After that, for some reason, you ended up lending me a hand, Sena-senpai.

You stood in as a member of the audience, and I practiced some magic in front of you.

Yeah. That's one of the fundamentals of any craft, be it magic, idol work, modeling, or whatever else.

When you hole yourself up and practice something alone, you develop bad habits—which ends up rendering all the time you spent not just pointless, but outright harmful.

When it comes to improving, what you need is someone to scrutinize and evaluate your performance, and then offer you the guidance to proceed in the right direction.

I just happened to have slightly more free time than I know what to do with, and I have excellent taste no matter the field, so I was perfect for the job! ♪

Ughh... You sounded so sure of yourself and weirdly confident that I just took you at your word, without so much as a second thought.

I was even about to completely reevaluate my opinion of you. Like, "Wow, maybe Sena-senpai's actually pretty kind~⁠♪"

What do you mean "maybe"? I'm always kind, aren't I? Did you forget all those times I had your back last year?!

No, uh. This is kind of hard to say but, basically all you did was criticize me, Sena-senpai. I don't remember you giving me any real guidance or support.

Excuse me? Criticism is essential, isn't it? Back when I was studying ballet, my instructor would constantly lambast me to the point that it was dehumanizing!

Oh... So that experience shaped who you are today, Sena-senpai...

I'm totally fine with being treated like trash, but I think you should be kinder to the rest of your juniors.

Positive encouragement seems to be the best motivation to grow as a person.

But look here: to put it bluntly, I didn't have a single thing to praise you for, To-mo-ya-kun. You're obviously a novice at magic, and every single move you made was just stiff and awkward and clumsy.

I'm no magician, but I could still tell you were crap. You made it pretty obvious how all of your tricks were done. It was just painful to watch, don't you agree?

Ugh... It sounds like I'm just making excuses, but I swear I was way better when I was practicing by myself!

But the way you kept staring at me with that piercing gaze made me weirdly nervous⁠—

Hmm? Well, I do happen to be incredibly beautiful, but there's nothing I can do about that⁠♪

It was more like, I was terrified that you'd start scolding me no matter what I did.

I don't particularly intend to scold you. For the most part, I have nothing but support for hard-working kids.

Giving you straightforward critiques was simply me doing everything in my power to help you out—wouldn't you see that as an expression of my kindness?

But you didn't just stop at critiques alone, you'd want to physically get involved too...

When I was practicing that escape stunt, you insisted that I "let you try, just this once."

Well, it looked easy enough to me.

No, it's super difficult! I'm using real handcuffs for this escape stunt, like the ones the police use!

The whole point of the trick is to escape from something unescapable! That's what makes people go "Whoa!" or "Amazing!"

Well, I suppose... If handcuffs were easy to escape from, the police wouldn't always be using them to apprehend criminals, huh.

But still. They just looked like a pair of cheap and flimsy toys. On the off chance something went wrong, I figured it would be easy to bust out of them.

Excuse this, excuse that... What are you, a little kid?

Oh god, I'm so sorry for being so cheeky to you, Sena-senpai!

No, it's fine. A touch of rebelliousness is cute. You're the child of someone who "has a sharp tongue when he gets all riled up," aren't you, To-mo-ya-kun?

Ughh... Sorry, I guess I'm also kinda losing it, thanks to this bizarre situation.

Yeah. Who would have thought amidst the chaos of trying to get the handcuffs off we'd end up like this?

Yeah. On top of the two of us being handcuffed together⁠—

—We can't get the handcuffs off, either. But why? Didn't you have a key ready? Isn't it normal to have a key ready?

I've told you over and over again, we were so flustered trying to get the handcuffs off that I guess I lost the key in the scuffle.

So I think I might've dropped it in the same place I was practicing magic yesterday.

Worst case scenario, one of the cleaning staff handed it in. But are you certain that was really when you lost the key?

We searched all over that room yesterday until late at night, but couldn't find it anywhere.

Right, I know... That's what makes it such a mystery. I know I had a key ready, but it just disappeared.

Well, it didn't just disappear. You definitely just dropped it somewhere, or put it away in your pocket and forgot about it, I'm telling you.

That's what I believe too, and yet... While we were retracing our steps god knows how many times yesterday, we ended up running out of time.

We were making such a fuss that the security guards and other staff in the building came over to investigate...

Then you insisted that you "couldn't be seen like this!" and started dragging me away to flee the scene.

Well, I didn't have a choice in the matter. I've already said this before, but I do not want the rest of Knights to know that I've been staying out here instead of flying back to Italy.

Not to mention, if they saw me handcuffed to a cute younger boy, there'd probably be a big misunderstanding that I'm up to some funny business like kidnapping all over again.

It actually did seem like Nii~chan had that kind of misunderstanding when he saw us. Though I'm sure he'll understand if we explain the situation to him.

No, no! When blood rushes to Nazunyan's head, he won't listen to a word from anyone around him! And I have my doubts whether Shinkai is capable of a sensible conversation in the first place.

Not that it matters, but why were those two together anyways? They're a pretty unusual pair.

Don't know, don't care. Never mind what anyone else is up to—all that matters right now is sorting ourselves out, right?