Chapter 94: Suika Ibuki, Connoisseur of Refinement.
....
"Kihara-sama, is this pressure alright?"
"Kihara-sama, which feels better — shoulders or legs?"
He had to be honest: he genuinely could not tell which one was the real Liliruca.
Both of them were wearing Suika's face. Both were delivering attentiveness at the same pitch, the same warmth, with the same small accommodating smiles. There was nothing externally distinguishable between them.
He briefly considered asking them both to breathe on him and checking for traces of his special yogurt on the breath, then decided that would be a difficult thing to explain if Shinobu noticed.
He thought for a moment longer.
Then he simply pulled both of them in at once — one arm around each — and waited.
His reasoning: the real Suika wasn't romantically invested in him. Being held without it being her own idea first would produce at least a flicker of instinctive resistance. Liliruca, by contrast, would settle in without hesitation because this was simply normal.
Both of them nestled in without a word of objection.
Both looked up at him with identical expressions of warm, uncomplicated contentment.
Not a single crack. Not a single tell. Two pairs of eyes, perfectly synchronized, giving him absolutely nothing to work with.
He dropped his gaze in theatrical dejection, while his actual attention moved left and right along his peripheral vision.
"Lili." He let disappointment color his voice.
"You've actually learned to team up and deceive me. I'm genuinely hurt."
On his right, something moved behind the eyes — a flash, instinctive and involuntary, the specific flicker of someone whose first impulse is always to explain that they weren't doing anything wrong.
"Heh." The corner of his mouth lifted. "Still too young for this, Lili."
He turned right and kissed her without further ceremony.
"Ah—"
"Mm— Mm—!!"
Liliruca was on the verge of tears.
The body she was currently piloting was Suika Ibuki's — genuine, centuries-old, oni-strength and all — and its actual owner was sitting right across from them watching the whole thing with her chin in her hand. The most Liliruca could manage in protest was the lightest possible push against his shoulder, calibrated carefully to avoid sending him through the wall.
Kihara read the light resistance as embarrassment.
He covered Suika's eyes with his free hand to stop the spectating, and kissed Liliruca considerably more thoroughly than before.
Suika pried his fingers apart with patient precision, opening a gap just wide enough to watch through, and settled in with the focused appreciation of a connoisseur at a private exhibition.
My own face, she thought. Making that expression.
She had worn this face for centuries without ever seeing it do anything like what it was currently doing — something that she would have classified, if pressed, somewhere between genuinely feminine and dangerously alluring, the precise combination she'd never had occasion to observe in a mirror because mirrors didn't show you what you looked like when you were actually feeling something.
The lake that she kept inside herself — the one that had been still for so long that she'd stopped checking the surface — received something. Small. A stone, barely larger than a pebble. The ripples moved outward in slow, expanding rings.
She watched them go, and let a smile take the corner of her mouth.
Decision made. Tonight — I do what I want. Free, unscheduled, on my own terms. That's the oni way.
Liliruca finally broke free, pressed both hands to her burning cheeks, and breathed like someone who had been briefly held underwater.
Under normal circumstances she would have been happy. This was Kihara. This was something she wanted. But there was something deeply wrong about the fact that none of this was happening in her own body, and the awareness of it moved across her skin like static.
"So," Suika said pleasantly, from across the room, "how was kissing me, Kihara-kun?"
"...Suika. If you're bothered by this, I apologize."
"Not bothered at all. It wasn't really real anyway." She glanced at Liliruca with the teasing ease of someone who had decided the other person's discomfort was charming. "Right, Lili?"
"Ah... yes. Exactly what you said."
Liliruca looked at Suika — genuinely looked at her, trying to reconcile the version sitting in front of her with the internal model she'd been operating on, which had consisted primarily of cheerful drunk who causes pleasant chaos and forgets about it. That model was no longer adequate.
The person in front of her was settled. Comfortable. Watching a situation that should by rights be awkward with the mild interest of someone who found it mildly interesting and nothing more.
And then there was the kitchen.
At some point I didn't know about, Liliruca thought, did Kihara-sama already...with Suika...
The image of the simple, happy drunk dissolved. In its place: someone who had been alive long enough to understand every game being played and had simply chosen, so far, not to play any of them.
A situation analyst. Sitting quietly. Studying new moves.
Liliruca's attention drifted.
Across the room, the figure wearing Shinobu's body had been eating donuts in silence for quite some time. The pout had deepened to a degree that was approaching architectural — lips pushed forward far enough to balance small objects on.
Flandre had come here with one goal: proximity to Big Brother. What she had instead was a front-row seat to other people achieving that goal, and a mountain of donuts she couldn't possibly finish, and no way to fix either problem without blowing her cover.
