Chapter 85: Tokishikko: It's My First Time — Don't Stare.
....
Two days after Enome came home from the hospital, Eshune declared the situation resolved, grabbed both her mother and Kihara by the wrist, and marched them to the civil registry office.
The paperwork took about twenty minutes.
The news that Bud Town's most popular guild receptionist had acquired a husband traveled at the speed that interesting news always travels in small towns — which is to say, immediately and everywhere. The reaction among a certain subset of the male Guardian population was not gracious.
Kihara addressed their feelings on the matter by knocking all of them down in a single, unhurried exchange. After that, nobody had further opinions they wished to express in his presence.
He also sat down with Enome and Eshune and told them the truth — about Gensokyo, about the other world, about what came next. Enome submitted her resignation to the guild's parent organization that same week. One month's handover, and then she and Eshune would leave with him.
The squad took the news in their own ways, and then, collectively, trained harder. Even the frequency of Hitamuki and Hanabata's accidental welfare incidents dropped to something approaching manageable.
Kihara had allowed himself, cautiously, to believe the final month would be quiet.
Two Guardians came through the guild doors at a near-run, armor cracked, moving with the specific careful gait of people concealing how badly they were hurt.
"There's a — a Specialized Evasion Spider. Outer ring of Bud Forest—"
Enome was on her feet before they finished. "How many in your party?"
The warrior-type Guardian looked at the floor. His jaw worked for a moment. "Just us now. The others... the spider got them."
"Understood. I'll issue an emergency subjugation request and a recovery mission for the fallen. Please go get treated."
"Thank you, Miss Enome."
She watched them support each other out the door, then turned.
"Darling. Would you be able to handle the spider?"
"Already on it. The recovery mission — I'll bring Hitamuki's group." He glanced toward the hall. "Give me five minutes."
They assembled quickly. He ran the briefing on the way:
"When any monster reaches elite tier, it develops a new attribute — some direction it wasn't capable of before. That's what Specialized means. This particular spider is known for sensing killing intent and evading attacks based on that. Its specific Specialized attribute is unknown."
He paused to scan the group as they moved.
"Hitamuki, Maidena, Hanabata — you three take the recovery mission. The coordinates the survivors gave us are here." He passed the map. "Evasion Spiders don't consume human remains, and they don't linger at previous combat sites. You're unlikely to encounter it. Shinobu will go with you."
He reached into his shadow, grabbed Shinobu by the back of her collar, and deposited her in front of Hitamuki's group.
"Watch them for me."
"Thou hast my word~"
"Shinobu-san lives in Shishou's shadow?!"
"Kahkahkah~ Impressive, yes?"
"SO impressive—!!"
"I want to be on the easy team too,"
Tokishikko announced, watching this exchange with open longing. "Casual recovery stroll through the woods, no deadly spider—"
Kihara was already walking. "I need your area magic. Let's go."
She blinked. Jogged to catch up. "You need me specifically?"
"Specifically."
She was quiet for a moment. Then, for reasons she didn't fully interrogate, her mood lifted considerably and she fell into step beside him with more energy than she'd started the morning with.
The outer ring of Bud Forest was quiet in the particular way that meant something had recently frightened everything else into silence.
Kihara moved along the path with a lighter in hand, pausing at intervals to touch the flame to the threads of webbing that stretched between trees, across rocks, along the ground in near-invisible lines. The silk caught and burned in small, clean flares.
"What are you doing?" Tokishikko asked, watching him work.
"Provoking it. Spider silk is how they hunt and how they sense the world around them. Burn enough of it and they feel every loss. It'll come to us." He moved to another thread. "When it does — that's when you use the area magic you can't always aim."
"I appreciate being needed. I do not appreciate the editorial."
"I'm trying to get all of you to Ace level before I leave. Everything I say is in service of that goal."
Tokishikko shifted her staff to her other shoulder, squinting at the side of his face with mild irritation. "And then you ride off into another world with Miss Enome. Very touching."
"That's part of it, yes."
She puffed out her cheeks.
He's not even going to deny it.
She thought, not for the first time, about the unofficial tally of accidental incidents that had accumulated over the past month and a half — the falls, the tangles, the moments where proximity had briefly exceeded appropriate parameters and nobody had called for help or filed a report, entirely because the person at the center of it was their teacher and occupied a specific category that made the normal rules feel complicated.
She thought about a certain girls-only gathering where Hitamuki — cheerful, oblivious, constitutionally incapable of hiding anything — had asked, with apparent genuine curiosity, what the offspring of a human and a beastfolk typically looked like.
The implication had been completely transparent to everyone present except Hitamuki.
And then there had been the moment Tokishikko herself had said, out loud, in front of witnesses, that she'd like to quit the Guardians and simply be supported by Kihara for the rest of her natural life, and never cause damage to his reputation again.
That suggestion had been voted down four to one.
Unanimously. Forcefully. With supplementary remarks.
All on the same starting line, the others had said. You don't get to just walk to the finish.
She was still thinking about this, and about words like idiot and dense and infuriating man who likes married women, and expressing her feelings by attacking the roadside grass with her staff in short, sharp swings—
The smell hit her first.
Every monster carried it — that particular biological wrongness, thick and animal and wrong in a way that bypassed thought and went straight to the older parts of the brain. She turned toward the sound of disturbed air, fast, and the Evasion Spider was already there — enormous, dark purple-black against the shadows, its forelegs spread and its chelicerae open wide. The fangs at the front caught the filtered light: small, needle-fine, and carrying the unmistakable sheen of something that produced a substance specifically designed to stop a living thing from continuing to be one.
Of all the—
Her half-month of conditioning had sharpened her considerably. Her reaction time was genuinely better than it had been. Against a standard opponent, she might have managed something.
Against a Specialized Evasion Spider, her considerably better reaction time was still not enough.
Kihara was between them.
The sound the sword made against the spider's exoskeleton was the specific frequency that made the inside of your ears ache — a shriek of metal on chitin that hit somewhere behind the teeth. Something dark scattered through the air in droplets.
The spider screamed.
Then it was gone — blurring backward into the forest with a speed that seemed to violate the available space, its shape dissolving into shadow before the echo of its cry had finished.
Tokishikko lowered her hands from her ears.
Opened her mouth to say something.
Kihara's color had gone wrong.
He was still standing. For one more second he was still standing, and then he wasn't — he came down toward her and she caught him without thinking, both arms, the full sudden weight of him against her.
"Boss—?!"
"Poison-type Specialized." His voice was level in the way that voices go level when the body is allocating everything to staying functional and has nothing left over for tone. "I didn't avoid the fang entirely."
She looked at him. The white in his lips. The way his breathing had gone shallow in the thirty seconds since.
Specialized poison.
Not a standard dose. Not something a basic antidote touched.
She didn't think. Her staff hit the ground point-first and she spoke the word:
"Ice magic — Coldra!!"
The ice came up in thick curved walls, rising and closing overhead into a half-dome that sealed them both inside — pale blue light, cold clean air, the muffled sound of the forest locked outside.
It would hold against the spider if it came back. It would hold for a while.
She looked at Kihara's face.
She looked at her staff.
She looked at what she was about to do.
...Right. Okay.
She laid him carefully on the ground.
Pulled the ribbon loose from her collar.
Then, working with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had made a decision and was not going to second-guess it, she began undoing the clasp of her outer cape.
The hem of her skirt followed.
"Boss." Her voice came out quieter than she'd intended, with an edge to it she hadn't planned. "This is my first time trying something like this." She looked away from him, cheeks carrying a color that had nothing to do with the cold. "So... don't just stare."
....
Thank you for reading.