Chapter 86: From Poison Cure to Mana Transfer.
....
"Wait — what exactly are you planning to do?"
"Boss. Have you heard of a Cursed Name?"
"A name with a curse effect built into it?"
"Exactly. My name is a Cursed Name. The curse effect gives me a passive immunity to all poisons." She held his gaze. "Which means... if someone receives my bodily fluids through close contact, there's a chance they could temporarily share that immunity."
Tokishikko delivered this explanation with the focused composure of someone reciting from a textbook, which was the only thing keeping her voice steady. Then she placed both hands on her shoulders and began to ease her outer dress down — slowly, because her fingers weren't entirely cooperating.
The fabric pooled at her waist, revealing a camisole in soft lilac.
Her fingers found the upper edge of her black tights.
"Wait."
She startled. "Wh — what?!"
"The tights." His voice had a quality she'd never heard in it before. "Please. Leave those on."
"Now of all times you're worried about that..." She looked at him for a moment — pale, barely holding upright, being fussy about hosiery while poison worked through his system — and felt something helpless and fond move through her in equal measure. She moved her hands away from her waist. "Fine. But take your shirt off. Where's the wound?"
Kihara's expression developed a subtle, complicated quality.
"Hypothetically," he said. "And I want to be very clear that I'm saying hypothetically. If I told you right now that I was joking — that I'm actually fine — what would you do?"
She looked at him without blinking.
"I would cast a Black Magic self-destruct forbidden curse and take both of us out together."
She said it the way you'd say I'd probably have soup for dinner. No inflection. No hesitation.
A drop of cold sweat traced its way down the side of Kihara's face.
He took off his shirt.
And, in the interest of both their continued survival, he quietly produced a small wound that looked convincingly like a fang puncture. He had made a decision: he was going to take this secret to his grave.
Tokishikko had not spent much time looking directly at his torso before. She looked at it now. The compact build — the kind that registered as slight until the shirt was off, and then registered as something else entirely — caught her somewhat off guard, and the color in her cheeks, which had been maintaining a manageable level up to this point, climbed.
"Boss, you have... an unexpectedly good body." Her hand moved toward his abdomen, made contact with the muscle there for approximately half a second, and retreated as though the surface had conducted something. "Strong... I can feel your pulse... warm... really firm..."
"Good thing Maidena isn't here. She'd have things to say to you."
"Hehe~"
The exchange — so completely normal, so completely them — unknotted something in Tokishikko's chest that she hadn't realized was pulled tight. The moment she'd seen him go down, she had felt the bottom fall out of something. If she hadn't happened to have this particular passive ability — if her name hadn't been what it was—
Stop! Focus.
She had thought, for years, that her name was awkward. Odd-sounding. The kind of name that required explanation and still produced confused looks. She thought differently now. She thought it might be the best name she'd ever heard.
"...I'm going to start."
"Go ahead."
She knelt. Settled back onto her heels, the black tights doing what they were designed to do in terms of keeping the cold forest floor at a slight remove. She looked at the small wound beneath his right ribs, still seeping, and felt her throat do something tight and involuntary.
She blinked until her eyes were clear. Then she gathered her hair behind one ear, lowered herself over the wound, extended her tongue, and let her saliva fall onto the broken skin in slow, careful drops.
"How does it feel?"
He didn't answer. His brow had furrowed, jaw tight, lips pressed together in the manner of someone managing something.
Just saliva isn't enough, she concluded.
She shifted, pressed her lips directly to the wound, and began to draw — pulling the poisoned blood out and releasing it, coating the site with her immunity as she worked, focused, methodical, the way she approached spellwork when she was actually trying.
The warm breath from his exhales landed against her skin in irregular intervals, and she felt him shudder once — which she read as the toxin responding, fighting back, and redoubled her effort.
Then something pressed against her collarbone.
She stopped. Looked down.
Looked up at him.
A slow, knowing curve appeared at the corner of her mouth. "Boss. Whatever is happening there is categorically not within the professional scope of a student-colleague relationship." She let the observation sit for a moment. "That said — a reaction means this is working. So I'll take the confirmation."
"...More or less."
