At that same moment.
The weather was actually rather fine today. Sunlight pushed through the thin cloud cover and spilled across the broad, marble-paved courtyard of the Twilight Manor.
The very heart of the [Loki Familia] home base.
Flowers massed in bloom on every side, and water murmured in the fountains.
By rights it should have been the kind of lazy hour made for afternoon tea in a lounge chair. And yet.
"Hey! Pour me a glass of chilled juice! And don't skimp on the ice!"
Hestia had shamelessly commandeered the widest wicker lounger in the courtyard.
Her two small bare feet were propped on the footstool beside it, and she waved her arms and hollered at the red-haired goddess standing on the stone steps.
The sheer nerve of it.
"You stumpy little brat!"
Loki's pale red ponytail looked ready to stand on end, strand by strand.
She wore a cropped shirt that bared her midriff over jeans washed nearly white, and now she had her hands planted on her hips, teeth bared, glaring at Hestia.
"Get it through your head! This is my Twilight Manor!"
"You walk in the front door and start ordering me around like you own the place, fetch this, pour that. Who lent you the guts?!"
Loki stamped her foot and jabbed a finger at the cluster of [Haimer Familia] girls nearby, who were busy looking the place over.
"And another thing!"
"Sure, these girls turned the Guild upside down. Sure, their levels went up. Sure, they took every last scrap of the spotlight!"
"But not one of them belongs to your [Hestia Familia]!"
"So what exactly are you strutting about? They're Haimer's kids, every one of them, and you're showing them off like they're yours?"
The jab landed dead center.
In the old days Hestia would have jumped up and shouted herself hoarse denying it. Things were different now.
"Hmph! What would a flat-chested old hag like you know!"
Hestia folded her arms beneath her chest, chin high, thrusting out the proud curves that her tight white top could barely contain.
"Haimer told me himself, ages ago. He's willing to take me in forever!"
"In the Lower World, his door is always open to me!" Hestia proclaimed at full volume.
"Which means Haimer's things are my things! And rounding up, his Familia is my Familia!"
"What, jealous? Jealous that the one Haimer shelters most in the Lower World is me?!"
The words dropped.
Oh, boy.
Every [Loki Familia] member polishing a weapon nearby stopped mid-stroke at the same instant, ears going up like antennas.
So this Virgin Goddess was that favored in front of the great dread god of the Heavens?
"You dumb loli!"
Sure enough, steam was all but rising off the top of Loki's head as she ground her teeth and shoved her sleeves up.
"Haimer only puts up with you because it's less trouble than kicking you out into the street! Give you an inch and you take the whole road!"
"Let me tell you something! Tomorrow. Tomorrow for sure! I'm going to Haimer myself and having him throw your freeloading little stump of a self out the door!"
"Ha? Go on then, if you've got the nerve! Let's see whether Haimer listens to me or to you!"
Hestia gave no ground, bouncing straight off the lounger.
"Aaaargh! Die, you washboard!"
"Bring it, I'm not scared of a stumpy brat!"
And so two goddesses who were, whatever else, names of some standing in myth went at each other on the Twilight Manor lawn without a shred of dignity.
Hair pulling, cheek yanking, rolling over and over, kicking up a haze of dust.
Haimer's people and Loki's people alike rolled their eyes and, by unspoken agreement, decided they had seen nothing.
After all, these two had been running the same act all the way from the Heavens down to the Lower World.
Not far off, in the shade of a huge oak, beside a stone table.
Riveria, the high elf in green robes, sat upright on the stone bench.
Her long jade-green hair lay smooth down her back, and the pointed ears unique to elves gave a twitch.
As vice-captain of the [Loki Familia] and one of the handful of true sages in all of Orario, Riveria paid no attention to her patron goddess rolling around on the ground. Her eyes rested calmly on the Holy Emperor seated across from her.
The Holy Emperor wore everyday robes woven of plain white and pale gold today, her bearing quiet and gentle.
After two levels in a single leap, the sanctity about her seemed to have thickened into something almost solid.
"Miss Holy Emperor."
Riveria's slender fingers traced the rim of her teacup, and she came straight to the point. "The rankings the Guild posted today have surely spread through the whole Labyrinth City by now."
"Two levels at once. In all the history we know of, that is a miracle without precedent."
"Orario says the Emerald Sun of that night was your doing, and that it was this unprecedented excelia that bought you so irresistible a rank up."
"And yet."
