The jingling of a door chime signals Nakano Ichika's exit from a coffee shop not far from the Pentagon luxury high-rise, and there are no prizes for guessing which franchise.
Today's been a long day at work for the oldest quintuplet, so Ichika decides to treat herself with something she usually doesn't order: a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino. Normally she doesn't fancy caramel - it's not that she dislikes it like how Miku hates chocolate, but it's just something she usually doesn't go out of her way to get. But now that she's giving it a try, it's actually quite delicious - perhaps she'll order it again in the future.
Ichika is accustomed to getting coffee from Starbucks or other trendy coffee shops deeper in the heart of the city, as her job has her travel to various locations around downtown, so she is thus used to the hustle-bustle of a busy international city: traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, various foreign languages being spoken just as often as the native Japanese, and advertisements as far as the urban eye can see. She's a city kind of girl, and she's proud of it - though she takes care to never forget that she wasn't always one.
Today's work dragged on somewhat longer than usual, but this is due to Ichika's own fault: she had initially cleared this whole week with her employer so that she could focus on her studies with her sisters, so her workplace was under the impression that she wouldn't be showing up this week, yet she did anyway on her very first day off, so they hadn't had anything planned for her to do. So when she came in unexpectedly, they had to find something for her to do, and when they did, Ichika ended up working for longer than usual anyway - not that her workplace could really complain about it. She did tell them that this was just for today; this shouldn't happen again for the rest of the week since today's circumstances were...unusual.
Unusual is underselling the situation that exploded at the Nakano residence earlier today. When Nino slapped Fuutarou's worksheets out of Miku's hands and Itsuki realized what had happened, Ichika felt an enormous pulse of magical energy resonate from Itsuki. It was akin to a bomb exploding in their house, a figurative one, but only Ichika could feel it - and any of her sisters who have also unlocked their latent magic talents too. That was before Itsuki slapped Nino - the moment Ichika's magic senses were bombarded by the sheer magical energy release from her youngest sister, Ichika was genuinely afraid that something much, much worse than just two of her sisters having a messy punchout would happen.
Thankfully nothing catastrophic happened, and maybe in hindsight, Ichika didn't need to worry about such a thing happening, as that was the moment when Ichika witnessed Itsuki unlock her magic potential. That's the first time she's ever seen someone discover themselves as a mage in such a...dramatic fashion, now that she ponders it a little as she begins her lonely walk back home in the night, sipping on her caramel frappuccino in the night breeze that is progressively getting chillier the longer she's outside.
Ichika herself, as mentioned before, has never known exactly when she became a mage, or discovered her magic talent, or whatever the proper phrase is; all she knows is that she had this power vested into her right eye from a young age, back when she and her sisters could still be considered truly identical quintuplets, and that she's slowly over the years learned how it works and how to control and utilize it properly. Of course, she's still a far cry from a much more dedicated mage like Uesugi Fuutarou, for example, as she's never had proper guidance on how to use her magic talent and has focused more on living the life of a normal person, though Ichika does sometimes wonder to herself how different her life would be if she did have the choice to take one path for her life or the other...would she remain the same as she is now, or follow more in the footsteps of her tutor? Then again, knowing how tough Fuutarou's life seems to be, she's not so sure if following in his footsteps is necessarily the greatest of ideas.
In any case, that tangent aside, Ichika considers her other sisters. She now knows that both Miku and Nino have activated their magic powers; she's known that Miku has had hers for a while now, judging by Miku's sojourns to the bathroom following her sleep paralysis attacks in the middle of the night and sensing the subtle but creeping magic energy leakage coming from her room during those nights. And much more recently, Nino as well has developed her own, joining Miku and herself in the magic quintuplets' club of which most quintuplets in the family have no idea exists.
But both Nino's and Miku's developments were under the radar. Ichika still doesn't know exactly when Nino developed hers; the first sign that Nino showed that she was a mage now was back during that one weekend following the incident between her and Yotsuba, the weekend when their tutor treated them to a lunch at that Italian cuisine family restaurant or whatever that was with the tasty parfaits, and that was only because all the magical energy leakage from Nino's room during that time made it obvious that she'd become a mage at some point; it's just that Ichika is very curious as to when exactly she'd turned, though that just makes it sound like she's thinking of her sisters as nothing more than zombies or something.
So the fact that Itsuki's transformation, as much as you can call it a "transformation", unfolded in such dramatic fashion came as a big shock to Ichika, to the point where she took the opportunity to get out of the house herself as soon as she could, which was right before Nino and Itsuki stormed out of the house to run away, though not necessarily together. While she did help to mediate the situation immediately following the scuffle the two of them had, Ichika was legitimately frightened of what could happen and honestly did not want to have any part of it. She has no problems with getting involved with her sisters' problems when it comes to normal stuff, but this? If things went magical, how the hell would she be able to keep things under control?
