Chapter 3: There’s a Hot Spring at the Noros’ Summer House!

Things were, for the moment, proceeding as planned. But Yuri Konishi still felt a slight pang of anxiety. Would they continue to go this smoothly?

Her first priority had been to restore Takashi’s beast form, and he had already undergone the lycanthropy ritual at Kurokami Island.

To think that Aiko Noro and her group might also come there — that she could settle things with her, just as an afterthought — seemed almost too much to hope for.

Yuri Konishi’s gaze remained focused on Aiko Noro, splashing around off the shore.

That girl — the “bookseller” — had said that she would set the whole stage. That she would even lure them to Kurokami Island. Yuri didn’t know how she had gone about it, but clearly, she had been successful. From Madono Island, Kurokami Island was just a short boat ride away.

“Really, why look a gift horse in the mouth?” Yuri Konishi laughed, shaking off her worries.

She was currently monitoring Aiko Noro and her retinue from up in a tree. Climbing trees was easy for her half-bestial form, which also extended her vision and hearing range.

She was currently in a pine tree about three kilometers away from Aiko and her group. She had cat ears and a tail, and was dressed in a swimsuit. It looked more like a black dress than a swimsuit at first glance, though; the A-line skirt that came off of the waist hid everything down to her ankles. It was probably hard to swim properly in it, but Yuri always put appearances first.

“Now, is it going well for him?” Yuri wondered, turning her eyes out to sea.

She could just barely make out the island. Kurokami Island, the cornerstone of her current plans. By the time Yuri returned there, Takashi’s bestialization would likely be complete.

Yuri gently stroked the notebook in her hand. She had received it from the “bookseller” girl, and it contained information about anthromorphs. It was from this book that she had learned how to restore Takashi’s powers.

“I do hope it works, of course...” She hadn’t told Takashi this, but Yuri knew that the chance of success was only about 50%. She desperately wanted him to succeed. He was her only henchman at the moment, after all.

Of course, she didn’t really believe an anthromorph army of one would be enough to change the world. But it would be the first step. The first step to changing everything — to a world of darkness over which she would reign.

Kurokami Island. Once Aiko and her friends went there, it would all be over.

They would have no way to fight back. Of that much, Yuri was certain.

✽✽✽✽✽

Noro’s family villa came with a large bathhouse. The bath was an open air hot spring.

Naturally, since it wasn’t a commercial facility, there was no divide for men and women. There were also no directions for what to do if a large number of people were using the house at once.

“I think the most natural thing to do would be to break it into shifts. Men’s bath time, women’s bath time, family bath time,” Yoriko proposed.

“Huh? Wait a minute. One of those sounded a little bit odd...” Aiko tilted her head.

“No, it’s all perfectly normal,” Yoriko insisted. “Ibaraki will use the men’s bath time. Orihara and Takeuchi will use the women’s bath time. Family bath 1 will be me, my sister, and my brother. Family bath 2 will be you and your brother.”

“...Yoriko... that’s ridiculous...”

They had returned to the house after a full day of playing on the beach. The survival club members had agreed to each take a turn at cooking. As Aiko and Yoriko were on cooking duty for the first night, they were currently making curry in the kitchen.

“Is it really? I think it’s natural for families to bathe together, don’t you?” Yoriko asked.

“Yoriko... do you bathe with your brother every night?” Dubious pictures were beginning to form in the back of Aiko’s mind.

“C-Certainly not! He would never allow that! He’s very fastidious in that regard! Don’t make fun of me!” Yoriko shouted, her cheeks bright crimson.

“Right. I never know what’s going to embarrass you, Yoriko.” Aiko didn’t know what she was so flustered about, but it was rather cute regardless. “But he’d agree to family bath time?”

“Yes. If that’s the rule of the household, it’s okay to enforce it. ‘When in Rome,’ after all. So, what do you think?”

“No way. I don’t want to take a bath with my brother.” Aiko thought back. She had vague memories of bathing with her brother, but that had been before she was even in elementary school. There was no way she could go back to that after all this time.

“I suppose you wouldn’t,” Yoriko said. “Then why don’t you join us, Noro? There is the custom of the host sharing her bath with her guests.”

