Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9 - Chapter 1.1

Through her office window, the slender woman quietly clucked her tongue as she watched an adventurer stroll past Adrian Imperial Plaza and out of sight.

Her name was Maxine Mia Rehmann. She was a beautiful woman who took care of her appearance, but most would see her frailty before her beauty. She was tall and incredibly gaunt, her wan cheeks holding a waxy pallor. Her slender, noble face was just as emaciated as her body, the heavy burden that she bore evident upon it. Despite being in the prime of her life, her black hair that reached the small of her back was already half filled with gray. The adventurers of sufficient rank to have much cause to speak of her at all called her the Lady of Ash or the Last Ember—testament to her endurance, yes, but one couldn’t overlook the derogatory streak.

The fault could be found in her position as the manager of Marsheim’s Adventurer’s Association.

From the outside, the salary, privileges, and prestige made it seem like quite the esteemed position. However, to those in the know, it was the same as the Imperial government’s Emperor’s seat—nothing more than a dressed-up implement of torture. Maxine aired her complaints from the safety of the inside of her own head.

The Adventurer’s Association had a long history that stretched back to the Age of Gods; it was rather unique in a cultural sense, in that its existence spanned borders. It had lost any sort of central seat of power when its original parent state fractured beyond recognition. Now the Associations across the land were only loosely connected, the real thing that bound them being the pact that adventurers would never take part in wars between nations.

It was a unique position to be in—the manager was highly respected, but they were not a government official. The Association resembled a monastery, yet it was not a temple. Above all it was an institution that kept the world’s least employable afloat with cheap day labor and nominally legal thuggery. It wasn’t a surprise that the higher-ups didn’t view it all too favorably.

Furthermore, the laws of the Association dictated that within the bounds of the Empire, Association managers could not be of noble birth. Despite the fact that the only ones who would even be capable of passing judgment were the gods, the Empire dared not to do anything to upset Them, as the divine pact was very much alive and well.

Maxine’s personal herbalist had begged her to take it easier on the job. Begrudgingly, she still filled Maxine’s prescriptions—pills and powders to settle the stomach and soothe the ulcer, salves for her mental fatigue—but nothing yet curbed her own inflamed thoughts.

“That foolish little brother of mine... He was too soft,” she muttered, her distaste for Margrave Marsheim—and perhaps her contempt for the strictures of law and custom that forbid her from acknowledging their family ties in public.

What kind of monster had he tried to get her caught up with?

Marsheim’s tensions were coming to a head, and with them, the margrave’s desire for faithful pawns. He had a number of committed noble subordinates, but many who served him were opportunists—a number that needed constant surveillance, who would not hesitate to turn tail in an emergency.

There had always been scuffles with the local lords. However, as of yet there’d never been a true skirmish—categorized in Imperial records as battles involving five hundred or more combatants—which was the only reason things hadn’t fallen into complete anarchy. It didn’t help that the western territories had been unable to participate in the Eastern Conquest, due to physical distance and the Empire’s preference to have a healthy reserve on standby. Hardly any of the battle-hardened soldiers that had survived their time out in the desert—blazing hot in the day, deathly cold in the night—were from the western periphery. With so few experienced in the art of war among the local cantons and mere weeks to mobilize a fighting force in the event of a real coup, the margrave had little hope of matching an opponent strength for strength. His trusted retainers or blood relatives were spread thin throughout the region, strategically placed to keep untrustworthy strongarms in check, and now it was starting to burn him.

His confidants had originally been stationed to watch over these local lords and act as intermediaries to smooth relations over. The strategy was that if they managed to solidify the outskirts of Marsheim, then the local lords would find it more difficult to connect with one another, and thus block them from seizing majority rule. The local administration knew that this stratagem was crumbling before their eyes, and the cost of sustaining it any further was painfully clear.

Should the local lords’ dissatisfaction explode into a revolt, just how many of their forces would be chipped away before they could even come together to fight as one?

A particular worry was that military families sympathetic to the Empire would be targeted first. Before an official declaration of war was announced, their manors would be surrounded, and the margrave’s most-valued forces would be destroyed piece by piece. Even this would be enough to light the entirety of the western reaches ablaze.

It was too late for the margrave to hurriedly flee to another region—it would give away the administration’s panic to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. His enemies would be left a huge window to stoke the flames of war while he was packing his things.

There was no doubt that if a revolt broke out now, the Empire would claim victory by the end. With enough time, the vassal states would come to their aid. If the Empire put their all behind the struggle, then these provincial fools could only yap like a puppy worrying at the heels of a wolf.

Yet at the end of the day this was merely domestic strife. There was no glory to be won, no new territory to claim—just a land laid barren by war and pointless loss of life. If the unruly local lords were wiped out, their territories would remain unstable, and odds were that it would create an influx of refugees and unlawful types as soon as the army pulled out.

The margrave’s only option at this point was to headhunt. Unfortunately there was a limit to how many promotions he could give to the families that already populated his subordinates, and it would no doubt create a mountain of issues that would need to be dealt with once the revolts had settled down.

The plan was therefore to raise up some adventurers—disposable but useful playing pieces.

Recruiting big-time adventurers with their own large-scale clans would be a risky move, as they already had sway within Marsheim, but taking on a rookie adventurer was a different story. Training them up and instilling in them a fealty to the margrave with the eventual goal to create a loyal vassal seemed to be an efficient and less-costly strategy. Of course, it wouldn’t do to have them working under the title of “adventurer,” but surely the gods wouldn’t complain if the adventurer quit the business and received a peerage of their own accord.

The first test subject had been Goldilocks Erich, and the result of their meeting had made Maxine want to throw a whole pitcher of wine over her half brother.

“To think that he would see through my words and turn down a personal recommendation from the margrave... Just how wide is his purview?”

Maxine hadn’t liked making a snap judgment, but she had reasoned that Erich was not someone to be trifled with. He was smart enough to have a confident read on the political situation. Neither was he interested in quick profit or social fame.

Any normal adventurer would have easily been swayed by a rapid ascension to amber-orange and a personal request to aid the margrave. He had the gift of gab—able to convey his meaning without explicating it—and this only made him seem more disgusting in her eyes.

Maxine had spared no quarter in trying to convince him of the situation, but Erich hadn’t blanched in the slightest. He’d made no mention of the suspicious nature of his most recent job, nor the influence of the local lords in it; he’d simply feigned ignorance and said it was quite the thrilling adventure. There was no way they could control someone like that.

Not only that—the fact that he’d kept his cool in the face of the person who had been pulling the strings under the surface, still fully aware of the situation, was terrifying in its own regard.

Maxine’s position meant she knew all too well the idiosyncrasies of the adventuring class—she had to herd them about, after all. No one else was more qualified to make the call. An adventurer guided by their own singular yet consistent logic would never be swayed by an appeal to the customary axioms of wealth and power.

Marsheim had its fair share of such textbook cases. They lived without inhibition. Saint Fidelio and his merry gang served only their own ideals, never balking at the prospect of enacting punishment where they felt it was earned. Laurentius the Free and her gaggle of admirers used their singular strength to smash through any political subterfuge. And of course, there was Smokestack Nanna and her insipid chemical cultists, whose methods Maxine had no option but to overlook as they grew and spread the infernal fruits of her dope-sick mind.

Maxine had sensed the same stench from Erich as she did from them.

All of them were monsters, utterly inflexible in their convictions and swift to take up arms against the slightest obstruction of their ends. Even if Maxine had been able to integrate them into the margrave’s machinations by kindness, favors, or obligation, they would never forget the slight that had been done against them. They would use any means at their disposal to ensure the master’s hand would not come away clean or intact, once the leash was taken up.

Maxine’s people had probed into Erich’s relationship with Count Ubiorum. She had been told that their connection had waned in recent days. Plainly, this was false. Why else would he have received so many grave demands from that monster’s Department of Lost Writing Retrieval?

He had laid his own defensive measures against the margrave’s snares—measures too worldly for a man of noble birth to counter. In the meeting, Erich had simply announced that he wished to focus on this governmental task, and that he would only take on tasks that he’d chosen himself unless the matter was quite dire.

Maxine could only assume that Count Ubiorum had trained him from a young age to foster this obedience. The reins around his neck were merely so long that he had grown unable to see them—however, she was sure that he would still howl on command with one simple flick from his master.

It was clear from their meeting that as long as he was permitted a quiet life, Erich wouldn’t do anything untoward. Maxine assumed that if he was left to his own devices he would continue to quash evildoers. After all, it was in an adventurer’s nature to aspire to such heroic heights.

In this case, it would be far more expedient for Maxine to leave him be and to continue to foster his goodwill toward Marsheim. Perhaps then, if some would-be separatist lord decided that now of all times was the right one for a fool’s crusade, Erich would decide to leap to the region’s defense on his own terms, driven by his private sense of justice.

Maxine had made a gamble, testing him as she had. She knew that when you reached into a snake’s den, the odds were never zero that you might pull out a dragon. She was infuriated at herself for letting the meeting go so poorly. It would be an incalculable loss if she had stirred up ill feelings toward Marsheim and driven him to a new base of operations.

After all, Goldilocks Erich had already sent ripples through the relationship of a number of clans. It was true that he was only one person, but if he moved elsewhere out of a disgust with the prevailing political game, then the gap would be difficult to fill. He had proved a valuable deterrent. His absence would risk baiting in new and old evildoers alike.

Maxine’s information network had caught something. The Exilrat, who had gone relatively quiet recently, had suddenly started to move upon someone else’s domain.

More likely than not, a local lord was behind the matter. The settlements outside the city were a social grease trap for the dispossessed—those who had abandoned their countries, those whose countries had abandoned them, those who could no longer stay in their hometowns. Such folk had little cause to sympathize with the system as it stood. Any plan to sow unrest in the heart of the region would start there.

Personally, Maxine turned a blind eye toward small-scale villainy, viewing it as a necessary evil, but there came a point where the boot had to come down. She wore the boot; she made the call.

The decision to leave Goldilocks Erich as a wild card was a logistical call. It was evident that he had a fondness for the Empire. She wasn’t sure where it came from, but she could safely wager that it would drive him to crush the very same enemies she’d considered pressuring him to, at less cost to her operation.

After all, he had already crossed blades with the Exilrat once. He would show even less hesitation the second time.

During their conversation, Maxine had sensed an unusually strong love for adventure. If it came between him and his thrill-seeking, he could be counted on to cut it down. Maxine had no intention of trying to force reins around adventurers that would never take to the plow in the first place. This was hardly the first time she’d found herself in a situation where the best approach was to let the other players do as they willed.

And in any case, she could hardly be made to clean up after Erich if he’d only coincidentally acted in her interests.

Maxine set to thinking of what to write in her report for that foolish brother of hers. She pondered what would really make the bastard squirm.

[Tips] The rules of an association created during the Age of Gods do not necessarily all fit into modern-day ideals. Personnel are chosen in the various nations across the land in order to stave off the wrath of the gods.

In the case of the Trialist Empire of Rhine, they dictate that a current noble—regardless of their birth and previous history—cannot be designated as manager.

A literally medieval-grade upbringing like mine tends to grind certain brutal gendered expectations into oneself. As much as I could tell where it all came from and resented the hell out of it, I still couldn’t stand making other folks put up with the stuff that weighed on my mind. Academically speaking, I knew better, but down at gut level I hated the idea of coming off like a whiner.

That wasn’t to say that I couldn’t ask for help. I could never have survived this long without figuring out the trick of it. I had my own share of frustrations when we didn’t discuss our next moves at the table and our support or tank ended up completely wasting their turn. That’s why I had to plan out my next steps and—

Oh crap.

I felt a shiver run down my spine. Permanent Battlefield had put a quick stop to my idle thoughts of the past and Lightning Reflexes slowed my perception of time to a crawl.

I knew my defenses had been down, but I inwardly berated myself for allowing myself to slack off as soon as the door was shut behind me. I was as exposed as I would have been in the bath or under the covers. This was a locked, personal room at the Snoozing Kitten, but that was no excuse.

I felt a sharp killing urge from behind me and immediately released the energy from my legs, rolling forward to evade the blow before unleashing one of my own. I let my fey knife fly from my sleeve toward a shadow in the corner of my vision. The knife wasn’t suited for throwing, but it was better than nothing. I landed on my shoulder and glanced to see if my attack had connected; in the next moment, my failure registered.

The blade had hit its mark, but my target had been a ragged cloak. The presence I had sensed to the left of the door had been a lure to draw my attention—a sudden, powerful presence that had flitted away in a moment to render my attack impotent.

They hadn’t just baited me into a pointless counterattack—they’d taken my own honed senses and turned them against me by dividing and diverting my focus. I’d been pushed into losing two entire turns!

Their next move lacked the bloodthirst from before. Their body came flying in from my blind spot as they crashed into me, pinning me to the bed.

“Ngh...”

