Again, Fuutarou closes his eyes. The memories stored in his mind rush forth upon his visitor's request, filling his inner vision as he takes a step into the golden sunlight that wraps him with the warmth that his memories bring to his heart...
— Chapter 1: Place to Start
Five Equal Angels
is a The Quintessential Quintuplets Alternate Universe Fic by Hieda no Akyuu.
Fuutarou Uesugi is a poor, antisocial ace student who one day meets rich transfer student Itsuki Nakano...but they are courteous to one another and leave on good terms, with Itsuki asking Fuutarou to come tutor them as a possible replacement for another tutor that her father has assigned to her and her quintuplet siblings in an attempt to fix their terrible academic records. Itsuki thinks that having a classmate tutor them will be better than whoever her father has picked, but to her shock, Fuutarou is that very tutor assigned to teach her and her sisters Ichika, Nino, Miku, and Yotsuba, and his job is not only to tutor them but to guide them all the way to high school graduation.
But the quintuplets' surprises don't stop there. As they soon find out, there is much more to their tutor than they ever imagined, and his responsibilities involving them extend beyond mere academic tutoring. And through him and his extraordinary talents and duties, the girls slowly discover that they themselves are considerably more related to them than they ever imagined and in certain ways that they may not be prepared for.
Warning: due to the Alternate Universe nature of this fic, some key plot points in the manga are introduced much earlier in the fic, causing potential spoilers for those who have not read the manga in full.
This fanfic contains examples of:
- Adaptation Personality Change: While he still shows signs of his canon lack of social skills, Fuutarou is much less hesitant to do what he must as the quintuplets' tutor and bodyguard. He is also much more aggressive and more liberally uses profane language thanks to his true occupation as a freelance mage.
- Alternate Universe: Fuutarou is still the quintuplets' tutor, but he is also an independent mage-for-hire and has been since a young age. The quintuplets are also magically inclined, but they are not aware of this at first.
- Belated Love Epiphany: Averted from the manga. As a result of more interactions with Fuutarou, Itsuki eventually begins to develop feelings for him much, much earlier than she does canonically.
- Big Damn Heroes: At the end of Chapter 8, Fuutarou reveals his real identity as a mage to his students by saving them from a kidnapping attempt made on them.
- Birds of a Feather: Just like in canon, Nino and Itsuki. In the fic, it's taken a step further, with the two even referring to themselves as the "Anti-Uesugi Fuutarou Coalition" because they are the two who are initially staunchly against Fuutarou's responsibility of tutoring them and their sisters. Fitting that they even give up that title to officially join the rest of the quints for tutoring with him and even acknowledge that they have feelings for Fuutarou, though they do so independently of each other.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Thanks to his upbringing and identity as a mercenary mage, Fuutarou freely uses whatever he deems necessary to accomplish his goals, including but not limited to covert surveillance, torture, interrogation, blackmail, and flat-out murder. But despite the unsavory nature of his work, he does this and much more to protect the quintuplets from the city's underworld and other rival mages who can and will do the same for much worse reasons.
- Bloodier and Gorier: the fic includes things like murder, explicit detail to battle injuries and magically induced nightmares, and contraband drugs when the most amount of blood the original manga ever showed was Fuutarou's nosebleed during the Last Exam arc.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Being a trained mage with years of fighting under his belt, Fuutarou easily dispatches of anyone who has no magical talent, and the few who do need to be just as experienced to pose any serious threat to him.
- Darker and Edgier: par for the course with Bloodier and Gorier above. A few examples:
- Nino's drugs. The original manga doesn't explain why Nino has knockout drugs in her possession or how she acquires them, but in this fic, Nino has them as a countermeasure against guys who've tried hitting on her or her sisters around the city and has kept contact with a drug dealer to ensure that she has access to a steady supply. It also turns out that the drug is a lot more dangerous than she's initially aware of.
- On a related note, Fuutarou's work as a freelance mage explores the city's underworld; it doesn't help that the city has an ongoing drug trafficking problem that's endangering its residents as gangsters and drug dealers are flocking to the city to stake their claims on the profits to be made.