Ichika's chest tightens up painfully. Even if she doesn't show it or tries not to most of the time, she really does pride herself on being the eldest quintuplet whom the rest of the siblings can look up to for guidance and mediation; being the one who can keep things under control is a responsibility she's oftentimes tasked with, and she's enjoyed the prestige that comes with it. So no matter what the situation, even when magic gets involved, she ought to have that same attitude of stepping in to keep her sisters together, just like their late mother wanted them to.
But this is twice now that she has been unable to do fulfill her duty as the eldest quintuplet, once at the warehouse and twice tonight. At the warehouse, she refused to use her magical talent to help get her sisters out of that dangerous bind - even if she has the excuse of not being very well trained in the art of fighting with magic or simply lacking martial arts knowledge in the first place, the fact of the matter is that she did not act because she did not want to reveal her identity as a mage to her sisters unless she absolutely had to, like to save one of her sisters from getting badly hurt, for example, and thankfully for her, Uesugi Fuutarou was there to bail her out in the sense that she ended up not having to reveal herself as a mage to her family.
And Ichika feels much worse about today, because it's not like there was a third party outside of their family and Uesugi that was involved in the matter; no, it was just among her sisters and no one else. Ichika has no excuse in this case to have not acted as the proper older sister she prides herself on being to do whatever she can to keep the situation under control and make sure things stay under control. She may have helped settle things down initially, but she wasn't there to stop Nino and Itsuki from ditching the house to go their separate ways as the final result of their fight, because she'd already been long gone from the house already.
And to make matters even worse, it's not as though Ichika hasn't been in high-tension situations herself either, and as a matter of fact, she's been in quite a few. Has she already forgotten about her private vigilantism that she's waged against people whom she deemed as threats to her sisters? Has she forgotten the fact that she's confronted other less-than-friendly and disagreeable human beings during her time as a Mystic Eye-wielding mage? And some of those people were actually scary people too, men who had sometimes had weapons on them or otherwise posed a very real danger to a young girl like herself. So why is it that she can face people like that but not her own sisters, especially Itsuki today?
The only reason for that that Ichika can think of is because they're her own sisters. Bad guys whom she's dealt with before are no problem since she doesn't care about them beyond the threats that they pose to her and her family, so she doesn't need to hold back against them or really worry about the consequences of dealing with them, since they're probably bad people in general anyway if they think that attacking an unarmed young girl like herself was an okay thing to do. Obviously she can't approach her own sisters with that same mentality, otherwise she'd be no better than the people she fought to protect those very siblings in the first place, and she certainly doesn't want to.
But is that really all? Just because they're her sisters? That'd be like saying just because they're her sisters, Ichika should let them stay up however long they want on a school night. Not that her sisters do that anyway because they're all good girls and they all at least go to sleep properly for school so Ichika doesn't need to worry about such delinquency from them, but still, the point is that along this logic, Ichika shouldn't get involved with the fight between Nino and Itsuki because they're her sisters and so she shouldn't do anything that'll hurt their feelings. But obviously she can't just do nothing; as their older sister, she needs to get in there and get involved, because otherwise if she doesn't, her sisters will begin to question her role as that eldest quintuplet whose job is to step in when things get heated to help calm down everyone down. As mentioned before, just because things are getting a little magical doesn't mean she should suddenly begin shying away from the situation like she's got nothing to do with it.
As if to taunt her, the sight of Itsuki's red Mystic Eyes flashes in Ichika's own.
Her youngest sister has never acted like that in her life, not from what Ichika is able to recall. Sure, Itsuki has gotten angry at the rest of them for various reasons, mostly because they love poking fun at her eating habits, but even when she had gotten seriously angry, all she would do is yell at Nino for a little while and that would be the end of that. Today, Itsuki seemed like a whole 'nother person, like someone else had taken over her body and acted in the name of Nakano Itsuki. Perhaps it was just the combination of Itsuki's extreme behavior, her Mystic Eye activation, and the situation at hand in which it all occurred, but Ichika just can't shake the lingering sense that she got hit with at the time that still persists now that Itsuki, at that moment, was the most dangerous person on Earth...and the fact that when Itsuki at that time cast her gaze upon Ichika herself for a split second she felt something wrap around her neck, almost like a hand that's tried to choke her out, does no favors for her jumbled thoughts on the matter.
Could she just chalk it up to base survival instinct, then? That Ichika wanted to evacuate from the area because her instincts were screaming at her to get the hell away from her youngest sister? Even if that were the case, the eldest quintuplet still doesn't feel very good about admitting that, since that still insinuates that she just wanted to run away from the situation and not help get her family back together.
