“Boruto, you’re so cute!” Sarada squealed. “You look like a girl.”
“Shut up!” he snarled. “Why aren’t you the one doing this?”
“If you can use the Sharingan, I’ll gladly trades places.”
Boruto couldn’t argue with that. Naturally, he had firmly rejected Mitsuki’s plan when he’d first heard it—“No way I’m dressing up as a girl!”—but when pressed, he’d been unable to come up with any alternatives.
So he’d ended up taking on the role of Lily’s double.
Marchmallow Marchmallow Marshmalloooow ♪
Have a marshmallow ♪ C’mon c’mon ♪
Now Boruto found himself having to learn the choreography for “Marchmallow Heart” and the other twelve songs in the set list for the big day.
“Boruto.” Lily sighed. “Please move your eyes around more evenly. Lily belongs to everyone.”
“There’s gonna be fifty thousand people. I can’t look at every single one of them…”
“You have to look at them. With determination. That one moment is eternal for the audience.”
“What are you even talking about?” Boruto didn’t understand ninety percent of what Lily said, but he dilligently put his athletic abilities to work in order to master her lessons. Learning the dances wasn’t especially hard, nor was the between-song banter any real challenge. The issues were his pride and his shame.
Whenever Boruto started to feel pathetic or to lose heart, he reminded himself that this was all for the sake of peace in the village—and to get Sasuke to notice him. I can hardly call myself a ninja if I get hung up on my pride and lose sight of my objective.
By the day before the live show, he’d somehow managed to hammer the basics of being Himeno Lily into his head.
“You really did learn the whole thing in a week. Although I’d expect nothing less of a Konoha ninja.” Lily was thoroughly impressed with Boruto’s efforts.
“Well, it’s for the sake of the mission. When Old Man Sasuke gets back, I wanna stand tall and make our report to him!”
“Old Man Sasuke?” Lily asked. “Do you mean Sarada’s father, Uchiha Sasuke?”
“Yup! Old Man Sasuke’s my master!” Boruto declared happily.
Smiling, Lily narrowed her eyes. “So Sasuke’s your teacher then.”
“Do you have one?” he asked in return. “Like, an idol teacher?”
“I do.” She nodded. “Someone who inspired me to try to be an idol. I haven’t seen him in a long time… But he’s still my teacher, even now.”
Was she talking about a producer or something? He was curious, but the something about that faraway look in her eyes kept Boruto from asking her anything more.
The day of Bewitching Macaron Night arrived. A long line stretched out from the entrance to the dome, waiting to go inside. The audience was uniformly dressed in Lily’s preferred shocking pink, large fans and pen lights in hand, eager for the doors to open.
A shadowy figure looked down on the excited group. Cloak flapping in the wind, he sent his gaze racing over the surroundings, searching for something. The fans below were utterly absorbed in their excitement, and not one of them noticed Uchiha Sasuke.
“Whoa! There’s a ton of people.” Astonished, Boruto watched on the monitor in the dressing room as the audience seats filled up.
“Well, of course. It’s actually sold out!” Lily held her head high.
With pink lightsticks in hand, the capacity crowd looked like they could hardly wait for the show to start.
Boruto noticed a large camera set up in the middle of the first floor seats. It bore the logo of a TV program he’d actually appeared on himself. “That’s a TV camera.”
“Looks like. I guess the show is going to be broadcast on a music program,” Lily explained nervously.
“What?!” Boruto’s eyes flew open. “You didn’t tell us that!”
“I’m sorry. I only just found out myself…”
“Gotta make sure my jutsu holds.” He felt a touch of anxiety run through him, but the audience was already inside the dome. He couldn’t turn back now.
The start time was fast approaching. Boruto moved to the wings of the stage with Lily. The staff had already been informed of what was going on and had promised to keep quiet about the switch.
Boruto transformed into Lily, grabbed the hem of his skirt between two fingers, and walked gracefully out into the center of the semi-circular stage. Chilly smoke rolled down around him and off the edge. In the stiletto heels, Boruto stood nearly ten centimeters taller than usual.
