The Simulacrum

Chapter 62

How should I describe the peculiar sensation that was currently crawling up my arm? Uncomfortably warm would be a good one. It was also, for lack of better words 'skittery'; it was as if the legs of several large centipedes were tapping at my skin as they moved around, but from the inside. Overall, it wasn't exactly painful, but still thoroughly unpleasant. Even so, my trusty sixth sense wasn't telling me I was in immediate danger, so for the time being I forcefully suppressed the anxiety slowly welling up from the pit of my stomach and faced the distressed huntress still sitting on the ground.

"Your sword is asking me to 'let her in'. Is that normal?" I asked with as level a voice as I could manage at the moment.

"What? No!" she shouted back to me, which I acknowledged with an absent-minded nod.

She apparently wanted to say something else as well, but before she could, I let out a long grumble in Faunish.

"[I can't help but discern that our disarmed interloper is yet to be apprehended.]"

As if woken from a daze, both Karukk and the other Fauns who came into the open once I took Rinne's sword sprung to action, practically tripping over each other in their hurry to be the first to subdue her, and in about a second she completely disappeared under a mountain of bodies. I'm not going to lie, the sight was a tad unnerving, but I had more pressing matters at the moment, therefore I smoothly ignored the ruckus in front of me and focused on the blade in my hand.

"kill great things, you and I!>"

"{Chief, I'm hearing some kind of static noise. Is everything all right out there?}"

"Sorry Dormouse, I'm kind of busy right now; I'm being tempted to join the dark side at the moment."

"{By that Rinne woman?}"

"No, her annoying sword." I only realized that what I said must have sounded quite silly, so I quickly added, "It's a long story."

""

I naturally ignored the creepy voice demanding my attention, and instead focused on the much more soothing, if currently equally ethereal voice of my girlfriend instead.

"{I imagine,}" she responded, her tone telling me that she was expecting a proper explanation once things settled down a little. "{If you have the leeway to talk like this, I suppose it's not a serious situation.}"

"It's hard to say. We're not at the body-snatching battle-of-the-wills part yet." I didn't get any reaction to that, and maybe for the better. "Jokes aside, the battle is over out here, so you can come out of the closet if you want to."

"{I'm fine here, don't worry about me. Rather, did you just say 'body-snatching'?}"

"I'm just exaggerating I think."

While I was chatting with Judy, the Faun successfully subdued the huntress, and even tied her up with some kind of thin, bright orange rope. They also looked really proud of their handiwork, which I didn't mind, though there was one small question that still bothered me about the situation.

"Where did you get that?"

My inquiry made the guys glance at each other, as if to decide who should answer me, right until Hrul raised his hand.

"[It's an extension cord. Milord said he wanted to capture her alive, so I grabbed it when I brought the bandages.]"

"[Wise,]" Brang noted with a satisfied grin.

"Yeah, good thinking," I agreed without any reservations. "Remind me to give you a performance bonus once I get around to giving you your first paycheck."

In the meantime, the currently kneeling Rinne, flanked by one Faun on each side, appeared to be utterly bamboozled by the situation, which probably wasn't helped by her only understanding one side of the conversation. After taking off the mask and sparing one last glance at the annoying sword still clinging to my hand, I turned to her for some answers.

"So, now that things have calmed down a bit and nobody is trying to kill anyone, can you please explain what the hell is going on with this stupid sword?"

"" It was at this point that I started running out of patience, so I gestured for Brang to raise the spear I loaned to him, and the moment he did so, I unceremoniously whacked the flat of the blade against it. ""

"Quiet, you dumb, oversized bread-knife."

""

"{I'm hearing some static again,}" Judy noted, barely audible under the background noise.

"Just ignore it; that's what I'm doing." Saying so, I completely disregarded the raving katana and focused my attention on Mountain Girl again. "So, just to reiterate: why is your sword trying to crawl up my arm?"

Rinne continued to blink at me in utter incomprehension for several seconds, but at last there was a glint of resignation in her eyes and she began to speak in a level, somewhat lethargic voice.

"Rinne I... got upset when I saw you here, and so Onikiri also became agitated. Normally Onikiri only chooses a new wielder once in every generation, but in her current state, she might be trying to forcefully make you accept her." She paused her unusually cogent explanation for a second and looked me in the eye before stating, "You mustn't. Please return her to me. She's my burden."

The Faun shared an uncertain look between each other, apparently just as taken aback by the change in her demeanor as I was. Or was I? Honestly, I was getting a little light-headed again, and my headache also started to act up, so I couldn't really tell how I felt about her behavior at the moment.

"Well, excuse me, but I'm afraid I have to refuse," I responded flatly.

""

After another quick, sparking whack on the blade, I instructed Brang to keep the dragon slayer spear close by in case I'd need it again in the near future and turned back to the downed huntress.

"As I was saying, I went through a lot of trouble to get this damned thing away from you, so I'm not going to hand it back."

"Why?" she blurted out, her brows instantly rising like toilet paper stocks in a pandemic.

"Because then you would probably try to kill us again, duh."

"Oh, right Rinne probably" She abruptly cut herself short, and then restated, with added emphasis, "I mean, I probably would."

"I'm glad we are on the same page," I noted with an only slightly strained smile before amending, "Seriously though, if it wasn't blindingly obvious yet, your stupid sword doesn't want to let me go."

To emphasized the point, I raised my arm to show off the shroud wrapped around my hand, and as I looked at it, I noticed something quite alarming. I reached out with my other hand and pulled the sleeve of my coat down a little, only for my brows to immediately knot into a baffled frown.

"Oh, great. And now my veins are glowing on my forearm," I muttered under my breath, which naturally didn't escape Judy's notice.

"{You have Volcanic Veins?}"

I observed the sickly green, pulsing light emanating from under my skin for a short while, and ultimately told her, "First off, that's a nice trope name. Secondly, yeah, I pretty much have that."

"{That could be either good or bad. What's the color?}"

"I kind of ugly neon-green," I stated while twisting my arm left and right to get a full look.

"{That's not good. According to traditional color-coding, glowing green means evil.}"

"Leonard-san!" Before I could answer my girlfriend, Rinne demanded my attention with a panicked yell.

"What?"

"You must cut it off!" she continued to yell while frantically struggling against her bindings, forcing one of the Faun to hold onto her shoulders lest she would fall forward and faceplant onto the concrete floor.

"The cloth?" I asked back, though a hunch told me that wasn't what she meant.

"No, your arm! You must cut off your arm before the corruption spreads any further!"

