Chapter 56

“Well, all right. Thanks. I’ll go check out the situation upstairs. Rino, Celes, Arian—hang out here.” “Okay… Yawn…,” Rino replied. Shinichi left the girls, sleepy from eating their fill, and went upstairs to look for bedrooms. “Only three beds, huh?” This house must have belonged to a married couple with one kid. There was the dad’s room, tidy and simple; the mom’s room, decorated with knitted items; and the child’s room with paper and things strewn about the floor. “What a mess…,” muttered Shinichi with a creased brow, picking up some of the paper fallen in the kid’s room. Written on it were some characters different from any human or demon language. He looked at them for a moment and felt a sudden sharp pain in his head. “…Ow! Mr. Translate, is that you?” He was talking about the translation magic that had been used on him when he was summoned to this world. It was trying to analyze the lines of text, which seemed to place significant stress on Shinichi’s brain. In conversation, the magic could access his partner’s facial expression, hand gestures, and most importantly, their thoughts in a similar vein as Telepathy. That was how it provided him a good translation. But with written language, it didn’t have access to that additional information. It was like when someone attempted to crack a code. It had to analyze the frequency of repeated characters in the giant block of text and look for familiar words. A scholar could spend their entire life trying to decipher an undiscovered language and never understand a single word. Fortunately, this elven script and human writing had a few things in common, so Shinichi started to get the gist of the texts after scanning a few different pages. “That headache was a bad one, but you’ve done a great job, Mr. Translate. But this…” The scattered pages seemed to be parts of a novel. The fragments strewn on the ground were pages the author had deemed unacceptable. There was one word that kept standing out to Shinichi’s eyes. “I bet there’s a finished version somewhere,” he said as he looked around the room, lifting up the mattress on the bed to check underneath. There, he found the stack of papers, and an evil smile stretched across his face as he slipped them into his pocket. Afterward, he went downstairs and saw Rino and Celes already asleep on the couch and Arian looking at him with sleepy eyes. “I guess we’ll have to carry them,” he said. “Yeah,” agreed Arian. She picked up Rino, and Shinichi did the same to Celes. They carried the two to the second floor, placing them in the large bed that belonged to the dad. “Arian, you can use the room next door. Fey, you can use the kid’s room across the hall. Sorry it’s a mess. I’ll sleep on the couch downstairs.” “What?! But that’d make me feel bad for you!” protested Arian. “Well, there aren’t any other beds,” he replied at a loss. Arian’s face turned bright red as she muttered, “…Well, we could share a bed?” “What?!” Shinichi’s cheeks burned red as he was caught off guard. Then his eyes met Fey’s. Her face was just as flushed as his. “I—I sleep like a log when I’m out. A-and I won’t wake up until morning, so you don’t have to worry about me!” “Worry about what?!” Obviously, Arian hadn’t meant anything, but Fey scurried off to the child’s room before they could finish talking. That left Shinichi and Arian standing there in an awkward silence. Finally, they both waved. “…Right. I’ll sleep downstairs,” said Shinichi. “…Yep, sorry for being weird,” replied Arian. Shinichi walked uncomfortably down the stairs and flopped on the couch in the living room.