Cradling Wakaba Mutsumi's surprisingly heavy guitar against his chest, and feeling the weight of the band's stares—some expectant as kittens waiting for milk, others sharp as needles under fluorescent light—Kazama Haru considered what song would suit this moment.
From what he'd gathered of Wakaba Mutsumi, whether during the band's regular practices in the studio or during those late nights she spent alone plucking strings in her basement, her preferred style leaned toward hard rock—a jarring contrast to the doll-quiet stillness of her face.
But the current atmosphere demanded something else. In less than an hour, the members would step onto a stage that would judge nearly a month of grueling effort. As their Band Manager, and because the girls were looking to him now with something close to hope, he couldn't indulge in a flashy showcase of technique.
Music, in this moment, had to be a vessel—a way to gently siphon the pre-show nerves out of their shoulders before the curtain rose.
So he settled on something soft. Something warm.
"Everyone, breathe a little," Kazama Haru said, lifting his head to sweep his gaze across them, his voice pitched low and even.
His fingers ghosted over the strings, and a clear, tender melody began to unspool through the greenroom, like a thread of spring water slipping free from a lingering sheet of winter ice.
It was "Yasashisa no Riyuu"—the song his music app had chosen at random yesterday while he'd been dozing on the Yamanote line. As the opening theme for the classic Kyoto Animation adaptation Hyouka, the gentle prelude had, the moment it reached his ears through his earbuds, transported him to that summer of drifting sakura petals and unspoken questions between Oreki and Chitanda.
Because Wakaba Mutsumi had asked for that particular sensation—the guitar itself singing—Kazama Haru played only the instrumental, keeping his admittedly not-unpleasant voice silent.
Not that his silence dulled anything. The five girls in the room were, without exception, spellbound.
Perched on the 76cm stool, he tilted his head slightly downward, his short black hair spilling across his brow to half-veil his eyes, which somehow made the concentration in his expression all the more magnetic. Every pluck, every slide of his fingertips along the fret-board, was surgical in its precision, drawing out a tone that was full and mellow as steeped tea.
He wasn't showing off. He was faithfully, almost reverently, drawing out the gentle marrow of the song itself.
The soft yellow lighting of the greenroom pooled around him, and if one squinted just so, it looked as though a barely perceptible halo hovered at the edges of his silhouette.
Gazing at Kazama Haru's profile—rendered impossibly gentle by the interplay of light and shadow—Togawa Sakiko felt her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with pre-performance nerves.
"...I've heard this song a hundred times," she thought, her long silver hair catching the light as she tilted her head, "so why does it sound completely different when he plays it?"
Every shared moment between them flashed behind her eyes, one after another, like frames from a stop-motion film reeled too fast to catch.
Even now, Togawa Sakiko could recall the exact warmth of the porcelain cup he had once pressed into her trembling hands, back when she'd been on the verge of shattering like a puppet with its strings cut. He had reached into that black tar of hers and pulled her out, and when she had presented him with her "unreasonable, tyrannical" demand for how she wished to live her life, he had answered her not with hesitation, but with gentleness—an unconditional trust in her dream that no one before him had ever offered.
And so Togawa Sakiko, biting the inside of her cheek to hide the tremor at her lip, quietly convinced herself: this melody is for me. He is playing it for me.
Across the room, the habitual mischief in Yuutenji Nyamu's amber eyes dimmed, replaced by something pure and unguarded—an expression even she herself did not fully recognize on her own face.
Such a gentle melody. Why did it make her want to cry, inexplicably, ridiculously?
From the sleepy fields of Kumamoto to the neon-drenched chaos of Tokyo, she had clawed forward, manufacturing opportunities out of thin air while juggling coursework that never seemed to lighten. The pressure had, on more nights than she cared to count, felt like a pillow pressed slowly over her face.
Then she had joined Ave Mujica on a shrugged "eh, let's give it a shot," and met this Band Manager, Kazama Haru—and the rhythm of her heavy, breathless life had shifted onto a different track.
Last night, while he'd stepped out to take a call, she had, driven by that cat-like curiosity and just a sliver of mischief, tiptoed to his desk to peek at what documents the busy Band Manager was hunched over.
She'd expected stage layouts. Interview schedules. Something dry.
What she found made her breath catch in her throat.
It was an analysis of her recently uploaded restaurant review video—annotated line by line, timestamp by timestamp, with modification suggestions detailed down to individual camera angles. From the cheap headphones lying beside the papers, spilling out at slightly-too-loud volume, came her own theatrical wails about the spice level, that little performance of hers half-genuine and half-shtick.
"...What is this? Does he... like me?"
"No way, no way. Why else would anyone dissect my videos frame-by-frame like some overinvested fan on Niconico?"
Yuutenji Nyamu was no narcissist, and the thought glimmered for only a fleeting second before she shook it off. Recalling Kazama Haru's utterly earnest performance as her guest that day—no camera awareness, no ego, just full commitment—Nyamu understood that his promise, that her video's popularity wouldn't be a one-hit flash-in-the-pan, had been more than lip service.
And so Yuutenji Nyamu, in her own way, decided the song at this moment was a private hymn played in tribute to all the years she'd spent running on empty.