"Oh well, that's a great idea, but you know what, I have a better one. How about No?"

"This is no time to joke around!" Rinne retorted with a scorching scowl. "If you don't, you're going to be crippled!"

"I don't see how cutting off a hand would make me less so, but for a start, I would like to know more about this 'corruption' you are talking about."

She stared daggers at me for a while, but it didnt take her long to relent.

"Onikiri is the holy sword of our clan, bestowed upon us by the great"

"Wait, hold on," I cut her short with both hands raised. "Could we skip the exposition and just explain it in simple, relevant terms?"

The disapproval on her face was practically palpable by this point, but once she collected her thoughts, she rapidly explained herself in a wooden, matter-of-fact tone.

"Onikiri was corrupted by the miasma and bloodlust of the creatures she had slain. If you harmonize with her to become her wielder, then two becomes one, and you remain unaffected, but if you fail, the miasma will corrode your body. If you resist" she paused for a beat, and then used her chin to point at my hand. " that's what happens."

"Thank you, that was very succinct," I responded while raising the hand with the sword to eye-level. "So if I get this straight, if I don't 'let her in', she will corrode me from the inside, but if I do, she gets into my head?" Rinne mulled over my words, and at last gave me a nod. "Well, neither of those are viable options."

While muttering so, I confirmed that the glowy veins have reached just above my elbow, and even though I still wasn't feeling any pain, my arm was getting number by the second, to the point it became hard to keep it raised to eye-level. I tried to consider all of my options. First, cutting the shroud. I extended my hand and tapped the wrapped up part against the spearhead still held steady by Brang, but I only got an eyeful of magical welding light for my trouble. I've already noticed it during the duel with Rinne, so this just confirmed that the cloth was as impervious to damage as the blade itself (probably a perk of being an enchanted weapon), but hey, it was worth a try.

The second option was well, I wasn't cutting my hand off, so no, that actually wasn't an option. Then I could always allow Onikiri to possess me and then we could engage in silly body-sharing shenanigans and nah, that wasn't even good for a joke. Which meant I only really had one option.

"Judy, are you listening?" My dear assistant let out a grunt in the affirmative, so I continued with, "This might either take a while or no time at all, depending on how subjective timey-wimey tomfooleries would work out in this case, so don't be alarmed if I don't respond for a while."

"{Noted. Also, for the record, if you end up body-snatched, I'll be really angry and will possibly hate you for real.}"

"Well, then I better avoid that, I suppose."

"{You better.}"

I couldn't help but chuckle at her response before I let out a sharp breath and prepared myself for what I expected to be something that I was going to regret soon, and I would probably doubly regret it in a few days if I was still alive. Bad jokes aside, I reached out with my Phantom Limb, and without any further ado, I plunged it inside the sword.

First off, the obvious question: can I break the enchantment on the sword? It was quickly answered when I tried to cut it with my ethereal appendage, only for a disobedient part of my brain to start yelling at me while waving at least ten red flags at once, telling me that this was, in fact, another plot device I wasn't supposed to touch. Great, there goes my quick and easy solution. Not that I was too surprised, to be honest; after today's track record, I would've been incredibly suspicious if something actually worked out for me on the first try.

In other words, it was time for a deep-dive, which was something that I really wanted to avoid, considering I had a sneaking suspicion the only reason my head was no longer hurting at this point was that I've already run out of pain receptors. Not that I had much of a choice in the matter, so I steeled my nerves and headed even deeper.

Reaching the core of the enchantment was considerably less of a chore than the usual fare, and after only a subjective few minutes of what felt like jogging through a sewage treatment plant during a hurricane, I successfully arrived at... something. Let me try to paint a mental picture: first off, I was inside space with no clear beginning or end. Inside that space, there was an absolutely enormous black thing with glowy green highlights that kind of looked like some sort of malformed, constantly shifting sea urchin. On closer look, the whole thing seemed to be made of, or at the very least covered by, a thick, viscous substance.

Now, I didn't need to be a genius to figure out that an ugly sludge that smelled like puppies crying and was fluorescing in a mixture of death black and uranium green might have been, just maybe, a representation of the 'corruption' that Mountain Girl had alluded to. Call it a hunch.

Seriously though, as much as I was annoyed by the clichd appearance of this thing, at least it was easy to recognize, so I obviously avoided it and looked for something else. Unfortunately though, there didn't seem to be anything else in this non-Euclidian space, not even any sign of the actual enchantment I was looking for. I had my own suspicions about that, but for the time being I decided to first check the 'thorns' of the sea urchin thingy.

Each of the long, needle-like protrusions on the dark blob in the middle started out the same dark color, and as they stretched towards the infinite distance, they grew thinner and changed from an oily black to smoldering neon green. Not only that, but these needles were constantly moving; at times retracting, only to be replaced by new ones. Sometimes they merged, while at other times one could divide into two or more new needles, constantly moving around in a frankly disturbing and yet somewhat familiar display. Not only that, looking into these thorns revealed that each had a practically infinitely thin, colorless string inside of them, and when I tried to follow them back to the source, I could finally discern a comparatively small, softly glowing sphere in the middle of the sludge-urchin.

For a while I tried to take a better look at the thing from the outside, but the constantly shifting surface of the blob made it nigh impossible to see any small details, so after a long minute of hesitation, I decided to try my luck and get closer. First though, I had to figure out whether it was even safe to touch this nasty muck, so I proceeded to very gently poke it with the tip of my Phantom Limb. To my pleasant surprise, the black, gooey substance not only didn't cause any obvious ill effects, but under the gentlest touch of my ethereal limb, it parted like the skin of an overripe tomato cut by a freshly sharpened knife. I waited for just a little longer, to see if there were any delayed effects, and then I carefully shifted my disembodied point of view towards the gash on the surface.

"Ugh."

While I didn't actually 'feel' anything wrong when I finally crossed into the sludge, I still couldn't help but let out a disgusted grunt. There were no good ways to describe the tactile sensations surrounding me, but none of them were particularly pleasant. Still, I soldiered on and quickly made my way over to the glowy bit in the middle. Once I was within Phantom Limb's reach, I could finally see it for what it was, and my initial suspicion was ultimately confirmed by the sight.