The caramel frappuccino is starting to taste more bitter than sweet, but that's not its own fault. So this is it, huh? Finally the time has come for her and her sisters to enter a new period of their lives, one that would last for the rest of their lives, in fact: a period of magical involvement, when the quintuplets would no longer be able to live their lives ignorant of their true identities as mages. Ichika was the first to discover this, and as the oldest sibling, she has long wondered how long her family could live normal lives. Perhaps Nino was right about their tutor, at least partially, that his entrance into their lives would impact them heavily; as a fellow mage, Ichika should have anticipated things beginning to turn out like this.
And it scares Ichika, frankly, just like how Itsuki's magical development today has frightened her. Ichika has very little knowledge of the magical world, so she won't know how to protect her family or keep them together during times like these when the problems that they get embroiled in begin to involve magic. She doesn't want to feel helpless, and while she's much more open to recruiting Fuutarou's help for matters she cannot handle on her own than someone like Nino, Ichika still doesn't want Fuutarou to be the lead actor in this show. Perhaps Ichika understands her younger sister's feelings towards their tutor a bit better now.
Before she knows it, the eldest quintuplet, whose legs have been on auto-pilot this whole time as she's dunked her head into the infinite basin known as her memories, has arrived at the last intersection that she needs to cross to read the Pentagon grounds, so she stops at the pedestrian crossing to wait for her turn to cross the street, despite the fact that there is no vehicular traffic in sight at the moment.
"I don't know if you've ever bothered talking to girls in your life, but I hardly think following a girl through the city like that's supposed to be anything like good manners," the eldest quintuplet barks out suddenly, turning around next to the large industrial pole that serves to hold up the traffic lights over the street that she intends to cross.
True to her sudden accusation, a young man in a dark hoodie jacket stops in his tracks about ten meters behind Ichika. He didn't anticipate Ichika suddenly calling him out like this and thus had no time to duck out of sight behind something to hide himself. Lowering her half-drunk caramel frappuccino, the sharp-eyed quintuplet, with her lips growing as sharp as her eyes too, glares at the man who's been stalking her this whole way.
"Bring out your friends, too. I know they're there with you."
The hoodied man just grins nefariously, since his cover is blown already, and he simply raises his hand a little to have his two crewmates step into view next to him, seemingly out of nowhere, as they deactivate their own shoddy Presence Concealment spells that Ichika has been able to circumvent somehow.
"Tch...bitch saw through our Presence Concealment, how?" one of the amateur mages hisses in annoyance, clearly overestimating his own magical talent.
"Doesn't matter how she did it when it isn't gonna fuckin' help her. No one's around, so let's get her quick before anyone else sh - "
The cocky hoodied man glances back at the high school freshman standing next to the traffic light, who glares back at him with a glowing golden eye.
All three men's bodies jerk a little like they've been physically shaken where they stand, and the muscles in their necks go a little slack to make their heads hang a little, like they've had a little too much to drink tonight, on a Monday night of all nights. Their eyes are also glowing an eerie gold, all six of them. While the hoodied man who's been stalking Ichika out in the open is gazing down at the ground, listless and inactive just like a machine that's sitting idly without anything to do, the two mages are struggling to regain control of their bodies and break free of the immobilizing spell or whatever Ichika's just cast over them to stun them in place.
"Wh-What did you just to do us? And what the hell is that eye? Is that eye doing this?!" the enemy mage growls at the quintuplet.
"No, wait, I think - I think Boss told us something about this. Mystic Eyes, I think they were called? This bitch's gotta have one! There's no way she'd be stronger than us, we didn't even sense a magical signature off her for all this time!"
Ichika doesn't care much for these men's yapping, but that second mage did mention someone they refer to as "Boss", which means there's only one thing to do.
"Tell me who this 'Boss' of yours is," Ichika commands, taking another sip of her caramel drink. "Tell me everything you know."
"Our boss is a dude named Shirazumi Rio. He's a mage like us, but he's the strongest of us all. He's been rounding us up to scour the city for these quintuplet girls or whatever and to traffic drugs into the city," the second mage answers immediately, but as soon as he's done talking, he immediately cries out, "Wait, fuck! I didn't mean to say that! You bitch, are you putting a suggestion spell on us right now or something?! What the hell are you doing?!"
"Wouldn't you like to know. Anyways, keep talking - did this 'Shirazumi Rio' boss of yours specifically tell you to hunt me down tonight?"
"Yes, those've been our orders whenever we're not doing other shit like traffic drugs or test our drugs out on random idiots that we find. The guy in the middle saw you in the city tonight, and so he called for backup to help him detain and capture you," the first mage answers this time, and he, too, groans angrily at this forced interrogation. "Dude, we gotta fight it, man, we can't just keep feeding her info like this! Shirazumi's gonna fuckin' skin us alive if he finds out shit's been leaked!"