- The quintuplets themselves; while they act like their canon selves for the most part, they have their moments of demonstrating some more extreme behavior than in the manga. For example, the fight that Nino and Itsuki have that prompt both of them to leave the house at the beginning of the Seven Goodbyes arc in the manga doesn't just stop at the two quints merely exchanging slaps across the face in the fic; the two of them exchange whole punches to the face as their relationship during the fight degrades even further. In addition, several of the girls eventually discover that they possess Mystic Eyes, powers imbued in their eyes that are proof of their true identities as mages. The processes by which they learn this, depending on the quintuplet, disturb them greatly.
- Miku's nightmare.
- Death Dealer: Fuutarou uses playing cards as weapons.
- Eldritch Location: Miku's recurring nightmare. It is described as some kind of dreamscape that houses an infinite ocean of blood whose surface looks like glass underneath a pitch-black sky, and the sound of blood dripping into the ocean can forever be heard but never seen. And it doesn't stop there...
- Eye Scream: During her accidental trip into Miku's nightmare, Itsuki is approached by the corpse that normally haunts Miku and has her eyes slashed out, prompting the two quints to wake up immediately.
- Female Gaze: When Yotsuba runs into Fuutarou on accident during one of her jogs, she finds him working out discretely in a children's park after hours without a shirt on, and she has more than enough time to get a good look at him.
- Fiery Redhead: the fic specifically describes all the quints' hair color to be "peachy-red", so Nino and Itsuki would qualify as such. This is demonstrated no better than the fight these two have in Chapter 52.
- Gorn: Some of the fights that Fuutarou gets into are described with rather exacting detail.
- Gratuitous English: Nino has the strongest grasp over English among the quints, but even then, she can only barely scrape together coherent sentences.
- Homage: The quintuplets are revealed to possess Mystic Eyes, the very same kind prominently featured in the Nasuverse. In addition, the main antagonist, Shirazumi Rio, is heavily based off Shirazumi Lio from The Garden of Sinners.
- Mind Rape: What Miku's nightmare ends up doing to anyone who enters. Even though she's been suffering it for the past few years before the start of the story and thus has gotten somewhat used to it, Miku still wakes up in a shivering, clammy mess every time. And when Itsuki enters it on accident in Chapter 62, she starts screaming immediately and is swiftly reduced to a sobbing mess.
- Open Secret: Miku's canon affinity for Sengoku-era generals, warlords, and history. While in the manga she was able to keep this a complete secret from her sisters, in the fic she only thinks she's keeping it secret when in reality the rest of her sisters already know, given that Miku has had a Takeda emblem set as her phone's wallpaper for a while now.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni:
- The obvious one is Miku and Nino, as per their canon relationship.
- The not so obvious one is Miku and Itsuki, but it's a more literal one. Miku's Mystic Eyes are blue, but Itsuki's are red.
- Running Gag: It's an in-universe gag for both the quintuplets and Fuutarou to consistently crack jokes about Itsuki's eating habits.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: In Chapter 62, when Itsuki is recovering from her accidental entry into Miku's nightmare, Fuutarou shares with her a bit about his personal past growing up as a mage and admits that he, too, was traumatized from his own first experiences with the world of magic in an attempt to calm her down.
- Shout-Out:
- Several chapter titles in the fic reference various songs from Mike Shinoda's album Post Traumatic. In fact, when Fuutarou is screwing around and playing along with Yotsuba's antics one day, he even jokingly refers to himself as "M. Shinoda".
- Several of Fuutarou's magical incantations are voicelines of Nagao Kagetora from Fate/Grand Order. In fact, the magic in the fic is explicitly stated to be based off that seen in the Nasuverse.
- Spontaneous Weapon Creation: If Fuutarou is pushed to this point, he can summon a few different melee weapons, such as a spear, a knife, and even a sledgehammer.
- Troll: Fuutarou is this to Nino at times to get back at her a little for all the opposition she puts up to him trying to tutor her and her sisters.
