Chapter 100: Kaguya: Someone's Taking My B Point!!
....
Exposed.
Ais held the silence for a moment, then delivered the truth with the economy she applied to everything. "The consciousness currently in my body is Kaguya. We swapped."
So that's why last night had zero technique and one hundred percent raw output, Kihara thought. Brute force as a substitute for not being yourself. Clever.
He sat with the information for a moment. He would be lying if he said his feelings about it were simple. There was something pure-hearted-protagonist about the position he'd apparently been put in — the honest, unsuspecting party in someone else's calculated gambit. Kaguya had looked at the situation, identified the perfect disguise, and released whatever she'd been keeping under pressure with both hands and no warning.
He couldn't let that go unanswered. That would set a precedent.
He leaned toward Ais and spoke quietly for a moment. She listened. They walked into the bathroom together.
Two separate rinses. One shared bathtub afterward.
Ais settled against him carefully, the warm water finding its level around them both, her back against his chest with the tentative precision of someone not entirely certain of the correct procedure but committed to the attempt.
He took out his phone, flipped the camera to selfie mode, and held up two fingers in a V.
"If you're embarrassed, cover your eyes."
"...Mn."
She raised one hand.
Click.
Ais, trusting soul that she was, had no way of knowing that raising your hand to cover your eyes in a photograph of this nature produced a specific visual effect — one that communicated a great deal about what might be happening just outside the frame. This was, precisely, what Kihara was counting on.
A straightforward shared-bath photo would have zero effect on someone whose shamelessness operated at Kaguya's altitude. The photo as it had just been taken was a different instrument entirely.
He changed clothes afterward — and made a point of putting his own and Ais's discarded clothes in the same laundry basket before opening his phone's group chat.
[My Wives Are the Best in the World]
One Designated Husband: "[image] Ladies, I ran into a sugar mama today. She says she wants to keep me~"
Monster Domain Deity: "Wait isn't that Kaguya???"
Sword Princess: "!?!?!?!"
Gensokyo's Premier Reporter: "Ohhh~ this is a story~"
One Designated Husband: "WAIT. Aya. Why are you IN my wives' group chat?!"
Gensokyo's Premier Reporter: "As a professional journalist, my presence anywhere should come as no surprise."
One Designated Husband: "My grandmother used to say — anyone who enters this chat is one of my wives."
Gensokyo's Premier Reporter: "That's insane. You think every girl you meet is your wife?"
One Designated Husband: "Alternatively — a woman with a future as my mother."
Gensokyo's Premier Reporter: "...."
THEY'RE TAKING MY B POINT!
Kaguya had not seen this coming.
From the photo alone it looked like a full offensive was being launched against her — the implications stacked and pointed directly at her. Her first experience, her dignity, the territory she'd been managing — all of it was apparently in immediate jeopardy.
She did not stop to verify the photograph's full context.
She moved.
Eientei to Kaguya's room: maximum speed, using Ais's legs, which were objectively better for this than her own. One kick to the door. Full voice:
"KIHARA. You shameless little pretty boy — are you really going to leech off your own best friend's body?! Have you no limits?!"
"START UP."
The mechanical sound hit the air like a starting pistol.
Kaguya recognized, one quarter of a second too late, that she had just sprinted directly into a provocation designed to make her sprint directly into a room. She tried to reverse direction. She tried to exit through the door she'd just kicked open.
Ais's body, for all its considerable virtues, was not equipped with meaningful resistance against Kihara running in time-acceleration mode. She was on the floor, bound in specialized rope, arranged into what could only be described as a very aggrieved caterpillar, before the exit attempt had finished forming.
"Let go of me!!" She thrashed with the energy of someone who had made an error in judgment and was not ready to accept the consequences.
Kihara crouched in front of her, his expression carrying the specific pleasantness of someone who had prepared for this moment. He poked her cheek twice with one finger.
"You seemed to enjoy the roleplay last night."
The fury vacated her face instantly. What replaced it was the temperature of deep space.
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
"Amazing timing on that memory loss. Almost like it's not real."
"What are you going to do—"
"Return what was done unto me, with interest. You can watch."
He stood, crossed to Ais — who had been observing all of this with the composed attention of someone watching weather — and took hold of her feet. He looked back at Kaguya over his shoulder.
The message was clear: your body. Someone else's experience. You get to watch.
"...Are we doing that again?" Ais looked at her own feet with mild reluctance, fine brows drawing together.
"Wait — what exactly have the two of you been doing with my body without telling me—"
"You'll find out."
He worked his fingers between her toes, thumb finding the arch, and pressed.
"Mm..."
Without the barrier of over-the-knee socks, the contact registered completely differently — each point of pressure traveling upward with a directness that Ais found mildly alarming and found herself unable to compose a response to. Her fingers closed around the armrests. Her head tilted back. A long, quiet sound came from somewhere deeper than her throat and stayed in the room.
Kaguya watched her own face produce an expression she had never, in her several centuries of existence, managed to make it produce.
Something small and sharp moved through her — the specific sensation of watching someone else inhabit your body and do things with it that you didn't know it could do. Like finding out your house had rooms you'd never opened.
That's my face.
That's my body.
That's supposed to be —
He's doing it WRONG, that should be ME —
She caught herself. Refocused.
That is absolutely MY body and I want it back.
You absolute scoundrel, Kihara. This is the lowest thing you've ever done.
By the time he'd finished — both feet, worked until the color had risen from beneath the skin into something visible even at a distance — he turned around with the smile of a man about to deliver a line he'd been saving.
The line was going to be: I've always wanted to see this expression. The jealous one. That exact one.
He turned.
Kaguya's cheeks were flushed. Her breathing had weight to it. Ais's composed, cool features were currently wearing an expression that had no business being on them — something unfocused and pleased and entirely unguarded.
"Heh... Why did you stop?" she said, with the ease of someone who had arrived somewhere unexpected and decided they liked it. "I just figured out — watching someone else enjoy my body, when it's someone I — it's actually kind of interesting."
Kihara stared at her.
The effect he'd planned for: teeth-grinding jealousy, the wounded pride of someone watching their territory occupied.
The effect he'd achieved: Kaguya discovering a new category of experience and expressing enthusiasm about it.
The energy left the room like air out of a balloon.
He stood there with the feeling of someone who had logged into a website to be confronted with a pirated version of his own work — the precise deflation of maximum effort meeting the wrong outcome.
"Hm~"
"You stopped again. Keep going."
He ignored this, picked up a towel, and walked toward Ais to wipe the light sheen from her skin. She made a small sound. Her right leg came up with the speed of something spring-loaded.
Two toes found his nostrils with unerring accuracy.
"Ais. What—"
The warm air from his words moved across the arch of her foot.
"Don't — don't talk — ahhh!!"
The second wave arrived.
Direct hit. Full coverage. Bamboo-scented.
Silence descended on the room like a curtain dropped.
Kaguya — who had, moments ago, been a very aggrieved caterpillar — was now seated on the tatami three meters away, twelve-layered court robes perfectly arranged, posture immaculate, expression that of someone who had been quietly reading for the past twenty minutes and had no information about anything that had just occurred.
Kihara wiped bamboo-scented water from his face.
Looked at her.
"Tell me something." His voice was very level. "This consciousness swap — you didn't arrange it, did you. The two of you."
The room offered him no answer.
....
Thank you for reading.