Ch.3
The bruise had gone from purple to a sick yellowish green overnight, which apparently meant it was healing. My ribs still ached when I twisted, but the sharp edge was gone. I could breathe without wincing. Good enough.
I left the church basement early. Hestia was still asleep, curled on the couch with her hair spilling over the armrest, one ornament dangling loose from her twin-tail. I closed the door quietly and climbed the stairs into morning light.
Orario in the early hours was different from the afternoon. Fewer adventurers, more merchants. Carts being loaded. Shutters going up on shops. The air was cooler and the shadows from Babel still stretched long across the western streets. My route to the Dungeon entrance took me down the main avenue, and I was thinking about which floors to hit when she appeared.
She'd been waiting. That much was obvious.
Bluish-gray hair pulled into a small ponytail, gray eyes, white blouse under a half apron. She stepped out of an alley mouth holding a wrapped bento box in both hands, and her smile had the exact look of a person who wanted you to think this was a coincidence.
"Excuse me!"
I stopped.
"You dropped this." She held out the bento.
I hadn't dropped anything. I looked at the box, looked at her, looked at the alley she'd come out of. A girl standing in an alley at dawn holding a wrapped lunch for a stranger.
Syr Flova. The anime version of this scene used a dropped magic stone as the excuse. Same girl, same morning ambush, different prop.
"I didn't drop that," I said.
She blinked. The smile faltered for half a second before it came back wider. "Are you sure? I found it right here on the-"
"You made it. And you've been waiting out here to hand it to me."
The smile froze. Then it thawed into a different one. Smaller, realer. Her eyes did a quick scan of my face like she was recalculating.
"Your stomach was growling," she said. "I heard it from inside."
She hadn't. There was no way. But I took the bento because I was hungry and it was food and she was holding it out with both hands, and when our fingers met on the cloth wrapping, hers stayed a beat longer than they needed to.
Warm hands. Deliberately warm. She was watching my face while our fingers overlapped, and I watched hers back instead of pulling away.
"You always make breakfast for strangers?" I asked.
She laughed. Short, surprised, the kind that comes out before the composed version can replace it. "Only the ones who come home covered in blood and don't cry about it."
So she'd heard about yesterday. Or seen it. I didn't ask which.
"I work at the pub up the street," she said, tilting her head toward the far end of the avenue. "The Hostess of Fertility. If you want to eat that inside where there's a table, the kitchen's already open."
"Lead the way."
The Hostess of Fertility was a large, warm-looking building with a wooden sign swinging over the door. Inside, it smelled like bread and cooking oil and the ghost of last night's ale. Tables and booths, most of them empty at this hour. A long bar counter with stools. The morning light came through the front windows and caught the dust in the air.
Syr led me to a seat at the counter and disappeared into the kitchen. I unwrapped the bento. Rice, grilled fish, pickled vegetables. Simple, carefully packed. I started eating.
"Your order."
The voice came from my left. I turned and found an elf standing beside me holding a mug of water and a menu. Blonde hair that caught the window light, sky-blue eyes, pointed ears, and a posture so rigid she might as well have been standing at attention. She wore the same uniform as Syr but wore it like a military dress code she disapproved of on principle.
"I didn't order anything yet."
"Water and a menu. Standard for new customers." She placed both down with precise, economical movements and turned to leave. Every step was exactly the same length. Heel to ball, zero wasted motion. That was combat footwork, not waitressing.
Ryuu Lion. I knew what she was hiding and I needed to keep that to myself.
"Thanks," I said to her back.
She paused. Half-turned. "You're welcome." Then she went back behind the counter.
I was three bites into the bento when a hand reached past my shoulder and plucked a chunk of fish right off the rice.
"Ohh, Syr made this? It's good-nya!"
I turned. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown cat ears twitching on top of her head. She'd already popped the fish into her mouth and was chewing with her eyes closed, tail swaying behind her.
"That's my breakfast."
"You still have most of it-nya." She leaned her elbows on the counter beside me, completely unbothered. Her tail brushed my arm. "You're the new adventurer, right? The one Syr's been talking about?"
"Syr talks about me?"
"Syr talks about everything." She stole a pickled radish. "I'm Anya. What's your name?"
"Bell."
"Bell-nya. Cute name."
Another body leaned against the counter on my other side. Black hair, green eyes, cat ears to match. She propped her chin on her hand and looked me up and down slowly, making sure I knew she was doing it.
"Hmm." She reached out and squeezed my upper arm through my sleeve. "Nice arms for a rookie."
"Thanks?"
"You're welcome." She didn't let go. "I'm Chloe. If you need someone to check your muscles after a long day in the Dungeon, I'm very thorough-nya."
"You check a lot of adventurers' muscles?"
She grinned. "Only the cute ones."