First off, there was a semi-transparent outer-layer made of two halves, kind of like one of those balls in those vending machines where you have to crank a lever for a random toy to pop out. I think they were called gacha balls? Anyhow, it was actually roughly the size of a small house, which I was no longer surprised about; sizes and distances were screwy enough in this place so that I kind of got used to this sort of thing. On an even closer look, the two halves of the hollow ball turned out to be a single interlocking and stupendously complex enchantment array housing a familiar-looking sphere of multi-layered, transparent yarn. It was slightly smaller than the one I've seen when I fixed Emese's injury, but it looked practically the same, even down to the filaments that reached out through the enchantment-case and towards infinity. It was precisely these threads that, after passing through the muck, formed the countless thorns of the sludge-urchin visible from the outside.

This actually put the situation into a new perspective. If my interpretation of the ball of yarn being the core of a 'character' in this world, a kind of soul if you will, was correct, then it meant that Onikiri wasn't 'just' a sentient weapon, but one housing an actual person. It was both intriguing and somewhat annoying at the same time. I mean, if it was a malfunctioning virtual intelligence of some sort, I wouldn't have minded 'fixing' it, in my own way, but if it was really a person locked up in that semi-transparent ball (for a loose definition of 'person', at the very least), it complicated things a bit.

But speaking of the enchantment-ball, I decided to focus my attention on it and try to touch it with my Phantom Limb, parting the greasy substance surrounding me in the process, aaaaand yep, red flags. By the looks of it, it was definitely something I shouldn't carelessly manipulate, so I proceeded to observe and lightly poke it instead to look for clues, just like how I dealt with Emese's curse. I mean, that was a perfect example of why, just because it was something a slightly more knowledgeable yet infinitely more unsociable part of my brain recognized as a thing that should not be tweaked under any circumstances, it didn't mean I couldn't manipulate its environment and effects to get the same result. It might have sounded like a semantic difference, but it was the same kind of difference as between dropping a brick on someone, or just putting a brick on a ledge so that someone could 'accidentally' nudge it and drop it on their own head. One was murder; the other was just unfortunate and had nothing to do with you.

Now, back to the observations: the shell was quite intricate, and while on the surface it appeared to be written in a different enchantment 'language', so to speak, than anything I've seen so far, its underlying principles when viewed from the supernatural stratum were exactly the same as any other enchantment I have experimented with. It was also incredibly high-quality stuff, easily on the level of the 'spider' controlling the Chimera from the inside, and upon further inspection, I came to the conclusion that it served three purposes: it protected the yarn-ball inside, it was responsible for the sword's attributes in the outside world and, unexpectedly enough, it was also responsible for the sludge accumulating around it.

To put it into layman terms, the enchantment was designed to take 'samples' from anything the sword had slain. Using that sample, it would proceed to adapt and strengthen itself so that it would be more effective against the same kind of opponent the next time. However, each time it did so, it was during a situation when the opponent died, so they were naturally in a heightened state of emotions, which then piled up over time to form this nauseating muck. Whether that was working as intended or a design flaw, I didn't know.

That said, if I dedicated enough time to it, I was fairly sure I could find the answer to that question, but I figured it was about time I stopped dallying around and took a look at the inside. Piercing right through the outer shell was something I could've probably done if not for the insistent nagging of the enchantment-savvy part of my brain whenever I even considered the idea. Since the forceful approach was apparently ill-advised, I started looking for alternatives, quickly arriving at a certain function of the array. It was what allowed for the threads from the inside to reach out, making the seal one-way permeable. By doing a bit of reverse-engineering that I didn't one hundred percent understand, but looked intuitive enough, I figured that if I pretended to be one of those threads, I could theoretically slip right through with the seal being unaffected. My plan went through a few boring reiterations and some trial and error I shall omit for the time being, but once I got a hang of it, I was fairly confident it should work.

"Here goes nothing," I whispered, my words sending visible ripples through the oily sludge around me. I decided to ignore the sight, as well as the question of how I could even talk without a mouth, and instead I focused my attention on the task at hand. I twisted, and contorted, and almost became one-dimensional for a second or two. At last, I managed to find the sweet spot, and my point of view simply slipped through all the seals of the external shell with absolutely zero resistance, so that I was right in front of the ball of yarn except when I wasnt, and before I knew it, I suddenly landed on my feet.

Wait a moment. That felt subtly wrong. Since when did I have feet at times like this?

I glanced down, and to my further bewilderment, I could see my whole body, except it wasn't really my body. For a start, I was pretty sure I wasn't completely smooth between my legs, and on second look, my abs and biceps were just a tad more defined than in what I jokingly called my reality. That was mildly odd.

It was also a conundrum for later, as it was much more important to figure out my current situation, and to do so I first had to know where the hell I was. At a quick glance, I actually had to consider 'hell' as an actual option. I was on a hilltop that was made entirely out of blood, including the grass under my feet that melted back into fluid at a simple touch. Oddly macabre, but that would've been fine on its own. Then I noticed that on my left, there was something that looked like a ruined Japanese shrine, with broken sculptures, a small building with a caved-in roof, and even one of those characteristic gates with the crescent top. Oh, and it was all on fire. Blue fire, to be exact, which didn't really help the eerie atmosphere one bit.

"Is this some kind of artificial environment, or" I mumbled aloud without even realizing it, only to almost fall over when the ground under my feet shook with a deep, groaning sound. I turned towards the source of the impact, and I didn't even realize what I was looking at until I raised my head so much my neck started to hurt. I was facing, for lack of better words, a black giant made out of indistinct, roiling fog that still appeared to be perfectly solid. The leisurely sitting creature in front of me had a vaguely feminine shape, with long, thin limbs. On its ankles and wrists it had four sets of large prayer beads, its only article of 'clothing', so to speak. Most of its body was covered by her thick, ankle long, and rather unruly hair that waved and undulated as if it was on fire.

"" In response to the giant's voice, the whole world around us trembled. It leaned forward with slow, leisurely movements that reminded me of a well-fed cat, right until it was practically on its knees, and it slowly closed the distance until its enormous head was right above. ""

The creature's featureless face hung over me, completely motionless. It had no nose or mouth, only two perfect, glowing circles where the eyes were supposed to be. It was quite unnerving, to say the least.

"" the giant noted with a voice that felt like Onikiri's already uncanny voice was cranked up to eleven, and then some. ""

"No, and neither am I your 'wielder'," I answered with a frown that quickly turned into an expression of alarm when the giant Onikiri thing extended a hand towards me.

""

The request might not have sounded threatening on its own, but the fingers ending in curved talons heading my way sure as hell were.

"Back off!" I yelled out as I took a step back and instinctively swung my Phantom Limb at the incoming palm.

