Inhaling sharply, the third Nakano quintuplet snaps her eyes open. Even as her vision quickly focuses to show her where she is, Miku can tell that she is yet again transported back into her nightmarish dream, dragged back down into the same endless basin of blood and darkness. However, this time it seems that she won't be given any opportunity to sit where she's awoken to ponder why she's back here again, because as soon as Miku sits up to survey her familiar surroundings, a distant but dreadful scream shatters the clammy, heavy air. The sudden scream, although not exactly loud, is sudden enough to give Miku a bit of a jumpscare, something she's normally resistant to in real life, but clearly a dream is anything but.
Worse, Miku recognizes the scream as one from Itsuki, so she bolts up to her feet and looks around herself frantically, only to find herself alone.
"Itsuki!? Itsuki!" the third sister cries out, a chilling panic beginning to grip her mercilessly. Even if this is just a dream, even if this won't actually do anything to Itsuki herself, Miku can't help but feel an almost suffocating sense of responsibility for whatever's happening to her younger sister right now, which is all the more reinforced as another chilling shriek echoes through the darkness.
Not wanting to just stand where she's woken up, Miku forces herself to move, and she bolts straight ahead in the direction that she's facing when she got up to her feet. She has no idea where Itsuki's scream is originating from directionally; it's almost like the scream is on surround sound, echoing into her ears from every direction. And the more she runs, the more Miku realizes just how pointless her efforts are - this is an infinite stretch of blood and darkness, so how in the world is she supposed to know what kind of progress she's making?
Miku doesn't let this initially faze her, and she spends a good amount of time searching fruitlessly for Itsuki, going one direction for a couple minutes before heading off to another. But the screams from her sister that resound at regular intervals in the distance, forever out of reach, combined with Miku's own infamously terrible physical stamina, quickly erode her already shaken determination. So it should come as no surprise that Miku finds herself crumpling to her feet not too longer after she set off to find Itsuki to no avail.
As she lies collapsed on the surface of the bloody liquid floor, panting hard with signs of tears forming in her eyes, Miku doesn't feel the usual senses of helplessness and dread that would normally beleaguer her by this point. Instead, they're replaced with rapidly expanding feelings of anger and bitterness - and they're already manifesting physically through Miku's clenching of her teeth and fists. Before two weeks ago, she was once an aloof stranger to these corrosive emotions. Sure, she's felt annoyed or angry at things that have happened to her in real life, but never to this extent, to the extent where she would take her anger out physically on something, a behavior she has never once exhibited before, not even in fights against her sisters. And now that her head is filled with the residual echoes of her younger sister's screams, the morphing rage bubbling in her blood seems to be giving her the strength to slowly push herself up from the ground to at least a kneeling position when she'd usually be knocked out for at least a good ten or so minutes without doing anything further.
Opening her eyes again, Nakano Miku, still with clenched teeth and fists, glares down at murky red water below her; by opening her eyes again, Miku knowingly opens the floodgates to an accumulated rush of angry tears that drip down to the water - at least, they would if something else hadn't surfaced up to greet her.
The corpse fills the center of Miku's vision, causing her irises to constrict as she realizes what she's now looking at. And when she does, the same cycle of emotions crashes through her mind yet again: first a drowning wave of dread and terror that begins boiling rapidly as anger and bitterness seize control, producing a surge of rage and a sense of vengeance that compels Miku to immediately clasp both of her hands around the corpse's jagged, slimy neck, dipping her hands down into the blood in order to do so.
"WHERE IS ITSUKI!?" she screams at the very top of her lungs. "YOU KNOW WHERE SHE IS HERE, DON'T YOU!? WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?! TELL ME, YOU BITCH!"
Adrenaline and rage have drugged Miku's senses, making her desensitized to the sensation of choking out a wet, slimy human corpse and staring headlong into the twisted, decomposed mess of a human face that a corpse presents. They have also blinded to her to the blood that falls from her eyes and face as they fuel Miku's explosive demands and vengeful words.
"YOU DO NOTHING BUT - BUT TORTURE ME! EVERY FUCKING TIME I END UP HERE, I SEE YOU! AND - AND FOR WHAT?"
Miku shrieks in a way that's going to quickly rend her vocal chords that are mainly used to a much more soft-spoken Miku; the tears of blood still streak down her face onto the corpse and the blood in which it is partially submerged. True to the behavior of someone who is normally soft-spoken but is suddenly compelled to vocalize their dangerously bloated thoughts in an explosive manner, Miku feels her thoughts all jammed up at the tip of her tongue as her brain races faster than she's ever felt it work before to try to process those emotional thoughts properly into words, like surging water rapidly piling up against a poorly constructed dam that is already leaking horribly and threatening to collapse under the weight of the water behind it altogether.
"WHAT MAKES YOU DO THIS TO ME? ARE YOU JUST HERE TO LAUGH AT ME? DO YOU ENJOY KILLING ME OVER AND OVER? HUH? WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU LIKE THIS?!"
