It was a typical evening in Earnest’s room. All the girls were gathered in a circle on the floor, chatting and snacking. Each of them had their favorite cushion behind their back or under their butt, which they hugged tightly whenever they said something like “ahhh!” or “no waaay!”
“Besides…you know him,” muttered Earnest in between mouthfuls of snacks. She was sitting with one knee up, putting her panties on full display beneath her negligee. It wasn’t a very proper position for a woman, but this was a girls’ gathering. She was being joined tonight by Yessica, Claire, Sophie, Iona, Deemo, and Lunaria—all close friends, lifelong rivals, or both. There was no reason to be shy around this group.
There were no guys here tonight, either. It would’ve been weird if a boy tried to sneak into a girls’ party, though Blade would occasionally join in like it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t even really listen to them; he was only there to scarf up the snacks. He was such a child.
“Why is he such a child anyway?” Earnest asked indignantly before stuffing another handful of food into her mouth.
“Aww, but that’s what makes Blade so interesting, isn’t it?” said Claire. “Don’t you agree, Yessica?”
“Huh? You’re asking me? Well… I guess it is cute, in a way… Okay, Deemo next.”
“Mmm. I can’t speak for Maria, but my spirit has only been fully manifested for five years, so I think I’d be a perfect match for his five-year-old mind. Now you, Sophie.”
“If Blade is happy, then I am happy, too. Iona.”
“I think I have just realized something. In terms of both mental age and actual age, my master is younger than me.”
“How old are you?” asked Earnest.
“Hee-hee-hee… Never ask a Guardian or a Berserker their age. Do you want me to round to the nearest thousand or the nearest million?”
“Never mind.”
“Hee-hee-hee! But thinking about how he is younger than me makes my love for him flow even more torrentially. No, I cannot help but interrupt these feelings, place them in a call stack, and remove the AES decryption from them.”
“Whatever that means. What about you, Luna?”
“Um… Actually, how old is Blade now?”
“We celebrated his seventeenth birthday a little while back. Mentally, though, five seems rather generous.”
“Oh, he’s younger than me? Hmm. So we’re his big sisters here at school?”
“That’s right. We’re all his big sisters!” Earnest giggled. “But even if his childishness is what people like about him, doesn’t that mean he’s out of the running? If his mental age is five now, how many more years will it take for him to become interested in girls? Ten?”
“No way. Boys are already proper men from around age twelve.” Yessica waved her hands to make her point, revealing a hint of her vaunted “wealth of experience.”
“Huh? Really? So seven more years… Ugh. We’ll be twenty-five by then. What should we do about this?”
To the eighteen-year-old Earnest, turning twenty-five was unthinkable, something that only happened to other people. It meant her current self would die well before Blade would so much as look at her.
Earnest let out a deep sigh. “Haaah… I wish we could do it, though.”
Claire spat out her tea. Yessica jumped, her eyes emitting a catlike sparkle.
“What? What do you want to do, huh? C’mon, tell us!”
“Huh? I mean go on a date, of course… Hey! What did you think I was saying?!”
“Oh, that?” Yessica immediately lost interest.
Claire, meanwhile, was still struggling after some tea went down the wrong pipe. Her toes were twitching, even. Death was almost upon her, until Deemo finally held her upside down and Iona bravely stepped in to give CPR.
“What a girly girl you are,” Yessica told Earnest as they watched.
“Hey! Don’t say that! It’s not like I really wanna go on a d-date with him!”
“But that’s perfectly normal for a girly girl.”
“Again, stop! You keep calling me a girly girl all the time, Yessica, but you never even tell me what you mean. I’ve been a fighter and martial artist for eighteen years, you know. Right, Luna?”
“Huh? Why drag me into this? But…yes, I’ve been a genius for eighteen years myself. But lately, I’ve come to realize that I am a woman first, a genius second. It certainly gives one pause, yes… I never truly thought about it before, but perhaps I should have studied matters like how men and women ask each other out. That said, I am a genius. One look, and I’ll immediately have it down.”
“You said ‘genius’ three times just now. That’s exactly why I hate geniuses.”
Earnest chugged her herbal tea. It was the kind meant to calm your nerves and help you get a good night’s sleep.
“But, say,” she continued casually, “what’re dates like anyway? Have any of you ever been on one?”
Everyone froze. They stared at Earnest, their gazes dead serious.
“Huh? What? No one?”
Nobody raised their hand.
“You have, haven’t you, Sophie?”
“I can hardly call that a normal date,” Sophie said with a shake of her head. Blade had asked her out, jumping to the conclusion that the life of a normal teen was all about dating. But he’d set it up like a boot camp, complete with a schedule planned down to the last minute. There was no way you could call that a “date” in the usual sense.