"Like I said, this spiky-haired guy can take on the entirety of fiction!" she exclaimed, holding up a Japanese comic and jabbing a finger at one of the action panels.
"Okay… and…" I glanced at the page, not even remembering when I'd bought it.
"I ordered it," she cut in immediately, then launched straight back into her rant. "Anyway, just look at this, he literally unlocked this cool looking new form and started dodging everything like it's nothing!"
She paused, tapping her chin.
"What was his name again…? Ah, right. Goku!"
"…So you're into animanga now?" I sighed, running a hand through my hair.
"And powerscaling too?"
She flipped through the pages like they weighed nothing.
"Yeah. No one's beating this guy," she said, completely ignoring me.
"And if I remember right… in the anime, his fight with that God of Destruction almost wiped out Universe Seven or something."
I stared at her, deadpan, as she kept reading.
No. A person who casually talked about erasing an entire universe shouldn't get to say that.
I didn't know much about powerscaling, or even what it really was. But I knew one thing.
Goku isn't exactly everything most fans make him up as.
"So… would he survive narrative breakers?" I said. "Like that demon king from Misfit. I remember reading somewhere that he's one, at least to an extent."
Anathasia froze.
Slowly, she turned toward me.
She looked… different.
"Source?" she asked, stepping closer until she was almost pressed against me.
"Feats? Link?"
Then she scoffed, pulling back just as abruptly as she reached for her phone.
"Demon King of Tyranny… metaphysical abstractions…" she muttered, eyes scanning the screen as her expression darkened line by line.
Anathasia fell silent, then stared back at her screen, taking another look. She seemed genuinely torn for some reason… probably because she understood the implications better than anyone.
"This…" she breathed. "How is this a character?!"
No, you exist. Should you really be that surprised?
She continued scrolling through her screen, then suddenly muttered a name I recognized from a visual novel I played once.
"Feather… something something…"
Ah, the Witch of Theatergoing, Drama and Spectating.
Her expression darkened further as she read through the witch's profile.
"Authorship??"
"That's not even a character at this point, that's just an author insert!" she huffed.
"She is the Author of it though? Well, avatar or something. It's been a while since I played or read it so I'm not too sure." I shrugged, glancing at her as she still seemed salty about being unable to defend meaningfully.
"Did the author of her story eat crack or something when they wrote her?" she said, her expression flattening the more she read through the witch's profile.
I almost choked at my own spit.
"Woah, okay. It has good writing, alright? It's not all about scaling."
In response, she shoved her phone in my face. What looked like layered cosmology charts and meta-fictional diagrams filled the screen.
"Looks like cosmology-maxxing to me," she said flatly.
"No, that's just supposed to map out layers of existence though…?" I replied, squinting at her screen as she scrolled through some site, or forum, of some kind.
"Multiversal, hyperverse… whatever," she muttered, tilting her head. "Outer? Boundless?"
She frowned slightly.
"These scalings don't even map things properly. They're not wrong about dimensionality, but… honestly, it's too bothersome to think about."
She trailed off, still scrolling.
"As long as character A beats character B, isn't that enough?"
I sighed.
"I don't really get how that works," I admitted. "But aren't those kinds of things supposed to matter when you scale characters…?"
I paused, then shook my head.
"You know what—let's just drop it. Crossing verses and powerscaling characters from universes with completely different rules of reality doesn't really work anyway."
Reaching over, I ruffled her hair.
"And does it even matter in the first place?" I smiled.
"If I remember right, you still have a deadline you missed last week. Shouldn't that be your number one concern right now?"
Anathasia froze.
Her eyes slowly drifted away as she slid her phone behind her back.
"That's—" she started, then hesitated.
"…I already finished half of it."
"That's strange," I nodded, still smiling at her. "especially since you even have the time to scale and watch shounen animes despite missing one deadline."
She went silent, her lips parting once before closing.
A small mumble escaped her lips.
"That's… I mean, it was just about teaching styles and whatnots, wasn't it?"
My eyes narrowed at her.
"No? The activity was about Mathematics in the Modern World," I said. "did you even listen?"
