talk this out with her - "

"I'll put her down, sure, but neither of you are leaving until you explain to me exactly what the fuck's gotten into the two of you tonight," the young mage declares, complying partway with Yotsuba's request and setting Nino back down on the roof. "And Nino, call me a simp all you want, but the fact of the matter is that it's my responsibility to keep you all safe from shit like what happened tonight. While I can do that against people like those guys from earlier, I can't do it anywhere near as easily if you girls are fighting each other like this, do you understand? You're not exactly helping me do my job of making sure the five of you are healthy if you're the ones hurting each other."

"Like I said, you can't even do your job properly even against bastards like those fucking shitstains from earlier tonight! You let Itsuki get hurt last time, and now me!" Nino cries.

"Yes, well, things like this can happen; I was paying a visit to the hospital and checking in with your dad when I sensed the two of you getting hurt and ported my over to you as fast as I could. I don't literally stalk the five of you all day because you'd fucking yell at me for that too. And if you'd prefer this, Nino, what I can suggest to your dad is to have him tell the five of you that you're all barred from leaving this high-rise without permission and by my escort to near-guarantee your safety. Does the idea of house arrest sound good to you, Nino? Is that what you want? Because honestly, that's what we should've been doing from the very beginning so that none of you gets hurt; the reason why we haven't been doing that is because I don't like the idea of boarding you girls up inside your own house and be unable to lead the lives you normally have otherwise!"

Nino and Fuutarou glare at each other, each of them unwilling to back down from one another's intense gaze, with an uncomfortable and miserable Yotsuba standing beside them.

"I'm not here to be your fucking parent; that's your dad's job, and we all know how good he is at doing that," Fuutarou snarls wickedly down at Nino. "So whatever business you have with Yotsuba that made you hit her like that, fine, I'll be a good little outsider and leave it to the two of you to work out; I'll trust that you two can be mature enough to talk it out while I'm not here and resolve it. But if I get wind of you getting into another argument like this with any one of your other sisters, Nino, I will intervene. Now let me treat your shoulder so that you don't have to deal with me any longer than you have to."

Clenching her teeth tightly one last time for tonight, Nino finally tears her gaze away, turning to point her right shoulder in his direction.

"...then hurry up and get it fucking over it," she orders harshly. "How long's it gonna take?"

"I'll have a better idea in a second here, but for now, probably about fifteen minutes or so. The cut itself doesn't look too deep; that switchblade you got stabbed with didn't seem to have that long of a blade, so we're pretty lucky in that sense," the young mage says carefully while examining the second quintuplet's wound. "Yeah, it should be about fifteen minutes; I just need to repair some muscle, cartilage, and a tendon here..."

As Fuutarou gets to work repairing Nino's wound with magic, Yotsuba continues to shift uncomfortably where she stands. Nino has her eyes closed again to bear with the uncomfortable sensations she feels from the anesthetizing rune over her shoulder that Fuutarou's applied to numb the wound, and their tutor and classmate is hard at work healing Nino's stab injury.

"Because of whatever's happened tonight, let's see, what day's today, Friday? As I'd mentioned earlier this week, I was planning to have some extra lessons this weekend, since I promised to take you all out for parfaits at that one family cafe that Itsuki told me about earlier and I figured we'd come back to your place to study some more, but I'm gonna go ahead and cancel those. Take this weekend to calm yourselves down so that when I come back next week, we don't need to deal with this shit and we can focus on your studies."

Uesugi talks as he operates on Nino's wound, on the verge of completing. He just needs to repair the epidermis layer of skin and make sure that there are no scab cells left behind.

"If you want to cancel the parfait thing later tonight, just tell Ichika to text me what you girls want to do so that I know. If I don't get a text from her, I'll assume I'm still meeting you girls there, just without the studying afterwards since we're obviously not going to make any progress. Alright, I'm done."

As soon as Fuutarou pulls up and away from Nino's shoulder, the second quintuplet immediately pivots and storms off towards the doors leading downstairs to the elevator lobby, and he and Yotsuba watch the door slam shut after Nino as she disappears from view.

With a heavy sigh, Fuutarou rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly, while Yotsuba gazes back up at him.

"A while back, Miku told me that Nino's a good person, and it's just that I need to come to her in good faith or whatever..." Fuutarou grumbles, though his voice lacks the intensity from before when he was arguing with Nino. "I guess I still don't know what that really entails."

