Hanako's sudden silence left both Yuto and Chiko confused, but she did not give either of them much opportunity to ask about it.
After remaining quiet for a while, she exchanged only a few more ordinary words with them before ending the call herself.
Chiko stared strangely at the phone for several seconds before looking across at Yuto.
"What was that about?"
"Who knows?"
Yuto gave a small shrug.
Chiko's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Do you think Hanako-san knows that man?"
"Maybe."
Yuto answered with a casual smile, though inwardly he was nowhere near as unconcerned as he appeared.
After chatting with Chiko for a few more minutes, he said goodbye and leisurely made his way back toward the restaurant.
His expression remained calm as he walked, but his thoughts kept circling around Hanako's peculiar reaction.
The name Morishita Nobuko.
The faded photograph of two girls leaning against each other.
The way Hanako had immediately asked for a detailed description of the old man after hearing that name.
And then there was the first thing she had said when answering the phone.
'Nobuko General Store...'
Yuto quietly repeated the name in his mind.
The more he connected those details, the more a rough possibility began taking shape.
It was still only a guess, and there was nowhere near enough evidence for him to be certain, but the coincidence was difficult to ignore.
Eventually, he could only sigh.
Life really was unpredictable.
...
When Yuto returned to the restaurant, Tohru and Kanna were sitting together at one of the tables with their cheeks propped in their hands, looking so thoroughly bored that the sight was equal parts pitiful and amusing.
The instant he walked in, however, both dragons immediately came alive.
"Boss!"
"Kamisaka!"
They exclaimed almost simultaneously before hurrying over to him.
Yuto gently patted Kanna's head and smiled toward Tohru.
"I'm back."
"Kamisaka finally came back." Kanna looked up at him with an expression far too world-weary for someone her age.
"Staying in the restaurant was so boring. And whenever I played games with Tohru-sama, Tohru-sama kept losing."
She turned toward Tohru with the weary disappointment of an old veteran forced to carry an incompetent teammate.
Tohru's face instantly turned bright red.
"When do I ever have time to play games?! Of course I can't beat you!"
She waved her fists indignantly while Kanna continued staring at her with the same unimpressed expression.
Yuto laughed at the sight.
"All right, all right. That's enough. Either way, thank you both for watching the restaurant today."
"Eh?! That was nothing!" Tohru immediately waved both hands, looking slightly embarrassed by the praise. "If I promised Boss I'd do it, then of course I was going to do it properly!"
Yuto smiled and headed farther inside.
There were only a few hours left before opening time, so it was about time to begin preparing for the night.
Tohru naturally followed him to help, while Kanna chose to sit nearby and watch the two of them work.
She had barely settled into her chair, however, when she suddenly shot upright.
The little girl had remembered something.
Something extremely important!
Without explaining herself, Kanna immediately hurried upstairs.
Yuto watched her go with a puzzled expression before turning toward Tohru, but the dragon girl looked equally confused and clearly had no idea what Kanna was doing either.
With nothing else they could do, they simply returned to their preparations and waited for her to come back down.
"Did Sakura or Hestia come by today?" Yuto suddenly asked.
Tohru shook her head.
That answer made him fall briefly into thought.
If neither Sakura nor Hestia had appeared at the restaurant, perhaps nothing had happened during the gods' meeting after all.
Unfortunately, Yuto did not think that possibility was especially likely.
Considering how worried Sakura had been the previous night, it seemed more plausible that something had happened and they simply had not been able to reach the restaurant yet.
Before he could think any further, Kanna's voice suddenly pulled him back.
"Kamisaka!"
Yuto looked down.
The little girl had returned carrying her mathematics workbook in both hands, and the pride overflowing from her face was impossible to miss.
"I finished it!"
Kanna lifted her chin triumphantly, her entire expression practically demanding, Praise me!
Yuto accepted the workbook in genuine surprise.
Had his little motivational trick that morning really worked this well?
He flipped through the pages and discovered that every single problem had indeed been completed.
There were no conveniently skipped sections and no half-finished pages hidden somewhere in the back.
He looked down at Kanna again.
