Entrance of H University.
Shiratori Seiya sat behind the wheel of his parked car, the engine idling in a low, patient hum. His gaze wasn't fixed on the flow of students streaming through the campus gates or the pale November sunlight filtering through the windshield. Instead, his attention was wholly absorbed by the translucent System interface hovering in his peripheral vision—specifically, the number glowing beside Takahashi Mio's name.
Favorability: 69.
The figure seemed to pulse faintly, as if aware of his scrutiny. A simple, seemingly straightforward bug-fixing attempt—exploiting the System's relationship mechanics to accelerate his earning potential—had unexpectedly unlocked this hidden display function. The interface now showed him, in stark, unblinking digits, exactly how Takahashi Mio felt about him.
Unfortunately, the feature appeared limited to her alone. Saori's affection, though confirmed to have reached its absolute maximum of one hundred, had only triggered a one-time notification when he'd attempted to switch girlfriends through the System. He suspected the same would hold true when he eventually re-established his relationship with Shione—a brief, clinical prompt, nothing more.
Speaking of which...
If not for the catastrophe at Shione's concert—that desperate, self-destructive gambit that had shattered her voice and nearly broken him—he probably would never have conceived of the dual-earning strategy. He would never have attempted to cycle between romantic partners to compound his System rewards. And therefore, he would never have stumbled upon this hidden condition buried in the System's architecture.
The key, he now understood, was this: when the favorability of a previous romantic partner reached one hundred, certain restrictions could be lifted. The System—cold and transactional as it was—seemed to acknowledge the depth of such bonds, offering paths forward that would otherwise remain locked.
After a long, contemplative silence, Shiratori Seiya shifted his focus back to the present. Back to the number. Sixty-nine. Not low, by any reasonable standard. But not where it needed to be.
He had been consumed these past few days by the logistical demands of the film project—scripts to finalize, producers to negotiate with, schedules to coordinate. But in the rare, quiet moments between crises, he had found himself circling a question that refused to be ignored: Do I actually like Takahashi Mio?
Not as an asset. Not as an investment. Not as a variable in a complex financial equation. But as a person. A woman. Someone whose smile he had grown accustomed to seeing, whose voice he had learned to read for hidden emotions.
He had asked himself the question several times. Stripped it of self-justification. Examined it from multiple angles, with the same clinical precision he applied to everything. And finally—reluctantly, honestly—he had arrived at an answer.
She was diligent. Relentlessly hardworking. She had transformed herself from a directionless, debt-ridden girl into someone who could hold her own in a professional training room, who devoured scripts and acting theory with the voracious hunger of someone making up for lost time.
She was persistent, refusing to crumble even when circumstances conspired against her. She was ambitious—sometimes to a fault, but that fire was real, and he couldn't help but respect it. And yes, she was beautiful. Objectively, indisputably beautiful, with those striking eyes and that confident stride and the way she could command attention without saying a word.
Did she have flaws? Absolutely.
Her vanity was legendary—she could spend an hour adjusting her hair before a simple trip to the convenience store. Her jealousy was a sharp, green-edged thing that she wielded like a blade, often before she fully understood what she was jealous of. But these were not fatal defects. They were, in their own way, part of what made her her. And overall, her virtues did not merely outweigh her flaws—they rendered them almost endearing.
After all the time they had spent together—the late-night script sessions, the car rides to and from training, the quiet meals, the unspoken understandings—there was simply no reason not to like her. The affection had crept up on him gradually, almost without his notice, and now it sat in his chest like a quiet, steady flame.
As it stood, choosing to pursue Takahashi Mio in earnest—to raise her acting skills to the Master level required by the System, and thereby unlock the ability to cultivate a second target simultaneously—was undoubtedly, strategically correct. It aligned every incentive. It served every goal.
Moreover, even if this particular System condition had never materialized, even if the hidden door to a two-person romantic limit had remained forever sealed... he hadn't planned to break up with Mio anyway. The thought had crossed his mind—briefly, clinically—and been dismissed.
Shione's throat was still in recovery; her voice remained a fragile, uncertain thing. She wouldn't be able to sing for some time. Currently, Mio was the only one positioned to generate income through the System's dramatic arts track. Abandoning that pipeline would have been strategically inept.
And honestly—if he was being completely, brutally truthful with himself—Shiratori Seiya harbored deep, nagging doubts about Hojo Shione's future motivation. Once he agreed to resume their relationship, once she had what she wanted, would she still burn with the same ferocious ambition? Or would she, as she had done before, gradually allow her career to become secondary to her obsession with him? He couldn't afford a repeat of that pattern.
