Translator: Reflet

Editor: Weasalopes

「I'm home.」

「Welcome back.」

Three days had pa.s.sed since they returned from the nesting area of Giant Spiders. In order to take care of the three survivors (who still haven't come out of their coma), Hiros.h.i.+ and Haruna were taking turns going to work. As for the five who didn't survive, it wasn't something they could take care of by themselves, so they took the bodies to the Adventurers' a.s.sociation for them to handle. When they had to carry them there, they had asked Randy and other adventurers they knew, after telling them what happened honestly. Of course, everyone involved were more exasperated than surprised upon hearing that Hiros.h.i.+ and Haruna not only went down to faces the spiders just to save some money on clothes, but that they faced Piaranork and survived without wearing so much as an armor.

They had only been operating the food stand when Hiros.h.i.+ returned early, or when Haruna was out working. Of course, the main reason was that Hiros.h.i.+ could not work the front end, but another contributing factor was the fact that buying supplies was more difficult because they couldn't go out at the same time.

The three survivors had taken over a bedroom. The flat they had rented was small, but still a two-bedroom. Needless to say that Hiros.h.i.+ refused sleeping the same room as Haruna, and Haruna couldn't allow one of them to sleep in the dining room (that sounded exhausting). After much debate, they had finally found a new room that met the criteria of being the cheapest flat in the city with at least two bedrooms in addition to the kitchen and dining room. They had to use a shared toilet for the floor, but there was rarely a crowd since there were only two other residents on their floor. They used the public bath house every day.

The flat was barely separated into three s.p.a.ces (including the eat-in kitchen), each bedroom barely had enough room for a bed. Still, two woman could manage to share a room. Haruna slept on a futon, crafted by Hiros.h.i.+, in the dining room, which she managed to fit by putting the dining table away. Hiros.h.i.+ slept in a sleeping bag on the veranda. Part of it was that he didn't want to spoon an old dude, but even if he wanted to, that man's build was too muscular. The kitchen was flooded with things like spices and treated herbs to the point where it was no environment for anyone to sleep at, let alone the fact that it was connected to the dining room, making it a deal breaker for Hiros.h.i.+.

While Haruna felt guilty that Hiros.h.i.+ was taking the short ends of all the sticks, but even when they camp, Haruna was the only one in the tent, and he would be in the sleeping bag under the elements.

This may not be so different from that situation, after all. It wasn't too long ago that she watch Hiros.h.i.+ as he crafted a catalyst and treated his sleeping bag with some obscure enchantment called Rainproof, just to avoid being in the same tent with her. It was bittersweet, in a sort of way.

「How are 'em folks?」

「They're all breathing steady, but no one's come out yet. How are you doing?」

「Work ain't much different. I gathered up some food when I went to bunch of places for work, so look forward to that.」

「Okie dokie.」

Haruna answered, as she cleared the table. There wasn't much to do when staying home, so she had been working on new menu items (as far as ingredients could permit) and preparing materials for Compounding and Metalworking as part of her practice.

While it was only three days (one of which she had gone out to work), it seemed that she had gotten enough practice in to solidify the knacks she was already beginning to grasp. She had even finished processing some that were quite tricky at a Novice level.

「So, anything interesting happen today?」

「Before I get into, I'll go check on 'em for a sec. They looked like they'd be comin' out of it soon.」

「Okay.」

Nodding, Haruna prepared the tea set. Spreading out some sweet-potato-ish snack on the tray, she boiled some water to a perfect temperature for some Houjicha tea, using Hiros.h.i.+'s magical kettle. Just like the electric kettles on Earth, and kept the water warm after it was heated to the desired temperature, and best of all, it wouldn't keep running on empty because it was powered by magic.

As for the Houjicha, they had found and purchased tea leaves that were not fermented, and prepared it themselves. Fermentation in this world had been developed rather lopsidedly. While there was barely any progress with bread or other foods, when it came to alcohol and tea, it was comparable to that on Earth during the 18th century. Apparently, black tea had been accidently developed during the process of trying to create herbal liquor, which meant that the history of tea here had followed a slightly different path than on Earth.

「How are they?」

「Lessee. This ol' man would come out of it with some sort of trigger, at least. I just can't be sure, so we shouldn't go shakin' him or castin' spells on him, or tryin' to get him to react to immediate danger or somethin' like that.」

「Uh-huh. And the other two?」

「Toudou-san. You wanna kill me?」

「They won't get on your case just because you check on them medically.」

「Nah-uh. That's where you're idealistic, Toudou-san. That's only applicable to a specific species of G.o.d's gifted men with the sort of face that counteracts any exudin' eroticism. Watch 'em wake up to my ugly, useless face. They'll go berserk, no doubt. "What were you going to do to me, you pervert!?" they'd scream through the roof.」

「I-I don't think that's likely…」

Taken aback by his visceral reaction Haruna still attempted to dispute the core misunderstanding, but Hiros.h.i.+ just shook his head, pathetically. This pansy seemed to have lived a life that lead to him losing all trust in women.

