"Mio. Seriously. Why are you acting like absolutely nothing is wrong?"
"Huh?"
Takahashi Mio blinked, her pen pausing mid-sentence above her notebook. She looked up at the hand planted firmly on her desk, then at Haruno Reika's face hovering above her with an expression caught somewhere between concern and exasperation.
"I'm not sick. Therefore, nothing is wrong. Flawless logic."
Haruno Reika's eye twitched. She leaned forward and rapped her knuckles against the open textbook in front of Mio with the sharp, insistent rhythm of someone who knew they were being deliberately deflected. "You know exactly what I'm talking about. Can you please, for once in your life, stop playing dumb?"
Takahashi Mio regarded her for a long, measured moment. Then, with the unhurried grace of someone who had all the time in the world, she twirled her pen between her fingers—a fluid, practiced motion—and shrugged with studied indifference. "If you have something to say, just say it directly. No need for cryptic preamble."
"You..."
Haruno Reika's mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. Something about her friend felt fundamentally altered, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. A shift in posture. A new weight behind her gaze. The way she held herself—less like someone bracing for impact, more like someone who had already weathered the storm and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"Didn't you go to Hojo Shione's concert with your boyfriend? The one that turned into a complete, spectacular disaster? How can you possibly have no feelings about any of it?"
"Feelings?"
Takahashi Mio's lashes fluttered. Then, unexpectedly, a soft, private chuckle escaped her lips—the kind of laugh that was directed more at her own thoughts than at the person across from her. "Oh, I have feelings. Plenty of them, actually. A whole colorful spectrum."
But as quickly as the amusement surfaced, it faded. Her expression clouded. She looked at Haruno Reika as if she genuinely wanted to say something—to unburden herself, to confess, to share the absurd, maddening, heartbreaking truth of everything that had happened—but then she simply shook her head, the motion weary and resigned.
"Never mind. There's nothing good to say. Nothing worth repeating."
In her private assessment, Hojo Shione was despicable. Shameless. Utterly filthy in her methods. That woman had completely abandoned every shred of dignity, every ounce of pride, to snatch Shiratori Seiya—a man who was, for all practical purposes, already spoken for. The sheer, naked desperation of it was almost admirable in its audacity. Almost.
But no matter what she thought, no matter how vividly her private condemnations burned, she absolutely could not tell Haruno Reika the truth. Not now. Not ever.
Part of her reticence was pragmatic. She knew Reika well enough to recognize that her friend's probing questions were driven not by deep concern but by the universal, insatiable human hunger for drama. For gossip. For the kind of juicy, scandalous narrative that made for excellent conversation over drinks.
Reika would listen with wide eyes and then—despite her best intentions, despite any promises of secrecy—the story would slip out. A detail here. A whisper there. And once something entered the ecosystem of online speculation, it would mutate. Evolve. Spawn countless distorted versions of itself, each more lurid and destructive than the last.
The internet didn't require concrete evidence. It didn't need verified facts. Speculative information, passed from person to person, from forum to forum, from tweet to tweet, could spiral into a catastrophe within hours. Hojo Shione's already fragile reputation would be annihilated. Her career—still teetering on the edge after the concert disaster—would be utterly, irreversibly destroyed.
And then what? Even if Shiratori Seiya never traced the leak back to her, never discovered that she had been the source of the rumors that demolished his ex-girlfriend's future... even if he never knew... she would know. She would have to live with the knowledge that she had done something despicable. Something shameless. Something that placed her, in terms of moral conduct, on the exact same level as the woman she despised.
Anyone could expose Hojo Shione's ugly deeds. Anyone but her.
Of course, she would be lying if she claimed she didn't derive some dark, petty satisfaction from watching Hojo Shione squirm in the court of public opinion. Seeing that woman—so elegant, so untouchable, so infuriatingly serene—finally face consequences was... not unpleasant. But a very obvious, very inconvenient problem kept intruding on her schadenfreude: Shiratori Seiya probably wouldn't stand idly by.
If Hojo Shione's situation truly deteriorated, if the wolves of public opinion closed in for the kill, Shiratori Seiya would intervene. He would turn his attention back to her. His energy. His focus. His infuriatingly potent, world-bending competence. All of it would be redirected toward rescuing his ex-girlfriend from the flames.
And that would be a net loss. A catastrophic, unacceptable net loss.
Setting aside the tiny, inconvenient, stubbornly persistent flicker of affection she harbored for him—a flame she kept trying to extinguish and kept failing—Takahashi Mio found it genuinely, objectively impossible to imagine where she could find a replacement.
Someone so dedicated to her career. Someone who cultivated her with such wholehearted, almost paternal attention. Someone who could write scripts—good scripts, scripts that networks actually approved—and who could, in the future, promote her, guide her, open doors that would otherwise remain forever sealed.
