My honest opinion on the "feelings" Keitaro has for Naru is that the is only interested in her because he's desperate. The first thing that caused him to be interested in her was seeing her the first time in the onsen plain and simple "falling for her because of her looks" the thing that made him "definitely fall in love with her" was her helping him to get into Todai, because she was the only person who actually believed that he could make it resulted in him seeing her as pretty much a goddess and with his completely (romantically) loveless live, together with his fanatic infatuation with his promise made him fall in love with Naru while completely ignoring the fact that 90of the time she does everything that normally would drive away any guy who is interested in her. Naru is just his first crush and he is to naive to see the bad things that are happening and even thinks about abandoning his promise in order to be with Naru if she wasn't the promise girl.

So... the "hidden ability" and "underlying talent" Tsuruko was talking about was Keitaro being able to be a good hubby?

...
So learning that her sister tried to kill herself gets no reaction?
I get that she's trying to manipulate Motoko's life around for what she thinks is her sister's best interests, but her complete lack of response to discovering that her sister tried to commit suicide is still fucking cold.

I really hope that Tsuruko hears about what happened. Even if they eventually fall in love with each other and exist happily married, she needs to know what the consequence of her decision was.

Hell, there was never any chance of Motoko being able to beat her in the first place.

lovely ;)

I'm trying to suspend my disbelief at this story, but this isn't how people realisticly would act in this situation. Motoko and Tsuruko do all these things to Keitaro and mess up his life, and he doesn't even hold a grudge. It urks me.

Wow Tsuruko is a bitch, isn't she?

'Twas a lovely ride to be taken on, good sir. My thanks to you.

Even though you're no longer active (I assume), let me tell you this... This was beautiful!

I have to leave a very short review, or I won't forgive myself. Probably this won't be read by the author, since he doesn't seem to be around anymore for quite a while, but thatdoesn't matter, I feel this is an obligation after reading this fic for God knows how many times in the span of a few years, enjoying it more each time.

Thank you, Hawker748, for one of the best stories I've ever read. What's most impressive is that I can't even affirm it's the best story I've ever read written by you, because it would be an Herculean task to choose between "Loss and Redemption", "Ships in the Night" and "He Who Fights Monsters", which means that you hold at least 3 spots in my personal ranking... And I've read a lot, I assure you.

Nothing more could be said to make justice to what you've done, so let me repeat myself: Thank you.

... wow, that note. lol.

I hope this is completed some time soon, I know the feeling of not completing stories as I myself have published some titles some time back. But life and stresses of that has prevented me of doing so, but wish you all the best to somehow work on this title... Thanks

Welp, Motoko's gotten all fired up now (and not out of rage). And I think we all know what that means.

...

For anyone who doesn't know what it means, it means that something epic's gonna happen.

Y'know, I'm kind of surprised that at this point, neither Keitaro nor Motoko have come up with the idea of getting the latter reinstated to the Shinmei school... and then just getting married again if they want to.

This was a great story! I really like the KeitarouxMotoko pairing. I liked what you did with the plot. You had Motoko rely on Keitarou as an emotional crutch of sorts at the beginning and from there her feelings began to grow. The pace of the story was good; not too slow and not too fast. I liked how you ended it because it was realistic. I mean in real life their would definitely be some lingering resentment from the party who lost. Thank you for writing this story because I really enjoyed it.