The impact on my chest knocked the wind out of me. I let out a surprised groan. By the time I’d even realized what was going on, my feet were off the floor and I was in no state to stop my tumble. Humans are irredeemably defenseless once you knock them off their feet—I didn’t even have the wherewithal to cast a spell. When I caught my breath and regained some measure of cool, I used my Unseen Hands to rid myself of whatever it was that had clung onto my back.

Hands grabbed my head, forcing my face up from the bed. Dressed in my usual clothes, my neck was completely unprotected. I cast an Insulating Barrier a few millimeters from my skin to keep myself constantly protected, but how much could it take from a direct attack?

Then the final blow was struck—a crimson line cutting across my throat...

“You got me.”

“Hee hee, we can tally one more win for me.”

...left by Margit’s lipstick-coated fingertip.

There I was, pinned face down on my bed, with my partner Margit straddling my back.

Ugh, I didn’t notice her in the slightest! Who’d have thought she would have lain low on the ceiling, ready to pounce as soon as I got home?

If it hadn’t been my beautiful scout, I would have died just now. Not only would I have been forcibly parted from my body, I would have caused an incident at my senior’s inn.

“You’ve had a gloomy expression for a while now, but no matter your state of mind, that doesn’t mean you can drop your guard this much.”

“I can’t hide a thing from you, can I?”

Margit’s skills had blossomed quickly under the pressure of our newer, deadlier workload, and now her win ratio was three-to-seven in her favor. Just what skill had she used to get past my barrier spell?

Nothing screws you quite as hard as having your whole action economy shut down. Naturally, not every enemy could force you into such a state, and it took an incredible amount of experience to pull off, so I had tended to put it on the back burner at the table, but being OHKO’d was absolutely terrifying.

I couldn’t believe I’d ended up like this even with my own countermeasures.

“Did I really look so troubled? I was trying to act normally.”

“Do you really think I wouldn’t notice? Your desire to fix everything by yourself hasn’t changed at all.”

Margit gave my forehead a cheeky flick. I would have been fine, if it weren’t for the fact that she’d used her thumb with all the force you’d usually put into a big, dramatic coin flip. Reader, I was in agony.

Hmm? Usually she would’ve clambered off by now... Her legs are wrapped around me, and I can’t move an inch... With her weight on my back, I couldn’t even shift my center of balance.

“Are you ready to tell me what happened? I watched you being called in.”

“Oh, yeah, well... Um...”

With Margit’s silent implication that any attempt to lie or weasel out of giving it to her straight would be at my own peril, I came clean about my meeting with Maxine Mia Rehmann.

The meeting was tense, but it ended up how I had expected. At the first glimpse of the net she meant to cast around me, I responded with every slippery rhetorical move, nonanswer, and feint in my repertoire.

Simply put, she had left me just enough room to believe that I could accept or deny her request as I pleased, disguising a fiendish battery of social, procedural, and financial traps. There had been no similar cases before me; she made it very difficult to deny her. If I hadn’t read the regulations from cover to cover, or if I hadn’t had my “prior engagement,” I might have been roped into something terrible.

“That seems like quite the tricky and intricate case. And you didn’t think to discuss this with me or the others at all?”

“I thought about it, but I didn’t want to tell you what amounted to baseless predictions. I mean, you know what Siegfried’s like...”

“He tends to get in over his head, it’s true.”

Margit snickered. I had no rebuttal. Sorry, Sieg.

Siegfried’s biggest dream was to become a hero. Part of that package was that once you got a few drinks in him, he’d start writing checks with his mouth that nothing in the world could cash. That was part of why I’d told him to leave the Golden Deer. He never said how much Baltlinden’s head had fetched us, but he had let slip that we’d sent him in alive and that we’d been praised for our hard work. That was cause enough to really wind up our less reputable cohorts. If people knew that you were going to receive a little cash prize from a noble, then the greedier among them might think to eliminate you beforehand.

By the same token, receiving praise or a letter of recommendation from folks in high society wasn’t the sort of thing you aired out to just everyone. If everybody knew whose pocket you were in, that made it all the easier for your patron’s enemies to single you out.

So yeah, I’d tried to handle the situation on my own. It ran counter to my principles, but I had the background in the care and handling of nobles to make it work, and the less anyone knew what I was up to, the safer we’d all be.

“I realize that I am unable to help in that department, but I do wish you would have at least told me something.”

I held my tongue for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I trust you utterly and completely, but things have a way of slipping out, even if you don’t do anything wrong.”

“Do you honestly think I would let things slip? Or that I would let myself get caught?”

Margit shifted above me. I felt her chin press atop my head. Her discontent was to be expected. Still, to quote a sage of my old world: it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life.

“If the enemy had a talented magus under them, then I think you would find it hard to resist. I don’t doubt you can tough it out through a lot, but the folks we’re dealing with, we can’t put it past them to resort to taboo methods like psychosorcery. I’ve studied up on their methods, but even I wouldn’t be able to fight back against a true pro.”

Here, as on Earth, the chance that something might plow into your life like a runaway truck and smear it across the pavement was small, but never zero. At any rate, it wouldn’t do to act so nonchalant when the local aristocracy was tied up in a panic like this.

You could fault me for being overprotective or a worrywart, but I’d already experienced a sudden and undignified death once before; what was I supposed to do? My pancreatic cancer had come on suddenly in my thirties and ripped my life away before I knew it. I couldn’t help harboring these anxieties.

One day my loved ones might fall prey to a foe I couldn’t just punch out. Time, the great apex predator of the universe, hung over us all. It promised a cruel separation at the end of every story. You couldn’t get over a fear that big.

If I kicked the bucket after jumping feet-first into a terrible ordeal, fully resolved to my fate, I wouldn’t mind. It would be entirely my own fault. This was true of Margit and my two new comrades too. But for something to shatter what we had from out of the blue, just because the dice came up snake eyes? That was too much. I came by my love of fixed values honestly. A one-in-a-million chance of getting hosed seemed like good odds until you considered how small your part in the big machine is, and how many people there are who are just like you. That fringe outcome isn’t a threat—to some poor bastard out there, it’s a guarantee. It was a bit late coming, but I realized that this was at the root of my desire to author my own fate as much as I could this time around.

“You don’t know until it happens, do you?”

“Depending on who you’re faced with, you could be subject to anything. Some spells scrape at the surface of your thoughts, but other, better ones can read your mind without you even noticing.”

The head of the School of Daybreak, the one person who stood toe to toe with my former employer—she was so utterly broken that Lady Agrippina chose endless fieldwork instead of dueling her—knew spells that would rip every secret from your brain, lay eggs in your psyche, ravage your every nerve ending, leave you with a fistful of new and debilitating personality traits, and then make you carry on with your day like nothing happened.

In the past, I had received a little lecture from her about anti-psychosorcery measures. Although it was true that the pervert was an unsalvageable menace, she had some semblance of a conscience, so although she had used her magic upon me, she hadn’t probed right into the depths of my soul. Instead she revealed that she could lay bare all my surface thoughts. She could perfectly recite a twelve-digit figure I held in my head. During questioning, she could subconsciously lead my inner monologue to the answer she sought.

If we took that monstrous wraith as the gold standard for a magus, then ninety-nine percent of the world’s magia would be lumped together as idiots. All the same, it was important for Margit to know the horrors that lurked in the world of magic. This wasn’t the same kind of thought policing that conspiracy theorists thought could be fixed with a tinfoil hat—it was the real deal.

In the world of upper-class nobles, preventative measures were as common as cleaning your house before a guest comes over. I wanted to be prudent.

Maxine was a tricky foe; even the margrave had trouble dealing with her. The Baden family and its offshoots were a formidable bloodline all on its own, but the margrave had found himself saddled with—when you got down to it—the Empire’s exposed belly. It would be stupid to even think of underestimating such a foe.

That was why I wanted to put on a show to everyone that I didn’t know anything more than I actually did. It was all to keep my beloved partner and my two friends out of the line of fire.

“You’re such a fool.”

I felt another sting in my head. It felt like she had just bit me.

“What do you expect me to do if you alone become our enemies’ target and end up swarmed by a force you can’t beat back? Just scraping together the intel I’d need to avenge you would stain my hands with the blood of dozens.”

“I wouldn’t want to see that.”

Margit was right. I couldn’t live a life where I shook my head in defiance at each seemingly insurmountable difficulty, especially when I had chosen to live the life of an adventurer based on my affection for a contradictory system that loved fixed values.

“And I suppose leaving Marsheim crossed your mind too?”

“I really can’t hide anything from you.”

I was used to being an open book in front of Margit, but I felt a strange mixture of pleasure and fear having her strike the bull’s-eye time and time again. Having someone who understood you was a rare and precious thing, but having my heart picked clean like this reaffirmed to me that the min-maxed build I dreamed of was still a ways away.

I loved the idea of being totally OP and ultimately efficient enough to solve anything on my own, but that was harder than it looked on paper. With Margit’s warm weight on top of me, I started to feel that such an end point would be utterly dull. The mind is such a fickle creature.

“It was just a thought.”

When I was considering the routes available to me, moving our base of activities from Marsheim had certainly crossed my mind. Staying here could mire us even deeper with all these damned landlords. If I took a wrong turn and ended up down a path where I had to give up the adventuring life, my soul might break.

How many choices had I thrown away until now for the sake of this life?

I was certain that I would find a way to go on even if my dreams were stoppered, but it wouldn’t be the same fun table I was currently sitting at. It would be a sequel put out thanks to some obligation no one would enjoy. I mean, if things got that bad, maybe I would... It wasn’t my fault that such pessimism would rear its ugly head.

“You really are incredible, Margit. Have you been a magus all this time?”

“When it comes to you, I can see everything,” Margit said, her lips pressed close to my ear as she wrapped her arms around my neck.

...Why did it feel so good to be ensnared so tightly that I was as still as a corpse?

“It’s because I know you that I can say with certainty that wherever you go, whatever job you may do, you will end up standing out and shouldering the exact same worries.”

“Gack...”

“Does the prospect of a life of adventure dispirit you that much?”

As soon as Margit said these words, it felt as if the fog obscuring my vision suddenly cleared. It was exactly as she said. I needed to remember what I had done at the table in my old world again and again—exterminate everything around me that restricted me from being the master of my own fate. No matter how crazy it was of me, no matter how obstinate, I would let my tongue and my two fists carry me to freedom.

It didn’t matter how much wider society would criticize us for being heartless—rather, we had to puff out our chests, put on our biggest smiles, and announce that this was how a true player moved. I had been so enamored by this life that I had thrown away everything I hadn’t needed to get here. How could I have been so blind?

“If you told me now that you had forgotten our promise, then I might just break out in tears. I might not know just how hard I should be holding you.”

“You’re totally right. We promised we wouldn’t half-ass this.”

Although the finer details would be different, this problem would follow us wherever we may go. It was stupid for an adventurer who wanted to one day save a world or two to back down now. One day we would be taking down the leader of a knight’s order—no, a veritable demon lord. A true player character would throw themselves at every adventure hook they saw with their whole heart exposed!

A sudden death? Bring it on, then. It wasn’t just me for whom death might come knocking at any moment—my former employer, the Emperor, the lowest peasant, and the oldest and most fearsome god anyone could care to name were all alike in the hungry eyes of chance. I couldn’t be sitting here twiddling my thumbs with my brow furrowed in worry—that just wouldn’t be cool.

“You always grab my hand and pull me forward in times like these. Whenever I start to err toward compromise, you always remind me of how I used to be.”

“I told you, didn’t I? I will always watch your back, so that perilous shadows will not tread on you. That includes your own.”

Man... This childhood friend of mine was so sweet, but so terrifying—deathly strict, but lovingly kind. She steadied my wavering heart and forced me to remember what it was I really wanted.

“To the ends of the earth in the west. To beyond the Southern Sea.”

As I recited the words, warm nostalgia filling my breast (had I really only said them a year ago now?), Margit answered in kind.

“To the snowcaps of the north. To the desert sands covering the east. That was our promise.”

We laughed together. It felt as if a sudden spring breeze were tickling a meadow of sun-kissed flowers.

“Ah, buuut...”

Words failed me. As Margit’s bewitchingly seductive voice tickled my ear, a shock went through my brain and my body tightened in response. I felt something wet.

Margit. Was. Licking. My. Ear.

“Bad boys who have lost their vim need to be given a little extra lesson.”

“Hold th— What are you doing?!”

I wasn’t sure if it was for only seconds, minutes, or even hours—the thrilling, unknown sensations that ran through me made it impossible to think straight. I wasn’t sure if the sun was still high in the sky, or if twilight had fallen; the ticklish, pleasant feeling coursed through my brain, leaving me numb to all else.

“Now, if my memory is correct, I remember you boasting to Siegfried about how important one’s first ‘body’ was.”

“Y-Yeah, but that was about battle!”

“You still waver so! Clearly your manhood needs a more lasting adjustment...”

Margit’s face as she leaned in was as beautiful and as terrifying as ever.

[Tips] Even if it is the woman who instigates the act, it’s a strange fact that most languages and cultures still portray the man as “stealing” her virginity.

