Hariya stopped scribbling in her notebook and stared up at Ikiba. "A gun or a sword? How does that work exactly."
Ikiba held up his right hand, palm facing upward. Then he made a gun gesture with his fingers and pointed it at his head. "Evo."
A soft click echoed in the air, and suddenly the weight in his hand was real. The gun materialized from a faint shimmer of dark energy — sleek, black, and slightly too elegant to be a normal firearm. It had faint markings along the barrel that looked almost organic, like veins.
Hariya's pen dropped.
She stared at the weapon for a full three seconds before her scientific instincts kicked back in and she was leaning forward, eyes wide behind her glasses, nearly falling off her stool.
"Fascinating. The materialization process — was that a phase transition? It looked almost like condensation but the energy signature was—" She caught herself, then looked up at him with flushed cheeks. "Can I touch it?"
"It won't let you," Ikiba said simply. He tilted it slightly so she could see the markings better. Up close, they pulsed faintly, like a slow heartbeat. "Evo doesn't like being handled by anyone else. Last person who tried ended up with a burn shaped like a handprint for two weeks."
Hariya immediately pulled her hand back, then reached for her notebook instead, scribbling furiously. "Evo. That's what you called it. Is that its name or a command?"
"Both," Ikiba said. "It named itself, actually. I just learned to say it right."
Hariya's pen paused. "It named itself."
"Spirits tend to have opinions."
She looked like she was simultaneously thrilled and deeply unsettled by this information, which Ikiba was beginning to understand was just her default expression when confronted with something outside her existing models.
"How long have you had it?" she asked.
"About a year. Since the curse attached itself to me." He dismissed it with a casual flick of his wrist — the gun dissolving back into that faint shimmer before vanishing entirely. "I didn't ask for it. Walked into the wrong place at the wrong time and something decided I was a suitable host."
"Host," Hariya repeated, writing the word down and underlining it twice. "So it lives inside you."
"In my right arm, mostly. I can feel it when it's restless." He flexed his fingers absently. "It gets restless around things it wants to hunt."
Hariya went very still.
"Is it restless right now?" she asked carefully.
Ikiba stared at his arm then shook his head. "No, I think it reacts to spirits and since you said Alternates belong to another dimension i don't think it ever will, unless if it saw an Alternate and maybe develop a hunger towards it sure."
Hariya paused with interest. The existence of things other than Alternates means that this world has deeper secrets. She shook her head put that thought at back of her mind, maybe after dealing with hers and Ikiba's problem, she could explore them.
"Is that all?." Hariya asked as she looked up.
Ikiba nodded and dispersed Evo. "Yeah but from what I understand, Sentient spirits can take on human form and form contracts with humans, my curse is Sentient but it can take on the form of an object which is how some spirits...well are. It's a Neutral curse so it can use the elements of other Spirit's, though i have yet to test that since It needs to devour a significant amount of the same type of spirit to do that."
Hariya paused. "That's quite the info dump."
Ikiba paused as he ate the last of his food. "Now, before break is over and we go back to class, let's get to know each other. You seem like someone cute and interesting and i don't think you like speaking in that scientific tone that much. Also I may ask for your number later."
Hariya froze, her pen hovering mid-air. The transition from discussing spectral taxonomy to a personal compliment was a "temporal anomaly" she hadn't prepared for. A slow, deep crimson creeped up from the collar of her lab coat, reaching the tips of her ears.
"Cute?" she squeaked, the word coming out an octave higher than intended. She quickly adjusted her goggles, pulling them down over her eyes to hide her flustered expression. "That—that is a subjective qualitative observation, Ikiba-san. Not a scientific fact."
Despite her protest, she didn't turn away. Instead, she let out a small, huffed breath and clicked her pen closed. "And for your information, the 'scientific tone' is a defensive linguistic layer. It's harder for people to make fun of you if they can't understand half the words you're using."
She looked out over the school yard, her shoulders dropping an inch. The intense, clinical researcher persona softened, revealing the lonely girl who wore a costume to feel safe.
"But... you're right," she admitted quietly. "It gets exhausting. Constantly calculating variables, looking for reflections in windows, checking if my own shadow is moving at the right speed. Sometimes I just want to eat a strawberry crepe without wondering if the sugar rush will dull my reaction time."
Ikiba watched her, leaning back on his elbows. "Then let's do that. This weekend. No notebooks, no goggles. Just crepes."
Hariya blinked, her scientific brain momentarily short-circuiting. "Is that... a request for a collaborative social outing? Commonly referred to as a 'date'?"
Hariya pouted.
Hariya's pout was less of a rejection and more of a defensive maneuver, her cheeks puffing out like a startled hamster. She looked down at her white-washed bento box, suddenly finding the grain of the plastic extremely interesting.
"A 'date' carries a high probability of emotional variables I haven't accounted for in my current schedule," she mumbled, though her fingers were nervously twisting the hem of her lab coat. "And besides... what if she shows up? If my Alternate sees me enjoying a strawberry crepe, she might interpret it as a psychological opening. A moment of vulnerability."