Would Miku take the time to assess the situation, she would notice that the corpse she is yelling down at has done nothing else other than to begin to surface before her; this is also the first time Miku has brought herself so physically close to the corpse that has tormented her in this nightmare as long as she can remember, a thought that would normally cause her to shrivel in fear. But the enraged quintuplet understands none of these things as she continues to bellow down at her perceived tormentor.
"IT'S ENOUGH THAT YOU DO ALL OF THIS TO ME, SO WHY DRAG ITSUKI INTO THIS?!" she roars. Several of her words crackle and falter, a clear sign that her vocal chords are already starting to give out. "LEAVE HER OUT OF THIS, SHE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG! IF ANYTHING, SHE DESERVES THIS THE LEAST OUT OF ALL OF US! SO LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE!"
Every mention of her sister's name reminds Miku subconsciously of the likely danger that she is in, and it infuses her with even more anger and vengeful energy that causes her to let one hand go of the corpse's neck and raise it up into the air past her shoulder. But before she can drop it like the blade of a guillotine, Miku spies subtle movement on the corpse's face. Movement that strangely resembles the closing of eyelids, even though the corpse's face has no easily distinguishable human facial features to begin with.
As Miku lets herself hesitate at this peculiar sight, processing whatever it is that she's just seen, she hears two small splashes of water beneath her. Her glowing blue eyes dart down towards the sources of the sounds to identify them, only for them to feel the terrible sensations of blades straight into the pupils that turn her world black.
Bolting upright in her bed this time, the pain of having her eyes stabbed by something she couldn't quite make out before it happened still painfully fresh on her mind like it just happened a second ago, Nakano Miku gasps for breath, trying to keep her labored pants as quiet as possible as to not wake up her sisters in the rooms besides hers. But even as she struggles to catch her breath, Miku can still feel the sense of extreme urgency that she's carried with her out of her nightmare slamming against the back of her mind, the one that continues to urge her to find her youngest sister and ensure her safety.
"Itsuki...!"
As such, the third quintuplet manages to will herself out of bed, throwing aside her blanket and swinging her legs out to get out of bed. Doing this is more difficult than she anticipated, as her body is not accustomed to suddenly jumping out of bed like this, but the nerves that still have Miku on edge help her adjust to this clash of mental and physical states as she checks herself for a moment to give her body some time to catch up. Her eyes are throbbing, and even through the extreme discomfort that they give her, Miku can magically tell that her Mystic Eyes have resurfaced on their own; if she couldn't, the bioluminescence of her own Mystic Eyes casting a soft blue glow into her room like a sort of night light would give them away. Not that this should be at all a surprise, given what happened in her nightmare just now.
Glancing at her desk clock, the quint reads the time as 2:29 AM. The lateness of the night prods her urgency to locate her sister for reasons Miku doesn't quite understand, only that she must find Itsuki. Since she's just woken up and her mental state is already frayed due to her nightmare, Miku has forgotten what Nino told them earlier yesterday that Itsuki is spending the night at her friend's house and hurries towards her door, opening it slowly so as not to awaken her siblings, and she makes for Itsuki's room to her left. Itsuki has been locking her door at night when they go to sleep from what Miku remembers, probably a result of their circumstances of being targeted by an enemy mage, but on the off-chance that Itsuki might have not locked her door tonight for whatever reason, the third quintuplet tries the knob anyway, and to her quiet surprise, it turns without resistance. The door opens slowly, and Miku lets herself inside and closes the door first before turning on the lights so that Itsuki's bedroom light won't disturb some of her sisters in the rooms across the short second floor hall, only to find, to her horror this time, the bedroom of her youngest sister completely unoccupied other than herself.
"...Itsuki...?!"
Unable to help herself as she lets out the name of the fifth quintuplet again, Miku can feel her anxiety manifest swiftly into panic, with the horror of the revelation of Itsuki's absence acting as the catalyst. Her mind races again, scrambling as fast as it can to assess the situation and perhaps try to understand what may have happened to lead up to Itsuki's disappearance, and only then does she remember Nino telling her sisters that Itsuki would be spending the night at a friend's house today. But while that briefly tempers her escalating panic, it doesn't counteract it completely, since that means that Itsuki isn't here and could still be in danger in a way that no one would know about.
So the third quintuplet quietly tiptoes out of Itsuki's room after turning off the lights and returns to her own room silently to fetch her phone before heading downstairs to use the bathroom as she customarily does whenever she is released from her nightmare. While she feels bad that she's giving Itsuki a call in the middle of the night and doing so might wake up and irritate both Itsuki and whoever friend she's with right now, Miku needs to make sure that she's okay; Itsuki should be able to explain her situation a little bit to her friend if anything happens.
But even after Miku's finished her business in the restroom, Itsuki has still not picked up, and after the fifth consecutive attempt, Miku lowers her phone slowly, having seated herself at the couch in the living room in the meantime. The panic has resettled in her mind, and it's taken even firmer root there than before. Why isn't Itsuki picking up? Does she not have her phone with her somehow? What if something did happen to her? And should she let Fuutarou know?
