Chapter 98: Drop the Staff, Link the Dual Blades to the Brain.
....
Both Ryuu and Maidena's plan had been built on the foundational assumption that Kaguya was Kaguya.
Neither of them knew that the consciousness currently operating behind those red eyes belonged to Ais Wallenstein.
And Ais had a very specific relationship with Ryuu — one that extended across both the dungeon and everything adjacent to it. They were rivals in the most complete sense of the word: measuring each other's growth, pushing each other toward the ceiling of what was possible, competing with the focused intensity of two people who had decided the other person was the only relevant benchmark.
So when Ryuu appeared in the doorway wearing a soft yellow sweater and a pleated skirt, holding Kihara's hand, Ais read the situation in approximately one second.
A date. She brought him here to show off in front of me.
Rivals didn't get sentiment. Rivals got the direct approach. Ais had decided she wanted Kihara to herself for the afternoon, she had a room full of good games, and Ryuu was standing between her and that outcome.
Yesterday's exploration of Kaguya's game library had been productive. Specifically, she had discovered Elden Ring, and the experience of learning that a wheelchair was, in fact, a legitimate path to victory had produced a satisfaction she hadn't expected from a medium she'd never engaged with before. That satisfaction, with the addition of Kihara beside her, was something she was reluctant to put numbers on.
"Should Ryuu maybe go home?"
Kihara turned to look at "Ryuu," whose expression had achieved a specific blankness that he couldn't immediately interpret.
"Do you want to go somewhere else?"
Somewhere else. Maidena's newly calibrated interpretive framework — installed via forty-eight hours of intensive study — immediately began processing this phrase.
Somewhere else could mean —
The phrase love hotel had assembled itself in her mind before she'd invited it, followed immediately by the clarifying observation that Pelican Town didn't have one of those, followed immediately by the question of whether back to his house counted as a reasonable substitute, followed by the temperature in her face exceeding what she considered medically advisable.
She shook her head firmly. "Here is fine."
Ais's eyes narrowed slightly behind the three-no mask.
That wasn't right.
She knew Ryuu. Knew how she moved through a room, how she held herself, how she responded to direct dismissal. The person in front of her had just absorbed a flat rejection and responded by asking to stay anyway. Ryuu's pride didn't work like that. Her rivalry didn't work like that. Even softened by a relationship, even in a sweater and a skirt, Ryuu would not have done that.
Ais connected the logic.
The same thing that had happened to her and Kaguya had apparently happened to Ryuu and someone else.
The consciousness in that body wasn't Ryuu.
Which meant there was no competition here. Just someone who deserved a reasonable amount of mercy.
She withdrew her attention from the doorway and returned it to the monitor. "Stay if you want. Just don't be loud while I'm playing."
"Thank you."
Kihara stood between them with the expression of someone who had witnessed an exchange that should have had more friction than it did, and couldn't locate the variable that explained the outcome.
Is this how they normally interact?
He decided not to pursue it. At minimum, nobody had been removed from the premises. He crossed to the television cabinet, pulled out the PS5, and retrieved two controllers from the shelf below.
"Ryuu — you've never played anything like this before, right?"
"No. Never seen one."
This was technically true — Maidena had played games before, including online co-op sessions with Tokishikko that she would prefer not to inventory right now, but she had no way of knowing whether the real Ryuu had ever touched a controller in Kaguya's room. Better to play naive.
"Then I'll teach you!"
Kihara's expression shifted into the specific brightness of someone who has just been handed an excellent opportunity. He opened Monster Hunter, created a character — a Longsword user built for maximum visual impact — and settled into position.
"Come sit in my lap. Hands-on instruction."
Maidena stood up, walked to him with the joint-by-joint deliberateness of a marionette navigating unfamiliar terrain, and settled herself in front of him.
The long pointed ears, she noted distantly, felt quite different from the outside — their tips had gone soft pink, the color of something chewy. The aesthetic was, objectively, something people would want to interact with.
Then Kihara discovered the geometric problem.
In his current body, with "Ryuu" seated in front of him, the height differential meant he was looking at the back of her head rather than the television. His teaching posture was aimed at approximately ear level. The hands-on instruction plan had several structural flaws.
