Chapter 177: The Correct Use of Mind Reading [2-in-1]
Consider the following hypothetical. You have a best friend. Friends since before either of you could tie your own shoes. Eighteen years of shared history, the kind of friendship where you have seen each other through everything. And then one day your best friend is inexplicably a beautiful girl, and you have just read her private thoughts and discovered that those thoughts are deeply, comprehensively terrible.
What does a reasonable person do in that situation?
A reasonable person would never be in that situation.
Amano Rei arrived at this conclusion while eating the noodles Kikawayu had just made for him.
He had to admit the cooking was genuinely excellent. Back in District 32, he had not had much to compare it to. Having spent time in the mid-level district now, he had sampled enough of the restaurants with actual reputations to have an informed opinion. Kikawayu's late-night noodles, made from synthetic ingredients, were better than most of them.
Kikawayu, for her part, had not served herself anything. She was seated at the table across from him, chin resting in one hand, watching him eat with the quiet, unhurried attention of someone who had nowhere else to be.
This was not new behavior. Kikawayu had always been like this, the kind of person who was content to simply exist near someone she liked without needing to fill the air. In the past, Amano had found it entirely unremarkable.
Now it was making him acutely uncomfortable.
Not only because the person sitting across from him was currently the image of an extremely pretty girl, but because he had just finished reading that girl's private thoughts, and the contents of those thoughts could not be unread.
He had assumed she was just sitting there quietly. She was, in fact, absolutely not just sitting there quietly.
"Cough!"
The thought arrived in vivid detail at the exact moment he swallowed, and the broth went down the wrong way.
"Honestly, Rei." Kikawayu leaned forward and patted his back with practiced familiarity, then reached for a napkin and dabbed at the corner of his mouth. "Some things really do not change."
This was, on every objective level, the same thing she had always done. The same gesture, the same mild exasperation, the same complete lack of self-consciousness about the physical contact.
Because she always touched him. She always had. He had simply never catalogued it before.
He was cataloguing it now, and the result of that cataloguing, combined with Thought 2 and Thought 3 from earlier, was producing an increasingly difficult internal situation.
He needed to stop putting those two things together.
They finished the late meal and moved toward their respective rooms.
Amano stopped at his door.
He could not have explained the impulse precisely, but he wanted to ask the question. He asked it anyway.
"Yuu. Hypothetically. Just hypothetically: if one of us were a girl, do you think anything between us would actually change?"
Kikawayu's eyes moved, just slightly. Then her face arranged itself into an expression of maximum theatrical shock.
"What? Rei. Do you want to become a woman?"
Amano looked at her. She was, at this particular moment, an extremely beautiful person making an extremely exaggerated face while asking him, with complete deadpan delivery, whether he wanted to change his gender.
He nearly lost it entirely.
"I said hypothetically!"
"That is such a strange question." Kikawayu tapped her chin thoughtfully. "I think nothing would change, probably. Except you would not be allowed to pull my swim shorts down at the pool anymore."
"Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Sorry, that was a weird thing to ask. Goodnight."
"Stop reading those gender-swap manga. Goodnight."
They closed their doors.
On the other side of hers, Kikawayu pressed her back against the wood and stood very still, breathing faster than she should have been.
Had she been found out?
Why had he asked that?
She ran through the past several hours at speed, searching for any obvious mistake. Any behavior that had deviated from what he would consider normal. She could not find one. Her conduct had been identical to how she had always behaved, going all the way back to District 32.
Though, now that she was being thorough about it.
Staying up past midnight to wait for him to come home. Making him noodles by hand. Sitting across from him without eating, doing nothing but watching him eat while privately wiping traces of drool she was reasonably certain he had not noticed. That was the same behavior she had always exhibited. Rei had never questioned it before.
Perhaps she had, in retrospect, been somewhat obvious for quite some time.
For a moment, when he had asked that question, she had felt the pull of a very different option. Just tell him. Right now. Stop pretending. Handle the consequences directly and on her terms.
Her rational mind had reasserted itself just in time.
"Yubel," she said quietly, to the room. "Is there really no way to reveal myself early?"
"If the illusion disguise is broken while active, the worst outcome is that Eva's systems detect our signature, lock our location, and forcibly exile us from Eden."
"And the not-worst outcome?"
"Eva does not detect us, but Amano Rei concludes that you have been deceiving him for eighteen years and begins to dislike you."
"That is the worst outcome."
A long exhale. She looked toward the window, at the artificial dim light that passed for moonlight in the tower.
Maintain the disguise. That was still the right call. Not only for safety.
She had been holding this secret for eighteen years. Somewhere along the way, she had quietly developed a fear she had not let herself name directly: what if, after all that time, he did not accept what she actually was? What did she do then?
Everything would change. Of course it would. Whatever she had said to his face about nothing changing, that was the kind of answer you gave to children.
She was not a child. Adults handled things differently.
Specifically: she would just knock him unconscious.
That night, for the first time in a while, Amano dreamed of childhood. The two of them, small enough that the world had seemed enormous, always next to each other. He could not remember a version of his life that did not have her in it. They had been through a great deal, and they had never once been apart.
He woke up the next morning feeling uncharacteristically sentimental, and then immediately remembered Thought 2 and Thought 3, and the sentimentality evaporated.
At Synchro Academy the following morning, Amano was visibly off his game from the moment he arrived. The Thought Reading revelations were still turning over in his head. The specific vocabulary Kikawayu's mind had produced was not vocabulary he could have reproduced out loud if someone had asked him to.
The midnight cooldown on the skill had passed. He could use it again.
In the interest of what he decided to call experimental sample diversity, he resolved to test it on a different target before returning to Kikawayu. Confirm the skill was functioning correctly. Establish a baseline.
