Chapter 18
It was only after so much time had passed that the Hero finally came out of the bathroom—long enough for me to start worrying that something had happened.
What could he have been doing to take that long?
For now, though, I had to clear up a more pressing matter: the Hero might still be misunderstanding me.
The moment the Hero came out, I held up the clothes of his that I'd taken earlier.
I thought showing him this, at least, would help clear up the misunderstanding quickly.
Fortunately, the Hero didn't seem to find it strange.
When I held out the clothes I'd cleaned and made pleasantly fragrant, the Hero accepted them with a bewildered expression. Even so, by using another spell, I'd managed to get rid of the smell somehow, so I could use this as an excuse.
An excuse, perhaps—but it was the truth.
“Did you wash them with magic?”
I nodded in response to the Hero's question.
Do you understand now?
I'd only gone into the bathroom specifically to smell your clothes, just to check whether they needed washing. I absolutely hadn't gone in with some perverted idea of spying on you while you bathed or sniffing your clothes.
I looked at the Hero, pouring all that desperate resolve into my gaze.
Please don't misunderstand me.
“Thank you.”
“...”
The Hero smiled brightly and nodded to me.
Thank goodness..
I sighed inwardly in relief.
Now that the misunderstanding was cleared up, I should go wash up too.
“Lumia.”
“..?”
The Hero caught my hand as I tried to stand.
When I turned around to see what was going on, he was looking at me with a strangely serious expression.
What's gotten into him?
“There's something I want to ask you.”
“..?”
Well, answering a question shouldn't be that difficult.
I sat back down as if telling him to go ahead. He mulled it over for a while, then sighed, seeming frustrated that he couldn't get the words out. What kind of question was he hesitating so long to ask? I was beginning to feel frustrated too and fidgeted my fingers, and only then did the Hero open his mouth.
Then a question I never could have imagined struck me.
“Um.. What do you think of me?”
What?
I stared blankly.
What on earth was he talking about?
“..?”
What was this?
Had I heard him wrong?
But the Hero's expression was far too serious for it to have been a mishearing.
“No, I.. I phrased that wrong.. Ahem. I mean, we haven't known each other long, right? I was wondering if I might have been too familiar with you.”
Should I consider that a relief?
If he had been asking that because he genuinely liked me, I would have had no idea how to answer.
To survive, I had to like the Hero for now—and even bear his child—but I wasn't ready to accept that, much less willing to.
If possible, I wanted to find some other, better way and survive by that method.
“I was asking whether you really think of me as a companion.. and whether you might think badly of me. If something happens between companions, it's better to clear it up quickly.”
Then why was he asking this question?
The most appropriate answer would have been to say I thought of him as an ordinary companion, but we hadn't known each other very long, and saying that would make my overly clingy behavior up to now work against me.
What if I said I thought of him as an ordinary companion, only for him to realize that I'd been subtly seducing him?
Since nothing was ever completely impossible, there was also a chance he'd noticed I was trying to seduce him.
After all, two companions who had known each other for less than a week wouldn't normally wash each other's clothes, sleep in the same place, straighten each other's clothes, wipe something from the other's mouth, or hold hands. It was practically certain.
Had I been acting too aggressively?
Was that why the Hero was asking me this?
“...”
Come to think of it, there was another possibility I hadn't considered.
I'd already suspected for some time that he was truly a regressor.
Suppose the Hero knew how to defeat the Demon King and had returned to the past after experiencing an ending in which the mage sacrificed herself.
If so, that meant he might have seen through my intentions.
“I don't want to hurt you. You may find this strange, but I want you to answer seriously.”
Saying that, the Hero gazed steadily at me.
“...”
I'd made a mistake.
By getting too close to him, I seemed to have made the Hero suspicious of me instead.
Judging by his words alone, it might have seemed that he was asking because he was worried about me, concerned that his actions might somehow hurt me. But when I considered that he had specifically mentioned how little time we'd known each other and whether he'd treated me too familiarly, it definitely wasn't that.
In other words, this was what the Hero was really asking:
Did I know him?
Perhaps he was asking because he thought I, too, might have regressed.
Was this psychological warfare to judge for certain based on my answer..?
“What do you.. think of me?”
I swallowed.
What should I say?
...
...
There was no choice.
If I answered that I was following him around purely out of curiosity, as in the original story, or that I was his companion in defeating the Demon King, he'd be more likely to think I was a regressor.
The original Lumia shouldn't have grown particularly close to the Hero at this point.
However, viewed another way, that was a blind spot.
There's a saying: the butterfly effect.
Since the Hero was also acting differently from before his regression, if I firmly committed to a single persona, he would have no choice but to believe that was who I was.
The Hero had been looking after me and going out of his way for me to a suspicious degree, so I decided to assume that, even if he hadn't yet accepted me as a companion, he had at least recognized me as a party member.
Now that things had come to this, I had no choice but to commit fully to that persona.
It was a little embarrassing, but.. what else could I do?
I steeled my resolve once more, then used telepathy to answer.
...
I was embarrassed after all.
* * *
The next morning.
I got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror.
“Phew..”
To be honest, I hadn't slept well.
Until yesterday, I'd struggled with anxiety over Lumia and the thought that I had to endure this, but this time, it was for a different reason. I couldn't stop the answer Lumia had given yesterday from circling through my head, and it was making it hard to endure.
“Haaah..”
I felt like I was going crazy.
I picked up my clothes.
As Lumia had said when she told me she'd taken them to wash, they smelled nice and were incomparably cleaner than before.
They had a fragrant scent.
I swallowed and put them on.
At first, I'd been mostly anxious that I might have come on too strong with Lumia. She'd shown several behaviors unlike her usual self, so I wondered whether my changed behavior had changed her as well.
Although her usual behavior wasn't all that different from the Lumia I remembered, it was also true that she'd acted far too familiarly for two people who hadn't known each other for even a week. Worried by that, I'd asked Lumia what she thought of me.
The problem was that it was practically no different from confessing my feelings.
I'd babbled afterward and made all sorts of excuses about how something shouldn't happen between companions and so on, but that wasn't really why I'd asked.
I'd asked to find out whether Lumia regarded me as a companion.. and how close we'd become.
Of course, I'd also considered the possibility that she had returned, but if she had, she would have approached me and spoken up after seeing what I'd done so far. Lumia valued efficiency, so she'd have quickly told me that we'd both returned and tried to find a way forward.
Besides, both Lumia and I would know how to defeat the Demon King completely.
If Lumia had returned as well, we would have already..
No, that wasn't it.
I covered my face with my hands.
Let me think again about why I returned.
If so, I had to firmly discard the assumption that she had returned.
I had only asked in order to reestablish a clear boundary and gradually make her fall in love with me.
But the answer I'd gotten was ordinary.
Only the answer, that is.
- A fellow party member..?
As she said that, she turned her head away shyly.
The Lumia of the past—or rather, Lumia at this point in time—should have said she was following him out of curiosity, not that we were fellow party members.
Yet she had astonishingly acknowledged that we were fellow party members.
I didn't know why.
It hadn't been long, but unlike before, I'd devoted all my attention to Lumia.
I didn't know what had happened during that time to change Lumia's feelings, but one thing was certain.
Unlike before, I'd grown close to Lumia at an astonishing speed,
and Lumia was so cute that I could hardly stand it.
I banged my head against the wall.