Yuichi and Yuri walked among the throng.
After the meeting at Nihao the China had dispersed, Yuichi had headed for the shopping district, and Yuri had come along with him.
“I see you’ve gotten over your earlier depression,” she said. “You look so satisfied with yourself, it’s a bit repulsive.”
“You really don’t want me to like you, do you?” But Yuichi was so happy, he didn’t even mind the insult. He was, in fact, smiling a little.
As he walked, he scanned the people around him to be sure. There were no annoying labels above their heads. It was such a refreshing feeling.
He felt as though his mind was clear again for the first time in a long time. He hadn’t realized how much of a burden Soul Reader had been until it was gone.
He was still a little worried about having made Mutsuko mad, but that was starting to feel more and more like a trivial matter. His feeling of liberation was more than enough to let him dismiss his sister’s bad mood. He had no intention of taking back Soul Reader as Mutsuko wanted, anyway; he never wanted to use it again.
“So, did you come here to confirm that you can’t see any labels?” Yuri asked.
“Mainly. But there’s one other thing.” Yuichi pointed to his destination, a shop for “wagashi,” Japanese sweets.
He bought some mitarashi dango, rice flour dumplings covered in sweet sauce. It was Mutsuko’s favorite food, and a cheap way to buy his way back into her favor.
“Big Sis is really predictable,” he said. “If I feed her, she’ll forget all about it.”
“You think this will suffice to make her forget about it?” Yuri asked. “She seemed a bit too angry for that, to me.”
“I-It’ll be fine! She can really erupt when she gets mad, but she also calms down really quickly.” That was how it had always been. She immediately lost her temper when things didn’t go her way, but if you offered a little compromise, she’d quickly come around.
Of course, this isn’t much of a compromise...
Mutsuko’s request had been for him to recover Soul Reader, and this wasn’t doing anything to solve that. Still, it was the best he could think of.
“Well, I’d better head home,” Yuichi said. “I’m pretty tired.”
His day had started that morning at the shrine, and he’d been through a lot since then. He was genuinely ready to take a break.
Yuichi waved to Yuri as they left the wagashi shop and started walking towards home. But he soon found Yuri still walking beside him as if it was a matter of course.
“I see,” she said. “Will this be one of those at-home dates I hear penniless commoners so often engage in?”
“What makes you think you’re invited back with me?”
“It’s true that if I were to pay, it might insult your masculine sense of honor, so I don’t mind at all!” Yuri declared. “Do you have a game system at your home, Yuichi Sakaki? I’m rather good at games, you see. I can win at any fighting game!”
“Listen to me!” he snapped. “I said I’m tired, so I’m going home and going to bed. I’m not hanging around with you!”
“Bed? My, you do move quickly, Yuichi Sakaki! But such plans are also in my favor. It’s not my mating season, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it!”
Yuichi hated dealing with one-track minds like this. While he was stewing over how to respond, he realized that the area around them was completely deserted.
It was Sunday afternoon in the shopping district, which certainly meant that business could lag from time to time. But it still seemed a little unnatural. Yuichi slowed to a stop and looked all around him.
There was nothing.
Then, there was the sound of wings.
It was coming from the sky above.
“That guy...”
“Yes, the one we saw this morning.”
A boy dressed like a mountain monk with black wings on his back — in other words, a tengu — dropped down from the sky to land in front of Yuichi and Yuri.
“Hey. It’s been a while.” The boy, who looked about Monika’s age, smiled casually yet confidently at him.
Yuri seemed unimpressed. “Oh? Wasn’t your tier placement already decided? You lost to the man who looked like a priest, and then Yuichi Sakaki beat the priest. That puts you at the bottom of the hierarchy.”
“Shut up! I let my guard down back then, that’s all.”
“So, what do you want?” Yuichi demanded. He assumed the guy was here about the Divine Vessels War, but the priest had probably already taken his Divine Vessel, which meant he should already be out of the game.
“Huh? You can’t feel the resonance?”
“Hmm? Is there a resonance right now?”
“You’re not a host?”
The Divine Vessels resonated, communicating their location to one another. But as Yuichi wasn’t host to a vessel, he wasn’t aware of when it was going on.