""

To my sincerest shock, my extra limb not only came out on top in the clash, but when it met the hand of the giant, she was outright thrown back. After the first surprise, the enormous body let out a terrifying (or maybe terrified, though the two weren't mutually exclusive) roar as it lost its balance and rolled down the hill. For several seconds I could only blink in surprise, though not because of the improbable outcome I just experienced.

When I 'struck' the creature, it didn't feel like I hit an object. In fact, it was exactly the same as when I interacted with an enchantment. Following that logic, I tried to touch the ground with it, and then my own 'body', and the results were the same. Apparently, my first hunch was correct: this place was indeed fake, or rather, a sort of illusion created by the enchantment. In short, the shell surrounding the soul-ball in the middle had two layers: the outside, which was supposed to protect it from external effects, while the inside had a separate array that created this rudimentary illusion. Well, rudimentary compared to the 'simulation' outside, but I digress. No time for existential musings right now.

That said, now that I was aware of this fact, I could not only clearly perceive the workings of the enchantment array through the supernatural stratum, but I could also see that the yarn-ball was still in front of me under the layers of the illusion.

I was just about to try and decipher this new discovery, but my time to do so was cut short by the ground trembling under my feet once again.

"" the giant Onikiri demon thing roared with indignation practically dripping from its wounded pride as it ran up the hill, each hard step making a small earthquake a run for its money and its hair flailing in the wind, making it look even larger in the process.

"Okay, calm down for a mo" 'ment!', I would've said, if I was given the chance, as the giant didn't stop when it reached the top of the hill, and instead it swung its leg and tried to punt me like a soccer ball. My whole body tensed up for a moment, and even though I knew I wasn't in real danger, the giant, incoming feet still scared me for a moment.

Then it met with my Phantom Limb again and instantly stopped as if it hit a stone wall. There was a moment of silence, and then the creature let out another terrifying roar, made more impressive by the fact it did so without having an actual mouth, before it fell down in its butt and grabbed hold of its big toe.

"" It bellowed between pained hisses before it focused all of its attention on me again. "" While it boomed so, the blue flames around began to burn brighter and brighter, until it felt like we were standing (or sitting) in the middle of a roaring inferno. ""

"First off, stop shouting," I told it with a sigh while using my hand to wave away some of the sparks landing on my shoulders. "If it makes you feel better, I'm just your natural nemesis. You manifest and control a world created by a complex enchantment. I'm someone who can dismantle and modify most enchantments as I want. We are simply on a different level."

"" the unstable (in more ways than one) giant screamed as it once more tried to reach out towards me, only to be rebuked by another slap from my Phantom Limb.

I waited for it to finish throwing its outburst, and a couple of minutes plus a few more slaps later it finally calmed down a little.

"So, now that we established the pecking order," I noted while dividing my attention between it and analyzing the inner workings of the inner layer of the shell around the yarn-ball, "How about you stop being obstinate and let me go? In reality, I mean."

"" she roared, yet instead of being scary, she simply sounded petulant. ""

"But why? Don't you already have Rinne?" I tried to reason with it, but the giant had none of it.

""

"Okay, I get that, but"

""

Well, great. And now the giant, scary demon-thing was throwing a literal tantrum like a kid, complete with repeatedly banging its fists against the ground. I could still try to talk, but I had a distinct feeling that it was pretty much impossible to argue with the unreasonable creature in front of me. I was just about to entertain the idea of doing something slightly unsavory, like hacking the enchantment to turn her into a chicken and threaten to eat her for dinner if she didn't behave, but then I stumbled onto something during my exploration of the array.

So, just to reiterate: even though that miasma or corruption or what have you completely covered the shell housing Onikiri's 'soul', it couldn't actually get in. However, while it couldn't touch the yarn-ball itself, the strings that reached out and through the shell were also all part of what made up the entity called 'Onikiri'. This meant that it was likely affected by at least some of that, which would explain why it was so uncooperative and moody. However, if we turn it around, would that mean that if I got rid of the stuff outside, I could theoretically make her see reason?

It was worth a shot, especially considering that even if it didn't work out, if I could get rid of this corruption thing, I would stop the whole Volcanic Vein business from getting worse, and at the very least buy myself some time to deal with everything else on my plate. As for how I could do that well, the sludge was easily cut by my Phantom Limb, so that was a start, and I could probably improvise the rest.

"Okay, that's it," I raised my voice with exaggerated indignation. "If you're refusing to cooperate, I'll just go out and do it my way."

The giant looked at me with a befuddled expression, or at least as befuddled as something can look without actual facial features, but I didn't wait for it to form any response and instead I quickly wiggled out of the shell around the soul-ball the way I came. Truth to be told, folding my illusionary body into a one-dimensional dot was way weirder than when I only did it to my disembodied point of view, but it wasn't the time to dwell on that.

Once outside, I first tested if I could even properly cut the sludge, and to my immediate relief, the whole process turned out to be really easy, if time-consuming, though it didn't take long for me to discover that even if I managed to detach a piece of muck from the central blob, I had nowhere to put it, and it would gravitate back towards the rest of it. This almost made me reconsider the notion, but then I suddenly had an ingenious idea, if I may say so myself.

I dived back to the middle and accessed the shell again. I leafed through the functions of the external array, and I quickly found the part that I was looking for. It was the bit responsible for giving the blade an edge that could cut through most things with ease. I ran into another issue at this point though, namely the fact that I couldn't actually change the function to suit my purposes, because of the whole 'Plot Device; Do Not Touch!' thing. It was such an elegant idea thought, and I wasn't willing to give up on it just yet, so after some further consideration I folded myself up one more time and entered into the Shell.

"Hey, Onikiri?"

When I called out to it, the giant practically jumped to her feet in surprise, only to stop and tilt its head in puzzlement.

"" it stated, and I shrugged.

"Don't mind the clothes, they're only here for my peace of mind," I told her while pointedly straightening the coat I manifested on my way in, because Barbie Doll Anatomy or not, modesty was important. "Listen, I need you to do something."

"" it bellowed, and I quickly and concisely explained that I wanted it to channel mana into the edge of the blade for me, though with considerably more specific terminology, but who has time for that? Anyhow, once I finished my explanation, it asked, ""

"Easy, easy," I soothed her with my hands raised, and once it calmed down, I took a deep breath and told it, "Let's say I want to cut something, and so I"

"" the giant abruptly exclaimed, making me wonder if it was pulling my leg or was really this easy to convince. ""

"Yeah, sure, that's exactly what's going to happen," I spoke using my best Judy impression, but it didn't catch up to it and instead let out a satisfied laugh that made me wonder if it was an idiot.

