(T/N: Yooo... Guys it's back with the 3th volume and as before it will be 1 chapter daily....)
Volume 3: Losers, Alien Sisters, and Gensokyo High.
Chapter 1: Suika Ibuki: I Already Paid For This!
....
It was only after Kihara had thoroughly attended to Maidena that he learned the full context of what had led to that evening.
She had, it turned out, been living under the sustained literary influence of Ryuu's pink book collection for several days running — her entire mental landscape redecorated by its contents, her wardrobe choices shifting accordingly toward what she privately categorized as decisive. She had been waiting, in a state of quiet strategic readiness, for an opportunity that would present itself naturally.
Tokishikko, learning that her competition had moved first, had refused to accept this outcome gracefully. She had dragged Maidena along as an ally-turned-rival in a negotiation conducted via the medium of black tights versus white over-the-knee socks. The resolution of that particular standoff — and its aftermath, which involved cream puffs in a sense that was only partly culinary — was a matter for a subsequent evening.
Pelican Town's summer moved through its remaining days with the warm, unhurried energy of a season that knew it was well-regarded.
Not long after the Cooking Competition concluded, the Trout Derby opened. Hestia, Tatsumaki, and Kihara entered as genuine competitors with championship ambitions. Everyone else entered because there were prize tickets.
The ticket catalogue was extensive:
One-day trip to another world with Kihara. Eientei's exclusive bust-enhancement tonic. Sunflower field sunbathing pass. Scarlet Devil Mansion afternoon tea invitation.
And others.
The final standings produced a three-way tie — Hestia, Tatsumaki, and Kihara had each caught an identical number of trout. Rather than the gold trophy, all three seemed more interested in arguing about whose largest individual catch had been largest, a debate that continued through dinner and resolved nothing.
The other girls watched this and agreed, collectively, that fishing people had a thought process that simply could not be mapped to anything they recognized.
Pelican Town. Summer, Day 28.
The Spellcard war that had lit up Gensokyo's nights for the past two weeks was drawing to a close. Even Reimu — who could, within the Great Hakurei Barrier, defeat more or less anything that flew at her — was showing the specific weariness of someone who had been performing at peak capacity for an extended period. Eventually she and the assembled youkai factions came to terms. A contract was signed. Hostilities ceased.
The specific contents of the contract were, remarkably, something that even Aya Shameimaru hadn't managed to pry loose. What was known was that Yukari had brokered it, and that it had required considerable effort even from her to get all parties to initial.
That evening, Kihara was on the beach with his girlfriends watching the moonlight jellyfish migration — thousands of pale, luminous shapes drifting through the dark water in their unhurried seasonal procession — when his phone buzzed.
Suika. Coal Forest. Come by.
The signal tower at Moriya Shrine had been a transformative development for Gensokyo's social infrastructure. Sanae had gotten a phone. Then various youkai had gotten phones. The adoption curve had been steeper than anyone predicted.
He followed the moonlight path into the forest and found Suika waiting, the characteristic warm-sweet smell of good sake preceding her by several meters. She raised her gourd in greeting.
"Kihara-kun! Auspicious evening! Have a drink with me~"
"Suika." He said it with the resignation of someone who had been here before. "You know I don't drink."
"That's exactly why you should have some tonight~ Think of it as expanding your experience~"
He had no effective resistance against Suika's specific variety of insistence. He accepted the gourd with a furrowed brow and drank.
"There we go~ A little something to make sure you can't run away later~"
"What does that—"
The world rotated. Not metaphorically. The actual spatial relationship between up and down made a unilateral decision to renegotiate, and his legs filed a formal objection to continuing to support him. He went down with the unhurried inevitability of a tree that had already finished deciding to fall.
The ground was soft. The moonlight was very bright from this angle.
Suika settled onto him with the comfortable finality of someone arriving at a destination they'd been thinking about for a while. Her chains clinked softly in the night air. Sake from the tilted gourd caught the moonlight as it fell, soaking through her thin clothes in slow spreading patches.
"Hmm... a little cold..." She leaned down until her face was close to his, close enough that he could see the moonlight in her eyes.
"I paid for this, you know. You're responsible for warming me up."
Paid who?! The question formed in his mind with perfect clarity and had absolutely nowhere to go, because Suika's mouth found his and brought the rest of the conversation to a productive close, and the alcohol in his system did what alcohol did, and the Coal Forest at night had the particular quality of a place that kept secrets naturally.
