That evening, after finishing dinner, taking a bath, and curling up in bed, Hoshino Haruka started her usual pre-sleep “homework,” following the routine she had developed over the past month.
Tonight’s homework was flipping through the photo album.
Actually, she had already skimmed through the album before, but back then she mainly looked at photos—still images of things that had already happened.
Videos, on the other hand, were fluid; they showed “what Hoshino Haruka used to do.”
At the edge of the album, she noticed a few video files.
From the thumbnails, they showed the practice room mirror and Haruka wearing her training clothes.
She randomly opened one.
The camera angle was a bit tilted.
Clearly, Haruka had set her phone somewhere to film herself, noticed it was crooked afterward, but couldn’t be bothered to redo it.
The practice room lights were bright, the wooden floor reflective, and the mirrored wall took up most of the frame.
In the video, Haruka wore a black sports tank top and shorts, her hair tied in a high ponytail, practicing dance in front of the mirror.
It was the choreography for a single she had released a few months ago.
The tempo was fast, the moves demanding, with several sections requiring quick turns and weight shifts.
In the video, she danced smoothly, her body seemingly led by the music, each movement perfectly hitting the beat.
The power and range were pleasing to the eye.
Haruka watched it twice.
The first time for the content, the second time for the details.
Then she paused the video at a specific pose, got out of bed, and stood in front of the bedroom mirror.
“Alright. Let’s try.”
She took a deep breath, replayed the image she had just seen in her mind, and attempted one move.
Raise right hand from the side, arc it overhead.
At the same time, step forward with the left foot, shift weight from the right leg to the left—
Thud.
Her knee hit the corner of the bed.
“Ow—that hurts, hurts, hurts… so painful!”
She crouched down, clutching her knee with a grimace.
“Looks like the corner of the bed and my knee have reached an unfriendly consensus.”
Haruka rubbed her knee and stood up again.
“One more time.”
This time, she opened the video and set the playback speed to 0.5x.
She didn’t follow the music or the video’s rhythm; instead, she broke down each move and executed them one by one.
“Raise right hand—”
Her right hand moved on its own.
Her body seemed to know exactly what angle to lift to.
The rotation of the shoulder, the angle of the wrist, the direction of the fingertips…
The first move.
Success.
“Raise left hand—”
The second move went smoothly too.
Haruka immediately issued the next command to step forward with the left foot.
“Then left foot steps forward… Huh? Didn’t I just say left foot out loud? Why did my right foot come out?”
She withdrew the move and tried again.
This time her brain gave a clear command—
“Right hand and left foot. Simultaneously. Now.”
Right hand: “Roger. Executing immediately.”
Left foot: “Roger… uh, wait. Did you say ‘simultaneously’ or ‘in sequence’? Let me confirm.”
As a result, she almost stuck out both arms and both legs at the same time.
“…”
She refused to give up.
She tried a few more times, but the result was almost always the same.
She could perfectly replicate a single move, but when it came to compound moves involving two or more body parts at the same time, there was always a “time lag.”
A time lag between hand and foot, between upper and lower body, even between breathing and movement.
To put it metaphorically, this mech’s weapon system responded quickly, but the propulsion system and the weapon system weren’t being piloted by the same person.
One was Pilot A, the other Pilot B, and both thought they were the main pilot.
“Guess Pacific Rim wasn’t lying.”
Facing the mirror, she then danced for over a minute based on memory.
Most of the basic moves had the correct form—her body really did remember.
But the rapid transition parts were all stutter-steps.
The two sections with small jumps caused her feet to slip, and she almost fell.
There was also a head-turning move requiring a quick two-and-a-half rotation; after doing it, she felt dizzy for several seconds.
All because of one turn, she stood there leaning against the wall, feeling the world slowly spinning on its own.
“What is this, buy one get one free? Did I accidentally draw a ‘High-Speed Escape’ card and get three ‘Stun’ cards stuffed in?”
Haruka decided to lie in bed and rest for a while.
Then she began to recall: in today’s interview, most of the things she did well were static—standing posture, hand gestures, speech, facial expressions.
Those were “frozen frames,” things her body’s muscle memory could handle easily.
Because frozen frames only required the right instant.
But dancing was a flow—dozens of individual movements linked together in a precise sequence, forming a smooth chain.
Each link in the chain had to reach the correct position at the exact time.
Miss one beat, and everything fell apart.
Her problem now was this: her body remembered what each link was supposed to do, but the “transition animation” between links was lost.
If she tried to forcefully replicate those moves, she would end up like that zombie game dog that could climb walls—similar in appearance but not in spirit.
In plain English: when she danced, it looked like she was moving at 0.5x speed.
No matter how good the song was, it would turn into a slog.
“Alright.”
Haruka lay in bed for a while, letting her heartbeat calm down.
Then she decided to try something else—singing.
After all, an idol’s main job was singing and dancing, right?
Singing came first, so it had to be the most important.
Plus, singing didn’t require moving her legs, and it was less likely to make her bump into furniture.
She thought for a moment, then opened her mouth and sang one line from the chorus of Haruka’s debut song, “Start Line.”
