A/N

It appears that this fic has attracted a few more readers in yet another absence from writing of mine. Thank you to all the kind words as of late; with any luck I'll somehow find a way to write on a regular basis to repay your readership.

"A-Alright, alright, you win, okay!? You don't need to kill us over this!"

A very frightened gang leader, after witnessing one of his henchmen get his arm broken with a mere palm strike and another get knocked unconscious from having his head driven into a nearby wall, both by a boy who looks like he isn't any older than a high schooler, realizes that the boy in the snapback cap and dark hoodie who is now approaching him and the rest of his equally frightened gang members with a slow gait that he and his crew are no match for him and capitulate immediately. A lone warehouse light illuminating this forsaken alley on the edge of the abandoned sector of the city is all that is needed to display Uesugi Fuutarou's moderate but still somehow commanding presence as he slowly makes his way to the men who stand uncertainly before him.

"The cache's inside! We're just lookin' over it, y'know?" the leader of this small six-man gang, down two men currently thanks to Fuutarou's efforts, blurts out nervously, watching Fuutarou's every move. The henchman who was knocked out still lies still near the wall where his head met it, and the other gangster whose forearm got broken when he tried to attack Fuutarou for knocking one of their own out has staggered back to the perceived safety of his fellow gangbangers, holding his newly busted arm gingerly and trying his best to manage the pain.

"W-Wait, we're just - we're just gonna let 'im waltz in? What's Boss gonna do when he finds out?" one of the uninjured gangsters asks aloud in alarm when they realize that Fuutarou isn't headed for the rest of them but rather for the side door to the moderately-sized warehouse beside them.

"You wanna fuckin' try 'n stop him? Be my fuckin' guest!" the gang leader spits back. "And fuck Shirazumi, we ain't paid enough for this shit to put up with hospital bills that're double our goddamn rent for the month! Next time he ought'a give us more bodies so we can actually chance a chance against this dude!"

Listening carefully to the men argue briefly among themselves in a subtle attempt to glean any kind of useful information off them naturally, Fuutarou stops before the door, trying the knob but finding it locked. One of the other unscathed gangsters, seeing Fuutarou try the lock, gingerly asks out, "Hey, uh, you need the key or somethin'?"

To his and the rest of his crew's shock and subsequent dismay, though, Fuutarou proves that he needs no such item to grant himself access, as he takes a step back and merely applies the bottom of his shoe to the door, right below the locked handle, to brute-force his way through and kick the door wide open with a magically powered kick.

"I'll have to ask you all to vacate this area," Fuutarou suddenly notifies the men behind him. "Make sure to take that guy I knocked out with you, 'cause I'm just gonna leave his ass here once I'm done here. If he or the guy whose arm I just broke want it, you can get treatment for your injuries at the hospital downtown - just mention the name 'Nakano' at the front desk and tell them you need treatment."

The men just stand there, glancing among themselves being unsure of what to make of the young mage's words, so Fuutarou turns to them threateningly with a simple pivot.

"Now. Before I decide to kill you all instead."

Such words are more than enough to put some gas in their feet, and the gangsters hurry out of the area without another word, with two of the uninjured henchmen picking up their unconscious comrade to carry him with them as they leave. Following them with his eyes only, Fuutarou tracks them from in front of the busted door even as they slip out of sight with his magic tracking runes to make certain that they are leaving for good before turning his attention to the drug cache inside this small warehouse.

The familiar musky odors of old boxes and other cheap packaging material hit the mage's nose as soon as he steps inside, though honestly he was able to smell such a scent from the outside anyway. In very recent times, Fuutarou has noticed on his own personal drug bust runs like this one tonight that the drug cartels around the city have been resorting to using low-quality packing material to ship their contraband - a sign that, almost miraculously, the constant police busts and ones that Fuutarou himself has been conducting are finally beginning to take their toll on the drug runners. Having a considerable amount of experience in logistics thanks to working with his father Isanari, Fuutarou knows that what is more likely to limit these drug rings' ability to circulate drugs isn't the drugs themselves, but rather their means of circulation - elements such as manpower and shipping material. Since it would be a bit much even for someone like Fuutarou to go after their manpower, as that would obviously involve constantly killing people, he has instead settled to play the long game of diligently hunting down drug caches large and small around the city, since his work would aid the city police in their own drug busting efforts, even if they will never come to know of it. And sure enough, after these last several months of consistent raids, the drug rings are beginning to show signs of weakness, though the fight against the city's black market is far from over - and of course, Fuutarou himself is only concerned with Shirazumi Rio's personal involvement in all this.

Perhaps the drug rings' ability to produce and import drugs itself is also being impacted, for this stockpile appears to be yet another small drug cache, the fifth one this week, in fact. Fuutarou quietly takes a mental note of this as he inspects the contents carefully, looking for signs of Heisei or variants of Heisei that he hasn't seen before or other new drugs that demand his attention. Public police reports and the media that is tracking police drug bust progress in the city also confirm that successful drug raids are turning up more and more smaller-scale stockpiles, with drastically less big hits compared to a few months prior. The young mage does doubt that the city drug runners are somehow unable to keep up the rate at which they're bringing drugs into the city or making it themselves; rather, he believes that this is a coordinated response on their part to reduce the amount of their wares that they're losing to the police and his own personal vigilante work. But for them to do so would be another growing logistical nightmare on their part, because they would need to assign more gangs to transport and safeguard more stockpiles around the city and be able to keep track of them all, and there are only so many juvenile delinquents or unemployed middle-aged men freshly fired from their black companies downtown to pull recruits from to replace the ones whom they lose every day, or just about.