The frustration had been accumulating for a while. It was approaching the kind of pressure that produced structural failures.
If she reached her limit and just said it—
Liliruca did the math quickly and spoke before the outcome could materialize.
"Shinobu — why aren't you sending the donuts into your shadow space like usual? Are you planning to eat all fifty of them right now?"
Flandre looked up. Something crossed her face — the very specific relief of someone who has been saved from themselves.
"Of — of course not. I simply find the visual arrangement pleasing. I wished to appreciate it for a moment longer."
She packed the remaining donuts into the shadow space with as much dignity as the situation allowed, then dissolved down through the shadow between Kihara's feet and rematerialized directly in the center of his lap, claiming the position with the decisive finality of someone completing a military objective.
"From this moment forward, this location is hereby designated as Flan — as Shinobu Square. All other parties are formally evicted."
"You can't just declare sovereignty over someone's lap." Kihara pinched her soft cheek.
Suika rose from her seat with the unhurried grace of someone who had accomplished everything she'd come for and was now moving on to the next item. "Fine by me. I had something to ask Lili about anyway. Sake-related." She steered Liliruca toward the kitchen by the shoulder. "You two enjoy yourselves."
Kitchen. Door closed.
Suika's voice dropped to the low, interested register of someone pursuing a genuine research question.
"Do you think his... yogurt... could be fermented into sake?"
Liliruca's pupils executed what felt like a magnitude ten seismic event.
She put her little finger in her ear. Removed it. Regarded Suika with the careful attention of someone checking whether they had misheard.
"...Could you repeat that."
"His milk. The special yogurt from earlier. Does your world have any brewing traditions that would work with that as a base ingredient?"
Liliruca had lived seventeen years. In those seventeen years she had encountered a wide range of unusual questions. This was, without question, the most unusual question anyone had ever asked her about fermentation, or about any topic adjacent to fermentation. She was fairly certain that even Soma, the divine brewer of sacred sake in ancient myth, would have needed a moment to collect himself upon receiving this inquiry.
She chose her words with care. "I have never... in my entire life... heard of a brewing tradition designed around that category of ingredient."
"Makes sense. You're human. Human brewing methods probably weren't developed with youkai palates in mind."
Liliruca stared at her.
Youkai sake.
Brewed from that.
She would genuinely drink it.
Her eyes made a serious effort to exit her face.
Is this what youkai consider normal drinking?
Dinner.
Several of the usual faces were absent — no explanations offered, none requested. Instead, Eris and Ryu arrived together, which was unusual enough to warrant a comment.
"Rare to see you two away from the dungeon at the same time. Did someone finally settle the score?"
Kaguya-as-Eris delivered the three-no response with professional precision — slight headshake, eyes down, attention immediately redirected to the food. She ate without ceremony or comment.
Maidena-as-Ryu mirrored her, matching the mechanical eating rhythm with the focused effort of someone performing a role they had studied.
In truth, Maidena was still processing the afternoon.
She had entered Ryu's library expecting date strategy guides and relationship theory. What she'd found instead was a collection of illustrated publications that Ryuu, apparently, referred to as date manuals — with titles including:
Sweet and Thick Couple's Date.
The Expressionless Elf Who Wants Me to Come Outside.
The Little Devil Junior's Special Date.
The library had opened a door in Maidena's worldview that she was not certain could be fully closed again. She had read approximately half the collection at an internal temperature her skull was not rated for, and had decided the remaining half could wait until tomorrow when her brain had returned to operating parameters.
Dishes done. Kitchen clean.
Kaguya grabbed Kihara's collar the moment he set down the last bowl, towed him upstairs to the guest room with the efficient momentum of someone who had been waiting since morning and was not interested in further delay, and shut the door.
A single soft exhale from inside — the specific sound of prolonged tension finally releasing.
And then, in the privacy of her own head, with the triumphant energy of someone who had crossed a finish line:
I FINALLY GOT MINE!!
Late night.
Moon through the window. Kaguya was in the middle of her enthusiastic performance of the evening's entertainment when the door opened.
Liliruca stood in the doorway.
Then — between one breath and the next — she wasn't Liliruca anymore. The transformation completed quietly, the familiar compact figure of Suika Ibuki settling into place as the smoke cleared.
Suika reached over, plucked the controller from Kaguya's hands with the easy confidence of someone reclaiming something that was always going to be hers eventually, and smiled.
"If we're committing to the experience," she said, with the pleasant finality of someone who had made a decision sometime that afternoon and had simply been waiting for the right moment to execute it, "we should see it through properly~"
....
Thank you for reading.