“Hey, man. Whoa, what’s with you?”

“I could ask you the same thing, Siegfried.”

The next day, after passing an intimate and sweet and exhausting time together with Margit, we popped by Siegfried and Kaya’s place.

The usually energetic hero-hopeful looked gaunt and utterly defeated.

“Oh no...” I said. “You didn’t—”

“L-Listen! You gotta hear me out!”

One glance at the disgruntled-looking herbalist poised over her new equipment told me everything I needed to know.

“I was only thinking of Kaya!”

“Yes, but I think it a bit odd that you bought new equipment and silk fabric all without consulting me, Dee.”

It made complete sense that my comrade didn’t even have the backbone to push back against her refusal to use his nom de guerre. He had really stepped in it this time. It was totally natural for Kaya to be fuming.

“I can’t believe you went on a big spending spree as soon as you got paid again...”

Of course, I wasn’t going to fight in his corner. It seemed like he had received quite the lecture already, so I wouldn’t lay it on any thicker, but I also wasn’t about to offer any false sympathy.

“N-No, you got it wrong! I was gonna talk to her! B-But I wanted to see some samples first...”

“You can’t ask them to bring out so many and then say you don’t want any, Dee.”

To anyone else, Kaya would have seemed completely normal, but the way she stressed Sieg’s name proved she was this close to going nuclear. What kind of sick luck did we have to get chewed out by our partners on almost the same day? Two peas in a pod, huh...

“Oh, Sieg... You’re a one-in-a-million guy.”

I found myself covering my face with a hand and letting out a big sigh.

He was like your stereotypical dad who wanted to be generous to his kids and had no idea how. You could hang him up in a frame for posterity, and generations of women would come to nod and grimace at a textbook example of a grown man who still needed mothering.

It looked like he had learned a lesson or two. He had given Kaya full rein over the expenses and received an allowance from her—that was progress. But it was a rookie mistake to buy presents for someone directly from the merchant without getting an intermediary to help.

“C-C’mon, I literally only asked to see the samples! Honest! I’ll pay, and if you don’t like it I’ll sell them on!”

“You were the one who said they were trying to lure people in. If you say you don’t need their goods after getting them to bring ’em out, then their reputation as a merchant takes a hit. It was quite something that they would even serve us. We’ve only just shook off our soot...”

Kaya hadn’t looked up a single time as she ground down some herbs. She made no effort to hide her anger.

Sieg didn’t know a thing about fancier stores nor did he realize the weight of asking to see the merchant personally. Knowing what someone wanted was a simple but powerful piece of information—in sales or in spycraft.

“Hufeland Trading and the flagship Acronym store don’t usually serve adventurers. Even if we were to visit, they are somewhat above our station.”

“Oof, you aren’t kidding—those are big names...”

Hufeland Trading was a pharmaceuticals store; they traded not just in the raw materials, but in high-end equipment. The whole business was propped up by the Baldur Clan so they’d have a legitimate vendor to work through, and our ties with them had probably helped in Sieg’s negotiations. We’d already both been buying catalysts from Nanna’s wholesaler, so it was no surprise they knew our name.

However, Acronym was a legitimate veteran store with outlets in the capital. It wasn’t simply a luxury brand geared toward customers with deep pockets—no, it was one of Marsheim’s premier clothes dealers, and they generally only dealt with nobles. They were famous for directly dealing in the highest-quality silks, crafted with traditional methods from the Hierarchy.

I wanted to applaud Siegfried for having the cojones to stroll straight in. It was obvious to anyone that it only catered nobles! I’d passed by once before and been amazed that a business with such an esteemed history could be found in Marsheim too.

That guy picked the weirdest times to be a real go-getter.

“Y-You gotta understand! The receptionist lady said that everyone would like to have that fabric once in their lives!”

“Exactly! That’s how incredible their stock is! So expensive that you could only afford one with your whole life’s savings! Their cheapest fabric was five drachmae, Dee. That’s more than your spear ran you!”

I wondered whether the catalyst in Kaya’s hand was supposed to glow that dangerously...or if it was reacting to her roiling heart.

This ain’t good.

Joy was easily overcome by righteous anger. It would take a little time for the dust to settle here. The fact that she was busying herself with her medicines in order to regain her composure spoke well enough of how this had shaken her. She hadn’t brought out tea because she loved Siegfried and didn’t want to let her true feelings slip as we sat and caught up.

What a troublesome turn of events. I placed my hand on my forehead as I pondered how best to move the conversation forward, when Siegfried, equally awkward, asked me a question with a curious expression.

“By the way...how come neither of you are sitting down? And how come you’re holding Margit up instead of letting her hang off you like normal?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Margit’s voice was far lower and more lethargic than usual; it stunned Siegfried into silence. She was hanging off me like she always did, but today I was holding up her spider body with my hands. It was my fault, really—I got a little bit carried away. At any rate, Margit no longer had the energy to dangle with her own strength as she usually did, and she couldn’t walk around that easily. It was an unfortunate necessity.

I asked her if she wanted to take the day off, or at least call it a half day, but she said checking in on Kaya and Siegfried was a pressing matter. She’d been right to push the matter. If we’d taken any longer there was no telling what other corporate entities our friends might have drawn the ire of.

“Anyway,” I said, “we’ve got something to discuss. I thought it was something I could tidy up and not bother any of you with, but unfortunately it’s spread a bit wider than expected.”

“Wider? Whaddya mean?”

A good GM could just gloss the stuff everyone at the table already knew; I found myself wishing I could do the same. Even if my own personal skills were out of a TRPG handbook, this was a world as real as any other.

Erich explains the situation to Siegfried and Kaya, and they move on to figuring out their next move. How easy it had been back then to just skip ahead! It was nominally metagaming, but only a truly obnoxious player would raise a fuss about this sort of streamlining. On top of that, as long as the GM didn’t leave out anything new, the truth was nothing more and nothing less than what they’d said.

“So, uh, should I start with shouting at you for getting me wrapped up in this shit?” Siegfried replied.

“Hey, we all were in that ichor maze together, so it’s not purely my fault. Don’t you remember what we discussed at the camp back then?”

“Agh, yeah, right... I totally forgot. It’d be totally unheroic of me to blow up about it now...”

The day before we found the ichor maze, I told Siegfried that when a right-thinking adventurer found themselves in a trap, they’d either evade it and administer a sound beating to the perpetrator, or fight tooth and nail to escape the trap and then administer a sound beating to the perpetrator. Siegfried had berated me, saying that it was barbaric, but in the end he saw my logic.

Siegfried scratched his head with a look of utter despondency before sitting back down and kicking his legs out onto the table.

“Fine, you got it. Whether we skirt around this thing or dive right into it, we’re gonna pay a few ‘fists of recompense’ to whoever threw us into this.”

“Dee?”

“Ah, sorry!”

The hero-hopeful swiftly removed his feet from the table before he got chewed out any more—clearly a long-standing habit of his. He wasn’t helping his standing with Kaya. We don’t put our feet where our food goes, young man.

“Well, worst comes to worst, you can move base until things die down. You’re just as much a target as I am. I expect that Acronym were so genteel with you because they mean to take you in.”

“Uh, take us in?”

“What do you think is an adventurer’s greatest weakness?”

“Women and booze.”

I nodded with approval, but hurried to move the conversation along—I’d noticed Kaya’s ear twitching.

“Yes, but none of us are that sort of adventurer. So they’ve set their targets elsewhere. In my case, they’ve been playing on my conservatism and my perennial weakness for authority.”

“Uhh, so I ain’t received that good an education, but...what? I don’t remember those words meaning whatever you think they do!”

Rude so-and-so... I was extremely cautious about my public image and wanted to bail the second a situation started looking politically relevant. If that wasn’t “conservative,” what was?!

“Oh, Erich. I’m not sure whether to laugh or worry at the idea that anyone who throws themselves onto swords and spears for a living is risk-averse,” Margit said with a chuckle. “Ah! It hurts to laugh...”

“You just ain’t convincing when you’re the one who spends time rubbin’ elbows with creepy-ass clans,” Siegfried said.

“Sorry, Erich—they’re not wrong,” Kaya added.

I huffed in the face of all three of them rebuffing me so easily, but if I got in a little verbal spat right now, we would never get anywhere. I held my tongue, for the moment at least. It’s not like I hadn’t considered that I came off differently to folks than I did to myself. I just thought that my intentions were pretty obvious.

Anyway, I was the adult here, so I wouldn’t get mad. I had come of age twice now! It wouldn’t be double-grown-up of me to hold a grudge.

I just, you know, wouldn’t forget this moment as long as I lived. Possibly longer, depending on whether my whole reincarnation deal was a one-off or not.

“Moving on,” I said, “I think we can all agree Siegfried loves drama and can’t budget to save his life.”

Being vengeful wouldn’t be double-grown-up of me either. That absolutely wasn’t what I was doing. Sieg let out an audible oof.

My dear comrade had been taken for a ride at those stores. He wasn’t the most savvy when it came to a woman’s tastes, so I could easily see him asking the nice receptionist lady for advice. After all, it wouldn’t take half a day to investigate and find out that our connections were pretty thin on the ground. Siegfried didn’t have many other friends to go to for advice, and I knew he wouldn’t come to me about this kind of stuff. This was something anyone could dig up on him. It would be easy to set him down the wrong path with a little bit of pushing at his weak points.

“I know you went in of your own accord, but I think they set measures to draw you there. And then they gave you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“So they set me up?”

“I can’t think of anything else it could be. I know you’re amber-orange now, but they wouldn’t sell to you otherwise. Unless you had an invitation, a rookie adventurer would be turned away at the door—myself included, naturally.”

Both Siegfried and I were underfed brats, still shy of twenty summers—such a luxury store was far above our station. Unless someone trustworthy invited us to browse, they wouldn’t even give us a tiny scrap to go home with. It wasn’t a matter of whether you could fork over the cash or not. The sales world was beyond my ken, but even I knew that a store’s reputation hinged on who they allowed in.

“Hm? Hold on a sec...”

“I suppose next would be a jeweler,” I said. “Kaya, you don’t have many accessories. I bet they’ll come up to you saying that your neck is looking awfully lonely.”

“I said hold on a sec! Can you—”

“Or Acronym might approach again with the draw of their new season of fabric.”

“Grah! I said hold on! Did you just say I was amber-orange now?!”

Siegfried had leaped over the table and grabbed at my lapel as he cut me off. I gave a slow nod, as if to pull him along just for a moment. Wait, no, not “as if”—I was totally pushing his buttons.

I had found out when I saw the manager yesterday. The letter of acknowledgment for taking down Jonas Baltlinden had finally been issued, and Maxine had said she was considering Siegfried’s promotion, judging the general public atmosphere. I suspected her and the margrave’s plans were at the heart of it. I could understand that they hadn’t wanted to create too many “exceptions” last autumn, but it was weird that she would bring it up now, of all times. I expected that the promotion was part of the snare she’d prepared for him.

In this case, if a noble’s request came from somewhere else, then there was no worry that their own social standing would be harmed. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to create a rift in the party or bring us closer together, but I knew that there was some ulterior motive there, since she’d bothered to bring it up with me directly.

In all honesty, if a friend of mine was doing well, I was more inclined to congratulate them than start stewing. I wasn’t so small a person to hold feelings of jealousy or estrangement. Which is not to say I couldn’t hate them forever if I ended up stuck on a long campaign headed nowhere in particular.

Putting that aside, I wanted Siegfried and Kaya to know that this promotion was both a carrot and a stick.

“Listen well, comrades. You’re going to be pushed into overspending to an extent that your adventuring successes won’t be able to keep pace with. It’s just as Kaya said. If you had turned down that merchant, then they would have put a black mark on your name and written you off as one more uncouth adventurer.”

“And in order to make up the cash, they’d force requests on me that I wouldn’t take otherwise?”

Bingo. I was glad he caught on quick. He was a little impulsive, but he was proof that a lack of education didn’t make you an idiot.

“Exactly. Once you make one purchase, that’s it. You’ll find yourself in Margrave Marsheim’s lap before you know it, unable to turn down any dirty request he asks of you. Records of your promotion will reach other Associations, and once you’ve worked up a big enough debt, you’ll have nowhere to run.”

“Graaaah! Firk ding blast!”

I wondered if Sieg’s D100 had landed pretty badly, because as soon as he’d recognized what I was steering at, he laid his head on the table and clutched at his scalp. I knew he was a tenacious guy, but maybe this was too much. I hoped it was only a temporary fit of madness.

“Gn...’s...ld...”

“Excuse me?”

“Gnitaheidr’s gold...” he said, his voice so full of malice that you could see its trajectory straight into the lowest vaults of hell.

The phrase came from the tale of the original Siegfried—Sieg’s role model.

If I remembered correctly, it was the name of a story where Siegfried, desperate to cross deadly waters, was swindled by the ferryman into surrendering all the spoils of his next adventure. The episode ended with Siegfried clearing a labyrinth loaded with cursed gold, hoisting the ferryman by his own petard.

