After putting on the black headphones, Touma Kazusa sat down at the piano bench.
The headphones' noise-cancelling effect was excellent—once they sealed over her ears, it was as if someone had deleted time itself. The noisy morning instantly transformed into the stillness of midnight.
For a moment, Kazusa could only hear her own heartbeat, beating faster and faster.
It was as if her heart—no, as if she—was expecting something.
Her gaze lifted to the boy in front of her, who was fiddling with the electronic keyboard. He was carefully removing the row of trick-ridden keys with a tool—because they were no longer needed.
After that, he started pressing the instrument's buttons.
Kazusa knew what those buttons were for. On a normal keyboard, they switched tones—bass, strings, synth, whatever you wanted.
But this one had been modified by Hara Kei. Only he knew what those buttons truly did.
Kazusa didn't ask. Not only because she'd lost to him before, but because she'd come to trust him in some strange, unexplainable way.
Putting on headphones, playing a melody that only she herself could hear—what was the point of that?
She didn't know. But she did know that it had meaning.
The man before her never did meaningless things. Her defeat was proof enough of that.
At that moment, Hara Kei's hands stopped moving. He looked up at her, made a small "K" gesture—indicating he was done adjusting.
Taking a deep breath, Kazusa emptied her mind.
Her slender fingers pressed down, beginning the first measure of "Der Erlkönig."
Inside the headphones, the piano sound matched her keystrokes exactly—so Hara Kei hadn't scrambled the keys this time.
But that didn't mean he hadn't done something.
"Der Erlkönig" was her competition piece in the piano tournament. She had spent hundreds of hours practicing it. So even after less than a measure, Kazusa immediately sensed that something was… off.
"What's going on?" she asked, stopping mid-phrase. She shifted one side of her headphones slightly, revealing the pale curve of her ear so she could hear his reply more clearly.
"I told you," Hara Kei said, stroking the sleek black instrument with faint affection, "if you won, I'd give you the legendary 'Noise-Free Piano.' This is it."
"..."
"It's impossible to build a truly 'noise-free piano' in the real world. It's like trying to create a surface that's completely frictionless—an ideal that exists only in imagination." He smiled faintly at her silence. "But while such a piano can't exist physically, people can still imagine what it would sound like."
"What you just heard, Kazusa, wasn't a recorded piano tone. It was a physically simulated one—generated entirely through mathematical modeling."
"...A simulation?"
"That's right. A 'noise-free piano' can't exist in reality—but in a virtual environment, data can make it possible. And what you just played was exactly that."
That was why the headphones were necessary—to shut out the real world completely, so that only the purest, most unadulterated piano sound could enter her ears.
Kazusa finally understood.
She adjusted her headphones properly again, biting her lip. Her delicate, pale face tensed into focus.
Both Hara Kei and Yukinoshita Yukino had seen that expression before.
It was the same one she wore on stage during the piano competition.
She began playing again—steady, focused, unwavering. Her fingers danced over the keys, pouring her full concentration and emotion into the performance, burning everything she had for that ephemeral yet tangible sound.
What kind of sound filled her headphones at that moment? Hara Kei couldn't know. The faint traces that escaped from her headset mingled with the surrounding air, turning into the kind of ordinary notes one could hear anywhere.
Now, finally, Kazusa understood what she had been chasing all along—the so-called "pure, flawless piano tone."
And that was—
"…Awful." Kazusa stopped playing and gave a brutally sharp verdict.
Yes. Just as water doesn't taste better the purer it is, piano music isn't more beautiful the cleaner it becomes.
In fact, Hara Kei himself had tested it before. That sound—thin, lifeless, utterly devoid of warmth—was nothing like the beauty people imagined.
"So that's what I've been striving for all this time? This dull, empty sound?" Kazusa's fingers tapped idly on the keyboard. Each tone that rang out seemed to mock the effort she had poured in for so long.
But instead of frustration, a strange sense of release washed over her. It felt like she had finally found the answer she'd been chasing all along.
She pulled off her headphones, unplugged the cord, and turned around to beckon Yukinoshita Yukino over. Then she scooted aside, leaving half the bench open.
The meaning was clear.
Yukino stepped forward quietly and sat beside her.
Two high-caliber beauties—two faces like mirror images of grace and resolve—sat side by side, like twin lotus flowers blooming from the same stem. The scene was breathtaking, almost dreamlike.
"I'll take the upper part," Kazusa said, noticing Yukino's faintly puzzled look. "That means I'll play the right-hand part, and you take the left. Sound good?"
Yukino nodded silently.
And music began once again.
What were they playing, you ask?
Well, Yukino only knew one song, didn't she?
The noise-free tone existed only within the headphones. Once they were removed, what came from the keyboard was the ordinary, imperfect, mixed sound of real music.
But that was fine.
Because that was the real music—the kind that moves people, the kind that's truly beautiful.
Happy moments are always fleeting. In what felt like an instant, the duet reached its finale.
They returned once again to that familiar cliff in the score.
Without the scrambled keys, Yukino couldn't complete that section, and Kazusa couldn't play it alone either.
But neither showed any sign of stopping. As they entered the final passage, Kazusa took Yukino's hand—as if to play together, literally hand-in-hand.
Both of them turned their gaze toward Hara Kei.
He understood instantly. Facing them across the keyboard, the layout was reversed from his angle—but that hardly mattered.
He placed his fingers on the keys as well.
After all, there was another way to conquer this "death-cliff" finale.
If one person couldn't play it—
Then just have three people play it together.
..
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