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"Why are you running? Weren't you all quite ruthless and brave with your cheap shots just now? Come on, stand and fight!"
Although Yuuka Kazami didn't know exactly who cowardly threw the specific cheap shots in the chaotic, muddy free-for-all, it honestly didn't legally matter to the Flower Master—she just needed to ruthlessly ORA ORA ORA absolutely everyone present once to ensure she hit the guilty party.
While Yuuka was busy violently dispensing indiscriminate, floral justice out in the rain, Leo had already retreated to the safety of his porch. He took out his smartphone and formally sent a portion of the remaining, premium sashimi to Special Week, even specifically asking the terrified Kappa interns for an exquisite, lacquered wooden bento box to carefully package it, as using a cheap wooden bowl would make the legendary meat look like discarded leftovers.
Leo: "@Special Week @Three Goddesses, please try the absolute specialty fish slices from my side today. It's a premium, magical ingredient that can literally only be produced once a year, and it's absolutely best eaten raw. Let me know what you think!"
Ding. Godolphin Arabian: "Received, World Lord. Little Spe is still currently running hard on the training track right now; I'll safely teleport the bento box directly onto her dorm room desk."
Meanwhile, in another universe at Tracen Academy.
On the pristine, synthetic middle-distance track training field, Special Week, who had just exhausted herself finishing a grueling set of high-speed interval training, saw the notification message from the Three Goddesses pop up on her smartwatch. She silently put down her phone, her chest heaving. If she excitedly replied in the group chat right now, would the strict Shopkeeper incorrectly think she was lazily slacking off during mandatory practice?
But... her stomach rumbled loudly. She was really, incredibly curious about what the legendary "sashimi" the Shopkeeper mentioned actually tasted like.
Not far away on the grass, a tall, white-haired horse girl with incredibly long hair, who absolutely wasn't participating in the structured training and was instead engaged in some bizarre, chaotic performance art involving a Rubik's cube, watched Special Week intently.
Gold Ship lowered her stylish sunglasses slightly, her golden eyes gleaming with an eerie, predatory light as she watched Spe, who was currently lost in thought holding her phone, with a highly visible trickle of hungry drool forming at the corner of her mouth.
This country kid... absolutely seems to have a delicious little secret stash lately, Gold Ship schemed.
Special Week somehow managed to focus and completely finish her grueling morning training routine just before 11 A.M. With a full, agonizing hour left until the massive academy cafeteria officially opened for lunch at noon, she hastily left the training field, using the entirely plausible pretext of desperately needing to go back to the dorm to shower the sweat off.
"You all definitely noticed it too, right?" Gold Ship whispered, sliding over.
"Yeah," Vodka nodded, crossing her arms.
"Spe absolutely seems to have inexplicably gained a tiny bit of weight again recently," Daiwa Scarlet analyzed critically, putting a hand on her hip.
"Suzuka, you share a dorm room directly with Spe. Has she been acting strangely or suspiciously lately?" Gold Ship interrogated the quiet runner.
Gold Ship, Daiwa Scarlet, Vodka, and Silent Suzuka stood together on the track, intensely watching Special Week's rapidly retreating, eager figure, and gathered in a tight circle to discuss the anomaly.
"Spe recently... has a suspiciously large amount of unmarked wooden boxes shoved completely under her bed," Suzuka hesitated for a moment, her ears twitching, but she still honestly spoke up for her friend's health. "The glowing labels on the wood say 'Stardew Valley,' which looks like some kind of obscure organic health brand, but I haven't politely opened them to check. However, our dorm room has been completely filled with the incredibly strong, sweet smell of freshly squeezed, premium carrot juice every single night lately."
Suzuka sighed. Every single night after the strict dorm lights went out at curfew, Spe would quietly, carefully open the sliding window, stick her head completely out into the cold night air, and loudly crunch on secret, delicious snacks, foolishly thinking she was being incredibly stealthy and discreet. But how could she possibly hide that loud crunching from an elite runner roommate with sensitive horse ears?
Fortunately, Spe trains incredibly hard on the track every day, and her overall body weight hasn't officially, catastrophically increased when formally measured by the trainers, but the digital numbers have been hovering dangerously, consistently close to the red penalty edge.