Yes, yes she should. Once the fifth and final call attempt fails and ends at Itsuki's answering machine tone, Miku taps on Fuutarou's contact number and calls him instead, praying that Fuutarou will pick up instead. Her prayer ends up being unnecessary, as just like every other time she's ever called him, her tutor does pick up.
"Hey. You're calling about Itsuki, right?"
The perpetually calm, consistent tone of Fuutarou's voice immediately soothes Miku's peaked anxiety, but her concern for Itsuki won't let her get distracted.
"Y-Yeah. Where is she? I - " Miku stumbles, trying to keep her voice down.
"We'll be back at your place in about ten minutes. For now, Itsuki's okay, but she'll need a shower when we get back; we'll explain everything that's happened once we do."
The phone call disconnects promptly, indicating that Fuutarou closed the call on his end. Miku lowers her phone but remains seated on the couch, her anxiety levels slowly abating to give her the freedom to breathe a little more easily, but a good remainder of it still remains. Even though her fear of Itsuki being in danger was confirmed by her tutor in that phone call just now, the fact that he's confirmed her safety neuters it for the most part, with questions slowly bubbling up to the surface now that the rainstorm of emotions in her head is over, for now.
Was the nightmare that she had earlier tonight trying to tell her that Itsuki was in danger? Or was it simply a coincidence that her nightmare manifested the way it did on this same night when it seems like Itsuki was compromised? Miku's initial feelings about this matter are trying to convince her that this isn't just a coincidence, but she herself isn't so quick to jump to such a conclusion, and the best counterargument she has against it is the fact that this is the first time something like this has ever happened; this isn't the first time Itsuki was in danger, and it's not like her nightmare tipped her off about that first time at all.
But then Miku starts second-guessing herself. What if for that first time, Miku's nightmare didn't alert her to the danger Itsuki was in because Itsuki hadn't been brought into the nightmare first? It's only relatively recently that Itsuki was brought into that nightmare with Miku, so what if the nightmare was only able to communicate the danger to Itsuki to Miku because of the former's recent entry? Because up until then, Miku's been the sole inhabitant of the nightmare, so obviously the nightmare isn't going to tell her about any dangers she's in that she doesn't already know about. But now that it's registered Itsuki as a second inhabitant...?
And to press the point, what if Miku couldn't find Itsuki physically inside the nightmare because it was trying to convey to Miku that Itsuki was missing? Because in the previous times Miku found her sister inside her own nightmare, the two of them were still physically close by, in the same house. Is that a coincidence too, or a sign of the nightmare's attempt to communicate Itsuki's disappearance for the night?
All this second-guessing, by extension, is getting Miku to reconsider the true nature of her nightmare. If that was what was really going on, that her nightmare was actually trying to warn her that Itsuki was in deep shit, then just what on earth is this nightmare, really? And now that she thinks about what happened in there tonight, Miku vividly remembers, much to her discomfort, the part when she uncharacteristically and aggressively confronted the corpse resurfacing beneath her. The corpse did nothing the whole that Miku was screaming down at it, almost like it was listening to what she was shouting about. Of course, Miku can't assume that the corpse actually understood anything that she was yelling at it, but at the same time, she can't shake off the feeling that it intentionally allowed her to vent her frustrations the way she did. Not only that, but if the nightmare's true intention regarding Itsuki's safety turns out to be true, then does that mean that when the corpse attacked Miku by stabbing her in the eyes, the corpse was actually allowing Miku to leave the nightmare?
This last thought widens Miku's normalized eyes, causing them to stare down at her darkened phone in her lap. Every time that Miku has emerged out of her nightmare, it was by the corpse attacking her in some way. Does that mean that for all this time, the corpse was actually trying to help her by giving her an escape out of that bloody hell fabricated inside of her own mind?
Frantically shaking her head in an attempt to deny the thought, Miku feels herself begin to tremble. There's just no way, right? That corpse, that thing that lives in that nightmare that's always attacked her and now has gone after Itsuki too when she got dragged in - there's no way that it's supposed to be a friendly entity. Sure, Miku can maybe buy that it's not strictly an evil entity who wants the worst for herself and her sister, but Miku just can't accept that it's specifically there to help her out. Besides, how the hell does constantly stabbing Miku in the eyes supposed to constitute as "help"? If the corpse's intent is to help Miku get out of her own nightmare, couldn't it find a better way to do that that doesn't involve ocular destruction every single time? Even if she's somewhat desensitized to her own eyes getting sliced and mutilated by now, Miku still finds such experiences very painful, as they kind of should be.
So lost is Miku in her thoughts that the front door to the Nakano penthouse creaks open in what feels like only a minute or two after she got done calling Fuutarou, and as such Miku bolts up from the couch in shock and hurries over to the hallway in time to find Fuutarou setting down a clearly very distressed but otherwise unharmed Itsuki and for some reason a disturbed Nino behind them carrying Itsuki's bag.
"Miku, Itsuki needs a shower," the young mage alerts the quintuplet while quickly casting some sound suppression runes around the first floor.