Deciding to pursue Mio might not be entirely fair to her, he acknowledged silently, the thought settling in his mind with the weight of a stone dropped into still water. But what's truly fair in matters of the heart?
The universe didn't distribute romantic justice in equal measure. It never had.
The best he could offer—the only thing he could genuinely promise—was to be as responsible as possible. To provide for her. To support her dreams. To ensure that whatever emotional gaps existed in their relationship were compensated for, as much as possible, in money and career and the tangible, material fruits of success. It wasn't a perfect solution. It wasn't even a good one, perhaps. But it was the only one he had.
Just as these thoughts were settling into something resembling resolution, movement at the edge of his vision snapped him back to the present.
A familiar figure had emerged from the university gates.
Takahashi Mio stood at the entrance, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the pale autumn sun, her head turning left and right as she scanned the line of parked cars. She was dressed today in a style that could only be described as soft and demure—a black-and-white knee-length skirt that swayed gently with the breeze, a white knitted cardigan draped loosely over her shoulders, and a light pink handbag slung elegantly over the crook of her arm.
The ensemble was carefully calibrated. Intentionally gentle. The kind of outfit designed to make people underestimate the sharp, calculating mind beneath.
The slightly chilly November wind swept across the campus, catching her long, dark hair and lifting it in a shimmering cascade. The pale sunlight reflected off the strands, painting them in faint, luminous shades of gold and amber. In that moment—wind-tousled, sunlit, unconsciously graceful—her elegant, refined demeanor was highlighted with almost cinematic perfection.
Shiratori Seiya found himself conducting an involuntary, silent census. In the brief span of time she stood there, perhaps seven or eight people walked past her. Every single one of them—without exception—turned their heads after passing. Walked a few steps. Glanced back.
Every. Single. Person.
Her return-look rate was a perfect, unblemished one hundred percent. Even other girls with comparable facial features couldn't approach that kind of gravitational pull.
If one were forced to analyze why—to dissect the mechanics of her appeal—it likely came down to the recent transformation in her aura. The training. The discipline. The growing confidence of someone who had discovered her purpose. She carried herself differently now. Stood differently. Moved through the world with a newfound certainty that drew eyes like a magnet.
Watching her scan the row of cars with that focused, faintly impatient expression, Shiratori Seiya felt his lips curve into an unconscious smile. If he had to articulate the feeling—this warm, proprietary sense of satisfaction—it was probably the pleasure of nurturing. The gratification of watching something you planted grow and bloom. The quiet pride of a craftsman observing his work taking shape.
Takahashi Mio's searching gaze finally landed on his car. Recognition flickered across her delicate features, and she immediately began walking toward him, her heels clicking a brisk, familiar rhythm against the pavement.
Knock, knock, knock.
She leaned down, rapping her knuckles against the driver's side window with playful impatience. Without waiting for him to respond, she pulled open the passenger door, slid inside with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a hundred times, and collapsed back against the seat. Her posture melted from elegant to utterly boneless. All pretense of composure evaporated the moment the door clicked shut.
'Whew...'
She exhaled a long, deep, bone-weary sigh. Her gaze drifted instinctively upward—toward the rearview mirror, perhaps, or the ceiling of the car—but then, as if she'd spotted something unexpected, her eyes paused. Lingered for a single, unreadable heartbeat. Then, deliberately, she lowered her gaze and stared straight ahead through the windshield.
Shiratori Seiya noted the odd flicker of her attention but chose not to comment on it. Instead, he reached toward the center console, retrieving a chilled bottle of herbal tea and offering it to her. "What's wrong? You seem exhausted. More than usual."
"I'm fine. Just a long day." Takahashi Mio accepted the bottle with a perfunctory nod. She set her handbag aside, wedging it between her hip and the door, and wrapped her fingers around the cap, preparing to twist it open.
But before she could apply any force, Shiratori Seiya's hand moved. He gently pulled the bottle back from her grip, his fingers brushing against hers in the exchange. "Let me. I'll open it for you."
"?"
The offer—simple, mundane, utterly unremarkable by any normal relationship's standards—seemed to short-circuit something in Takahashi Mio's brain. She stared at him, her long, dark lashes fluttering with genuine perplexity. Her lips parted slightly, as if a question was forming, but no sound emerged. She simply looked at him, her striking eyes wide and searching, trying to parse the anomaly.
'Click.'
The bottle cap twisted free with a crisp, satisfying sound. Shiratori Seiya extended it back toward her. "There you go. Drink."