"But how the hell we do fight it, though!? It's not a spell, she's not using a spell!"
"Then do you know who the rest of my sisters are? Where we live? What they look like?"
The first mage again snaps to attention to speak against his will. "We don't know yet; we've been trying to find out information about you girls for the past couple of months as per our orders from Boss, but we just can't seem to find anything. We thought it'd be a cakewalk since, y'know, how many freakin' quintuplets do you know walking around, right? Usually it's just twins and that's about it. But we haven't found shit! Besides you, we don't know what your sisters look like, who they are, what they do - nothing! It's frustrating, dude - as frustrating as it is being forced to fucking talk!"
"I'm sure it is," Ichika mutters, doing her best to act nonchalant about the matter when in reality her active and glowing Mystic Eye is now beginning to get strained from overuse; she cannot maintain this interrogation for much longer, so she must ask just one more set of questions and end it before something dangerous happens that not even Ichika knows. "What about Uesugi Fuutarou? What do you know about him? What does your boss know about him?"
"We've heard Boss talk about him a few times but he hasn't given us any orders involving him; only that if we were to ever run into him, we ought to let him know about it - if we manage to get away from him alive, that is," the second mage answers this time. "But I've overheard Boss talking about how fun it'd be to kill him the next time they meet."
Squinting her right eye to deal with the accelerating pain, Ichika pushes her luck and asks one last question: "Did their first fight involve one of my sisters? One of the quintuplets?"
"Uh, I think so, Boss mentioned something about seeing one of the quints there and how he would've loved to capture her right then and there or something, I don't know beyond that."
"Alright, thanks. Forget everything that just happened here and never work for Shirazumi Rio again."
And Ichika releases her Mystic Eye's power.
Like puppets whose strings got suddenly cut, all three men crumple instantly to the ground, with nothing but gravity acting on them as they collapse into heaps on the sidewalk. None of them are moving, not even twitching, once they've come to rest on the pavement, and Ichika pays them no more heed as she turns around to quickly cross the empty street after looking both ways and hurries back to the high-rise before anything else can happen for the night.
As soon as she steps into the elevator and hits the button for the thirtieth floor, the eldest quintuplet herself crumples onto the floor, leaning exhausted against the elevator side across from the doors. That's the longest she's ever held her Mystic Eye for when the average amount of time she usually ever has to use it is only a few moments, if only to ask just a question or two. She's practiced using her Mystic Eye in the past just to see how long she can hold it, so she knows that she's not meant to hold it for too long, and she doesn't fancy finding out what happens if she does, if the scraping pain she feels inside her own eyeball is any indication for her not to do so.
Feeling sweat now dripping down her forehead, which she hasn't felt until now because of the adrenaline pumping in her blood vessels, Ichika quickly reaches into her bag and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe away the sweat so that Miku or whoever is still at home doesn't start asking questions she'd rather not answer. The elevator is very fast, given that this is a very recently built luxury high-rise, so she doesn't have much time at all to clean herself up before heading to the front door, but she manages it and stows her handkerchief away in her bag as she steps out of the elevator and practically runs to the front door to swipe her passcard and get inside before anything else can happen.
"Oh...welcome back," Nakano Miku greets her oldest sister as she pulls off her shoes and walks into view of the living room. Miku is studying on her own at the glass table, having stayed here instead of going up to her room to study so that she can also wait for her sisters to come back home - the ones who are willing to come back home, anyway.
"W-Where's everyone else? Still mad at each other?" Ichika asks, making a bit of an improper remark all things considered, but Miku doesn't seem to take offense to it and nods a little.
"Nino and Itsuki, yeah, but Yotsuba's still out there with Nino right now."
"They really ought to be getting back; at least Yotsuba if Nino's still mad about today," Ichika sighs, stopping by the glass table in the living room. "It's already, what, about to be nine o'clock? And we haven't even eaten dinner yet, have we? I should've thought ahead and ordered takeout for us at least..."
"I can cook for us tonight if you want me to - " Miku begins to offer, but Ichika raises a hand at her to stop her.
"Sorry, normally I'd be okay with you making dinner for a night, especially since Nino probably isn't gonna be back for a hot minute, but given that we've got finals at the end of the week, I'd rather not us get sidetracked by stomachaches and all that because you messed up your cooking. Sorry, but I'm getting us takeout."
Pouting a little, Miku can't bring herself to protest Ichika's logic and returns to her studying a bit dejectedly.
"By the way, can't you just call Yotsuba to see where she's at right now? She's got her phone, right?" the eldest quint asks her only currently available sister.
"Well...about that, Fuutarou met up with her and Nino and called me to let me know that Yotsuba has her phone...but she forgot to charge it, so..."
