"Guess who~♪"
A cute voice called out from behind him.
Yasutaka knew instantly who it was.
"Kana-chan?"
"Bingo~♪"
Kana laughed brightly at that.
Her feathered ears and the wings on her back, so typical of the Snipe-folk, twitched with delight.
"That was so scary the other day~♪ Who even was that woman?"
"U-uh... who knows..."
Yasutaka dodged the question.
Kana laughed brightly again.
"She's your real girlfriend, isn't she? You shouldn't go making girls cry, you know~"
"Wha~? No she's not~?"
"Liar~?"
Kana laughed merrily, and the two of them walked on together toward the Kato.
"By the way, Taka-san, what are you doing all the way out here?"
"Uh... guess it's that Anakonda hunt I mentioned before?"
"No way? Can you actually pull that off?"
"For real, for real, I'm totally gonna do it!"
Chatting like that as they walked, Yasutaka found himself curious about one thing too.
"What about you, Kana-chan? What are you doing here?"
"Hmm... just some work stuff, I guess? The manager asked me to run an errand, so here I am."
"Out here?"
Yasutaka looked around, puzzled.
This part of town was rather run-down, with no large shops and nothing aimed at young people.
The area wasn't particularly safe either, hardly the sort of place one came to have fun, but Kana just laughed merrily.
"Our shop's main branch is around here. I just had some business there, that's all."
"Huh..."
Kana's shop was one that supplied serving girls to an unlicensed red-light district.
Come to think of it, maybe it made sense for the main branch to be tucked away in a place like this.
As he was thinking that...
"Guess who?"
Squish!
That icy voice hit him with a "Guess who?" delivered with enough force to gouge his eyes right out of his skull.
Far from delighting in the sensation of huge breasts pressing against his entire back, he felt nothing but terror.
"Eeek!"
Kana let out a scream and bolted, fleeing in a panic...
That alone was enough to tell him exactly who stood behind him.
"U-uhh... M-Mani-hime... is that... you...?"
Yasutaka answered in a voice as faint as a mosquito's whine, but Mani-hime didn't loosen her grip around his head one bit.
"Hey... why didn't you say yes just now, when she called you her boyfriend?"
"..."
Cold sweat poured down Yasutaka's back without end, and he felt a fresh jolt of terror as the pressure on his eyeballs kept creeping higher.
(One wrong answer here, and he was pretty sure his eyeballs were coming out.)
He chose his words carefully... or rather, scrambled to come up with a good excuse.
And then... he arrived at the answer.
"Well, she's my fiancée, not my mistress, right?"
"...Eh?"
Mani-hime blinked in confusion, not quite following.
"In Edo, when people say 'real girlfriend,' it means the favorite among a bunch of mistresses. That's why I said she wasn't."
"Oh! Sorry, Tacchan♪ I totally got the wrong idea♪"
Just like that, Mani-hime loosened her grip.
Needless to say, no such rule actually existed.
She promptly hooked her arm through Yasutaka's, and the two walked on arm in arm.
"So, where are you off to now?"
"Just off to the Kato. Got work to do, so I'll catch you later."
"Aww~..."
Mani-hime puffed out her cheeks in a sulk.
"I finally got to see you, Tacchan... and we can't even stay together..."
She looked on the verge of tears as she said it.
Seeing her like that, Yasutaka's face twisted into something hard to describe.
(...She hasn't changed a bit in this way, even after all these years...)
Thinking that, Yasutaka found himself drifting back through old memories.
Every memory he had from childhood included Mani-hime somewhere in it.
After all, ever since she was a baby, Mani-hime would wail the moment Yasutaka stepped away, so the two of them were always kept together.
Since Yasutaka was two years older, naturally her studies were set to match his level.
As a result, she came to be called a child prodigy: she picked up her studies faster than anyone, and grew strong in the martial arts in no time at all.
Of course she got strong so fast; she was training alongside a boy two years her senior.
Yasutaka's reputation, on the other hand, only suffered for it.
His own grades were perfectly ordinary, but since his and Mani-hime's results came out roughly the same, that meant, in effect, that he was losing to a girl two years younger than him.
Since they always did the same things, their results naturally landed at the same level. But that only dragged his own standing down while lifting hers up.
It was only natural, perhaps, that he came to resent it a little.
Mani-hime, sensing this somehow, started deliberately losing to him at some point.
She did it out of a wish to make him look good, but Yasutaka could always tell she was holding back, which rendered the whole gesture pointless.
For Mani-hime, it was all born of a single-minded desire to stay by his side, yet the more devoutly she followed him, the more his irritation grew.
In the end, the two of them were saddled with reputations neither of them wanted: the child prodigy, and her mediocre older-brother figure.
On top of that came the striking beauty typical of spider-women, along with a shy, intensely bashful nature, which was really just another way of saying she was easily led.
It was little wonder the retainers all thought she'd make the perfect bride for their own sons.
But as long as she remained devoted, body and soul, to Yasutaka in true spider-woman fashion, that was never going to happen.
Yasutaka found himself crushed beneath a stroke of fortune far too great for a talent as ordinary as his.
(...I know it's not really Mani-hime's fault, but...)
Seeing her plead with tear-filled eyes always left him with a feeling he couldn't quite put into words.
Squeeze...
With no other choice, Yasutaka took Mani-hime's hand and pulled her gently along.
"C'mon, just till we reach the Kato, all right?"
"...Okay!"
Still teary-eyed, Mani-hime smiled happily all the same.