Ikiba let out a soft snort, standing up and brushing the crumbs off his trousers. "Then I'll just have to shoot her with a ghost gun, won't I? Or at least distract her with a very confusing conversation about spectral taxonomy while you finish your dessert."
He held out a hand to help her up. Hariya stared at his palm—the same hand that had just manifested a pulse-pounding weapon of curse energy—and then slowly, tentatively, placed her smaller hand in his. Her skin was cool, but her grip was firm.
"You're very... persistent for a transfer student," she noted, allowing him to pull her to her feet. She quickly snatched up her notebook, hugging it to her chest like a shield.
"Fine. But under one condition: if we encounter something strange, we split the bill."
Ikiba smiled. "Don't worry, I'll make sure to protect you."
"T-Thats not what I meant?!!." Hariya's face went from a faint pink to a full-blown supernova red. She flailed her free arm, the white sleeve of her lab coat whipping through the air like a distress signal. "Protection is a collaborative effort! I have seventeen defensive protocols, three of which involve high-frequency sonic emitters in my goggles! I am not a—a 'damsel' in need of a tactical escort!"
Ikiba just chuckled, the sound low and easy, which only seemed to make her flustered indignation spike. He didn't let go of her hand immediately, and for a second, the scientific genius forgot how to process the tactile data of someone actually holding onto her.
"Protocol eighteen," Ikiba said, his voice dropping to a playful whisper as they moved toward the rooftop door. "Accepting a compliment without over-analyzing the physics of it."
"There is no Protocol eighteen!" she hissed, though she didn't pull her hand away until they reached the stairwell.
The rooftop door swung shut behind them, cutting off the afternoon breeze. Their footsteps echoed down the concrete stairwell as they descended toward the classroom corridor.
Neither of them noticed the scuff marks on the wall at the third landing. Three shallow gouges, roughly the height of a standing person, as if someone had leaned there a long time.
The marks were still warm.
The rest of the school day passed without incident, which Hariya logged as statistically suspicious.
She sat through chemistry, calculus, and literature with her usual quiet diligence, but her pen moved slightly slower than normal, and twice she caught herself glancing at the seat diagonal to hers where Ikiba was currently failing to look like he was paying attention to the assigned reading.
He was watching the windows.
Not obviously. Just a flicker of his eyes every few minutes, casual enough that nobody else would register it. But Hariya registered it, because she did the same thing, and she recognized the practiced disinterest of someone who'd learned to surveil a room without appearing to.
She wrote in the margin of her notebook: He checks sight lines. Habitual. Not new behavior.
Then, underneath it: We are the same kind of careful.
She underlined it once, then closed the notebook before she could analyze why that sentence made her feel something she didn't have a clean word for.
The school day wrapped up, the classroom emptying out in the usual rush of scraped chairs and half-finished conversations. Yuta dropped into the chair beside Ikiba with the effortless confidence of someone who collected acquaintances the way others collect bottle caps.
"Ikiba, right? The name's Yuta. I'm the club leader of the Paranormal Club." He jerked his thumb toward Hariya, who was methodically packing her bento into her bag with the focused precision of someone defusing a device. "I saw you two talking earlier. Figured she might've pointed you our way. Fair warning though — the club only has two members including me, and the other one barely counts because she mostly comes to steal our club room's electricity for her experiments."
"That is a deliberate misrepresentation," Hariya said without looking up. "I come for the isolated space and the surplus outlets. The electricity theft is incidental."
"She's the other member," Yuta confirmed to Ikiba.
Ikiba looked between them. "So you want me to be member number three."
"I want you to be member number three and also ideally someone who actually believes in the stuff we investigate." Yuta leaned forward, elbows on the desk, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial register that somehow still managed to carry.
He had the kind of energy that filled rooms without trying — broad grin, easy posture, the sort of person who made everything feel slightly more like an adventure than it probably was. "Hariya's great but she spends half our meetings trying to disprove things. Last month I told her that I saw a girl transform into a bird but she said that was biologically impossible!!?."
Ikiba glanced at Hariya who shrugged again and returned to what she was doing.
Ikiba turned back to Yuta. "Well that is indeed biologically impossible, but what kind of bird did it turn into?."
"A Phoenix." Yuta declared with upmost confidence.
Ikiba simply smiled. What he described...didn't really sound like a spirit but it felt like something close.
"You may have just hallucinated but if you see her again maybe not." It was better to make sure the normal people don't get involved in supernatural events.
Yuta deflated but quickly sprang back up. "Ugh come on you too!!. Well that aside, I'm glad Hariya found a friend she particularly likes and also a potential club member."
Hariya turned around with her bag slung over her arms. "Don't get it wrong Yuta–San, we are in a beneficial partnership that gives me information on my current research."
Yuta smiled brightly. "Well that's great, anyways I'm going home, see you all tomorrow. Oh and we have club meetings by Tuesdays and Thursday's after school be sure to be there."
After saying that, Yuta left the classroom leaving only Hariya and Ikiba there. The rest of the students have already left.
Ikiba stared at Hariya for a moment before taking his bag and stepping beside her. "So shall we go?."
Hariya turned up to look at Ikiba and nodded.