While Fuutarou is thinking about how Shirazumi's gang is personally reacting to the current situation, his phone vibrates quietly in his pocket, and he pulls it out to check the notification. The number that he sees in the new text message he's just received surprises him silently, and he immediately stands up from where he was kneeling to inspect some drugs to dial the number from whom he has received this text. After a few seconds, the call is promptly picked up.

"That was quick. You really wanna talk about this, huh."

Forgoing the need for any pleasantries, Fuutarou takes a seat on an unopened crate of drugs nearby as he begins talking to his usual informant.

"One of my students, her name is Miku...her Eyes are awakening really fast, from what I can tell. More so than the rest of her sisters. They've been bothering her for quite a while, but now it's at the point where I feel like something big's gonna happen, and it probably won't be pretty, given what you've told me about these Mystic Eyes."

"Yeah, and going off the description you gave me about Miku's Mystic Eyes in particularly, you aren't gonna like what you're about to hear."

"I've lived most of my life hearing things I don't like hearing, you know this."

"That I do, but unfortunately this is one of the worse ones I'm gonna have to tell you, since I have something of a personal connection to the Eyes that I believe Miku's got. They're called the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, one of the rarest forms of Mystic Eyes in the world - to the point where quite a few in the magical world even believe they don't even exist at all, at least not anymore. While they're wrong to think that, I only know of two other Death Perception holders in the world...well, technically three, but for all intents and purposes two, and with the addition of Miku, all three of them are from Japan for some reason..."

"I remember you mentioning them before. What do they do, exactly?"

"A ton of bullshit, to put it bluntly. You can write an entire college thesis about them, so I'll do my best to summarize as relevantly as I can. Basically, Death Perception lets the user literally see death - the lines and dots that Miku described to you that she's seeing are more or less manifestations of death in the objects she's seeing them on. You mentioned earlier that Miku told you about a time where she accidentally split the side of a cup apart with just her thumb when she traced it by mistake? That's what she was doing."

Fuutarou narrows his eyes. "But a cup isn't alive, at least not in the same sense as, say, a human being."

"Good observation. You're right, a cup can't be said to be 'living' like us humans or other actual living organisms. But death doesn't have to be applied only to living things just because they're the usual victims of death - even inanimate objects can 'die', just in different ways. In my opinion, what's going on here is that Miku saw a 'flaw' in the cup she broke. We know that perfection cannot be achieved in the normal world, unlike what the vast majority of conventional mages like to delude themselves into believing - therefore, everything in existence has a flaw, no matter how small. So the 'death' in living beings and the 'flaws' in inanimate objects are treated as one and the same...or, so the first theory goes."

"There're more?"

"Just a second one, thankfully, which goes like this: rather than the concept of 'death', what Miku may be seeing is the 'end' of an object, be it inanimate or living. Everything in existence has a beginning and an end - for us humans and other living things, usually our end is recognized as 'death', so that's a simple concept to grasp. But for inanimate objects, they can't 'die' in the sense that we do, but they can still be destroyed. Take a car, for example; it's not like you can 'kill' it, but you can damage it to such an extent that its existence as a car is shattered and thus prevent it from ever being repaired back to being a car again. Well, you can, but it can be damaged so badly to the point where repairing it might just feel like you're putting an entirely new car back together or something. Chemical reactions such as burning paper also count, since you can't take the ashes from burning paper and turn it back into paper - not without magic or alchemy, at least. Point is, everything, even gods and concepts, have an eventual end. Obviously for things like concepts, their 'ends' are much, much harder to tamper with as a regular human, even for a Mystic Eye holder, but for ordinary, day-to-day things like a kitchen cup, Miku should easily be able to perceive its 'end'."

The young mage sitting on a crate of contraband drugs stays silent, taking a few moments to process everything that he's learned.

"That's the long and short of it. I'd love to sit you down and tell you more about them, but I take it that you're too busy to just sit down and chat for too long. Just as a tangent, though, in the Mages' Association, they have this ranking system that they use to help them categorize the strength of different kinds of magecraft, and Mystic Eyes are included in them. Specifically, Death Perception eyes are ranked Rainbow - the highest possible rank of magecraft."

"Why didn't you tell me about these before, if these Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are considered to be so strong?" Fuutarou inquires quietly but firmly. "I only even knew about them at all because of, like, one time you happened to mention them and I just happened to remember it."

"Because like I said, Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are hilariously rare, again to the point where it's widely believed to not exist at all, at least not right now. The other two Death Perception holders' whereabouts are unknown, so as of right now, according to me, anyway, with Miku being another confirmed Death Perception holder, she's the only one in the world who has them. They sound like they're not fully developed yet, but they're definitely Death Perception eyes - I don't really know of any other Mystic Eye that has these specific symptoms that Miku has from what you've told me."

"And why are they so rare? I know that Mystic Eyes can seem pretty random on what you get if you somehow get them through natural means like how the quints got them."

