Tashiro Benika pulled Kuroba Akira into her embrace of her own accord, gently running her hand through his hair.
"Mm… as expected, a man's body temperature really is a bit higher than a woman's. Or is it that boys in their teens just run hotter…? How does it feel?"
"There's no man who'd dislike this kind of feeling… do I even need to say it?"
"Hehe, as long as you like it."
This time, compared to the hug just now, there was more intimacy. Even from the amount of deformation at her chest, Akira could tell Tashiro-san had gotten closer to him.
Not bad… so this is what having an older sister feels like?
Even though the light novel he was writing this time had a younger sister theme, Akira suddenly felt maybe "older sister" was also a blue ocean worth exploring.
In his previous life, Akira had no siblings, no sexy onee-san neighbor, and no childhood friend who'd promised herself to him. At this age, he had never felt this mixture of reassurance and heart-fluttering before.
After holding him for a while, Tashiro Benika seemed to feel she still owed him too much, and her expression turned thoughtful.
"But just a hug feels a bit too perfunctory… Mm…"
Her eyes scanned the room. In this place messy enough to be mistaken for a garbage dump, she precisely locked onto the thing she wanted.
She reached out and plucked up a pair of red panties—still with a faint whitish stain in the middle—holding them in an O-shaped grip, as if even she found them a bit distasteful.
"How about… I give you this? You can make do with it, Akira-kun?"
"…"
Why is it that everyone likes to hand over panties?
I'm not a panties collector!
Still, Akira decided to use this opportunity to confirm something.
"I'll pass on the panties. But… could you show me your hand?"
He wanted to confirm whether Tashiro-san had any talents, and by checking her relevant skill proficiencies, he could deduce her line of work.
Also, bringing up the keyword "hand" would reveal, from her reaction, whether she had the same "blessing" as him.
"My hand?"
Tashiro Benika looked down at her own hand, tilting her head in puzzlement.
From that reaction… she didn't have a cheat ability?
If it were acting, it was too natural… most likely she really couldn't see the words on her hand.
Not every transmigrator had a cheat—or maybe each one's cheat was different.
Or perhaps this was a cheat unique to him… Akira still couldn't be sure.
"Mm, I'll read your palm for you."
"Wow, you can do palm reading, Akira-kun?"
"I learned it from the old man in my family."
Akira made up an excuse, tying palmistry to an elder. When it came to things with even a whiff of the occult, saying it was taught by an old person made it more convincing.
Tashiro-san seemed interested. She let go of him and spread both hands out before him, looking expectant.
"Alright, then please take a look for your onee-san. I remember you can read life lines, marriage lines, career lines… In that case, I hope the rest of my life turns me into a rich lady!"
"Well… let's see."
Life and marriage aside, he really could get some idea about career.
He started with the right hand—there was writing on it.
Her talent was [Beauty & Makeup C].
Not a high rank, but enough to make a living. With that talent, Tashiro-san shouldn't be doing that badly. So how had it gotten to the point she needed to drink to drown her sorrows?
She didn't seem like someone with zero emotional intelligence. If she managed upward well and kept good coworker relations, she shouldn't have been singled out for petty revenge…
Could it be she hadn't realized her own talent yet?
Thinking this, Akira checked the left hand—and discovered his guess was way off.
The real surprise wasn't the right hand's talent, but the left hand's skills. Two in particular almost blinded him.
[Makeup LV4]
[Massage LV4]
Level 4. And two of them.
Skill levels got harder and harder to raise the higher they went. The time it took to raise ten skills to LV1 was less than the time to raise one skill to LV3.
And LV4 was a realm worthy of the title "master"—something you could only reach after decades of doing the same work day in and day out.
There was no way a woman with a physical age of twenty-four could accumulate that. Even if makeup could be accelerated by talent, massage had nothing to do with her beauty talent.
This proved her mental age really was, as Akira suspected, much older than her physical age.
In her past life, Tashiro-san was probably already in her forties or fifties.
So that air about her wasn't "onee-san charm," but rather "mature woman charm"?
An older sister with the scent of a mature woman… it felt like some strange chemical reaction. More erotic—no, more distinctive.
From those two skills alone, he could guess where she worked: if she was good at both makeup and massage, most likely she'd worked in a beauty salon.
But then her work environment must have been terrible—either the boss was harsh or she'd been the target of customer complaints.
Still, with both skills at LV4, she was more skilled than veteran technicians. Would there really be dissatisfied customers?
Maybe they were planted by rival shops to cause trouble?
And if the boss had a top-level technician who could support the whole shop, they'd be desperate to keep her, bending over backward to please her—only an idiot would target someone like that.
Too strange… everything felt off.
Akira felt there must be a flaw in his deduction this time—he just couldn't see where the flaw was.
Unable to figure it out, he kept looking—and found another unusual skill.
[Braille LV2]
Tashiro-san could read Braille?
And not at a basic level—LV2. That wasn't a hobby skill; it meant she used it often enough in daily life to raise it to that level.
Looking at her other skills, there was also sound localization, spatial awareness…
Taken together, these pointed to only one conclusion.
Tashiro-san had been blind.
Or rather, in her previous life, she had most likely been blind.
But now, she wasn't…
Yet past injuries and scars carried over into this world. The scar at Akira's eye was proof.
Which meant—Tashiro-san hadn't yet encountered the event that would take her sight.
Would she in the future? Was it inevitable?
Damn… could there really be something like "fate"?
Originally, Akira had just wanted to check talents and skills. Now, a kind of creeping fear rose inside him.
From the small to the large, he felt like he'd caught a glimpse of truths he wasn't supposed to know.
Fate… was it something that couldn't be changed?
Would he, no matter how he struggled, still end up like in his past life—becoming a corporate slave and working himself to death?
No… that couldn't be right!
Then what was the point of crossing over? Just to give a man a second round of despair?
What kind of sick joke is this!
In that moment, Akira wanted nothing more than to tilt his head back and shout that gloriously chuunibyou line—
My fate is mine, not the heavens'!