Honestly? She felt her own mother wasn't this invested in her success. It wouldn't be an exaggeration, she mused, to call Shiratori Seiya a second father. A bizarre, age-inappropriate, romantically-entangled second father, but a second father nonetheless.
And then there was her actual father. The one back home in Kyoto. The one who harbored such deep, implacable animosity toward her acting ambitions that merely thinking about him made her stomach clench with cold, visceral dread.
Compared to him—compared to the man whose disappointment was a blade she'd been dodging her entire life—Shiratori Seiya sometimes felt less like a boyfriend and more like a cosmic consolation prize. A gift from the heavens specifically designed to compensate for the paternal love she had never properly received.
Haruno Reika, who was decidedly not a gossip by nature—or at least, not a particularly skilled one—had been watching Takahashi Mio's face cycle through this complex emotional sequence with growing impatience. Her curiosity had been pricked, then hooked, then reeled in. She settled into the seat beside Mio, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur.
"What do you mean, 'nothing good to say'? Did something actually happen? With you? With him?"
She paused, her brow furrowing as a new thought surfaced. "Especially your boyfriend... he was Hojo Shione's ex-boyfriend, wasn't he? What was his reaction when everything went down? He must have had some reaction."
Though the Hojo Shione incident had occurred nearly a week ago, its online popularity had only intensified with time. She had held a press conference—her first public appearance since the collapse—during which she bowed deeply, apologized with visible, trembling sincerity, and released official medical diagnostic certificates to corroborate her account.
She promised to compensate disappointed fans with raffles, exclusive merchandise, and free online live-streamed performances in the future. The incident had become a universal conversation topic, dissected and debated over every dinner table in Japan.
Comments of regret, ridicule, and concern mingled together in a turbulent, unpredictable storm of public opinion.
Yet, strangely, the catastrophe had not been entirely negative in its effects. Some people who had previously paid no attention to the new generation of singers—who had dismissed Hojo Shione as just another manufactured idol—had, out of morbid curiosity or genuine sympathy, begun listening to her songs.
The two newly released tracks, "Snow Flower" and "Riding on the Back of a Silver Dragon," had generated an unexpected wave of popularity. Even the manager who had accompanied Shione to the press conference had remarked, with a strained, bewildered laugh, that they hadn't anticipated this disaster doubling as a form of promotion.
But Takahashi Mio—along with many more discerning listeners—believed the songs were simply, objectively good. Excellently written. Masterfully composed. If the quality hadn't been high enough to captivate on first listen, no amount of pity or controversy could have generated such momentum.
And so, alongside the sympathy and the schadenfreude, another strain of commentary had emerged online: 'It's such a pity that A-Sensei stopped writing. Imagine what she could achieve with songs of this caliber.'
In response to this entire maelstrom of attention, A-Sensei—the enigmatic, reclusive composer—had posted only a single, brief update regarding Hojo Shione: "Rest well. Keep up the good work in the future."
Takahashi Mio had not told Haruno Reika that Shiratori Seiya wasA-Sensei. That secret was not hers to share.
But at this moment, hearing Reika mention that Shiratori Seiya was Hojo Shione's ex-boyfriend, Mio felt her expression ice over. Her face darkened. A chill crept into her eyes.
What was his reaction?
Should I tell you the truth? Should I tell you that he stayed in her hospital room all night? That he held her hand while she slept? That I—his actual, official girlfriend—was sent back to the hotel alone like an inconvenient piece of luggage?
A man and a woman. Alone. In a single room. Through the darkest hours of the night. And he dismissed his girlfriend with a gentle pat on the shoulder and a suggestion to get some rest.
If it hadn't been a hospital—if the setting had been literally anywhere else, where something could actually happen—she would have gone out and purchased the most vivid, emerald-green hat she could find, placed it on her own head, and cried herself into dehydration.
But despite constantly reassuring herself that nothing could have occurred in a sterile hospital room with nurses patrolling the halls... the jealousy had been unbearable. It had started as a small, sharp splinter in her chest that night and had slowly, steadily worked its way deeper. It had spread through her veins like poison. It had kept her awake. It had blurred her vision with hot, stinging, utterly humiliating tears.
And the only reason she hadn't spent the entire week hiding in her apartment, curled under her blankets, sobbing until her throat was raw, was that she had thrown herself into her studies with an intensity that bordered on self-punishment. Every moment she wasn't training, she was reading. Every moment she wasn't reading, she was practicing. She had transformed her jealousy into fuel, and she had burned it until there was nothing left but ash and forward momentum.
"..."
