Chapter 88: Paparazzi Aya's Report: "What Is Wrong With You People?!"
....
The Evasion Spider incident concluded without further incident.
The remaining days passed quietly. Enome completed her handover at the guild — paperwork filed, keys returned, a brief ceremony that involved the entire town pretending not to cry while absolutely crying — and then Kihara brought her, Eshune, and the squad back to Gensokyo via signed contracts.
He hadn't, in all honesty, anticipated the squad part.
Enome and Eshune had been the plan. The others — Hitamuki, Tokishikko, Hanabata, Maidena — he'd intended to cultivate more gradually, build toward something, bring back eventually.
What actually happened was that they showed up at his door late at night, carrying Tokishikko, who was five-star-bound in rope and clearly the proximate cause of whatever had occurred. They were loudly of the opinion that preferential treatment was unacceptable and something needed to be done about the current disparity immediately.
Hitamuki resolved her feelings on the matter by charging forward with the directness that defined her in all situations. Hanabata leveraged her height advantage to execute what could only be described as a pincer maneuver, with Hitamuki as the other arm. Between the two of them, Kihara was briefly and comprehensively sandwiched.
Maidena was the one nobody had seen coming.
She didn't faint. That was the first surprise. The second was that the accumulated stress of the evening apparently unlocked a full playback of every single one of her several-dozen previous incidents with Kihara — the complete highlight reel, arriving in her consciousness all at once, in high definition.
She cried through the entire thing. Declared at length that she was absolutely unmarriageable and that her life was essentially over. And then, still crying, produced a silver needle, pricked Kihara's thumb, and pressed the resulting drop of blood to the wing-shaped sacred mark on her lower back — a mark she'd apparently had for quite some time without explaining what it was for.
The explanation came later, courtesy of a deeply aggrieved Tokishikko.
The wing mark was a Finizask marriage ritual. A specific one, reserved for practitioners of white magic — the only mechanism by which a devout Finizask healer could retain access to their sacred abilities after taking a spouse. The ceremony required willing participation from both parties.
Kihara had been a willing participant by virtue of having a thumb.
By Finizask law, the ritual constituted a legally binding marriage.
Which meant Maidena — oblivious, easily-frightened, perpetually embarrassed Maidena — now outranked Tokishikko on the official relationship hierarchy.
By a significant margin.
Everyone calls Black Mages calculating, Tokishikko had said, grinding her teeth. But I want to know who taught the White Mage to pull a move like that.
[Suitable candidate detected for Adventurers' Guild management. Assign as Guild Administrator?]
[Yes.]
[Enome and Eshune have been registered as Adventurers' Guild Administrators. Monster subjugation bonus rewards: unlocked.]
[Kyan Hitamu, Tokishikko Dana, Hanabata Nokinsu, and Maidena Anger have been registered as town residents.]
Pelican Town. Outside the farmhouse.
Kihara materialized with six young women in tow.
Rikka Takarada was already on the porch, apparently having sensed the return of someone she'd been waiting on. She looked at the assembled group. Looked at Kihara. Began to applaud with the measured appreciation of someone whose prediction had come in above forecast.
"Impressive. Last time I said you'd probably bring back five. You said definitely not." She tilted her head. "It wasn't five. It was six."
"I'm very charming. It can't be helped."
The six young women directed a synchronized look of withering contempt at him that he absorbed without visible effect.
Rikka introduced herself to each of them with the gracious efficiency of someone who had done a lot of welcoming in her time, then turned back to Kihara with an expression that contained approximately seven layers of meaning. "Go check on Tatsumaki. She hasn't left her house in almost a week. I'll get Akane to show the others around."
"Understood."
She watched him go, pulled out her phone, and sent a text.
Three minutes later, Akane Shinjo arrived at a pace that suggested she'd been waiting for the summons.
"Hiii~!" She swept into view with the radiance of someone who had decided today was going to be excellent and was making it happen through sheer force of disposition. "Nice to meet everyone! I'm the divine presence who's been smiling and lurking in the background this whole time — Akane Shinjo~"
The six of them blinked at her in unison.
Maidena leaned toward Tokishikko.
"Something about her feels like it would get along very well with you."
"I enjoy games," Tokishikko said, with dignity. "I don't have that."
"You're misreading it," Rikka said. "Akane really is a deity. A legitimate one. Just — probably not as powerful as whatever gods you have where you come from."
Maidena stared. "...Seriously?"
"Details later!" Akane was already producing a flag from a storage box — a full meter of fabric reading PELICAN TOWN SIGHTSEEING TOUR — and waving it above her head with the practiced authority of a professional guide. She took two steps toward the road, turned back, and found the entire group staring at the box with expressions of intense scientific interest.
"Come on, let's go~"
"How did that fit in there?" Hitamuki asked, ears forward, tail stilled — the posture she adopted when something had genuinely arrested her curiosity.
Akane considered this. "It's just a normal box."
Tokishikko turned to Maidena. "That was not a normal box. That required spatial magic. Advanced spatial magic."