"Oh God, again? And at a time like this, too..."
"Fuutarou said that she and Nino are fine right now; it hasn't been that long since he called. And you know Yotsuba, she can just run all the way back here in no time."
"I guess that's true. I'm gonna go put my stuff away and go take a shower; it's been a long day today..."
So Ichika puts her bag and belongings back in her room and undresses, not bothering to take a towel from the bathroom first to cover herself up after she's undressed and simply waddles through the house buck naked, caring very little that one of her sisters can see her walking around in the nude like this if Miku merely looks up from her work at the glass table.
Stepping inside the shower stall and drawing warm water, Ichika gives the largest sigh that she's given in recent memory and stands underneath the showerhead, letting warm water pour down her body. The hearty warmth helps the oldest quintuplet relax - it would be even better if she were able to take a proper bath so that she can sit down and soak in the warmth - but she knows she can't do that, as she needs to focus on studying, lest she let all the hard work and effort that her tutor's put into teaching them go to waste.
The rejuvenating shower facilitates blood flow into her brain, which helps rapidly ease the pinching pain she feels in her right eye. It also makes it easier for Ichika's thoughts, heavy and laden with stress both physical and mental, to turn again like the gears in a machine, which in turn gets her thinking again, specifically about the information she's gained from those men who've tried stalking her back to her house. Now that she thinks about it, Ichika realizes that if she hadn't sensed the two mages following her, she would have led them straight to the quintuplets' home, since she was so preoccupied with her own thoughts while walking back home.
Shirazumi Rio...she's not sure if Fuutarou has mentioned this name specifically to her, and if he has then perhaps she's just forgotten since the name isn't immediately familiar, but she knows for a fact that Fuutarou has warned them of an enemy mage somewhere out there in the city who's coming after them and that he's the one Fuutarou is protecting the girls from. Not only do the girls have him to worry about, but apparently as she's found out not even half an hour ago, but the girls also have his cronies to worry about, too. By extension, those men at the warehouse two and a half months ago were probably collaborating with Shirazumi Rio too, now that Ichika thinks about it.
One of the hostile mages she interrogated with her Mystic Eye tonight complained about how they haven't been able to find anything on the quintuplets and how it's been frustrating for them specifically because these are quintuplets they're looking for. Indeed, now that Ichika thinks about it in hindsight, quintuplets are supposed to be extremely rare, right? Twins are rare enough, let alone triplets or quadruplets - but quintuplets? Ichika realizes that she's never had to think about herself and her sisters quite in this kind of retrospective manner since they've all grown up so closely with each other that them being quintuplets has long stopped being something interesting to them and has become more of a fact and less gossip.
On second thought, now that Ichika ponders this curious aspect of her interrogation further, that really is strange - all their lives, the quintuplets have never really been bothered by others about their collective identity as quintuplets. Well, hold on, it's not quite that extreme - the sisters have been marveled at before when they're all in one place together in an environment where they're surrounded by other people, so it's not like they haven't been gawked at like they're a bunch of zoo animals on exhibit before. But that's understandable, at least - what Ichika can't seem to get is why she and her sisters haven't been stopped on the street about their identity as quintuplets. Quintuplets are supposed to be extremely rare, right? Ichika herself certainly can't think of any other quintuplets out there, so shouldn't there have been, like, paparazzi and news reporters or something coming after them? Maybe not nowadays, but when they were younger? Not to give themselves more credit than they deserve, but Ichika feels like quintuplets being born could be a thing that'd be big news on the media, just given her own experience of consuming modern media outlets. Maybe such a thing happened when they were babies, right after they were born, which would be the most logical time to get hounded by such people when the news of their births was fresh and recent. And if that were the case, the eldest quintuplet feels even worse for their late mother, who must've had her hands full having to deal with such people.
Her own thoughts on the matter aside, Ichika focuses back on the facts: she and her sisters have not been badgered much at all about their whole quintuplets thing outside of a closed environment. All throughout their school years, regardless of the school they've attended, the Nakano girls have never needed to deal with such harassment. While Ichika is thankful that they've been spared such treatment, it does still come off as strange that it happened nowhere near as it probably should have; even stranger is that while they still attended Black Rose Academy, a supposedly prestigious school that was full of petty, gossipy teenage girls who were high off their own self-importance that they derived from their families' social standings and/or financial wealth, they did not receive such treatment. They weren't even referred to as quintuplets when the girls were alone, though when two or more of the Nakanos were together, they'd sometimes be addressed as such.
Ichika washes her short hair with shampoo and conditioner before rinsing her body off and stepping out to dry herself with a big bath towel. Beginning to dry her hair with a blow dryer to get rid of whatever moisture is left in it that her towel can't quite dry off manually, Ichika gazes into her own eyes in the huge mirror of the bathroom.
