Chapter 99: The Kaguya Spring — Bamboo Scented.
....
Maidena was having a genuinely good time.
Monster Hunter was, it turned out, an excellent game. Kihara was an attentive teacher. The afternoon had the warm, unhurried quality of something that didn't need to be anywhere else.
The only disruption was a persistent chill between her shoulder blades — the specific physical sensation of something going wrong at a distance.
Ryuu-san is handling the patrol, she told herself. She's skilled and composed and nothing bad is going to happen.
Unless Tokishikko decided today was a good day to push her luck.
The image assembled itself without invitation: Tokishikko, operating under her usual theory that Maidena was fundamentally manageable, making some remark she thought was clever — and then discovering, in vivid sequential detail, that the person currently piloting Maidena's body had completely different opinions about what was tolerable and what constituted grounds for a field correction.
Tokishikko crying. Begging. Forced to request healing from the very person who'd just administered the correction. Receiving it with the dignified minimum of eye contact.
Maidena's mouth did something involuntary at the corners.
On the screen, Kihara's Longsword user attempted a Soaring Wyvern Strike and connected with nothing but air. The game made the specific sound of maximum effort producing zero result.
"Come ON — how does a Soaring Wyvern miss?!"
The room brightened noticeably. Even the figure behind the monitor — earphones around her neck now, apparently the game she was playing had lost to the spectacle — let a response escape:
"Longsword players."
Five words. Flat delivery. The traditional verdict.
Kihara's face achieved the color of something that had been in a covered pot too long.
"That is not what happened," he said, with the energy of a defense attorney who had just been handed a difficult case and intended to win it on points. "Missing a Soaring Wyvern is a deliberate difficulty adjustment. If I wanted to just kill the monster I'd switch to Charge Blade, land two Savage Axe combos, and it'd be over in forty seconds. Where's the craft in that? Where's the engagement? The Longsword player and the monster need to communicate — it's an art form—"
He continued. The argument was comprehensive. The core thesis was: do not mock the Longsword, it is the perfect weapon, its practitioners choose suffering intentionally, and this is a mark of distinction rather than incompetence.
Maidena's phone buzzed.
She pulled it out.
Maidena: Are you still on the date right now?
Ryuu: Yes. Why?
Maidena: About the patrol... I may have slightly overdone things. Can you come?
Ryuu: On my way immediately.
Maidena put the phone away. The pang of having to leave before the afternoon was finished was real and specific. She let herself feel it for one moment, then set it aside.
"Kihara. Something's come up — I need to handle it. I'm sorry, the date has to—"
"We have plenty of time." He reached up and pinched her cheek lightly, the gesture carrying the ease of something he'd done before. "Go take care of it. We'll continue another day."
"Mm. I'll go then."
She stood. Turned toward the door.
Turned back.
The kiss landed on the side of his face — barely a touch, there and gone, the kind of thing that used the entire remaining reserve of her available courage in one expenditure. Then she was through the door, down the corridor, out of the Bamboo Forest, moving at a pace that was technically walking and functionally fleeing.
Behind her, in Kaguya's room, Kihara raised one hand and pressed it lightly to the warmth on his cheek, the expression of someone cataloguing a pleasant surprise. He turned to share his findings with the room's other occupant.
"Did you see that? She kissed me on her own initi—"
He stopped.
Kaguya's face was approximately four centimeters from his.
Not Kaguya's expression, though. The eyes were wrong — the red was the same, the face was the same, but what was behind them had the focus of someone who was very good at paying attention to things and had been paying very close attention to the last thirty seconds.
Both of her hands came up and took his face, one palm on each cheek, fingers pressing in slightly. The distance between their mouths became a question of millimeters.
Four eyes, close range, holding contact.
What Kihara did not see in those eyes was any trace of the flustered, stumbling shyness that was Kaguya's default state when proximity exceeded her comfort zone. He remembered, specifically, the time Kaguya had received a peck on the cheek and responded by kicking him out of the room at high velocity.
The person holding his face was not doing anything remotely like that.
"...So. What exactly are we doing here?"
"You kissed Ryuu. I'm unhappy."
"She's my girlfriend. Kissing her is within the normal parameters of our relationship."