Riveria paused.
"Was that truly the power of Miss Holy Emperor alone?"
"A wide-area magic capable of blanketing an area that vast."
"Forgive my bluntness, but as a Mage who walks the same path of magic, I find I have my doubts."
Riveria was no goddess. Lies could be told to her face.
But in Orario, when a question came direct enough, few people could fob off a powerhouse who saw through everything with a fabricated answer.
It amounted to a demand that she lay her cards on the table.
Faced with that pointed interrogation, not a flicker of panic touched the Holy Emperor.
After all.
Haimer had warned her long ago that the truth behind his authority must never be exposed to outsiders, so the Holy Emperor swallowed that half of the sentence whole.
Before she came to this world she had been the sovereign of a nation, schooled by seasoned old political animals such as Tendou Kikunojou, and she had honed the art of language to a fine edge.
And so.
The Holy Emperor kept that serene smile that seemed able to hold every sorrow in the world, her gaze soft and steady as she met Riveria's eyes.
"The emerald light that covered the city was indeed 『Gensokyo』, invoked by my own chanting, Lady Riveria."
"And through all of it, I truly leaned on no other adventurer of Orario for aid."
"Everything was accomplished beneath Kami-sama's gaze," the Holy Emperor added with a smile.
After all, "beneath Kami-sama's gaze" could be unpacked as nothing more than Haimer having been present.
That no one else had lent a hand was simple fact.
It was rooted deep in common knowledge, besides, that a god cannot use Divine Power in the Lower World.
Airtight, every word of it, and every word an established fact no one could argue with.
Riveria studied the Holy Emperor.
Nine Hell's instincts still whispered that something here did not sit right, that this was far beyond anything a Lv.2 Holy Emperor should be able to do.
And yet.
Look as she might, from any angle, she could not find on the Holy Emperor's face the guilty flicker of a liar.
If she was not lying, then only one explanation remained. The Holy Emperor had truly brought forth a miracle.
"I see…"
Riveria let out a long breath, and the last of the suspicion faded from her eyes.
"If that magic really was chanted by Miss Holy Emperor and no one else, then a promotion to Lv.4 is nothing less than you have earned."
"You have my sincere admiration."
Seeing Riveria finally sheathe her edge, the Holy Emperor quietly unclenched the fingers she had balled inside her sleeve.
Talking her way around the scrutiny of Nine Hell, a first-rank adventurer, was anything but easy.
"Miss Riveria is too kind. I still have a long way to go."
The Holy Emperor lifted her teacup with mild grace and hid the rest behind the act of drinking.
The view shifts.
To the open-air training ground on the west side of the Twilight Manor, its floor laid deep with heavy sand.
A shriek of torn air scraped across it.
"Ting. Clang!"
The harsh clash of weapons fell like a sudden squall of rain, leaving the eardrums of the Loki Familia members who had drifted over to watch buzzing.
Out on the field, sand churned.
Ais wore her signature black-and-white light armor, circling with footwork that looked weightless and impossibly fast.
Opposite her, Koharu Narukami came in for the kill, a short blade reversed in her grip.
It had begun as a friendly spar.
But once the two of them locked up, the savagery and speed of it looked like anything but two strikingly pretty young girls at play.
Koharu Narukami had only just risen to Lv.3.
Yet once her innate skill 『Slay for the Sake of Slaying』 began to turn, even Ais, veteran of a hundred battles, felt a small flicker of surprise as they traded blows.
"Clang!"
Another solid, grinding collision of steel.
Ais rode the force into a backflip and landed light as a leaf a dozen paces off, toes touching down first.
Koharu held her ground like a steel spike driven into the earth, wrist rolling to catch the hilt in reverse, chest visibly rising and falling as she stared her opponent down.
She knew precisely how absolute the gulf between herself and a Lv.5 was. Trading raw force was a losing plan.
"Lv.3 you… you've gotten strong."
Ais tilted her head, golden bangs hanging in front of her eyes, and something like admiration surfaced on a face that usually gave nothing away.
"But… there's something I'd like to ask."
Then, out of nowhere, Ais changed course.
Her interest swung to a subject so far removed that it left no time to brace.
She even scratched her pale cheek.
And asked, dead serious:
"Um… there's something I'd like to ask."
"Where's Lord Haimer?"
"Why didn't he come with you today?"