“It’s just like that. I won’t be used and tossed aside. No way. I’ll get my revenge somehow.”

It was one of the rare episodes that went largely unchanged from the prototypical Sigurd tales in the revised version for the masses. It was a beloved plot—who doesn’t like to see a swindler get their just deserts? I believed there was one small difference, though—in the later version, Siegfried offers his hand to the ferryman, ruined by the cursed gold, and gives him a second chance; in the original, Sigurd simply leaves in the ferryman’s boat. It was during his journey home with this stolen boat that Sigurd was swallowed by the waves and met a watery end.

My comrade had perhaps chosen a slightly inauspicious story to project upon.

“Part of the whole point of gettin’ into the hero business was to show the folks back home what I could do. If I pack up my bags and move elsewhere, I can’t do that.”

Sieg was as superstitious as any good adventurer, so I was a bit uncertain whether to mention the untoward ending of Sigurd’s story. His voice held all its usual vigor, even with his face planted firmly on the table.

“My hometown still means a lot to me. Gramps’s grave is there. I’ll do the extra work for Illfurth’s sake.”

“Your revenge plan seems a little more than extra work.”

“The bastards...trying to make a fool out of me. I’ll get even, same as Siegfried. They’ll rue the day they crossed me.”

It was slightly less encouraging to hear when his face and the table were still so intimate, but he had the right spirit. It looked like he had successfully passed this Sanity check.

“Anyway, it’s you we’re talking about. I bet you’ve got a plan already. Go on, spill it. I’ll do anything if it means becoming a proud adventurer.”

“Oh, you said you’ll do anything?”

“Uh, yeah, I did?”

Siegfried finally raised his head, looking at me like he was wondering if I’d gone deaf. I coughed and tried to change the subject.

Ugh, why’d I say that? I can’t even remember what the original reference was, but it’s one of those things I let slip. There’s no way he’d even know! I expected it was from some kind of popular meme, but not one that I would be proud to say I knew.

“Anyway, yeah, I’ve got an idea. It’ll protect our dignity, let us keep adventuring, and protect Marsheim by fostering a situation that’ll show the local strongmen what’s what.”

In truth, I was glad of Siegfried’s resolve to help me. The path we were to tread might not have been as heroic as some of the legends, but we were living in the modern age—he had to accept that.

I tried my best to give a big smile and laid bare my idea.

[Tips] Sometimes words or phrases slip into our everyday vernacular without us remembering that they were originally from some internet meme. It happens more easily when more regular turns of phrase get used in the “source material.”

The power words have to intentionally alter one’s position—in other words, one’s existence—can be leveraged to political ends more deadly than ten thousand swords.

“Oooof...”

The young herbalist felt a strange pang of jamais vu at the sight of her party member groaning on the bed. Where Kaya had been groaning due to her own embarrassment, Margit seemed to be suffering from physical pain.

“Are you feeling okay? You’ve looked a bit under the weather ever since you arrived. I’m still but a novice herbalist, but if you tell me your symptoms I can prepare something for you.”

“Mmf... No, it’s quite all right. I’m in pain, but it is not all that bad. It’s more like a...lethargic feeling. A heaviness, like my spine has been replaced with lead.”

The two of them were in Kaya’s personal room, taking a small rest after the guys went out to enact their schemes. When the news about the sheer size of the bounty Kaya had won left her reeling from the stress, Margit had been the one looking after her. Now the tables had turned; the arachne lay sprawled out, chest down, clutching a pillow tightly in her arms. Kaya felt more vulnerable than she might have expected.

Ordinarily the party would all have headed out together. They were less vulnerable to the city’s predations in one group, and even if there was no real danger, it just made more sense for the party to move as one during negotiations. But their scout—the one most fit to watch over them in a covert position—was in no condition to work, let alone stand up, so Erich and Siegfried had headed out alone.

Kaya had noticed that something was wrong with Margit the moment she had come in through the door. Her education on how to be a refined woman might have only been passed down from her mother, but Kaya had cultivated her social manners through self-study. She worked patiently and magnanimously, able to phase out her presence like the last embers of incense should the situation require.

She pondered what could have happened to the huntress. It couldn’t have been a job—Erich and Margit had said that they wanted at least ten days to just find some simple joy in being alive, and had thus sworn off work during this interim.

It was during this time that Siegfried had his unfortunate run-in with some overly persuasive merchants. Kaya had been well and truly happy that her closest friend was the sort of person to openly chat about what she might like to receive instead of forcing presents upon her under the expectation of receiving a thank-you, but even though she had been right there, things had proceeded too quickly for her to stop them. After looking at the bill, there was no possible way that Kaya could remain calm.

During the meeting with Erich and Margit, Kaya had her frustration on display for everyone to see, fed out in little fits and starts so that it wouldn’t bubble over in one go. Now, with Margit in front of her, looking well and utterly drained, she couldn’t help but be pulled back to her usual frame of mind.

“You seem thoroughly pooped. It wasn’t from the job, was it? Oh! You didn’t have some kind of falling out, did you?”

“Oh, no, not that sort of thing. How do I put this... I’ve never felt exhausted in this manner before, so it’s hard for me to put into words.”

“In...what manner?”

Margit furrowed her brow for a few moments, but concluded that it would be no good to keep secrets between friends. She decided she was happy to have another girls’ talk with Kaya. They had laid their hearts bare to one another before—a little more embarrassment shared would only amount to some gentle teasing at the bar later.

“I’m just presuming, but you two haven’t done it yet, have you?”

“Done what?”

That wasn’t all—even though Margit and Kaya were of different races, the huntress felt that her own experiences might be of some use to her friend. Unable to put what she had done into words without endless euphemisms muddying the water, Margit did a little gesture with her hands—one that, back in Erich’s old world, would have been heavily censored.

Kaya was still green in the ways of the world, but she had spent a year living in the thick of Marsheim’s adventuring community; thanks to rude strangers on the street, she was not completely naive to the gesture’s meaning. It did take a moment or two for her to realize what Margit was intimating, but when she did, her face went bright red.

“O-Oh, n-no, n-nothing! I-I haven’t...with D-Dee, I...”

“Okay, okay, enough of that. Your innocence is giving me heartburn.”

Margit grinned at seeing Kaya flap her hands in front of her in a desperate attempt to explain her situation.

“Oh! D-Does that mean...?” With a pounding heart and fiery ears, Kaya cottoned to the meaning of Margit’s lazy smile. The more romantic expression would be that she was a woman now. To put it in more uncouth and direct terms, she’d absolutely taken it to pound town.

“Wh-Why n-now of all times?!”

“Why, you say? I’m almost nineteen. I think it would be stranger if I had zero interest in it, don’t you think?”

For the young herbalist, whose pure and innocent heart chose to construe her romance with Siegfried as stemming from “resolve,” the truth behind the arachne’s lethargy was all too much. She covered her face with her hands, unable to look her friend in the eye. It didn’t matter that Kaya hadn’t seen a single thing happen. Margit’s attitude and openness meant that she couldn’t not think about it. Her thoughts had turned so frantic that her cerebellum was on the verge of fusing under the heat of it all. Kaya almost regretted being so close with Margit and Erich—she couldn’t stop herself from visualizing the scene Margit so unsubtly hinted at.

“There were a few other reasons too. For starters, that boy was getting awfully worked up about this whole situation. That, and I realized that life is a fickle thing in our line of work—why not take the plunge? After all, I had been prepared to die of starvation countless times in the ichor maze.”

Despite Kaya’s utter embarrassment, Margit carried on. She was blushing hot enough to boil a kettle, so why did the young herbalist find herself adjusting her fingers so that she could peep at Margit with one eye?

“No one—man or woman—wants to leave this world with regrets. That’s why I thought to pluck up my courage and make a move. I surmised that it would revitalize him at least as much as me. I don’t think there’s much wrong with dispensing with my regrets now, before I’m at death’s door.”

After all this, Kaya would be a truly unique and otherworldly young woman if she chose to change the topic now.

“S-So you made the first move?”

“Indeed I did. And this is what I have to show for it.”

“Did it...hurt? I mean...you are in quite the state.”

Kaya’s usual temperament would never have dared allow her to ask such a shameful thing, but her curiosity was too strong. Margit was no longer merely her senior in age alone; even Kaya’s usual prim and proper presentation couldn’t prevent her from delving deeper.

“Interestingly enough, it didn’t at all. I suppose it’s because I’m an arachne. Even compared to other demihumans, we’re, ah, laid out a little differently.”

Kaya was completely at a loss, much to her dismay. Now, it would be extremely uncouth to delve into the details of what had passed between the two lovebirds, but it should be known that although arachne and mensch had different makeups to their womanhood, the pleasure from the act was the same.

“The problem, I think, was doing it seven times in one night.”

“S-Seven times?!”

Kaya couldn’t help but squeak a little. Although not yet of her mother’s caliber, Kaya was still a healer. Her anatomical readings had furnished her with a passable grasp of the physiologies of most peoples of the Empire—Rhinian academe loved a good dissection—so she understood the “tab A into slot B” side of mensch reproduction well enough. Naturally, she was familiar with the fact that mensch lacked mating seasons, and so could increase their numbers at almost any time they wished. That dreadful monthly visitor made this painfully clear.

This didn’t mean mensch had limitless sexual potential. According to the extensive studies of a certain historically famous physician—a man who had earned renown as the medical god of the Southern Sea in the Age of Antiquity—the typical mensch could only sustain two to four sequential sessions, on average during a normal cycle of activity. Forgetting the public criticisms he had earned as a “lecherous creep,” the results of his research had suggested that on a purely physical level, a mensch could go that far and no further. This should have counted double for two inexperienced lovers.

“I honestly don’t know how things ended up this way. The first time was good. I took the lead—you know, playing the role of the more worldly older woman, telling him how lucky he was to have a guide like me.”

“You t-took the lead...” Kaya murmured to herself, still flushing terribly.

“I managed to keep that act up until we wrapped up with the second time, and by then I was too absorbed in the afterglow to keep my nerves all tamped down.”

“You managed two times just like that?!”

Kaya couldn’t hide her face any longer. Now she was clutching tightly onto her robe, leaning forward to catch Margit’s next words.

“But I suppose Erich had forgone all nervousness by then. It turned into a back-and-forth that neither of us could stop. We tried all sorts of things, and by the time we were done and I wasn’t sure just how many times I had peaked, I was completely exhausted.”

As if moving to match Kaya’s interest, the huntress spared no detail in laying bare the events of the day before.

There was no way for Margit to know this, but Erich’s mental state had been swept along with the desires of his more youthful younger body, which had driven him to make a surprising number of “purchases.” Pleasure in sex came from mutual love and passion, but also from familiarity and dexterous technique. Yes, even this activity stood to benefit from a successful DEX roll. And so the stressed young man in the height of his second youth sought to overcome the strain of his work and any lingering setbacks about his performance in that area through his own unique shopping spree.

Goldilocks had reached Divine Favor in the bedroom. Not only that, his various traits had allowed him many more actions, so to speak—hence Margit’s current state. Seeing his arachne lover, a species with heightened senses compared to mensch, respond with such pleasure surely must have struck Erich’s heartstrings.

“You see, arachne are hunters who often lie in wait before making our move and getting the job done in a flash. That means our endurance is hardly much to write home about. I’ve spent five days on the hunt without eating, all for the sake of catching my prey—but despite that, never have I experienced such exhaustion as I have now.”

“W-Wooow...”

“My abdominal muscles are throbbing. I get these sudden dizzy spells, and my stomach just starts throbbing. My body feels so heavy, and it makes me wonder if this fatigue will ever disappear.”

“Wow...”

“How strange it is that people derive pleasure from something that can be such agony. The sheets were in quite a state afterward, so it was difficult to launder them without anyone catching on.”

“Wooow...”

The herbalist could only muster iterations on the same few single-syllable replies. The heavy air from the difficult conversation from earlier had been blown away. When Siegfried came home later that day, he saw an expression on his partner’s face like nothing he had never seen before.

[Tips] There are a number of TRPGs which include mechanical support for sexual intercourse as a negotiation method. Unfortunately, people in hard times offering cheap service have been known to let greed take over and end a foolish adventurer’s story before it could even approach a conclusion.

Siegfried only realized he was sweating when the salty bead reached his lips.

After the past winter’s adventure, the hero-hopeful had finally developed the confidence that he was a proper man, not just a wannabe who talked big. All the same, he couldn’t suppress the wave of fear that was running through him right now. The guts he had hardened in the fire of battle seemed to shrink as he received glares from every goon in the dodgiest joint in the neighborhood. Unfortunately for Siegfried, he was still untested on this front. As they sat in the Inky Squid, Siegfried cursed Erich—his cohort and, he was coming to acknowledge, his comrade—for bringing him to such a terrifying place. All in the safety of his internal monologue, mind you.

