Chương 210: Chapter : 210

"Magnificent," Ken declared, nodding proudly at his terrible creation.

"I call it... the Leaning Tower of Potato." Risa watched him from the edge of the sandbox, her teddy bear clutched to her chest. She looked at the sand. She looked at Ken's goofy, lopsided sandcastle. She looked at the children playing nearby. And then, very carefully, she kicked off her shoes, stepped into the sandbox, and sat down right next to Ken. The moment her feet touched the sand, something wonderful happened. Nothing magical. Nothing dangerous.

Just the simple, grounding feeling of cool, soft sand between her toes. Risa wiggled her feet, burying them deeper, and let out a tiny, contented sigh. It was such a small thing, sitting in the dirt with her bare feet in the sand, but to a girl who had been kept inside for weeks because the world was afraid of what she might accidentally do, it felt like freedom.

"Can I try?" Risa asked, reaching for the bucket.

"Be my guest," Ken said, waving his hand magnanimously.

"Just remember, the secret to great sandcastle construction is very simple. If it falls down, just pretend it was supposed to look like that." Risa filled the bucket with sand and flipped it over. Her sandcastle was slightly better than Ken's, mainly because she actually pressed the sand down before flipping the bucket, but it was still pretty lopsided. She did not care. She was having fun.

She patted the sides of the castle with her small hands, trying to make it smoother, and when a chunk fell off the side, she just giggled and rebuilt it. Ken watched her for a moment, then went back to work on his own creation. He was now building a second structure next to the Leaning Tower of Potato, this one even more structurally unsound than the first.

"This one," he said, pointing at the new pile, "will be the guest house for when people visit the potato farm." He patted the top, and the entire thing collapsed.

"Hmm. The guest house needs work." Risa laughed and threw a handful of sand at him. It landed in his hair. Ken gasped in mock horror and threw a tiny pinch of sand back, which landed harmlessly on her knee. This escalated quickly into a very gentle, very tame sand fight that involved more giggling than actual sand throwing, and which ended when Risa accidentally got sand on her teddy bear and spent a full minute carefully brushing it off with extreme concern.

While Ken and Risa played in the sandbox like a pair of overgrown children, Ira stood a few feet away. She was not in the sandbox. She was not near the sandbox. She was standing on the grass, her posture as rigid as a flagpole, her hands clasped behind her back, her face as empty and unreadable as a fresh canvas. Her pale eyes tracked every movement in the park with mechanical precision: the children, the birds, the passing pedestrians, a dog sniffing a tree.

She was performing her bodyguard duties flawlessly, which meant she was also refusing to participate in anything that looked even remotely fun. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Ken glanced up from his sand disaster and looked at Ira. She was standing perfectly still, like a beautiful, emotionless statue that someone had placed in the park as a piece of modern art.

The contrast between the joyful chaos of the sandbox and Ira's absolute, crystalline stillness was almost funny enough on its own. But Ken being Ken, he could not just appreciate the humor. He had to make it worse.

"Hey, Ira!" Ken called out, wiping sand off his hands.

"What's wrong? Is your highly analytical brain too scared of a little dirt? I bet you don't even know how to build a proper sand wall." Ira turned her head. Her face did not change. Her expression remained as flat and featureless as a still pond. But something happened. Something small, something that most people would have missed entirely. Her left eyebrow twitched. It moved upward by perhaps a millimeter, stayed there for a fraction of a second, and then returned to its original position.

For Ira, this was the equivalent of screaming in outrage and throwing a chair across the room.

"Statistically speaking," Ira said, her monotonous voice as flat as ever, "sand construction is an inefficient use of time and resources. The structural integrity of any sand-based architecture is inherently compromised by environmental factors such as wind, moisture, and physical contact. The probability of a sand structure surviving more than forty-seven minutes in this park is approximately twelve percent."

"Wow, twelve percent," Ken said, nodding with fake amazement.

"That is way more than I was going for. My guest house is at about negative five percent right now. Sounds like you are just making excuses because you are afraid you cannot do better." Another eyebrow twitch. This time, it was the right one. Ira stared at Ken for three full seconds. Then, without a word, she walked over to the sandbox, stepped inside with her boots still on, and knelt down on one knee. She surveyed the sand with the cold, calculating gaze of a general surveying a battlefield.

She pressed her hands flat against the surface, feeling the texture, the density, the moisture content. Then she began. What happened next could only be described as terrifying precision applied to a completely ridiculous task. Ira's hands moved with absolute, mathematical accuracy. She did not use the bucket. She did not need the bucket. She scooped sand with measured, exact amounts, shaping each wall with the flat edge of her palm and smoothing each surface with the precision of a surgeon.

Her fingers carved out windows at perfectly symmetrical intervals. Her thumbs created doorways that were exactly the same width on both sides. She built corner towers that rose to identical heights, each one capped with a tiny, perfectly rounded dome that she shaped using only her fingertips. Within ten minutes, Ira had constructed a geometrically flawless, statistically perfect sand fortress. It had four walls, each one exactly the same length and height.

It had eight towers, one at each corner and one at the midpoint of each wall. It had a central courtyard with a miniature sand fountain in the middle. The walls were smooth, the angles were precise, and the entire structure was so perfectly symmetrical that it looked like it had been built by a machine rather than a human hand.

It was the single most impressive thing anyone had ever made in a sandbox, and it was absolutely, completely, hilariously out of place next to Ken's lopsided Leaning Tower of Potato and its collapsed guest house.