…what…!? I turned my head to see the Black☆Star I ignored come up and stun me in the back with an elbow strike. Bringing his opposite hand under, he punched me. He punched me hard. I could feel him forcing the power of his soul through my body in order to deal the maximum amount of damage; the energy ruptured and bruised organs.

I took a step forward to right my balance and turned to face Black☆Star in full. Every movement I made spoke of excruciating pain. “…What was that…?” I found myself saying. How did he know what to do in order to trick me? How did he manage to fool me with a reverse decoy trick?

“It’s about time you started paying attention to me…” Black☆Star’s grin felt malicious. “I figured, you weren’t paying attention to me, but you were listening to Tsubaki. So if we switched places, you’d get distracted by her. And I was right!”

…he made the right plan for all the wrong reasons, in other words. He thought that I was so deliberately not paying much attention to him earlier that when he swapped with Tsubaki, I’d stop paying attention to the real him long enough for that sneak attack to go through. What kind of self-centered idiot makes a plan like that?!

Who else but Black☆Star?

I exhaled slowly and tasted iron, but did not spit the blood out. Already, my injured body was repairing itself. To others, what might qualify as a killing blow only slowed me down by a few seconds.