“That’s even worse,” Aiko said. “I think we should just keep the men and women separate.”

“I didn’t really think it would work,” Yoriko sulked. “I just wanted to say it out loud.” It sounded like she had really wanted it, though.

Between this and that, though, they eventually finished their preparations for dinner.

✽✽✽✽✽

After finishing the curry, the survival club had a discussion.

This one was for members only, so the five who sat around the dinner table were Mutsuko, Kanako, Yuichi, Aiko, and Natsuki. The others had gone back to their rooms early.

“Doing beach-like things eventually made this more fun!” Mutsuko announced. “Maybe we should have played beach tennis, too!”

“Please, no... you’d take it too seriously, Sis,” Yuichi said.

When it came to competition, Mutsuko always gave 100%. But she also hated to lose, and she wouldn’t let you lose to her on purpose, which made her a very annoying person to play with.

“Anyway! Day one is moving day, so it’s okay to just play around,” Mutsuko said. “But starting tomorrow, we need to train in earnest! The power-up training camp!”

“You just wanted to say ‘power-up training camp,’ right? What exactly would we be powering up? What’s the point of our club having a training camp, anyway?” Yuichi demanded.

All Mutsuko had told them was that they had to go on a training camp. Normally, their club didn’t do much except for sit around and talk, so he couldn’t imagine what a training camp would entail.

“Anyway, we need our front man, Yu, to get stronger!” Mutsuko cried. “That will make our club stronger in general!”

“Are we a sports team now, or something?” Aiko muttered.

“You also need to do some serious soul searching after last time, Yu!” Mutsuko continued. “What was that? You started that fight half-cocked, and only got serious after you were up against the wall! You need to unleash all your power from the start!”

Yuichi braced a little under the criticism, wishing she could have said that at the time, instead. But he couldn’t actually argue with her, either.

“You were also too afraid!” Mutsuko pursued. “What’s a vampire? Nothing!”

“Um, hey...” Yuichi glanced over at Kanako, uncertain of whether they should be talking about vampires in her presence.

“Hm?” Their eyes met, and Kanako tilted her head. She didn’t seem to have the slightest idea of what they were talking about.

“So? What do we do?” Natsuki asked Mutsuko.

“Excellent question, Takeuchi!” she responded. “The truth is, there’s a great place right nearby!”

“Yeah, I’ve got a bad feeling about this already...” Yuichi muttered.

“Kurokami Island!” Mutsuko proclaimed. “It’s really close by! We’ll head there tomorrow!”

They would go there by boat, she explained. The Noro family apparently had a private boat, and Akiko could drive it.

Mutsuko looked excited. “There’s a legend that there’s a pirate treasure buried on Kurokami Island! And that they hold mysterious rituals there that outsiders aren’t allowed to witness! And that there are sightings of UFOs and cryptids! And that they worship an evil god that can kill you if you look at it! And that there’s a military facility where the army did research during the war! And that they have their own unique martial art that’s never spread past the island!”

“That’s too much stuff! Narrow it down a little!” Yuichi shouted. Naturally, these were all things Mutsuko liked, but it was far too much at once.

“Um... should we really be going to a place with all that weird stuff?” Aiko asked nervously.

Her trepidation was only natural. Even if it wasn’t all true, if even half of it was, it could be serious trouble. Yuichi couldn’t dismiss it all as nonsense, either.

He knew now that the world was full of vampires and anthromorphs and serial killers who just walked around in society, unnoticed.

“It’ll be fine!” Mutsuko insisted.

Yuichi paused, waiting to hear if she had some rationale for that statement.

Nothing came.

“You don’t have any basis for that!” he shouted.

“Anyway, who told you all that stuff about it?” Yuichi demanded. Knowing Mutsuko, she may have been researching it for some time, but it still seemed somewhat out of left field.

“Oh, that?” she asked. “Someone wrote a letter to the Traditional Martial Arts Preservation Society.”

The Traditional Martial Arts Preservation Society was one of the organizations that Mutsuko ran in her spare time.

