"I imagine the host is not thrilled to hear my voice right now. But I'm afraid there's no help for it—you know how it is."
"Please find a way to share a kiss on the lips with Yuigahama Yui before leaving her home. Success will potentially yield a Yuigahama Yui series deck or item reward. Failure will result in drawing from the punishment deck."
"Cheering for the host!"
Mio listened to the full task description, tugged the corner of her mouth upward, and flopped onto Yui's bed with the quiet resignation of someone who had stopped expecting good things from the universe.
She'd known this was coming. Once the difficulty scaled up, the tasks were never going to stay tame. But she hadn't expected the first one to come out swinging like this.
She was almost afraid to imagine what the next difficulty tier would look like.
As she lay there rolling across the mattress, mentally sketching out approaches and discarding them, Yui returned from the kitchen carrying drinks and snacks.
Back in the present.
The two of them were now sitting side by side at Yui's desk, books open in front of them.
Or at least, Mio looked like she was studying. Her eyes were on the page; her mind was anywhere but.
She was quietly calculating. The situation was different from before—she'd done that sort of thing with Yui once already, but the circumstances then were completely different, and recreating them wasn't straightforward. But the task wording was flexible this time. No requirement about who initiated. That gave her options.
No need to rush, either. The task only failed when she left the house. As long as she was still here, she had time. She could find her moment.
Mio surfaced from her thoughts to find Yui watching her.
She blinked. "Yui, the answers aren't on my face."
Yui jolted slightly—she hadn't realized she'd been staring. In the past, she would have scrambled to cover it up. But Yui had quietly changed, somewhere along the way. She still felt a flicker of nerves now, but she held her ground and said, evenly, "Sorry. You looked a little distracted. Were you thinking about something?"
"Nothing important. Don't worry about it." Mio glanced away with the faint guilt of someone lying directly to a person who deserved better, and returned her eyes to the textbook. "By the way—how's your revision going?"
"Honestly? Pretty much done." Yui smiled with quiet confidence. When it came to studying and athletics, she had every reason to be self-assured.
She'd realized some time ago that whenever Mio was around, sitting down to study was more or less a lost cause. No matter how firmly she set her attention on the page, her eyes kept drifting back on their own.
Eleven o'clock. She hadn't absorbed a single line.
It was becoming clear that if she actually wanted to study, she couldn't do it with Mio around.
She'd anticipated this, which was why she'd put in extra hours beforehand. Today's review session wasn't going to move the needle—but it wasn't going to hurt her, either.
The real question was Mio. She'd been unfocused from the start. Was she actually going to be okay?
Yui caught Mio glancing back at her and cleared her throat lightly. "So—my mom had something come up and won't be home until this afternoon. I'll take care of lunch today."
Yui had kept up her cooking practice. She wasn't at Mio's level—or her mother's—but she'd long since crossed the threshold from technically edible into genuinely good.
"Then let me help."
"Sure." Yui agreed without hesitation. Cooking together with Mio was something she'd always liked.
With two pairs of hands, and given that it was only the two of them, lunch came together quickly. Mio handled prep—washing, cutting, portioning—while Yui ran the actual cooking from start to finish.
The result was better than expected. Yui's disastrous cooking tendencies, it seemed, had been almost entirely cured by Mio's sustained influence over the past months.
"Mio—let's do something else this afternoon."
"Fine by me. But are you sure about skipping the rest of your review?"
"It's because you're here," Yui said plainly, "that I can't focus on studying." The words left her mouth before she'd thought them through, and her expression flickered—but the sentence was already out in the world, and she wasn't going to take it back.
"Huh?!"
Mio stared at her. Wasn't that her line? She was the one who usually said things like that. When had Yui started volleying it back?
And the question now was: which layer did she mean? Because you're my good friend and I get distracted when friends are around was one thing. Because you're you and I can't stop looking at you was quite another.
After a beat, Mio decided not to push it. She redirected. "So what did you have in mind for this afternoon?"
"Movies! I rented some. Ones I thought you'd like."
"Ones I'd like?"
Yui's expression shifted into something anticipatory and slightly evil. "Horror. I looked up reviews online—actually, I started preparing the moment I knew you were coming over. Legitimately terrifying, I promise."
Mio stared at the smile on Yui's face and felt a very specific dread settle in her chest.
In another life—before a certain punishment card—she'd watched horror movies without blinking. She'd genuinely enjoyed them.
Now, thanks to [Coward], even the idea of horror was enough to make her skin prickle.
She still vividly remembered what had happened at the cinema with Miura Yumiko. That was not an experience she needed to repeat.
But.
Yui had clearly put real effort into this. She'd researched, she'd prepared, she'd been looking forward to it—Mio could tell just from looking at her.
If she said no now, Yui would be disappointed.
Mio drew a slow breath, assembled what she hoped was a natural smile, and said, "I'm looking forward to it."
Yui caught the faintest stiffness around the edges of that smile and filed it away with quiet delight.
Ah. Just like last time.
The memory surfaced immediately: Mio burrowing into her arms because she was too scared to watch, trembling just a little—it had been unbearably cute. And Mio had been the one who'd told her she liked horror films in the first place, which meant Yui had every right to look forward to a repeat.
Today might be even better.