“Boruto, your face is too stiff.” In his earpiece, he could hear the voice of Lily watching from the wings. “Everyone in the audience is your lover. Please look at them with love.”
“But the seats are pitch black. I can’t see faces,” he whispered.
“If you look with your heart’s eyes, you’ll see them.”
As usual, he had no idea what she meant, but he’d come this far—he just had to get out there and finish it now. He got into position, marked in phosphorescent tape on the floor. The smoke chilled his feet, but his head, caught in the beam of the spotlight, was hot. He could sense the excitement of the thousands of people on the other side of the thick curtain as though they were generating electricity. When he really thought about it, it was actually kind of amazing that this many people would come all this way just to hear someone sing some songs. Every person there was the fan of a single girl. They had come to see Himeno Lily. Not Boruto.
“Hey, Lily?” Boruto said into the headset. “Are you sure you’re okay not being out here?”
“What?”
“It’s just, you became an idol because you wanted to see this, yeah? I can’t believe you’re actually satisfied just watching from the wings.”
“This is enough for me.” Her response was immediate.
He wondered if that was really the case. “So why did you want to become an idol anyway?”
The curtain went up. A galaxy of shocking pink stars flashed before him. The cheer that rose up was deafening.
“Lily? Can you hear me?” He was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the earpiece when he heard Lily’s voice, hesitant.
“I wanted to follow my master’s teachings.”
“Hey, I’ve been wanting to ask you—”
A round pin light snapped onto him, and an incredibly loud upbeat tune began to play. The guitar intro of the first song. He cut the conversation short. Face vibrating at the rattling noise, Boruto gripped the microphone—powered off, naturally—and took the first step of the dance he’d worked so hard to memorize.
In the arena seats Lily had gotten them, Sarada and Mitsuki waited for the show to start. The standing seats were split into six blocks of two rows and three columns. Blocks A, B, and C were in front, while blocks D, E, and F were to the rear. Their seats were around the center of the B block, toward the front of the center of the arena. To blend in, they both had lightsticks in one hand and fans that read “Lily, over here! ♥” and “I love you, Lily!” in the other.
Mitsuki was covering one eye with his hand as per the plan. They were on the look out for anyone suspicious, but at the moment, everyone looked like typical idol fans.
“Hey, Mikki! Isn’t that a TV camera over there?” Sarada pointed at the camera crew in the center of the first floor seats. “Lily didn’t say anything about a live broadcast…”
“We’ll just have to keep a low profile as we look for the assassin so that no one notices us,” he replied.
The lights started to go down in anticipation of the start of the concert.
Sarada willed herself to relax and opened her eyes wide. They shone with a reddish light, and her pupils shrunk like a cat on the hunt. Shadows in the shape of magatama popped up in her irises like inverted commas. The Sharingan, the unusual power she’d inherited from her father, allowed her to see through anything and everything in this world, and now she used it to scan the crowd.
Behind them, she spotted two people carrying a metal pipe-like instrument, likely some kind of firearm. She couldn’t sense any chakra.
“I see them. Guys with a gun. Probably not ninja. Location…block F, last row.”
“Let’s go!” Mitsuki darted away through the audience. The area was pitch black now that all the lights were down, but because he’d kept one eye covered while the lights were still up, his eyes were already accustomed to the darkness.
According to Lily, they had about thirty-five seconds between the house lights going down and the stage lights popping on. They would need no more than ten to make it to the F block. However, they weren’t even out of the B block when the stage suddenly grew bright.
“What?!” Mitsuki cried.
“This isn’t what she told us!” Sarada snarled. “That Lily—!”
It hadn’t even been ten seconds, and already the introductory banter was blaring at them as smoke spilled over the edge of the stage and into the audience.
“We got trouble! They’re on the move!” Sarada shouted, watching the gun-toting men with her Sharingan. “They’re taking the long way around. Probably headed for the right side of block A! They’re going to shoot from the front row!”
“But we can’t move!” Mitsuki groaned.
The crowd had turned into a crush of people, pressing in closer from all directions and trapping the two ninja in place. But they couldn’t exactly go tossing civilians aside, and if they tried to use any ninjutsu, it would be captured on camera.