Several li away, Reimu was sitting in her room at Hakurei Shrine, gently shaking her donation box.
It played music when it was full.
Tonight it was playing something that sounded like a bagpipe piece, which she felt was appropriate for the scale of the evening's success.
"Twenty thousand yen from an oni." She shook it again, appreciatively. "Truly, the Four Heavenly Kings do not disappoint. I hope Kihara survives — if she breaks him I lose my primary revenue stream."
The contract that Yukari had brokered was, in fact, considerably more specific than anyone suspected.
Its core provision was this: Reimu's existing informal practice of selling revenge-on-her-fiancé services had been formalized and brought above board. Any party with a grievance could now pay a set rate to make Kihara's day more complicated, under properly monitored conditions.
The monitoring party was Moriya Shrine.
The enforcement clause was where it got interesting: if Reimu was found to be abusing the arrangement for pure profit — causing Kihara actual harm beyond the agreed scope — she would forfeit her status as his fiancée. That position would pass to Moriya Shrine's Sanae Kochiya.
Reimu had agreed to this.
She had agreed to it because she was confident in her own judgment and because twenty thousand yen from a single client was a very compelling argument for a shrine maiden whose donation box usually contained enough for two meals and a prayer.
She turned the box over in her hands, already composing the rate card for autumn.
"I always knew Sanae was scheming," she muttered. "Nobody volunteers for third-party oversight out of the goodness of their heart. She's after the position. She wants my revenue stream."
She set the donation box aside and looked at the other thing Yukari had given her.
An oval gemstone, roughly thirty centimeters across, semi-transparent, the kind of object that should have been colorless and still. Currently, several threads of green light were moving through its interior in slow, unhurried spirals.
"Green means vitality," Reimu mused. "Is it telling me the shrine is doing well under my management?"
She looked at it for a while. The longer she looked, the more she liked it.
"I should display this somewhere. Make it a small attraction. Charge admission to touch it."
She considered this. The idea improved with consideration.
"I'm genuinely getting better at this."
She put both the donation box and the gemstone in her bedroom closet for safekeeping, then got into bed. Before she closed her eyes, she thought about the fiancé who had been generating steady income for her in various ways since he'd arrived.
"I'll go check on him tomorrow. If Suika actually hurt him, I can bill her for the damages." She pulled the blanket up. "And maybe he'll be... more willing... to be my... fiancé..."
She was asleep before she finished the thought.
Summer gave way to autumn.
Pelican Town put on its seasonal wardrobe — gold and amber and the particular quality of light that only existed in harvest weather, warm and slightly melancholy at the same time. Morning fog settled over the fields in thin layers that burned off by midmorning.
Kihara was in the farm clearing out the summer crops that had run their course, working through the rows with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that the motions had become meditative.
Farming level: 7.
One more autumn harvest cycle and he'd hit level 8. Level 8 unlocked the keg. The keg was the beginning of the end — the transition from active farming to passive income through fermentation, which was the agricultural equivalent of finding a way to make money while sleeping.
The hops and blueberries accumulated during summer were already filling a storage chest, waiting for winter. Winter was the brewing season. The math worked out.
The oak grove he'd planted at the start of summer had matured into proper trees over the intervening months. He spent the morning installing tappers on all fifty oaks, then laid wooden floor panels between them as relay infrastructure for the automated collection system — everything would flow through to the external chest at the grove's edge on a seven-day cycle, without him needing to physically harvest any of it.
His Foraging skill had hit level 6 through two weeks of comprehensive field clearing, which unlocked the Lightning Rod recipe. No more weekly trips to the wizard's cart hoping a battery pack had refreshed.
For the level 5 passive, given the brewing path he was committing to, he'd chosen the Forester bonus — twenty percent increased wood yield. Kegs required lumber. The math, again, worked out.
He pulled the last summer crop from the soil, straightened up, and stretched his back until something released.
"All that's left is getting autumn seeds from Pierre."
Eientei.
Kaguya was staring at her computer with an expression that had moved past shock into something more philosophical.
The screen was empty.
Her cursor drifted in small circles across the blank desktop.
"Gone," she said, quietly.
"All of it. Gone."
....
Thank you for reading.
(T/N: Sorry for the delay update)