“Agh, I’m tired!”
Alina flopped over face down on her desk.
The refreshing morning sun was streaming into the offices of Iffole Counter. Alina could hear the bustle of the city outside, but here in Iffole Counter, it was quiet.
Of course it was. The office was closed today, so none of the other receptionists had come to work.
“It hasn’t even been an hour since I started…”
After looking at the clock with an expression of despair, Alina turned her gaze to her mountain of documents.
“There’s so many…”
Lined up around Alina’s desk were wooden boxes of documents labeled either PROCESSED, CHECKED, or UNCHECKED. She stared at the imposing boxes for a while, then gave her cheeks a smack.
“But this is the final push, so I just have to do it. Okay then, Jade, you go from that mountain of papers—,” Alina said, turning to the desk beside her where Jade always sat and trailing off when she noticed no one was there.
“Oh yeah, he isn’t coming in today.”
She remembered that he said he’d gotten an emergency job. Tiring, even by her own standards. Alina gave a little sigh, then silently went to work again.
The next moment, however, she immediately set her feather pen back down. She just couldn’t quite concentrate today. Maybe it was because there was nobody there with her. No, it was weird for Jade to be sitting at the desk beside her in the first place. He wasn’t a receptionist, and he wasn’t an office worker at all. He was an adventurer.
“…”
For a while, Alina listened to the faint sound of activity coming from outside. The whole office was quiet and still, the kind of silence that felt nostalgic to her.
“Now that I think about it, it’s been a long time since I last did overtime alone. Though I guess this is technically ‘weekend work,’ not overtime…,” Alina muttered.
She’d come to take it for granted that Jade would help her with her overtime, so she hadn’t felt like this in a long time. But for some reason, despite how she used to think of being alone as refreshing—
“O-of course I’m feeling a little sad; I’m down a fighter today!” Forcing these words from her mouth, she faced the documents.