"She needs more than just a shower, she needs a whole damn bath!" Nino asserts quietly from behind Fuutarou. She's not trying to make fun of Itsuki, but rather she's just trying to emphasize the fact that Itsuki may need some time to herself to wind down and try to relax.
Miku, in the meantime, begins to look a little confused. "...why, why does she - " And then the creeping stench of dried urine hits Miku.
"Like I said, we'll explain, just get her into the shower," the tutor urges.
Running water reverberates through the walls of the first floor of the Nakano penthouse, easily drowning out the rest of the quiet ambience of the floor that's really only comprised of the soft ticking of the mechanical clock built into the wall over the flatscreen TV and maybe the occasional snore from Yotsuba's room. For tonight, however, the late night shower that Itsuki is taking will not be reaching the second floor thanks to several well-placed sound-proofing runes, and their creator, Uesugi Fuutarou, takes a short glance up at the wall clock, noting the time as 2:57 AM. Having done his part to explain what's happened tonight to the third quintuplet, he patiently waits for Miku to process everything that's been told to her while standing by the TV, with a silent Nino sitting on the one-seater couch nearby with her arms crossed.
Nakano Miku lets out a large but slow sigh, turning to Nino first and foremost, and the second quintuplet, anticipating this sort of reaction, averts her gaze from her younger sister a little more.
"Nino, what the hell were you thinking...?" Miku asks her older sister in quiet but clear disbelief. "You lied to us yesterday night about how Itsuki was at a friend's house just so that you could tag along with Fuutarou? This is so much worse than when you and Itsuki had that big fight that made both of you run out of the house!"
To Miku's quiet surprise, Nino doesn't immediately retaliate or defend herself like she usually does and simply sits in silence. Miku can tell just looking at her expression that Nino has no intention of trying to do any of that anyway, and that there's already enough occupying her own mind at the moment in addition to whatever Miku throws on, so despite having built up a very upset reaction to the whole ordeal and how it started, Miku finds herself losing her motivation to press the issue and opts to just let her anger go. Itsuki is safe and sound now, and that's what's most important, so getting angry at Nino now won't do anyone any good, especially when Nino herself seems to know what she's done anyway.
Fuutarou, for his part, glances over at Nino and gazes at her for a few moments before saying to her, "You should at least tell her why."
Nino looks back up at her tutor. "I don't know if she'll believe me, though?" she questions, her tone sounding a little defeated even though she wasn't the one in any sort of danger. "You almost didn't either."
"Yeah, well, I did change my mind a little bit after seeing your reaction when we found Itsuki," the young mage concedes. "So I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that your intention behind it all was at least genuine, with a couple other circumstances also taken into account. Besides, telling Miku what you were thinking is the important part so at least she knows, right? It's up to her whether or not she'll accept that as a legitimate reason."
"Okay, well, I'd like Itsuki to be here too, at least," Nino sighs. "I'd rather not have to explain myself twice over; I'm already embarrassed enough as it is."
So the high schoolers return to silence to awkwardly wait for Itsuki to finish her shower; in the meantime, Fuutarou quietly shuffles over to the kitchen to get everyone some glasses of water, setting them down on the glass table where he would normally host his tutoring sessions with the girls. Miku thanks her tutor for the considerate gesture, and seeing her sister partake in the delivered water, Nino slowly follows suit. It's not like there's anything better for her to do right now, anyhow.
The same thought crosses Miku's mind too, and as the young mage takes a seat on the couch with her to her right so that Itsuki can take the seat in to her left when she gets out of the shower, Miku figures she ought to strike up some kind of conversation with him, seeing that she doesn't get to see him that much lately until summer vacation ends. Her initial conversation topic gravitates towards the nature of her nightmare that she was pondering before they all got back home, but perhaps it'll be for the best that she talks to him in private about that. So instead...
"...how have you been doing?" she asks softly, glancing to her right a little meekly as though she isn't sure if she's allowed to ask him a question at all in a time like this.
"Busy," he answers promptly and gruffly; Fuutarou sounds a little more disgruntled than usual, which amazes Miku that she can even tell at all given that this is how he sounds most of the time anyway. "Lots going on at the hospital; your dad runnin' my ass around all over the place isn't helping matters either."
"Um, do you want us to, like, talk to him, maybe...?"
Fuutarou snorts softly in turn.
"Talk to him about what, exactly? To tell him to go easy on me? It's hospital work, Miku, people's lives and health are at stake, so it's not gonna do much. I'm just complaining since I don't get along with him, so it's cathartic for me."
Listening intently, Miku senses a certain question bubble up in the back of her mind, a question that, now that it's there, makes her wonder why she or any of the rest of her sisters never asked their tutor before.
"How...how did you get to know Papa, Fuutarou? Is that, um, something you can tell us? Or...?" the third quintuplet asks slowly, with each word that she utters crisp and clear despite their softness in the still night air, aided by the water that she's drunk that's cleansed her vocal chords.