She visibly flinched, her gaze slowly meeting mine as she forced a smile.
"Right… that… I knew that."
"You know I don't really care if you're some kind of cosmic horror, right?" I added.
My hand drifted to her chin, tilting it up slightly.
"Now how about we finish this activity so Professor Wang won't scold you again for the fifth time this year?"
She nodded silently, not a single word leaving her mouth.
—
"So you are capable when you actually put your mind to it," I said, watching her force herself through the last parts of the activity she'd missed.
"Ngh… I could've finished reading a manhwa by now…" she grumbled under her breath.
Unfortunately for her, I heard it anyway.
"Well, if you'd finished everything beforehand, you could've," I shrugged, casually pointing at an unanswered space.
"I don't remember ever allowing you to procrastinate in the first place."
She stayed silent after that and went back to her work, typing and writing with a focus she rarely showed.
Since she was actually trying this time…
I should make something for her. Pastries, maybe.
I glanced at her, still locked in, eyes fixed on the screen.
"That said," I spoke up, "I remember having something else to take care of real quick, so I'll be stepping out for a bit, alright?"
She nodded. Subtle, but enough for me to notice.
As I slipped out of the living room, the sound of keys clicking and pen scratching followed me down the hall.
I tied on my apron and rolled up my sleeves before pulling out the ingredients.
"Good thing I made the dough earlier," I muttered, reaching for another bowl in the cupboard.
My phone sat off to the side as I poured hot water into the bowl, followed by sugar.
"Now for the eggs…"
I cracked them in and reached for the whisk beside the dough I'd prepared earlier.
Whisk the eggs while the sugar dissolves.
Once the mixture smoothed out, I added the evaporated milk, then the cooled sugar water, stirring until everything came together.
With the filling done, I rolled the dough out thin and cut it into even circles.
Press and prickle with a fork.
It'd been a while since I last baked, so it took longer than just throwing together a quick meal.
Still—
She rarely works this hard anyway. Egg tarts aren't that complicated.
After shaping the dough into shells, I slid them into the fridge to cool. The bowl of filling followed, covered with plastic wrap.
All that was left was waiting.
"Though… thirty minutes is a bit long." I leaned against the countertop after preheating the oven.
"Should I make a quick lunch while I wait…?"
My brows furrowed as I crossed my arms, tilting my head slightly.
"She'll definitely get hungry after…"
Yeah. Might as well.
I pulled out the leftover rice from last night's dinner and fired up the stove, setting the wok down as it heated.
"This shouldn't take more than ten… maybe twenty minutes."
Shrugging, I drizzled oil into the wok once it was hot. I grabbed an egg from the carton on the counter behind me, cracked it cleanly, and let it hit the pan.
After scrambling it, I added the rice and mixed everything together, followed by a few vegetables and the leftover meat from dinner.
Just as I was plating the dish—
My phone lit up.
I leaned in, checking the notification on my lock screen.
A message.
"…Noah?" I muttered, unlocking my phone.
'I'm coming over, so cook a lot, alright? It's been pretty damn long since I last had your food.'
I stared at the message.
"What…?"
Before I could process it properly, the oven timer suddenly went off.
"Oh crap—! The tarts!"
—
Thirty minutes later
"Just barely…" I muttered, wiping the sweat off my forehead. "What the hell…"
I let out a breath and glanced at the counter.
"And now I have to make another dish…?"
As I grumbled under my breath, a voice cut in.
"Need some help?"
I looked up to see Anathasia already strolling into the kitchen. Her eyes moved over the dishes on the counter, then to the egg tarts cooling on the tray.
"Uwah… looks like you had it rough," she said.
I could only nod, wiping my face with the handkerchief from my pocket.
"Yeah. Noah's coming over."
"Oh," she hummed. "That thing he mentioned—about 'catching up'?"
"Yeah, that." I sighed. "You know how big that guy's appetite is…"
I gestured toward the food already laid out.
She nodded, then grabbed an apron and tied her hair back into a ponytail.
"I'll help out, then."
"What about your activity?"
"Already finished," she replied, waving a hand dismissively. "No worries."