The lamps in the master bedroom had been turned down to a dull amber.
The soft bed sank in one spot.
Haimer sat propped against the headboard, arms spread wide, Mary Kikakujou gathered against him on one side and Rei the siren on the other.
It was the kind of tableau that would set anyone's imagination running.
Marie, above all, had no room left in her head for thinking at all.
For a blonde young lady who had always carried herself with pride, her body had gone as soft as wet clay, and all she could do was let her whole weight settle against the firm chest of the god she adored.
Every breath she drew was nothing but his scent.
A damp flush spread from the corners of her eyes, and strands of golden hair clung in disarray to the fine sweat on her neck.
All those romance-novel scenes she had rehearsed in her head a thousand times had turned to mush the moment his arms actually closed around her.
She had heard someone say once that girls were made of sugar.
Right now she felt she had been kneaded together out of secret wanting, and the heat in her was close to catching fire.
Her fingers twisted into the edge of the sheets.
"Even out your breathing. Holding it in only makes the magic slam around harder."
Haimer's voice came from above her head.
The words went through Marie like a needle.
A low sound slipped out of her throat, and she hurried to release the lip she had been biting, dragging in one deep mouthful of air after another.
Rei, on his other side, was far quieter.
As a Xenos, a humility before those above her was carved into her very bones.
Leaning against Haimer now, she did not dare stir so much as a single feather.
That pair of broad blue wings stayed folded tight behind her, taking up as little space as she could manage.
In truth, though, the sweet fever running under her skin was no less than Marie's.
Where the magic seeped into the sigil patterns, a shivering, prickling warmth spread out, and every pulse of it washed away a little more of the cold that lingered in her monstrous frame.
"L-Lord..."
Rei's voice trembled. Her face was so red that even the roots of her feathers had gone faintly pink.
"Don't lose focus. It's almost over."
Haimer did not look down. He simply pressed his palm an inch lower along her smooth back, working loose a clogged knot in the flow of magic.
Rei shut her eyes, lashes fluttering without pause, as though she were steeping in a hot spring.
The scene in that room would have stripped away the defenses of any god with less self-control on the spot.
At that same hour.
In the great walled money-pit off Southeast Main Street — the Pleasure Quarter.
Lili, who had slipped inside and lain low until dark, was learning firsthand what it meant to walk on thin ice with your breath locked in your chest.
She gripped tight the thing Haimer had entrusted to her, having only just wormed out from beneath the rusted iron grate at the bottom of that derelict cistern.
The instant she came up to street level, the sight in front of her drew the instincts she had honed through years of scraping along the bottom of this city taut as a bowstring.
It was all wrong.
At this hour, however tight the lockdown, the Pleasure Quarter should still have been a riot of red lantern light and spilled wine.
Even in broad daylight, those three-story pavilions with their hanging red lanterns kept a few wooden shutters open, and the smell of rouge and powder drifted out of them.
But not tonight.
Everywhere she looked, every last window had been nailed shut behind thick, solid planking.
Not even a stray sliver of light escaped.
Across the whole district, the pleasure-house streetscape had been wiped away.
Under the smell of face powder, the air carried something heavier: the dull clatter of metal armor knocking against metal armor.
Bands of Amazon warriors moved between the covered walkways, their upper bodies wrapped in nothing but a few leather straps, muscle packed tight, eyes vicious.
These were the rank-and-file fighting strength the [Ishtar Familia] took such pride in.
"Not a single blind spot anywhere..."
Lili kept to the shadows at the mouth of an alley.
With the magic 『Cinderella』, she had become a thoroughly forgettable Chienthrope errand boy.
She stood a bit taller now, and two half-drooping dog ears sprouted from the top of her head.
She held the broom handle and pretended to sweep fallen leaves along the roadside with no particular purpose, while her eyes never stopped sliding over everything around her.
Lili counted silently.
At the main eastern junction stood three ten-woman squads in full gear, rotating in a crossing pattern every fifteen minutes. There was never a gap longer than two seconds to slip through.
Push in deeper.
On the second-floor terrace of the tallest, most ornate main building in the western district, dense pulses of magic flickered faintly.
And there was more.
At the central street mouth below that main building, a gang of laborers swung hammers, throwing up a towering watchtower of solid timber.