An audibly patient sigh comes from the other side of the call.

"Think, kid, think, I taught you to do that much at least, didn't I? What do you think happens to the average human brain when their eyes suddenly start seeing literal death everywhere they look?"

"...some bad shit, I guess?"

"Not just 'I guess' - humans just aren't meant to see certain things, and concepts in their raw, unfiltered forms, especially something like death, will fuck with us bad if we happen to see them or perceive them at all. Death is particularly bad since as living creatures, humans like ourselves naturally want to stay alive; death is not supposed to be second nature or natural to us because it fundamentally clashes with our base instinct as living creatures which is to live. So depending on the person and how mentally strong they are or how mentally accustomed to death they already are, the raw perception of death may degrade their mental status at varying rates."

"That lines up with what Miku's experiences with her Mystic Eyes so far have been like. Severe discomfort, trauma-levels of stress when dealing with her nightmare..."

"Exactly. So to answer your original question, while obviously I can't be a hundred percent sure that this is the case, my personal theory is that while Mystic Eyes of Death Perception can naturally manifest at a 'regular' rate, as regular as Eyes like that can get, the vast majority of people who do end up with them simply can't handle the sheer stress of having such eyes. I'd go so far as to hypothesize that many suicide cases around the world may be because the victims ended up developing very early stages of Death Perception Eyes, but they never fully developed since their holders mostly went insane and were driven to killing themselves because of whatever reactions they had to seeing death in whatever interpretations they saw of it. Again, we'll never know if that's truly the case, but..."

"So not only are their occurrence rates just naturally rare to begin with, but the holders have to survive having them for them to fully develop."

"More or less. You said that Miku probably had hers for about three years by now, right?"

"It sounds like it from what she's told me, but I think the symptoms only started relatively recently."

"But she had an accident that put her in the hospital, right?"

"She did, yeah."

"Then they probably first formed then, and they just took a while to fully manifest. Quite the long incubation period, honestly...but our sample size of actual Death Perception holders is so low that I'm not sure if that's really out of the ordinary or not."

Fuutarou takes another pause, wondering where he should take the conversation next for a moment.

"Since it seems like Miku's Eyes are beginning to fully awaken, is there anything I can do to keep making sure that she can live as normal a life as possible?" he asks quickly, but the first thing he gets in return is a quick laugh.

"A normal life? As a Death Perception holder? You're sounding like how you were when I first met you way back when - well-meaning and serious but naive as fuck. Miku's Eyes sound like they're well on their way to manifesting fully; at that point, there's no hope of her having this 'normal life' that you speak of. There are three outcomes that she's looking at now at this point: first, she fails to get them under control or she constantly ignores them hoping that they'll just kind of go away on their own, and then her Eyes get too strong. Outcome? Mind go boom. Two, she manages to learn how to control them but isn't able to fully master them, so she spends the rest of her life in a constant battle with her own Eyes just to keep them from making outcome number one happen. And if at any point she fails to do that, outcome: mind go boom. The hardest outcome to have happen, naturally, then, is if she does somehow fully master her Mystic Eyes to the point where she can control it flawlessly, but...that's extremely unlikely, to say the least. And I'm not saying that because of our pathetically low sample size of Death Perception holders - mastering those eyes is essentially only one or two steps removed from mastering death as a whole fucking concept, which is like reaching the Root in the magical world, which is kind of the ultimate goal that the magical world wants to achieve, as much as I think it's completely stupid and delusional."

"Then by extension, none of the other quints can lead a normal life, then."

"Depends on what their Eyes are, but it's just that Death Perception is such an dangerously powerful kind of Mystic Eyes to have that it will impact your life permanently once it manifests. I would say Miku is actually very lucky that her Mystic Eyes were able to confine themselves to that nightmare that you say she keeps having; from what I know of the other Death Perception holders, their Eyes forced them to see death when they were conscious as soon as they got them. I mean, without some sort of magical way of suppressing them, you'd walk around just seeing death everywhere you look; it would be impossible for you to live life completely unmolested by something like that."

"Then you're just telling me to let those Eyes of hers run their course? But isn't that what we've been doing for the past however many weeks it's been ever since we first learned that the girls have Mystic Eyes in the first place? Surely there's something I can do to help Miku keep her eyes in check or something?"

"Well, if I recall correctly, you did tell me about Nino and how she wears contacts to hide the fact that her eye color is purple or something like that."

The mention of Nino's special contact lenses immediately rings a bell in the young mage's head.

"...then it seems I'll have to ask their dad for another set or something," he murmurs darkly.

"Kinda sounds like you're not really fond of that idea."

"I'm really not, no, I'll be honest."

"Tough luck, though, since it's your only option by the sounds of things."

"I can't have you make something of your own instead?"

"On top of all the other shit you owe me? Not a chance, kid. Besides, you forget that I'm not really good at making magical stuff, I'm not too versed in Item Construction or things like that, and the few people I know who are good at that are all busy at the moment. My question is, why'd it take you this long to realize that the quints' dad is basically your only option if you want to make sure Miku keeps her eyes under control? Especially when you already knew that's what happened with Nino or whoever the other girl was."

