Perhaps my horror showed in my eyes, for the Protagonist belatedly panicked and waved his hands in denial.

“N-no! I didn’t mean it like that! If you keep wearing wet clothes, you could get hypothermia, so I had no choice but to…”

Ah. He meant undressing for a perfectly sensible reason. What a relief. My student wasn’t a fatally seductive adult unbuttoning things one by one, after all.

I casually turned my head away, as if to say ‘suit yourself.’ He’d probably feel awkward undressing right in front of me, after all.

“Th-thank you. But um… you’re quite soaked as well, Professor. Will you be alright?”

The Protagonist’s voice trailed off into a mumble. Come to think of it, I had also fallen into the sea.

“L-Lady Chris! If you stay still, I can warm you up plenty! I don’t see any need to strip down!”

Bandage, who until moments ago had been slumped against the wall like a corpse, shouted.

Good grief—one wants me to strip, the other wants to warm me up. They’re making advances all on their own at quite the pace.

[Bead: My, my, aren’t we popular. A flower in each hand? Personally, I rather fancy that Bandage fellow.]

He’s from the Demon Lord’s army, you former Holy Relic.

[Bead: Ooh, a bad boy.]

Ugh, let’s ignore him. There was really only one way to silence these noisy fools at once.

[Bead: Are you seriously undressing? Of course, it’s purely for survival, so it’s not strange or anything.]

“Sh-should I turn around? No, I’m already turned around. Yes!”

“Oh come on, Lady Chris! At least unravel these bandages and wrap them around yourself. The boy will get a shock if he sees.”

The commotion subsided, and silence soon settled over the cave.

[Bead: …What is this.]

Right. I had the same reaction when I first saw Chris’s bare body.

Even in a sleeveless top, the scars covering her entire upper torso left little to the imagination about what lay beneath the concealed areas.

They resembled the Protagonist’s curse tattoo, but far more gruesome. Because these were wounds carved into her, one by one, by someone’s own hand.

‘There was a reason Chris’s roleplay was all wrapped up so tightly.’

Appearances like this were best hidden for effective use later, after all. The irony being that even I didn’t know how these scars came to be.

“What are you looking at. Shut up and rest.”

Then I went to wring out my wet clothes and gloves.

Finding it more comfortable that the atmosphere had turned chilly like this—I suppose my personality had truly gone to rot.

* * *

Chris sat leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. At a glance, she might have appeared not asleep but briefly stopped breathing, yet her chest rose and fell ever so faintly.

Confirming this, Michael stepped back with relief.

“When the young master’s breathing suddenly went quiet, I thought perhaps you were stealing a kiss.”

“…Keep your voice down. The Professor is sleeping.”

“Those who have roamed battlefields for a long time, you see, don’t truly sleep even when they do. Moreover, she never learned to sleep deeply since childhood. She’s likely hearing every word of this conversation right now. She simply doesn’t respond because none of it matters to her in the slightest.”

Michael’s brow furrowed. Whenever Maria brought up details about Chris that he himself didn’t know, something twisted inside him.

“What do you even know about the Professor as she is now?”

“Lady Chris is no different from before. Still strong, still beautiful, still incapable of submission…”

Maria’s words trailed off slightly. The scars he had seen on her body in the past surfaced in his mind’s eye against the darkness.

“She bears everything alone. Well, I happen to like that about her, too.”

“…Do you know who did that to her?”

“I can only speculate, young master. The beings capable of carving wounds into Lady Chris’s body could be counted on one hand in this world.”

Michael’s teeth ground together audibly. He had clenched his fists so tightly that his nails were digging into his palms, though he seemed not to even notice.

“That illustrious ‘lord’ of yours, perhaps?”

“Oho. You’re not entirely foolish, young master.”

“You never even tried to hide it. The fact that you’re the Demon Lord’s subordinate.”

When Michael fired back in a low voice, Maria’s lips curled into a smirk.

“You always played the fool in front of Lady Chris, so I wondered where your master’s blood went. That spirit of yours almost makes me regret she can’t see that expression herself.”

Maria rubbed his own jaw.