Still, she didn't move. Her fingers remained frozen in mid-air, suspended in the gesture of accepting the bottle. It wasn't until the cool glass made contact with her palm that she jolted back to awareness.
"Oh. Thank you."
She brought the herbal tea to her lips but hesitated just before drinking. Her eyes—still clouded with that same unreadable confusion—fixed on him from over the rim of the bottle. When she finally spoke, her voice carried a note of cautious bewilderment.
"What exactly... are you doing?"
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Never mind." Takahashi Mio shook her head—a quick, dismissive motion—and took a small, measured sip of the herbal tea.
She had actually intended to ask, Why are you being so strangely kind today? What's the occasion? But after a split second of reflection, she swallowed the question down with the tea. Asking it outright would make it seem as though he was never kind to her normally—which, to be fair, was not entirely inaccurate, but admitting that aloud felt uncomfortably like exposing a vulnerability.
Still, the ancient wisdom held true: unusual kindness often concealed an ulterior motive. He probably wanted something from her. Something specific. Something he was about to ask.
"Twisting open a bottle cap for your girlfriend... isn't that just the most basic, fundamental thing a boyfriend should do?"
Hearing those words emerge from his mouth—delivered with such calm, matter-of-fact sincerity—Takahashi Mio immediately choked. The herbal tea went down the wrong pipe, and she erupted into a violent, uncontrollable coughing fit.
'Cough, cough, cough...!'
Her delicate features contorted into a mask of distress. Her cheeks flushed crimson. Eyes watering, she fumbled blindly for the tissue packet in her handbag, managing—after several agonizing seconds—to extract one and press it to her lips. She coughed twice more, her shoulders convulsing, before her breathing finally steadied and the chaos subsided.
Wiping the residual moisture from her chin, she fixed Shiratori Seiya with a look of pure, incredulous amusement. Her lips curved into a half-smile—the kind that hovered ambiguously between genuine humor and sharp-edged sarcasm.
The most basic, fundamental thing? Is that what you just said?
If it's truly the most basic thing... then why, in an entire month of dating, is today the VERY FIRST TIME you've ever done it?
The retort burned on her tongue, sharp and ready. But she held it back. Swallowed it. Let it dissolve unsaid. Instead, after a moment of contemplation, she redirected the conversation to more practical terrain.
"So. What's going on? There must be a reason you suddenly asked to meet today. You've been practically invisible all week."
It had been nearly seven full days since the Hojo Shione incident. An entire week. In that time, she had barely caught a glimpse of Shiratori Seiya. If he hadn't been sending her daily messages—relentless, punctual, utterly impersonal reminders to study her scripts and complete her training exercises—she might have genuinely believed her boyfriend had vanished from the face of the earth entirely.
Poof. Gone. Evaporated.
Privately, she suspected he had been occupied with cleaning up the wreckage of Hojo Shione's catastrophe. Managing the media fallout. Handling the legal and financial complications. Doing all the things one does for an ex-girlfriend whose life has spectacularly imploded.
And now here he was, casually spouting nonsense about "basic boyfriend duties." She had never—not once, in her entire life—encountered a boyfriend quite like this one.
A cold, sardonic sneer flickered through her heart, but she kept it firmly off her face. Instead, she arranged her features into an expression of pleasant, unconcerned curiosity and smiled.
"By the way... I happened to notice that the public sentiment toward Hojo Shione online seems to have improved significantly over the past couple of days. The narrative is shifting. It shouldn't cause any lasting damage to her future career development, should it?"
[Takahashi Mio's Favorability: 69 → 65]
Shiratori Seiya observed the System panel in silence. He watched the number shift—downward, in a smooth, almost gentle decline—and said nothing.
From the moment she had settled into the passenger seat—when he had simply twisted open a bottle cap for her—her favorability had ticked upward by a single, tentative point. A small, quiet warmth kindled by a small, quiet gesture. But immediately after he'd dismissed the act as merely a basic duty of a boyfriend, the number had plummeted by two.
And then, when she'd mentioned Hojo Shione's name with that carefully constructed casualness, it had dropped again. Four more points. A clean, surgical descent.
In total, her favorability had fallen by six points in the span of minutes.
And yet—her voice remained light. Her posture remained loose and relaxed. Her expression radiated nothing but mild, pleasant curiosity, as if she were inquiring about the weather forecast or the price of seasonal fruit. No trace of the wounded, complicated emotions that the falling numbers betrayed.
So. As her acting skills continue to improve, she's begun skillfully applying them to daily life as well. The mask doesn't slip even when the sting is fresh.