"I didn't think Miku's Mystic Eyes would progress this much, and I didn't know the details behind the nature of Death Perception until just now, now that you've let me know. If I'd recognized Miku's symptoms earlier or understood the sheer gravity of the situation better, obviously I would've acted a lot faster."

"Well, better late than never. Again, Miku is really lucky to even still be alive even after the last three years of having Death Perception. Either she's the toughest girl you'll ever meet or she's truly blessed, and by what I'd like to know." Fuutarou's informant clears his throat briefly once he's done.

"This probably won't matter now, but I'm still rather curious: what even caused her to develop those specific eyes in the first place? Is there a way to know now, three years after the fact?"

"Again, since our sample size of Death Perception holders is so low, I can't determine something like with a hundred percent certainty, but funnily enough, the other holders also ended up acquiring their own Mystic Eyes through accidents that put them in the hospital too - I guess a requirement is that they need to be involved in an accident bad enough to land them in a hospital somewhere? Jokes aside, tell me the circumstances behind Miku's incident - maybe I can glean something off that."

"Apparently at her middle school, someone, probably a classmate of hers by the sounds of it, punched her in the back of the head and knocked her out."

An awkward pause follows Fuutarou's very short anecdote.

"...that's it," he finishes, unsure of his informant's hesitation.

"...that's it?"

"Yeah. Unless Miku's hiding something from me, which I don't think she is."

"Huh. That simple, huh..."

"Expecting something more dramatic?"

"At least when I'm comparing it to how the other holders got theirs; their accidents involved them getting very close to death or interacting with death in their own ways, at least, but Miku just got knocked out cold and she still ended up with Death Perception? She really is blessed - or cursed, depending on how you look at it."

"She'd say cursed."

"I'd imagine so. I will say this - Miku getting hit in the back of the head means that her occipital lobe got struck. Normally, magic circuits shouldn't be able to be altered by mere physical means, but this is the brain we're talking about. Aren't you a doctor, kid? You should'a known this even without asking me."

"I had my suspicions but like you said, I couldn't imagine Miku getting Mystic Eyes just because someone gave her a concussion, so I decided not to jump to that conclusion."

"Fair enough." The young mage's distant friend gives off a moderate sigh. "You've already told me that you're against the idea of teaching those girls magecraft, so I won't sit here telling you to do that. However, understand that the moment Miku developed her Mystic Eyes when she got put in the hospital a couple years ago was the moment when she lost her life as a normal person who had nothing to do with magic or the magic world, which also means that the only one who can reliably guide her into the magic world whom she can trust is you. This also applies to the other girls as well if they end up being in the same situation, which is very likely even if their own Mystic Eyes all end up being different. You obviously care for them enough to have done everything you have so far for them, so at this point what's stopping you from teaching them magecraft?"

"So you're basically telling me to teach them magecraft."

"I said that I wouldn't do that. I'm saying that logically speaking, given Miku's and her sisters' circumstances at this very moment, it's in your best interest to teach them a little magecraft, something that they can use to defend themselves at the very least. Need I remind you that the two of us are both quite the rational thinkers? That was a major reason why I even decided to teach you magecraft myself back when we first met. And knowing how you think about things, I feel like you should've come to this conclusion yourself sooner or later. So this isn't me telling you to teach them; this is what you should be doing, and I'm just wondering why you're hesitating on pulling the trigger."

"Their dad...Maruo is the main reason," Fuutarou clicks his tongue in slight annoyance. "He wouldn't agree with it, and he's the person I work for."

"Is that it? From what I understand, you don't really give a rat's ass about him, so why's he stopping you?"

"I like being professional. Yeah, he and I don't get along, but he's still my boss, and I feel like teaching his girls magecraft is something he'll have a problem with, and so I won't do it. Simple as that."

"Mkay, if you say so."

"Besides, I don't even have the time to teach them magecraft; I've already got a big enough shitfest on my hands in this city trying to find that Shirazumi motherfucker, and what time I do spend with the girls is tutoring them so that they don't go back to being middle schoolers again. Where am I gonna find the time to teach them magecraft in the middle of all that?"

"Easy, just take a day in your tutoring schedule to teach them magecraft instead of school stuff. Just needs to be a single day, not every day or something."

"Well, they need all the tutoring days in regards to their schoolwork that they can get, given how their grades are now - they barely were able to drag them out of flat-out failing this trimester. Besides, the magecraft I know is the kind you taught me - do you really want me to be teaching them something like that?"

"Sure, I don't mind. Besides, we both know magecraft as a whole is on the fast track to extinction in this world - even if you teach your girls my magecraft, there won't be enough old-school mages around to bitch and make a big deal out of it. I'd even go so far as to say that old-school magecraft overall will be too weak to hold its own compared to what I've taught you and what you might teach others in the future if you do change your mind. Also, remember that my magecraft is specifically made for people like you, which should also be perfect for the girls you're tutoring."

The stressed young mage sighs heavily, rubbing his brow with his phone still up to his ear.

"Seems like you're still not sold on this, so I'll say one more thing before I go fuck off: either you can try to teach Miku and the others magecraft so that they'll have at least some idea of what they're doing with their powers, or you can let them develop on their own with no idea what's going on, with a chance that their Mystic Eyes, namely Miku's, might grow out of control and become a danger to not only herself but to others around her, including you. And this is all the more so now that you know Miku has Death Perception, one of, if not the most dangerous Mystic Eyes in existence right now that we know of."

