We arrived at the capital’s Adventurer’s guild hall, and were immediately shown to the storehouse. The moment I stepped inside, I found that a certain someone had been lying in wait for us.
“There you are, Mukohda! And Dora-chan, and Gon as well!” Elrand exclaimed as he dashed over to us at the speed of sound. The smile on his face had shot straight past “friendly” and landed somewhere closer to “dangerously unhinged.”
“Yeah, err, and Fel and Sui too,” I noted, doing my best to play it cool and smile back at him.
“Oh, so they are,” Elrand casually replied, brushing them off entirely.
You know, Elrand can actually be kinda mean sometimes. I could sort of see how the progression had gone down. He’d always been super into dragons, but ever since he’d managed to see a real one—which is to say, ever since he met me—he’d started straying further and further from conventional social graces. It felt like his filter had been particularly lacking recently, to a dangerous degree.
As I reflected on Elrand’s devolution, he took the opportunity to validate all of my concerns. “Dora-chan! Gon! I missed you both so much!” he shouted as he charged toward the dragons.
I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I knew how he was coming across: like a lunatic degenerate. I frantically jumped in front of him and spread my arms, blocking his path.
“Wh-What are you doing, Mukohda?! Why are you getting in my way?!” Elrand wailed.
“That should be super obvious!” I shouted back. “Have you already forgotten what happened back in Karelina?!”
Even if you’ve forgotten, I remember perfectly well! It’s filed in the “never forget” corner of my long-term memory!
“Ugh! Well, that was then, and this is now!” Elrand shot back—nonsensically, if you ask me. “They’ve been here in the capital this whole time, but I haven’t gotten to see them at all! They kept being occupied by nonsense like guard duty and whatnot, and somehow things lined up so that I never, ever ran into them! Do you realize how torturous it is to be so close to them, yet so far away?!”
Elrand’s little speech felt very reminiscent of the sort of thing a card-carrying pervert would say to justify their indiscretions—“You could never understand how hard it is to live with these urges!”—but, like...it wasn’t that the universe was conspiring against him, or anything. The truth was very simple: Dora-chan and Gon had flown away because they didn’t want to be around him.
“They were just avoiding you, that’s all. Take the hint already,” I muttered under my breath. After how everything had gone down that one time in Karelina, it couldn’t have been that hard for him to recognize the reality of the situation, surely? Any reasonable person would have been able to figure it out. But regardless, that wasn’t even the biggest issue here. “And were you trying to hug them a moment ago? Why? How could that possibly be okay?”
I knew what I’d seen. There was no other way to interpret the way he’s spread his arms: He had fully intended to hug the dragons.
“Why not?! Just a little! What’s the problem?!” Elrand countered.
“Just a little”? Seriously? “The problem is that they don’t want it, obviously!” I shouted, spinning around to look at the dragons as I did so. Unsurprisingly, they both looked deeply disgusted and nodded rapidly in agreement.
“Wh-What?! Nooo!” Elrand wailed. “Why, though?! How could they not want to be around me when I love them so, so much?!”
“Okay, see, it’s exactly stuff like this. That was really creepy,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be that blunt, but it had sort of slipped out.
“Creepy?! How could you say that, Mukohda?! That’s so meeean!” Elrand moaned as he dropped to his hands and knees, crawling along the floor. Now he was acting both creepy and pathetic. I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so either, judging by how put off all the guild employees who happened to be nearby looked. They hurried off to do their work somewhere else, presumably in the hopes of not having to deal with him.
My familiars and I were left alone with Elrand, and frankly, I had no clue what to do about him...which made the arrival of a certain someone who immediately kicked him up to his feet all the more welcome.
“I take my eyes off you for one second, and look what happens! Back to work, this instant!”
“Wha— Hey! Cut it out, Moira! I haven’t even gotten to touch Dora-chan and Gon yet! Wait, no! Don’t take me away from them! Dora-chan! Goooooon!”
And just like that, Moira and Elrand were off, the former bodily dragging the latter. I raised a hand in a gesture of quiet thanks to her.
Before long, the guild’s workers returned to the storehouse. I asked where I should put the leviathan’s head, and brought it out from my Item Box at the location they showed me. Then, at Dora-chan and Gon’s emphatic insistence, we left the guild as quickly as our legs could carry us.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Well then, today, we go out on the hunt.”
“Yes, that sounds wonderful! We’ve little else to do with the day, after all.”
《Sounds good to me! That guy said we didn’t have to bother going back to the guild yesterday, after all.》
《Huntiiing!》
The day had only just begun, and from the way my familiars were talking, you’d think our plans had been set in stone for ages.
“This again?” I sighed. “I mean, sure, we don’t have any plans today, but we just went hunting right before the leviathan project kicked off, right? You took down a bunch of dragon turtles! Weren’t those big enough prey for a good long while? I wanna take it easy today!”
I’d been sitting down and enjoying a nice after-breakfast cup of coffee when they started pestering me to take them out hunting. It really ruined the relaxing atmosphere, honestly—though as long as I’m being honest, I guess I have to admit that I had also seen Fel’s proposal coming from a mile away. In fact, I’d known it would turn out like this the moment it became clear that our schedule for the day was empty.
We’d visited the Adventurer’s guild the day before, and frankly, it hadn’t gone well. Elrand had gone berserk the moment he’d seen Gon and Dora-chan, trying to hug them and making himself look like a total freak in the process. He’d really flown off the handle lately.
Anyway, later that night, Willem—who’d been holed up in the guild for quite some time—finally made an appearance at my rented house again. He’d told me that they had the butchering of the leviathan’s head well under control, and that I wouldn’t need to stop by the guild until it was done. Or rather, he’d said that I shouldn’t stop by the guild, since if I showed up, it would cause the work to grind to a halt.
I’d dropped the head off the day before, so I didn’t see any particularly good reason for us to stick around either. That said, I did feel a little irked by the fact that I was being treated like a liability. I was technically the client here, after all. I also had the presence of mind to admit that a certain dragon lover with no sense of restraint was the one who was really at fault, though.
So, long story short, we ended up with a block of free time on our hands from now until the head had been fully processed. We didn’t have much of anything to do, sure, but I’d been tagging along with my familiars’ overactive antics for so long that I had to seize the opportunity to take it easy whenever I had even a hint of a chance. I welcomed boredom, if that was what it took to let me sit still for a full afternoon.
Unfortunately, however, I was alone in that opinion.
“‘Take it easy’? Ridiculous. I have no intention of boring myself for no good cause.”
“I got more than enough sleep to last me for quite some time in the dungeon before we met, my liege!”
《Nothing’s more fun than getting out there and moving around, right?》
《Sui thinks going hunting sounds fun too!》
Honestly, this is exactly what I meant about you guys being too active! I’m an indoorsy sort of guy at heart, and I need a house day every once in a while.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you to just relax today?” I asked, giving my familiars a very tired stare.
“No.”
“There is not!”
《Same over here.》
《Sui too!》
They didn’t mince their words at all. I hung my head, resigned to the inevitable.
“It is time. Let us be off!” Fel said. He and the rest of my familiars hustled me out the door as quickly as they could.