"I'm unhappy."
"Kaguya—"
"I'm unhappy."
She said it the same way each time. Same volume, same flat delivery, same complete absence of inflection — the verbal
equivalent of a loading screen that wasn't progressing. Whatever explanation he offered, the response was identical.
He looked at her outfit. She'd apparently given up on Kaguya's formal court layers entirely — she was wearing a loose t-shirt that read I DON'T WANT TO WORK and white over-the-knee socks. The aesthetic was, without question, three-no shut-in. But the person wearing it was doing something with it that the original owner had never managed.
"You can't just repeat the same thing. If you want something, tell me what it is."
A pause. Longer than the previous ones. Something moved behind the flat red eyes — a calculation, a redirection.
"...Rub my legs."
"That's all?"
"Yes."
"As you wish, Lady Kaguya." He kept his voice light, the tone of someone who had agreed to something simpler than expected and wasn't going to question it.
She released his face and settled back into the chair, extending both legs toward him. The white over-the-knee socks caught the afternoon light coming through the door — a smooth, faint luminescence, like the surface of something that didn't want to be touched carelessly.
He knelt. She lifted her right leg slightly, extending it until her toes were level with his chest, and waited.
He breathed in, took hold of her ankle, and felt, even through the fabric, the warmth of the skin beneath.
The socks were softer than expected. The kind of texture that didn't feel like a layer between his fingers and her skin so much as a second, finer skin.
Ais's toes curled.
She had not, until this moment, understood that the body she was borrowing was apparently quite sensitive in this particular region. The mere fact of his hand around her ankle was producing reactions she had not budgeted for.
She began, quietly, to regret her own request.
I haven't even felt him actually start yet and it's already—
She said nothing. Pressed her lips together. Stared at a fixed point on the wall.
Kihara noticed the silence, noticed the quality of it — the specific tension of someone working very hard to maintain a surface while something ran contrary underneath — and concluded that what he'd taken for composed indifference was actually the opposite. He kept his expression neutral and made a decision.
No taking advantage. Proper massage. Professional application.
His fingers shifted from the ankle to the arch of her foot, found the pressure point at the center — Yongquan, the Gushing Spring — and pressed.
"Aah—!!"
Both hands flew to the armrests. Her upper body snapped forward, spine arching away from the chair back. She tried to pull her leg back. He held on.
"Kihara—"
"I'm pressing the Yongquan point. Breathe through it. The dizziness is normal."
He was not being merciful. He worked through every foot massage technique he could recall, methodical and thorough, while the resistance coming from the chair gradually changed character — from sharp and urgent to something slower, more reluctant, as though her body was beginning to have opinions that differed from her stated position on the matter.
He set down the right foot, which was now noticeably warmer and slightly damp, and picked up the left.
Both thumbs found the center point.
Full pressure.
"Mmmgh—"
The sound she made was the sound of a person experiencing several strong competing sensations simultaneously and losing the capacity to manage any of them gracefully. The chair creaked. The armrests received considerable input.
And then — without warning or precedent — something wet hit him in the face.
He stopped.
Blinked. Wiped his eyes.
Looked up.
"Kaguya" had gone completely boneless against the chair, head tilted sideways, one cheek resting on the upholstered back. The flat, ancient-still red eyes that had been completely undisturbed since the moment he'd walked in were no longer undisturbed. They were bright with something — moisture at the edge of the lashes, the specific quality of eyes that had been pushed past their operating parameters.
The smell reached him a moment later.
Clean. Faint. Green and woody, like something that grew in cool shade.
Bamboo.
They looked at each other.
The embarrassment moving through her expression was not Kaguya's variety — it was sharper, more pride-adjacent, the embarrassment of someone who had very high standards for their own composure and had just watched those standards fail in front of a witness.
Her right hand moved to her hip. The fingers closed around air — but the motion had a shape to it, a practiced readiness, the reach for something that was normally there.
"Gale Wind—"
The words hit Kihara somewhere between the ears and the brainstem.
He knew that incantation.
He knew it the way you knew the sound of something being drawn from its sheath.
"Wait — you're Ais?!"
She stopped. Looked at him.
"Then who was it that I was with last night?!"
....
Thank you for reading.