"...I'll think about it."

"For your own sake, at least, I hope you do."

"For now, though, I should contact Maruo and ask him if he's willing to get some contacts for Miku too."

"I thought you just said you're not on friendly terms with the guy?"

"What other choice do I have, now that Miku's Mystic Eyes are at this point where they're starting to affect her life outside of her nightmare?"

"Not much else, yeah. Though, now that you mention it, I'd love to know what sort of contacts Nakano Maruo has to have access to someone who knows how to build Mystic Eye Killers...but anyways, is there anything else you wanna talk to me about, kid?"

"No, that'll be all. Thanks for the info as always."

"I'll just put it on your tab as always, too. What about the rest of your work? How's city cleanup going so far?"

"Making progress, slowly but surely. City police's been doing work too, surprisingly enough, I didn't think they'd get as much work busting drug caches as much as they have so far, so that's been helping me a bit."

"Local police forces doing actual impactful work? News to me, at least from where I'm from."

"Matter of fact, you called me while I was in the middle of investigating another cache that I tracked down tonight, and I need to get back to it now."

"Alright then, just let me know if you need anything."

Fuutarou taps the call off and pockets his phone to return to his work curtly as though he never had been called at all. Opening the box on which he's taken a seat to take his call just now, he finds at the very top of the box's contents what appears to be a hastily written manifesto of some kind, if these drug runners are even that diligent to bother writing shipping manifestos for black market contraband. Perhaps they would need to now, if they're to be this organized to be able to field multitudes of these smaller drug caches throughout the city now...

But what initially starts as a cursory glance at the shoddy manifesto's contents turns into a sharpened, deeper look when Fuutarou is able to glean a concerning situation from it, so he picks up the manifesto to give it a more in-depth read:

Shirazumi's been ordering us to send out more and more of these drug caches lately, smaller ones too, not the big ones that we used do earlier this year. I don't know why he's making us do this, and he won't explain either - and I get the feeling that if I press the issue too much, he'll fucking kill me and eat me like what he does for the people we bring him sometimes. We had a good thing going with the bigger drug caches, so I don't know why he's making the process way more complicated getting all these smaller stockpiles. Not only that, but before, we put them in places that made sense to store them - usually downtown or at least the suburbs immediately around downtown. But now he's having us plant these smaller caches all around the city, like this one that's supposed to go all the way out to the industrial boondocks! Our drug runs don't even go out this far, so what's the point of sending a shipment out all the way there? Not to mention, the police seems to be finding a lot of these smaller caches we've been hiding anyway, even the ones that we've hidden in places that should normally take them like months to find - how the fuck are they finding them so fast? And maybe even more to the point: where the hell are we even getting this many drugs to ship around the city? Where's Shirazumi getting all this from?

And that's not all. I've been hearing rumors among the grunts that some of them have been going missing, and not because they're being taken out by the kid Shirazumi sometimes rages about or because they're being arrested by the police. One of the guys who works at my storehouse said that another gang rolled up to his and told them to go with them to somewhere, and when they asked where and why, the other gang wouldn't say, just that they were under orders to, and both these gangs are our boys, too. He said that there was a short fight between them before the other gang gave up and left, but apparently other smaller gangs weren't so lucky, because I know for a fact that some of our own guys are just gone for no reason and we can't find them anywhere.

Yoshinori, you know what kind of guy Shirazumi's like, we both do. We can't stay drug runners forever even if the money's good, at least not in this city. Either we bail sooner rather than later or move to another city to do this sort of thing - shit's getting real fucking weird nowadays and I don't like it. It might just be the grunts for now, but what's to say that we aren't the next ones to go missing?

Make sure to destroy this after you've read it - I'll definitely be the next one to disappear if Shirazumi finds out I've written this, and even though I obviously won't leave my name on this, I wouldn't doubt it if he has a way to figure out that it's me anyway.

Furrowing his brows, Uesugi Fuutarou first snaps a picture of the manifesto with his phone to make a back-up copy before taking the hastily written manifesto itself and slipping it inside his storage rune.

Nakano Itsuki sighs heavily herself after swallowing a big bite out of her grilled cheese sandwich. Across from her at their outdoor table sits her older sister Nakano Nino at a streetside cafe called Downtown Tavern, and Nino is absentmindedly watching her younger sibling dig into her lunch.

"I thought I was being quite the naughty one, essentially going on a dinner date with Uesugi-kun, but now you are telling me that you have done the same?" Itsuki shakes her head disapprovingly, wiping her mouth politely with her napkin while Nino takes a sip from her non-alcoholic apple cider cocktail, topped with few slices of fresh red apple. "It would seem that I had nothing to worry about after all!"

"You still do, bitch, that should've been me to go on that dinner date with him!" Nino seethes quietly, chomping on one of her apple slices in annoyance.

"Oh come off it, you at least ate lunch with him, are you already forgetting about that?"

"But dinner is so much more romantic, though..."

"That's right, you do still care about that sort of stuff..."

"G-Got a problem with it, huh?!"

"Not at first, but if you insist on making a big deal out of it..."

