Guy sat on the lounge sofa, training his grip with his left hand.
His equipment wasn't a grip trainer-it was a kitchen nutcracker he had borrowed from the proprietress while eating earlier.
He repeatedly squeezed and released the nutcracker in his left hand, keeping a rhythm as steady as the dripping water clock he had heard in the cave at the Ancient Riverbed.
Chisen sat in the armchair beside him, his right leg resting on the coffee table and a chilled towel from the proprietress draped over his knee.
Neither spoke much. They only occasionally glanced up at the shogi game.
Kakashi sat by the lounge window, Paradise of Passion back in his hands.
This time, he wasn't spying on anyone. Beyond the window lay a nighttime view of the low mountains, their trees dark beneath the moonlight, with the occasional firefly flitting through their shadows.
He read a few pages, then looked up at the fireflies outside. After watching for a while, he slipped his bookmark into page forty-eight.
"Fireflies," he said.
"What?" Guy hadn't heard him clearly.
"There are fireflies outside." Kakashi gestured toward the window with his chin.
Guy turned to look. Several fireflies drifted slowly above the camellia bushes, their greenish-white lights tracing irregular arcs through the shadows at the foot of the mountain.
Chisen turned to look as well.
The fireflies' lights reflected in his glasses, drifting across the lenses. They were nothing like the pulsing lights of the fragments he had seen beside the main root beneath Pheasant Feather Valley. Those had been artificial, chakra luminescence compressed into a crystal lattice. These were alive, their cool light moving freely through the night sky.
The two kinds of light were fundamentally different, yet it took him nearly a minute to fully separate them in his