The only available target in the classroom at this hour was Nanki'in Sakuya.
Sakuya had returned from the morning run and was now completely horizontal across her desk, face buried in her arms, not moving.
He almost felt guilty about this.
Almost.
"Thought Reading."
The expected delay did not come. Sakuya's mental voice arrived almost immediately, which meant even in her current state of total physical collapse she was apparently thinking about him.
Thought 1: Why does Amano have stamina like that, and why am I like this every single day? I have been following Ryuuma's advice to drink milk before bed. Why has my stamina not improved at all?
Sakuya, Amano thought, milk before bed improves sleep quality. It has essentially no effect on physical stamina. Those two things are not related.
Thought 2: Last night I dreamed that Amano accepted the house and he was so happy about it that he picked me up and spun me around. Why does that not work in real life? My mother always said no man can turn down a house. But Yukki said it might make him dislike me. Who is right?
The answer, Amano reflected honestly, was that Sakuya's mother was not entirely wrong. If she had pressed a little harder, there was a meaningful chance he would have eventually caved and accepted it on the grounds that it was simply easier. He chose not to examine that thought too closely.
Thought 3: There is still half a red bean bread in my bag from this morning. I need to find an opportunity to make Amano eat it. Second period break would be ideal. Everyone starts getting a little hungry by then.
Amano sat with this.
He was fairly certain he had just identified a pattern. Thought 3 was strange both times. Yesterday Kikawayu, today Sakuya. Why did his Thought 3 always end up being about something being put in his mouth?
And then the larger realization arrived.
Sakuya always left him half of whatever she was eating. He had noticed it before without examining it. Half a bread roll. Half a bag of chips. Half a pack of beef jerky. Half a water bottle. It happened constantly, had been happening for a while, and he had assumed, without really thinking about it, that she simply had a small appetite and did not want the rest.
That was apparently not the explanation.
He poked the unmoving shape of Sakuya on the desk. She lifted her head slowly, eyes vague with exhaustion, and looked at him.
"What is it, Amano. Is it time for class?"
"Not yet. I just, I was not quite full this morning, actually."
He watched the transition happen in real time: the faint tiredness in her eyes replaced, in the span of about one second, by something considerably more alert.
"You did not eat enough? I have half a red bean bread left here. It is good. Do you want it?"
"Sure."
Sakuya produced the bread from her bag. Amano accepted it and looked at the broken edge, where the bite marks were clearly visible, neat and precise.
"Why do you always leave half of things, Sakuya?"
"I just. I could not finish it. And I thought, since it was there, you might want to try it."
That was not the truth. He could tell. Sakuya had a very composed face under normal circumstances, but he had been paying attention to her for long enough now that the small evasions were legible: the eyes that did not quite hold contact for the right duration, the slight pause before the answer.
He filed the observation away with considerable frustration. He had already used the skill today.
Though, he thought, this was actually the more interesting discovery: the skill was significantly more effective when you guided the conversation before activating it. If you sent the target's thoughts in a direction first, then read them, you got genuinely targeted information rather than whatever happened to be at the surface. He had just demonstrated it by accident.
The limitation was that the skill refreshed once per day, and he had already spent his activation on the unprompted Thought 3. If he had guided the topic first, he might have gotten the actual answer.
He was now going to spend the rest of the day thinking about this instead of whatever was being taught in class.
This was exactly the problem with Pandora's box. Once you knew there were secrets accessible to you, the curiosity became genuinely difficult to manage.
He needed something to do with his hands.
Fourth period had barely started when his VSN lit up with a message from Finesse.
Finesse: Are you free right now?
Amano: As it happens, completely free. What is it, Finesse?
The follow-up arrived a few seconds later.
Finesse: Then I need emergency Back Seat Soul support. Come to me as soon as you can.
Not a casual conversation, then. An actual request for possession.
The fact that she had asked whether he was free first suggested it was not a full emergency. But whatever it was, it was enough to pull her away from whatever she would normally be doing.
Conveniently, his attention had not been on the lesson anyway. He raised his hand.
"Sensei. I am not feeling well. May I go to the nurse's office?"
He was halfway to the door before the teacher finished saying yes.
Behind him, with minimal delay, he heard Sakuya's voice.
"Sensei. I ate too much this morning. I need to use the bathroom."
She caught up with him in the hallway.
"Are you going to Finesse?"
"Yes. She seems to have run into something."
"I see." Sakuya fell into step beside him without comment. "Then I will stay with your body while you are gone. Go without worrying."
"You are a lifesaver, Sakuya."
Someone keeping watch over a body in full Back Seat Soul shutdown was a genuine convenience. Lying unconscious and unresponsive in the nurse's office without anyone present was bad enough under normal circumstances. In the event of an actual emergency, the inability to react was a serious problem.
The nurse, Kanzuki-sensei, was mercifully not in when they arrived. Amano found the most interior bed, lay down, and felt Sakuya settle into the chair beside him.
He closed his eyes.
"Hacker Intrusion!"
The tunnel through Finesse's consciousness was familiar by now, that characteristic deep crimson passage through her mental space. But the transit took noticeably longer than usual. Longer than the last time he had crossed academy districts. Long enough that he registered it as meaningful data before he arrived.
Finesse was not in Academy City at all.
He reached the mind-room, exchanged the brief impression of her presence, and transferred control.
When he opened his eyes, the first things he saw were Karl and Latir. All three Wein siblings in the same place at the same time.
The room around them looked like a hospital. Yellow police tape cordoned off a section near a bed. The girl lying in that bed was absolutely still, her face completely drained of color, white as paper, not a trace of blood in her complexion.
Amano stared at her.
He had the persistent, nagging feeling that he had seen that face somewhere before.
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