A large spate of martial arts forms had begun dying out lately for lack of heirs. Mutsuko had started up her society to combat that. A rare case of Yuichi’s sister turning her energy to the benefit of the world at large.

“Wow, someone actually contacted you?” Yuichi asked.

Stranger things did happen, Yuichi supposed. Mutsuko’s usual MO was to burst into a dojo and collect their secrets by means of force.

“Yes!” Mutsuko said happily. “It seems the island is host to a form of Xiang Xing Quan that was brought over from China and developed in a unique direction there! But recent depopulation means there’s no one to inherit it, and it’s going to die out pretty soon! So, they wrote to me!”

Xiang Xing Quan referred to martial arts derived from animal movements.

“So I investigated the island to find out what kind of place it was, and I found out there’s tons of interesting stuff there!” Mutsuko added. “How could we not go?”

Yuichi had mixed feelings about the Martial Arts Preservation Society. It meant that Mutsuko had knowledge of real martial arts. He really wished that she would teach those to him, rather than the weird fighting style she had cooked up based on manga.

“We’ll go camping on the island!” Mutsuko announced. “It’ll be survival training! We can put up a tent on some random mountain or in a forest somewhere, and cook for ourselves for three days!”

“Um, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t actually go camping,” Kanako said, dampening Mutsuko’s enthusiasm.

“Huh? How come?” she asked.

“Well, I have a deadline for my book,” Kanako explained.

They all knew that Kanako wrote novels, but as far as they knew, she only published them online. What was the deadline for?

“Why can’t you just put it off for a few days? Ah, not to say that I take your work lightly, of course...” Aiko said.

Yuichi agreed. A summer training camp seemed like a reasonable excuse for not updating your web novel.

“Oh, actually! Orihara’s book was selected for publishing! The Demon Lord one!” Mutsuko exclaimed.

She was referring to Kanako’s seminal work, My Demon Lord Is Too Cute to Kill and Now the World is in Danger!” AKA Demon Lord or Can’t Kill the Demon Lord. Yuichi had heard that it was picking up a following, but he’d never dreamed that it would get published.

“That’s right. I was hoping I could finish it during our training camp, but camping outside would be...” Kanako trailed off apologetically.

“Got it! Orihara, you stay here and focus on your novel! We’ll go camping by ourselves! Okay?” Mutsuko stood up, pounding the table. “We head for the island in the morning!”

It wasn’t that Yuichi minded going. But he did wish she’d told him about this from the start.

“Let’s go peeping on the girls in the bath!”

Yuichi slammed the door in the visitor’s face. He wished it would hit him and send him flying, but alas, he wasn’t so lucky.

There was another knock. Yuichi had the feeling the knocking wouldn’t stop if he just ignored it, so he had no choice but to open the door. Naturally, it was Ibaraki again.

“Come on, man! Hear me out!”

After the survival club meeting, they had split up and each returned to their own rooms.

“Fine. What do you want?” Yuichi asked shortly.

“To invite you along! Let’s go peeping! C’mon!”

They had decided that bath time would be after dinner. The girls would go in first, then the boys.

“Look, half of the girls in there are my sisters. I’m not interested,” Yuichi said as he went back into his room.

The room itself was only about ten by ten feet, but as a place to sleep, it did its job well enough. The furnishings it contained seemed appropriate to a historic, old Western mansion.

Ibaraki followed Yuichi into the room, while Yuichi ignored him and sat down on the bed.

“Yuichiiii! This is a thing healthy guys in high school gotta do, y’know?” Ibaraki complained.

“I thought you didn’t go to high school,” Yuichi retorted.

Ibaraki wore a collared high school uniform, which he apparently hung around town wearing. He had been wearing it the first time they’d met, too, but that didn’t mean he went to high school. It was just camouflage to fit in with people better.

“That’s not the pooooint!” Ibaraki whined.

“By the way, aren’t you an oni?” Yuichi asked. “Do you even like naked human girls?”

“Sure, I do!” Ibaraki said. “I mean, there aren’t actually that many of us, so sometimes we’ve gotta get with human girls to keep the line going.”