The warm melody caused Yahata Umiri, who had been quietly scrolling on her phone, to slowly lift her head.
Because she was, by nature, someone who kept a moat around herself—especially when it came to boys, whose company she rarely sought—Yahata Umiri had always treated Kazama Haru with clipped, respectful formality. She was, notably, the only member who still bothered with proper honorifics when addressing him.
He, however, didn't seem to notice—or care.
The way he spoke to her, when they were alone, mirrored the way he spoke to every other member. That serious set of his brow. The way he'd ask, again and again, whether her bassline in this song felt natural to her fingers, whether any measure gave her trouble, whether the tempo was too demanding.
Sometimes, honestly, Kazama-san's fussing reminded her of her own mother—the one who still called her from Osaka to ask whether she'd eaten a proper breakfast that day.
She had been living on her own since she was small. Was all this extra worry really necessary?
"...Annoying," she thought, but the word had no edge to it.
Listening to that soft melody, Yahata Umiri's lips curved—faintly, secretly—into the smallest smile.
Originally, Misumi Uika had planned to steal a few more furtive glances at Saki-chan during this idle window, but the moment Kazama Haru's melody threaded into her ears, her gaze was tugged, magnet-like, toward him instead.
It wasn't his hands, elegant and pale, fingertips moving with dancer's precision. It wasn't Mutsumi's cute pink-bodied guitar cradled in his lap, either.
It was his face.
A face that, like Saki-chan's, possessed that particular quality that pulls the eye and refuses to release it.
"They say beautiful people naturally drift toward each other," Uika thought, her pink eyes half-lidded, her light purple hair falling in soft waves down her shoulders. "So it makes sense, doesn't it? Haru-kun and Saki-chan gravitating like that. Slowly. Inevitably."
Her shared past with Saki-chan was fabricated—a beautifully forged counterfeit assembled under the mask of "Hatsuka"—and one day, inevitably, that forgery would be held up to the light and revealed. Misumi Uika understood this the way one understands the terms of a contract signed in blood.
A false self like hers, aside from silently begging the heavens that this dream stretch on just a little longer, had no right to demand more.
And yet, listening to Kazama Haru's earnest, coaxing music—music that seemed to whisper "it's okay to want things"—a greedier thought bloomed inside her chest like a night flower.
"Even as I am now... I want something that belongs to me. Really me. Not Hatsuka's."
Misumi Uika quietly balled her small hand in her lap, as though trying to catch the notes drifting through the air, her gaze lingering—hungry, unblinking—on Kazama Haru's profile.
This is it. This is the feeling of the guitar itself singing.
Though her face maintained the porcelain stillness of a well-crafted doll, Wakaba Mutsumi's heart was, at that moment, a swirling galaxy of feelings. Joy. Astonishment. Longing. A tide she couldn't name rising against the walls of her ribs.
When she had first heard that musician play, back in her childhood, this multi-talented girl who had been given everything had finally, for the first time, found something of her own. From that day forward, the guitar in her arms had become—next to Saki—the most necessary thing in her world.
Watching Kazama Haru now, she felt as though she were being permitted to witness her own first embrace of that guitar, seen through someone else's eyes.
So her instincts hadn't lied to her. Handing over the guitar she cherished as her own heartbeat, into his hands, had been the correct choice.
Gazing at Kazama Haru, who was entirely absorbed in his playing, a strange thought bloomed unbidden in Wakaba Mutsumi's mind.
"I want to hold the person playing... the same way I hold my guitar."
[Guitar Playing has been upgraded to LV4 (Master)]
[Your performance deeply resonated with the members of Ave Mujica. Reward: 16,666 wish points]
[Wish points balance: 17,266]
As the final note dissolved into the air, the system's crisp notification rang, incongruous and cold, inside Kazama Haru's skull.
He inclined his head slightly in response to the applause, but internally, Kazama Haru was blinking in confusion. "Oi, oi, is the system glitching today?"
The [Guitar Playing] upgrade tracked. That made sense. But the sudden, oversized wish point payout? Deeply resonated? It had been one soft song. How deeply could it possibly have hit them?
Kazama Haru lifted his gaze, quietly puzzled, and looked around the unusually silent room.
Togawa Sakiko blinked hard, twice, chasing away something wet at her lashes, then offered him a smile more luminous than any she'd worn before—edged with a shyness he had never once seen on her regal face. Nyamu's usually roving gaze had gone still, resting on him with a soft, searching quality. Misumi Uika lowered her lashes slightly, the corner of her mouth tugging upward in a curve so subtle it was almost imperceptible.
Yahata Umiri met his eyes directly and dipped her chin in a small, deliberate nod, her expression carrying a gratitude that ran deeper than politeness. Wakaba Mutsumi still stared at him without blinking, her arms squeezing the empty air where her guitar had been, then tightening around the returned instrument once he passed it back.
"...The effect was better than expected, huh?"
Watching the quiet light that had ignited in each of the girls' eyes, Kazama Haru—though he didn't grasp the deeper current beneath it—let out a small breath of relief.
He glanced at the clock on the wall, then stood, sliding the stool back with the soft scrape of wood on tile. His voice, steady as ever, cut cleanly through the hush.
"Alright, everyone. It's time to go on stage."