Yutaka isn't jealous anymore. He is not jealous because he has made peace with the fact that he will never be as good a person as Haru is. He might as well just stick close and learn how to be like that.

Eventually Haru is able to get Kyubey to put low-granularity numbers on things, and he disappears into his room for twenty minutes and comes out with a number that is one higher than it was before for dementia and the flu but still not as high as the one he gets for malaria, and he throws up his hands in frustration.

Blink.

Blink blink.

"Wow uh. That's." Did he just manually make himself want those things more?????? Like—wow. What the uh. What the fuck.

Yutaka wants that superpower.

"Still not good enough uuuuuuugh."

"I feel like I may be insane for offering a hug but, uh, do you want a hug?"

"- sure."

Hug.

Oh okay that worked. Cool. Noted.

Also oh he hasn't hugged another human being in a while, huh. Even the last couple of times he had sex, he snuggled a bit but didn't really hug so much. He's having some complicated feelings about it, which he should shove in a box and ignore.

"Thanks." </hug>

"Yeah, sure." Turns out that even if your body is mostly fake your heart can still beat a little bit too fast and loud for your liking. Who knew. Now Yutaka knows, that's who.

It is rare to have a wish strong enough to do something like remove a whole disease from the Earth.

"I get that, but if I'm the guy who can do it I want to get the right disease, and -" Gesture.

Yutaka is going to continue to shove his feelings into a box because they are not the important ones, here. "—has it happened before? Eradicating a disease via wish?"

Smallpox escaped the lab once and was prevented from spreading further by a wish.

"Oh holy shit what the fuck thank you that person!!!!"

"Yeah, fuck, wow. - that would have been like, curing a handful of people, though, right? So it's actually quite a lot if I can get malaria. Lots of people have it, lots of mosquitoes carry it..."

Yes.

Yutaka has been deep in the Wikipedia mines and he read a few too many horror stories about smallpox while getting distracted from his homework this morning and he had a very very vivid image of something quite horrifying. "Why do we still even have that in a lab," he mumbles to himself.

"Same reason you have anything in a lab, I guess. ...I need a break from this, I'm not making any more progress in the next thirty minutes on wanting something as complicated as heart disease gone. You wanted to test some magic?"

"—yeah. I should probably figure out what-all I can do." He looks at Kyūbey. "If I had a weapon other than this shield would I necessarily know how to summon it, like, intuitively? Or could it just be hidden somewhere until I press the right button somewhere?"

It might just be the shield. Some weapons are not very weaponlike. If you have another weapon it should be intuitive to summon.

Yutaka thinks about it for a few seconds then shakes his head. "It's not coming to me." He pushes himself to his feet and detaches the shield from its strap. It's more like a buckler, really. "This is really heavy and—thick, though?" He flips it over to show how it's kind of domelike in a way that suggests an internal mechanism. He brings it close to his ear and shakes. "There's something inside..."

"May I?" Haru asks, reaching for it.

"Sure," Yutaka says, offering it to him.

Poke poke prod.

It seems pretty solid overall, but rings like it has some hollow parts inside. Also there's this small aperture near the edge on the inner part of it.