Ch.12
She was watching me from behind the pillar at the Babel entrance for a while before she decided to approach.
I'd spotted her on the way in. Short, even by Orario standards, barely clearing the waistline of the adventurers walking past. Brown hair with a reddish tint, tucked behind a pair of dog ears that twitched when she scanned the crowd. Gold eyes. A heavy canvas backpack that was almost as big as she was, straps reinforced at the shoulders and hip. She was dressed like a supporter, and the gear was real, worn in the right places from actual use.
Liliruca Arde. Cinder Ella disguise. Chienthrope form. She'd been scouting me, probably since yesterday, watching my routine, timing my exits from the Dungeon.
She was going to try to rob me. She'd buddy up first, play the helpful supporter, earn enough trust to get close to the Knife, and then she'd take it and vanish. It was the con she'd been running for Soma Familia since she was old enough to carry a bag.
And I was going to let her.
In the anime, the thing that broke Lili's armor wasn't defeating her plan. It was kindness she couldn't explain away. Bell gave her half his earnings on the first day, and she'd never recovered from it. She'd been beaten, exploited, rented out, used as monster bait by her own Familia members, and the first person who treated her like a human being was a Level 1 rookie who split his profits down the middle and said thank you.
I could do that. I could be that person deliberately instead of accidentally. And I didn't have to fake any of it.
She pushed off the pillar and walked toward me. The nervousness was controlled. She let a little of it show because a nervous supporter was more convincing than a confident one. Her dog ears flattened slightly. Her hands fidgeted with the backpack straps.
"Excuse me!" She stopped a respectful distance away. Her voice was higher than I'd expected from the anime. Younger. "Are you an adventurer? Lili was wondering, would you like a supporter?"
Lili. Third person. She did it even in disguise.
"Lili?"
"Lili is a supporter, sir! Lili can carry items, organize loot, watch your flanks, and manage supplies. Lili has experience on Floors 5 through 9!" She bowed. The bow was practiced. "If sir is going solo, Lili can make your run much more efficient!"
I looked at her. She was tiny. The backpack dwarfed her. Her gold eyes were wide and earnest and her dog ears were perked forward and everything about her body language said eager, helpful, trustworthy.
The con was good. If I didn't know what I knew, I'd have believed every word.
"What's the rate?"
She straightened up from the bow. "Standard supporter rate is 30% of the haul, sir."
"What's your name?"
"Lili." She smiled. Bright, practiced. "Just Lili."
"Bell." I shifted the Knife on my hip. Her eyes tracked the motion. Fast, involuntary. She'd already appraised it, priced it, calculated the exit strategy. The arithmetic running behind those gold eyes.
"Let's go, Lili."
Her ears perked higher. "Thank you, sir! Lili won't let you down!"
She wasn't lying about being competent.
By the time we'd cleared Floor 7, she'd reorganized the magic stone pouch twice, separated the higher-grade stones from the lower-grade ones without being asked, and positioned herself consistently on my weak side during fights. She knew the Dungeon. Her footwork through the corridors was quiet and deliberate, staying close enough to be useful but far enough back that she wasn't in the way when a monster spawned.
I fought. She collected. We moved.
The Killer Ants on Floor 7 came in a cluster of eight, pouring from a crack in the wall. I put a Firebolt through the center of the pack and went in with the Knife for the ones that scattered. She was already at the edges when I finished, picking stones out of the dissolving remains with quick fingers, dropping them into separate pouches by size.
"Sir is very strong," she said while I wiped the Knife. "Lili has never seen a Level 1 use magic like that."
"I'm full of surprises."
She laughed. It was small and polite and completely manufactured.
We pushed to Floor 8. An Orc came at us around a blind corner and I dropped it with a Firebolt before it finished its swing. The bolt cratered the wall behind it. Stone dust filled the corridor.
Lili was kneeling by the dissolving remains before the dust settled, prying out the magic stone. She looked up at me through the haze. Her gold eyes caught the bioluminescence on the walls and in the dim blue-green light with dust swirling around her, she looked less like a con artist and more like a kid. Underneath all of it, she was a kid who'd been eating scraps and dodging fists for as long as she could remember.
I reached down and offered her my hand. She stared at it. Took it after a beat, and I pulled her to her feet.
"Thanks for the pickup," I said.
She let go of my hand quickly. "Lili is just doing her job, sir."
Floor 9. Floor 10. The corridors got wider and the spawns got meaner. Orcs in groups. Killer Ants in swarms that filled the passage wall to wall. I was burning through Mind faster than on my solo runs because I was using Firebolt to clear space rather than for efficiency, keeping the fights away from Lili's position.
She noticed. She adjusted, tucking herself into corners and alcoves during the bigger fights, shrinking her profile. She'd worked with enough adventurers to know when one was fighting to protect their supporter. She didn't know what to do with it, because the adventurers she'd worked with before had used her as bait.
Between spawns on Floor 9, I glanced back and caught her watching me. Her gold eyes moved away a beat too late, and she busied herself with the backpack straps. Her dog ears twitched.
On Floor 10, a pair of Orcs cornered us in a junction. I put the first one down with the Knife, took a hit from the second one on my forearm that split the skin open, and finished it with a Firebolt to the chest at close range. The detonation was loud. My ears rang. My right arm throbbed where the Orc had connected, and the wound was bleeding through my sleeve.
Lili was beside me before I'd straightened up. She had a roll of bandage out and her small hands were wrapping my forearm with quick, practiced motions.
"Sir is hurt."
"It's a scratch."
"Lili has seen scratches. This is not a scratch." She pulled the bandage tight. Her hands were steady but her jaw was set and she was focused on the wrapping with an intensity that didn't match the injury. She'd done this before. For other adventurers. Who probably hadn't thanked her.
