Make Them Love Me Or They'll End The World-Chapter 153: Weird Dreams

"You're kidding me… right?" Kentaro muttered.

"B-…" Serica couldn't even finish the letter. Her mouth hung open, her eyes wide with polished shock.

The park Kentaro had left, Tenka, Yura, and Aria perfectly intact, alive, and duck-free, had transformed into a battlefield.

A particular kind of battlefield.

The kind covered in bird poop and feathers.

The grass was snowed over in white and grey fluff; the air itself had a sour, ammoniac sting that rushed straight up Kentaro's nose and stabbed his brain. Even the sandbox looked like a crime scene. Right at its edge, sprawled out like fallen heroes beneath a blizzard of down, lay Tenka, Yura, and Aria, completely unconscious.

"TENKA! YURA! ARIA!" Kentaro and Serica shouted together, launching into a desperate sprint, only to slow to an awful, tiptoeing ballet as they began dodging… Splat mines.

"Ew, ew, ew, why is there so much poo?" Serica muttered, hopping between white splats like she was playing a nightmare version of hopscotch.

"I don't know," Kentaro said, lifting his foot over a fresh smear and gagging as the smell clawed his throat, "but a battle happened here… And it's a battle they lost."

They reached the fallen trio. Up close, the smell was worse. Tenka, Yura, and Aria were tucked under a thick blanket of feathers, like some evil duvet delivery gone wrong. The only spots relatively free of poops were small, unlucky islands of skin and hair.

"Okay, okay, don't touch the mystery blanket," Kentaro told himself, squinting at Tenka's face. A streak of guano ran along her cheek; a feather stuck to her eyelashes like a tragic beauty accessory. He slid his fingers under the one clean strip at her neck and shook gently. "Hey, Tenka. Tenka! Wake up. What the hell happened?"

Tenka groaned, lids fluttering. "J-just five more minutes, Kenny… I'll make breakfast soon…"

"HUH?! Breakfast? It's been years since you've made any for me!" Kentaro shook harder, pinching his nose against the smell.

Another groan. Then her eyes opened, hazy, confused, and found his. The first thing she did was catch his expression: that scrunched, please-don't-hate-me face of someone who was about to deliver bad news about the weather, the rent, and the duck-pocalypse at the same time.

"W-why are you looking at me like that?" She asked, already blushing. Kentaro ignored the question. "What happened to you?"

Across from them, Serica knelt over Yura, steeling herself. Yura was in even worse shape: feathers stuck to her bangs; a neat circular stamp of duck-foot dirt decorated her forehead like a cursed tattoo.

"Yura, wake u-"

"AHHHHHHHH! GET AWAY, BEASTS!"

"Ngh!"

With the gentlest touch, Yura shot upright and smashed heads with Serica, forehead-to-forehead, a crisp bonk. Serica went rolling backwards, clutching her crown and kicking her legs like a dying beetle.

Yura panted, wild-eyed, scanning the field for enemies. Tenka and Kentaro simply stared with equally tragic pity.

"Y-Yura…" Tenka breathed.

Yura answered between gulps of air. "Yes… What is it?"

Tenka stood, the feather duvet sliding off her shoulders in a slow avalanche. Her eyes went bright with sudden, dramatic tears.

Yura's eyes mirrored hers, shining instantly.

They looked at each other, sniffed once, and then threw themselves into a hug like soldiers reunited across a ruined shore. "WE LOST THE BATTLE, AHHHHHH!"

Kentaro stood there, arms out, then down, then out again, trying to collect the situation with his face alone. From what he could tell… The girls had gotten into a war with ducks. And lost.

He knelt at Aria's side. She was curled up like a cat buried in fluff, lips moving. He leaned closer.

"Duck duck quack quack," Aria whispered, over and over, prayer-like.

Kentaro's mouth twitched into a smile despite the stench. "Hey, Aria. Wake up. You don't want to stay like this forever," he murmured, brushing a clean patch of hair back from her forehead.

Her lashes fluttered; her eyes opened slowly and dazed. The cacophony of Tenka and Yura's dramatic lamentations painted her face with gentle confusion.

"W-what's going on?" She asked, sitting up. Feathers sloughed off her shoulders in a soft cascade.

"Um," Kentaro said, helping her to her feet. "How do I say this… You lost the battle?"

She blinked. Once. Twice. Then her eyes widened as memory arrived, an army of waddling feet, the cavalry of wings.

"Oh my god…"

"Ah, don't cry!" Kentaro flailed, hands out as if catching tears midair would help.

"I was so scared," Aria whispered, a tremble in her voice. "There were so many."

Kentaro did the one thing that came naturally: he rubbed her head. His palm slid gently over her hair.

Aria flinched, then stilled. The warmth that spread across her scalp and down her neck wasn't new. It landed in her chest like a key slipping into an old lock. Her brows knit; confusion tugged at her mouth.

"K-Kentaro," she whispered, a little breathless.

He drew his hand back. "Yeah?"

