Chapter 87: The Side Character Is Trying to Kill the Main Wife!!
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"Ugh... that was like drinking unprocessed milk straight from a Misha River dairy cow. Can't call it bad exactly, but it definitely wasn't good."
"Full marks in the Pointless Observations subject, I assume."
"Hehe~"
Tokishikko stood up, stretched her arms overhead with the satisfaction of a cat waking from a nap, then looked down and immediately stopped being satisfied. The black tights that had survived the morning were now a documentation of the past hour — holes of varying diameter distributed across the inner thigh region with a specificity that defied any innocent explanation.
She looked at them.
She looked at Kihara.
"How exactly do I explain this when we get back?"
"Tell them you had to dodge an attack and tore them."
She pointed, without words, at the precise geographic distribution of the damage.
"Tell them you dodged with a split."
"I said a dodge. Not a gymnastics routine."
"You lunged to avoid the spider's attack, went into an emergency split, and the tights paid the price. Perfectly coherent sequence of events."
"You're a genius," she said, with genuine admiration and zero warmth. "If I were Maidena I'd be on the phone with law enforcement right now."
She was also, she noticed, developing an awareness that her particular flavor of semi-tsundere personality had been thoroughly reverse-engineered and was being operated against her with surgical precision. The question was whether this was high emotional intelligence or an extremely good act.
She decided it didn't matter. The genuinely tsundere one was Maidena. Tokishikko's job was to watch that unfold from a position of comfortable superiority.
Having arrived at this satisfying conclusion, she stopped arguing, picked her clothes up off the ground, and got dressed.
When they were both presentable, she studied him for a moment with the assessing gaze of someone whose conscience had sent a late memo.
"Boss. You really didn't lie about your age?"
"Why would I?"
"It's just..." She pressed a hand over her face. "Looking at you right now makes me feel like I've done something genuinely terrible to an innocent child. Like I reached into a pure and untouched soul and smudged it."
"Temporary. I'll be back to normal size within a few weeks."
"Good." The relief in her exhale was entirely sincere.
Kihara reached into the void at his hip and withdrew the Crimson Blade. He settled his arm around her waist with the ease of someone who had decided this was simply how things were now, and started walking.
"Let's go finish the job."
"Right."
The silver-white arc of the sword's draw detonated across the air like a struck match.
The scenery rearranged itself.
They were above the Evasion Spider before it processed what was happening — the Crimson Blade already moving, the strike already complete, the elite monster coming apart in sections with the casual efficiency of something being filed rather than fought.
Tokishikko looked at the twitching remains beneath her feet.
Then she looked at Kihara.
Then, with a calm deliberateness that suggested she had been thinking about this for the past thirty seconds, she stepped forward and pressed him against the nearest tree trunk.
"Boss." Her eyes were narrow. "You weren't faking the poison, were you."
"Absolutely not."
"Really."
"I swear on the name of the water goddess Aqua — no deception whatsoever."
"I don't know who that is." She looked up at the sky. Clear blue. Not a cloud. No thunder. No divine retribution of any kind. "Swearing by a deity's name with no atmospheric response... I suppose that means you're telling the truth."
"It does."
She held the look for another three seconds, decided she believed him, and stepped back.
"Photo for the report, then we rendezvous with Hitamuki's group."
"Agreed."
She took the photo. They walked.
The next day, Tokishikko sent invitations to the other three.
Girls-only gathering at my place. Come over.
Her room was exactly what you'd expect from someone who had strong opinions about aesthetics and zero competing obligations for her time — pink as a declaration, game merchandise arranged on dedicated shelving, throw pillows shaped like various desserts stacked along one wall, and a low table currently hosting an array of Bud Town's most sought-after sweets. The particular shop that supplied three of the items had a waiting list. Tokishikko had connections.
She greeted them at the door with a wide smile and waves of both hands. "You made it! Come in, sit down, eat things—"
Hanabata gave her one look. Said nothing.
Maidena, who had the instincts of someone who had been burned by optimism before, skipped the pleasantries entirely. "You did something. What did you do? How bad is it?"
Tokishikko let the smile fade. She sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and took on the expression of someone preparing to confess before a tribunal.
"...Pretty bad, yeah."
