"Hmph. I see you and Zenitsu are getting along quite well."
In the fading evening light, Kaigaku's face looked more sinister than usual. He wore a yukata hanging open at the chest, a silk cord knotted around his neck with a magatama dangling from it—the whole picture of some street-corner thug who'd never quite grown out of it. One hand resting at his collar, he grinned. The kind of grin that had no good intent anywhere near it.
Kanao's face was blank. Her fists were quietly tightening.
"Something felt off to me," Kaigaku went on. "That guy should've been dragging himself around like a miserable wreck—and then suddenly he finds motivation to actually train. So it's because of you."
If not for Zenitsu, Kaigaku wouldn't have spared this girl a second glance. But he had a particular fondness for making Zenitsu eat dirt. He was jealous—their teacher had always doted on Zenitsu, given him far more care than he deserved—and he despised him for being so hopelessly, embarrassingly weak. Someone like that was meant to stay right where he belonged: a permanent source of Kaigaku's sense of superiority. He was not going to let some girl drag Zenitsu into maturing—into becoming someone worth respecting. Into surpassing him.
He reached for her hair.
Kanao read the intent and twisted aside, and her foot came up hard toward his groin.
That technique was something Shinobu had taught her—for dangerous men.
If Kaigaku hadn't spent time watching her spar with Zenitsu, that kick might have connected somewhere critical. But he'd had warning in his mind—he'd seen her move. He was not going to let someone half his size blindside him.
But Kaigaku was faster than she'd expected. As if he'd known it was coming, he caught her ankle mid-arc and shoved her backward. She lost her footing instantly.
She hadn't been pushed so much as slammed into the ground. No time to react, no time to break her fall. She landed squarely on her backside and the impact hit like a hammer. That quiet, doll-still face of hers—so young, so unreadable—creased at last with the faintest frown.
"Get up."
Kaigaku stepped toward her, no trace of restraint, reaching for her hair.
That hand, lunging out of the dark toward her—
Something electric fired through her skull. The world froze.
Past memories tore through her like a nightmare flood—images from before Kanae had found her, of her own father's hands.
She closed her eyes.
There was no pain. Instead, a shriek tore out from the other direction.
"Son of a—! My hand—my hand!"
Kanao opened her eyes. The man had been flung several steps back and was pinned against the wall—a crimson feather-shaped blade driven clean through his palm.
The pain nearly dropped him. Not just the ordinary agony of a punctured hand, but something else, something wrong. Like hundreds of ants gnawing endlessly at the wound, agonizing and itching past all tolerance at once. He looked at the blade more closely—and terror swallowed the pain entirely.
The crimson blade had an eye on it. A real eye. Looking around.
"What—what the hell is that?!"
Pinned to the wall, he couldn't move. The pain held him perfectly still. The hand he'd raised against Kanao was finished.
"Kanao-chan." A woman's voice, warm and unhurried. "Didn't I say to wait for me to come pick you up?"
Kaigaku heard it—and his whole body dropped about ten degrees. The dread of something unknown crystallized into wordless, crushing pressure. He raised his head.
A woman with pink hair—vivid, strange pink, a shade he'd never seen in nature—had already helped Kanao to her feet.
Without question, the blade pinning him was hers. But—the wrongness of it. That living feather blade with an actual eyeball. Had she made that?
—She was beautiful. More beautiful than anyone he'd laid eyes on, and in a way he couldn't name. Her beauty was something fundamentally different from other women's—he couldn't explain why. But this woman was very, very dangerous.
"I—I came to find my junior, Zenitsu. I'm his senior disciple."
His voice came out harder than he felt.
"Haven't seen your face before." Inori looked at him, unhurried. "Are you a patient here?"
Kaigaku's mind was flooded with questions. But her voice was perfectly flat—which somehow exerted more pressure on him than a sharp interrogation would have.
"Oh~" Inori nodded. "So you're the senior who came to collect him."
"Then why are you in here roughing up my Kanao-chan? Hm? Did you get your head caught in the gate on the way in—forget what your own junior looks like, whether he happens to be male or female?"
"And just who are you to ask what I do?! This has nothing to do with you!"
"You're on my doorstep," Inori said, "asking who I am?"
Something about that struck her as genuinely funny. The amusement leaked out before she could stop it.
So this was the senior from Zenitsu's memories—the one who'd made a hobby of bullying him. And he'd trekked all the way here to pick on Kanao. Was he one of those innately rotten types, like DIO? Not some tsundere with a sharp tongue and a soft heart underneath—just a straightforward sadist who got his sense of worth from standing over people weaker than himself.
She hadn't gotten far enough in the manga to know where this would go. Based on what she could see right now, though, this person was not good.
"You—you dare look down on me?! You're nothing but a cook—kitchen help at best!"
Kaigaku's pride was profoundly childish.
—A... cook?
Is she talking about me?
She blinked—one slow, deliberate blink, almost a wink.
"Ha."
She didn't move. Didn't speak. Just looked at him—quietly, steadily—like something was about to happen.
Kanao leaned into her, clutching the knot of Inori's sash, wide eyes peering up. She knew Onee-san was angry. She could feel it, pressed against her warm, soft body—waves of unreasonable force radiating from her, her chest rising and falling like something building toward breath. It was overwhelming.
But it was aimed at Kaigaku. Standing beside Inori, Kanao only felt safer for it.
Kaigaku was still working himself up to fire off another insult when, in the fraction of a second after that quiet laugh, his vision tilted sideways. A thick curtain of red swam across it. Something like a voice—muffled, almost incoherent—rang through his ears.
Clatter.
The Feather Blade pulled free from his palm. Kaigaku crumpled to his knees like a puppet with cut strings, eyes glazed and unfocused.
The last thing he saw before consciousness left him was the single eye on that living feather, watching him.
"If I weren't trying to keep Kanae out of trouble," Inori said, looking down at his unconscious form, "you'd be dead right now."
The smile came off.
She exhaled, and her brow furrowed slightly.
She hated this feeling—being constrained. Whether by raw authority or by the soft weight of people she cared about, the result was always the same: she felt bound.
This was why she'd always been obsessed with being the one in charge. Back in Funeral Parlor, she'd fabricated Diavolo as a shadow looming over Gai Tsutsugami—that way, she could do whatever she wanted and dismiss any order she didn't feel like following.
But here—she couldn't just kill Zenitsu's senior. Just concealing her existence was already a violation of Corps rules for Kanae. If this idiot turned up dead in their courtyard, the entire Butterfly Mansion would be dragged into trouble, and the peaceful life she'd grown fond of would be gone for good.
Kanao was clutching the knot of her sash, staring up with big, wordless eyes.
"Don't worry, Kanao-chan." Inori patted her head and smiled. "Leave this to Onee-san."
"Come on. Let's go have dinner."