On floor one of Tennessine, a shadow attacked me, resetting my stars. I then defeated the fake version of me that it created and received matsutake mushrooms.
Neptune, Lil, Ran, and I took turns getting hit by new shadows to reset the stars on us. Now they had twelve stars each, and I had eleven.
“You’ve really saved us this time,” Neptune said with a smile. Lil and Ran behind him were back to their usual selves, never taking their eyes off of him. That was how they always were─they only had eyes for Neptune. “Who knows what would’ve happened to us if you weren’t there? I mean, just losing all of your stars once gets you trapped in there.”
“Yeah.”
I grinned wryly back at him.
I’d tried bringing an outsider shadow from another floor to fight a trapped test slime, but even that couldn’t reset the captive’s stars. In fact, the shadows’ powers only worked on their home floor. Taking an outsider to another floor would yield no fakes.
“You’ve really saved us. Isn’t that right, girls?” Neptune looked to Lil and Ran. Despite his appreciation, the two of them hardly seemed to be thankful─or so I thought.
“Thanks, Ryota.”
“You have my genuine gratitude.”
“…”
I was dumbfounded. If you took a picture of my face right then and entered it into a photography contest with the title “Incredulous,” You’d win. My jaw might as well have hit the floor.
The ever-prickly Lil returned to her usual cold self. “What? Is it that surprising?” Oddly, that came as a relief.
“Oh, no, I guess. I just didn’t expect an honest thank-you.”
“Well, we really are grateful.”
“That’s right. If not for you, we’d have been torn apart forever.”
“Yeah! So… Thank you, really.”
Oh… I get it.
It all made sense now. The two of them had never cared about me, just Neptune. If they were just thankful that I’d saved their future with him, then that made perfect sense.
For the first time, I started to like them.
“Now, it’s about time we took our leave,” Neptune announced.
“Going home?”
“Yep. Based on my experience, there’s a long grace period before the stars start naturally going down. I’m going to enjoy a truly relaxed day with my girls for the first time in a long time.”
“That so?”
“If you learn anything else, call me. Or if you need any help, of course…Boss.”
He’d said it jokingly, but when he emphasized the word boss, I sensed real hatred coming from the girls. Lil in particular was glaring daggers at me.
“No more of that, please.”
“Ahaha! See ya.”
I saw off the laughing Neptune and his orbiters.
Ran stopped, turned, and waved at me. Lil just glanced over her shoulder. We weren’t exactly best friends yet, but I was glad that their attitude toward me had improved. And while we hadn’t resolved this problem, we’d bought time to work on it.
I decided I wanted to go home and relax, so I went through the warp gate I’d used to get here and returned to the mansion.
When I left the warp room, I literally bumped into Alice.
“Ack!” She fell on her butt, sending her buddy monsters falling onto the floor. “Ouchie… Everyone okay?” Her chibi monsters used their adorable body language to confirm that they were okay, and they jumped back onto her shoulders one by one. After confirming that everyone was back in place, she stood up. “Sorry, Ryota.”
“No, I’m sorry. Did I hurt you at all?”
“I’m okay! Everyone else is, too─whoa, Boney, what’s that?!” One of her buddies, the skeleton Boney, had a matsutake mushroom stabbed through her empty eye-hole.
“Sorry, that’s mine,” I said. That was the last thing I’d dropped and brought back.
Fwoop!
When Alice pulled the mushroom out, it made a funny, airy noise.
“Ahahaha! Fwoop! It went ‘fwoop’!” Alice laughed boisterously, and her buddies followed suit, mimicking hearty laughter with their tiny bodies.
Among her buddies were the master dragon Rawry and Phosphorus spirit Burny. Even the two of them, a dungeon master-tier monster and a literal dungeon spirit, laughed alongside her. If we were in a manga, they would have little laugh lines above their heads.
“Have those two always acted like that?” I asked.
“Hmm? You mean Rawry and Burny?”
“Yeah.”
“Yep!” she replied matter-of-factly.
I don’t think so, I rebutted mentally. Rawry aside, Phosphorus definitely hadn’t acted like that before. But as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Maybe that’s true for adopted kids, too.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.” I accepted the mushroom back from her.
“Is it a drop? Weird that you didn’t send it to Erza. Are you gonna eat it?”
“No, that’s not quite it.”
“Hmm… Then you’re making it an outsider!” Alice theorized.
“Huh?”
“I mean, if you’re not eating or selling something, then you’re usually making it an outsider to get a different item, right?”
“I see… An outsider, huh?”
The fear─or rather, the panic over the stars─had kept me from trying to convert the drops of Tennessine into outsiders. Even when I’d tested whether outsider shadows could make fakes, Neptune had been the one to kill the shadow when it failed. I still hadn’t killed an outsider from Tennessine.
“Well, I might as well give it a try while I’m here.”
“I’ll watch!” Alice raised her hand and followed me.
The two of us went to the mansion’s basement, where I put the matsutake in the corner and backed off.
After a while, a fake me appeared.
“Ooh, Prince Ryo! Oh… No. Just Ryota?” For a moment, she thought it was Prince Ryo from Plumbum, but she stopped and cocked her head.
Unlike the shoujo manga hottie Prince Ryo, and unlike the Omnipotence-summoned Ryochin, this one actually looked like me. I instantly killed him with Repetition so that he couldn’t damage the mansion.
The risk was even greater than usual this time. I doubted this would happen with an outsider, but if it did try to attack Alice, that would be big trouble, so I was even more aggressive than usual with my Repetition cast.
The fake me died and disappeared.
“Huh? It didn’t drop anything,” Alice noted.
“Sure didn’t…”
“That’s weird. Has this ever happened before?”
“Not as far as I remember.”
“Hmm… That is weird.”
I quietly tilted my head in confusion. Never had I had a monster drop nothing. My unique S-rank drops made it so that I got drops even from outsiders.
It was strange that it didn’t work now.
What’s going on? Should I try another mushroom?
While I thought to myself…
“Huh? What’s up, Burny?” Alice asked Burny, the Phosphorus buddy on her shoulder. As a fireball, or maybe a will-o’-the-wisp, he communicated by flickering his flames. The fact that she could understand him was proof of their impressive bond. “You mean it?! Wow, it’s true!”
“Alice, what’s wrong?”
“Ryota, your arm! Look at your arm!”
“My arm?” As directed, I looked…and was amazed. “They’re gone…”
The eleven stars on my arm had totally disappeared, as if they’d never been there to begin with.