"After official training ends this afternoon, you all know exactly what I mean we have to do," Gold Ship grinned wickedly, cracking her knuckles.
She seamlessly handed everyone in the circle a pair of cheap, black plastic sunglasses and a surgical mask—a traditional, highly illegal skill of their chaotic racing team: Kidnapping and Interrogation.
Back at the pristine Tracen dorms, Special Week unlocked the door, peeked nervously around the empty hallway to make sure she wasn't followed, and immediately spotted the exquisite, lacquered wooden bento box resting perfectly on her desk by the open window.
"Is this the legendary, premium fish the Shopkeeper mentioned?! There's so little of it!"
Special Week, a literal bottomless pit who could easily, happily eat four or five massive, heaping bowls of white rice in one single meal, looked down in absolute dismay at the dozen or so impossibly thin, translucent slices of fish meticulously arranged in the box. She actually held her breath, genuinely afraid she might accidentally blow the feather-light fish slices away with her exhale.
"Okay, let's divide it fairly," Spe whispered, grabbing her chopsticks. "One piece for Suzuka, one piece for me. One piece for the Trainer, one piece for me. One piece for Gold Ship-senpai, one piece for me..."
She methodically counted the slices, moving them to different corners of the box.
"Hmm, there are exactly two pieces left over after the math, so I'll just logically take them both as the distributor!"
Clapping her hands together quietly in thanks for the meal, Special Week excitedly picked up a single, translucent piece of fish with her chopsticks and put it in her mouth. She was immediately, violently stunned by the explosive, magical taste.
"So yummy~~!" Spe squealed softly, her horse ears standing straight up in pure culinary euphoria. The intense, floral essence of spring washed over her palate.
"Wait," Spe paused, looking at the Trainer's designated pile. "The Trainer drinks cheap beer every single day after work, and Miss Toujou Hua always treats him to heavy, greasy meals at the pub, so he probably doesn't legally need this healthy, delicate fish... No, no! Mom explicitly said back in the country that good things should always be shared equally with friends and mentors!"
Struggling internally with her massive gluttony as she looked at the neatly divided, delicious fish, Special Week finally, painfully gave up on the dark temptation of selfishly skimping on the Trainer's portion. She found a small, clean plastic Tupperware box to carefully pack the fragile fish slices, fully planning to generously share the magical Stardew Valley sashimi with absolutely everyone at the cafeteria lunch table.
Back in Stardew Valley...
Yuuka Kazami returned to the muddy tavern tent looking incredibly refreshed, humming a cheerful tune. She was casually, effortlessly dragging a groaning Aya Shameimaru and Megumu Iizunamaru by the collars of their ruined shirts, leaving two long, muddy trails behind them.
She violently tossed the two beaten, human-shaped pieces of Tengu trash aside into a puddle and sat down elegantly at the wooden counter, adjusting her green skirt.
She had successfully, brutally ORA'd absolutely everyone present in the rain, then methodically pressed them firmly to the muddy ground one by one by the neck to meticulously compare their shoe prints to the dirty marks on her clothes. She finally found the absolute culprits—the specific, wooden Geta shoe prints perfectly matched these two terrified Tengu.
As for the cowardly, lightning-fast cheap shot directly to her beautiful face? There was absolutely no need to critically think about it. Only a very select, powerful few of the ancient old-timers could physically break through her passive magical defense, and with such incredibly skilled, rapid martial arts involved, there was physically only one person capable of it. It couldn't possibly be the lazy, sleeping doorman from the Scarlet Devil Mansion, right? Yuuka laughed darkly. Meiling was going to have a very bad day later.
Eirin Yagokoro sat silently next to Yuuka at the counter, wincing as she held a freezing ice pack tightly over her left eye.
Eirin had completely, tragically miscalculated the situation in the mud. At the chaotic time, she only thought about mischievously throwing a fun, consequence-free cheap shot in the dark, and entirely forgot that this terrifying sunflower woman absolutely never bothers with gathering logical, concrete evidence when seeking violent revenge.
Eirin had tried to logically argue her absolute innocence a bit earlier, but the other party just ignored her words and threw a devastating, unblockable punch directly to her face. She suffered immensely from trying to be too reasonable with a force of nature.