Yuichi had both of Monika’s Divine Vessels — the Evil God’s right and left eyes — in his possession, but they both already had hosts, so he couldn’t use them himself.
Even if he could, he probably wouldn’t, since he was trying to drop out of the fight.
“Nah,” Yuichi said. “But didn’t the priest take your Divine Vessel?”
“Yeah, but when I woke up, he was knocked out, so I took it back from him. Never mind about that, though. I went there to beat you, which means I can’t just leave things unsettled, and I bet you can’t either!”
“No, I absolutely can.”
“Indeed,” Yuri said. “You are clearly the weakest of the three.”
“We won’t know that until we fight!” the tengu shouted. “Sometimes it’s like rock-paper-scissors. I lost to him, but that might have just been a bad match-up! I haven’t actually lost to you!”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with. Just don’t give me any more ‘I let my guard down’ crap later.” Yuichi could have attacked at any point while they were talking, but he’d specifically decided to wait for the conversation to be over. It was an annoying situation, but walking away might offend him, and if he took him by surprise, he might come back again to complain later. He clearly just wanted to have a fair fight.
“I won’t let my guard down again, so no problem!” As the tengu boasted, his body seemed to slide to the side. There had been not the slightest movement in his limbs; it was just his wings that were moving.
That’s creepy!
An enhancement of aerial mobility seemed to be the ability granted by his Divine Vessel.
Yuichi didn’t know what the tengu was trying to do, exactly, but he was rushing all around in an ostentatious display of his mobility. He’d move to the right, then pivot, streak upwards without warning, then plummet back down. The way the creature moved seemed to defy both gravity and momentum.
“Well? Can you keep up with me?”
Yuichi watched the tengu dispassionately. His body offered no signs that allowed Yuichi to predict what he’d do next. His wings seemed to be what propelled him, but it was hard to tell from the movement of those wings exactly what his next move was going to be. He could learn, perhaps, but he’d need a little time. It might be trouble if the tengu made use of some projectile weapon on top of his mobility, but it seemed there was no need to worry about that.
As the tengu moved around wildly, he slowly closed the gap between them. He flew around Yuichi, drawing closer, then abruptly vanished from his sight. Yuichi lashed out behind him with a kick.
The counter hit the charging tengu in the solar plexus. Then, as his foot was sinking in, Yuichi pivoted on his standing leg to face the tengu again, then slammed him down onto the ground with his foot.
The tengu, charging in at such a high speed, couldn’t react at all, and was helplessly pinned to the ground by Yuichi.
“Ngh!” The tengu let out a pained cry.
“Your movements were so basic, they didn’t serve as any kind of distraction,” Yuichi said coolly. He hadn’t been able to anticipate the tengu’s actions through his body movements, but the pattern had been obvious enough. It was easy for an attacker to fall into simple patterns while moving rapidly, and the tengu hadn’t seemed to be thinking about that at all.
“I would expect a flier to stay up in the air and drop things down on you,” Yuri commented. “The easiest thing to prepare would have been boiling water.”
“Well, that’s true,” Yuichi said. “But you have some pretty vicious thoughts...”
“Sh-Shut up!” the tengu shouted. “This is why I hate women! A competition between men can’t be like that.”
“Well, you have good timing, anyway. Here, these are for you.” Still keeping his foot firmly planted, Yuichi retrieved the two eyes from his breast pocket, and set them down next to the tengu. “I don’t need them anymore, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I thought about pissing everyone off by throwing them into a volcano somewhere, but that would also be more effort than I want to expend...”
The tengu looked taken aback. “W-Wait a minute... then there was no need for us to fight...”
“You’re the one who challenged me. Now, I’m not gonna indulge this crap any more, so leave me alone.” Yuichi lifted his foot off the tengu.
“Merciless, even against a child,” Yuri commented. “But I’m also impressed that you could deal so calmly with a flying monster like that. Truly astonishing.”
“He surprised me at first, but I’ve gotten used to supernatural surprises like his by now,” Yuichi shrugged. “Anyway, now I’m totally disconnected from the Divine Vessels War!”
Still feeling like he was forgetting something, Yuichi headed triumphantly for home.
Yuri tried to follow him, but he eventually managed to drive her off. When he arrived home, though, Mutsuko hadn’t been back yet.
She didn’t come home for the rest of the day, either.