After seeing Kimihiko and Nagisa off at the airport, I was planning to head back to my hotel, but Yui Saikawa hauled me away and made me attend her concert rehearsal instead.
Even if I try to calmly put it into words, it doesn’t make any more sense: For some reason, Charlotte and I were forced to sit in the dome’s audience seating and act like enthusiastic fans.
I waved a pink light stick and desperately shouted cheers I was reading off a sheet of paper. The quirky lyrics made my head spin, and the two-hour rehearsal ended just as I hit my limit.
“Thank you both so much for your help!” Yui said with an energetic smile when we returned to the break room.
She was so lively and full of energy that it almost seemed like she hadn’t just been doing all that singing and jumping around. Frankly, it was amazing. Compared to her, someone like me who just stayed shut up in my room most of the time was… Oh, now I just want to disappear…
“Huh? Mia, did something bad happen?” Yui had no idea how I was feeling, but she leaned over and peered into my face.
“…All sorts of bad things. For one thing, y-you made me dress like this…”
I was wearing a concert T-shirt, had some small designs painted on my face, and even had my hair styled in a way that made no sense to me. If Rill saw me like this, she was sure to make fun of me for the rest of my life.
“Oh, but you know there’s no helping that! It has to be just like an actual concert!”
“Your professional attitude is admirable, but what’s the point of making me go along with it?”
I gazed steadily at this girl, who was about the same height as me but whose mindset was the complete opposite.
“Huh? Mia, do you maybe not like me?”
“Y-you were the one who started picking weird fights with me. You kept saying something about younger heroines…”
“Oh, I don’t care about that now! I found out I’m younger than you, so I’ve got a higher purity as a younger heroine.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but she seemed proud of it.
As long as she was done messing with me, I didn’t care why. I’d just go change…
“Yui,” Charlotte interrupted. “I’ve been listening without butting in so far, but I wasn’t real into being your rehearsal audience either, all right? This isn’t going to happen again.” She was sipping from a can of milk tea, looking as mentally exhausted as I felt.
“Ah-ha-ha! Sorry. Well, I’m taking you out to dinner after this as thanks!”
“—When’s your next rehearsal?”
Oh, so that makes it all okay to you…?
Good grief. Kimihiko really does have an awful lot of peculiar girls in his life. Other than me, that is.
“Come to think of it, is it really okay to be doing all this?” I asked, starting to clean off my face paint.
There was a massive disaster bearing down on us. The concert rehearsal was probably an important job for Yui, of course, but an easygoing dinner on top of that really seemed like too much.
“Siesta had leisurely tea breaks even when she was dealing with incidents, didn’t she?”
“…Well, yes, she may have.” She’d also eaten quite a bit of cake. And pizza.
“No matter how urgent the situation may be, people eventually get sleepy and hungry,” Charlotte said calmly. “Ignoring that and panicking won’t resolve the problem, right? On the contrary, it would just make things worse.”
If I recalled correctly, her title was agent. Was she speaking from a lot of battlefield experience?
My mission, on the other hand, was to see the future, detect crises, and have other Tuners resolve them. Simply put, I let other people do all the real work. It was always the Ace Detective, Magical Girl, and Assassin who faced death for the sake of justice; all I could do was watch them get hurt from a distance. Even now, only Nagisa and Kimihiko had gone off to fight the final battle.
“This sort of thing is all about matching the right person to the right job. It would be a problem if all the Tuners were fighters—which is why your position has existed for thousands of years.” Charlotte seemed to have read my mind. She gave me a faint, encouraging smile. “Besides, those two will be all right.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. Nagisa goes without saying, but at times like this, even Kimizuka has always worked miracles that subvert our expectations and worries. You’d think he was balancing out his usual unbelievable amount of bad luck.” Her tone was a little prickly, and her smile seemed exasperated. And yet…
“You trust him, then.” I wasn’t great with communication, but that much was clear even to me.
“I hate the guy, but yeah.”
Did she really? I felt like having someone you could fight alongside without holding back was probably a closer bond than that between best friends or lovers. After all, no matter how much Charlotte and Kimizuka might hate each other, that tie would bind them for the rest of their lives.
“Charlie, the more you say you hate Kimizuka, the more I think nobody can come between you.”
“Would you quit saying weird stuff like that, Yui?!” Was this girl flushing because she was angry, or did it mean something else? Red-faced, Charlotte drained her milk tea and stood up. “Haaah. I’m punishing you two for messing with me. Go buy us some drinks.”
“Aww! Mia, sure, but you’re even making me go?”
“Yui, you’ve got this awful scheming side that shows through sometimes, you know that?” Charlotte’s face was drawn in irritation.