"Uesugi-san...none of this is your fault, despite everything Nino's been saying," Yotsuba says quietly. "She's...she's just..."

"Just what?"

Yotsuba bites her lower lip.

"Nino's been acting weird lately. I'm sure...you've noticed it too. Studying with us after midterms, even though she'd talked so much about how things would go back to how they were normally...not hanging out with her friends from school as much lately...and she's even been studying on her own in her room too, which is something she'd only ever do to last-minute cram for exams or something."

"Seems like progress to me," Fuutarou remarks bluntly. "Can't say that isn't what I want as a tutor."

"Maybe not, but...I don't know how the others feel about it, but I've just been feeling like there's something off about her lately. And before we had that trouble happen earlier, I ran into her at the Izumi supermarket, and we had a bit of an argument there, too."

"About what, me being an outsider and all that?"

Yotsuba nods a little. "She blames you for how we've been changing recently. Ichika, Miku, myself, and even Itsuki...after what we talked about before we ran into those bad guys, it's pretty clear now that she resents you for everything you've been doing for us."

"Hmm. You heard me briefly mention this to Nino just now, but a while back, I think this was right after we came back from our Golden Week vacation, but we had a night when Nino ran out of the house and got herself locked out of the high-rise, remember that?"

"Oh yeah, that, uh-huh."

"I took the time to sit down and talk with her for a bit that night, and it was then that I first came to know how she views me, an outsider. Because she helped me keep my post as your tutor and she's been cooperating with me in studying and whatnot, I figured maybe she'd gotten over those initial feelings, but clearly I'm wrong, and it's way worse than I thought."

"Like I said, Uesugi-san, please don't feel like this is your fault! How can it be?"

"I never said it was my fault, Yotsuba. And whose fault it is is irrelevant; what matters is that one of my students has a serious problem with me, and I want to take it upon myself to learn more about it so that I can continue to tutor her like my responsibility entails."

"Then in that case, I can tell you whatever I know on my end - "

But Fuutarou shakes his head, holding up his hand to stop Yotsuba in her tracks.

"As much as I would like that, I feel like that'd just be taking the easy way out. I want to have Nino tell me her gripes with me herself. It might take a while for us to get to that point, but...out of respect for her, I feel like this is the most appropriate route to take. You'll have to excuse me for my selfishness here, Yotsuba."

"S-Selfish...?" Yotsuba scoffs lightly, but she means no offense by this. "...that's hardly what I'd call selfishness, Uesugi-san."

"I dunno, denying someone else's offer to help because I want to do things my own way sounds pretty damn selfish to me, don't you think?"

Yotsuba blankly stares at Fuutarou.

"...yes...you're right..." she mumbles, lowering her gaze slowly.

"In any case, it's already pretty late, you should also get going," Fuutarou advises. "Before I go, though, I would like to ask you one thing: do you think Nino was saying those things about me just because she's pissed off at me, or do you think there's actual merit behind what she's saying? Because I obviously can't tell what exactly it is that I'm doing that Nino takes so much fault with. Don't give me a detailed answer; I just want you to tell me if you agree or disagree with Nino, or she's only halfway right."

Yotsuba blinks at her tutor at first, then lowers her gaze for God knows how many times it's been now. What should she say? Things just happened so fast today that she hasn't even had a chance to organize her thoughts. Shaking her head, Yotsuba feels tears welling back up in her eyes.

"...I don't know, Uesugi-san. I honestly...don't know," she mumbles, quickly wiping her tears away. "I won't deny that we as sisters have definitely changed ever since you began teaching us. But at the same time, I personally really enjoy having you around and teaching us, because it's fun and we've made so many memories that I never thought we'd be able to make just from studying and tutoring like this. And I know that Ichika and Miku would be inclined to agree, and maybe even Itsuki once she's studied with us for long enough. But now that I see how Nino really feels about all this, now I just don't know what to think. I'm sorry, Uesugi-san. I'm just...I'm just too dumb to give you a straight answer."

Bowing her head a little so that her eyes disappear from Fuutarou's view, Yotsuba lets her green hair ribbon droop down with the rest of her upper body.

"It's fine; I was prepared to have to find that answer myself either way, like I mentioned earlier with how I want Nino to talk to me directly. As much of a bitch, frankly, that she was tonight towards us, I trust in her that she has a good reason why she's acting the way she is tonight, and in so doing..."

