Mai pressed her palm to her forehead. She could perfectly picture Maki standing in a blizzard, gripping her phone. Maki knew the rules she'd given Ren for his survival. Knowing them and hearing the details, though, were different things.
Hey Maki. While you were looking for a sword in a ditch, I was in your boyfriend's bed. We're dating now.
Maki was going to kill him. Then her.
"Mai." The older-sister tone crept into the static. "Talk to me. Who did you fight?"
"Nobody!" Mai sat up. "I didn't fight anyone. I'm literally sitting on my bed."
"Then why did I feel it?" Maki's voice cut through the static, sharp and demanding. "A complete bottom-out. You don't just drop to zero sitting in your dorm."
Mai tightened her grip on the phone. "I... I wasn't in my dorm all weekend."
"Where were you?"
"Tokyo."
A pause on the line. Maki let out a slow, steady breath.
"Tokyo," Maki repeated. Her tone dropped a dangerous octave. "You hate Tokyo. Utahime said you were visiting family. Did you go see the old man?"
"No! Gross, no. I just... I had plans. In Shibuya."
"With who?"
"Just a friend."
"You don't have friends in Tokyo, Mai."
"Yes, I do! Kind of."
"Give me a name."
Mai squeezed her eyes shut. She pulled her knees to her chest, making herself smaller on the mattress. She could lie. She should lie. But Maki's tone was the exact same one she used when they were kids and Mai tried to hide a broken vase. It bypassed every defensive wall she had.
"Mai."
"Ren," she squeaked out.
The silence on the Hokkaido end of the line was absolute.
"Ren," Maki echoed. It didn't sound like a question.
"He invited me out!" Mai hurried to explain, her words tumbling over each other. "To make up for the Goodwill event. We just got coffee. And walked around."
"You lost your cursed energy getting coffee."
"No. I..." Mai swallowed hard. Her face felt like it was on fire. "I stayed over. At his hotel."
Another brutal silence.
"You stayed at his hotel."
"He slept on the couch the first night!" Mai yelled defensively.
"The first night."
Mai bit her lip hard enough to taste copper. She had walked right into that one. Maki was dissecting her sentences like a forensic analyst.
"Maki, please don't be mad. You told him—you gave him the rule! The survival pass thing. He told me about it. And it's not like that, he said he's marrying you! He made that very clear." Mai was practically begging now, her usual prickly pride completely vaporized. "I just... I like him. And we... yeah."
"You slept with him."
"Yes," Mai whispered, shrinking down until her forehead rested on her knees. She braced for the explosion. The yelling. The inevitable threat of a naginata to the throat.
Maki exhaled. A long, heavy breath that crackled through the phone speaker.
"Are you hurt?" Maki asked.
"I already told you no."
"Not from fighting. From him. He doesn't know his own strength sometimes."
Mai blinked, the sheer practicality of the question short-circuiting her panic. "Uh. No. He was... careful."
Maki groaned, a visceral sound of utter exasperation. "I'm going to kill him. I'm going to actually murder him. I leave for three days and he hooks up with my sister."
"Maki—"
"And then I'm going to kill you," Maki added, though the lethal edge was gone. She just sounded incredibly tired. "Are you really okay? Energy-wise?"
"Yeah," Mai said softly. "I'm really okay."
The line fell quiet, save for a faint, chaotic burst of audio playing somewhere in the background of Maki's receiver. The interrogation was over. Mai stared down at her lap, unable to just let him take the fall.
"Maki, seriously," Mai blurted out, her fingernails biting into her own palm to force the words past her lips before she lost her nerve. "Don't be mad at him. It wasn't his fault."
Only a tense, heavy silence answered her over the speaker.
Mai squeezed her eyes shut, pushing through it. "I was the one who called him. I made him come to Tokyo. I... I invited him to the hotel." It was mostly true, and right now, swallowing her own pride was a cheap price to pay if it kept her sister from bisecting Ren with a polearm. "He actually tried to leave, and I didn't let him. So if you're going to be pissed, be pissed at me."
"I know, idiot," Maki said. Her voice lacked its usual bite, sounding more resigned than anything else.
Mai opened her eyes. "You do?"
"I know him," Maki said, the static crackling as she shifted the phone. "Ren wouldn't have laid a hand on you unless you explicitly pushed for it. He's way too paranoid about me gutting him in his sleep. Plus, you're too stubborn to let a guy call the shots anyway."
Mai opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Her face heated up again, but the crushing weight on her chest finally evaporated. Maki wasn't going to disown her. Maki wasn't going to kill Ren.
"So we're... good?" Mai asked tentatively.
"We're fine," Maki grumbled. "But I'm still making him run laps until he throws up when I get back. It's the principle of the thing."
Mai let out a short, breathless laugh, slumping back against the headboard. The tension completely drained out of her muscles. She stared up at the ceiling of her dorm room, listening to the faint hiss of the connection.
"How are you?" Mai asked, her voice dropping to a softer, normal register. "Actually."
A loud, resounding CRACK echoed through the speaker, followed by the sound of crumbling stone.
Mai pulled the phone back slightly. "Was that a rock?"
"No," Maki replied, her voice completely deadpan, though the howling wind over the receiver had noticeably muffled. "Just noise from the TV. Some kid is watching anime in the other room."
Mai narrowed her eyes at the screen of her phone. "Anime. Right. In the middle of a Hokkaido blizzard."
"It's a very loud anime," Maki insisted smoothly. She let out a long sigh, the sound crackling through the line. "Look, you remember the intel I got? The whole reason I came out to this freezing wasteland to retrieve that lost Zen'in cursed tool?"
"Yeah," Mai said, sitting up and crossing her legs on the mattress. "Did you actually find the barrier?"
"Found it. Got stuck in it," Maki grumbled, sounding more annoyed than traumatized. "I spent hours walking in circles inside this massive, ridiculous stone maze. But right after my heavenly pact completed, the barrier's rules stopped registering my existence completely. I just walked right through the boundary line. It practically spit me out near this random little mountain town."
Mai blinked. "Wait, so you're in a town? I thought you were calling me from a snowbank."
"Close to it," Maki admitted. "I managed to find a small house on the edge of town. Some sweet old woman let me in to warm up and let me plug my charger into the wall. That's the only reason I have enough battery and signal to call your idiot self."