Tokyo: After years of stagnation, the heiress of the yakuza arrives.

in the apartment.

Amamiya Kaoru watched the incredibly incredible scene before her in a somewhat silent manner.

Artificial respiration.

The reason it's considered miraculous is because the recipient of the artificial respiration wasn't a human, but a mouse.

On the living room floor, Big Black lay flat, its four little paws stiffly outstretched, belly up, with a bit of book scraps still stuck to its mouth. This was something Big Black had done during the day when it was starving and had defied its ancestors.

He chewed on the notebooks inside his schoolbag...

Unfortunately, he couldn't hold on and fainted from hunger.

Kuroba Shido knelt beside him, holding a straw in his hand. He aimed it at Kuroba's small mouth, took a deep breath, and blew it out in a cool way.

"call--"

Big Black's belly swelled up.

Kuroba Shido extended a finger and pressed it down precisely.

My stomach is flat again.

"call--"

It swelled up again.

Press again.

It deflated again.

Between each rise and fall, Amamiya Kaoru felt her medical ethics, common sense judgment, and professional dignity as a school doctor were being repeatedly rubbed into the ground.

"No, kid, what are you doing?"

Kuroba Shido looked up, his eyes red-rimmed, his expression one of utter grief: "Sensei, can't you see? I'm saving the breadwinner of a family!"

Amamiya Kaoru: "..."

Help.

What's wrong with this world?

You might say that Shido Kuroba is unhygienic, but he knows to use a straw to separate his mouth from the water, and he even seriously disinfects the straw opening with the cap of a soda bottle before blowing into it.

But let's say he's hygienic.

He was giving the mouse artificial respiration.

Is this reasonable?

This is not reasonable.

This is so reasonable that she, as the school doctor, wanted to call the police.

As Kuroba Shido played the whistle and pressed the keys, he cried as if he were about to lose his dearest friend: "Kuro, you have to hold on, Kuro, how can I live without you!!!"

Amamiya Kaoru looked at him: "Didn't you forget it at my house for a whole day?"

Shido Kuroba froze.

What nonsense! What kind of talk is this?!

He just made a small mistake that everyone makes!

The next second, his grief intensified: "Teacher, you don't understand. It's precisely because I made an unforgivable mistake that I now need to make amends through my actions. A father's love is like a mountain collapsing and the earth splitting open—do you understand?!"

Amamiya Kaoru: "Are you its father?"

Kurobashi said, "On a spiritual level."

Amamiya Kaoru remained silent.

She felt that she might be really too tired today, because she was actually listening attentively to a male college student talking about his spiritual father-son relationship with a mouse.

Beside them, Big Black's wife and Little Black peeked out from the opening of their backpacks.

Two black mice, one big and one small, quietly watched the big black mouse on the ground.

Little Black squeaked.

Big Black's wife also made a "squeak".

The voice sounded inexplicably sad. It was one thing for Big Black's wife, but Little Black's tears were truly crocodile tears. I wonder who was just having their "last supper" while hugging their father's tail.

What a filial son!

Kuroba Shido immediately broke down: "Stop yelling! Big Black isn't dead yet! Nobody is allowed to start the feast for it!"

Amamiya Kaoru: "..."

She no longer wanted to know how these rats usually held their family meetings.

After pressing the button twice more, Dahei suddenly twitched.

Kuroba Shido's eyes lit up.

"Big Black!"

Big Black's four little paws trembled, and it let out an extremely weak "Squeak..."

Kuroba Shido was so excited he almost threw his straw away: "He's alive! Sensei, he's alive! A medical miracle! A great moment in the history of Tokyo Rat Medicine!"

Amamiya Kaoru said expressionlessly, "You'd better not include this in your thesis."

Big Black rolled over, lay on the ground for a couple of seconds to recover, then twitched its nose and slowly crawled toward the crumbs of toasted bread that had fallen onto the table.

Shido Kuroba's expression froze, deeply moved.

"Big Black, you just got back from the brink of death, and the first thing you do is eat?"

Big Black picked up a crumb of steamed bun.

"squeak."

Human language... Hungry.

Kuroba Shido was silent for two seconds, then turned to Amamiya Kaoru: "Sensei, did you see that? That's vitality, that's the resilience of a poor family!"

Amamiya Kaoru: "All I saw was a rat that was almost stuffed to death starting to eat again."

Big Black's wife popped out of the backpack, first checked Big Black over, and then patted its head with her paw.

Little Black followed and crawled out, circled around Big Black, and finally went to pick up the scraps of roasted corn.

When Shido Kuroba saw the family of three start eating again, he finally breathed a sigh of relief, as if he had just completed a major heart and lung resuscitation operation on a rat.

Amamiya Kaoru leaned back on the sofa, the skin of the roasted chicken in her hand already half-cold.