Siegfried’s brain was going into overdrive parsing his situation. Yes, he had said he would do anything. He dreamed of being the sort of hero who could leap to answer any call to action. But this was different! He was in a notorious hideout for bloodthirsty adventurers; there wasn’t a soul in sight who didn’t look like they’d happily cut his throat as soon as look at him. How the hell could Erich have just wandered in here without an appointment?!

If the young adventurer had possessed the means to ignore the pressure coming down on him, he would have taken Erich by the lapels and read him the riot act right then and there.

We need to build enough connections so that we don’t lose to any organization—that was what Erich had said, so why in all the gods’ names were they here, in one of the most terrifying places not only in Marsheim, but the entirety of Ende Erde?!

The logic held up. It had irked him a little to see Erich drive home the point as if talking to a child, but even Siegfried understood what it meant to get so strong that no one wanted to mess with you.

Siegfried admired the idea of going it solo, just like his epic heroic namesake, but this option had been shut away ever since he decided that he and Kaya were in this thing together. Not only that, he wasn’t a complete dreamer—he knew that they couldn’t immediately obtain the kind of power and clout that would shield them from the political gamesmanship of the city’s movers and shakers. As he saw it, the quickest method to insure themselves would be to either find some sort of politically powerful backing or become the head honcho of a group that people kept their distance from. They had begun plotting because they didn’t like the former option, so here they were, trying to achieve the latter.

Although neither young adventurer wanted to start a clan, they realized that they would need to form some sort of loose coalition to elevate their status. Siegfried had decided to tag along with Erich in his plan to approach a senior adventurer for advice, but he could never have foreseen that they would end up at the Inky Squid.

It stank of blood and cheap booze. In every dark corner—the joint abounded with dark corners—the clientele sharpened daggers and polished arrowheads. It had the look of your textbook pit of vipers, top to bottom. Other establishments, like the Golden Deer, might have conveyed a bleaker picture with their babbling, dejected drunkards and hardest of hard-luck cases, but none were quite so chilling as this.

“So you’re alive. Rumor mill was starting to think otherwise, you’ve been out of sight so long.”

The most terrifying person in the room was the ogress sitting right at the back of the tavern. Siegfried had never encountered a thinking being of her sheer scale. She was beautiful—her easy posture in her chair made her seem more like a bronze statue than a person—but she radiated an aura of menace that left him feeling like his balls were retreating to higher ground. He was certain he wasn’t the first to feel that way, nor would be the last. From the azure luster of her skin under the candlelight, Siegfried knew that even his precious new spear could never pierce it. Even her copper hair had a sophisticated, martial aura about it: unkempt, but not untidy.

Her exhaustion and ennui had abandoned her. Whispers of that fatigue and the shadows of dark circles under her eyes remained, but the ogress’s might was honed once again, all traces of rust meticulously polished away—she was more than enough to set a newbie adventurer who had only done a few big jobs quivering in his boots.

“Then again, I knew you weren’t the sort to get himself killed, so none of us here gave a damn what the rumors said. Right?” she went on, gesturing to her underlings.

Coarse peals of laughter came from her cohorts; they cackled and hooted at Goldilocks. Siegfried just couldn’t understand how his fellow, this man with whom he had shared bowl after bowl of tasteless gruel in the ichor maze, could just stand and take all this laughter.

“I must apologize for the awful delay in my New Year’s greetings,” Erich said. “I was snowed in with quite the job.”

How could Goldilocks act so coolly in front of this languorous beauty? Any regular person would find themselves prostrated on the floor begging for her forgiveness, whether or not they’d done anything. Siegfried found Goldilocks as strange as ever as he switched from that usual shady, half-smirking air of his to a totally elegant, well-mannered metropolitan dialect. Siegfried couldn’t put into words why Goldilocks’s civility seemed so fishy to him. It was as if some nameless, grasping horror, its shape impossible to pin down, dwelled beneath the surface of his shadow.

In truth, Erich was not that different from Siegfried—a foolish, sentimental boy who only had eyes for adventure.

“Oh, I thought you seemed a little more refined than before—you were on a journey, I see. And what, pray tell, was your esteemed victory against?”

“Nothing to write home about. We simply brought an end to a grudge that had been festering for many, many years.”

“No, no, no, that won’t do at all. Your modesty pulls the wool over people’s eyes! At least give the foe you vanquished the dignity of praise. You might as well spit in my face otherwise!”

A chill ran through Siegfried at these last words. Had he heard her correctly? Piecing together the unspoken context, Siegfried could only presume that Goldilocks had beaten this mighty warrior...

“It was an adventure that lasted all of winter. Hah—I was more concerned that we would die from starvation than a blade to the heart.”

“Ahh, a war of attrition. Yes, quite the beast to struggle with. We, too, would be nothing without our supplies. As you can see, we’re all big eaters. The battlefield back home was quite awful, I’ll tell you. We ended up rushing the enemy to steal their horses for meat.”

The ogress let out a bellowing laugh, then set an elbow to her knee and rested her head in her palm, and fixed Siegfried firmly in her gaze. The young adventurer felt like that golden glare of hers was picking him apart, as if he were prey in the jaws of a great eagle. He instinctively dropped his center of gravity—knees slightly bent, weight in his hips: the stance he took when holding his spear. Thinking they had only come to talk, he hadn’t brought even a dirk.

“Now you look like a warrior. Name?”

She smiled; it spoke to the gesture’s origins not as a sign of mirth, but a show of one’s fangs. Hers were large even for an ogre.

“The name... My name is Siegfried of Illfurth.”

The answer came without thought, without pause. Sieg knew, in the depths of his primeval rodent brain, that to freeze now would only invite the beast before him to lunge. Caught in her long shadow, he found his usual raw manner replaced with all the courtesy he knew how to express. The three he now spent the most time with all used palatial speech, and he had unwittingly absorbed some of the fundamentals.

“Very good. I am Laurentius the Free, of the Gargantuan Tribe. I hope we may continue this acquaintance.”

“O-Of course.”

It seemed that the hero-hopeful had passed the ogress’s test. If this had been the Laurentius Erich had first met—the listless apex predator feasting upon the tasty morsels her underlings brought to her—Siegfried would be screaming his head off in the yard in a few minutes.

“I am pleased that you have found someone worthy of holding the reins beside you on the battlefield. Ah, not that an ogre would know anything of how a horse feels in the saddle. We just know they go squish-crunch.”

Laurentius’s guffaw rang high up into the ceiling. Upon finishing her appraisal of Goldilocks’s ally, the ogre warrior jabbed her chin at the waiter standing with a bored expression behind the bar counter—bring out the booze.

“So, then. I doubt that you came to visit to assuage my boredom now, did you?” she said to Erich.

“Your intuition is as sharp as ever.”

“You didn’t seem as if you were up for another dance. You need warriors for a battle? I can send some if need be.”

Laurentius didn’t need to explicate the mutual understanding that a worthy payment would be required. The barkeep came over and poured drinks for the three of them. The mugs were large, but as Laurentius picked hers up, it looked like a little medicine bottle in her hand. For the two mensch, on the other hand, it was quite the drink.

“Ugh...”

Siegfried couldn’t help but flinch as he caught a whiff of the fumes that wafted up from it. He had an average tolerance for an Imperial subject, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t like a stiff drink; still, it was his first time faced with this type of liquor.

Erich took a swift sip without a flinch before letting out a satisfied sound.

“Mmm... Very good. Gin from the northern isles, I presume?”

“I’ve been taking on more gigs to wake up this rusty body of mine. I feel stronger than before, so I’ve been reinvesting into this old place’s selection. Now they surprise me on occasion with a brew like this.”

It might have seemed odd to many for a customer to hand out walking-around money to a brick-and-mortar store to improve the general quality, but it wasn’t an odd hobby for a bon vivant with flush coffers. Investing in something local and leveraging one’s name to move product traced its roots all the way back to the Age of Gods.

Laurentius wasn’t necessarily investing in capital, but she was funneling her money to the barkeep so that he could add some variety to the Squid’s stock at his discretion—a fitting method for such an eccentric.

“H-How can you keep this stuff down, man? The scent alone’s putting me off,” Siegfried said.

“Only the most booze-loving fanatics drink this straight,” Erich said matter-of-factly. “I can only manage a couple of sips, to be honest. Mind if I have some water as a mixer?”

“Huh? Ah, right, I suppose it’s a little strong for you mensch. Forgive me—at times I rate you as an even tougher ogre than me!”

Goldilocks shrugged his shoulders in bemusement at the ogre’s deep belly laugh, while Sieg set his mug back down, happy he hadn’t taken a sip yet.

Siegfried knew his own limits. When they had brought in Jonas Baltlinden, the revelers had given him drink upon drink, which had left him crouched over a bucket the next day, muttering insensate apologies that would go unanswered. Siegfried couldn’t forget Kaya’s exasperation—far more bitter than the tea she had given him to nurse his hangover.

“You see, I’m in a situation that is hitting me far harder than this drink. As my senior in the business, I wanted to borrow some of your wisdom, that I might mount a better defense.”

“Is that right? Well, the only thing of worth I can give you is my blade.”

“Yes, but you lead a clan of dozens. I wanted to ask what chain of events brought you to such a position.”

Laurentius made a peculiar expression in reply to Goldilocks’s unexpected remark before taking a huge gulp of gin straight from the bottle. She then took Siegfried’s mug—rightly assuming that it was too much for him—and drained that too.

“Hmm... So you want to start a clan?”

“Not exactly. Becoming like Saint Fidelio, someone whose affairs go unmeddled in out of a collective understanding of the consequences, is hardly a task of days or weeks. I merely wish to improve my connections and information network; I do not wish for money or power.”

Even though Erich had only taken one sip of alcohol, he was plainly far more drunk than anyone else in the room—drunk on the allure of adventure.

“I was hoping you could give some counsel based on your own experiences building a safe bedrock for yourself, given that you built one of Marsheim’s most feared clans.”

“Counsel, you say...”

Erich was far younger than her, a rookie adventurer who had snapped her out of her ennui—a man who still resolutely held that he lost that duel—and Laurentius felt a twinge of embarrassment at being asked for advice. She looked into the middle distance as she pondered the question.

“I’m not sure. It just kind of happened.”

“C’mon, boss-lady, that’s not true at all!” One of the old guard of Clan Laurentius, a gnoll who served as both adjutant and accountant, screamed in response. “Don’t you remember my first day here?!”

“Of course I do! But...hmm, I was pretty drunk. I just kind of went with the flow, I guess?”

“You’re breakin’ my heart!”

If the genders were reversed, this would have been your typical comedic spat between an old couple—poor Kevin seemed quite shocked at this news. He fell to his knees upon the tavern floor, thick with grease stains and dust. As much as the liquor had improved, they’d never seen fit to hire a better custodian.

“S-So, boss-lady, do you not remember when I joined?” Ebbo, another old-timer in Kevin’s vein, spoke up, pointing to his own face.

Laurentius evidently didn’t want to answer. She averted her eyes from the quivering mensch, but her silence spoke volumes.

“H-Hold on, everyone! Take a deep breath! You’re all my valued subordinates! I just can’t remember how things ended up like this; I can’t remember the moment we went from a mob to a clan!”

The ogress did her best to appease her loving subordinates, who broke out in tears one after another. The sight of a pack of square-jawed brawlers all but wailing into the titanic bosom of their leader left Sieg and Erich positively bumfuzzled.

“It’s not like we had a party to celebrate our formation or anything. We just ended up here! To me it just seemed like the clan formed without me really doing anything!”

Erich took a sip of his grog. This “advice” seemed simultaneously vital and utterly useless. Put plainly, the clan had formed around Laurentius’s own animal magnetism (or, in less charitable terms, they had simply flocked to the tallest landmark in sight)—that was all there was to it.

These men who served under her had seen in her exhaustion, her despair, and her flight into drink a mirror held up to their own lives. Adventuring had sapped their spirits and broken their ambitions, and their shared hunger for a win bound them inextricably. This alone had allowed them to hold together and avoid the iron fist of the law, even as the clan grew to staggering size.

“Hey, Erich... Should we slip out?”

“Nah, it would be ruder to run away from this situation. Though really, Sieg—do you have the guts to stand up and walk out while this is going on?”

Siegfried thought for a moment and realized that Erich was quite right.

Lost in the intense atmosphere of the tavern, the ogress’s overwhelming beauty, and now this weird chaos, Siegfried had completely forgotten the question that had been playing on his lips—how the hell had Erich fallen in with this motley crew? It had proved such an awful time to ask that the question had fallen out of his brain.

[Tips] Unlike the more deliberate means by which one forms a company, the loose connection between adventurers can evolve and change, founding an institution before one realizes it.

When a situation got out of hand, one could always count on the nuclear option for dispersing many people’s worries at once: throwing a party and letting everyone drink themselves under the table.

Such a scene had come to pass at the Inky Squid.