Either way, once it agreed, I headed outside again, and by the time I arrived, there was already a steady stream of something that I presumed to be mana flowing towards the nebulous 'outside'. My plan was fairly simple in theory, though for some reason I had a feeling if I wanted to explain it to the class rep, she would probably blow a fuse halfway through. Anyhow, here's what I did: first I went a layer 'deeper', and entered the supernatural strata of the world. There, I found the mana stream, and with a bit of elbow grease, I 'tied' the miasma directly surrounding me to it, so that when it was channeled, it sort of 'pulled' the muck with it. As for what happened afterwards well, imagine one of those enormous mobile pump trucks they bring out during floods. Got that? Now imagine one of those things being used to empty a kiddie pool. There was no contest whatsoever.

The whole process took about three minutes from my own perspective, plus another ten or so which I spent scraping the remainder of it off the bases of the 'thorns' in a bit of metaphysical labor, but once I was done, there was not a speck of the nasty black sludge remaining in sight. I let out a sigh in appreciation of a work well done, yet couldn't help but notice that even after I was done, the mana stream heading towards the 'real world' was still going at full force. Shouldn't Onikiri have already noticed what was going on by this point? Well, there was no sense in asking a question that I could answer with minimal effort, so after preparing myself for a few seconds, I once again slipped into the inside of the sphere and

" What the hell?"

The question slipped through my lips before I even knew it, but I doubt anyone could blame me. The blood-hill was replaced by a perfectly nice knoll. The burning shrine gate was replaced by a new one that was about twice as big. The shrine building itself was not only no longer in shambles, it was both taller and more lavish than the original. And as for the giant creature

"O-kami-samaaaaa!"

I could practically taste the cold shiver running down my back the moment I've heard a young voice calling out to me, followed by the equally foreboding sound of small feet running towards me. As I turned around, I was met with a pair of large golden eyes staring right back at me, their owner coming to a screeching halt just a step away from me. A short yet infinite long beat later the young preteen girl in front of me let out a small gasp and bowed at a ninety-degree angle, her long, straight black hair almost reaching the ground as it hung from her head.

"Please accept my sincerest apologies for my previous behavior, O-kami-sama!"

Her voice, oddly low-pitched yet still girly, was filled with palpable shame as she maintained her posture, and if the prayer beads around her wrists and ankles weren't enough to spoil her identity, her words made it an absolute no-brainer.

I stared at the top of her head for an embarrassingly long time, then I closed my eyes, counted to five, and then opened them up in the company of a long, drawn-out sigh.

"Three things," I began while raising my right hand with the same number of fingers extended. "First off, I'm not an 'o-kami'. Secondly, stop bowing." At this point I waited for her to stop doing so, and only then did I add, "Thirdly, you said this is your world where you can create and do whatever you want, right?"

The girl looked me in the eye, and then her lips slowly bent into a demure smile before she nodded, so I, naturally, straightened my fingers and whacked her right over the top of her head with the edge of my palm before exclaiming,

"Then put on some damn clothes already!"

"So, in short," I mused aloud while standing under the eaves of the traditional Japanese shrine, my arms crossed and my brows refusing to unfurrow, "You originally weren't a sword, but since you were about to die due to an accident, a legendary sword-smith and a legendary priest, both of whom you just happened to know and who just happened to be in the area at the time, put you in the sword. Did I get that right?"

The young girl sitting on her knees in front of me immediately nodded with a bright expression. She was thankfully wearing clothes by now, which included a loose, bright red skirt, a white upper garment with red trimming around the baggy sleeves, and her long hair was tied back, using a pair of borderline comically large red ribbons, into a pair of tidy twin-tails flowing down her back. It didn't need a genius to deduce that she was supposed to be wearing a shrine maiden outfit, just with a couple of added frills (though, at the very least, it wasn't one of those miniskirt versions popular in certain genres). Also, if everything else didn't make it blindingly obvious yet, the hairdo made it one hundred and one percent clear that she sure as hell wasn't a placeholder, either the run-of-the-mill or the unique variety.

While I pondered on this, she unexpectedly leaned forward into a deferential bow and told me, "In my previous life, I used to be called Azusa Ichiko. I would be honored if Tsukuyomi-okami-sama would call me by my given name."

I was about to roll my eyes, but then I stopped midway. Wait, which one was her first name again? Ugh, Japanese name ordering always gave me a headache, especially at times like this, where I was pretty sure neither of us was speaking English, and the enchantment just auto-translated our thoughts on the spot. Where the occasional gratuitous Japanese came from, I had absolutely no idea. Maybe the enchantment was a weaboo? Bad jokes aside, we were at addressing her by her name, weren't we? Well, I had a 50/50 chance to get it right, so I figured might as well give it a shot.

"So Ichiko?" I guessed, and the way her lips twisted in delight when she looked back up at me told me I got the coin-toss right, so I allowed myself a relieved smirk in return before adding, in my flattest voice, "Also, I'm not a 'Tsukuyomi-okami-sama'."

That comment immediately made her smile wither as she sat up straight and let out a disappointed sigh.

"Truly? I was sure I would get it right this time" Her words were followed by a defeated shrug, and then she told me, "Tsukuyomi-sama was always a mysterious one, so I believed that if there was a great god hiding amongst the masses, it would be him, and Ue-sama? Why are you holding your head like that? Are you hurt?"

"No, this is called a facepalm," I told her through clenched teeth. "Also, I think I already told you that I'm not a great god. Could you please stop casually calling me one?"

"But, my ue-sama"

"Yeah, and that too," I cut in again while redoubling my facepalming efforts. "I'm not that either, whatever that means."

"Then how shall I address you?"

Her completely earnest question only made my headache worse, so I might have responded a smidgen impatiently.

"You already know my name. Just call me Leonard or something."

"I understand, Leonard-ue!"

Her reply came packaged with a beaming smile that would have been right at home on Angie's face, but I couldn't muster anything more than a deadpan reaction.

"My name has no '-ue' in it."

"Then Leonard-dono?"

"Just Leonard will do."

"I wouldn't dare to be so disrespectful to a great" She might have noticed the glare I was sending her way, for at this point she immediately let out an unsubtle cough and said, "I mean, my benefactor."

"I don't mind at all." With that, I cut the name-discussion short and aimed to move things along by asking, "You said you wanted to talk to me before I leave, didn't you?"

"Ah, right! I beg your pardon for taking up your precious time." After apologizing, she bowed her head one more time and proclaimed, "Please wield me!"