“I know I asked, but I didn’t actually want to hear about your sex life.”

“...Listen, you... you keep doing that, and it hurts, y’know?” Ibaraki complained. “Why am I the only one you treat this way, anyway? You’re nice to all the girls. You seem pretty respectful of the vampire guy, too.”

“Listen,” Yuichi said. “I know you’re trying to cozy up to me, but do you remember how we met? You tried to kill me, a high school student who had done nothing wrong.”

“Takeuchi did the same thing!” he protested. “She tried to kill you, too, remember?”

Actually, Yuichi thought “tried” wasn’t the right word. She was still trying. Natsuki sometimes still attacked him with the intent to kill.

“That’s different. I can handle her, so it’s not a big deal.” Yuichi looked out the window, a thought occurring to him. He didn’t want to let Natsuki kill people, but how long would he have to stick around with her? For now, he was a vent for Natsuki’s killing urges, but she wouldn’t have that option without him in the picture.

“Anyway, that’s not what I came here to talk about,” Ibaraki said. “The bath! Let’s go to the bath!”

“You really shouldn’t—” Yuichi began.

There was a 50-50 chance. Would his sister have put up iron-clad defenses against men peeping into the bath, or would she permit it, as part of the natural trope of a hot springs episode? But just as Yuichi was thinking about that, he suddenly detected a strange presence nearby.

“—Actually, just go on your own. And stick with them, okay?” It was a presence he had felt vaguely on the beach, and several times since then.

“What’s wrong?” Ibaraki asked.

“Something’s here,” Yuichi said. “Anyway, I’ll go check it out. I don’t like asking you for help, but I need you to look after the girls. If you’re going to peep anyway, it’s perfect timing, right?”

“What is with you, man? You’ve got one confused set of morals. Don’t you care if I see your sisters naked?”

“It doesn’t hurt them, does it?” Yuichi asked.

“I’ve never met a guy who said that in real life...”

“I don’t need a lecture from a guy who barged in here talking about peeping...”

Yuichi decided to leave the rest to Ibaraki, and left his room to check on things outside.

✽✽✽✽✽

The spring water was said to improve skin complexion. It was known as “beauty water,” and it had been diverted here to the Noro family summer house.

“Wow, bigger than I expected!” Aiko cried.

It was an open-air bath. Nearly all of the parts of the mansion were Western-style. The bath was the one taste of pure Japan there.

“You mean Orihara’s breasts?” Natsuki asked, staring at Kanako’s bosom.

“No!” Aiko shouted.

Certainly, Kanako’s breasts were large, but Aiko had been talking about the size of the bath. It could fit ten people and still have space left over. There were also several places to wash up.

“Oh? Noro, you don’t have a bath this size at home?” Mutsuko asked. It was an understandable question.

“Nothing this big, no,” she said. “It’s just for one.”

“I see. I guess using something like this every day would be more trouble than it’s worth!” The naked Mutsuko made a running jump and dove into the bath.

“Sis! You have to wash off first!” Yoriko called after her.

They all entered the hot water.

Its effect was plain to see right away. Aiko rubbed her skin, feeling how smooth and pleasant it was to the touch.

“Ah, I see why they call it ‘beauty water.’ I really feel like it’s improving my skin.” Aiko had never been in a bath like this before. She hadn’t even known they had a summer house here.

“But it’s fishy somehow!” Mutsuko exclaimed. “To have beauty water and a bath this big... Noro, does your father plan to bring a mistress here or something?!”

“My father is not that kind of person!” Aiko stated, a little annoyed. She was certain that her father was devoted to her mother.

“Sis... that’s extremely rude,” Yoriko jibed.

It seemed that when the sisters were together, Yoriko worked hard to keep Mutsuko in line. Incidentally, Yuichi generally did whatever Mutsuko said, and thus was useless in this regard.

“I haven’t been to a hot spring in so long! When was it last?” Mutsuko chattered on, as if the exchange hadn’t even happened. Aiko was slowly coming to realize that Mutsuko just said whatever popped into her head, and never listened to anyone.

“...But, let’s see... what to do in a hot spring...” Mutsuko went on with a blissful expression, apparently enjoying the hot water.