Fuutarou's lightless but sharp black eyes shift straight back into Miku's. Even in the relative darkness of the living room illuminated only by the moonlight draping in from the glass window door leading out to the veranda, the quintuplet knows immediately that her eyes are locked with his. Or perhaps it's her Mystic Eyes that sense this as opposed to her own regular senses? But the sensation doesn't last for long, as Fuutarou averts his gaze again.
"...there's not much of a story to that," he answers curtly. "Maybe if it were something that was worth talking about in detail then sure, I wouldn't mind divulging it. I just happened to meet your dad during one of my jobs when I was younger; he took an interest in my ability to use magic and asked me to consider pursuing a more medical approach to magecraft. He said if I did that, then he would offer me a long-term career of sorts at the hospital he worked at."
Miku blinks back at her tutor. "...Papa was the one who convinced you to become a, um, a medic mage or...or whatever?"
"Less convinced and more 'I didn't have much of a choice' since back then, securing a reliable source of income was something I was trying to achieve for the sake of my family."
"How long have you known him, or worked with him?"
"Six years. Little more at this point, I think."
Nino, who's also been listening intently over at her own couch, sets down her glass again after taking another sip to moisten her own throat. "That would explain why you don't really get along with him, then."
Fuutarou nods slowly. "I'll be honest, I'm not a big fan of working with the same people for a long time. Part of it's because of how I started out as a mage when I was younger, taking all sorts of odd jobs so that I don't really work with the same customer more than once for the most part, part of it's because the longer you work with the same people, the more chances that they'll betray you or do something to stab you in the back somehow just because they learn more and more about you and can take advantage of things that they know about you. But since your dad hasn't done anything of the sort yet and my employment with him has in fact been a steady source of income, I've been able to put aside that preference of mine. He's a good employer; I just don't like dealing with him and certain parts about him. They irritate me..."
"Was that why you confronted him that one time? When we went on vacation to Hawaii for Golden Week?" Nino asks. "I think one of the things you argued with him about was how he wasn't spending as much time with his family as he ought to?"
"Yeah. I don't bring it up at work since that's not the place for it, but during Golden Week when it's supposed to be a vacation you should've been spending with your dad, I could bring it up there since it was appropriate."
"How's Raiha-chan and your dad, actually? We haven't seen them in a while...well, not Raiha-chan, at least..." Miku adds.
"They're doing fine. Raiha wants to go kimono shopping this weekend since I offered to get her one for the summer festival coming up. I was actually thinking letting her tag along with you girls since our dad is thinking about hanging out with some of his old friends he knew back when he was still in school."
"Oh, yeah, of course. Yotsuba'll be happy to hear that, for sure."
"Yeah...I imagine she would be..."
Fuutarou gets up, letting that last thought trail off as he heads over to a freshly showered Itsuki, who's emerged from the bathroom with a towel draped around her shoulders and already dressed in a clean set of pajamas that Nino made sure to leave for her to wear when she came out.
"You alright?" he asks the fifth quintuplet, who nods shortly. "Cool. Nino needs to explain her side of things, so have a seat over there."
So Itsuki complies, sitting down to Miku's immediate left so that she's situated in between her two older sisters. Fuutarou gets another glass of water for her from the kitchen and sets it down in front Itsuki before resuming his own seat and motioning to Nino.
"Whenever you're ready," he says, and Nino sighs slowly.
Fifteen minutes, six glasses of water, and a trip to the bathroom later, the three Nakano siblings silently bask in the wake of Nino's full explanation, with Fuutarou thumbing through his emails on his phone in the meantime. Itsuki slowly raises her arms up to her chest to cross them over it.
"So to summarize, you deliberately lied to everyone and waited until everyone had gone to sleep to tell Uesugi-kun that I was missing, just so that you could maybe learn a little magecraft from him?" the youngest quintuplet recites slowly. She doesn't sound angry or hostile, only disappointed, something that does not go unnoticed by Nino, who responds with nothing. "I hope you understand that this is so much worse than the fight we had not too long ago?"
"Yes, I'm aware, Miku's already brought that up," Nino grumbles with miserable irritation.
"But what I want to know is, why did you change your mind about magecraft, Nino?" Miku inquires. "Because if I recall correctly, there was one night when we talked here about maybe trying to get Fuutarou to teach us magecraft. I was for it, but you were against it at the time. So what made you change your mind?"
Nino opens her mouth to answer, but she just barely manages to stop her words from spilling off the tip of her tongue - the main catalyst for her change of heart that Miku is asking about is her newfound feelings for Fuutarou, and she's not sure if this is the time and place to reveal to her sisters that she, too, has feelings for the same boy that the two sisters sitting before her now on the perpendicular couch also have feelings for. So she hastily rearranges her thoughts before speaking for real.
"Well, it's what I explained a bit of earlier: you know my whole shtick's been to do things on my own. And at this point, I think it's clear that we're all going to run into more and more incidents where we could find ourselves in danger; case in point, what happened tonight. So it only makes sense that we should learn magecraft to protect ourselves at least a little bit in the event that Uesugi-kun's busy or something, especially given how we all have Mystic Eyes, even if we don't know how to use them yet."