At least she's been able to confirm what happened during that incident when their tutor protected Itsuki from this Shirazumi Rio guy and brought her home safe; this tells her that Fuutarou does not intend anything malicious against her family, at least not right now, so it's probably reasonable to assume that Fuutarou is on their side.
But what if it's all just an act? Fuutarou himself told the girls that mages by nature should not be trusted, on the night when he rescued her and her sisters from the baddies at the warehouse and revealed his true identity to them. What if he has some kind of ulterior motive like Nino keeps claiming he does and is merely bearing with everything that's happened so far and will happen for the sake of a more overarching goal?
Ichika sets down her hair dryer to lean over the sink, her elbows pressing down uncomfortably against the hard marbletop. Just as Nino was starting to warm up to their tutor, even if today would threaten to suggest otherwise, now Ichika herself is beginning to have doubts? It's as if the quintuplets' doubt towards their tutor and classmate is a virus; Nino was infected at first, and now Ichika too? But especially tonight, now that she's gotten a bit of information off the men who tried stalking her, Ichika's mind is kicking open tons of doors in search of answers that she just isn't finding, doors that merely lead her to even more questions instead, and these additional questions are punching holes in her once amiable, easy-going friendship and trust of her tutor and classmate named Uesugi Fuutarou.
Perhaps all the questions that are popping into her head can be aggregated into one big, general inquiry: what is Fuutarou's true relationship to her and her sisters? Whether Nino meant it or not, her conjectures about the timing of Fuutarou's entrance into their lives do hold some weight. The part about his contract that he'd been hired to protect the girls from potential threats is true enough, but what about her sisters' Mystic Eyes? Why is it that in the next three months since the beginning of his tutoring contract with them, all of her sisters save for Yotsuba have been one by one developing their own Mystic Eyes? She herself is an outlier of course, but that's three out of the five of them who've evolved into magehood after Uesugi Fuutarou became their tutor, which is a solid majority - and when Yotsuba eventually and inevitably develops her own, then that'd be an even more solid four out of five. It also doesn't help that Fuutarou has freely informed the quintuplets that he's developed methods of tracking all of them, presumably because it'll make his job of safeguarding them easier so that in case any of them get kidnapped or something along those lines, he can more easily find them and recover them before something bad happens to the girls. But what if there's something more that he plans to do with that? And not to mention that he and their father, Nakano Maruo, clearly do not maintain a good relationship, if what little of it that they saw back down in Hawaii was any indication...
Is Fuutarou really there to tutor them and protect them?
Ichika washes her face with cold water in a feeble attempt to wash away her thoughts along with her fatigue, but that doesn't work out for her too well as she looks back up into her reflection that's still just as tired and confused as it was before it got dunked with two handfuls of cold water. Giving a deep sigh and drying her face with her bath towel, Ichika keeps her face buried in the folds of her towel for a few moments longer than necessary.
She doesn't want this. She doesn't want to become suspicious of Fuutarou. She doesn't want to give him a hard time like Nino's done for the majority of the past three months when his life is already full of hardship to begin with, even if the girls themselves can't see or understand what's he's going through fully. Just like what she told Miku the other week when they had Kiku over at their house to look after her for the day, Ichika wants to keep the most recent status quo going; she wants to keep hanging out with her sisters and Fuutarou, whether it be because of studying or not. She's grown comfortable with Fuutarou's presence among the quintuplets, for he provides another aspect of conversation and entertainment that the girls didn't know they liked, despite initial first impressions from both himself and the girls. Maybe it's because the girls have attended all-girls' schools all their lives, and so they've never regularly talked to boys their age, but then again, Fuutarou didn't seem like all that interesting of a guy at first, right? But as they've gotten to know their tutor more and vice versa, before the girls knew it, their tutor became one of their closest friends. To his credit, Fuutarou was also figuring out how the girls like to behave and converse and adjusting his own speech to better accommodate them, since Ichika gets the feeling that his behavior around the girls isn't a hundred percent natural, but it doesn't seem like Fuutarou himself minds all that much anyway.
The too-long, didn't read version is that Ichika considers the current situation among the quintuplets and Fuutarou to be the best that things will get; this is the peak of their collective relationship, a time when Nino doesn't absolutely hate his guts and everyone is willing to study with him and hang out with him, and Ichika doesn't know if it can get any better than this - actually, scratch that, that question's already been answered with her starting to develop doubt towards their tutor in Nino's place. But she doesn't want to do that; she doesn't want to become the new Nino and take over the role of the main antagonist in their family. And it'd be especially weird considering that Ichika was one of the girls who'd always been pretty nice to Fuutarou consistently.
You can't trust him.