“—Hashiridase, kono michi no saki e—”
The moment the sound flowed out of her throat, she paused.
“Huh. I’m actually this good at singing? No, that’s a dumb question.”
She realized she had asked a very stupid question.
She was Hoshino Haruka now.
If Hoshino Haruka sang her own song and it wasn’t good, that would be the problem.
But she also vaguely felt that it wasn’t just as simple as “of course the original singer sounds good.”
She opened her phone’s voice recorder, sang two more lines, then played it back—
The pitch was flawless.
Breath support was solid.
Her voice was clear but not sharp.
The tail of each note ended naturally—not dragging, not abrupt.
“…Yeah, I really do sing well.”
So, striking while the iron was hot, she sang the chorus section of Haruka’s representative song, “Himawari.”
“—Himawari no you ni, sora wo miagete—”
It was a strange feeling.
When she sang, she didn’t need to think about where the pitch was, where to breathe, which word to emphasize, which to soften.
The moment she opened her mouth, her vocal cords took over automatically.
And as a fan, she had listened to those songs hundreds—if not thousands—of times; she could already sing them all.
Whether she sang them well was a different story.
Every rise and fall, every transition of the melody was engraved in her mind.
When the brain’s memory overlapped with the vocal cords’ muscle memory, the result was astonishing.
After finishing, she opened a music app and compared the recorded version of her singing with the original studio version.
Then she noticed a very interesting difference.
In the original, Haruka sang with a feeling of “the sun”—bright, warm, illuminating everything.
Her own version seemed to have something extra added.
She didn’t know how to describe it—more like the same photo with a different filter applied.
The content was the same, but the lighting had changed.
“Probably because the person singing has different shadows in her heart.”
She shook off that thought and saved the recording.
Then she leaned against the pillow and hummed random songs without accompaniment.
As she hummed, a melody popped into her head—a song from a tower defense mobile game she used to play.
In that game, there was a character whose code name was exactly the same as her own name: Haruka.
She was the kind of player who skipped the story, “leaping past her own life.”
But because this Haruka had a very high idle combat power, she brought her along for every level.
Over time, having grown attached, her simp instincts kicked in. Eventually, she went from indifference to fandom and even took the time to learn about the character’s story and design.
But if she had to name the most attractive thing about this character, it would be the official MV released for her.
In the MV, because the on-site sound equipment malfunctioned, the singer was “forced” to clap and hum an unaccompanied segment.
The melody was simple, but catchy to the point of insanity.
She could recite those lyrics backward—
“Tell Me👏 Tell Me👏
Kagami👏 yo Kagami👏
Ichiban👏 Suki na👏 Watashi👏👏 ni naru no👏👏
Tell Me👏 Tell Me👏
Kagami👏 yo Kagami👏👏
Ichiban👏 Suki na👏 Watashi👏 ni naru no”
She remembered once at Ritsu’s place, they played this song on loop for about an hour.
Ritsu’s reaction first was silent endurance, then deep breaths to suppress himself, and finally, he almost threw her phone out the window.
Another time, while looping this song, her phone accidentally fell into the crack of the bed.
Luckily he fished it out in time, or else he would have had to listen to it all night.
Now, she tried clapping the beat herself and humming it casually, using Haruka’s voice—
“Tell me, tell me, kagami yo kagami—”
(‘Mm. Singing “Haruka”‘s song with Haruka’s voice. Double Haruka, double the joy.’)
And the lyrics themselves were amazing—”Mirror, oh mirror, let me become the me I like best.”
Wasn’t she now, every day, facing the mirror, trying to become that “her” she liked the most?
Although who exactly that “her I like best” referred to was something even she wasn’t sure of: Was it Hoshino Haruka?
Or some new existence that was a blend of her own memories and Haruka’s body?
She smiled faintly at the air, then set her phone aside.
—
Before sleep, she came to the following conclusion:
Singing: No problem.
Maybe even better than expected.
After all, Haruka’s own vocal cords were top-tier.
Add to that her own familiarity with these songs—far beyond a normal person’s—and the genetic support from her mother’s music teacher genes.
A triple buff.
“That said, dancing… that’s a big problem.”
This body’s muscle memory would automatically help her with things that came “naturally to this body.”
But the issue was that the “communication protocol” between the brain and the body didn’t match.
It was like the Jaegers in Pacific Rim—two pilots needed brain-wave synchronization to control them.
She was now one pilot sitting in the mech, but the mech’s operating system was keyed to the previous pilot’s sensitivity.
It needed time to recalibrate.
And time was exactly what she was most lacking right now.
Not to mention the near future—tomorrow was the dance rehabilitation assessment.
Thinking of this, Haruka pulled the blanket over her face.
“…Whatever.”
Her muffled voice came from under the blanket.
“Worst case, I’ll say I’m not feeling well. No wait, I am not feeling well. That injury was called a miracle just for surviving. If I recovered enough to dance in a month, that would be the real ghost story.”
She turned over, her voice growing softer.
“They probably won’t… give me a hard time…”
“…One day at a time. Sleep.”