Piled at its top were bundle after bundle of barbed arrows smeared with throat-sealing poison.
Beside them sat several heavy ballista-cannons capable of punching through stone walls. This was a defensive line dug in for a last stand, a position prepared for a bloody siege against an enemy coming in force.
"Has Ishtar lost her mind...?"
Lili drew a quiet, cold breath.
Against a deployment like this, unless several first-line regulars of the [Loki Familia] came down and forced the gate themselves, anyone ordinary who tried to break in was simply throwing their life away.
But that only proved the intelligence was correct.
The more absurd the defenses, the more lethal the secret hidden behind them.
Broom in hand, playing the part of a servant hauling off refuse, Lili crept along a gravel path screened by a row of potted plants, inching toward the deepest part of the compound.
The farther in she went, the sparser the torches became, and the better the shadows covered her.
Her steps halted behind the corner of a low wall carved with delicate flowering patterns.
Roughly twenty paces straight ahead of her.
A separate three-story house stood on its own.
For dozens of meters around it, the ground had been swept so clean that not even a bird had anywhere to land.
It was cut off from the noisy barracks nearby.
What struck Lili's eye hardest was this: unlike everything else, the little house had not been boarded up with crude planks. Heavy floor-length curtains of plain white hung in its windows.
And two hulking Amazon warriors, each well over a meter eighty, were posted at its door.
Judging only by how they stood and the pressure rolling off them, Lili's survival instincts told her those two were seasoned mid-tier fighters at Lv.3, a completely different species from the Lv.2 muscle padding out the streets.
"So this is the place."
Lili held her breath, pressed flat against the cornerstone, eyes fixed on the largest window on the second floor.
And in that very moment.
A gust of night wind came out of nowhere and tugged one corner of that thick white curtain aside.
It was only that one corner, only that sliver of a gap.
Behind it, an unmistakable fox tail flashed into view for less than half a second!
Right after it came a small, panicked hand, yanking the curtain shut again.
Lili pulled her gaze back at once.
Her heart skipped half a beat from sheer excitement.
That was the decisive clue!
A fox tail like that was the single most distinctive feature of the renard girl called Sanjouno Haruhime.
Lili was certain now: Sanjouno Haruhime was being held under guard in a second-floor room of that three-story house!
Found her.
The target's location, pinned down exactly.
What came next was no longer her job.
Lili forced the thrill back down.
Everything a veteran knew said the same thing: once you have found what you came for, the moment you let yourself relax and turn for the exit is the moment you give yourself away.
But for all her careful reckoning, some things never bend to anyone's calculations.
When the wind moved the curtain, she had lingered two extra seconds at that corner to confirm the tail.
And just as Lili turned, ready to shoulder her broom and shuffle back the way she had come, behind that row of flowerpots —
A shadow tall enough to blot out nearly all the pale moonlight at the alley mouth stepped soundlessly out of another dark, narrow lane beside her, and planted itself squarely across her path.
Lili stopped dead.
Blocking her way was an Amazon of striking height and dangerous curves, black hair falling to her waist, skin a healthy wheat brown.
She wore a thin leather garment that could only just be called a bustier.
At her hip hung an outrageous serrated heavy broadsword, and the huge blade still carried a faint smell of blood.
The frontline general who commanded the Ishtar Familia's combat courtesan corps — Lv.5, "Antianeira", Aisha Belka.
Aisha stood there.
She narrowed a pair of sharp, pale-violet eyes and dragged them up and down over Lili's Chienthrope servant disguise, inch by inch, like a blade with real weight behind it.
"Whose crew are you with?"
Aisha's voice was low and rich, but in the silence of the alley it was cold enough to make bones ache. "At a moment this critical, who gave you leave to wander around the inner grounds?"
Cold sweat broke out across Lili's palms where they gripped the broom.
She could feel it plainly: if she stumbled over so much as half a syllable, this battle-hardened Lv.5 general would have that broadsword out inside a third of a second and split a nobody like her, barely Lv.1, clean in two.
Lili drew a deep breath.
She repeated to herself the words Kami-sama had once told her — if you don't dare draw a blade, then use your head; as long as you keep your footing, you have value.
Here goes!
Working with what the 『Cinderella』 transformation gave her, Lili let her head drop and hunched her body down small, putting on exactly the cringing terror of a bottom-rung drudge who has just been singled out by someone above her.