“We don’t have to do anything, do we? I think we just sit and relax...” Aiko responded, wondering what else there could possibly be.

“No, I feel like there’s some special event that must happen in a hot spring!” Mutsuko announced.

“Really?” Aiko had no idea what Mutsuko was talking about.

“Yes! Peeping is the usual trope!” Mutsuko cried. “You can’t have a hot springs episode without peeping!”

“Peeping? Peeping from where?” Aiko looked all around. She hadn’t been particularly cautious up until now, but they were outside. It wouldn’t be impossible for someone to spy on them. Aiko suddenly felt self-conscious.

“Oh, don’t worry!” Mutsuko said. “They usually build these things so they can’t be seen easily from outside! My advance recon only caught three places we could be seen from, angle-wise!”

“How is that a ‘don’t worry’ situation? And when did you do, um, ‘recon,’ exactly?” Aiko asked.

“While you guys were making dinner!”

“So uh, what do we do if the peeping ‘event’ does happen?” Aiko wondered.

What if Yuichi peeped on them? Aiko’s face turned red at the thought, and she sank deep into the bath.

“Of course, there are obstacles to peeping!” Mutsuko exclaimed. “If they think they’ll get to peep that easily, they’ve got another thing coming! But hey, if they can conquer the traps I laid out for them, they deserve to see a little skin, in my opinion!”

“You can’t just decide that without asking us!” Aiko shouted, her voice cracking. It was wrong for Mutsuko to put them in that position without any warning. If Mutsuko had asked, of course, Aiko certainly would have been against it.

“Well, no need to worry about the peeping right now,” Mutsuko said. “Let’s compare breast size!”

“That makes no sense! Why do we have to do that?” Though her breasts had been exposed the entire time prior, Aiko suddenly covered them self-consciously.

“We don’t have a choice!” Mutsuko said. “That’s what you do at a hot spring!”

“We do have a choice! That’s not what hot springs are about!” Aiko shouted.

But now that she had made up her mind, there was no stopping Mutsuko. She was side-by-side with Aiko in a flash.

The order turned out to be Kanako, Natsuki, Aiko, Yoriko, then Mutsuko, though the margin between Aiko and Yoriko was slim.

“Orihara, yours are amazing, though! They float!” Mutsuko didn’t seem to mind that she was the smallest in the group. “But what a waste, to have all these amazing treasures here and nothing to use them for!”

“That’s right!” Yoriko agreed. “We’d get much better use out of them if we’d had a mixed bath, so we could show them to my brother and make him squeeze them!”

“What is with these sisters?!” Somehow, Aiko felt like the bath was making her more exhausted than before.

“Speaking of which... we’ve never really talked, have we, Takeuchi?” Yoriko said, suddenly drawing closer to Natsuki.

“Is that so? I don’t believe we have anything to talk about,” Natsuki replied curtly.

“You’re cozying up to my brother, aren’t you?” Yoriko asked.

“‘Cozying up’ is not an accurate description for what I do. Though I’ve never tried to put the relationship into words.” Natsuki seemed perfectly composed. If Yoriko had pressed Aiko like this, she would surely have gotten flustered by now.

“Oh?” Yoriko asked, her eyes piercing. “How would you describe it, then? Pressing up against him with that body you’re so proud of?”

Natsuki’s curves were certainly worth being proud of; she had an impressive figure.

“H-Hey! Yoriko!” Worried that a fight might break out, Aiko tried to intervene.

“All that I will say is... the ‘better use’ you were talking about before? Sakaki has squeezed mine.” Natsuki hugged herself, hefting her chest up with her arms.

“Ah...” Yoriko stiffened.

“Hard.”

“Takeuchi?” Aiko asked.

“Too hard. It felt incredible. I couldn’t move for hours.” Natsuki’s face glowed with triumph. It was not an expression one saw very often.

“W-Wait... are you... talking about...” Yuichi’s fight with Natsuki replayed in Aiko’s mind. He had used a Double Crashing Palm strike to finish her off. From the side, it had looked like he was groping her breasts.