"Kid, tell me, what exactly happened to it just now?"

Kuroba Shido looked at the bag of kebabs on the table, which had been gnawed to pieces, and said with a pained expression, "It was probably because he suddenly ate a lot after being hungry all day, which caused his life system to temporarily crash."

Amamiya Kaoru: "Speak like a human."

"I'm so full I'm dizzy," Kuroba Shido said.

Although I don't know if chewing on books counts as getting through it normally... I guess so. Books are paper, paper is trees, and trees are edible. Rounding it up, Dahei chewed on the tree a few times, so it shouldn't be a big problem.

reasonable.

Amamiya Kaoru put the roasted chicken skin back into the box and covered her face.

She was truly convinced.

She's a school doctor, and late at night she was watching a male college student try to save a mouse that had fainted from being stuffed with books in her apartment. If someone had told her about this three days ago, she would have just told them to go see a psychiatrist.

Now she only wants to ask one question.

Why at her house?

Kuroba Shido shooed the Daikuro family back into their backpacks and gave them a stern warning: "From now on, food intake is limited. Anyone who steals food again will be given a family ethics education session tomorrow."

Big Black, with crumbs of bread in its mouth, pretended not to hear.

As Amamiya Kaoru watched this scene, she suddenly remembered something, and her expression became somewhat unnatural.

"Kid, about what you said on the phone earlier..."

Kuroba Shido stopped moving.

coming.

Onodera Zan'e

He slowly turned his head, his eyes clear: "Teacher, why are you only telling me now?"

Amamiya Kaoru looked away: "How was I supposed to know it was this serious? She just came to the infirmary saying her shoulder was uncomfortable. I'm the school doctor, I can't just kick a student out, can I?"

Kuroba Shido stared at her: "And then?"

Amamiya Kaoru coughed. "Then she asked me if I had a boyfriend."

The Black Feather Warrior said, "..."

Amamiya Kaoru continued to stubbornly insist, "That's not surprising, is it? It's normal for girls to chat and ask about each other's relationship status."

Kuroba Shido said expressionlessly, "Teacher, are you and Onodera-senpai having a normal chat? This is your first real confrontation, and she comes up to you asking if you have a boyfriend. Is that considered a normal chat?"

Amamiya Kaoru: "Don't use the word 'confrontational' to describe doctor-patient communication!"

Kuroba Shido sneered: "Is she a patient?"

Amamiya Kaoru remained silent.

No.

That girl doesn't look like a patient at all.

The girl seemed to be treating her like a patient.

Amamiya Kaoru felt increasingly guilty, but she still stubbornly said, "Anyway, I've already said that I will never like a boy younger than me, especially the childish, troublesome, willful, or troublesome type."

Kuroba Shido looked at her.

"Teacher, why does your statement sound so precise in its scope of attack?"

Amamiya Kaoru: "You're overthinking it."

"I didn't think too much about it, and neither did my senior. She just wrote it down."

Amamiya Kaoru's face stiffened.

Kuroba Shido continued, "Amamiya-sensei, congratulations! You've evolved from a lackey to a key target in the upperclassman's social network... To put it bluntly, you're next!"

Amamiya Kaoru hugged the bottle of soda and shrank back a little on the sofa: "Don't scare me."

I wasn't trying to scare you.

"You're just trying to scare me!"

"Teacher, it's right that you're afraid now. If you weren't afraid, it would mean you know nothing about high-level games."

Amamiya Kaoru felt a chill run down her spine from his words and reached out to grab a skewer of grilled mantou slices to calm her nerves.

Big Black peeked out of the bag and stared longingly at the slice of steamed bun in her hand.

Amamiya Kaoru glared at it: "You're not allowed to eat it!"

Big Black: "Squeak."

Kuroba Shido's translation: "It said it had experienced life and death and needed nourishment."

Amamiya Kaoru: "Then tell it that it almost died because it was too nutritious."

hum.

Just then.

Shido Kuroba's phone vibrated.

His movements stopped instantly.

Amamiya Kaoru also stopped.

Both of them looked at the phone on the table at the same time.

Kuroba Shido reached out and cautiously turned on the screen. The two seemed to have a tacit understanding, a tacit understanding that opening the message would lead to something unfortunate, and they instinctively looked over.

The person who sent the message was Shimotsuki Takagi.

【Kuroba-kun.】

Is it convenient now?

Kuroba Shido stared at the two lines of text in silence.

Amamiya Kaoru leaned closer, and her expression froze for a moment when she saw the sender.

"Master?"

[Kuroba-kun, I'd like to confirm the details with you beforehand regarding our trip to the Miyazaki's house this weekend.]

Kuroba Shido was about to return.

Another message popped up.

There's one more thing.

Is Xiaoyu next to you?

Amamiya Kaoru: "???"