The moment she noticed his gaze, the little dragon raised her chin even higher.
"Amazing. Kanna really did a great job."
Yuto did not hold back his praise.
He smiled warmly and rubbed her head, and judging from the little girl's expression, she was clearly enjoying every second of it.
Almost immediately, however, Kanna remembered the real reason she had worked so hard.
"Kamisaka isn't allowed to take back what you said before!"
Yuto smiled helplessly.
Of course he knew exactly what she meant.
There was only one thing capable of motivating Kanna to finish an entire mathematics workbook this efficiently.
His promise to take her to the amusement park.
"Don't worry. In a few days, we'll all go to the amusement park together. I promise I won't break my word."
"Mm!"
Kanna nodded happily, finally looking completely satisfied.
Yuto could not help smiling.
...
Time continued to pass, and before long most of the preparations for opening were finished.
There was not much time left before business began, so Yuto asked Tohru to give the restaurant one final cleaning.
Kanna, meanwhile, sat leisurely in a chair and watched Tohru work without showing the slightest intention of helping.
That put Tohru in a rather bad mood.
Before she could complain too much, however, the restaurant door suddenly opened.
Utaha walked inside.
She had clearly gone home, showered, and changed after their outing.
She was now wearing a blue-and-purple dress, while her freshly washed hair fell loosely around her shoulders and carried a faint, pleasant fragrance.
Beneath the skirt, her legs were still wrapped in the black stockings she seemed particularly fond of.
Her beauty was impossible to ignore.
Dressed like this, with her dark hair framing her face and the rich colors of the dress setting off her complexion, she looked almost like a rose blooming at the height of summer.
The moment she saw Yuto, however, her expression changed in a way that drew far more attention than her clothes.
Her lips curled into an incredibly sweet smile, so affectionate that anyone looking at her could practically taste the romance hanging in the air.
"Ka~mi~sa~ka~kun~"
Utaha deliberately stretched out every syllable.
Even a complete stranger would have recognized how unbearably affectionate the tone was.
Tohru and Kanna immediately frowned.
Yuto merely looked at Utaha with a helpless smile.
"Want something to eat? I'll make it for you."
There was an unmistakable indulgence in his voice.
Tohru and Kanna's frowns deepened.
Utaha practically skipped over to the counter, sat down, rested her chin against one hand, and stared intently at Yuto with eyes that seemed to sparkle like stars.
"I want tamagoyaki~"
Her voice was spoiled and affectionate, making her look unusually charming and cute.
Yuto smiled.
"All right."
With that, he turned and headed toward the kitchen.
Behind him, Tohru and Kanna slowly looked at each other.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Something had definitely happened between those two while they were out today.
Something the two dragons knew absolutely nothing about.
...
Tohru and Kanna clung to the edge of the counter, staring so intently at Utaha that their gazes almost seemed tangible.
Utaha, meanwhile, was happily eating the tamagoyaki Yuto had made for her, her face covered in a blissful smile.
She looked like a child completely immersed in some beautiful fairy tale and had no intention of hiding how happy she was.
Yuto quietly watched her from nearby, a faint smile resting on his face as well.
The two dragons immediately shifted their attention toward him.
He endured their stares for several seconds before finally turning around with a helpless expression.
"Have you stared enough?"
Tohru puffed out her cheeks.
Then she suddenly shot upright so quickly that she looked like a spring being released.
"That's not fair! When I became Boss's girlfriend, why didn't Boss make me something delicious?!"
The dragon girl glared indignantly at him.
Yuto rubbed his forehead.
After watching her brood for so long, he had expected her to suddenly reveal some profound objection to the situation.
Instead, her complaint was that he had not cooked something special for her when she declared herself his girlfriend.
Then again...
Should he really have expected anything else from Tohru?
Her thought process had always operated according to its own mysterious rules.
"Did you ask me to make anything back then?"
Yuto looked calmly at her.
Tohru immediately froze.
She carefully searched through her memories of that day.
Back then, she seemed...
Maybe...
Probably...
Not to have asked him for anything to eat at all.