“He just shoved you across the room! Stop twisting the events!” Aiko shouted.

Yoriko remained frozen.

“The fact remains that I have had more physical contact with him than either of you,” Natsuki said calmly.

Was she joking around? Was she genuinely trying to lord this over them? Aiko hadn’t talked with Natsuki very much, so she had never seen this side of her before.

“H-He’s... touched my thighs, and carried me in his arms, too...” Aiko stammered, perhaps out of a strange sort of competitiveness.

“Noro?” Yoriko suddenly reactivated, and focused her attention on Aiko. “I’d like to ask you more about that later.”

Aiko wished she hadn’t said anything at all.

“Um...” She was just about to say something else, when she was interrupted by a loud crash outside.

“What could it be?!” Mutsuko’s eyes glistened at the potential sign of trouble.

✽✽✽✽✽

A little while earlier...

Yuichi had left the summer house to track down the vague presence he had sensed. It was a sweltering night outside, so Yuichi did the best he could to mask his footsteps as he got around behind the villa.

A faint wind was blowing. Yuichi knew more or less where he was going, and kept his target upwind from him.

He focused. The presence was up in a tree. Whatever it was, it was definitely watching the Noro summer house.

Yuichi walked up to the base of the tree. Whoever it was didn’t seem to have noticed him yet.

Now, what to do...

He had located his quarry, but he hadn’t figured out how to deal with it just yet. The minute he started trying to climb the tree, he’d be noticed.

Instead, he gently placed both hands on the trunk. (He didn’t know it, but this was around the same time Aiko was talking about his Double Crashing Palm.)

He steadied his breathing, then released all his power in a single blow.

His hands pierced the tree trunk with a crash. Something fell from the treetop.

Yuichi began judging his timing to kick the tree’s former occupant out of the air, but one sight of her gave him pause.

It was a girl with cat ears.

“Huh?” As Yuichi hesitated, the girl twisted in the air and landed on all fours. It wasn’t just her ears — even the way she moved was like a cat.

But it wasn’t just the girl’s feline nature that had caused Yuichi’s hesitation. It was that she looked just like a girl that he knew. It was his classmate Yuri Konishi, plus cat ears and a tail.

The cat ears were sticking out of her intricately-bound blonde hair. She was wearing a swimsuit that resembled a black dress, and her golden tail stuck out of it, swishing.

Above her head was the label “Anthromorph (Cat).” Previously, it had been “Heiress.”

“Um... this might sound crazy, but are you... Konishi?” Yuichi ventured. This was possibly last person he had expected to see when he struck that tree.

“Indeed,” she said. “Quite a coincidence, meeting you here.”

“A coincidence? You’re trying to write this off as coincidence?” Yuichi had never had a real conversation with her, but her personality was more frank than he’d expected. “Fine, we’ll say it’s a coincidence. But this is still Noro’s family property. You can’t be here without permission.”

“I see. But I don’t need permission... if there’s no witness to report me!!” Yuri suddenly sprang at him.

She brandished her right hand, readying a broad swing at Yuichi. Yuichi caught sight of the lethal-looking claws at the ends of her fingertips. They were the length of small knives. She was definitely not human.

Yuichi moved away, giving Yuri a wide berth. If he focused too much on the claws, she might hit him with a body blow. She followed up with another desperate left hook, which he dodged by dropping his upper body.

Yuri continued on her trajectory and landed, then turned back to Yuichi.

“What’s going on here?” Mutsuko came running towards them, naked except for a bath towel around her.

“Hey! Put some clothes on before you come out here!” Yuichi shouted.

Yuri took Yuichi’s moment of distraction to run off.

“What? Were you fighting someone?” Mutsuko asked. “Hey!”

“Go get dressed!” Yuichi ordered her. “I’ll explain everything inside.”

Yuichi kept his senses alert as he returned to the summer house, but all trace of Yuri had vanished. It seemed she had really run away.

✽✽✽✽✽

Aiko was lying on her guest room bed, gazing up at the ceiling.

She was worried about what Yuichi had told her. It sounded like her life was in danger.

