After handing Sabo over to the Revolutionary Army and exchanging intelligence with them, Mousse returned to Shimotsuki Village, only to be given quite a fright. Kuina had actually fallen down the stairs!
Fortunately, Mousse had known he could not follow her around twenty-four hours a day, so he had specifically assigned the colorless, transparent, and hard-to-notice Homie "Formless" to secretly keep watch over Kuina. This had finally prevented the tragedy from the original timeline: before her head could hit the ground, the soft Formless cushioned her fall, and the young swordswoman was merely frightened.
Kuina thus learned that Mousse had been having someone watch her the entire time. Though grateful that he had saved her life, she could not help feeling somewhat embarrassed and annoyed.
But Mousse had no interest in peeping on a little girl who was flat as a washboard from top to bottom. Seeing her reaction, he immediately curled his lip and said:
"What's there to look at on a washboard? I only wanted it to see whether you were doing as I told you. Who knew you'd be unlucky enough to nearly fall to your death at the bottom of a staircase and become the shame of all swordsmen?"
Kuina was so furious that she raised Wado Ichimonji and tried to smash Mousse with it, but naturally, it was a futile effort.
Still, amid their scuffle, Mousse came up with an explanation for why he, from thousands of miles away, had been paying such excessive attention to Kuina. The reason was readily available.
"You see your younger self in me?" Kuina immediately accepted the explanation, then unconsciously began to feel lingering fear. *If Mousse hadn't been nearby that night, if I'd really given up, then he wouldn't have continued paying attention to me, much less helped