While Seiya wrestled with his silence, Isuzu glanced over her shoulder at him. Her gaze was surprisingly calm.
Before she could say anything, though, he swiftly slammed the door shut, threw himself back against the wall, and started shouting. He vaguely resembled one of those evil magistrates in a samurai drama calling for the guards.
“S-Sis! Aisu-san!”
There was a brief silence, and then Kyubu Aisu dragged herself out from her nearby bedroom.
“Mguh? ...What now?” she grumbled, “It’s first thing in the morning and I just got murdered by an all-nighter...”
He called her “Sis,” but Aisu was actually his aunt. She was 26 years old with short black hair, and wore a loose-fitting T-shirt over her very ample bosom. She was an editor for some publishing company, so she lived a highly irregular lifestyle, but though she smoked and drank a lot, her skin remained surprisingly young-looking and dewy.
“...Oh, Seiya,” she remarked. “You got yourself up, huh?”
“Sis, what the hell is she doing here?!” He jabbed his finger repeatedly at the door to the bathroom.
Aisu showed no sign of surprise. “She? Oh, Isuzu-chan? Did she take a bath?”
“Just answer my question!” Seiya demanded hysterically. “What’s she doing here?!”
“...She brought you here late last night,” Aisu told him. “She said something about you being on a date when you fell and hit your head? But it was probably just a concussion, so I thought I’d let you sleep it off. By then she’d missed the last train home, so I asked if she wanted to stay the night, and she was like, ‘sure.’”
Knowing Aisu, that was a fairly plausible series of events—she never paid any attention to anything besides her work, after all. She was the kind of person who, if a gang of foreign thieves showed up at two in the morning, rang the doorbell and said, “We’re the maid service,” would just respond, “Seiya must have called for you; go right in,” then fall back into bed.
But... even so... Even so, it’s transparently nonsense! Come on! How could you just swallow that whole story?! Just as Seiya’s mind was focusing its ire on her, a strange thing happened.
«It’s about time Seiya started going on dates with girls. He’s really mellowed out, I guess... he used to be so hostile to any woman he met. I’m so happy! Speaking as his guardian, of course.» Aisu’s voice resonated in his mind.
Her mouth had been closed. Nevertheless, he had heard her voice, as clear as day. “What?”
Aisu, who had said nothing, responded only with a “Hmm?”
“Sis,” he asked suspiciously, “did you just talk in a weird way?”
“Huh?”
“Something about me mellowing out or something...”
Aisu started in surprise. “Wh-What? I don’t know what you’re talking about...”
“You just said a bunch of stuff with your mouth closed...” Seiya accused her. “Like that I had mellowed out, that I’m hostile to women, something about speaking as my guardian...”
The surprise on her face grew even more pronounced, and she clamped a hand over her mouth. “What? I didn’t say anything. You know, you’re really creeping me out right now...”
“You’re the one creeping me out...” he told her angrily. “I don’t know if that was ventriloquism or what, but I don’t like people making fun of me.”
“Ventriloquism?” asked Aisu, obviously confused.
“That’s what it was, right?” Then he thought, of course, she’d never mentioned having a skill like that.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about... Oh, I get it,” she said, realization dawning. “I’m probably half asleep. Yeah, alcohol’s not out of my system yet... Anyway, you’re awake, so that’s all behind us... I’m going back to bed now. Get yourself to school, okay? Later.”
Aisu rambled for a little while without giving him a word in edgewise, then withdrew into her bedroom. The door closed with a clack.
While Seiya was still staring blankly after her, the door to the bathroom opened.
“That’s interesting,” Isuzu remarked.
Seiya was surprised out of his stupor. “Huh?!”
Sento Isuzu was standing there, already dressed in her school uniform. She showed no sign of being bothered that Seiya had seen her naked.
“I overheard your conversation with your aunt,” she said. “There was only a door between us, after all.”
“...So what?”
“I think I know what your ‘magic’ is.”
It was Monday morning, so they didn’t have any time to lose. He got himself dressed, had a simple breakfast with Isuzu (Chocowa cereal and milk) and headed for school. His aunt Aisu was fast asleep in her room, so she didn’t see them off.
“So, are you going to explain or not?” Seiya asked as they walked the road from his apartment complex to Yanokuchi Station. The rapid service train going in their direction would be arriving soon, so they ended up taking a fairly fast pace.
