"Haaah... Yachiho is going to lose."
Naoki muttered his thoughts aloud without meaning to, still standing with his arms folded. The words were audible enough for those around him to catch.
Tenka turned her head. "Why do you say that, Naoki-kun? From where I'm standing, Yachiho-chin clearly has full control of the situation. Himari and Slave-kun are already cornered."
Naoki kept his eyes on Yachiho. "The problem isn't her strength, it's her attitude. Instead of finishing the fight the moment her opponent went down, she's busy talking and provoking them. That's the classic thing a villain does in manga and anime."
He paused, then added with a helpless tone, "Excessive provocation like that is exactly what tends to reignite a losing opponent's will to fight and flip things around at the last second."
Sahara, who had been drowsing on her feet up until that point, chimed in with a small yawn. "Ah, I've read scenes like that in manga before. What Naoki-san said is completely accurate."
Tenka turned her attention back toward the Club Ginna barrier, and at that precise moment Naoki's speculation was proven right.
"In Unit Seven... fighting until the very end will never be something to be ashamed of!"
The despair that had been written across Himari's face vanished the instant Yuuki's words reached her, replaced by something burning and alive.
Watching Yachiho begin to strike her signature pose again, Himari threw herself into a desperate counter.
"She's going to use her Blessing! Let's use that opening, Yuuki!"
"Ready! Let's do it!"
Slave Release!
*SRING!*
Without warning, Yuuki's body erupted with a radiance so overwhelmingly bright it was blinding. Yachiho, in the middle of holding her pose, was forced to clamp her eyes shut.
(A smoke bomb? But I've already finished the pose!)
"«Golden Hour»!"
Time stopped for five seconds. The world inverted into negative.
Smirking despite the burn still stinging her eyes, Yachiho moved to fire at her opponent's last known position. But what she found in front of her made her freeze.
Yuuki was standing directly before her, arms spread wide, deliberately blocking her line of sight.
(What?! The afterflash from that light, I can't see where Himari is!)
The five-second countdown ran out.
*BANG!*
The instant time resumed, a shot rang out. Yachiho felt a searing heat bite into her neck. A bullet had come from below.
When she looked down with the last of her fading awareness, she found Himari lying flat on the ground, pistol aimed directly at her.
Himari had used Yuuki's body as visual cover to crawl underneath just before time froze.
"You went this far..." Yachiho managed in a broken murmur.
Her hand went to her neck. Blood seeped freely, her vision dimmed, and her body gave out beneath her, dropping her to the ground, unconscious.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
Himari pushed herself to her feet with labored breathing, raising one hand as high as she could.
"We have our winner!" Ginna announced at full volume, and Nei and Shushu immediately broke into hysterical cheering. "Azuma Himari wins! Unit Seven takes round one!"
"Oh no, she really did lose. Exactly like Naoki-san predicted."
There was no frustration in Sahara's voice. She sounded more curious about how Yachiho was going to react when she came to.
"Let this be a valuable lesson." Tenka sighed softly, showing no particular distress over her subordinate's defeat.
"This is what happens when you spend too much time talking in a fight." Naoki added, shaking his head.
Ginna wasted no time activating the arena's restorative properties.
Within seconds, the bullet wound in Yachiho's neck and every injury sustained by Himari and Yuuki had healed completely, as though none of it had ever happened. Only the tears in their uniforms remained as evidence of how brutal the exchange had actually been.
"Wait, Himari!"
Yuuki and Himari's footsteps stopped as Yachiho's voice broke through the quiet that had settled after the duel.
She was standing with her head bowed, her hair falling forward and hiding her expression from view.
"I admit it... you've become far stronger than I knew. I'll treat you better from now on. That's why... you can come home to the Azuma estate."
"..."
Himari was silent for a moment. Then a quiet smile settled on her lips, not the smile of someone relieved to be welcomed back, but the smile of someone completely confident in the path they had already chosen.
"Yachiho. My home... is Unit Seven."
"Whatever you say, I'm never going back."
Having said that, Himari turned without hesitation and walked away from the arena.
*CRACK!*
Something in Yachiho seemed to break at the bluntness of the refusal. She stood frozen where she was, unable to do anything but watch the back of her beloved little sister grow smaller and smaller as she made her way back to Unit Seven's side.
