Is it Wrong to Have a Harem in Danmachi

The wall at dawn was cold under my hands.

Two days back on the surface and the burns had closed to tight pink skin and the cuts were fading lines under my shirt and the tremor in my right hand was gone. Hestia had done a falna update the night we'd returned and her fingers had traced the hieroglyphs on my back for a long time without speaking. The numbers had jumped. She hadn't told me how much. She'd sealed the update and climbed into bed beside me and pressed her face into my shoulder and her hand had found mine in the dark.

The wall. Our wall. The stretch of Orario's outer fortification between the northeast gate and the abandoned watchtower where nobody trained because the stone was cracked and the footing was bad and Ais Wallenstein had chosen it specifically because bad footing was the point.

She was already there when I arrived. Rapier drawn, Desperate's unbreakable blade catching the first light, her golden hair tied back in a single tail instead of the usual fall. She was running footwork patterns against the wall's surface, her boots finding the cracks and using them, pivoting on stone lips that would have broken an ankle on anyone with less agility.

She saw me and stopped. Didn't greet me. She reset her feet, raised Desperate, and attacked.

The first strike came faster than anything she'd thrown at me before.

I got the Hestia Knife up. The impact ran through my wrist and up my arm and into my shoulder and my feet slid on the stone. She pressed. Two more strikes, each one heavier than training usually demanded, and I gave ground because the alternative was getting knocked off the wall.

She'd heard about the Goliath.

She didn't congratulate. She adjusted her stance and her weight shifted forward and her eyes went flat and focused and she came at me harder.

I grinned. She noticed the grin. Her next strike was faster.

We trained for an hour. She corrected my guard twice by tapping the flat of Desperate against my forearm where the opening was, hard enough to sting but precise enough that the edge never touched. She demonstrated a parry sequence by doing it at half-speed and then full-speed and I caught about sixty percent of it and she did it again without being asked because she'd seen the sixty percent on my face and knew which forty I'd missed.

She didn't talk during training. Her corrections were physical. A hand repositioning my elbow. A boot nudging my foot wider. The contact was clinical and brief and her fingers were cool through my shirt and each touch lasted exactly as long as the correction needed and not a second more.

Except once. Her hand on my shoulder, adjusting my stance, stayed for a beat after the adjustment was done. Her fingers pressed into the muscle and then released and she stepped back and her face gave nothing away.

We stopped when the sun was fully up. She sheathed Desperate and sat against the base of the wall in the spot we always used, the section where the stone had worn smooth from years of weather. I sat beside her. A hand's width between us. The distance we'd been maintaining since the fifth training session when I'd noticed that sitting closer made her shoulders tense and sitting farther made her look at the gap.

A hand's width. Close enough to feel the heat off her arm in the morning air.

She set Desperate across her knees. I set the Hestia Knife on my lap. The city below us was waking up. Cart wheels on stone, vendors setting up stalls, the distant clamor of the Dungeon entrance plaza where early-morning parties were forming.

"The Goliath," she said.

I waited.

"You took command."

"Someone had to."

"You were Level 2."

"Still am."

She looked at me sideways. The motion was small, her chin barely turning, but her gold eyes tracked from the city below to my face. "Most Level 2s would have run."

"I'm not most Level 2s."

Her lips tightened. Her eyes went inward for a second. She did this with combat technique too, the same expression when she was analyzing a new stance.

I leaned back against the wall and looked at the sky and let the silence sit.

A minute passed. Maybe two. The sun climbed and the stone warmed under us and the noise from the city got louder.

"I fought a Demi Spirit," she said. "On Floor 59."

I didn't move. My hands stayed on my knees and my eyes stayed on the sky and I kept breathing because the way you react to Ais opening up determines whether she ever opens up again.

"It called me 'Aria.'"

Aria. Her mother. The wind Spirit who was consumed by the Black Dragon a thousand years ago. I knew the name. I knew the story. I'd watched it on a screen in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

But Ais's voice when she said it.

There was a tremor in it. I wouldn't have heard it if I hadn't been sitting this close. The word came out steady from the outside. From inside, from the fraction of a second where her breath hitched between the second syllable and the silence after, it carried weight that lore doesn't carry. A daughter saying her mother's name to someone she'd chosen to trust with it.

"Ais."

She looked at me. Her gold eyes were steady. Her face was flat, the mask that everyone in Orario read as composure or coldness. I was close enough to see what was behind it. The tightness at the corners of her eyes. Her jaw set against the tremor that had leaked through on the name.

I put my hand on hers.

Her hand was resting on the stone between us, palm down, fingers flat against the warm surface. My hand covered hers. My fingers were larger, rougher, the calluses from the Hestia Knife pressing against the back of her hand.

She went still.

Her fingers stayed flat under mine. Her breathing continued at the same pace. Her eyes moved from my face to our hands and stayed there.

Five seconds.

Her fingers moved.

Slowly. Deliberately. They rotated under mine, turning her hand over so her palm faced up, and her fingers threaded through mine. Each finger finding the gap between two of mine, her thumb settling against the side of my index finger. Her grip tightened. Just present.

She looked at the city.

I looked at the sky.

Neither of us spoke.

The sun climbed higher. The warmth spread across the wall and into the stone beneath us and the city noise became a wash of sound that blurred into background. Her hand was warm in mine. Her fingers were slim and strong and the calluses on her palm were from a thousand hours of Desperate's grip and they fit against mine in a way I hadn't expected.

The shadows shortened. A bird landed on the watchtower railing above us and pecked at a crack in the stone and flew away. Ais's thumb moved against my finger once, a small shift, and then was still again.

I didn't count the time. At some point the morning became midday and the training ground stayed empty because nobody used this section and nobody came to interrupt and the wall was warm and her hand was warm and the silence held.

She spoke once more.

"This," she said. Her voice was quiet. Careful. The same tone she used when she was fitting a new word into her vocabulary. "What is this."

"Whatever you want it to be."

She processed. Her thumb moved again. The same small shift.

"I don't know what I want it to be," she said. "I don't have a framework for this."

"That's fine."

"It's inefficient."

"Yeah. It usually is."

Her grip tightened. The sun was warm and the stone was warm and the city was loud below us and she didn't know what this meant and she wasn't letting go.

The stars wouldn't come for hours. We had time.