"Then why were you against it in the first place?" Miku presses a little more.
"Because at the time that the two of us talked, Miku, I had a much more negative impression of all this magic stuff, because that was around the time when all our Mystic Eyes started kicking in. Your Mystic Eyes keep giving you nightmares, mine are starting to go through my own contact lenses, and now Itsuki has her own; at least hers aren't bothering her for now. Not only that, but you know I'm used to doing things my own way and I stress the fuck out whenever I can't. But now I've come to the conclusion that we can't just ignore magic anymore. It's already a part of us, so...if there's a way for us to get some use out of it too, especially when our lives could be on the line one day, then why shouldn't we? We might not know what we're getting ourselves into, but nothing good's gonna come out of us just sitting around letting things happen to us, either."
Nino takes another sip of water and clears her throat briefly.
"Again, I talked about this a bit ago already, but...I also want to do something to keep everyone safe. It's nice that we can rely on Uesugi-kun for that for the most part, but I feel like anything can happen, especially when magic's involved."
"Big words coming from someone who literally left her sister out to dry tonight," Fuutarou interjects with a thick swab of matter-of-factness that Nino certainly doesn't appreciate.
"I've already addressed that, asshole!" she spits back. "I'm just so used to you keeping us safe for the most part that I thought Itsuki would be fine! I thought you'd be able to find her instantly like you normally would so that we wouldn't have to worry about her as much, but clearly I was wrong. And I've already apologized for that."
"Fair enough. But I do want to make it clear, not just to you, Nino, but the rest of you in case this does come up again," the young mage says calmly, "but Itsuki got very lucky tonight. We've had enough run-ins with the bad guys who want to kidnap you that we don't know if just kidnapping you all is the only thing they'll do; I mean, you should've already known that ever the since the first time y'all almost got nabbed. And especially tonight, after busting that one hideout of theirs, they'll be sure to act a lot more quickly, so we can't afford to give them time to act for free anymore."
The quintuplets stay silent while their tutor lectures them briefly, albeit on a subject that has very little to do with their actual schoolwork.
"I've said before that while I can do a lot of things on my own, your cooperation is what I need in turn to give me the best chances at ensuring your safety. Or to put it more bluntly, don't do stupid shit in the middle of the night."
Fuutarou waits for any of the Nakano quints to say something back to him, but it's not from the girl he expects. Instead, it's Miku who asks:
"...I think we know the answer to this already, but...you still won't teach us magecraft, will you...?" she mumbles, crestfallen. She doesn't even bother looking up at her tutor to match his gaze, certain of the nature of his response.
"Especially with what's happened tonight? Yeah, no."
"Um...there is actually something...I would like to add..."
The sudden alert from the youngest quintuplet grabs everyone's attention in the living room, and such all eyes shift to Itsuki.
"...Nino...was not the only one who lied about the situation," she murmurs. "The truth is, I was not exactly entirely genuine myself, either. When I told everyone that I was going to study over at a friend's house, I was actually attending a cram school that I had learned of recently. And when I was abducted earlier yesterday night, they took me right when I got out."
Fuutarou, with furrowed eyebrows and a rather incredulous look on his face, reacts first to this. "...okay, but...how exactly is that supposed to be as bad as what Nino did? You couldn't control the fact that those guys came after you, but Nino could control when she was able to let me know that you hadn't come back home."
"Well, perhaps not in what came as a result of our decisions, but..." Itsuki takes a deep breath. "Allow me to explain in full, just as Nino had: she and I recently had lunch at a cafe over the weekend, and after she left first because she had friends to meet up with, I stayed behind to finish my lunch. An older man who needed a seat asked to join me since our table was the only one that had an occupied seat, so I allowed him to do so. After we talked for a while, he told me that he had opened up a cram school recently, and in thanks for allowing him to sit at my table to eat his own lunch, he offered me a free set of lessons there to see if the cram school would be right for me. So I took him up on his offer and went there today, er, yesterday evening."
Itsuki glances momentarily over at Nino, who is listening intently back.
"The main reason why I bring this up is because...I did not think that my own self-studying was enough, that studying with my sisters was going to be enough. I want the level of studying that we get with you, Uesugi-kun. But since you have been very busy lately, I have since been considering other options of studying that could come close to what we got from you, and I figured a cram school might be able to give me the studying that I was looking for until summer break is done."
"I know this's gonna sound weird coming from me, but, uh, I still don't see how that's supposed to be as bad of a reason as what I was up to," Nino smirks a little at Itsuki, mainly in self-depreciation.
"I am just trying to say that my own selfishness was also in part to blame for what happened today, not just yours," Itsuki sighs deeply, doing her best to maintain her patience as she works to figure out a way to convey her message. "As in, I should have been happy with studying on my own or with any one of the rest of you; Ichika, you, Miku, Yotsuba, whoever. But I was not satisfied with that because I thought none of you were as good as how Uesugi-kun teaches."
"Well, yeah, fucking duh?"