“Truth be told, I’ve been continually disappointed in you, young master. By our calculations, you should have already awakened your power by now. We even paired you with Lady Chris herself, and yet.”

“Don’t insult the Professor. She’s always put in difficult situations because of you people.”

“So you’re deliberately turning a blind eye to the fact that Lady Chris belongs to the Demon Lord’s army.”

Michael fell silent for a moment. Then the answer he offered was firm.

“She’s not one to take anyone’s side. At the very least, I believe she’s walking her own path right now. As for the past… I’ll wait until she explains it herself. Just as she has waited for me.”

“Hahaha, well, think what you like. I see now that the real problem is the fact that you, young master, rely on Lady Chris far too much.”

Maria’s head slowly turned toward the direction of Michael’s voice.

“Because you keep treating Lady Chris as your personal guardian and trailing after her like a lost puppy, you’re not growing at all. You figure that whatever happens, Lady Chris will sort it out for you, don’t you? Let me tell you something—Lady Chris doesn’t look after you lot because she’s fond of you. She simply has the power and the means to spare, so she picks you up like an act of charity and drags you along. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mistake that for some grand establishment of a relationship. Do you understand, young master? If you keep this up…”

Sentence after sentence poured forth without pause, as if to suffocate him. Michael felt himself being overwhelmed without even realizing it.

“You have no value. Lady Chris will leave you behind too. Do you understand?”

But he had already received certainty on that very matter. The instant Michael opened his mouth to retort—

“The Professor would never—!”

“Were you in the middle of a conversation?”

A voice cold as ice. It was Chris.

“What a charmed life you lead.”

“Oh, Lady Chris. So you were awake after—”

“And yet you didn’t even notice a guest had arrived.”

“Arrived? What are you—” “Oh.”

Maria’s puzzled expression contorted. Straining his ears, he could hear it. The sound of something swimming.

And then a horrifying noise, like nails scraping against stone, rang out several times before—

“Professor, that’s…”

Tap.

Five fingers, gaunt as dried branches, appeared in Michael’s field of vision, pressing against the cave floor.

-Eeek-eeek-eeek. Save me. Eeek-eeek-eeek. Save me.

But that wasn’t human. It couldn’t be human.

“There was no sound of splashing, so it must have come up from the seabed. Then it’s definitely a monster… But why here of all places?”

“Hmm, perhaps. Could that fellow look something like this? The crying sounds familiar.”

Both of them turned their gazes toward Maria.

Smiling somewhat sheepishly, he pointed at none other than the warm campfire. Or more precisely, the firewood?

Wait a moment. Didn’t that look similar to the monster arm now trying to climb up?

No way.

“Hahaha, well this is embarrassing. I never expected them to recognize the smell of their own kind’s limbs burning.”

“You insane bastard!!!”

“Hahahaha!”

Chris remembered. Maria was genuinely a lunatic character.

[Bead: So the firewood he gave us earlier was that monster’s limb? Is he out of his mind? Why would he carry something like that?!]

Bandage’s ability is creating chimeras from monsters. The setting was that he roams around searching for materials, after all.

[Bead: Good heavens, so he came here with that intention too? And then got done in by those things and ended up like this? But he doesn’t look strong enough to get beaten up like that.]

Our little Bead. You’ve been cooped up in the Holy Kingdom for so long that you don’t know much about monsters, do you?

Listen carefully. These monsters were born in places where the Demon Lord’s aura lingers. Thanks to that, they possess particularly strong power.

And…

‘No fighter wins against a swarm.’

[Bead: Oh for fuck’s sake.]

Soon, hands emerged—one, two, three—too many to count, swarming up in droves. Behind them, faces with gaping maws burst forth.

-Heh-heh-heh. Save me. Heh-heh-heh.

-Kkeuk-kkeuk, the Demon Lord, kkeuk-kkeuk, is scary, kkeuk-kkeuk.

-Screee-ee-ee-eech…

In an instant, the cave entrance was packed with creatures resembling dried firewood.

The sight of countless arms flailing as if about to snatch me at any moment…

‘Seriously disgusting. Enough to make me want to give up my sight right this instant.’

But I couldn’t do that. Because the Protagonist was watching me, and me alone.