Under the sudden, arctic weight of Takahashi Mio's stare, Haruno Reika felt her heart stutter. She had clearly, unmistakably stepped onto forbidden ground. Her mouth opened. She paused. Recalculated. Then, in a voice much smaller and more careful than before, she ventured:
"He... didn't break up with you, did he? Please tell me he didn't."
Hearing this, Takahashi Mio recapped her pen with a crisp, deliberate click.
"He didn't. But I did."
"Huh?!"
Haruno Reika's jaw dropped. She stared at her friend with naked, unfiltered shock, then—before she could stop herself—she reached out and pressed her palm against Mio's forehead, checking for fever. Finding the temperature stubbornly normal, she touched her own forehead for comparison. Equally normal. Her frown deepened into a canyon of confusion.
"No fever... so you're not delirious. Then why—"
Takahashi Mio smoothly evaded the touch, pushing Reika's hand aside with a graceful, almost dismissive gesture. "We didn't break up. He refused."
"?"
Meeting Haruno Reika's utterly bewildered gaze, Takahashi Mio's expression underwent a sudden, dramatic transformation. The ice melted. The darkness lifted. A brilliant, radiant, almost theatrical smile bloomed across her delicate features, and she let out a long, exaggerated, deeply self-satisfied sigh.
"Oh, what can I say? It can't be helped, really. He simply loves me too much. The poor man can't bear to let me go. It's almost tragic."
"Are you... are you feeling okay? Mentally?"
"Think about it logically." Takahashi Mio leaned forward, her eyes glittering with something that was half mischief and half genuine, aching bewilderment. "After such a massive, catastrophic incident involving his ex-girlfriend—an ex-girlfriend who still clearly has feelings for him, by the way—why else would he still refuse to break up with me? What possible explanation is there?"
"There could be plenty of reasons. For example, maybe Hojo Shione doesn't actually—"
"Hojo Shione still likes him." Takahashi Mio cut her off with the clean precision of a knife through silk. "She still loves him. Desperately. Pathetically. If he wanted to get back together with her right now—if he snapped his fingers and said the word—they could literally go get married tomorrow. The paperwork could be filed by noon."
"..."
Listening to Takahashi Mio's rambling, Haruno Reika's expression shifted through several stages of bewilderment before settling on frank disbelief. She opened her mouth, closed it, and finally managed, "Mio... aren't you exaggerating just a little bit? Like, massively?"
"Hehe..."
Takahashi Mio propped her chin on her palm, a mischievous smile dancing at the corners of her lips. But beneath the teasing exterior, a flicker of genuine confusion swam in her striking eyes. "So, Reika... what do you think his deal actually is? Why go through all this trouble for someone like me?"
Haruno Reika hesitated, her brow furrowing with the particular strain of a question that refused to yield an easy answer. Her fingers twitched instinctively toward the cigarette carton in her pocket—a reflex born of long habit—but the institutional reality of the classroom stopped her cold.
Denied her usual thinking aid, she resorted to drumming her painted nails against the desk in a restless, staccato rhythm. After a long moment of contemplation, she leaned in closer and asked, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur, "Did you two... you know... do it?"
"?!"
The question hit Mio like a sudden splash of cold water. Her mind immediately, traitorously, conjured the memory of that kiss—the warmth of his lips, the embarrassing way she'd practically launched herself at him, the taste that still haunted the edges of her dreams.
Heat flooded her cheeks, blooming across her fair skin in an unmistakable scarlet wave. She bit her lip hard, using the small sting of pain to anchor herself. "Why does your mind always leap straight into the gutter?! Can't it just be that I'm genuinely, exceptionally capable? That he sees my raw potential and wants to nurture it?"
"Ah? Are you seriously sitting there telling me you're more capable than Hojo Shione?" Haruno Reika pressed her fingertips to her temples, feeling the distinct throb of an oncoming headache. Every word out of Mio's mouth today seemed specifically engineered to strain her cognitive faculties to their absolute limit.
"And besides—aren't you two basically living together at this point? It would be completely normal if something happened. More than normal. Expected, even. You're not exactly hard on the eyes, you know..."
"We're NOT living together. We just happen to live in the same apartment complex. There's a very significant difference." Takahashi Mio paused mid-sentence, a fresh wave of irritation washing over her. The truth was, she had thought about it. Extensively. In embarrassing, cinematic detail. She had imagined various scenarios—some stolen straight from the dramas she studied—where things between her and Shiratori Seiya escalated into decidedly adult territory.
But reality had a way of being profoundly uncooperative.
Between her and him, there was a lunatic. A literal, sword-wielding, utterly-terrifying obstacle. Every single morning when she left her apartment, she was greeted by the sight of Hasegawa Saori performing her training exercises in the courtyard below, that polished wooden katana cutting graceful, lethal arcs through the dawn air. If Mio ever actually made a serious move on Shiratori Seiya... it was genuinely difficult to calculate the precise number of pieces her body would end up in.