"The external approach is too slow." She pressed her thumb gently to his lower lip, applying just enough pressure to part it. A beat of silence, and then: "The crime I'm committing right now... you're not going to report me afterward, are you?"
"Do I seem like someone without a conscience?"
"Then — okay. Good." She exhaled. "Direct contact is too embarrassing, and we're not — we're not that — so here's what's going to happen. I'm going to let the saliva fall directly, the same way as before. You swallow immediately. You do not taste it. That is a firm condition. Absolutely non-negotiable."
"Understood."
She steeled herself. Opened her mouth slightly, eyes half-lidded, and leaned forward.
His hand came up and found the back of her head.
She had exactly enough time to register what was happening before he closed the remaining distance himself.
Inside the black tights, her toes curled into a tight ball.
Then, slowly, released.
Then began tapping against the ground in rapid, uncontrolled alternation — both feet, toe-tips striking the forest floor like twin drumsticks, the only outlet available for what was currently happening inside her chest.
My first kiss. In a forest. During emergency poison treatment.
I really should have seen this coming.
She had run the scenarios, in a vague, private way, during the past weeks — imagined various configurations of how this might eventually unfold, if it did. She had not specifically modeled this configuration. She was updating her models.
He was warm. Warmer than she expected, even feverish as he was. His arm at her waist had a certainty to it that she felt down to the toes that were currently assaulting the ground. The dizziness that crept in at the edges of her awareness was, she was fairly sure, not the poison.
She broke away first — pulled back and breathed in cold forest air with a concentration she usually reserved for high-tier spellcasting. Her eyes were wet at the corners without her having decided they would be. Her lashes trembled.
"Boss." Her voice was softer than she'd intended. "Attacking a girl without warning is technically criminal behavior."
"Says the person who built a prison around us with ice magic."
She made a small, dissatisfied sound. "We just kissed. Following standard protocol — shouldn't there be a confession somewhere in there?"
"You led with 'criminal behavior."
"...That's — okay, that one's on me." She smoothed her expression. The effort required was considerable. "So. Now that we've established that. Is a confession forthcoming, or—"
"Tokishikko." His voice was completely level. "I like you."
The words landed as gently as anything she'd ever heard — no particular drama, no performance, just the simple fact of it offered plainly.
Tokishikko opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Something was happening in her chest that had bypassed all the usual systems — the deflection reflex, the commentary instinct, the layer of irony she kept over everything as a matter of operational practice — and gone directly to whatever lived underneath all of that.
She punched her own sternum, once, firmly, to restart her voice.
"Ha—!!" The laugh came out bright and helpless and entirely real. She grabbed her phone, held it up, and shook it at him with the vindication of someone whose contingency planning had just become unnecessary. "He confessed!! Boss actually confessed to me first!!" She was smiling wide enough that it was probably visible from outside the ice dome. "I had a recording ready, you know. Backup plan — if you didn't confess on your own, I was going to use it as leverage."
"That's genuinely reprehensible."
"Love is war. You think I walked in here without a strategy?" She tucked the phone away. "The benefits I provided today — do you think I hand those out without doing the math first?"
He looked at her. "Maidena says Black Mages are calculating. Based on current evidence I don't think she was wrong."
"Let that little shortstack say whatever she wants." Tokishikko tossed her hair with an air of supreme satisfaction. "I have a firm grip on my Boss, and that's what matters."
A beat.
His expression shifted — warmth, and something that had just remembered it had an agenda.
"Since we're officially..." He glanced, meaningfully, in a direction.
Tokishikko caught it.
Her eyes curved into something that was simultaneously coy and entirely in control of the situation. She shifted her position, adjusted her angle, and muttered with the professional demeanor of someone reporting for duty:
"Greedy Boss... this requires the personal intervention of Magical Girl Tokishikko. Prepare to be sanctioned."
Some time later, the ice dome finally came down.
Two people emerged into the afternoon light of Bud Forest. The mana that had been cycling between them — transferred, absorbed, returned, transferred again in the thorough and mutually exhaustive manner of people who had been very serious about solving a medical problem — had reached equilibrium.
Both of them needed to sit down.
Neither of them did.
....
Thank you for reading.