Two months had quickly passed by since Wataru defeated the dragon!!
Résistance had, just as planned, left the party to set out on a journey to become a better martial artist! Wataru and Aria had returned to the Sky Kingdom and gotten a great deal of reward money from the King!
Combined with what they’d gotten from defeating the Demon Lord Deus, they now had enough money to live in luxury for the rest of their days! But Wataru was not about to let himself get carried away by something like money! He was now living it up in one of the examination rooms in the clinic managed by Aria’s parents! He had completely remodeled the place into a personal fitness room! And today, like all days, he was hard at work training his muscles!
“Nine-ninety-five... Nine-ninety-six... Nine-ninety-seven...!”
With carefully controlled breath rhythm, Wataru kept his body in a dauntingly precise form as he raised and lowered a barbell! The weights on the barbell added up to an entire ton! And he hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet!!
“Nine-ninety-eight... Nine-ninety-nine... One thousand! Awesome!”
He slowly lowered the barbell to the ground, wiped away the sweat dripping down his forehead with his towel, and guzzled down an entire bottle of chocolate protein drink he had on hand!! His black hair had grown down to his waist during his fight with the dragon, but he had found it to be a huge inconvenience and so had cut it right back to the length it had been before!
“All right then, what kind of lifts should I do next?!?!”
Then! At that moment! The room to the door swung wide open and in barged none other than Aria!
“Wataru! Hey hey, boyyyyyy~!”
She looked nothing like the Aria we have come to know and love! She had always worn a simple, pure white dress, but the dress she wore now was an eye-popping crimson! Massive black sunglasses covered her eyes, and she wore a golden necklace around her neck and a silver bracelet on her wrist! How unbelievably stylish of her!!
The instant Aria had gotten her hands on a huge amount of money, she’d gone on a spending craze that apparently knew no bounds! “Price” had no meaning for this wealthy young lady!
✦ ✦ ✦
“Oh, hey, Aria, nice to see you here! I’d really appreciate it if you stopped going around wearing all that ridiculous stuff, though!!”
“Please, Wataru, don’t you lecture me! You went and wasted a bunch of our hard-earned money on a bunch of fitness equipment!” Aria took off her sunglasses and looked around the room, completely exasperated! The twenty-square-meter room was filled with barbells, dumbbells, treadmills, and a variety of other workout equipment! It was not at all the type of room you’d expect the two-time savior of the world to live in!!
“Hey, it’s my room, all right! ...Anyway, what do you want today?”
Aria answered Wataru’s question with an evil grin! “The truth is, I’ve brought along a surprise guest with me here today!”
“Huh!? Who’re you talking about!?”
Aria turned and called out to someone beyond the door! “You can come in now!” Slowly, the door opened wider—to admit a woman inside! She had sharp, clean facial features, and long, silky blue hair! Covering the rest of her body was spiky, sharp, wicked-looking black armor!
Yes, it was Résistance!
“Résistance! It’s you... but you only just left us! It’s too early for a reunion episode!”
Without a second thought, Wataru’s instinctive reaction was to criticize her sudden appearance!!
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Wataru?”
“It’s only been two months! What the hell happened!? Why’d you come all the way out here to the Sky Kingdom!?”
Résistance folded her arms with a most serious expression! “I’ll get right to it: I’ve come today because I have something to tell you both. I could’ve just written a letter, but it’s an important announcement, so I wanted to tell you face-to-face.”
“Oho...... An important announcement, you say?”
“Just what do you have to tell us!?!?” Aria tilted her head to one side! Despite having led Résistance all the way to Wataru’s room, it seemed as though she had no idea why she was back in the Sky Kingdom!
Just what in the world might Résistance need to tell the other two!?
With a solemn expression on her face, she stared at her friends, took a deep breath, and then opened her mouth to proclaim—
“I’m actually... going to debut as a novelist this month!”
There were several seconds of silence, then—!
“Résistance, please. Would you just cut that out?”
“She’s right, Résistance! Stop lying!”
Neither Aria nor Wataru believed her in the slightest!
“I’m not—! I’m telling the truth, you know.” Résistance was most resolute!
Aria, however, simply could not hold back her laughter any longer! She was literally doubled over in mirth! “Ahaha! Résistance, you could never be a novelist! Back when we were trying to get the second orb, your writing was completely awful!”
Wataru and Aria had discovered, through their ordeal as described in Chapter Two: “Chaos! A Novel Challenge for the Orb!” that Résistance had absolutely no talent when it came to writing novels! None whatsoever! It was quite ridiculous of her to claim that she was soon going to debut as a novelist!
“What happened was that as I was writing the outline for Dark Taboo ~The Forbidden Abyss~†, I remembered how fun it is to write. So that’s why after I split up from you two, I resolved to finish up my novel all in one go. After I got done writing it, I sent it off to a publishing house, and they told me they wanted to buy it!”
“Weren’t you supposed to be off training to become a better martial artist!?!? Do that first!” Wataru yelled at her, perfectly calm!
Aria was still a little suspicious of Résistance’s story! “Even though you’ve just told us how you did it, I still can’t believe you are going to be a novelist! If the publisher thought it was good enough to print, please show us your manuscript!”
Résistance responded with a firm nod! “I thought you’d say that. I brought along a copy of the prologue for you to read. Take a look.” Résistance pulled a tightly rolled scroll out from somewhere inside her armor and passed it to Wataru! He unfurled the scroll and ran his eyes across what was written there, all the while with a Nio’s stern countenance!
“I can’t read!!”
Yes, that’s right! Wataru can’t read the language of this world! But how, then, you may ask, does he manage to speak with his friends just fine!? We don’t care about that right now!!
“That’s fine. Here, I’ll read it.”
Aria gently took the scroll from Wataru and began reading aloud from the parchment!!