Every Sunday at 2 PM, Sakura would appear at the "Koran" tea ceremony classroom in Ginza. Today, she was wearing a light pink kimono, kneeling on the tatami mat. Before practicing the usucha (thin tea) preparation, the arc of her wrist as she flipped it was as precise as a mechanical clock. Just as the tea was poured into the bowl, forming a perfect whirlpool, the sliding door of the classroom was suddenly pulled open.
"Sorry, I'm late." The new female student bowed in apology, with a hairpin bearing the family crest of the Akasuna Group in her hair bun.
Sakura tapped the chasen (tea whisk) twice against the edge of the bowl, and a signature smile she'd practiced for three months appeared: "Your seat is here." As her kimono sleeve slid down, it revealed fresh needle pricks on the inside of her wrist—leftover muscle strain from the Glock disassembly training the previous day.
At the back of "Koran" was a storage room not open to the public. When Sakura pulled open the sliding door, Ryuichi Sato was placing gun parts on the tea table; the hem of his kimono was stained with gunpowder debris.
"Today's task," he pushed over a red sandalwood tea tray with a disassembled HK USP pistol on it, "assemble the gun blindfolded."
Sakura took off the silk scarf from her waist, folded it, and blindfolded herself. Her fingers brushed over the cold metal parts, gentle yet precise, as if touching tea utensils. The click of the spring sliding into the rail and the rustle of the distant chasen stirring tea created a wonderful harmony.
"Twenty-three seconds." Sato pressed the stopwatch, four seconds faster than last week. "Now attach the silencer."
Sakura's fingertips paused slightly when they touched the cylinder at the edge of the tea tray—it wasn't a regular accessory. She felt for the threaded interface and found it needed to be rotated three and a half times counterclockwise to lock. In the darkness of the blindfold, she suddenly remembered what the tea ceremony teacher had said the previous day about the "gyakute point" technique.
"The daughter of the Akasuna Group's second-in-command," she asked while assembling, "was she deliberately assigned to me?"
Sato's teacup hovered in mid-air. The tea reflected Sakura as she took off the blindfold—there was a bit of gunpowder on the corner of her mouth, like a high school girl who'd sneaked chocolate.
After closing on Wednesday, Sakura stayed at the café to practice a new skill. She hid the shooting target behind a "Sweet Magical Girl" poster, and each time she fired, she timed it with the rhythm of the coffee machine's grinding.
"Breathe," she told herself. The moment she pulled the trigger, the coffee machine just let out a hissing steam spurt. The bullet passed through the tip of the magical girl's wand on the poster, leaving a fifth overlapping bullet hole in the bullseye.
In front of the locker room's surveillance screen, Ryuichi Sato and Kobayashi watched Sakura take off her maid uniform splashed with coffee stains. Her back skin was like fine white porcelain under the light, except for a coin-sized bruise near her shoulder blade—leftover from last week's close combat training.
"A natural-born killer," Kobayashi passed over a glass of whiskey, "but why does she insist on wearing that ridiculous..."
"That's her most terrifying weapon," Sato pulled up another screen: Sakura was practicing smiling in the mirror while loading bullets into the pistol magazine. She changed her smile with each bullet loaded, seven expressions from shy to bright, exactly matching the "seven situational smiles" in the café's service manual.
Yuki Nakajima, the daughter of the Akasuna Group's second-in-command, came to buy macarons every Friday. Today she chose a sky-blue gift box, and Sakura wrapped the ribbon around it one extra loop.
"This is the new matcha flavor," Sakura handed over the gift box, her fingertips lingering on a spot at the bottom of the box for 0.5 seconds, "For someone important?"
Yuki blushed: "It's for my father's birthday..."
At 10 PM that night, an explosion occurred at a certain Akasuna Group stronghold. Firefighters found a burnt and deformed gift box in the ruins, with traces of C4 plastic explosive in the inner.
While Sato was watching the news live in the safe house, Sakura was making new macarons in the kitchen. The way she sifted almond flour was surprisingly similar to the steps of disassembling a grenade—both required removing unstable factors first.
"Did you improve the recipe?" Sato noticed some red particles in the batter.
"Strawberry seeds," Sakura squeezed the piping bag, and the pink batter formed perfect circles on the baking tray, "to enhance the explosion... I mean, the bursting effect."
When the first batch of macarons came out of the oven, Sakura's phone received a message. She glanced at the screen—it was a selfie from Yuki Nakajima, with a hospital ward in the background. The girl had a bandage around her head but was still holding that sky-blue gift box.
"What a pity," Sakura licked the cream off her fingertip, "I clearly reminded her to finish it within three days."
Sato suddenly grabbed her wrist. Under the light, he saw the calluses on her fingers—not the hard ones from holding a gun for years, but the translucent horny layers on specific knuckles unique to sugar pulling. The perfect disguise.
"At next week's tea party," he let go, "it's time to teach you to mix cyanide into matcha."