"And because I felt encouraged by all the good results we have been getting recently, I felt the need to capitalize on them over summer vacation and keep studying as hard as we did before so that I would not lose any of the progress I had worked so hard to make. I do not know how the rest of you feel about the matter, but that is how I feel. I let my own desire to pursue academic success take precedent over making sure to keep myself safe. And, besides, if nothing else, if I really had gone to a friend's house to study with them, I maybe would not have been found by that Shirazumi person since I would have been in a different place."
"She's trying to make it so that you're not entirely to blame for what happened tonight, Nino. She wants to share some of the responsibility," Miku clarifies for their older sister.
"I mean, if she feels like that'll exonerate me from some of the blame, then sure. I never asked for it, though," Nino simply shrugs. "But thanks anyway, I guess. Actually, I'm surprised you're not angrier at me for ruining our chances of learning magecraft from Uesugi-kun, Miku."
"Well, realistically, even if all this didn't happen, how likely would he have been to say yes anyway?" Miku also shrugs back at Nino. "I'm just glad that the two of us at least agree on magecraft, but...I guess it doesn't really matter now."
"Really? You're just giving up like that?"
"I certainly don't want to put any of my sisters in danger trying to learn a thing or two about it. I'm already kind of guilty of doing that myself, too, in a way..."
"I mean, we can always keep asking him. Who knows, maybe Uesugi-kun'll change his mind. I'm sure there're ways to ask him or learn magecraft in ways that won't end up in situations like this."
"You're being awfully cheeky right now!"
While Nino and Miku are talking, Fuutarou repositions himself over next to Itsuki.
"Itsuki, about that old man you talked to at that cafe who told you about the cram school," he says quietly, "did he give you his name?"
"Name...oh yeah. It was Mudou-san," she nods.
Fuutarou frowns deeply.
A/N
You knew this was coming.
derethl2: I'll start by saying that this was, in fact, one of the more uncertain chapters I've written so far in terms of how I wanted it to go. I've been asked in the distant past how it is I go about writing my fics from an overarching planning perspective, and I answered that my stories are anchored into place with various key events that drive the plot forward; I think of these plot points well ahead of when I actually write them, and my stories are written into them so that I always have an idea of where I want my story to go in order to prevent major writer's block. Think of it as plotting points on a map, and as the writer, I'm navigating the story towards those various points like I'm drawing a line to connect them all. This event was one such point, but the problem I faced when it was time to write the previous chapter was how it got to that point; specifically, how to connect the events of Itsuki first attending Noshiro Cram School and the battle at the top of Mizuha Bank Tower. But eventually, I was able to come up with enough reasons to justify the events of the last chapter to the extent that in case someone like you questioned it, I'd be able to respond and tell you why I'm not going to be scrapping anything I've written so far.
For Nino's reasons to delay informing and wanting to join Fuutarou: I have well established that Nino was in a state of mental flux in regards to the latent magical power that she apparently has. Originally, yeah, she was against it because it threatened to destroy her wish to keep her family the way it was, but that sentiment was gone the moment she started liking Fuutarou, which meant that she's now open to the idea of accepting magic as an inevitable part of her identity, especially with the knowledge that Miku's Mystic Eyes are getting stronger and that her own, too, may be doing the same. In addition, I've also gone to some length in the previous chapter elaborating on Nino's newfound desire to learn magic by linking it to her canonical personality of being aggressive, especially towards things that she wants. And the two most relevant things she wants are the power to protect her family on her own and more time to spend with Fuutarou, particularly because he's been AWOL due to his mage work and hasn't been spending a lot of time with the girls as a result. This provides the justification for Nino wanting to join him.
Nino's reason to delay informing him, however, is more complicated. Nino wants to learn magic or at least have her magic powers develop to the point where she'd be able to do something with them, but she doesn't know how to go about doing that, mainly because she knows that Fuutarou isn't willing to teach them any magic himself. So when she notices that Itsuki hasn't returned home like she said she would, Nino immediately recognizes that something may have happened to Itsuki and that since enough time has passed that Fuutarou probably doesn't know about her getting kidnapped either, in part because Itsuki's been targeted before, and therefore hastily improvises a plan to convince Fuutarou to bring her with him to search for Itsuki together.
There are several problems to Nino's rationale behind her improvised plan: first, Nino's inexperience with magic. She thought that she would be able to glean a thing or two about magic by simply observing Fuutarou in action, but clearly she didn't, so it ended up being a waste of effort after all. Second, her plan itself was hastily thought up and executed clumsily, and her aggressive nature of trying to forge a path for herself to get what she wants is largely to blame for this, because while it works well when she knows exactly what she's doing or she's in an environment that she's comfortable in, neither of those conditions were applicable here, which meant that she was essentially rushing into the dark on a hope and a prayer that things would go her way. You could say that it isn't in character for Nino to take such a risky gamble in the first place, but for all she knows, Itsuki getting kidnapped in the previous chapter might be the only chance that she gets to be able to learn magic from Fuutarou indirectly; even if it's just one useful thing she can take away from the experience, that would be a win for Nino, because then she has the chance to develop her magic powers from there, find out what they are and what they do, and maybe one day gain control over them.