"Denied," I replied right away, followed by the tactical nuke equivalent of a forehead flick that sent her reeling back.

"Ow-ow-ow!" She held her forehead with both hands a directed a wounded, teary-eyed stare at me. "Why did you hit me?"

"Because we were already over this," I told her in the company of a groan.

"But you're not supposed to hit girls!" she protested in a whining voice that only made shake my head.

"You're a sword," I corrected her, before adding, "Also, while you look like a girl right now, it's just a proxy body created by the enchantment housing you. There's nothing stopping you from becoming that giant flamey thing again, is there?"

"I wouldn't do that!" the little girl in front of me protested with a puffed-out cheek, and if she wasn't kneeling, I was pretty sure she would've stomped her feet. "I only looked like that because I was overwhelmed by the corruption!"

"Then why didn't you get rid of it yourself? I think I just demonstrated that it wasn't that hard," I countered, though after but a moment, I realized that I was probably a little unfair. After all, she didn't exactly have access to the same tools I did.

I was just about to grudgingly correct myself, but she let her hands down from her forehead and sent me a pitiful look while grumbling something along the lines of, "I never knew it could be done. I was always bad when it came to formations and arrays; my mother always said I just wasn't smart enough for it." She paused here, and I almost managed to get a word in when her eyes suddenly lit up as she looked up at me again. "I get it! You must be Toko-yo-no-Omoikane-no-kami-sama! I should've realized right away when you said you could manipulate arrays at will!"

She was giving me a bright, almost triumphant look, so I promptly swallowed back whatever verbal olive branch I originally wanted to offer her and instead proceeded to flick her forehead one more time.

"Ow-owwww! It was the same spot again! It hurts!" I allowed her to roll on the ground a few times, hoping she would learn her lesson, and then used my Phantom Limb to interface with the internal enchantment that materialized everything around us and simply 'turned off' the injury I caused to her.

It was actually way easier than one would think. I mean, removing an injury out of existence like it never happened sounds like it's some kind of amazing magical feat, but due to this enchantment only creating a surface-level illusion, without bothering to simulate pesky things like internal organs or skeletons, let alone cells or atoms, I literally just disabled the pain like you would change a variable in a spreadsheet. Of course, the comparison wasn't entirely on the nose, as even with the 'simple' materialization, the underlying enchantment was way more complex and occasionally counter-intuitive than any other enchantment I've ever seen.

To put it into perspective, simple enchantments were like looking at a page full of programming script; complex, but once you understood the language and the internal logic of it all, it was fairly intuitive. Complex enchantments, like the one on the dragon-slaying spear, were more like someone who either didn't know how to code, or knew how to do it but couldn't be bothered to do it well, slapped something together that technically worked as intended, but had a lot of superfluous lines and spaghetti-code. This one right here was something that was made by someone who not only had the know-how but also spent the time to debug their script and sprinkle in a lot of annotations to explain what the heck each of the myriad of interlocking bits were supposed to be doing. It was mind-numbingly complex all the same, but still the second-best thing after a straight-up graphic user interface though I didn't even know if one could be made for the thing I was inside of at the moment, as it seemed to be using colors and flavors instead of numbers, but I digress.

Anyhow, once she stopped flailing, the obnoxiously cutesy girl finally sprung to her feet again and showed a look so pitiful I was momentarily tempted to pat her on the head, but then I remembered that she was pretty annoying, so I stayed my hand.

She was about to say something, which would have no doubt led to further hijinks, but then we were interrupted by the world around us quaking, and by that, I don't mean the ground trembling like when she used to be bigger and slightly more unreasonable (with 'slightly' being the keyword here), but the artificial space itself. That was ever so slightly alarming, so I raised a finger to make her stay silent and quickly checked the enchantment, but at a cursory glance, I couldn't see anything unusual. I was just about to write it up to some freak happenstance, but then the space around us quaked and twisted once again, this time even harder, momentarily stretching and deforming everything in sight.

"Okay, I don't know what that was, but I didn't like it one bit," I muttered, but since even a second glance didn't show any anomalies, I looked my host in the eye and told her, "I'll go out for a moment and see what's going on. I'll be back soon."

I didn't wait for her answer, and more or less 'faded' out of the area by detaching myself from the artificial world only to come back about ten seconds later, much to her apparent shock.

"Did ue-sama find the problem?"

"In a manner of speaking," I answered with some hesitancy. I graciously ignored the way she addressed me again and stated, "I have some bad news, so you might want to sit down first."

I didn't mean that literally, yet she immediately sat onto her knees again and turned a pair of attentive, if currently somewhat distressed, eyes at me. I waited for yet another small space-quake to pass, and only then did I give my explanation.

"So, in a nutshell, the issue is that you're currently breaking apart the enchantment that's housing you."

"I am?" she blurted out, incredulity written all over her face, and I nodded in the affirmative.

"Yeah. Not on purpose, I believe, but how should I say this Have you ever seen a blobfish?" She tilted her head to the side and gave me an odd look that was only missing a small question mark floating over her. If she did this just a few minutes ago, I might have flexed my newfound comprehension about our surroundings to conjure up one myself, but it really wasn't the time for horsing around, so instead I collected my thoughts and tried my best to explain what was going on. "You see, a couple of thousand meters under the sea, there is a ton of water pressure weighing down on everything, including the fish living there, so they have adapted to it and look perfectly normal at that depth. However, take one of these blobfish up to the surface, and without the external pressure keeping them in check, they swell several times in size and become this amorphous blob. Are you following me so far?"

My audience blinked at me a few times, and at the end of the day she timidly told me, "No offense ue-sama, but has anyone ever told you that your analogies are hard to understand?"

"Yes, but you're not allowed to do it."

"I-In that case no?"

One sigh later I faced her again and explained, "You're the blobfish. In a manner of speaking, the sludge outside used to put pressure on you, so your soul or whatever you want to call it got compressed. The protective array on the outside also 'shrunk' to fit around you. However, now that the sludge is gone, your 'soul' suddenly began to expand to its original size, and the enchantment cannot keep up and it's getting pushed apart by you."

"That that's really, really bad!"

"To put it mildly," I commented a little half-heartedly, but then was shocked when she grabbed onto the hem of my coat with a pleading expression.

"Ue-sama!"

"W-What?"

The girl kept clinging to me even as I tried to back away and gave me the puppiest puppy eyes ever.

"What's going to happen to me if it breaks?"

"I don't think it will break. I mean, it was designed to accommodate you, and it can"

"But what if it does?!" she cut me off while turning the pleading look up to eleven. "I just got better! I don't want to die!"