"ANYA. CHLOE." The voice came from the kitchen, loud enough to rattle the mugs on their hooks. A large woman filled the doorway. And I mean filled it. She was taller than me by a head, broad-shouldered, arms like she could wrestle an orc and win the argument. She had her hands on her hips and an expression that said everyone in this room was in trouble and hadn't figured out why yet. "Table three needs clearing and the floor needs mopping and you're out here pestering a customer?"
Anya vanished. One second she was beside me, the next she was across the room with a rag, wiping down tables like she'd been doing it the whole time. Chloe's hand left my arm and she sauntered back behind the counter, moving at exactly the pace that communicated she was obeying but not urgently.
Mia Grand. Former Freya Familia captain. Level 6. Running a pub.
She looked at me. "You eating or loitering?"
"Eating."
"Then eat." She went back into the kitchen.
I ate. The bento was good. Syr came back out at some point and refilled my water without being asked, and when she set it down she said, "Come back tonight. We do dinner too." She held the eye contact a beat too long for a dinner invitation. Or maybe that was just how she talked.
I left money on the counter. More than the water cost, because Anya had eaten a third of my fish and I figured someone should pay for it.
The Dungeon was different when you weren't running from a Minotaur.
Floors 1 through 4 were the beginner zone. Low ceilings, narrow corridors, blue-green light from the walls. The monsters spawned from cracks in the stone, squeezing out of the Dungeon's surface like they were being born from the walls themselves. Goblins first. Small, green-gray, armed with claws and bad attitudes. Then Kobolds on Floor 2, bigger, tougher, with crude fangs. Dungeon Lizards on Floor 3, fast and low to the ground. Frog Shooters on 4, which spit acid from a distance and were more annoying than dangerous if you kept moving.
I knew their patterns from the anime. Goblins lunged, Kobolds circled, Lizards attacked from the flank, Frog Shooters planted and fired. The foreknowledge wasn't precise, but it was enough to stay ahead even with garbage stats and a beginner's knife.
I took Floor 1 slowly. Killed four goblins. Let the body learn. Bell's muscle memory handled the footwork and the grip, but I supplied the timing. When to step in, when to step back, when to wait for the lunge and let it come to the blade. By the third goblin I was cleaner. By the fourth it was automatic.
Floor 2, faster. Kobolds went down if you hit the throat. I knew that from the anime. Confirmed it when the knife sank in and the Kobold folded. Two more after that.
Floor 3, I got scratched by a Dungeon Lizard that came from a direction I didn't expect. Shallow cut on my forearm. I wiped it on my pants and kept going.
Floor 4, I killed a Frog Shooter mid-spit by closing the distance before it could fire a second shot. The knife punched through the membrane behind its jaw and it dropped. I collected the magic stone, wiped the blade, and moved on.
Floor 5 I stayed on for an hour. This was where the Minotaur had found me yesterday. The monsters were the same type but slightly faster, slightly tougher. I killed eight before I started feeling the fatigue in my arms and decided to quit while I was functional.
I pocketed the magic stones. Fourteen total. Small, low-quality, but they'd sell for enough to buy potions.
The walk back up was quiet. My footsteps echoed off the stone corridors and a draft came from somewhere deep below, cold and faintly damp. A pair of adventurers passed me on Floor 3, heading down, talking about a quest board posting for Killer Ants on Floor 7. The shorter one had a dent in her shield that looked like a Kobold had taken a good swing at it.
I came out of the Dungeon into evening. The sun was behind Babel and the sky was going from orange to dark blue at the edges. I exchanged the magic stones at the Guild counter. A clerk who wasn't Eina counted them, gave me a pouch of valis, and waved me along without looking up from his paperwork. I checked the amount. Enough for two health potions and maybe half a meal.
The church basement was dark when I came down the stairs. One candle burning on the table. Hestia was sitting in her chair, slumped forward, her cheek resting on her folded arms. Asleep. A plate of food sat next to her elbow, rice and some kind of stewed meat, covered with a cloth. It had gone cold a while ago.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a while. The candle threw her shadow against the wall, the twin-tails and the small shoulders, and her breathing was slow and even.
I took the blanket off the couch and draped it over her shoulders. Tucked the edges around her arms so it wouldn't slide. Her hair smelled like the candle wax and the floral warmth that lived in this basement, the scent that was just hers.
I started to pull my hand back and her fingers closed around my wrist. In her sleep. Her grip was light but definite, her thumb pressing against my pulse. She mumbled a word I didn't catch and turned her face further into her arms and didn't let go.
I stood there. The candle flickered. Her fingers were warm against my wrist and her thumb sat over the vein and my heartbeat pushed against it.
I didn't move until her grip loosened on its own. Then I sat down across from her, ate the cold dinner she'd made, and blew out the candle.