Seeing the patrons collapse where they stood, the barmaids had forsaken the day’s pay and left the joint as it stood: mightily trashed. As for the owner, he’d just accepted the chaos as part of the cost of doing business and drunk himself into a pleasant repose.

Siegfried and I remained awake—we had lain low in a corner to stay out of the cross fire—as well as Miss Laurentius herself.

“Hic...”

Even she had her limits. Keeping pace with her whole clan as they drowned their sorrows had tested them. She sat deep in her chair, three sheets to the wind, her face flushing into a deeper and fresher shade of blue.

“Ugh... What’s the time?”

“It’s been a little while since the dusk bell rang.”

“Oh, is that right? We’ve been drinking...for almost half the day.”

To be honest, I was somewhat relieved when we first arrived. At a glance, she looked markedly less like shit—brighter-eyed, better complected—most likely because she’d started going a fair bit lighter on the sauce of late. In other words, it was clear she’d returned to the life of a healthy warrior.

Her once unruly hair had been taken care of—she had asked me to cut it once after it wasn’t going how she wanted it to. Her clothes, on the other hand, were the same as ever: modest things that didn’t quite fit properly. Some vestiges of her previous state remained, but in general she was far more polished than before.

The party had closed out with some nonverbal communication to make amends between her and her underlings—scuffles, brawls, the sort of stuff that these muscleheads seemed to like—which, combined with her brief indulgence in the bottle, had put her in quite the state.

“I’m sorry... I never ended up giving you any decent advice.”

“Not at all. I’ve learned a lot.”

I wasn’t being polite—this experience had been enlightening in its own way. I had found out that beauty and martial might could make folks bend the knee without actually making a coherent effort to build connections. Even Miss Laurentius’s world-weariness could be a draw in and of itself. It likely helped that the adventuring community had no shortage of sad sacks with more grit than brains.

This was hugely useful intel. In this life and the one before, I’d been drawn to formal structure, social norms, authority, and institutional discipline. I had done the usual job-hunting grind that Japanese university graduates did and landed a place at a company whose name I’d long since forgotten; here, I had been invited by Lady Agrippina to work for her. In either life, I had never participated in a group this organic—hell, I’d scarcely known something of the kind existed! Even when it came to my former hobby, I had worked to create that space for us by going out to rent a room in an apartment so that me and my friends had a place to meet and play. There was variation in who chose to show up, as people often dropped out eventually, but they chose to join of their own accord and all happily contributed to keep the bills paid for the common space that we’d actively built together. And then there were Siegfried and Kaya. I had recruited them—all but press-ganged them into my circle of friends, really.

Seeing Clan Laurentius with the understanding that it had simply fallen into place was eye-opening. Adventurers, living moment to moment as they did, had a way of swaying wildly between pursuing their dreams and their practical needs. You hardly needed mind games or cheap tricks to pull a group together—you just needed to find something that you could all chase after, a path to walk as one.

“I haven’t felt like this in some time...how odd, to fight to keep my eyes open after one night’s revels... Hic...”

Miss Laurentius pushed her hair from her face and let out a self-effacing chuckle. Her hand reached out for the bottle, but after a moment of hesitation she picked up the water jug instead.

“I drank to rid myself of my hunger. I thought...if I dulled my senses with...hic...liquor, I could forget my lust for battle.”

After chugging half the pitcher, she tipped the rest over her head. Confronted again with her uniquely languid beauty, I could see why her fan club of drunken rogues were so drawn to her. Seeing someone who was so incredibly out of your league in terms of strength but also facing a complete disillusionment with the world made you want to admire and support them. Yep, this is totally the reason why penniless dirtbag rock stars always have fans.

“The burning feeling from pushing your body to the limit far outclasses the way that liquor burns...but however faint the imitation, it let me delude myself awhile. Then I found myself at the bottom of the barrel...lazy and hopeless.”

The ogre warrior flicked the rivulets of water from her brow, although the haze of alcohol couldn’t be so easily swept away, and stood up. Despite the waver in her speech, interrupted at times by hiccups, her posture showed no trace of weakness. I was stunned at how much could change in such a short period of time. If I took her on again with my no-magic handicap, I was sure I would lose. I couldn’t help but think of Miss Lauren—just how strong must she have been to make this terrifying specimen of a warrior flee from her? A shiver ran through me again at this thought.

“But it’s no good... If I remember that fire...the inferno that awaits me at my absolute limit...I feel a craving for blood...and death.”

Her thoughts dulled by booze, her ogreish appetites started to show through. Just as we mensch were unable to bear more literal hunger and thirst, so too did ogres crave the thrill of a real scrap. It wasn’t the same kind of abstract kick that other races might find in violence—joy at having attained superiority over others or the approval of the survivors. An ogre’s lust for battle drove them more deeply than their compulsions to pursue food, sex, or sleep. The higher they climbed, the harder the hunger was to endure—or to satisfy.

“Yes...it’s coming back to me. I see it clearer now... Victory was never my aim...only the fight.”

For regular folk, a battle was something to get through to reach either victory or death, but for ogres, these were simply bonuses that were tacked on at the end. The true draw was the emotional and physical toll of the thing; if one should prefer death or victory, it was only in the way one might prefer spirits to ale.

“All I want...is to unleash everything I have...and be cut down in battle once I am sated. Heh... I was always the black sheep of my tribe.”

Miss Laurentius moved with bored, smooth strides and picked up the massive twin swords lying by her chair without difficulty. She hitched them to her leather belt and gave another toothy grin.

“Fire... I need fire. Without it I cannot live. The blazing fire that comes of others pushing you ever forward. I think that...is the essence of a band like ours.”

At this, things seemed to fall into place.

The world was full of people that we could give value to by connecting with them. Such folk had built nations. Liu Bang, Emperor Gaozu of Han, differed from Miss Laurentius in many ways, but the way they had amassed followers had been the same. They had the strength to draw people in and make them want to live and die alongside them.

It was easy to say, but seemed impossible to replicate. Such charisma couldn’t be conjured on command—it was something you were born with.

“But you, Erich...you lit the fire beneath me. You have...talent.”

The ogress dragged her alcohol-dulled body toward the staircase. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the energy left to take care of her clan in their state.

“Hunger and fire. People will move if they are reminded of what these things mean to them. Heh...hic.”

The wooden staircase groaned under her weight, an echo of the howling emptiness that Miss Laurentius held in her own heart.

“Be proud. My blade is yours...if need be. I will always be at the ready to protect your own skills from ever being stripped away. Don’t forget...that you’re the one who did this to me.”

With a hoarse chuckle, Miss Laurentius disappeared out of sight as she trod the path back to her room.

“Phew...”

Siegfried and I let out massive sighs as we let go of the tension we had been holding. We had suffocated under Miss Laurentius’s incredible presence for far too long—something that a regular drunkard could never imitate. Our brains knew this wasn’t battle, but our senses were on high alert. It couldn’t have been good for our hearts, that was for sure.

“Let’s go home...”

“Yeah, you said it...”

I had introduced my friend to a powerful clan and received some advice. It had been a useful day, but good gods, were we exhausted. We hadn’t even drunk that much; it was the pressure of the room that had worn us down.

Charm, huh? The power to draw people to you...

It wasn’t an unfamiliar concept. When I was sick of two-bit thugs getting in the way of my adventures, I had boosted my Negotiation skills. When I had been perusing my skill tree for something that would allow me to lay down some roots, I had noticed quite the expensive trait: Absolute Charisma.

This was a trait that founders of nations or legendary heroes were permitted, so even with all the free experience I was getting from Limelit, it was still quite the pricey investment. I had been putting a lot of focus on skills and traits that would boost my direct fighting power—who knew when a Divine-level beast might ambush us—but it seemed like the time to make a decision had finally come.

Fortunately our gamut of battles had given me some direct experience, and I had gotten some bonus Limelit experience from the whole affair too. After all, our quest hadn’t just been to curry our sympathy for the situation in Marsheim—we had been little canaries heading down into the mines, that we might give our own appraisal of the situation. As such, our return had sent mouths flapping.

And yet...it still wasn’t quite enough to bag me Absolute Charisma.

It wasn’t all too surprising. This one little trait could leave you set for life. It was incredible, but it took some finessing in terms of build and usage if you were to use it to make some drastic changes to your life.

It cost about as much as five other cheaper traits—the boons it gave were in exchange for reduced firepower. It demanded absolute caution. Yet when I considered its practical applications, it seemed worth the steep price. I had bought the cheaper version of Absolute Charisma, so the rules of the world seemed to indicate that I had passed enough checks for a nice discount, but it would take all of my savings and then some in one go.

I was jealous of Siegfried’s spend-happy bravery right now.

“I was thinking we should make another house call the day after tomorrow.”

“You serious? Man, I don’t wanna do today again.”

“Yeah... We’re gonna get our hands a little dirty with this next trip, so I’ll need to prep you before we go. No sense wading into all that drug business half-cocked.”

“Drugs?! So you admit that you’ve been dealin’ with wastoids! No wonder all the rookies wanna keep their distance from you!”

“What?! Hold it, Sieg, people think that about me?! All I’ve been doing is trying to live an upright adventuring life!”

Siegfried and I ribbed each other as we walked through the cool night, our hearts full of newly acquired insights.

[Tips] It is said that humans’ three desires are food, sex, and sleep. However, ogres’ hunger for battle trumps all three of these. Researchers have noted that their desire for battle perhaps even exceeds vampires’ cravings for blood.

After two days of puzzling over the complexities it took to make a clan, I decided it was time to meet up with my trump card, however dirty it made me feel.

“My... You seem in good health. Your arms and legs...still attached to your body... How grand.”

Yes, I had called in with the head of the Baldur Clan, Nanna Baldur Snorrison.

“It was just as you had warned. We pushed onward and managed to arrive safely back despite it.”

“It was quite the foul-smelling request. I was wondering why...some customers at the Association were so upset.”

Today as ever, the emaciated (but inexplicably curvaceous—I tried not to contemplate what sort of alchemical horror she was knocking back to sustain her figure) College dropout was smoking on a potent brew. I could tell one puff would probably send me crashing straight to the floor.

I had given up on bringing Siegfried with me, mostly because Kaya wouldn’t sign off on it. My Insulating Barrier could protect us from the various smokes and fumes there, but Kaya knew most out of all of us the dangers posed by Nanna’s work, and so had decided she couldn’t in her right mind allow her partner to set foot somewhere so dangerous. She’d said that she wasn’t yet skilled enough to create antidotes to poisons of the brain. An ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of cure. And so here I was, alone.

Margit was taking a day off. We had, ahem, had a little bit more fun last night, and I had left her asleep. She had been muttering something about paying me back for last time, so I imagined there was something about our first time together that had annoyed her. Intimacy is sometimes heightened when we have secret desires and thoughts about our partner, so I decided not to pry.

“So? What brings you to me today?”

Nanna smirked at me as she touched the water pipe to her lips. I took a deep puff of my own pipe before getting into the matter.

“Circumstances of late have me interested in how best to go about my business without the movers and shakers of the world getting their hooks in me. You seemed like you might have wisdom to share.”

Nanna’s eyes—the bags under them set so deep that it almost looked like she was wearing makeup—widened in surprise at my remark. Why did I find her so cute in that moment? Had my first roll in the hay thrown my whole body out of whack? Gods, I need to keep a lid on these runaway thoughts. I do not want to be one of those men who meets a swift end because they can’t keep it in their pants.

“Advice, you say... In other words...you don’t want to be worked into the ground...doing political dirty work?”

“In short, yes.”

“I see... A difficult conundrum.”

Nanna had told me right at the start that our adventure in the ichor maze had been handed down to us through a mediator employed by a small-time noble. She had known that Viscount Frombach, in charge of our destination of Zeufar canton, would have been in Berylin on social business. In other words, it was highly likely that political powers had some sway in my current problem. Naturally, I thought the person who had seen this problem from a mile away would have some unique insight into how to avoid it.

Nanna was silent for a while, then blew out a puff of smoke. “The simplest solution,” she replied, “is to make a bond with a generous client or two...that no one would want to get rid of.”

The Baldur Clan had remained in play this long, despite the deeply illegal nature of their stock-in-trade, entirely because merchants of the black, gray, and white markets alike depended on them. Marsheim’s drug culture was old and strong; so long as the junk in circulation didn’t threaten the order of things, nobody batted an eye.

Whatever the poison, so long as your world needed a little escaping from, there would always be demand for intoxicants. Junk was hardly any different from booze in that regard. Considering the long history of alcohol on Earth, it was no surprise to see just how poorly prohibition in America had gone. Even more compromise was needed when it came to an era without firm rule of law, in a world even more chaotic than the one I’d come from. The Baldur Clan was Marsheim’s answer to these conditions. Under the circumstances, Nanna’s advice was quite fitting.

“Should I...introduce you to a mediator...who deals in many squeaky-clean jobs? They’re favorable with the Empire...and have links with local lords who have had a change of heart...as well as other clients from outside Marsheim. They seem...rather distant from all this scheming.”

Ahh, yeah, a mediator. That was an option.