"Hmph." Nino indignantly slurps through her straw, starting to feel miffed at Itsuki's attitude. "Funny how you go from all shy and reserved and stuff before your dinner date with Fuutarou to being all snappy with me just because I wanted to do the same right after. And I even decided to tell you about it like a good older sister!"

"Please do not abuse your older sister privilege in a situation like this!" Itsuki cries, taking an annoyed bite of her own out of her sandwich, with the crunch of the toast of her piping hot grilled cheese sandwich inadvertently adding emphasis at the end of her sentence. "Besides, I was the first one to suffer the humiliation of having my feelings for Uesugi-kun revealed to him the way they were."

"Oh, so now you're taking advantage of the situation and trying to assert dominance that you were first, huh? That what you're doing right now?"

"I-I am doing no such thing! I just find it quite amusing that no sooner do I go out on a date with Uesugi-kun, one of the rest of you follows suit almost immediately after."

"You sure don't sound amused..." Nino smirks a little. "But even though I was only half-kidding about that, you sure sound a lot more assertive about this matter. I figured you'd be all shy and bashful about it like you usually are."

Itsuki nods slowly while chewing thoughtfully. "This comes as a surprise to me as well. I find it a little difficult to believe that I am having such a conversation with one of my sisters right now about having dates with Uesugi-kun, let alone the fact that it's you I am having this conversation with."

"Wait, what - what the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, if you think about what happened between the two of us in particular just the other month..."

"Oh, right...you mean that..." Nino awkwardly twirls a lock of her own short hair in her index finger. "Well, hopefully this won't become another thing that we end up fighting over..."

"Even disregarding that, I am surprised to learn that you also had feelings of your own for him," the youngest quint notes. "I mean, we all knew that you were warming up to him slowly over time, but to think that you would come out like this and tell me that you like him too..."

Blushing a little but merely looking away, Nino clicks her tongue. "Like, come on, I wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret forever from the rest of you guys, especially not Ichika, either. There's no sneaking things like this past a girl like her."

"Now that I think about it, I suppose it is actually like you to tell me all about your own date with him, seeing that you like doing things your own way."

"If you put it like that, then sure, I guess. I just heard about your date with him through Fuutarou himself when we were just chatting around, so I figured I'd ask you about your own experience being on a date with him."

Itsuki lets out a small giggle. "Well, he was not much different than what he is usually like as our tutor. Same attitude and way of speaking and all that."

"So the same with you, huh..."

"This is Uesugi-kun we are talking about. Why, would you like him to act a little differently?"

"Kind of, yeah, actually! With the way he usually is, he's soooooo boring..." Nino complains, suddenly leaning forward in her seat now that she's locked onto something she can gossip about. "Always talking like everything's some kinda job to him, bring an insufferable snark all the goddamn time, and not wanting me to buy him stuff, like, ugh, he's such a pain in the ass to deal with sometimes, I swear to God!"

"While I can certainly picture him behaving like that with you, I had quite a pleasant time with him myself," Itsuki beams, feeling a little cathartic hearing that Nino's date experience with him went a little rougher than her own.

"Oh, lucky you. I guess Fuutarou's gonna start playing favorites soon, then. No way he won't..." Nino's expression begins to soften suddenly until her former signs of annoyance are all gone. "...I'm just surprised that you didn't react harder to the fact that I have feelings for Fuutarou too when I told you earlier. I thought you'd start giving me soooo much shit over that the moment I did."

Itsuki laughs dryly at this and takes a drink of water to alleviate the dryness in her throat because of it. "Given our usual dynamics together and especially our recent history, ordinarily, yes, I would have jumped at the chance to be a little cheeky around you about it. But I cannot do so in good conscience when I myself was not much different."

"What, why? What do you mean by that?"

"As in, before we came to know Uesugi-kun, I was so wrapped up in my studies and focused on my own desire to be a good student that I did not perceive social relationships to be important - I am sure you remember me on more than a few occasions claiming that going on dates and having romantic relationships were things that we ought to reserve for when we are adults, or at least out of high school. As a corollary, that also meant that I did not expect myself to meet anyone I would eventually come to consider a...loved one, outside of my own family. On top of all that, when we did meet Uesugi-kun and he became our tutor, I was of the firm opinion that students like ourselves should not pursue intimate relationships with our own tutor, even if he is our own classmate."

The youngest quintuplet sighs and gives a simple shrug as she lifts up her last morsel of her grilled cheese sandwich, but rather than put it in her mouth immediately, she pensively looks down at it.

"Never did I think times could change this much, this fast," she says quietly. "Or, more to the point, I never thought so many of my beliefs could be proven wrong in such a short period of time. It is difficult to think that only several months ago, we never knew Uesugi-kun, and I would still not have any experience going on a date. In any case, that is why I chose not to annoy you over this - and truth be told even if I did try, you would of course be quick to bring all that I have just mentioned up anyway, and there would be no way that I could deny any of it."

Nino slowly nods in agreement, listening to her younger sister's chewing of her last bite of her lunch and wiping her mouth once she's done.

"I guess this's just what we both get for being hard-headed bitches, huh," the second quintuplet concludes, running her hand up through her hair. "And I don't know about you, but for me, the worst part about it is that Fuutarou himself hasn't really changed at all! Like, yeah, sure, he's probably aware of the fact that we've changed our views towards him slowly over the last few months that we've known him, but it's like...it feels like he's still the same old Fuutarou. Don't you think so too?"

