Chapter 16: One Last Time — Time's Speeding Up.
....
King Deviluke had given his blessing for Lala's nominal suitors to come pester Kihara, but Zastin wasn't going to let strange aliens stroll onto Earth uncontested without at least giving Kihara a heads-up. The moment his scanners flagged an unidentified ship entering Earth's atmosphere, he sent a transmission: an alien has arrived, target probably Lala.
Shinobu cheered the moment she heard.
[Finally — the kidnap-the-princess arc that every story like this eventually gets to. Go put him in the ground.]
"I can't even locate him right now, so—" Kihara stopped mid-sentence. A blurred shape had just crossed the sky and dropped into the park not far from Gensokyo High.
"Never mind."
He muttered something about people walking willingly into trouble, asked Lala to cover for him with the teacher, transformed into Faiz on the rooftop, and headed for the park.
"Cough — cough — disgusting! What is wrong with this planet's air quality!"
Lacospo kicked the hatch open with one stubby leg and stumbled out, hand over his nose, complaining loudly. "Find this so-called fiancé, kill him, and bring Princess Lala back." He looked around with mounting confusion. "I set the coordinates to her school. This doesn't look like a school at all."
"Who are you?"
The black-armored figure that materialized without warning startled him badly. He recovered and immediately leveled an accusation. "You miserable lesser human — how dare you frighten Lord Lacospo with that ridiculous armor! Do you have any idea I am about to marry Princess Lala and become the next ruler of the universe?!"
[That line is so classic I want to bury him immediately just on principle.]
Agreed, Kihara thought back, and addressed Lacospo directly: "Do you believe in gravity? I have a lot of respect for whoever ate the first mushroom — could've been poisonous."
"What are you even talking about?!"
"One last time. Time's speeding up."
"Standing By."
The engine sound rolled through the air. The world slowed to something approaching stillness. Kihara drew several throwing knives from his dimensional pouch and sent them toward the frog-faced alien.
When the acceleration ended, Lacospo was on the ground, thoroughly perforated, his enlarged eyes still holding the last flicker of contempt he'd managed before everything stopped. He hadn't anticipated that this remote backwater planet contained someone with this level of capability and this little hesitation.
"Zastin. You can handle the body. I'd rather not touch the toad."
Zastin emerged from the treeline with his men, dropped to one knee, and bowed formally. "Understood. We'll see to it, Kihara-sama."
"Mm."
Once Kihara had gone, Zastin straightened, his expression considerably more troubled than his posture suggested.
Even as captain of the royal guard, he hadn't been able to track the moment of the attack. Combined with the phrase time's speeding up spoken just before it happened, the conclusion wasn't difficult to reach: this man had some form of temporal manipulation ability.
"Dispose of the body. I'm reporting back to Lord Gid."
"Sir!"
Privately, Zastin decided there was no further need to let any more of Lala's so-called suitors test their luck against Kihara. Against someone who could manipulate time itself, anyone who showed up was simply walking into a grave — and risked complicating the actual job, which was protecting Lala.
A few days passed.
After school one day, Lala announced — with considerable excitement — that her food machine was finally complete. Club activities were about to begin in earnest.
Yanami Anna was already salivating. Sanae was curious. Kihara was the only one who understood that Lala's inventions carried risk as a structural feature rather than an occasional bug.
Take her self-cleaning vacuum, for instance — externally, an ordinary robot vacuum. Internally: a miniaturized black hole. If the containment shell ever cracked, the house would simply cease to exist from the planet's surface.
For everyone's safety, Kihara had Lala start with something simple: caramel pudding. He watched her pour the ingredients into the rice-cooker-shaped device and press start.
He immediately ushered the other three out of the club room, shut the door, and positioned everyone to observe through the small window.
"Kihara, why are you so worried about Lala's inventions?"
"Ahaha..." Lala scratched the back of her head, a little embarrassed. "My inventions do tend to come with... unavoidable side effects. But I'm pretty confident about this one. It shouldn't explode. Probably."
"EXPLODE?!"
Yanami Anna, who had just been defending Lala's honor thirty seconds ago, went wide-eyed with horror and pulled everyone back another ten meters.
"This distance should be fine."
Sanae already had a wind-barrier talisman between her fingers. She'd worked out that this world prohibited supernatural ability use directly, but talismans — being a shrine maiden's tool rather than raw power — apparently didn't register the same way. Her status as a shrine maiden meant the world hadn't flagged her usage as a violation; if anything, the restrictions on her had loosened, giving her more confidence to prepare other, stronger effects in reserve.
Everyone braced.
No explosion came.
Instead: a clean ding.
Lala shot out from behind Kihara immediately. "Yay~ The pudding's done!"
Yanami Anna moved even faster.
She'd already caught the smell of caramel drifting through the door seam. She crossed the distance, yanked the door open, and waved everyone over with the urgency of someone who couldn't wait another second.
"Come on, come on — I can't wait to try it!"
They went inside. Lala opened the machine to reveal four servings of fragrant caramel pudding, plated them, and handed them out.
"Mm~~ The texture just melts — and the cream and caramel are so rich — I think this might be the best pudding I've ever had in my life!"
Yanami Anna's enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone else started eating too.
By the time they left school that day, she'd gone through twelve servings on her own.
Everyone concluded the food machine was perfectly safe.
That evening, getting ready for a bath, Yanami Anna noticed her fingers had started to go transparent. First the skin. Then the muscle beneath it. Then the blood vessels. Within moments, her entire body had become completely see-through.
"No... there's no way..." She stared at her own transparent hand. "Did Kihara actually call this one?"
....
Thank you for reading.