"We're in a different world," Maidena said patiently. "Things work differently here. Presumably this is ordinary for them."
"The box is a topic for later," Enome said, in the unhurried tone of a woman who had spent years managing the particular chaos that came with being surrounded by interesting people. "For now — shall we see the town?"
Nobody argued with the person who had main-wife energy and knew how to use it.
They followed Akane's flag into Pelican Town.
Meanwhile: the house next door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
No response.
Kihara knocked again. Called out. Knocked harder. Called louder.
Nothing.
He stepped back, filled his lungs, and directed his voice at the upper windows at maximum operational volume:
"FLAT-BOARD TATSUMAKI, I'M B—"
The window flew open.
An invisible hand — telekinetic, immediate, and carrying the exact amount of force required to express a specific emotional state — closed around him, hauled him off the ground, pulled him through the window at considerable speed, and deposited him on the bedroom floor. The window slammed shut behind him with enough force to rattle the frame.
The room was dim. Curtains drawn. The ambient atmosphere of somewhere that had been existed in rather than lived in for the better part of a week. In the middle of it, floating approximately two feet off the floor with her arms crossed and her green hair doing what it always did, was Tatsumaki.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The killing intent that had been building and pressurizing for seven days of no contact began, very slowly, to do something else.
She uncrossed her arms. Floated a slow, deliberate circle around him — studying, assessing, recalibrating. The killing intent kept transforming. By the second circuit it had become something she was clearly losing the fight to contain.
She stopped in front of him.
Lost the fight.
The laugh that came out of her was involuntary and helpless and completely real — she folded forward in the air, both arms wrapped around her own stomach, the tension of a week dissolving in the specific relief of finding something genuinely funny when you'd been braced for something else entirely.
"You've got nerve," she managed, between attempts to collect herself, "calling me flat — look at yourself! When did you turn into this?!"
"You didn't know?"
"Know what?"
Kihara explained the cooking competition. The side effects. The chain of consequences.
Tatsumaki floated higher, laughing harder, the kind of laughter that required her to press both hands to her abdomen to manage. Her eyes were bright with it. A tear traced the edge of one cheekbone and she brushed it away without breaking stride.
Then the laughter settled, and the brightness in her eyes shifted into something more calculated.
She descended to his eye level — which, given their respective current heights, required descending considerably less than usual. She extended one finger and tilted his chin upward with it. Adopted a tone approximately three registers more honeyed than anything that had ever come out of her before.
"My~ my~" she said, with the theatrical condescension of someone enjoying a role reversal at someone else's expense. "How did such a tiny little boy end up wandering over to big sister's house~ Do you want big sister to show you something wonderful~?"
Kihara met her eyes without blinking. "Sure, big sis. What kind of wonderful thing?"
The delight that crossed her face was genuinely attractive in a way she would never acknowledge and he absolutely clocked. She leaned in — lips finding the curve of his ear — and her voice dropped to something that was primarily breath:
"The kind that boys like you like the most~ Does little brother want to see~?"
The gulp that followed was audible.
It echoed in the quiet room.
"Yes!!"
"So well-behaved."
She laughed again — silver-bell bright — raised both hands dramatically, and stripped off the outer layer of her black bodysuit—
—revealing the red-violet-silver tricolor of the hero suit underneath.
"NO WAY — THAT'S TIGA'S COLOR SCHEME!!"
"It is NOT — WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! WHO RAISED YOU LIKE THIS?!"
The voice came from outside.
Specifically from the large tree across the road, where a certain tengu journalist had been wedged between two branches for the past twenty minutes with a camera, working angles, adjusting exposure, waiting patiently for the kind of candid content that a professional of her caliber deserved.
What Aya Shameimaru had gotten instead was a tokusatsu color palette debate conducted at volume, which was not what she had come here for and could not be published under any interpretation of her editorial standards.
She lowered the camera. She gathered what remained of her dignity. She muttered several things under her breath that she had the professional restraint not to repeat in print.
She began to climb down.
She looked up.
Kihara was in the window.
Looking directly at her.
"Oh no—"
"Paparazzi Aya." His voice carried the specific, pleasant calm of a man who had already decided what the next thirty seconds looked like. "You've entered my Stand's effective range. Nowhere to go."
"START UP—!!"
Aya Shameimaru's speed was her identity. Her signature. The thing that had never, in all her centuries of operating in Gensokyo, let her down.
Accelerated Kihara was a different category of problem than the ones her speed was calibrated to solve.
She was captured. Completely. In an embarrassingly short timeframe that she was going to take to her grave without disclosing.
The negotiated terms of her release: one thousand photographs, assorted poses and situations, none pre-approved, all archived.
She cleared the boundaries of Pelican Town at maximum velocity the moment the terms were fulfilled.
"That insufferable little — I will have my revenge, Kihara-kun!! This is not over!!"
The wind swallowed her voice before it finished.
The window closed.
Tatsumaki looked at the empty tree across the road. Then at Kihara.
"...The suit is not Tiga's color scheme."
"It really is though."
"GET OUT OF MY HOUSE."
....
Thank you for reading.