Chapter 96: Tease Her by Day, Lose to Her by Night.
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They ran two laps around the flower beds before Sanae registered that she was currently inhabiting a completely ordinary human body with completely ordinary human legs, and that catching Kihara was not something those legs were going to accomplish.
She returned to the bench, sat down, reclaimed her boba tea, and bit the straw with the focused energy of someone converting frustration into a productive activity. Her eyes, fixed on him as he settled beside her, had gone large and alert — the specific vigilance of a rabbit that has been startled once and has decided it will not be startled again. The moment he showed even a preliminary flicker of mischief, she was prepared to deploy the remaining pearls at close range.
"Alright, alright. That was my fault. Don't be upset."
She responded by shifting several centimeters to the right, establishing a buffer zone.
Without her shrine maiden abilities, she had no confidence in her reaction speed. Distance was the only reliable countermeasure. She intended to maintain it.
Something in his eyes went warm with amusement. He shifted the same distance toward her.
She moved right again.
He followed.
She moved.
He followed.
The exchange repeated itself in small, precise increments — a territorial negotiation conducted entirely through lateral movement — until the final step, when Sanae, whose entire attention had been directed at him rather than at the geometry of the bench, sat down on air.
"Kyah!!"
He was there before she landed — a blur of movement, one knee on the ground, both arms closing around her — and then she was against his chest and he was looking down at her with an expression of entirely unrepentant satisfaction.
"Akane. How did you manage to fall off a bench?"
"How — this wasn't me being clumsy, this was you doing something terrible to me on purpose!!" She pressed her forehead against his chest, lower lip forward, the picture of someone delivering a formal grievance. "And now my tea is spilled. Look at it. Gone."
"I'll get you another one."
"I don't want another one. I want to go to Kibougahama High."
"...The school? What's at the school?"
"I want to go~ Come with me~ Please~~"
Sanae discovered, with mild surprise, that she was quite good at this. The request came out naturally, warmly, with exactly the right amount of persuasive tilt — Akane's body providing the instinctive delivery without needing to be coached. Kihara's expression of mild resignation was the confirmation that it had landed.
"Fine. Let's go."
"Yes!"
The body moved before Sanae fully intended it to — leaned forward, pressed lips to cheek in a quick, bright kiss that landed just beside the corner of his mouth.
"Chu!"
Sanae's heart rate tripled.
Close. She had redirected it at the last possible instant — a fraction of a second of correction that had saved her from a very different outcome. Akane's body's instincts were generous and warm and would absolutely have gone further if she'd let them.
I need to be more careful.
She took his hand, made a point of breathing normally, and walked.
Kibougahama High had not changed much in their absence. The white-tiled buildings sat behind a curtain of April cherry blossoms, students moving between classes in loose clusters, petals lifting and falling with each gust of wind. The whole scene had the particular quality of a memory that had stayed intact.
Their arrival drew a few glances — primarily from former classmates who knew the broad outline of the story. Kihara had left Kibougahama to go abroad with Akane and Rikka; now "Akane" was back in her school uniform with someone who looked like his younger brother, presumably for a nostalgic visit.
Nobody looked too hard. Nostalgia visits were comprehensible.
Kihara reached over and plucked a petal from her hair — then, in the same motion, held the petal in front of her nose and drew it across the tip with a light, deliberate stroke.
"Achoo!!"
He laughed. Genuinely, helplessly, without a gram of remorse.
"Again?! You did that on purpose again!!"
"You've had a 'please tease me' energy all day. I'm just responding to what's in front of me. I suggest some self-reflection."
"Then don't you run from me—!!"
"Then don't you chase me—!!"
They ran.
Past the home economics classroom trailing caramel warmth. Past the music room where someone was alone with a euphonium, working through a passage that kept catching on the same note. The brass sound blurred with their footsteps and the wind as they rounded the covered walkway along the courtyard.
Kihara passed a white stone pillar and vanished.
Sanae stopped, braced on her knees, and focused on breathing.
"Ha — ha — ...Is he seriously playing hide-and-seek with me?"
