Mizuki overbalanced the boy, shoving him back, and sprang to her feet. Her side was blazing with pain, agony bolting through her ribs as she tossed her hair back and lunged again. Mochi was beside her, clawing and yowling like a miniature tiger. If she had been thinking—and at this point she wasn’t—she would have thought how happy she was that Mochi was with her. Dangerous situation or not, there was no one in the world she would rather face this battle with. Sucking in a breath, she bared her teeth. 

The blows were coming slower now and farther between as the crowd thinned and the beaten fell. Mizuki was squaring off with two foes, neither of which seemed keen on getting close. They were dodging back and forth, looking for openings, but she had managed to work them into a narrow space between a tall dumpster and a boarded-up shop. Her fingers twitched and she stepped into a punch that the thug wove under and the momentum carried her shoulder into his teeth. Stunned, he dropped back, as Mizuki turned on the remainder. The shoulder hadn’t been intentional, but it had worked and that was all that mattered. 

Mochi sank his needle-sharp teeth into the boy’s leg. The boy tried to kick him away; after a few attempts he managed to knock the ghostly cat away. Mizuki had advanced in the intervening seconds, wrapping both hands firmly around the boy’s throat and ramming his back into the concrete wall. She shoved, hard, then pulled him back and smashed him into the wall again. He dropped limply to the ground. 

The girl and the cat backed off, forming a rough triangle with the redhead and the dark-haired boy. Mochi, perched on Mizuki’s shoulder, pushed his head against her ear. He could sense the end of the melee, even as the assailants stumbled to their feet and lurched away at an unsteady pace. Eyes slitted, Mizuki watched them go. She made no move to follow. 

At some point in the fight her wounds had begun to throb less, had gone from bursts of knife-edged pain to muted pulses of discomfort. She felt under her uniform for the ribs she knew she had broken—her fingers froze mid-probe. There was no fracture. She had [i]felt[/i] the bone give way and had resigned herself to a trip to the hospital. Brows knit, Mizuki removed her hand and turned to her impromptu allies. 

The boy with the slick black hair introduced himself as Kurohana Ibuki. As far as Mizuki remembered, he went to her school, but she wasn’t certain if he was in her class. The other boy, Hitashi Smith, seemed leery of Kurohana. 

The silence stretched on for a beat before she cleared her throat. “My name is Ikino Mizuki.”