The letter said little more than what it needed to. Ryunosuke had urgent matters to deal with and couldn't come home for a while. He asked her to wait for him.
And Mahiru waited. She waited ten full months, nearly eleven, without a single word coming back.
Ryunosuke had also told her in the letter about the 10 million yen he had hidden in a box under the bed, his earnings from the underground fights, hoping it would take some of the weight off her.
Mahiru went to school each day with something hollow in her eyes. Her gaze was empty, as though something inside her had quietly broken. Meanwhile, Ryunosuke was already living at Advanced Nurturing High School.
Mahiru had passed the entrance exam as well, but she chose not to go. She wanted to be there when her husband came home. She was afraid that if she left, he would have no way to find her. Without either of them knowing, they had passed each other by in the cruelest possible way. Had Mahiru chosen to go, she would have walked straight into the person she missed most. But who could have known? She had no way of seeing what lay ahead.
Not far from Mahiru's classroom, Gintoki leaned back against a thick branch, quietly keeping watch. He took his promises seriously. He had been protecting Mahiru for nearly eleven months.
Thinking about it, he felt a little cheated. Four hundred thousand yen divided across all those months worked out to less than forty thousand a month.
An absolute loss.
Still, he had no intention of abandoning the job. He'd just chalk it up to bad luck for taking such a miserable commission in the first place.
He rolled over on the branch, propped his cheek on one hand, and pulled out an adult magazine, reading it up in the tree while occasionally scratching himself and picking his nose.
◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆
The story winds back to the moment Ryunosuke was knocked unconscious, roughly ten months earlier.
He woke up in a hospital bed to a splitting pain in his head. The memories from his previous life had returned, but in exchange, certain things had slipped away.
He had forgotten Mahiru. He had forgotten his childhood promises to other girls too. All of it, gone cleanly from his mind. On top of that, the force of the blow had caused a blood clot that pressed against a specific cluster of nerves in his brain. As a result, he could no longer activate his full-power state, what he thought of as Chuunibyou Mode, at will.
Now, triggering it required outside stimulation, and even then the clot meant his brain couldn't bear the strain the mode placed on it. That was why, whenever he entered that state, his cognitive function suffered. The fivefold boost to his physical output demanded more oxygen than his brain could supply, so it sacrificed mental clarity to compensate.
Ryunosuke threw off the blanket and moved to get up and leave. His remaining memories told him he was broke, and if he didn't get out now, there was no way he could pay the hospital bill. His personality had shifted considerably after his past-life memories returned, but at his core, he was still himself.
He had just opened the window, ready to jump out and make his escape, when Kirishima's hand came down on his shoulder. The look on his face made the warning perfectly clear.
"And where do you think you're going?"
Ryunosuke stiffened. He turned his head slowly.
"I, uh. I was just going to the bathroom." He scratched his cheek.
"Oh? The bathroom's out the window, is it? Not worried about splashing someone down below?" Kirishima grabbed Ryunosuke's head and squeezed.
"Ow, ow, ow, that hurts, that HURTS!" Kirishima was pressing directly on the wound still wrapped in bandages, and the pain brought tears streaming down Ryunosuke's face.
Kirishima hauled him back inside without ceremony and sat across from him, arms folded. Dozens of large men stood around them in perfect silence, waiting on his word.
Ryunosuke had never found himself in a scene like this. In his previous life he had been an ordinary person who watched anime and read novels. His only real advantage was a patchwork of odd jobs that had taught him a little of a lot of things.
He worked up the nerve to ask. "Are you the one my father owes money to?"
Even with most of his memories gone, his parents were still there, vivid and unshaken. Especially the 87 million yen. That particular debt was the kind of thing that lodged itself too deep to forget.
Kirishima didn't bother softening it. "Become one of my fighters. I saw what you can do. You'll work under me until the debt is paid."
And so it began. Ryunosuke followed Kirishima and was put to work as an enforcer. The problem was that he had lost his peak ability and had no idea how to trigger Chuunibyou Mode anymore. His physical condition was now below that of an average person.
Kirishima felt deceived. At one point he hung Ryunosuke over the edge of a cliff to force him to draw on his full power, threatening to cut the rope if he didn't. Ryunosuke still couldn't produce anything.
That was when Kirishima accepted it. In a genuine life-or-death situation, if someone had the ability to save themselves, they would have used it already. The brick his own father had smashed into his skull had apparently done real damage.
Kirishima felt the loss keenly. Trading 87 million yen for a fighter in this condition was a complete waste.
As it happened, his boss's daughter needed someone to look after her. Kirishima decided to offload Ryunosuke onto that role and at least squeeze some last remaining value out of him. And so Ryunosuke was assigned to watch over a young girl named Sakuragi Yaeka.
She had deep reddish-brown hair and eyes like ruby gemstones. An absurdly cute little girl. The two of them stared at each other in silence, neither knowing how to start.
Kirishima, who served as second-in-command of the Sakuragi yakuza clan, made himself very clear. "This is our boss's daughter. Her name is Sakuragi Yaeka. If you let a single tear fall from her eyes, I will peel the skin right off you."
Ryunosuke trembled violently and nodded so fast his head looked like a pile driver. Kirishima looked satisfied. "Good. She's in your care from now on."
He finally felt the weight lift from his shoulders. The task of watching over Yaeka had originally been handed down from the boss himself. But as the clan's top fighter, Kirishima had no business playing babysitter. He'd much rather be out fighting. So he passed it on to Ryunosuke. The boy couldn't work as an enforcer anyway, so he had better be useful for something if the 87 million was going to mean anything at all.
Ryunosuke looked after Yaeka for about half a month before he decided he had to quit. The main reason was that the little girl had started showing signs of attachment and told him she wanted to marry him when she grew up.
Ryunosuke could not accept that. He was not that kind of person. And she was the daughter of his own debt collector's boss, at that. Was he tired of being alive?
He prepared to run. He picked a dark night and made his move, but was caught almost immediately. Kirishima picked him up by the scruff like a baby chick.
"You little punk. Can you stop trying to escape every single day?! You're just making more work for me!" He knocked their foreheads together with irritation.
Ryunosuke said flatly, "I'll find a way to pay back the money. Can't you just let me go?"
Kirishima didn't believe him. Ryunosuke then pulled out the acceptance letter from Advanced Nurturing High School that he had just picked up from the post office, and from that, he explained what he believed he could find there.
His proposal was simple: give him three years, and he would pay back the debt with interest. Kirishima let him go. Not because he genuinely believed the boy could deliver, but because underneath everything, he was not a bad person. He just looked the part.
He hoped the kid would learn something real at that school and come back to work for the Sakuragi clan with actual ability. Kirishima had no intention of killing Ryunosuke. He just wanted the boy to be honest and work steadily. He wouldn't hurt him. At most, he'd hold his wages and let him work the rest of his life to pay off 87 million yen, and in Kirishima's view, that was already showing remarkable generosity.
That was the shape of Ryunosuke's life in the days just before he walked through the gates of Advanced Nurturing High School.