Third, and perhaps the most challenging to justify, Nino's attitude towards Itsuki getting abducted in the first place. Most extenuating circumstances would point against how I depicted her in the last chapter, factors such as Nino's love for her sisters as family and the fact that Itsuki and Nino made up from their fight during finals week so there shouldn't be any major levels of animosity between them to account for.
Despite this, Nino goes through with her plan because she believes wholly in Fuutarou's ability to promptly find and rescue Itsuki. Recall that all of the incidents so far that the girls end up in are resolved quickly because Fuutarou can find the perpetrators, dispatch of them, and rescue the quints involved anywhere from almost as soon as they happen to a short time after the fact. Yes, sometimes the quints end up with some injuries along the way, but Fuutarou has told them and demonstrated that he's a healer mage. So there's this false sense of security that's built up in Nino's mind due to Fuutarou's usual performance as their bodyguard that nothing really bad is going to happen to Itsuki so long as she makes sure to let Fuutarou know within the same night: he's going to find Itsuki as usual, rescue her, and bring her home, and even if she's hurt, he'll take care of her, so no harm, no foul.
What Nino doesn't account for is the event that Fuutarou can't find Itsuki in a timely manner because she's in a place that's difficult even for him to know about because she believes so wholeheartedly in his ability to protect them, in part due to her own hasty decision-making and Fuutarou almost doing too good of a job protecting them and inadvertently building up a sort of omnipotent image of himself in Nino's mind. And in doing all this, Nino doesn't realize until much later that she's actually putting her own sister's life on the line way more than what she intended for ultimately her own selfish gain, even if it was with the good intention of becoming capable of defending her sisters with her own power. This is why in the previous chapter, after Fuutarou and Nino spend a whole hour searching for but failing to find Itsuki, Nino is by then "completely silent" because she's "firmly gripped by a chilling, nerve-wracking fit of guilt": it's fully hit her by that point that in her shoddy, yolo pursuit of indirectly gaining some kind of magical knowledge from her tutor, she might very well end up being the reason why something very bad could happen to Itsuki.
I think that rather than the problems that you allege in your review, the more likely problem is the pacing. I think what I should have done was to spread out all this information that I've dispensed here across a few more chapters instead, rather than condensing it all into the previous chapter, so that way, Nino's drastic behavior here is more digestible.
However, I'm still not going to do shit to rewrite or scrap anything I've written so far, because your criticisms weren't good enough and because you don't sound much better than some of the anonymous readers who find this fic and drop their own worthless reviews on it from time to time. Just because you say "I didn't write this review to disparage or insult the author" doesn't justify the rest of your review sounding like your average Redditor wrote it, and truth be told, the only reason why I even bothered writing this Author's Note to respond to you was because you're not some dipshit anon whose review I can just yeet out of existence and never look at ever again because it's not worth my time.
The worst part about your review is how you claim there are "so many problems" and that you "could point them all out", but then you "would be writing the chapter for the author, and that's their job, not mine", yet I've spent a good bit of time and effort coming up with a fleshed-out response to your half-assed review just because I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are, in fact, not an asshole like you're trying to make yourself out to be. You clearly see the weak points about the previous chapter, but you don't feel like letting me know how you think they weren't written well, let alone give suggestions on how they could be changed? I could have easily given you the same treatment by summing up all of what I've written above as "Nino is a dumbass teenager and most teenagers have no fucking clue what they're doing, so yeah of course they're gonna do stupid shit sometimes", but that's not what I did because that's not elaborate enough and so no one else would accept that as a reasonable response on its own, let alone you.
I know for a fact that I've asked for constructive criticism in some of the Author's Notes I've written in the past, but "I know the author can write much better than this" does not fit my definition of constructive criticism and I don't know how well it would fit into many others'. So if your next review, assuming you actually do bother giving me one that isn't just you putting your fingernails against a chalkboard and scraping it as hard as you can, could deliver something a little more constructive for me to work with, that would be much appreciated. And if there's anything I missed or failed to respond from your review, I don't particularly care, because then, I would be writing your review for you, and that's supposed to be your job, not mine. And compared to writing an actual story, I daresay you have a much easier job than I do.
I think what I will do at some point, assuming that my own slow-ass and inconsistent writing schedule won't already bar me from doing this in the first place, is to go back and add a scene or two at the beginning of Ch. 80 to show Nino coming to her decision to go save Itsuki alone with Fuutarou; that way the abruptness of her last-minute decision won't come off as being so sudden, though I should stress that this should not make Nino's decision in that chapter any less stupid.
EDIT: One more thing -
TheGamerTwilight: No, but it seems you only exist to write trash reviews. That's far worse than writing shitty fanfiction, because at least trash fanfics have a chance to improve, but people like you have none. Now get the fuck out of my review section and go waste your time elsewhere, like reading any one of the 118 trash fanfics you've favorited.