While it wasn't polite, to say the least, to describe people he had only just met, with whom he hadn't even spoken to, but imagining that he had gone through events that justified his remark to him, even Haruna couldn't say much about it.

「In this world, ya see, there are a bunch of women who, despite a crowd of eye witnesses sayin' you only picked up somethin' they dropped, go ahead and cause a scene screamin' "Did you steal this!?" treatin' me like a thief.」

「No there aren't.」

「Six times.」

「What?」

「That's how many times that someone, even though they must have seen me pick it up, made a scene like that and called me a thief.」

Five of those incidents took place while Hiros.h.i.+ wasn't in middle school, and once after he entered high school. After that, even when someone would drop something right in front of him, he never picked it up unless he gathered eyewitnesses that would confirm he wasn't a thief, first. I didn't expect to be nearly made into a thief with same pattern of events after movin' all the way cross the country, Hiros.h.i.+ said with a bitter face, and Haruna couldn't respond. Thanks to the fact that he either never attended school (or went to the nurse's office when he did) for the majority of 9th grade, and to the school-wide scandal that caused his year-long absence in a way, the misunderstanding in his records that he had sticky fingers had been reconciled.

For the record, after the second incident while in middle school, Hiros.h.i.+ had ignored anything that anyone had dropped, but once his homeroom teacher (a woman in her thirties to forties) saw him and reprimanded him for it, which lead to Hiros.h.i.+ reluctantly picking it up. Which lead to him being called a thief once again. It was a painful memory for him that even the teacher, who saw the whole thing, started accusing him of stealing (whether she knew what was going on her was in it from the start). This event was the nail in the coffin for Hiros.h.i.+ to stop trusting any woman under the age of forty.

The one incident in high school was caused by a cla.s.smate, who had heard from her friends that attended the same middle school as Hiros.h.i.+, starting a rumor. While he dodged the worst case scenario of being called a thief and having the school call his home, it was something that neither Hiros.h.i.+ nor the school wanted to acknowledge that he nearly stopped going to school again.

The school, in particular, was aware that Hiros.h.i.+ had been treated this way even by his teacher, and had expected a lawsuit. Truth be told, Hiros.h.i.+ was only spared because all of the other cla.s.smates had defended him, and even accosted the girl who started the rumor (unlike his cla.s.smates in middle school). If a few more cla.s.smates had went along with it, Hiros.h.i.+ would have walked straight out of the normal realms of society, never to return. Not to mention that it would have been a devastating scandal for the school.

While the atmosphere of his school saved him from that fate, it had nearly negated three years (in real life) of VR therapy. While Hiros.h.i.+ had been able to manage his phobia at a level where it didn't impede upon his day-to-day life, if things had occurred a little differently three years ago, even his current lifestyle would have been impossible.

「In any case, I couldn't help it when I pulled 'em out of the web, but I would like to go on without stickin' my nose in places where it might get nicked off.」

「…I'm sorry. I'm really sorry…」

Haruna almost wanted to apologize for her gender. While people who would do such a thing were undoubtedly in the minority, that wasn't much of a consolation to someone who was apparently destined to meet so many of these mentally unstable individuals.

After the explanation for each of the six incidents, no one could blame Hiros.h.i.+ with any fault in them. The incident was put out after it flared up outside of his cla.s.sroom, and as Haruna was in a different cla.s.s, she was completely oblivious to this. Hearing the details of the other incidents, Haruna wanted to apologize again for having to be stuck together in this world.

At the end of the day, even the cla.s.smates that had defended him didn't consider the incident a big deal, and as such had mostly forgotten about it. The only time they were reminded of it was when Hiros.h.i.+ would insist upon witnesses when picking up something that had been dropped.

The majority of people who were in a different cla.s.s in 10th grade, and who rarely talked to him, didn't know about the incident at all, despite being in the same cla.s.s as Hiros.h.i.+ now. Besides, it only approached the realm of a big deal simply because of Hiros.h.i.+'s history in the first place. Isolated incidents like these had occurred occasionally in practically every cla.s.s.

「So, at least until they get up, I'm never ever goin' near 'em.」

「I understand. Come to think of it, it wouldn't be a far stretch if they wake up to a strange man tearing off their armor and changing them…」

「Even if they were smeared in spider webs, and couldn't get 'em down in the bed otherwise.」

Everything that they had been wearing had been neatly washed and fixed and now hung on their bedside. Unfortunately fixing the young girl's dress was nothing Haruna could handle, so Hiros.h.i.+ had taken care of that, along with the armor.

As for the weapons and armor, he had tinkered with them (without using Enchantments) while he was fixing them, which had turned some of them into completely different equipment that just happen to look the same as they used to.