At that unheralded leap of topic, at a question that plainly cared more about Haimer's whereabouts than about who won this duel, Koharu Narukami's brows drew together into three hard lines.
The hilt already tight in her fist creaked under her grip.
Here she was, sweating through her clothes, dragging out every last card she held, and what this woman had on her mind was her own Kami-sama?
Still.
Courtesy between Familia was courtesy.
She pulled in a deep breath and answered in a stiff, flat voice. "Kami-sama has other important business to attend to. He took Tsukuyo and Lili with him."
"He hasn't got time to burn out here with us."
There was a spark of temper in Koharu's words, and before Ais could answer them at all, one of the Amazon twins perched on the wooden rail outside the training ground spoke up.
Tiona, bare feet swinging, let out a wail. "Eh?! Little Lili and Tsukuyo didn't come either?"
In a thin little bandeau that just barely covered her unimpressive chest, Tiona looked crushed.
Where Tiona was disappointed, Tione, sitting beside her with her arms crossed, lit up the moment she heard that the Pallum girl called Lili had stayed behind. Delight flooded her whole face, and the corners of her mouth fought their way upward.
"Good. Better that she didn't come!"
Tione snorted, arms folded, fingers drumming impatiently against her own biceps.
After all.
Everyone knew it. Finn, captain of the [Loki Familia], meant to revive the Pallum race, and had always intended to take a wife of his own kind.
The mere thought that the Finn she was hopelessly in love with might be stolen away by Lili, herself a Pallum, had Tione, obsessed with Finn to the point of madness, giving off a thick reek of jealousy and spite.
Teeth grinding.
Watching Tione's terrifying pageant of expressions, all of it conjured up purely from imagining her beloved slipping away, the handful of young [Loki Familia] Second Corps members standing beside her all shuffled one small step aside at the same moment.
And privately they broke into a cold sweat on their captain's behalf.
If the captain ever did marry some other woman, with Tione's fierce, food-guarding temper, the sky over the Twilight Manor would surely come down in pieces.
She would stop at nothing.
Any woman but herself who dared come within five meters of Captain Finn would be driven off by every means she could invent.
"Fwsh!"
"Thud!"
A low, sharp cry came with it.
A short-range thrust wrapped in a fine, vicious spiral of whirling air.
It blurred into afterimage, flew like an arrow off the string, and punched clean through the exact center of a thickened, multi-layered straw dummy twenty meters away.
Straw sprayed everywhere.
The one who had struck.
None other than Mary Kikakujou.
A long, slender Western rapier rested in her hand.
In theory this should have been exactly the moment to be flushed with excitement, eager to probe the brand-new power flooding her body after her breakthrough.
But…
"Hss… ow…"
Mary Kikakujou kept her voice low, her legs shaking faintly inward no matter how she tried to still them.
She was going out of her mind.
Because, when you got right down to it, the culprit behind her not being able to stand steady was entirely last night's blessing in the master bedroom, that first taste of forbidden fruit.
Granted, it had been for the sake of rebuilding her circuits.
And besides. Most of the impact that night had been shouldered and soaked up by Miss Rei, the Xenos whose physical toughness far outstripped her own, a body that could stand toe to toe with a Lv.5 monster.
But Mary Kikakujou was, in the end, a sheltered young lady!
Her body was in no state to withstand Kami-sama's ravaging!
Even with her boundless hidden masochistic streak awakened, driving her to pleasure-mad tears and drool through that shameless ordeal, willing to offer up everything.
But… but the aftermath afterward was undeniably real, no faking it!
Today, just walking, that place still burned with pain, and her lower back ached as though someone had struck it with a war hammer.
Especially this morning, before she left home, if Rei hadn't caught her, she would have nearly collapsed to her knees.
Just as Mary Kikakujou gritted her teeth and forced herself back into her ready stance, those embarrassing lewd scraps still spinning through her mind like a carousel—
"Miss Mary!"
"You've improved so incredibly fast today!"
"When you thrust just now, I could almost feel Wind Attribute magic flowing with intense tension along the tip of your blade, Miss Mary!"
"No wonder you're a prodigy who sublimated to Lv.3 in such a short time! To have grasped the true essence of how Wind Attribute magic flows—that's amazing!"
Standing off to the side, Lefiya, who had long harbored a fondness for Mary Kikakujou as she watched, her bright, dewy eyes lighting up at the sight, immediately began to clap, her face full of admiration as she ran a few steps closer, speaking with obvious excitement.
____
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