Ichika lowers the towel in her hands. It's that voice again.
You know he's a threat.
Doing her best to ignore it, Ichika proceeds to wrap the bath towel around her body, but of course it wouldn't be that easy.
Just say it. You know what to do.
"Do I?" Ichika suddenly hisses, having enough of the voice in her head. "Because I clearly don't. But if you do, or you think you do, do what you want tonight. But harming anyone is strictly prohibited, am I clear?"
The voice doesn't speak again. Frowning deeply, Ichika exits the bathroom, having kept her voice down so that Miku won't hear her talking to herself, and walks out to the living room, finding Miku still studying at the living room.
"Still studying? You should get some sleep soon," the eldest quintuplet suggests, nodding up at the big clock built into the wall above their flatscreen TV.
Setting down her pencil, having finished her last practice problem right as Ichika suggested going to sleep, Miku leans back, getting up to her feet slowly and stretching her arms and legs out.
"Well, we still need to eat dinner, right?" Miku points out to her eldest sister, who jumps a little, having completely forgotten about food.
"O-Oh shoot, I totally forgot about dinner...let me get dressed, I'll order takeout right now. Do you have anything in particular that you want tonight?" the eldest sister asks, hurrying towards the stairs to go to her room.
"Er...not really...I'll just have whatever you're having," Miku shrugs. "I'll get some light snacks for us in the meantime while our food gets here."
So Ichika gets dressed in some pajamas in her room and orders takeout from a nearby ramen joint that she and her sisters have visited occasionally on their walks back home from school, which happens to deliver late at night as well; meanwhile, Miku fetches some matcha-flavored wafers from the snack cupboard and two cooled water bottles from the refrigerator to take back with her to the table, where she waits for Ichika to come back from ordering takeout.
"What did you order?" the third quintuplet asks, hearing her sister trudge back downstairs to rejoin her in the living room.
"Oh, just ramen. I didn't order anything to fancy, and I didn't order too much, considering how late it is right now. I don't you don't mind ramen."
Miku shakes her head. "Not really, it's been a while since we last had ramen. I'm not sure how healthy it is eating ramen this late at night, though..."
"I mean, it's not, but not much we can do right now when Nino isn't here, like I said before." Ichika takes a seat down next to her younger sister and decides to pass on the matcha wafers for now, opting to just wait for their dinner to arrive. "And eating ramen for dinner just this once isn't going to ruin our diets, and it's not like this is going to become a regular thing."
"But what if Nino doesn't come back tonight? What if she stays at a hotel like Itsuki's doing right now?" Miku asks. "And no one wants me to be cooking for too long, I get that. What, we're just gonna be eating takeout and delivery until Nino comes back?"
"W-Well, I'm sure I can find us some healthy takeout options. That, and you can practice your cooking every once in a while, but like, don't expect anyone to be a big fan of eating whatever you make..."
Ichika braces for the inevitable pout that Miku usually makes whenever someone disses her subpar cooking, but to her quiet surprise, Miku merely pulls her legs up in an upright fetal position again, as she's prone to do whenever she enters a pensive mood, and hugs her legs tightly against her chest again.
"...I'm getting worried again," she murmurs, nibbling on a matcha wafer.
"About the others, right? Yeah, it's pretty late now, isn't it...considering what's been happening lately, too..."
"Hopefully Fuutarou can help sort things out for us, even if this isn't something he should have to do..."
"You know he's the kind of person who'd do it anyway. This is Fuutarou-kun we're talking about here," Ichika remarks as she twists open the cap of one of the chilled water bottles to take a drink. "Once he's set his mind on something, you can't stop him. He's going to see this one through until it's all resolved."
Miku then glances up slightly from the top of her knees and locks eyes with her oldest sister.
"...and what about you, Ichika?"
"Hm? What about me?"
"Why don't you go help him too?"
Ichika blinks back at Miku.
"...huh?"
Running at full speed, Uesugi Fuutarou brakes himself to stop at the bench where Nakano Nino was sitting at the time of his departure. After securing Itsuki at his own home, at around the same time that his father returned home from his venture downtown and listening to his sister scold him for coming home so late, Fuutarou checked on Nino and Yotsuba only to realize, to his horror, that their signatures were now missing. And worse, try as he might to get his rune network to pick up whatever trails they've left behind, they've disappeared from the detection of his sensor runes. So he's teleported to the nearest active teleportation rune he's set up in this area and run over on the off-chance that the quintuplets are still here in case whoever's captured them, most likely Shirazumi Rio, is using them as bait to draw him out, but there is no sign of any one of them in this park now.