As if to punctuate her words, there was another quake that shook the land and air around us, and I couldn't help but bury my face in my hand again.

"Listen, as I was trying to say, there's a good seventy percent chance that the enchantment will hold out just fine, and then the inner enchantment will stop glitching out as well."

"Would you bet your life on those odds?"

The biting question made me stop in my tracks right away, and after trying to come up with a fitting counter-argument, I ultimately had to go with, "Fine, you got me there, but what exactly do you want me to do about it?"

"I don't know! Ue-sama is the genius master of arrays! If anyone knows how to resolve this, it's you!"

I gave her a glare for several seconds just to see if she was taking the piss out of me, but she only gazed at me with sparkly, expectant eyes, so I was forced to just let out a low groan and tell her, "Listen, it's really not that simple. For a start, I can't even really touch the outer layer, let alone manipulate it."

"Is it truly so fragile right now?"

"Erm Sure, let's go with that," I agreed with a tired shrug. "The point is, I can't make it expand faster, and as for reducing your size I suppose we could do that by shoveling all the muck back to compress you again, but that would be both counter-intuitive and obviously take a while."

"No, not that!" she exclaimed while shaking her head so hard I was pretty sure she was Oh, wait, she did get dizzy. How did she even do that? I was pretty sure her inner-ear canals weren't even simulated, but I was too lazy to check at the moment, so instead I grabbed her wobbling head like a coconut and held her steady.

"I wasn't serious. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to; we expelled it all into the outside, remember?"

"Did we? I didn't really understand what happened back then, but after ue-sama told me what to do, I was too relieved by the miasma disappearing, and then I was too busy tidying up this pocket-space for ue-sama's return, so I forgot to pay attention."

I once again couldn't help but frown in incredulity, but she seemed entirely genuine, so I decided to file her under the cutesy, clumsy moe-blob archetype and move on.

"So, as I was saying, we don't really have a lot of options here. Since I cannot tweak the outer shell, and I obviously cannot tweak you, I suppose the only other option would be to move you somewhere else before things irreversibly break down."

"That! I like that idea!" She exclaimed while pointing a finger at my face, which was made even sillier by the fact that I was still holding onto her head. Not that she seemed to mind, as she tried to repeatedly nod even though I kept her still. "Please do that, ue-sama!"

"That was just a hypothetical," I blurted out a tad helplessly in face of her relentless assault of confidence in me. "It's not like we have anything ready to house a soul just lying aro und"

"What? What?"

As my words trailed off, she began spamming beams of hope in my direction, and as much as I was trying to ignore them, they were somehow still getting to me. In the end, I closed my eyes (though it was only a token gesture, as it wasn't like I was seeing the enchantment-simulation through them in the first place), and after mulling over the feasibility of the sudden idea I've just got, I began to measure its pros and cons.

On one hand, it should theoretically work, and if my understanding was correct, it would have a fairly high chance of success. On the other, I wasn't even sure I could do it, as I have never tried something like this before, and even if it worked, there was no guarantee there wouldn't be any further complications. After pondering for a couple more seconds, I realized it was probably simpler if I just asked the girl clinging to me for her opinion, as it was ultimately up to her.

"So, Ichiko?" I began, and she immediately perked up. "I think I actually have a feasible plan to get you out of this sticky situation, but I'm not sure you are going to like it"

When Leonard Dunning exited the transplanar space, his eyes were still focused on the blade held in front of his face by a slightly trembling arm. The once black sword was now pure, matte white, as if covered by a fine layer of frost. The familiar purple shroud still grasped his hand like a vice, but it was of little concern at the moment.

After observing the weapon for three more seconds, Leonard Dunning's face clouded. There was a pervasive, acrid odor that stung his nostrils with every breath. It was the combination of the bloodied stench of the writhing Chimera and the black bile covering the ground around his feet. Leonard Dunning stepped away from the puddle of black, bubbling tar slowly eating into the concrete floor and focused his gaze upon the fallen life form.

His advance was momentarily stalled by a body blocking his path. He glanced at the being in front of him; Brang of Shadowfoot of the Faun Inanna-Dunning. He attempted to communicate, but Leonard Dunning simply walked around him and stopped next to the Chimera. He lowered himself to one knee and momentarily observed the weakly flailing creature, and he ultimately utilized his ******** to completely disable the artificial intelligence governing its actions.

The creature's body became completely limp and lifeless in short order. Leonard Dunning's expression didn't show any change as he patiently waited for its heart to finish its last beat, and then he carefully placed the tip of the blade against an already present wound on its torso and inserted it into the chest cavity of the Chimera. Karukk of Thunderer of the Faun Inanna-Dunning uttered an inconsequential comment, which he completely ignored while focusing on the task at hand. From the outside, it appeared he was only staring at the motionless body in front of him, which lasted for several long minutes before he exhaled a long breath, retrieved the blade from the insides of the Chimera and--

"Chief?"

...

I blinked once. Then two more times for good measure while I tried to stop the world from spinning in front of my eyes. Finally, after I no longer felt like I was sitting on a carousel, I glanced up at the girl nervously tugging at the collar of my coat.

"Hi, Dormouse. I thought you weren't going to come out of the closet until things calmed down."

My girlfriend let out a subtly relieved breath in response to my words and let go of my coat, only to immediately grab onto me again when I tried to stand up and almost faceplanted when my internal merry-go-round suddenly went in reverse.

"He told me you were acting strange," she explained to me while clumsily trying to use the hand holding onto mine to point at Karukk.

I sent the Faun a questioning glance, but since the only reaction I got out of him was a sheepishly averted face, I decided to ignore him and focus on the girl holding onto me.

"You're not possessed, right?" she asked, her eyes suspiciously measuring me from head to toe.

"Nah, I was just..." I wanted to say 'spaced out', but the expression didn't feel exactly right so, after some consideration, I settled on, "I was kind of detached for a moment."

"Are you better now?"

"'Better' is a relative term, but at least my head is comparatively clear."

"How's your headache?"

"It's... actually not that bad. That said, my entire body is pretty numb right now, so that doesn't mean much."

Now, truth be told, I wasn't entirely truthful with Judy at the moment, as while my head was indeed tolerable (or at the very least it only felt like I was standing by the speakers at a death metal concert with earplugs that could fall out at any second), my right forearm was stinging pretty badly, which considering my current state probably wasn't a good sign. Speaking of which, the shroud was still wrapped around my hand, so I shook it to loosen the fabric up and, after a couple additional tries, I successfully managed to get it off. The skin under it was unnaturally red, but after wiggling my fingers a little to confirm they still functioned, I decided to disregard the problem for the time being and have Angie take a look at it once the universe finished using me as its chew-toy.