If it weren't for the System's favorability display—that cold, clinical, indisputably honest number glowing in his peripheral vision—he suspected that within a few more weeks of this, he would no longer be able to see through her at all. The performance and the reality would blur into a seamless, impenetrable whole.
Setting those thoughts aside for later dissection, Shiratori Seiya allowed his brow to furrow. He started the engine with a smooth turn of the key, and at the same time, reached into his bag and withdrew a thin stack of documents. He tossed them lightly onto her lap with a long, put-upon sigh.
"Sigh... what you're really trying to say, beneath all that polite indifference, is that I've been busy dealing with Hojo Shione's mess this entire week. Isn't that right?"
"?"
The words struck their target with unerring precision. Takahashi Mio's mouth fell open, her eyes momentarily going blank with the shock of having her carefully hidden grievance so bluntly exposed. It took a visible heartbeat for her to recover, and when she did, she quickly dropped her gaze to the documents now resting in her lap.
"The Kidnapper's Daughter" — Production Application Form.
Producer: Fujikawa Shunpei... Screenwriter: Suspect X (Anonymous)...
...Application Status: APPROVED.
The official red seal gleamed up at her from the bottom of the page. Takahashi Mio's heart gave a sudden, sharp lurch. But before she could even begin to formulate a response—surprise, gratitude, questions, all tangling in her throat—Shiratori Seiya was already speaking again.
"I've been buried in script revisions and production meetings all week. Running back and forth between the network and the production office. Every single day."
"Besides... even if I wanted to manage Hojo Shione's affairs personally, it's not my place anymore. You know that. At most, I can only offer some vocal support online—post a message, help shape the public narrative a little. That's the extent of what's appropriate."
A pause. His tone shifted, becoming more businesslike, more focused.
"I asked you to meet me today because there's news. You'll begin preparing for the formal audition starting next Sunday. That's only a little over a week away. Set aside this week's basic training curriculum for now. I'll speak with Araki-sensei later today and arrange for her to give you intensive, specialized coaching tailored specifically to the role you'll be auditioning for..."
Listening to the steady stream of his words—the plans, the arrangements, the evidence of an entire week spent laboring on her behalf, on her future—Takahashi Mio found she could no longer focus on the printed characters on the page. The text blurred. Swam. Became meaningless.
Her heart felt as though it had been enveloped in a warm, gentle current—something soft and sweet and almost unbearably tender—which then slowly, deliciously flowed downward, pooling in her lower abdomen, sending a shiver through her that made her long legs press together involuntarily beneath the modest hem of her skirt.
He hadn't said a single negative word about Hojo Shione. Not one. No criticism. No dismissal. And yet... every sentence seemed to draw an invisible comparison between herself and that woman. Between the hours he'd spent on her career and whatever distant, appropriate support he might have offered his ex.
Most importantly... I won. In the end, he chose to spend his time on me.
A heady surge of triumphant self-satisfaction rushed through her veins, effervescent as champagne. Her lips curved upward before she could stop them—a genuine, radiant, irrepressible smile. She turned her head, glancing at Shiratori Seiya's profile as he focused on the road ahead, and her eyes softened with something gentle. Something sweet. Something deeply, privately affectionate.
[Takahashi Mio's Favorability: 65 → 75]
Shiratori Seiya watched the numbers leap upward on the System panel—a dramatic, ten-point surge in a single moment—and kept his expression carefully, deliberately neutral. But inwardly, he allowed himself a quiet sigh of recognition. Just as I expected. Just as the pattern suggested.
So many chaotic events had occurred recently—Shione's collapse, Saori's vigil, the sleepless nights, the spiraling complications—that he had almost forgotten a fundamental truth about Takahashi Mio. Beneath the recent layers of discipline and professionalism, beneath the improved acting and the sharpened focus, she was—at her core—profoundly jealous. Profoundly willful. Possessive in ways she barely understood.
Even though their initial arrangement had been purely transactional, even though she herself had laughingly referred to her position as that of a "listed girlfriend"—a role with a title but no real claim—how could she possibly not be jealous? The question, in retrospect, was absurd.
Before him, she had never been in a real relationship. She had no frame of reference for emotional detachment. No experience navigating the complicated boundaries of a partnership built on anything other than mutual convenience. The kiss that night—that fierce, desperate, tear-stained kiss—should have told him everything he needed to know.
Thinking back on it now, Shiratori Seiya could only shake his head at his own recent blindness. He had allowed himself to be swayed by circumstances. By guilt. By the overwhelming flood of Shione's pain and Saori's devotion. He had been reacting rather than analyzing. Feeling rather than calculating.
Fortunately, I've regained my clarity now.
Never again.