"L-Lady Aisha!"
She dropped to one knee with a thud and laid the broom down beside her.
"This one's with the outer-court hauling crew, ma'am. I carry the oil the honored ladies use to wipe down their weapons."
"I just finished clearing the empty jars out of the big bunkroom over there, and I was on my way back to the western district to report in."
Lili let a measured tremor into her voice, exactly as much as the disguise called for.
"There's guards posted everywhere, ma'am, and I lost my bearings for a second in all these alleys, that's the only reason I was creeping around at the foot of this wall..."
"Please forgive this one, Lady Aisha! I truly didn't mean anything by it!"
Lili kept her head down and her back teeth clenched, burying her face as deep into the collar of her cloak as she could.
The silence stretched for a full five seconds.
Aisha took a step forward.
In those five seconds, those predatory eyes stayed on the thin body in front of her.
She leaned in, the tip of her nose twitching.
As though picking a prey animal's scent out of the air.
This was an Amazon brute who had read more people than she could count.
Liars usually gave off a different kind of sour, nervous sweat.
That was hard-won knowledge from years of battlefields.
But she smelled none of that lethal false note on this little servant.
There was fear, yes, but only the useless, sniveling kind any drudge ought to show at the sight of her.
"A waste of skin who can't even keep a few lousy alleys straight."
Aisha sneered, and the pressure hanging over Lili's head slackened all at once.
"Stop cluttering up the front grounds. Get back to your bunk."
"If I catch you buzzing around these sensitive areas again like a headless fly—"
"—I'll feed you straight to the giant rats down in the tunnels."
"Y-yes! Thank you for sparing me, Lady Aisha!"
Lili snatched up her broom like a prisoner granted a pardon, bobbing and bowing as she backed away.
Only once she had retreated into an inconspicuous side lane did she turn and hurry off.
Aisha stayed where she was, saying nothing more.
But when Lili's back disappeared around the bend of the alley, she paused again, turned her face, and let those violet eyes rest on that direction for a couple of long moments.
In the end she let it go, snorted once, and hefted her broadsword to go patrol elsewhere.
Lili's heart hammered against her ribs.
Only after she had cut through a dozen alleys and escaped the suffocating field of view of Aisha and the massed guards of the front grounds did she follow the drain route she had come by.
She found the passage into the old cistern, screened over with dead branches and rotting leaves.
Without a moment's hesitation, Lili slithered in like a loach.
Through the foul water and the mossy stone of the underground culvert she climbed for all she was worth, not daring to waste a second.
That had been a walk right past the gates of death.
If her disguise had shown even the smallest crack, Orario tomorrow might not have contained anyone named Liliruca Arde at all.
But whatever the risk, what she had gained was worth the price of the ticket ten times over.
"Kami-sama, the lead you wanted — Lili has it..."
The moment her feet hauled her up out of the outer-street sewer, and she breathed night air that was cold but a hundred times cleaner than anything in the Pleasure Quarter, she slumped down against a haystack at the street corner, chest heaving.
She let the transformation go.
The Chienthrope frame collapsed swiftly back into a small Pallum girl in a battered red hood.
She scrubbed the foul water and cold sweat off her face with the back of her hand.
Then she got her feet under her, took the dark and empty back lanes.
And ran at full speed toward Haimer's residence on North Main Street.
Hours later.
Back at the residence.
The upscale district was quiet enough that the only sound was the occasional chirp of an insect.
In the ground-floor hall, the lamps still burned, though it was the dead middle of the night.
Second floor, master bedroom.
The channeling of magic had reached its final stretch.
After all, Haimer's own magic could flow on without end.
But for Mary Kikakujou and Rei, the process had been a grinding marathon, as punishing as running for three days and three nights without stopping.
Now, flushed and glowing from the magic poured into them, the two girls sagged limp among the bedding as exhaustion rolled over them.
They fell into a heavy sleep at almost the same instant, too far gone to care about the state of their disordered clothes.
Haimer rose and straightened the collar that had gone creased.
He looked at the human and the Xenos sleeping so sweetly and so defenselessly on the big bed.
He pulled a thin blanket up from the foot of the bed and draped it over the two bare bodies.
He had just turned away and poured himself a cup of water to wet his throat.
"Knock. Knock knock."
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