It was difficult to know the ins and outs of a request before actually taking it on. An incredible amount of time and resources were needed to vet not just a prospective gig, but the client themselves, especially before you’d made a commitment. It was an investment, and like any investment, it would demand that belts be tightened elsewhere in one’s budget. That said, if I could build a relationship of mutual trust with a client, I could rise in their estimation and stick to straight-and-narrow work.

Nanna was well aware that I could ruin her life with one simple letter; I surmised that she wouldn’t try and throw me under the bus now. After all, my ace in the hole wasn’t your regular old blackmail. I had all the power to let her former professor know where she was, and even I couldn’t say whether that horrific geist would cry or absolutely lose her mind if she knew the kind of filth Nanna was up to here. I could summon the pervert supreme in a single turn to completely obliterate Nanna. She could never have reached the heights of power she had if she were dumb enough to try to play me, knowing the position I had her in.

“Even in Ende Erde...they can be found: people with time on their hands...and philosophical thoughts about nobles in their heads.”

There were three types of nobles out here in the Empire’s western periphery. The first were those who directly served Margrave Marsheim. The second were the old bastions of power, the local lords. The third were dispatched from the government. Even though Margrave Marsheim had roots in quite the established bloodline and had a legion of his nobles and the local big shots who had joined the Imperial cause, he still didn’t have enough people to establish a hegemony here in Marsheim. To fill this void, nobles had been dispatched from neighboring areas. Many viewed the move to this underdeveloped and lawless land as a demotion—old Tokugawa probably felt the same way when he was forced to leave his home of Mikawa—but there were those who were happy to develop the land for the glory of the Empire, few though they might have been.

Responding to their enthusiasm, some of those in power had decided that they too would lend their aid in helping to make Marsheim safer for the people who lived there. There were a few mediators who worked with people like this, and Nanna promised that she would write me a letter of recommendation.

“Remember? You went on a medicine run...to help prepare for winter? I have a mediator...who works under kind nobles...like that one.”

That was a relief to hear. Of course, I wanted to do my own little bit of digging, but at this rate I would be able to make some connections that would allow me to avoid any unwanted suspicion.

Naturally, this introduction came with a price tag: namely, my continued silence. Nanna’s kindness came from the fear that I had the power to rat on her to Lady Leizniz with a snap of my fingers.

My pieces were all in place. Instead of blackmailing those in power and securing jobs by force to keep myself out of trouble, I could get in their good books by finding a good client who had political sway. Two birds, one stone.

“In return, a little generosity wouldn’t go amiss... I can give you prices...that are twenty to thirty percent below going rates... I won’t allow late payments though...”

“I don’t mind. All I want is to be able to enjoy my adventures without worries.”

I didn’t care that she looked at me as if I was this side of crazy. I just loved adventuring that much. Fame? Money? Connections? These were all necessary elements, yes, but they were not my end goal.

“And...may I make...a little request?”

“What is it?”

Perhaps Nanna had realized something after seeing me look so satisfied with myself. After a few moments of silence, Nanna drew something out and laid her hand on the table—as usual, a meal had been prepared for host and guest, but it sat there untouched and getting cold.

“What’s this?”

“A little something...that’s been in circulation...since the start of the year.”

I couldn’t help but furrow my brow. Drug problems? Again? I wasn’t stupid—I knew this was an inseparable element of human history in my old world and any other, but I felt wary of her way of wedding old-school pharmacology to actual magic. Nanna’s Sweet Dreams potion already had this town by the throat; what was she doing handing me the sequel?

I pushed down my frustrations. What I found inside surprised me. It was a pill. I had hardly ever seen a circular pill since coming to this world. Rhinian medicine usually came powdered, in infusions, or as little pellets.

The small black pill before me was given shape with starch or something, and cut into a little cylinder. It looked like candy. This was bleeding-edge ingestible medicine—even the College hadn’t fully adopted this kind of delivery mechanism yet.

I couldn’t sense any mana from it. I couldn’t tell whether magic had been used in its manufacture, but I could tell that when ingested, its effects were purely chemical.

“And what is this?”

“It causes ecstatic hallucinations, intoxication, mild dyschronometria, and changes in personality... It’s quite stimulating to the nervous system.”

Huh... That’s ringing a couple bells...

“It’s simple to ingest. Simply allow it to...melt on the tongue...and it’ll be taken in with saliva. Its effects...last about half a day.”

That’s it! It’s LSD!

LSD was a psychedelic drug—a powerful hallucinogen derived from ergot alkaloids. On Earth, naturally occurring psychedelics like the fly agaric mushroom had left a huge footprint on human history, helping fuel religious ceremonies and mystical experiences the world over. If I remembered correctly, folks figured out how to synthesize psychedelics in lab conditions in the latter half of the twentieth century; from there, they’d entered public use by private citizens and governments alike, and in time came to be treated as a social problem.

This is way too early for any world to develop LSD! And in such a compact form! This is potent stuff! I mean, maybe it isn’t a hundred-percent the same as LSD, but it’s close enough!

“Well, it’s a poor product, really... I thought it might come in handy, sharing a little of the burden of what goes on in my own mind...but it’s no real help...”

She’s already had a taste, huh... Jeez... Is there nothing this woman won’t test on herself, just to see if it’ll fit into her little junkie empire? She’s something else...

“It’s just a stupid drug... It doesn’t reach the soul...or the true depths of the mind. They’re calling it Elefsina’s Eye... Ridiculous name, if you ask me... It’s just a worthless hallucinogen,” Nanna spat, sounding uncharacteristically bitter. The pill caught fire right there in her palm. It seemed like she’d gotten her hopes up about it taking the edge off of the living nightmare locked inside that skull of hers.

“I don’t know who made this...but they should be ashamed. It’s worthless. An eyesore... The trip...does nothing...to strip bare...this world’s illusions.”

Life must have been a nightmare for an epistemologist with no higher ordering principle to fall back on. All that remained in the fields of a brain tilled by a plow of logic and deductive reasoning was a barren waste. Maybe if she’d had a little Descartes to chew on, she’d have turned out a bit less twisted.

“It’s a useless defect...lots of bells and whistles, lots of side effects, no substance... All the same...it’s habit-forming...and cheap.”

“How cheap?”

“Fifteen assarii for a pill... A generous price, indeed.”

Only fifteen?! That was pocket change—enough for a few days’ cheap eats! Hardly an appropriate price for something this strong. My memories were hazy, but I could swear that LSD used to set you back a few thousand yen at least. And considering the cost of manufacture, the price here didn’t make any business sense.

“So are they making a loss on them?”

“Oh, it’s a tried-and-tested method. You sell the first batch cheap...and crank up the prices once your user base gets hooked. You can drive out competitors...and control the market.”

Now that is evil. I was naive to have forgotten that such methods were viable. As someone who’d always tried to live in a just and fair way, whose only experience with drugs had been purely through the medium of fiction, this was a method that would never have come to me naturally. Still, I could have sworn I’d seen something like that come up in a novel I’d read once. All the same, this was not the kind of crap I wanted pulled in my medieval-slash-early-modern mishmash fantasy world, dammit!

“It seems that there are already some nobles and guards sniffing around the stuff...and are slowly being led into the trap. We’re doing our best to...eliminate this competition, but...”

“You need some more hands to rough up their labs?”

“It’s a relief that you catch on so quickly.”

The Baldur Clan had outsourced their bodyguard work to me so consistently because they weren’t geared toward close combat. The clan’s precious mages—excluding Uzu, who was on courier duty—were busy guarding their own workshops and turf, meaning that sending even one of them to do grunt work would amount to a loss in their forces.

They were working on a medical solution to their muscle problem, but so far they were still a long way out from any sort of super soldier serum. Putting the likes of Mister Fidelio to one side for a second, the Baldur Clan would no doubt be useless against the Heilbronn Familie, with whom they had strained relations, to say the least. Against their burly audhumbla boss or Manfred the zentaur (who’d made a name for himself splitting the tongues of would be shit-talkers), Nanna’s underlings would be like a rickety door rattling in the wind. Their mass-produced fighters would hold up against your average Joe in the street, but anyone with some real skill could deliver them a firm ass-beating.

“We’re still doing our research...and haven’t yet turned up many leads...but I will be sure to call on you.”

Nanna’s choices were limited when it came to important jobs like protecting her HQ, so I was to be called in when it came time to take on the big guns. It made sense; Nanna’s magical skill set was geared more toward indoor fighting, as opposed to open-air combat or sudden raids. She could transform her entire manor into a killzone for any intruder by simply releasing magical clouds of noxious fumes, letting the maddened fools pick each other off in a wild rampage. Her skills were very much geared toward being the one raided, not the other way around.

Fine, why not? I’d developed an attachment to this town, for better or worse. I would sooner turn a blind eye to the questionable ethics of this woman than sit on my hands and let a pit of squalor grow many times worse.

It would be a win-win situation for both of us. Which is not to say that I couldn’t tell who was getting the bigger slice of the pie.

[Tips] Descartes pondered on the nature of human consciousness, believing that it does not simply emerge from one’s sensory experience, but that the thinking, immaterial mind is a connected yet distinct thing from the unthinking, material body. However, such philosophical discussions on consciousness do not come about so easily in a world where even the gods are finite.

“It’s a matter of morality, young Erich.”

A resounding smack echoed in the fresh, bright morning air. Huge bedsheets hung in the Snoozing Kitten’s inner garden under the early spring sun, carefully placed so as not to touch the dirt below. Saint Fidelio was doing his best to get the creases out of the laundry as he gave Goldilocks a little lecture.

“They who indulge in vice shall flee and scatter. They who hold up their morals shall stand tall.”

“That’s from...The Book of Praises, Proverbs, Chapter, uh...Three? No, Two?”

Goldilocks was busily stamping on a bucket filled with water, soap, and laundry, but that was not the source of his wavering grasp on the Sun God’s scripture. It had just been a while since he had sat down with the texts.

“Chapter Two, Verse Three. It goes on: Moral ends and moral means are harmonious; they contribute to a peace everlasting.”

“I shouldn’t expect any less from a man of the cloth.”

“Not at all. I sermonize passably, but no more than that. I only seek to follow the teachings of my God in all I do. I’m hardly missionary material.”

While Erich had been out on an adventure, so too had the saint. He had rolled up his sleeves so as not to get them wet, and his muscular forearms—each broader than your average mensch child’s torso—were crisscrossed with welts that seemed more from the realm of a clumsy chef than an adventurer. Two large circular wounds on his left palm, still raw to look at, indicated to Erich that his senior had perhaps fought with some kind of beast of prey—a wound most likely sustained while protecting one of his party members.

Among his other bruises and cuts, this was a hideous wound that would have left the average person without an arm. But this devout follower of the Sun God paid it less concern than his current task of bestowing his bedding with his master’s blessings. These battle scars served as a fine lesson in and of themselves for this earnest youngster, so he didn’t mind showing off such fresh wounds only a day after his return.

“In the Proverbs is another passage: One’s virtue should be as our Sun in the heavens—though passing clouds may dim its glow, never should it go out.”

When this young adventurer had come to him asking what best to do in order to escape from the plotting of statesmen and the world of politics, the saint had plainly and cheerfully answered him: one must earnestly show one’s morals.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the heart of the axiom was to pare away all one’s earthly disputes with supreme violence, and this underlying implication caused Goldilocks to pull a wry smile. The words were heavy with the weight of personal experience.

When Saint Fidelio had enacted revenge against the crooks from the evil clan who had wanted to control him, he’d used his brute strength to crush any who’d sullied their hands in unforgivable misdeeds. There was no trace of exaggeration in the story of Fidelio’s night of righteous ruin—the armor-clad battle monk of the Sun God had crushed all evil in his path.

Despite the administrative ruling that combat between adventurers was not permitted, he had broken these rules, come in person to throw adequate compensation at their keepers’ feet—this was not a metaphor, Fidelio had quite literally flung his payment with enough force to leave a small crater at the castle gate—and gone on his way.

The message was clear: You can’t complain about this, can you? By proving his point with his might alone, his opponent could only sit in silence.

Since then, everyone had taken a step away from Saint Fidelio, regarding him as the one man most not to be meddled with.

“The most important thing is defining those morals for yourself and sticking to them. Ever since I was born into this world, there is only one thing that I am ashamed of.”

Fidelio’s arms, far broader and more powerful than the average lancer’s, were entirely busy with handling the laundry immaculately. If any were to look upon this scene, they would see nothing more than a youngish innkeeper who cared about his livelihood.

“Naive as I was, I didn’t kill all of those bastards before they hurt Shymar.”

And yet appearances were deceiving. Although his gentle smile was like a warm sunbeam, the sight of sheets hanging in the breeze positively pastoral, the details of his story were anything but.

The sun drove away the cold and gave life to crops. However, it could also parch the soil and mortify flesh. The Father God’s follower was no less dyadic.

