Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi Ep 11: Rejection #2

Ui gets a call from Ayumu to be his model for his drawing, she agrees to do so and shows up the next day while Kazuma is told to go out (so he can’t see her) where he ends up running into Ibuki. Ibuki asks him to go shopping with her as a payback since she wasn’t able to go with the group before. The two hang out for the day, but in the end when Ibuki decides to confess, she finds herself not taken seriously the first time, and rejected the second time. In the mean time Ui learns that Ayuma assumed she and Kazuma were dating and thought it’d be a good gift for him to have a picture of her and at the same time questions Ayumu about how’d he cope with being unable to spend as much time as he does now with his brother which motivates her to call up her brother and finally congratulate him.

Impression:
… Wow, what a way to immediately slash Ibuki off the list and prevent friendship complex between her and Ui. I’ll be honest here, at first I liked Kazuma x Ui, but I think that was because I knew they were going to be paired together in the end and so I only ended up really liking it halfhearted, however that wasn’t the case for Kazuma x Ibuki. Even though the majority of their scenes (going around the mall) did not have any vocal interaction, it still made me smile. So I was like, “EH?” when Ibuki suddenly decided to confess and brush it off as a joke, especially when Kazuma didn’t take her seriously, and then after he came back to check on her and apologize Ibuki only tries to brush off the confession as a joke for self-assurance.
It was also kind of good to see Ui finally congratulation her brother and his wife, and it was pretty funny about the timing since they just had a baby and he was about to call them himself. And now, I wonder if she will decide whether she actually feel for Kazuma romantically and not as a brother.
Next week, is the last episode (my god the month just flies right by!) and clearly we’ll either have Kazuma x Ui officially canon or no final pairing at all (but the chances of it not being official is pretty low).