Seeing the complicated, frustrated expression flit across her friend's face, Haruno Reika pressed further. "So? What's the actual state of things between you two right now? Give me details."
It was too messy, too tangled, too utterly absurd to explain properly. Takahashi Mio pouted, her lips pushing out in a gesture of pure petulance. "Let's just say... we're definitely not at the stage you're imagining. Not even close."
"Is it seriously just because you've never been in a relationship before? You're fumbling the basics?" Haruno Reika muttered this more to herself than to Mio, her expression taking on a bewildered, almost pitying quality. Then she looked up, her eyes narrowing with genuine curiosity.
"But if he's genuinely not after your looks—which, honestly, is still hard for me to believe—then is it really because he values your talent? Your acting potential? That's the only explanation left, isn't it?"
"What else could it possibly be?"
Takahashi Mio allowed herself a smug, self-satisfied smile. She extended one slender, elegant hand in front of her face, examining her perfectly manicured nails with the air of a great detective delivering her final summation. "Once you eliminate all the impossibilities... whatever remains, however incredible, must be the truth. Elementary, my dear Reika."
'Buzz, buzz, buzz.'
Right on cue, her phone vibrated insistently in her pocket. She fished it out and glanced at the screen. A message from Shiratori Seiya. Characteristically terse—no greeting, no explanation, just a simple instruction to meet him at the school gate. She tapped out a quick OK emoji in response and began gathering her scattered belongings from the desk.
"What's up? Is he summoning you again?"
"Yep." Takahashi Mio nodded, slinging her bag over her shoulder. "Probably about training. It's almost always about training."
She couldn't say exactly why, but ever since that catastrophic night at Hojo Shione's concert, Shiratori Seiya's training regimen for her had intensified dramatically. The pace had accelerated. The expectations had sharpened. It was as if some invisible switch had been flipped, and now he was racing against a clock only he could see. Maybe it was just her imagination, but she doubted it.
Hearing this, Haruno Reika slumped forward, her forehead hitting the desk with a soft, defeated thud. "Normal couples go on dates. They go shopping. They check into love hotels and do all the things that normal, hormonally-charged young people do. But you two? You just... clock in and out like it's a part-time job. It's honestly depressing to witness."
"Pretty much. But honestly? It's fine. This works for us." The words came out lighter than she felt. She was still adjusting to this strange, transactional rhythm, but there was something oddly reassuring about its clarity.
Watching her friend prepare to leave, Haruno Reika suddenly reached out and caught her by the shoulder, her expression shifting from exasperated to genuinely serious.
"Hey, Mio. Listen to me. I mean it this time." She waited until Mio's eyes met hers. "Don't forget what your biggest weapon is. You're a beautiful woman—objectively, indisputably, stop-guys-in-their-tracks beautiful. That's an advantage most girls would kill for. So use it. Before someone else does."
"We'll see. We'll see." Takahashi Mio waved a dismissive hand, but as she turned toward the door, a small, secret part of her acknowledged that Haruno Reika had a point. A very valid point. As long as she could find the right opening, the right moment, the right crack in his professional armor... opportunities would present themselves.
She had so many chances to be alone with him. So many unsupervised hours. The ancient proverb said you only hear of a thief stealing for a thousand days, never of someone successfully defending against a thief for a thousand days. Hasegawa Saori could stand guard all she wanted. Eventually, inevitably, an opening would appear.
And when it did? She genuinely wanted to see what that crazy swordswoman would do once the deed was already done, the line already crossed, the relationship between her and Seiya irrevocably consummated. Would she still swing that blade? Or would she finally, finally, have to accept reality?
However—just as she reached the doorway, one foot already over the threshold—Takahashi Mio stopped abruptly. A sudden, urgent thought seized her. She spun on her heel and fixed Haruno Reika with an intensely serious stare.
"Oh! One more thing. Don't tell Yuna and the others about me moving apartments. Actually, don't tell them anything about what I've been doing recently. At all. Not a single detail."
Some of these friends she had known since middle school. Others had entered her orbit during high school. All of them shared one dangerous commonality: their homes were clustered together, their families intertwined in a tight-knit web of neighborhood gossip.
If word started spreading—if one of them casually mentioned to their mother, who mentioned to her mother, who happened to run into her father at the local market—the entire carefully-constructed facade of her life would crumble like a house of cards in a typhoon.
The moving part was actually the lesser concern. What truly terrified her—what made her blood run cold even in the warmth of the afternoon sun—was the prospect of her father discovering her acting ambitions. If that man, with his traditional values and his iron expectations and his utter refusal to understand, ever found out what she was really doing in Tokyo...
She didn't dare finish the thought. Some nightmares didn't need to be imagined in detail to be effective.