"I know what you are talking about, and yes, I think the same. But should that not be a good thing for us? Are you saying that you would prefer it if Uesugi-kun went out of his way to acknowledge such changes in us and began bringing it up to us every time we met him or something like that?"

"No, no, that's...well, it's...kind of? But..." Nino fumbles with her words in an attempt to coalesce her thoughts on this matter, finally raising both of her hands up in front of her to gesticulate what she's trying to say. "As in, I feel like it's almost...humiliating that Fuutarou isn't like, also changing with us, at least his behavior towards us, or at least it doesn't feel that way. It's almost like he's not even acknowledging how different we are now compared to how we were before when we first met him, even though clearly he does know, and it's just that he's too professional or too much of a workaholic to bother showing us that he knows. I'm not saying that just because I wanna complain about it, but...it just feels a little humiliating to me whenever I've hung out with Fuutarou ever since he got us all back together for finals. Being with him, it makes me feel like such an indecisive idiot and how much less emotionally and mentally developed I am compared to him. Like, for crying out out, I've tried my fucking best to get under his skin, and usually I'm pretty fucking good at that whenever I do it to, like, our classmates at school or other kids around our age. But he doesn't get bothered at all by that! And to make it worse, he's the one who always get under my skin!"

Itsuki has on a growing smile that's been getting wider and wider the more she listens to Nino explain her thoughts.

"So much so, then, that you ended up having feelings for him?" she giggles.

"Y-You didn't have to put it that way, damn it! Besides, if you know exactly what I'm talking about, chances are that you're the same way too!"

"Well, at the very least I was not explicitly antagonistic towards him like you were most of the time," Itsuki says, but just as she mentions this, the memory of her run-in with her tutor during their family vacation to Hawaii during Golden Week bubbles up to her mind's surface. "...er, well...most of the time."

Nino squints her eyes over at her younger sister across the small two-seater table. "Sounds like you're hiding something from me. Suspicious, very suspicious."

"I-It was nothing that bad, really..." Her mind racing a little to think of another topic to distract Nino before she decides to dive too deep into her own history of grievances with their tutor, Itsuki then blurts out, "I-I just hope that, um, the two of us...Miku too, actually, so I just hope that...the three of us can still all get along just as well as we always do, even though...we all like Uesugi-kun..."

Nino straightens her posture with a sigh of her own. "I mean, so far so good, right? Normally, yeah, I can easily see our own individual relationships with him to be a bad source of tension among the three of us, but we can't exactly afford to fight over him with everything that's happened. I'm sure none of us want to put even more work on him just to sort our shit out, especially not when we've already done that exact thing once."

Itsuki nods, but she still looks a little concerned. "But what about afterwards? As in, in the future when Uesugi-kun is no longer contractually obligated to work with us, what then?"

"Eh, you don't need to worry about that." Nino waves her sister down nonchalantly. "You're talking years down the line, since Fuutarou needs to work with us until we graduate high school without a hitch at least. You can worry about it then - besides, we don't even know if we'll even feel the same way towards him then as we do now. I've seen my fair share of relationships, Itsuki, and the vast majority of the time, they don't last long. It's easy for us to sit here and think that we're different, especially when the boy we like is contractually obligated to basically be with us for the next few years at least, but...we don't know for sure, is the point I'm trying to make. Either because our feelings towards him might change, or...or..."

What Nino was going to say next suddenly saps her motivation to say it, so she just sort of trails off, not bothering to finish her thought, but Itsuki, following her train of thought and knowing exactly what she was going to say next, finishes it for her.

"...or...something happens to Uesugi-kun," Itsuki murmurs sadly.

"Yeah...that. So...you shouldn't worry about our future with him for now, since it's just so...volatile? Is that the word for this? More like uncertain, we just don't know."

Nino checks her phone, and seeing the time, she gets up from her chair.

"I gotta go now; I said I'd meet with a couple friends from school," she explains, finishing her drink and pushing in her chair. "Are you headed back home or what?"

"Actually, I wanted to try this place's karaage, I heard that their karaage's made a little differently than usual so I want to give it a try. You can head out first, though," Itsuki nods.

"Heh...I guess I should've known," Nino smirks back, gathering her bag and putting her sunglasses that she had on the table back on her head. "You should go exercise with Yotsuba too with how much you love eating."

"E-Excuse me, are you trying to say that I am getting fatter?" Itsuki balks at her older sister, who cackles as she slinks out of the outdoor patio of the tavern where the two of them had lunch. Sighing exasperatedly, the youngest quintuplet frowns in indignance at the underhanded insult she's been given. "...but I have been keeping my weight a secret from everyone else..."

Once Nino is gone, Itsuki reaches into her own bag to pull out her glasses and a supplementary textbook on English to study while waiting for her tavern karaage to show up. She has been doing her best to honor her tutor's request to them to study on their own as best they can while he takes care of his recent magework.

"Excuse me miss, do you mind if I take a seat here? There's nowhere else for me to sit, so..."

Nakano Itsuki looks up to see a bald older man of average height with a neatly trimmed white beard, dressed simply but neatly in dark business pants, belt, and a navy-blue button-up dress shirt standing behind the chair Nino was sitting in not too long ago, looking down at her for an answer.