“Of course I will,” Isuzu responded. “I start feeling like I’ll drop dead if I get fewer than three baths a day. That’s one every eight hours, more or less. After spending the night at your house, I was starting to reach the limit of what I could stand. So I used your bathroom—regrettably, without permission.”
“...Um, that’s not the explanation I was looking for...”
“I see... What did you want me to explain, then?”
“About this magic stuff!” he exploded, “and about that Latifah girl, while you’re at it!”
“Oh, that...” She nodded. “You lost consciousness when the princess, Latifah-sama, bestowed magic upon you. It was getting late, and we couldn’t wake you up, so I called a taxi and brought you home.”
She was still dancing around the heart of his question. “I want you to tell me about this ‘magic,’” he tried again.
“Latifah-sama is the queen of the magical realm Maple Land,” Isuzu explained. “The women of Maple Land’s royal family have the power to bestow magical powers on ordinary human beings via mouth-to-mouth contact.”
“M-Mouth-to-mouth?” he spluttered.
“It means a kiss.”
“I know what it means...”
So it hadn’t been a dream. You rotten woman, give back my first kiss! ...Actually, he didn’t mind that part so much. He did wish he’d had a little more time to prepare, though... perhaps a slightly greater sense of accomplishment?
Yes, it was that same feeling of emptiness you get when you’re playing an RPG and a glitch lets you beat the final boss at level three, and then you don’t even get the ending screen. It stinks! It just stinks!
Isuzu ignored Seiya’s quiet huffing and continued on calmly, “What kind of magic the royal family’s kiss bestows will vary based on the person receiving it. They may gain the ability to fire beams from their eyes, to grow super-strong metal claws from their fingers, or to control storms.”
“Are those really magic?” he wanted to know. Weren’t those actually mutant powers or something? They all sounded familiar, at the very least...
“Those are just examples,” she told him. “In your case, the magic appears to let you read people’s minds. If you gaze at a person and wish for it, you can hear what they’re thinking. There are stories about this in the old Maple Land records. However—”
Dubiously, Seiya gazed at Isuzu and concentrated. As if realizing what he was going for, she closed her mouth and said nothing more.
He focused. He heard a voice. It was a strange resonance in his head that felt close, and yet far away.
Sento Isuzu’s thoughts read: «However—according to those records, you can only use the magic on a single person once, and you can only read their minds for a brief time. Does it work? If you can hear me, say something.»
The inner voice cut off. Isuzu stared right at him, waiting for him to respond.
“...Well,” he concluded, “It looks like it’s true. I definitely could hear your thoughts. You said I can only read each person once, and for a limited time?”
“I’m glad that you catch on so quickly.”
“Hmm. It seems hard to believe,” he admitted, “but I don’t think you could be faking it...”
All this talk about magic might have seemed like nonsense, but Seiya took it relatively in stride. Given the amount of strange phenomena he’d been experiencing these last two days, he’d given up on trying to find realistic, logical bases for everything he came across.
Magic that let him read minds, eh?
Fine. Let’s just say the power existed and that he had it. In that case, the first thing he had to do was test that power and get a feel for its limits.
Arguing with himself over every little thing wouldn’t get him anywhere; he had to face reality and get some information that he could use! Of course, he would have preferred magic that let him control gravity, or perfectly copy another person’s powers... but he opted not to voice those complaints.
So, he thought, let’s test it one more time! He stared at Isuzu once again, trying to peer into her mind. But no matter how hard he concentrated, he couldn’t hear her voice again.
“......”
“It appears my suspicions were correct,” she said. “You can’t read my mind anymore, can you?”
“...How can you be so sure? Maybe I’m just pretending like I can’t.” He was saying it partly out of spite, but Isuzu wasn’t fazed.
“You’re not—” she denied confidently.
“Oh?”
“—because I was thinking something incredibly obscene just now.”
“Wh... What?” Obscene? What kind of obscene?!
“Just kidding,” Isuzu added.
“Rrgh...”
“But this does confirm it,” she finished thoughtfully. “You didn’t know that I was lying. In other words, you can only read each person once... That much is clear.”
“Grrr...”
So her tactics were impeccable; he’d have to be on his guard around her. There was their back-and-forth at the snack shop yesterday, too... He might have to keep a tight rein on his emotions around her from now on.
There was another way in which he regretted his carelessness, though.
He’d wasted his “one time only” magic on her already... If he’d timed it more carefully, he might have gotten some proper blackmail material.