Music Box (Keito Focus)

February 27, 2026

Characters

Season

ES 2nd Year of Establishment. August.

Translation

citrinesea

Proofreading

Object to be Sought, Searching For It 4

This is a partial translation of the full chapter.

An hour later. A hallway in the Sakuma residence.

Ritsu-kun’s home is real darn big, I tell ya what…

All I did was go to the bathroom, ‘n I end up gettin’ lost.

… Huh? Which room did I just come out of?

Nnah~ All the doors look the same, I can’t tell ‘em apart.

Welp, if I just start openin’ ‘em at random, I gotta find the right one eventua–

Mika opens a door.

Sakuma? How’d it go, did you have any luck?

Huh? What’s Hasumi-senpai doin’ here…?

C—Couldja be... the visible rays1 of the guardian spirit?

Object to be Sought, Searching For It 5

“Rei’s guardian spirit”…? What on earth are you talking about?

More importantly, you’re addressing Sakuma by his first name?

H-Huh?

I’m back~ Hasumi-kun, I found quite the suspicious cardboard box ♪

... Oh, what’s this? Why is Kagehira-kun here? Did you call for him to come over, Hasumi-kun?

I have no clue.

This guy was going on about me being your guardian spirit. I have no clue what he's on about.

Hasumi-kun? A guardian spirit? You'd probably scold me day and night if you were, so I can't say the idea of it thrills me.

He~y, Kagehira~! Where’d you go~?

Nnah, that voice is…!

Ikkun! I’m over here~!

Phew, that’s a relief. So you were here. Hey Ritsu, he’s in this room!

There you are. You went to the bathroom, but when you didn’t come back, I got worried.

I thought you might’ve gotten caught in one of the traps around here—

... Ewhgh, my brother’s here. What the hell are you doing here?

Kukuku. To think we'd run into each other without planning it. We must be destined to be drawn to one another!

Come, come to me! My pretty, cute angel, Ritchu~♪

— Gwah!

What the!? Hey, Sakuma just got sucked up into the ceiling!

Ahaha… That was probably one of Ritsu's traps.

I knew there were pitfalls, but… there's traps that can suck you up into the ceiling too, huh?

Heh heh. This house is my stronghold after all.

… Shouldn't it be Sakuma's stronghold too, though?

Anyway, I have a question. What are you guys doing here?

I was basically told nobody else would be here?

"Basically"? To be frank, we came to dig through the storage room.

Hm. So you're saying your goal is the same as ours?

Is it? Then maybe the noise I heard was you guys.

So, you came to look for hidden treasures too?

Yes. However, I have a specific objective.

According to Sakuma, there's a VHS tape with a recording of the original broadcast of Vampire Shogun2 somewhere in this house.

Of course I couldn't just stand by and let it get sent overseas, so I came to retrieve it.

Hmph. You could say I'm like the Vampire Shogun himself, rushing to the rescue of a damsel in distress.

A VHS tape sounds real old-timey, huh?

I've seen one in a junk pile once. If ya pull on it, tons’a black tape just keeps comin’ out forever ♪

There isn't forever amounts of tape, so don't do something so horrible, even if it is garbage!

Nnah, I’m real sorry. I just don't see 'em much, I'll be more careful next time.

Mmn, so… Watchin' stuff online is the norm these days. Why'd ya want a VHS tape?

Hmph… You clearly don’t understand what they call the “spirit of the otaku”.

I also own the DVD box set,3 so of course I know it's available for streaming.

Even overseas, Vampire Shogun is a popular work. In today’s age, you can watch it anywhere on earth.

The advantage of streaming is being able to easily enjoy a piece of work at high definition. I won't deny that.

But a VHS recording has a certain texture to it that you can't get anywhere else.

If the resolution is too high, details you weren’t supposed to see before become clear, so ironically, it can end up looking cheap.

Of course, if the first version of Vampire General you saw was a high-definition one, that might just be the "flavor" you get from the show, but—

I believe the visuals from that era were created keeping the quality of that time in mind.

Anyways, I have a VHS player at home.

I want to digitize the VHS tape, but I also want to enjoy it in its original format. That’s all there is to it.

Just like with glasses, you can never have too much of the thing you love…♪

Ah, sorry. I ended up getting carried away in a passionate ramble.

... Hm? Hey, where'd Sakuma's little brother go? He disappeared without us even noticing, didn't he?

Sorry. It seemed like the conversation was gonna drag on, so he slipped out.

That guy… And I assume Sakuma not immediately coming back isn’t a coincidence either.

I really resonate with that, though~ I know what it’s like not wantin’ somethin’ old thrown out.

So, didja find a VHS tape?

A few. It seems like stuff like that is scattered all over the place.

Sakuma said to think of it like a “treasure hunt”, and that I’d probably find more if I looked hard enough…

How incorrigible. If he’d just put them all in one place at the start, we wouldn’t have to go through all this time and trouble.

Heheh. But still, I feel like looking around for stuff is half the fun of it.

I get why he’d call it a “treasure hunt”. There’s all kindsa stuff no matter what room you go in, it’s like one big flea market.

This home is packed to the brim with stuff I never woulda encountered if I hadn’t come here today.

Even pickin’ ‘em up and lookin’ at ‘em is a real treat for the eyes ♪

Huh? So you’re giving up on the music box?

Nah. ‘Course the music box is the number one thing I wanna find.

But still. While I was lookin’ around at all this stuff, it made me start to think I don’t gotta be so hung up ‘bout it.

I guess the reason I got so fixated on findin' a music box is that I let a once in a lifetime chance get away.

I feel like I’ve got this regret hangin' around, like, maybe I shoulda gotten it back then.

So this time, if I can find somethin’ my heart truly wants, maybe the weight’ll get lifted off my chest.

It was said I could take as much as I wanted back home, but that in itself makes it hard to choose too.

Right now, I don't got the space to hoard stuff like I did when I was in an apartment, and even if I did, I'm scared Oshi-san might throw it all away again, y’know?

So yeah, if I find somethin’ I wanna take home, I’m only gonna let myself grab one. That way I can keep it in the dorm.

I wanna find that one perfect thing that makes me go, “This is the one.” So, I’ll do my best gettin’ back to the “treasure hunt”~♪

Translation Notes

↑ Mika says 例 (rei; example, case, instance) in "「例」の守護霊" here. Like "Is this an instance of the mentioned guardian spirit." Earlier in the story, Mika hears noises, and Ritsu tells them it's the guardian spirit of the home. The pun is that it sounds like "Rei's guardian spirit" ("「零」の守護霊"), so I fudged it around a little to make the pun work (rays and Rei's).
↑ Vampire Shogun is an episodic period-drama produced by a film studio associated with Rhythm Link. Keito and Rei bonded deeply over watching this show as kids. The UNDEAD/AKATSUKI tour story Learning from the Past (Succession Match) goes into the show and Keito and Rei's relationship with it in detail.
↑ In Succession Match, Keito buys a DVD boxset of Vampire Shogun to support the series, so this could be that same boxset.