"Um..." Unsure of what to make of this situation, Itsuki looks around first, and sure enough, the outdoor patio is full, with Nino's old seat being the only available one. "...s-sure, please help yourself."

"Thank you."

TOBI KAMARO: I share the same sentiment in the sense that I would also like to think that this story is able to be inserted easily into the Nasuverse proper, given the numerous references to Nasuverse elements already made so far. However, I strongly disagree that this fic is "not QQ story anymore" and that the "character[s] in this fic [are] not even remotely same anymore [as] their canon counterpart[s]": I have read and reread the original manga multiple times over and have gotten a solid idea of how each quintuplet is like canonically, and for what it's worth, I've watched both seasons of the anime too when I have largely stopped watching anime regularly for about a decade. So with this knowledge, I've done my best adapting their characters into a world that is fundamentally different in many ways. I can understand if you feel this way towards Fuutarou the most because obviously he shows the most drastic change between his canon self and this fic's iteration, but unfortunately that's an unavoidable consequence of giving him a role that's so different than what it was in the source material - and even then, I've taken many steps to ensure that he keeps as many of his original character's elements from the manga so that he doesn't feel like a completely different character like you claim him to be.

I find your review especially interesting because this was the same criticism I received in one of my previous fics, except it was a lot more common there: more than a few times did people bring up the concern that the way I wrote that fic was nothing more than me putting the characters from the source franchise through what was essentially a Call of Duty simulator, and that I could have written the fic as a standalone fiction, not a fanfiction, and it would have made no difference. Personally, I don't quite understand why this is an issue for some people: isn't part of the point of writing fanfiction to be able to put characters from an existing franchise or series into situations or even genres that can be vastly different than their source material? Case in point, even here on this website, when you create a new story, you can choose to set it as a crossover fanfiction, and they will be categorized under specific crossover directories involving the two or more source franchises that your fanfiction is based on. In my eyes, part of the beauty of fanfiction is to give people the freedom to be able to write characters from anywhere into any setting they want, so why try to strongarm fanfic writers into limiting their creative freedom to the confines of their source material's original settings? Is it because you're not comfortable with seeing your favorite characters be written into situations that you'd rather not see them in, or is it because you can't quite imagine them acting in certain ways because you've never seen them do so in their source material?

But the most curious observation that I have is that not once have I seen anyone who's given me this such criticism also give me a reasonable explanation or even evidence to support their claim; no one who has told me that "this story doesn't feel like [insert source material here]" has also given me their reasons explicitly pointing out the flaws in how I portray characters, much less give me suggestions on how to improve or change my portrayals of them so that they would better fit their source material, at least in their opinion. Every time someone gives one of my fics this criticism, it's usually done in a snarky or matter-of-fact manner and maybe a questionable analogy or comparison to go with it, and that's that. You were no exception: you merely claimed that the characters in this fic are just borrowed from the original manga but that they're nowhere near the same as they were in the manga, yet you just stopped there and didn't present any evidence to support your claim. And because you didn't, how else am I supposed to respond to your review? What exactly do you want me to do with a review like that? Better yet, why did you think a review like that was ever going to be meaningful when there's no real purpose to it? You can't just say something like that, refuse to elaborate further, and leave; that meme doesn't work here. You might as well have told me to scrap this entire fic and rewrite it from scratch and that would've been a better review since at the very least you would have given me a suggestion, however shitty it might've been, and I say this because I've actually received a review like that long ago telling me to do the exact same thing. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, seeing that it's infinitely easier to skim through a fic and leave a remark saying that it's trash rather than actually reading it thoroughly and coming up with constructive criticism to give to the writer; that would take actual effort, and why would anyone on the internet do that?

Finally, for what it's worth, you are one of the only people so far to have said that this fic's characters are not true to their originals; I have had multiple reviews prior to yours saying the exact opposite, with some even going so far as to suggest that they believe my portrayals of the quints to be superior to the originals somehow, though I assume they were just exaggerating. I do remember a review that told me that there were some parts where Nino behaved uncharacteristically, but the important thing is that they were kind enough to specify where and why. And after reviewing those areas myself, I ultimately agreed with them and made the corresponding changes to improve Nino's character in this fic, so despite what I sound like most of the time in these Author's Notes, I actually am open to corrections and suggestions on how to portray the characters better if I feel that they're reasonable and made in good faith since I actually give a shit about writing a good story. Since you didn't do this, however, I have no choice but to assume that you must be a QQ or Nasuverse elitist of some kind and thus have no incentive to take your review seriously.

Ultimately one of my goals with this fic is to make it good enough where it can be considered as part of the Nasuverse but still firmly be a Quintessential Quintuplets fanfic; if I cared more about the former, then I wouldn't bother putting this story under the Quintessential Quintuplets directory of this site, especially not when I would most likely be getting more reader traffic if I did. Regardless, I've been doing my best to pull it off and personally, I think I've been doing a decent enough job of it, and I daresay other people would be inclined to agree. It's fine if you don't think that's the case, but if you're going to let me know about it, at least point out the areas where you think I could improve so that your review isn't a complete waste of my time aside from giving me an excuse to pad this chapter's word count with twelve hundred extra words or so.