Chapter 26: Perfectly Normal
Before Freya could take her examination of the newcomer any further, a voice caught her off guard.
"What is going on here?"
Aria had just stepped into the chamber, the girls at her heels, all of them having come running after the shout Mei had let out a few moments earlier.
Her gaze made a slow circuit of the room. It stopped on Mei. It slid down the breastplate molded over that heavy chest, lingered on the pinched waist, on the hips, on everything the black steel underlined instead of hiding.
Then it climbed back up to Freya, and Aria’s smile stayed perfectly in place, which was far worse than if it had dropped.
Oh no.
"Calm down... calm down, Aria, it’s not what you think, all right? I can explain everything."
Damn it, isn’t that the worst possible thing to say in a situation like this?
She didn’t let the silence sit a second longer, nor the misunderstanding take root, and blurted it all out in one breath.
"She’s my summon! My Gacha summon, today’s! A Black Knight, Rank A+, her name’s Mei, I swear there’s nothing weird going on, I pulled her not even five minutes ago and she hasn’t moved from that spot since, you can check!"
Aria let her finish. She took all the time in the world before answering, hands folded in front of her, her gaze drifting back to the armor once more.
"I know that perfectly well, Mistress."
Her voice was soft, even, impeccably polite.
"You have no need to justify yourself to me. You are free to summon whatever you desire, and to keep it as close to you as it pleases you." A tiny pause. "You owe me nothing, after all. I am but one servant among those you will choose."
A shiver ran down Freya’s spine.
Every word was faultless. You could have repeated them in front of anyone without finding a single thing wrong. That was exactly the problem.
How does she do that... chew me out completely without a single reproach ever leaving her mouth?
She pressed on, a little too fast, driven by a stress she couldn’t account for.
"And besides all that, she looks terribly shy, the poor thing, so I really hope you’ll be very kind to her! Very kind!"
At that, Mei nodded frantically, before shrinking even further under the look Aria let slide toward her.
"Of course, Mistress."
Aria’s smile sharpened by a hair.
"I shall take care of her personally." She stepped up to the armor, laid a hand on Mei’s back, and turned her with a pointed gentleness to steer her toward the corridor. "She and I are going to get better acquainted. I’ll show her every corner of this dungeon, and explain to her very precisely what her place here is."
That sounds way, way too threatening for a simple guided tour...
"The girls and I will handle everything, Mistress. Don’t trouble yourself over a thing."
"Uh... okay..."
Is Mei going to make it? It should be fine, right? Aria’s not going to do anything too awful to a comrade... well, I really hope not.
That said, having Mei leave with her suited Freya well enough, since Aria’s mood was anything but reassuring and she wouldn’t have known how to face it herself.
On that thought, a little ashamed of foisting the poor thing off so cravenly, she raised a hand in farewell all the same.
"Be nice to her! I’m counting on you, Aria!"
And so they carried Mei off, still as mute as ever in their midst.
Laïa, for her part, couldn’t keep still and was already circling the armor, examining it from every angle — the blade, the plates — never once letting up on her barrage of questions.
"Hi! Is your name Mei? Are you a real knight, like Freya said? Have you ever fought a dragon? Have you ever rescued a princess, like in the fairy tales?"
Aria, meanwhile, tightened her hand on Mei’s back a little more with every step that took them away.
Why am I literally surrounded by lunatics? Not one of them to balance out the other. It’s not like I’m asking for much... Is it true, what they say, that a person’s company is a mirror of who they are? Would that mean I’m crazy too?
Then her gaze fell on Naïa, who had hung back a moment, upright and composed, watching the whole scene in silence without a word.
An angel! An angel fallen from the heavens, here’s my comfort at last! Thank you for existing, Naïa. Thank you for being normal, you. And above all, thank you for proving that I’m someone normal too!
Naïa met her gaze, bowed politely, and slipped out after the others.
It was on that last little bow that they vanished into the dungeon’s tunnels, taking the newcomer with them — as powerful as she was strange.
Silence settled back over the chamber, barely stirred by the slow beat of the Heart.
She stood there a while, alone, listening to Laïa’s laughter fade down the corridors until it died out completely.
It was strange. Moments earlier, the room had been teeming with people, and now there was nothing left but her, her red glow, and that mountain of cooling corpses spread across the stone floor.
She let her gaze wander over the rough walls, the cold forge, the Heart pulsing away in its corner, and caught herself finding the place a little more alive than when she’d first arrived in this world.
Back then, all she’d had was an empty cave and a summon veering into yandere territory. Now she had a forge, dozens of foxes, two girls, two problem summons, a pompous title, and a world to conquer.
Honestly, looking back, that went fast.
She shook her head, as if to chase off the melancholy before it could settle in, and lightly slapped both her cheeks with her hands.
"Right, where was I, anyway?"
She took a few steps around the chamber, mulling over where to start, before arriving at a very simple conclusion: thinking got you nowhere when you were rich.
So she set about tossing the dozens of corpses still littering the floor into the Heart, one by one, down to the last. Then she clapped her hands.
"Phew... finally done..."
[ Absorbing 1 Goblin Shaman corpse. ]
[ Absorbing 7 Hobgoblin corpses. ]
[ Absorbing 17 human corpses. ]
[ Calculating amount of mana harvested... ]
[ The Dungeon Heart has absorbed 464 mana points. ]
So these twenty-five corpses were worth, give or take two hundred points, the single body of the beast — which settled her all the more firmly in her theory.
A fighter, no doubt about it, because there was simply no way twenty-five second-rate carcasses could come anywhere close, even from a distance, to what she’d run into in that cave.
Right. Now, on to the serious business.
She pulled up her mana with a thought, took a glance at it, and all but rubbed her hands together.
[ Mana: 649/1000 ]
"System, I’d like to summon the three Worker Mycofoxes, the Smith Mycofox and the Researcher Mycofox I have left, plus the five Soldier Mycofoxes, please."
[ Summon x3 Worker Mycofox, x1 Researcher Mycofox, x1 Smith Mycofox and x5 Soldier Mycofox for 105 mana points? ]
"Yes."
Light crackled at the center of the chamber, and a little troop of foxes materialized all at once at her feet, glowing caps and noses in the air.
It was stronger than her. Calamity of Greed though she was, self-proclaimed terror of the world, she melted outright before that much cuteness gathered in one place.
She crouched down in the middle of the little gathering and set about naming them one by one, scratching each in turn between the ears.
The most recent had been Jūyon, so she simply picked the thread of numbers back up where she’d left it. The first Worker became Jūgo, the second Jūroku, the third Jūnana. The Smith got Jūhachi, the Researcher Jūkyū.
Then came the five soldiers, already jostling to sniff at her fingers before they even had names, and whom she christened on the spot Nijū, Nijūichi, Nijūni, Nijūsan and Nijūyon.
She stayed there a moment, petting them, a silly smile on her lips, when the count of the numbers caught up with her and quietly pulled that smile back down.
Now, number nine will stay empty.
Kyū’s place, in this long string of figures she’d been reeling off since the very beginning, would never be handed to anyone else. No fox would ever bear that number after him.
She let the thought pass through her, drew a long breath, and got back to her feet before she could slide any further down that slope.
The little ones stared up at her, caps perked, waiting on her every word.
"All right, newcomers. Good luck in your new home. Go on, run off and see what it looks like."
And so they all scampered away, scattering down the dungeon’s corridors in a joyful mess of little paws.