Clenching his teeth in frustration, Fuutarou is mentally kicking himself - this is the first time in a long while that he's fucked up this badly. Not only did he not look after himself with his busy-ass work schedule that's finally caught up to him and forced him to sleep in his own students' house on what should've been a proper tutoring day, but because of that, he's failed to prevent a conflict among the quintuplets from exploding into a situation like this, which then invited what's practically the worst-case scenario to occur, with two quintuplets totally missing and unable to be accounted for.
Why aren't his sensor runes working as they should? Even if Nino and Yotsuba are taken captive and forcefully relocated elsewhere, he should still be able to track their exact coordinates; hopefully this isn't the case, but even if they were killed, he'd still be able to track them, since a mage's energy signature still persists even after death for a period of time before expiring completely, so there'd at least be a trail for him to follow. The problem is that there simply isn't a trail that exists that'll at least give him an idea of where they could've gone; Fuutarou is wholly in the dark as far as the quintuplets' whereabouts are.
The only explanation that he can come up with right now on the spot is that Rio must have found out how he's been monitoring activity in the city via his system of surveillance runes, and he's somehow sabotaged them to render them unable function as intended. The scary part is that if this is the case, Rio must have done so without letting Fuutarou know that his runes have been tampered with, which would explain why the cursory checks that he's given his runes while he was spending time with Itsuki earlier tonight didn't tip him off to the fact that Nino and Yotsuba were missing until it was far too late.
As his mind races, Fuutarou then realizes that the rune sabotage theory is probably the correct one: if Rio was the one who set him up the bomb that he found in the big drug cache in the middle of the city earlier, a bomb that had a magical detonation rune on it, then he'd know how to mess with runes of his own. As much as he doesn't want to, Fuutarou finds himself quietly acknowledging Rio's magical rune knowledge, which is rather surprising, given what his usual fighting style is like. But now isn't the time to be giving props to his enemy, now is the time for action. Every second that passes is another second that ticks down Nino's and Yotsuba's lives, and no one understands this better than a mage like himself.
Having noticed a blotch of blood on the ground upon his arrival, Fuutarou turns to it and hurries over to analyze it, setting a hand over it and casting a small blue rune of his own to see if he recognizes whose it is - and luckily, the faint magical signature that it exudes matches that of Nino's. Scanning the immediate area forensically, analyzing the blood and the manner in which it's been spilled, Fuutarou determines that it roughly matches that of a stab wound, more or less confirming that Shirazumi Rio had a direct hand in the kidnapping of the two quintuplets who were here. This can only mean that Nino is injured, and given the amount of blood that's been spilled, she's hurt quite badly, which puts even more weight on the back of his mind to add to what already existed upon realizing how bad the situation's gotten.
Just in case he gets lucky, Fuutarou quickly pulls out his phone and dials his father's number, scanning his area swiftly to make sure there isn't anyone else nearby to eavesdrop on him.
"Yuh huh, what's up, kiddo?" Isanari's usual deep a jovial voice greets him, but Fuutarou has no time to banter with him.
"This is urgent - Nino and Yotsuba are missing; they're most likely kidnapped by Shirazumi Rio and I can't track them. Can you open Dragon right now and see if you can find them?"
"Yeah, yeah, got'cha. Gimme a sec..." Isanari sounds casual, but Fuutarou knows that his father is taking this situation very seriously now too, because if the situation isn't critical, then he always takes the time to talk shit or blab about something irrelevant at the start.
"I can't stay here long since I have to try to pick up Rio's trail, but I can't find anything in this area; I suspect Shirazumi probably sabotaged the runes I have here to mask his exfiltration. Let me know if you find something."
Not even waiting for his dad to answer, Fuutarou closes his phone and continues to gaze down at the bloody patches on the sidewalk. His forensics rune has now picked up traces of the same magical energy that he's felt when he himself got struck with one of Rio's knife runes, so if there were still any doubt about who the perpetrator could be, there sure as hell isn't now.
"Seem ta be havin' a bit 'a trouble there, Uesugi."
The instant he hears this voice, Uesugi Fuutarou bolts up to his feet from his hunch over the blood and darts his hand into his storage rune that's appeared at the ready to provide his playing card ammunition. He just scanned this area for any nearby presences and signatures, so how the fuck is there someone who went under his radar completely like this when his scanning runes are strong enough to get past any Presence Concealment spell or other such stealth spells that he's come across? Actually, here are a few better questions: why can't he detect any sort of presence from this girl at all, not even that of a normal passerby, and why does he recognize her voice perfectly?
Now for possibly the worst question that he can ask himself: what is Nakano Ichika doing out here in this park in the middle of the night?
Nakano Ichika stops about ten meters away from her tutor, who's on full alert right now, gazing at her strongly with the intention of engaging in a fight if need be. The same divine golden aura, subtle but visible plain as day in this nighttime darkness, glows from her eye -
- her left eye.