Hitamuki immediately moved to sit beside her, concern radiating from every surface. "It's okay! Whatever it is, just tell us — we'll figure it out together!"
"Thank you, Hitamuki." A genuine pause. "I mean that."
She looked at each of them in turn.
Her left hand was under the table, pinching her own thigh hard enough to leave a mark, because if she let her face do what it wanted to do right now the entire setup would collapse.
"I've been sitting with this," she said, in a voice of measured gravity, "because I wanted to hide it. But you're my best friends and my teammates, and I can't be that irresponsible. So I'm telling you. All of it."
Hitamuki's ears were flat with worry. "It's not — nobody died, right?"
"No. Not yet."
Maidena: "Not yet?! Then say something — before it gets worse! If you need help, we help — and if it's beyond us, Senpai can—"
"Maidena." Tokishikko looked at her with eyes that had gone soft and suspiciously shiny. "I didn't realize you cared about me this much." She reached out and took her hand. "All those things I did — spoiling the ending of your mystery novel, stealing your strawberries while you were in the bathroom, secretly photographing your underwear and sending the pictures to Boss to disturb him—"
"—the what—"
"—I've reflected deeply on all of it. I'm truly sorry."
The temperature in the room changed.
Maidena was doing the arithmetic. The period when Senpai's gaze had occasionally landed on her with an expression she couldn't parse. The mystery of why. Now solved.
That Black Mage.
That sneaky, underhanded, absolutely typical—
She held the killing intent behind her teeth by sheer force of Finizask discipline.
"Tell. Us. What. You. Did."
Tokishikko dropped the act entirely.
She threw her head back and laughed — genuinely, helplessly, the laugh of someone who had been holding it since yesterday and had run out of capacity to hold it further.
"Yesterday I accidentally kissed Boss. We are currently in the early exciting stages of a romantic relationship!!"
The room processed this.
Hitamuki's fist moved before her brain did.
The jab cleared the air beside Tokishikko's ponytail at a velocity that produced an audible crack — a few strands of dark hair drifting loose and settling on the floor between them. Hitamuki stared at her own hand with the expression of someone who had been ambushed by their own body.
"I — I'm sorry — Tokishikko — I don't know what that was, something just — I felt something I've never felt before and my arm just — are you okay—?!"
Tokishikko touched her cheek, which was tingling from the displaced air. She looked at Hitamuki with new respect.
"Did I just... briefly visit the gates of death?"
"Thud."
Hanabata placed her hand on Tokishikko's shoulder with a gentleness that was entirely cosmetic. The mana leaking from her fingertips had gone the particular deep pink that preceded what the squad had started calling Tipsy Blossom — the shade that meant the rational Hanabata was beginning to share processing space with a version of Hanabata who had different priorities.
She smiled. It was a smile that didn't reach the danger zone behind her eyes.
"Walk us through exactly what happened with Senpai yesterday," she said pleasantly.
"Every detail. Because right now I'm not entirely sure what I might do if you leave anything out."
Maidena produced a coil of rope from somewhere — nobody asked where — and began looping it around Tokishikko's wrists with the efficient movements of a girl who had read extensively about knots.
The cold smile on her face was a new expression for someone who usually cried at loud noises.
"I'll tell you everything!! Everything!!"
She did.
In the interest of survival, she held nothing back — including the more technical details of the mana transfer that had followed the poison treatment.
"And for the record," she added, during one particularly candid portion of the account, "externally he looks like that, but the actual — it's kind of alarming. I nearly — it was a lot to process."
"If it was too much," Hanabata said, in a voice of crystalline sweetness, "you could have simply not taken in quite so much."
"Hanabata... san?"
"Hm?"
"I'm hearing my own shoulder bones making noises." Tokishikko's tears had taken on the specific shape of vertical streams rather than drops — the anime format, expressing maximum suffering. "I think you might be actually breaking something."
Hanabata's smile widened by a precise, controlled increment. "Not a misperception. Fully intentional."
"HELP!! SOMEONE!! THE SIDE CHARACTER IS MURDERING THE MAIN WIFE!!"
"There are no main wives here," Maidena said, tightening the final knot. "We're all on the same starting line."
"THEN WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE TIED UP—?!"
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Thank you for reading.