She had never been particularly good at hide-and-seek. She wiped the light sweat from her forehead, cupped her hands around her mouth, and tried the diplomatic approach first.
"Kihara! Come out! I promise I won't hit you!"
The courtyard returned her voice to her, slightly delayed, completely unhelpful.
"If you don't come out I'm going to get genuinely upset!"
Nothing.
She set off through the courtyard, checking the obvious locations — the hedges, the flower beds, the base of the large tree at the center — with the focused patience of someone who had decided that if she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly.
She was reaching for her phone — the last resort, the diplomatic nuclear option — when something hit her from behind.
Both of them went down into the soft grass under the tree, the impact absorbed by the ground and his arms simultaneously, and she found herself looking up at him through the dappled light coming through the branches.
"Going to cheat already? What happened to the search?" His smile had the particular quality of someone who had won and was taking a moment to appreciate it. "I think you've earned a small punishment."
Sanae's body, apparently with its own views on how to respond to this situation, chose precisely this moment to make its preferences known — a slight catch in her breath, a subtle shift in her posture. She pressed her knees together, brought her forehead to rest against his chest, and delivered her counterclaim in the tone of someone who has decided indignation is the correct register.
"I ran until my legs gave out. You're carrying me to the shopping center."
"...How is that a punishment for you."
"I don't care. I'm your girlfriend."
The words came out before she'd finished constructing them.
She waited for the usual internal alarm — the one that would remind her whose girlfriend she currently was, and in whose body, and that this was borrowed — and it didn't come. Just a small, specific warmth behind the sternum, and something that felt like the last of a door closing.
She kissed the corner of his mouth, unhurried and deliberate, and then pressed her face into his chest and let her hair fall forward to hide the transparency of her ears, which had gone the precise shade of red that could not be blamed on exertion.
Kihara lay still for a moment and took a quiet internal inventory.
Whatever Liliruca's transformation magic did, it changed the face and the body — not the soul underneath them. But Akane specifically had never been one face. She cycled between them the way the weather cycled through seasons: the untouchable idol of the school hallway, the absorbed, single-minded girl who talked about monsters with the reverence most people reserved for religion, the particular magnetic chaos she became when Rikka was beside her.
And now this — the version that was young and slightly clumsy and had apparently decided vulnerability was something she was willing to try today.
That's why I can't stop teasing her, he thought, with a kind of fond resignation. She keeps producing new versions of herself that I haven't seen before. It's irresistible.
If she wouldn't let him tease her during the day, she'd just have to deal with him at night instead.
He held her while the light through the leaves shifted.
When Sanae surfaced from an unintended nap in his arms, the gaps in the canopy above her were letting through light that had turned amber at the edges.
She tilted her head back to look at him. The evening sun had gotten into his dark eyes and was doing something warm with them — the focused, unhurried attention of someone who was simply looking at her, without any other project in mind.
"You're awake." His voice carried the slight amusement of someone who already knew the answer to what he was about to say.
"Were you up until midnight making monster clay again?"
"...I wasn't." She looked away. She had, in fact, been assembling Gunpla until just past two in the morning.
"Shall we go get the models, then? Or are you planning to stay over tonight?"
"We should get them and go back. No need to stay."
"Mm."
What Sanae didn't know — what Akane had never mentioned, because it wasn't the kind of thing that came up in normal conversation — was that the time flow between the two worlds didn't run at the same rate. Under Akane's management, a week in Kibougahama corresponded to roughly an hour in Gensokyo.
She had spent an entire day here.
Gensokyo had barely noticed.
They bought the models. She carried more than she could comfortably hold and refused to admit it. He carried the rest without comment.
At the boundary back to Gensokyo, she watched him walk away toward his own house, his silhouette getting smaller against the evening colors of Pelican Town.
A thought formed itself in the quiet space behind her ribs. She let it come. She said it out loud, very softly, to no one in particular.
"It would be easier if Kihara weren't Reimu's fiancé."
The words dissolved into the evening air.
She stood there for a moment longer.
Then she went inside, set down her boxes, and began opening the first one.
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Thank you for reading.