"...Ryuu. You hold me instead."
"Ah — yes, of course!"
Maidena had not consciously planned what happened next. Her hand found the floor, she pushed off, and she was airborne — a full three-sixty rotation in the air, landing behind him with the muscle memory of someone whose body had logged hundreds of hours of precision movement and executed it on autopilot.
She stared at her own hands for a moment.
Ryuu's body is remarkably cooperative.
While this was happening in Eientei, elsewhere in Bud Forest, the real Ryuu was having a completely different experience.
She had not anticipated that Maidena's body would be so fundamentally,
comprehensively unprepared for physical confrontation.
The freezing response — muscles locking involuntarily at the sight of any monster, regardless of threat tier — was the first thing she noticed. The second thing she noticed was that the stamina pool she was working with appeared to have been allocated almost entirely to magical aptitude, leaving roughly enough physical endurance for walking to the end of the street and light reading.
She has put every point into intelligence and zero into constitution, Ryuu thought, with the calm assessment of an adventurer reading an equipment screen. This is mathematically extreme.
The party's performance added further texture to her afternoon.
Hitamuki — a Fighter whose primary combat strategy was to perform a courtesy bow at her opponent before engaging, and whose evasion capabilities were genuinely remarkable as long as she wasn't required to initiate.
Tokishikko — a Black Mage whose spell output was substantial but whose targeting appeared to be a suggestion rather than a parameter.
Hanabata — a Warrior who, after sustained magical reinforcement, began treating the concept of teammates as a category error.
Ryuu had been told that Kihara trained this squad, and that they performed well by new Guardian standards. She was looking at them with her own eyes — Maidena's eyes, technically — and finding it very difficult to reconcile this with well.
In this moment, standing in Bud Forest with one bar of stamina and a staff she couldn't swing effectively, Ryuu felt something she didn't often feel toward Kihara: genuine, unqualified admiration.
My boyfriend is actually remarkable. He managed this for weeks without visible breakdown.
The solution presented itself with the clarity of someone who had been solving combat problems for years and simply needed the right frame.
She located the nearest weapons vendor, asked Tokishikko for directions, and walked in. She walked out with two shortswords, one for each hand.
That afternoon, White Mage Maidena Anger ceased to exist in any operationally relevant sense.
In her place: Ryuu Lion, master-class adventurer, operating a vehicle with one bar of stamina and a talent for healing magic that she was deploying on herself in real time between exchanges.
The squad watched.
Hitamuki's mouth was open.
Hanabata had stopped moving.
Tokishikko appeared to be experiencing a philosophical event.
The Horned Demon Wolf that had been circling them with the confident energy of a predator assessing acceptable prey met a blade it hadn't seen coming, registered the thin red line that appeared across its forehead, and divided along that line before the registration was complete.
The aftermath was significant.
Tokishikko wiped something off her cheek. Decided not to investigate what it was. Looked at "Maidena" with the careful eyes of someone revising their threat assessment of a person they had previously considered manageable.
"...I'm going to be on my best behavior for the next two weeks," she announced, to no one in particular.
"Tokishikko," Hitamuki said helpfully, "I've been meaning to mention — you really shouldn't tease Maidena lately. I'm worried she'd split you in half."
"I know that. Obviously I know that."
Tokishikko kept her voice low, the way you did around something you'd reclassified. "I'm just trying to work out what happened to her. She's completely different. It's like she's... a different person."
"It reminds me of those reincarnation web novels," Hanabata offered, with the thoughtful expression of someone genuinely trying to help. "The protagonist always suddenly becomes extremely capable. Usually right around chapter fifty."
"That's a fair reading of the situation, actually."
Tokishikko made a decision. She walked up to "Maidena," tapped her on the shoulder twice, and delivered her question with the casual confidence of someone who had determined that the potential answer was worth the potential consequence.
"Hey. Future me and Kihara — do we have a son or a daughter?"
Ryuu looked at her.
The question had produced no meaningful information in her brain. Her hands, operating on instinct rather than instruction, tightened slightly around the hilts of the two shortswords.
"SPARE US, MAIDENA — SPARE US!!" ×2
....
Thank you for reading.