"Ehehe... ehehehe..."
Unable to come up with a proper response, Tohru simply began pretending to be stupid.
Yuto sighed.
Back then, Tohru had hugged him in what felt more like playful mischief than a serious confession and declared that she wanted to become his girlfriend too.
At the time, Yuto had assumed she would eventually forget all about it.
Apparently, she remembered perfectly well.
Utaha, who had been quietly eating her tamagoyaki throughout the exchange, glanced first at Yuto and then toward Tohru.
"Miss Tohru is also Yuto-kun's girlfriend?"
Her tone was surprisingly calm, and there was even a faint smile on her lips.
"Ah, mm! That's right!"
Tohru nodded without the slightest hesitation.
Yuto immediately felt another headache coming on.
Utaha lightly covered her mouth and smiled, but the subtle changes in her expression did not escape him.
Her eyes blinked several times in quick succession, and her breathing shifted almost imperceptibly before she managed to steady herself again.
She had already prepared herself for something like this.
During the walk down the mountain, Utaha had thought through the reality of Yuto's situation and accepted that she was unlikely to be the only person beside him.
But understanding something in theory and actually facing it were two entirely different things.
Sharing the person you loved with someone else was never going to be simple.
Even if you made that choice willingly, accepting a position where you could never claim that person entirely for yourself required an enormous amount of courage, along with feelings deep enough to overcome the jealousy and frustration that inevitably came with it.
"Yuto-kun really does have a lot of girlfriends~"
Utaha did her best to suppress the strange emotions stirring inside her chest and keep her voice light.
Even so, the look she gave Yuto inevitably carried a trace of resentment.
"This seems pretty normal to me."
Before Yuto could decide how to respond to that look, Tohru spoke first.
The dragon girl tapped one finger against her chin with a completely serious expression.
Utaha stared at her blankly.
Tohru grinned.
"Among dragons, a powerful male can have more mates. That's one of our rules. I don't really understand why humans are so obsessed with having only one partner, but survival of the strongest is a truth that never changes!"
She clenched one fist and continued with tremendous confidence.
"The strong deserve to possess more! An exceptional male deserves more mates!"
For once, Tohru did not sound like the goofy maid who spent most of her days hovering around Yuto and worrying about dinner.
It was at moments like this that her original identity became impossible to forget.
Tohru was a dragon princess.
She had been born into a world governed overwhelmingly by strength, where the weak could be devoured by the strong and where power shaped nearly every relationship.
She had later fought on the front lines herself, carrying those values through experiences completely unlike anything an ordinary human could imagine.
Viewed from that perspective, her opinion was hardly strange.
Human society might reject those ideas, but that did not mean Tohru's worldview could simply be dismissed as irrational.
They had been raised in fundamentally different worlds, so expecting them to share identical values would have been absurd.
"And in my opinion, Boss qualifies under that rule too!" Tohru proudly planted both hands on her hips. "Boss is amazing, so I can allow Boss to have a second girlfriend besides me!"
She smiled with enormous satisfaction.
She also looked like a complete idiot.
Yuto promptly knocked her on the head.
Considering Tohru's durability, he did not need to worry about actually hurting her.
The knock at least succeeded in making her quiet down.
Utaha, meanwhile, let out a soft sigh.
Yuto heard it immediately.
His expression softened, apology and concern entering his eyes as he walked over to her.
"Sorry."
Anything longer would only have sounded like an excuse.
He was the one who had chosen this situation.
Utaha had done nothing wrong, and there was no reason she should have to bear the guilt for his own greed.
So rather than trying to justify himself, Yuto simply apologized and pulled her gently into his arms.
The fault lay with him.
Not with her.
He really was greedy.
Utaha remained still against him for a moment, but because she had already thought through this possibility before confessing, she recovered more quickly than she otherwise might have.
She had known what kind of path she was choosing.
She had already compared herself to a moth willingly flying toward a flame.
And if that was truly the path she had chosen, then she would not turn away merely because the heat was more painful than she had imagined.
The flame's light and warmth were what had drawn her in.
And those were what she had decided to pursue to the very end.