"You said you were 'Disciple of the Magician'..."
The man who opened the door looked Tooru Amuro up and down, his astonishment impossible to hide.
"What is it? Is there a problem?" Amuro curled his fingers and nudged the arm of his glasses with his knuckles, wearing a slightly affected smile. "I believe I mentioned earlier that I'd be coming today..."
He tilted his head and shot a meaningful look at Sonoko Suzuki, who was inexplicably excited. The fake smile on his face became even faker.
With acting as incapable of concealing her emotions as Sonoko's, he could already guess what her style of talking online was probably like.
"Uh, you did say that..."
The smile on the man's face turned a little awkward as he looked toward the people approaching at the sound.
"What, Disciple of the Magician isn't a girl?" Naoko Kuroda, wearing glasses, widened her eyes. "Impossible. Someone who talks so cutely and loves adding sentence particles, how could they possibly..."
"Huh?!" Toshiyuki Hamano, standing beside her, let out an extremely exaggerated gasp. "What? So you completely ignored my topics because you really came here as a man? Ah, damn it, how could this be? You clearly..."
He exchanged incredulous looks with Yoshinori Ara, who had gone to open the door.
Disciple of the Magician was an amateur who had only recently become active in the group. In an enthusiast circle with such a strong professional focus, she normally should not have gotten close enough to everyone to sign up for an offline gathering.
But she spoke and acted briskly, without any of that pretentious keyboard-warrior attitude. Combined with the worldly air that only someone from a well-off family could possess, revealed between her words, her lively style had quickly made her one of the active members—and