She was careless and simply didn't dodge in time.
"I'm planning to take the boat to visit the newly risen Spring Island tomorrow morning," Leo announced, walking into the tent and tasting a piece of the Kappas' grilled fish. It was actually quite well-grilled and flaky, but the thick, sticky sauce brushed on it was incredibly sweet, which he wasn't used to on savory fish. "Do you guys want to come? There's plenty of fresh, magical fruit to eat."
"You guys go ahead without me," Yuuka ordered a tall glass of fresh vegetable juice from the terrified Kappa intern. "I definitely won't be going to the beach. Today, that cowardly woman Yukari Yakumo saw the violent situation turning bad and shamelessly escaped through a Gap. I'll personally go to the Yakumo Residence tomorrow to have a very deep, physical 'heart-to-heart' chat with her about running away from a fight."
Unlike the other constantly partying Great Youkai, Yuuka absolutely doesn't drink alcohol. She usually just drinks healthy organic juice or something similar, goes to bed early and wakes up early, takes a long, peaceful walk around her massive Sunflower Field every single day to tend the flowers, and does some light, lethal martial arts exercise—her ancient life is actually very healthy and strictly disciplined.
"I won't go either," Eirin muttered, putting down the melting ice pack to reveal a massive, swelling, comical black eye. "I just remembered there's a very important... medical experiment to do at Eientei. Yes. I'm leaving first."
Leo had to bite the inside of his cheek so hard it bled and think of absolutely every single sad, depressing thing in his entire life—like taxes and paying Reimu 100,000G—just to keep from laughing out loud on the spot at the Sage of the Moon's bruised face.
This woman is a legendary, immortal doctor, and a terrifying, lethal poison master. If he actually laughed directly in her bruised face, Leo was mortally afraid Eirin would instantly drug him unconscious with a needle, and then only the ghosts in the Netherworld would know what horrific surgical experiments would happen to his body.
"I... cough... I'll go!"
The groaning, muddy heap on the ground, Aya Shameimaru, raised her trembling hand with extreme difficulty. The dirty shoe prints on Yuuka's clothes really, truly weren't hers! Just because the specific shoe prints were obviously from traditional Tengu geta absolutely doesn't legally mean it was her—those two cowardly kicks were 100% all Lord Megumu's doing to escape!
How dare Lord Megumu violently kick Yuuka Kazami and frame me?! She usually avoids the terrifying Flower Master at all absolute costs! This is far too unfair to lower-ranking Tengu!
"Wah! Wah! Wah~~!" Aya began to sob loudly, clutching her bruised ribs.
"Stop crying! Hold it in right now!"
Just as the reporter was about to wail loudly to successfully gain Leo's soft-hearted sympathy, before she could even fully build up the tragic emotion, Yuuka's terrifying, cold shout instantly shut her up like a light switch. Aya sniffled twice in terror, silently and painfully got up from the mud, and sat in the absolute farthest, darkest seat away from this violent shrew. She shakily took out a small, waterproof notebook to furiously scribble down biased, angry complaints for tomorrow's headline.
"Leo, Leo! What is this weird, spiky thing in the picture? Can you actually eat it?"
The little ones—the Fairy Swarm and Chen—gathered tightly around the table, looking curiously at the glossy aerial photos Aya had taken earlier. Chen pointed a small claw at a strange, spiky yellow plant in the center photo and asked Leo.
Gensokyo's natural agricultural resources aren't actually very abundant; after all, when the magical barrier of Gensokyo was first established centuries ago to isolate them from Earth, it was physically only the size of a small, rural Japanese town and a mountain, and simply couldn't encompass many diverse, modern crops. Many new things were brought in much later by Youkai who entered from the outside world afterward. Most of the new, younger Youkai born strictly after Gensokyo's establishment simply don't recognize the modern, tropical things in the photos at all.
"This?" Leo smiled, pointing at the picture. "It's a tropical pineapple. It's very sweet. You carefully peel the spiky skin off with a sharp knife and eat the juicy yellow flesh inside. If you soak it in a little bit of saltwater first to neutralize the enzymes—it's incredibly sweet and sour, and the crunchy texture is really good too."