Apparently, Yuichi hadn’t planned to tell Aiko about it at first. But now, with a real-life assassin hanging around, that would be irresponsible.

Yuri Konishi was here.

Of course, it was possible that it was just a coincidence. The Konishi family could very easily have a summer house here, too, and if so, this would be natural place for her to spend her summer vacation.

But if she was sneaking onto her property and spying on them, it had to be more than that. On top of that, she was also an anthromorph.

Aiko didn’t know why Yuri was after her. Yuichi didn’t seem to know much about that, either. He’d just said it would be hard to explain, and it didn’t seem like he’d been lying or trying to cover up something, so Aiko just let it go.

Strangely, she wasn’t particularly worried about her life being in danger. She had convinced herself that Yuichi would protect her.

She imagined the two of them as a princess and her knight in shining armor. If she was really in danger, then Yuichi would stay close and watch out for her. And, while maybe she shouldn’t think that way, she felt like that put her one step ahead of Natsuki.

Oh, what am I thinking... Aiko didn’t even know how Natsuki really felt about Yuichi, yet she had started to think of her as a rival.

But actually... how do I really feel? It was true that she had affection for Yuichi. But how deep did it run? She couldn’t even answer that question.

With the questions turning over and over in her mind, Aiko began to drift off.

She was walking unsteadily down a hallway at night.

There were no lights, but she knew what was around her as easily as if it were daylight.

The darkness didn’t matter to Aiko. She could smell Yuichi.

It was the blood — the syrupy sweet smell of blood pulsing under his skin.

Aiko was following Yuichi’s smell. With unsteady yet persistent steps, she walked towards where he was.

She heard a voice.

It was the same one that had whispered for her to kill Kyoya.

Now it told her to suck Yuichi’s blood. It told her to make him her slave.

In her heart, she knew that it was wrong. But she couldn’t fight the temptation. Yuichi would belong to her. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing, to have him all to herself?

The next thing Aiko knew, she was standing in front of Yuichi. He was in bed, breathing slowly in the rhythms of sleep. He had pushed the covers to the corner of the bed, perhaps because it was such a hot night.

Aiko smiled. Yuichi showed no signs of waking up.

She sat down on the bed and stroked his neck gently. The holes she had put in there once before had healed over. She drew her mouth to the same spot. This time, she would put her mark on him — her proof of ownership — and it would never disappear.

Small fangs grew in Aiko’s mouth. She lay down on the bed, her body on top of Yuichi’s. Her mouth drew close to his neck.

“What are you doing? I can’t let down my guard for a minute! I see I was right to stay up in case of this!” a voice shouted.

Aiko, who had forgotten everything except for Yuichi, froze.

The coverlet shoved into the corner of the bed moved, and Yoriko popped out from underneath it.

Aiko looked at Noriko with eyes glowing red.

“Noro? ...Who are you?!” Yoriko looked back at her in fear.

“...Huh? Yoriko? What is it?” Suddenly, everything snapped into focus, and Aiko was left confused. She wasn’t entirely sure where she was. She seemed to be straddling Yuichi, and Yoriko was nearby, yelling at her.

“‘What is it’? Th-That’s my line! You’ve got to be kidding me!” Yoriko shouted. “I never thought you’d try to sneak in here at night! I was on guard for that Takeuchi girl!”

“Huh? Sneak in? Huh?” Aiko asked.

“Were you sleepwalking?” Yoriko finally seemed to realize that Aiko wasn’t fully in her right mind.

“Hey, could you get off of me?” Yuichi asked. He looked at Aiko uncomfortably. It was only natural that he would wake up, with how loudly they were arguing.

“Oh! Um, sorry!” Aiko quickly flew off of him.

Yuichi sat up and scratched his head. He’d just woken up, and he was clearly confused about what was going on. “What are you two doing here?”

“Sorry, I think I was sleepwalking...” That was all that Aiko could say. She had a feeling that she had been dreaming.

Yoriko said, “I-I always sleep in your room, so I felt lonely by myself, and decided to come here with you...”

“Do whatever you want, just be quiet.” With that, Yuichi lay back down and immediately started snoozing again.

Aiko was at a loss for what to do next.