Yotsuba hears two footsteps approach her, and she looks up just in time to see her tutor put his hand on her head reassuringly.

"...I'll take her word that I really am at fault here. So by extension, I'm sorry for making her act like that towards you. She should've acted that way towards me, not you."

Staring through her own bangs like Miku up at her tutor as he pulls his hand back, Yotsuba sniffles loudly.

"...even though I said you shouldn't be the one taking the blame for something you couldn't have known you did?" she mumbles, wiping some more tears away.

"Don't worry about it, I'm used to taking the blame for a lot of things. We'll just chalk it up as yet another thing that I just don't get because I'm a dense motherfucker. But anyways, you should really be getting home; your sisters'll get suspicious that you're still up here with me or something."

Nodding, the fourth quintuplet begins to head for the doors leading down to the elevators below, but she stops after a few paces.

"...something wrong?" Fuutarou calls out, having turned around to check if the teleporter rune beneath their feet on the helipad has reset so that he can establish another teleportation link on it. Yotsuba turns around slowly, fidgeting a little with averted blue eyes.

"Um...this is...a bit embarrassing to ask, but..." Yotsuba swallows nervously, "...do you remember that one morning when we met really early at school...? And you slept in my arms...?"

"Oh yeah, that. I never thanked you for that, did I? If you and your sisters decide to come by, I'll make sure to buy you an extra big parfait or something, whatever you want."

But Yotsuba shakes her head. "You don't have to do that; my sisters'll get suspicious and think you're showing favoritism towards me if you do. But..."

"But?"

Yotsuba hesitates again. Should she really ask him for this? When she'd resolved to prioritize the happinesses of her sisters rather than her own?

No. This isn't for herself. It's for Uesugi-san, to make sure that he knows none of anything that's happened today is his fault.

Spurred by these contradictive thoughts, Yotsuba turns, backtracks, and practically walks straight into her friend with the world's most awkward hug.

Fuutarou himself gives no reaction at first, simply letting Yotsuba do as she wills. But before long, he, too, puts his own arms slowly around Yotsuba, lifting his head up to the empty, lifeless sky hanging over them and bearing witness.

"Let me guess, you're trying to tell me to stop thinking this is my fault?" he mutters aloud, and he feels Yotsuba's head nod up and down slightly against the front of his right shoulder. "Hm. Thanks for the encouragement, then. It means a lot...but does this mean that I'll have to buy you two parfaits tomorrow or something?"

Unable to stop herself from breaking into a smirk, Yotsuba is glad that Fuutarou can't see her giggling silently at his remark as she shakes her head. Why should he, when he's already in the middle of paying the debt he owes her from their morning at school together.

---

"Nino!? Nino, what happened!? Nino, Nino!"

The quintuplet in question slams the door to her bedroom behind her and swiftly locks it so that her sisters can't follow her in. As Ichika knocks on her door urgently, calling out her name to get her to open the door, the enraged Nino tears off her blouse and angrily changes out of her clothes into her clean pajamas. Once her outfit is changed, she stomps over to her bed and, clenching her fists tightly again, begins to drive her knuckles into her blanketed mattress. Without a word escaping her clenched teeth, Nino makes full use of her freshly healed shoulder and punches the crap out of her own bed for ten straight minutes, cathartically ridding herself of all the anger and emotions she's been flooded with tonight.

By the time she's done, Nino, sweating bullets from her scalp from the sheer amount of effort she's put herself through, can no longer hear her sisters outside her room asking her to open up like the American FBI; they must've gotten scared away once they started hearing Nino start pounding her own bed inside. In the meantime, Nino's side where she's been kicked throbs pretty painfully, because Fuutarou healed her shoulder but didn't treat the bruise that she's gotten where she got kicked, and her elevated heartrate causes the bruise to throb rather painfully.

Was it always so hot in her room? Or is it just because of all the body heat she's produced from going into a tantrum like this?

Either way, after turning off the main light in her room, Nino climbs up onto the same bed that she's been hitting for the past ten minutes, ignoring the stuffed animals and plushie dolls that've spilled off the edge due to her mattress abuse, and sits on her bed in the dark, hunched over her knees against the parallel wall behind her with her very long hair draped down on either side of her, with only the glowing purple lights gleaming from her narrowed eyes to keep her company.