“When I was younger I used to believe that human nature was fundamentally good. I thought that if I were simply strong enough, then I could calm even the most fevered mind, and reason would follow. I was quite the fool in those days.”

“And so you cut down a hundred people?”

“Oh, enough of that. Personally, I struck down around thirty. The gross body count was higher, but that was only because my allies had my back. It wasn’t a hundred, I’m certain—maybe only eighty or so?”

While the saint let out a dry laugh and a comment that the Catchpenny Scribbler had penned quite the troublesome exaggeration, Goldilocks could only stand slack-jawed.

“One of the proverbs of the God of Trials hadn’t yet sunk in back then, I suppose. To be free and just, learn how to cut; virtue grows where a blade is there to shelter it.”

“Um, that’s from the Art of War’s...preface?”

“Bingo. Verse Two.”

Happy that this young adventurer had been educating himself in divine scripture, Fidelio took the washed sheet from Goldilocks and began to rid it of excess water and creases. Even though the Sun God had less vivacity on this early spring day, with enough moisture shaken off, they would dry by noon.

“All I can really say is to be like this laundry. Keep your distance from that which would seek to dirty you.”

Fidelio’s delicate handling of the laundry, not allowing even a corner to reach the dirt of the garden, was emblematic of the way he lived his life. Avoid evil, but be ready to strike it down—through putting actions to words, make your name known in the world.

This way in which Fidelio had created a rift between him and the troubles of the world at large was incredibly difficult, but the younger adventurer aspired to it regardless. After all, Erich had taken a similar route when a certain clan had tried to drag him into their schemes. The problem was that this wasn’t so simple when the one causing trouble was the political administration itself—only true monsters with positively demonic auras could avoid their prying.

“I still take on jobs if it’s for the people. I have connections whose noses are honed to sniff out reliable information.”

Survive and keep your means pure and exacting—these were the adventurer’s ABC’s.

“Don’t be too fussy,” Fidelio went on. “Find your morals and stick to them until your dying day. Although I suppose that results in profit being pushed to the back burner. It’s a difficult line to walk. Reliable information costs money, so that naturally eats into your margins.”

“That doesn’t bother me too much. I don’t want to be forced into a position where I want to quit being an adventurer all for the sake of a few silver coins.”

Money was useful, yes, but Goldilocks wasn’t obsessed with the stuff. What was important was the things that money gave you—tools, experience, efficiency. This belief that money was a means to an end had been finely honed ever since his previous life.

Instead of sleeping in the finest bed, drinking the fanciest wine, he would rather put his earnings toward Alert Potions or mana stones to up his MP. When, at the table, he had become a near-legendary adventurer, he had chosen to lie down in a bed of hay beside the horses. He had dined on flavorless gruel for ages to leave room in the budget for the right magic weapon.

What he yearned for, with his equipment that could all be sold for enough gold to make him a veritable noble, was a journey into the unknown and battles with ever greater foes.

Each adventurer had their own dreams, but there was no rookie who would meet their end with their riches still in their pockets.

All adventurers knew that money would come after a successful quest. There were some players who were obsessed with optimizing their monetary gains, but this was nothing compared to what the efforts from the grind gave you.

“Very good. There are many rookies who mistake the wood for the trees and do things they later regret, all for the sake of a quick few silver pieces.”

For Erich, who had swung his blade on dark nights on the orders of his former master, the older adventurer seemed almost blinding.

“Ah, I was going to ask,” Fidelio said. “By all appearances you’ve formed a party, but you don’t seem to have many connections with other lower-level adventurers.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Fidelio’s sudden change in topic took Erich by surprise. Fidelio wondered if the younger adventurer—arguably the saint’s disciple—realized it was his oblique way of saying that Erich didn’t have many friends.

“Well, then I would advise you that you’ve not given enough weight to your lateral connections. I wouldn’t sniff at making a little network of your peers. It can prove to be a useful source of information in its own way.”

Erich’s connections were horribly skewed. This had been the case ever since he’d worked in Berylin. During the years he spent in the Capital of Vanity, he had only managed to make two friends his own age—one of them, admittedly, was actually a vampire of forty summers, but developmentally speaking she was just as much a teen. His current network of relations could be counted on one hand—and one of these had gone from simple friend to something more.

Erich had no comeback to being told flat out that he had almost no friends.

His early days in Marsheim had led him to set up shop in the Snoozing Kitten, which had been the first factor to distance him from his peers. He’d spent these early days only with Margit, and a few jobs had led him to becoming fast friends with Siegfried and Kaya. Perhaps more than anything, however, it was the speed at which he’d amassed victories and notoriety that had led to his social solitude.

First he had clashed with the major clans. Then he had toppled Jonas Baltlinden—an almighty feat on its own. There was a gulf now between Erich and his peers that the camaraderie of youth or a shared calling could not bridge.

There was something else that the man in question had totally forgotten—he had obtained various traits, such as Oozing Gravitas, when the Exilrat had singled him out, which only made it even harder for people to approach him. Passive traits were useful, but they also invited their own unique problems. Just as a tiger stands out among cats, Erich’s might and fame had distanced him from his peers. A simple glance told them he was different, and this made forging friendships uniquely difficult.

“A social circle, huh...”

“Exactly. I can see why you stay here—it’s the best place in all of Marsheim. The food’s great and the owner is a real beauty! But I think it might be time to broaden your worldview.”

As Fidelio returned to bragging about his darling wife, he gave Goldilocks an encouraging pat on the back.

Of course, he refrained from telling his younger fellow something he deemed unimportant. In truth, it was Hansel, not Fidelio, who was saddled with dealing with their party’s social and information network...

[Tips] Fame isn’t all good. It leaves an uncontrollable first impression that might be difficult to alter.

Her pale back in the moonlight was a breathtaking sight, bringing to mind the desert at night. Her girlish figure was at odds with the defined muscle that rippled underneath her skin. The place where those back muscles, honed under a lifetime of archery, met her spider’s carapace captivated me.

I knew just how wonderful it would be to stroke that soft back, but I held myself in check—I didn’t want to tease her any more than I already had. Her beautiful back, which had never seen danger—aside from her mother—was more delicate and responsive than the lap harp it reminded me of. I knew that a simple touch was more than enough to make her sing, but I knew if I let my desires take over she wouldn’t speak to me tomorrow morning. She had already thrown a pillow at me once tonight in utter exhaustion—not with any force, though.

Man, it’s tough having a young body again. I had made a few...foolish purchases, and once a fire had been lit under me, I found it difficult to keep it contained. Details of this side of life from my previous teenage years were a bit hazy now, but this time around I had curbed any sexual desires that wouldn’t go anywhere with sword practice, so I had kind of lost sense of what was normal during these troublesome years.

What I did know was that eight times in one night was pushing it a little.

Margit’s responses had been too alluring, and I had egged her on by teasing her for coming at me like she was challenging me, which had led to a bit of fun between the sheets.

The early spring nights were still cold, even more so for arachne and their lower base temperature. I had wrapped up my partner in blankets before the warmth from our lovemaking had faded away.

I sat up and cast Clean on myself and the bed before leaning out the window and taking a deep drag on my pipe. I let out a billow of smoke and watched it dissipate into the night sky, blurring into the moonlight.

My hair, which had at some point come undone from its bun, looked almost silver. I took care of it as ever, and the glow from the Night Goddess was gentle but...heavy.

“Aww, you’ve finally dirtied yourself.”

The moonlight had more prosaic reasons to weigh on me than some ripple in the laws of physics.

“You should stop sitting on people’s heads.” Ursula had materialized right on top of me. I went on, “And what do you mean by that?”

“Purity is valued by some more than you may think. All children are born pure into this world, after all.”

“You sure do love your extremes...”

Ursula was swinging her legs in the corner of my vision; I could feel her heels tickling my eyelashes with each kick. I knew by now that they would never actually hit me, but it was quite the shock when it first happened. All the same, knowing that my eyeballs could be splattered at any moment with each swing was already exhausting my patience.

“Hmm, well, nothing about you has changed, so I’ll let you off the hook,” Ursula said.

“Yeah, yeah, thanks, I guess.”

“There’s less competition for you now, though.”

I had noticed that since I had turned fifteen, I had started to receive less teasing from my two alfar companions, and they had started to appear before me even less since Margit and I had made our promise together.

I imagined that both purity and age were important to alfar. I had gotten pretty sick and tired of their constant teasing and games growing up, so why did I feel this twinge of sadness now that it had stopped?

“All the same,” Ursula went on, “the human world is quite the headache.”

“Why do you make it seem so irrelevant to you?”

“Because it is. You mortals are so preoccupied with such trivial matters.”

I felt the svartalf shift above me before she used my forehead as a kickboard to propel herself into the air. Her wings caught the moonlight like an Actias aliena moth’s as her body—her deep amber skin, crimson eyes, and white hair—carved an elegant arc in the air.

“But no matter. The night sky is beautiful; the darkness, warm and inviting.”

The sight of an alf dancing in the spring night sky was mystical and enrapturing. It was as if the night itself had taken the form of a girl to enchant me.

“Hey! The wind at night is super great and awesome.”

In a moment, one arc of light had become two. Green intermingled with the pale blue light as a relaxed voice joined the mix.

“You’re here too, Lottie?”

“Well, yeah. You look like you ate a bug!”

“And you left us all alone for a whole winter,” Ursula added.

The alfar were free beings unbound by the shackles of ordinary life. The essence of their lives existed far above those of mortals, on a conceptual plane—natural phenomena given personality, doing as they pleased.

Folk led about by the base drives bound strictly to this world could never fully grasp the alfar’s ways. If you did, then you would end up spirited away, as they did with children.

“It wasn’t my fault. I was in my own share of trouble—if I could’ve asked for help, I would have. It all just came ’round on the wrong day...or under the wrong moon.”

If I could have borrowed the pair’s strength, we could have cleared that sprawling labyrinth in, maybe not a day, but three, perhaps.

“That’s happening all the time recently! Is someone playing tricks, I wonder? If you’re in trouble, then that’s the perfect time to help you or show you the joy of our alfar tricks,” Ursula said.

“Those kiddies with spinning wheels! They’re no good at all,” Lottie chimed in.

“Yeah, those lot who love messing with Erich seem to be hiding recently... Maybe they’re planning something.”

Spinning wheels? That’s not an auspicious motif... If I remembered correctly, among the decaying gods of the Southern Sea, there was a divine being who presided over fate or destiny and bore a spinning wheel...

It wasn’t rare for the gods’ authority to impinge on the alfar—the two before me were perfect examples—and I felt some sense of fate at work.

I had no faith in my own luck, but the two alfar completely ignored these concerns. Their midair dance grew more intense. They carved a circle of light in the air, and as I watched I felt a strange emotion tickle the corners of my eyes. Was this nostalgia? Homesickness? However one might qualify the longing, it was for something I was certain I didn’t even know.

I supposed it wasn’t all too strange. Back in my old world, I had felt a sense of longing toward things I had never known—dial TVs, ramune bottles where the lid was one with the bottle, untended countryside paths, old sweet shops with candies no one ate anymore. This feeling was much the same.

They had turned toward me with their hands outstretched—inviting, caring. Take our hands, let’s draw circles together...

I had a strange conviction that if I took their hand now, I would be able to fly—I wouldn’t plummet down to the ground; I would be able to dance in the open air with them.

“Isn’t the world of humans so tiring? Dance with us.”

“Yeah, I bet you’re sleepy-weepy! What’s the point if you’re tired?”

My elbows leaning on the window frame quivered slightly—my body was unconsciously reacting to their invitation.

I was sure it would be wonderful.

I was sure it would be beautiful.

I was sure it would be a time with no worries or cares.

But I had no plans to do so. Right now, I felt no desire to hand in my character sheet and say it was a good run. I had my fair share of troubles and worries, but they were part and parcel of an adventurer’s life.

The wisps of smoke from my pipe reached out to their hands.

In the next moment, I heard the snickering of young girls and boys and the circle they had created vanished.

I supposed that the pure alfar that dwelled beyond it didn’t take too well to the herbal fumes, designed to soothe an old and weary soul.

They were a far purer and more innocent class of being than children, after all.

“Ah, what a shame,” Ursula said.

“Aww, Her Queenieness said this would be super effective against tired people.”

I knew it. I couldn’t slip up with these two, even now. I hadn’t had to engage with any alfar tricks recently, so I had thought that all the alfar aside from these two were done with me. I hadn’t imagined so many of their kind would still fawn over me like this.

“I’d be happy to dance with you, if it’s on solid ground,” I said.

“Eh, I knew you wouldn’t bite.”

“Huuuh? You said we should do this, Ursula!”

“Silence is golden, Lottie...”

I smiled a mature smile as I watched them chase each other. I didn’t have plans for excitement in the near future, but I would ask them for help if I needed it.

Just how long would the protective facade I and my former master had devised last?

[Tips] The longer people live, the more they are prone to nostalgia for that which they have lost along the way. The alfar can only be seen during one’s youth, so it could be said that they are nostalgia given flesh.