In the meantime I also couldn't help but notice that the Chimera next to us started breathing again, so to avoid any future misunderstandings, I loudly cleared my throat to get everyone's attention.

"Listen up, everyone! If the Chimera starts moving again, don't be alarmed. She's probably going to start transforming soon. I think she's not a bad kid, but keep an eye on her anyway."

"She?" Judy leveled the question at me with a sharp look, earning her an especially tired eye-roll for her trouble.

"It's a long story, I'll explain the nitty-gritty details once things calmed down. If you still feel insecure even after you see her, feel free to apply some countermeasures at your convenience."

"I'm not insecure, I'm just not sitting on my laurels," my assistant responded with a microscopic pout, but a blink of an eye later her expression abruptly changed and, without any warning, she began dragging me along. Normally this would be the point where I would make an affectionate joke about how she looked like some kind of traditionally adorable small animal while she was ineffectually tugging at me, but it probably spoke volumes about my current state that it actually worked.

"Hey, easy there," I grumbled, barely managing to stop myself from stumbling. She helped me keep my balance, but was just as insistent as before, so it didn't take long for me to just go with the flow and ask, "Where exactly are we going?"

"You reminded me of something, so we're going to do it now, before you find a convenient excuse to avoid it and then tell me that you couldn't do it because of the circumstances."

I wanted to argue at first, but after considering my options, I ultimately folded and obediently let her lead me along. Seeing us walking, Brang and Karukk immediately fell in line behind us doing their best honor guard impression, and on our way to our destination, we passed by a couple of other, currently hard to identify Fauns, as they were doing their best mummy impression. Speaking of which, the injured seemed to have been fully bandaged (maybe even excessively so, if you ask me), so I couldn't help but wonder how much time has passed outside while I was fiddling with Onikiri and the little miko inside it.

"Hey, Dormouse? How long was I 'in' this time?"

Judy fumbled for a second as she used her free hand to fish her phone out of her breast pocket, and to my surprise, she actually had a timer running on it, which she immediately stopped.

"A little over fifteen minutes," she stated after a glance, then hurriedly pocketed the device again so that she could use both hands to support me. It wasn't exactly necessary anymore, but I appreciated the gesture.

"Really? Everyone got their wounds treated in just fifteen minutes?" I spared one more glance at the Faun standing at attendance, and noted, "You guys are really efficient as usual."

My words made all the Fauns present subtly puff up their chests with more than a hint of pride, so much so that my hard-to-restrain teasing instincts wanted me to add a line about how I wished they were half as useful in combat, but my grumpy comment never managed to leave my mouth once we arrived at our destination. In front of us, Rinne was sitting on one of the benches around the training area, her arms still tied behind her back with the extension cord and she was flanked by a grim-looking Pip, who was apparently on guard duty.

"Chief, please introduce us," Judy much less asked than demanded, and to further set the scene, she clamped her arms around mine and snuggled even closer than before.

"Wait; are we really going to be doing what I think we're doing right now?"

"If you mean implementing countermeasures, then yes," Judy noted with an expression that said she would hear no objection to this. I tried anyway.

"We're still in the middle of something. Is this really necessary?"

"Yes, because if we don't do it now, then you're just going to say 'It's a long story, I'll explain later', but then you never do it, so that it will lead to a series of increasingly ludicrous misunderstandings. I'm not having any of that."

"... Well, if you put it like that, I can't really argue," I griped while observing the far corner of the hall, because it was really interesting, and nothing else. It had nothing to do with what Judy said, and even if it did, I could absolutely look her in the eye with confidence any time I wanted; I just found that corner really thought-provoking at the moment and decided not to do so at the moment. Scout's honor.

"You better not," Judy commented following a triumphant little 'Hmpf!' noise, and she tugged on my arm again. "So, what are you waiting for? Introduce us."

One short yet infinitely exhausted sigh later I turned to the woman on the bench, and I was about to just get it over with a few words when I noticed that she was staring at me with eyes like saucers.

"Um Hey, Mountain Girl. I see you calmed down a little," I opened with a bit of small-talk which, based on how Judy's elbow poked my side, my girlfriend didn't really appreciate it. The abnormally overwhelmed huntress didn't say anything, but I decided to interpret the way she slightly lowered her head as a nod, so I swiftly continued with, "Neat. Anyhow, this is Judy Sennoma."

"And I'm your?" my dear assistant prompted me, followed by another unsubtle prodding with her elbow.

"And she's my girlfriend," I uttered a tad wearily, and then we both waited for her to respond.

For the next two seconds, she kept staring at me without as much as blinking, but at last she looked me directly in the eye.

"Leonard-san have you purified Onikiri?"

Now it was my turn to stare at her in puzzlement for a long while, but before I could answer her, Judy cut in with an indignant look in her eyes.

"Don't change the subject. Did you hear what the Chief said? Did you actually understand it? Have you properly internalized it?"

"Wow, easy there, Dormouse," I chided her while simultaneously rubbing the hand that was holding onto mine. "You're coming on a bit too strong, don't you think?"

"No Chief, this is important. I don't want to run into a situation where she could claim 'Oh, I, like, totally spaced out or whatever, and I, like, seriously don't remember like anything you said'."

"I don't think that would happen. Also, why do you make her sound like a valley girl? She's Japanese."

"It's because I can't do a Japanese accent," she retorted as if the answer was blatantly obvious.

"Im sorry that you had to learn it like this, but you can't do valley-speak either," I shot back, only to get my foot stomped for my trouble.

"Chief, stop being a contrarian. You're already on my bad side for making me worried. Now, let's stop this sidetrack and focus on explaining to her how you only have space for one relationship in your life."

"Um You mean two, right? There is also Emfff"

She actually covered my mouth. As in, she literally put her hand over it. What the heck?

"Chief, she doesn't need to know that," Judy all but hissed at me, only to glance over to the still strangely unresponsive huntress and hastily add, "So, as we were saying, we are in a steady relationship, and there is absolutely no space for someone else between us. Zero. Nil. Nada. Are we clear?"

This time Rinne actually gave us a proper, if still absolutely befuddled nod, and at last my girlfriend removed her hand from my face as well while muttering, "How come you're so smart, yet you make the dumbest mistakes from time to time?"

"Hey, I take umbrage to t

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