She kept her eyes down, fingers fidgeting with the hem of her sleeve. "I… I don't remember you. Even after Tenka and the others told me everything, and I'm trying, I really am, but when you do that, when you touch my head like that, it feels like… Like I've felt it a hundred times before. It's warm, and it makes my heart jump, and I don't know why." She swallowed. "It scares me a little. What is this?"

Heat crept up his neck. "I, I don't know exactly," he said, then forced himself to meet her eyes. "But I think it's because you… You…"

She lifted her gaze, searching his face. "I… What?"

"You love me," he blurted. "I think that's why. That's what you're feeling.

She froze. The world seemed to hold its breath with her, the wind paused in the trees, and the feathers settled slowly onto the sand.

"I love you," she repeated, tasting the shape of the words. They rolled as they belonged to her already. She stood still for one heartbeat more, then smiled, hands folding behind her back in a familiar gesture that made Kentaro's chest ache in a sweet way. "If that's what it is, that's okay with me. I don't remember it… But I can see why the other me would love you, Kentaro."

"Aria…" He said, his own voice slipping.

She turned, the smallest tilt of her head, the smallest stick-out of her tongue. "Let's go home. I would love a bath right now, hehe."

His heart skipped a beat. Aria always had moments of boldness, but this was different, like she'd found the rail of a staircase in the dark and decided to step down it, trusting the next stair would be there.

He didn't get to dwell. The battlefield needed clearing. With Serica back on her feet and Tenka and Yura pried apart from their tear-hug, the group staggered their way across the minefield of splats and collapsed feathers.

"Haruka," Kentaro said, tapping his comm as they limped toward the path.

"On it," came Haruka's flat reply. "Yumi is already en route. She'll pick you up where she dropped you."

"Thanks."

A few minutes later, the van rolled up, the door sliding open with a hiss. Tenka and Yura had burned through their second wind and fallen asleep sitting upright as soon as they were inside; Aria curled up across from Serica, their knees touching, whispering about "duck generals" and "quack formations" until their voices turned to yawns.

Kentaro took the front passenger seat. The window was cool against his temple; the air through the crack smelled like sun-heated grass and the faint metallic bite of the van's A/C. He let himself breathe for the first time since the duck war.

"Jeez," he muttered, half to Yumi, half to himself. "From a 'find Serica' mission to… whatever that was."

His comm clicked. "Kentaro," Haruka said.

"Yeah?"

"We picked up a signal while you were in the forested area. Faint. Human. Female," she reported, keys clacking faintly in the background.

Kentaro sat up straight. "A girl… Following me? Could it be Kira?"

"Don't think so. I sent Shogo to check. She's across town shopping," Haruka replied. "If I had to guess, Cradle. Or Spire."

Kentaro's jaw tightened. He watched the trees slide by the window; in their flicker, he could almost see the shape of someone leaping branch to branch, light and quick.

"I see that's quite worrying." He softly replied.

"Yes. From now on, avoid walking alone where response time is slow. Whoever it was had patience and distance. They weren't testing you. They were studying you," Haruka said, voice even, but Kentaro heard the thin thread of worry tucked in.

"…Got it," he said quietly.

He closed his eyes. He could feel the weight of Tenka's earlier silence on his shoulder, how she'd stood, looking at that big tree like it knew a secret it wouldn't share. He could feel Serica's hand still warm where she'd squeezed his fingers before she fell asleep in the back. He could taste the acidity of the duck field in the back of his throat and smell the faint sweetness of shampoo when Serica had leaned close.

Someone's moving while we're laughing, he thought. And not just Shaula.

*

Somewhere else, back at campus, in the cool, dusty belly of the drama hall, Shaula's voice cut through the staleness like a baton rap.

"Come on, play the part properly," said headband Shaula, tapping the marked stage with her toe. "Really put emotion in it!"

Necklace Shaula took a breath and tried again, rolling the antagonist's line in her mouth, aiming for a razor that came out half-butterknife. Her voice had the right pitch, the right shape… And still sounded like she'd laid it gently on a table instead of throwing it like a knife.

The third Shaula, the one with the hairpin and the bracelet, lay on the floorboards with her hands pillow-folded under her head, eyes on the ceiling grid. She exhaled a long, theatrical sigh.

"We need help," she said, deadpan. "The three of us are amazing, sure, but we need more people. It's been a week. Our Dates are about to start soon with Kentaro. And we have nothing really going on."

The other two Shaulas stopped and looked at each other. Something small flashed between them, a mirror-eyed communication that wasn't quite a blink, wasn't quite a smirk, but contained a little of both.

Then they did smirk. In perfect unison.

"Very well," said headband Shaula, stretching her arms overhead like a cat. "Let's go find some people."

"And let's make sure," necklace Shaula added, twirling her bracelet once, twice, "they're the best of the best."

Hairpin Shaula sat up in one smooth motion, the corner of her mouth ticking up. "Then," she said, dusting nonexistent dust off her skirt, "let's begin."

They stood, three reflections stepping into motion, and walked down off the stage to recruit their backup.