"Thanks, Lili."
Her hands stopped for a second. Then she tied off the bandage and stepped back. "Lili was just-"
"Doing your job. I know." I flexed my forearm. The wrapping was clean, tight, professional. "You're good at it."
She turned away to pack the magic stones, and her dog ears were flat against her head.
We came up at mid-afternoon. The light outside Babel was white and warm after the Dungeon's glow, and I stood at the entrance letting my eyes adjust. Lili stood beside me, the backpack heavy with a full haul, her dog tail hanging still behind her.
We exchanged the stones at the Guild. The total came to 312,000 valis. Lili had kept meticulous count during the run and her number matched the clerk's exactly.
I took the voucher. Split it down the middle. Held out half.
She looked at the money. Looked at me. Looked at the money.
"Sir, the standard supporter rate is 30%. Lili only-"
"Half."
"That's- that's too much. Lili didn't-"
"You organized the loot, watched my back, bandaged my arm, and kept count of every stone we collected. Half is fair."
She took the money. Her fingers were trembling. The gold coins sat in her small palm and she stared down at them and didn't move. A group of adventurers jostled past us on their way to the exchange counter and she stepped closer to me to avoid being bumped, and she was still looking at the coins.
"Sir is... strange."
"I get that a lot."
I bought lunch from a vendor on the avenue outside Babel. Two skewers of grilled meat, two cups of water. The vendor was a dark-skinned woman with arms thicker than my thighs, working a cart that smelled like it had been cooking since before dawn. I handed Lili a skewer and sat on the low wall that ran along the avenue's edge.
She sat beside me. Left a careful gap between us, then closed half of it when I didn't react.
She ate fast. Gone in under a minute, licking the sauce off her fingers before she caught herself doing it and stopped, wiping her hands on her backpack strap instead.
"When's the last time you ate?"
"Lili ate this morning." She said it too quickly.
I handed her my skewer. She looked at it. At me.
"I'm not hungry."
She took it. Ate it slower this time. Her dog ears, which had been flat since the profit split, rose slightly. She was watching me from the corner of her eye between bites, trying to figure out what I wanted in exchange for the money and for standing between her and the Orcs on every floor.
I didn't want anything. That was the part she couldn't process yet.
"Same time tomorrow?" I said.
She blinked. "Sir wants to party with Lili again?"
"If you're available."
"Lili- Lili is available." She stood up. Bowed. "Thank you, sir. Lili will be here." She adjusted the backpack and started walking toward the southern streets. Toward Soma Familia territory. She didn't look back, and I watched her go until the brown hair and dog ears disappeared into the crowd.
Hestia was waiting on the couch when I came home.
"You're late." She was sitting with her arms crossed and her twin-tails sticking out at sharp angles, which happened when she'd been adjusting them nervously. "And you're hurt." She'd spotted the bandage on my forearm before I'd finished taking my boots off. She was off the couch and pulling at my sleeve.
"It's handled. Got patched up in the Dungeon."
"By who?"
"My new supporter."
The silence lasted two full seconds. Hestia's face went through surprise, then suspicion, then a careful attempt at neutrality that fooled neither of us.
"Supporter." She said the word like she was tasting it for poison. "What kind of supporter?"
"The kind that carries a backpack and sorts magic stones."
"Is she pretty?"
"She's about three and a half feet tall and she has dog ears."
Hestia processed this. Her mouth stayed tight. "Dog ears."
"Dog ears."
"That's fine." She released my sleeve. "Shirt off. Falna update."
I pulled off my shirt and lay face-down on the couch. Her knees settled on either side of my hips and she pricked her finger and started tracing. Her touch was firmer than usual, her fingers pressing harder into the hieroglyphs.
"Your stats went up again," she said. "Everything climbed. Floor 10 excelia is dense."
"Good."
She traced in silence for a while. Her thumb lingered on a line of script near my lower back.
"Bell."
"Yeah?"
"If this supporter tries anything, I'll know."
"I know you will."
She kissed the back of my neck. Quick, proprietary, a stamp more than a kiss. Went back to tracing.
Lili walked through the Soma Familia district with 156,000 valis in her pouch and meat in her stomach and a bandage on her right hand where she'd torn a nail prying a magic stone out of a crack on Floor 9.
The money was wrong. All of it was wrong.
She'd done the math on the walk home. Standard supporter rate was 30%. Some adventurers paid 20%. The worst ones, the Soma Familia regulars who rented her out, paid nothing and took her share too. Fifty percent was more than she'd ever been offered. More than she'd ever heard of. It wasn't smart and it wasn't standard and it wasn't how adventurers worked.
Adventurers took. That was the deal. You carried their bags and they took your money and sometimes they used you as bait when the swarms came and sometimes they hit you when nobody was watching and sometimes they did worse. That was the deal. Lili had understood the deal since she was old enough to walk into the Dungeon and she had never once met an adventurer who broke it.
He'd given her half. Bought her food. Put himself between her and every Orc on every floor, every fight, and when she'd wrapped his arm he'd said thanks and when she'd told him the supporter rate he'd said half like the number was obvious. Like it was the only number that made sense.
There was an angle. There had to be. Everyone had one. Soma Familia, Canoe, Ged, every adventurer she'd ever carried bags for. The white-haired boy with the red eyes and the warm knife on his hip was going to want his payment eventually, and when he did, Lili would be ready.
But his hand had been warm when he pulled her up on Floor 8. And he'd given her his food without looking at her like she owed him. And he'd said same time tomorrow like it was real.
Lili turned the corner toward the Soma Familia compound. Put the coins in her hidden pocket. Her face went blank and her dog ears dropped and she was Liliruca Arde again, the supporter, the thief, the property, walking through the door of the place that owned her.
But her hand was still warm where his had held it.