"You just got thoroughly rejected, didn't you?" Tenka appeared at her side, placing a hand on her shoulder with a small, amused laugh.
"Yacchi, you know, the way you show your feelings is genuinely strange." Sahara chimed in, patting Yachiho's head in an attempt at comfort, though her own expression was still its usual drowsy neutral.
"What Sahara said." Naoki agreed, stepping over and lightly flicking Yachiho's forehead, making her flinch. "In your little sister's eyes, the way you've been treating her all this time has looked less like concern and more like bullying. It shouldn't come as a surprise that she'd rather stay somewhere else."
The match was put on a brief pause. Yachiho needed to change out of her uniform, which had been thoroughly shredded during the duel. Meanwhile, in a secluded corner of the headquarters, Himari prepared to offer Yuuki a special kind of reward, a rather indecent form of compensation for the hard work he had put in to help her claim a victory that meant everything to her.
◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆
The Exhibition moved into the second round.
Standing beside Naoki, Yachiho looked thoroughly deflated. Her face was drawn, her eyes fixed in the direction of Himari across the arena. The overwhelming pride that usually radiated off her had been snuffed out entirely, replaced by a quiet cloud of distress left behind by her sister's rejection.
Tenka, standing composed with one hand on her hip, broke the silence with a single name.
"Sahara."
Sahara stepped forward into the center of the arena, raising one hand in a loose wave, her mouth falling open in yet another wide yawn.
"Haaah... I'm still ridiculously sleepy, but I suppose fighting is what's expected of me right now."
"..."
On the other side, Shushu stepped up with a firm, confident stride. A challenging smile was fixed on her face.
"I'm winning this round!"
"..."
Yachiho was still staring blankly at Himari without blinking until Tenka put her hand on her head and physically turned it forward.
"Yachiho. You lost your match, so your job now is to support your teammates."
Naoki, standing on her other side, casually held out a pair of brightly colored pom-poms directly in front of her face.
"Use these."
Yachiho stared at them with an expression of pure irritation.
"You... you actually came prepared with something like this?"
She muttered under her breath as she took them reluctantly, gripping the handles as though she were considering crushing them.
Inside the Club Ginna barrier, Sahara and Shushu faced each other.
"How about we start without Peach Fruit Blessings?" Shushu proposed, raising her fists in front of her chest. "Your body is a weapon too, isn't it? Let's see who comes out on top in pure hand-to-hand."
Sahara, standing at ease across from her, raised a hand and gave a small wave. Her expression was completely relaxed, as though this were nothing more than an ordinary afternoon drill.
"Sure." She answered with a brief, pleasant smile.
Ginna, positioned between them, snatched up her microphone with a glowing face.
"I'll be commentating to make this match several times more entertaining!" she declared in a pitch that carried across the whole area. She raised one hand in the final signal.
"All right! BEGIN!"
*WHOOSH!*
Not a single second after Ginna's call, Sahara launched forward. The movement was explosive, cutting through the air with an opening strike that was shockingly aggressive for someone who had looked half-asleep moments ago. She leapt, twisted her body in the air, and drove a sharp, high kick toward Shushu's vitals at a speed that didn't belong to someone of her apparent energy level.
"Sahara opens with a devastating high kick!" Ginna called into the microphone, her voice capturing the full ferocity of the move.
Shushu didn't flinch. Her battle instincts were sharp, and she spotted the opening buried within the speed of Sahara's attack.
Rather than retreating, Shushu stepped directly into the strike's range. With stunning precision, both hands snapped outward in a flash, catching Sahara's ankle at the exact moment before the heel would have connected with her head.
"UWAAAHH!!" Sahara yelped in genuine surprise. All the momentum she had built up died instantly in Shushu's grip.
Shushu gave her no chance to recover her footing.
Using Sahara's weight as it hung off-balance in the air, Shushu pivoted with a firm plant of her feet and threw her full centrifugal force into the motion.
*BAM!*
Sahara's body spun helplessly through the air before crashing hard into the ground, raising a loud thud and a cloud of dust that scattered in every direction.
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