Chapter 13
“Well...”
Something was wrong, I thought.
It had been about two weeks since Carla-san and I worked on revisions together.
“No matter how I look at it, something’s wrong... Why can’t I become more of a background character?”
First, there was Liera.
Lately, something about her had been strange.
I’d gone to the trouble of doing away with the whole “Aah” routine, but she seemed to have rather liked it.
Just the other day,
Liera asked me, “Are you not going to feed me ‘Aah’ anymore...?”
Even when I casually replied, “Ah, well, yeah, I think I’m done with that. I was a little unstable, you know, with everything going on,”
she lowered her head and said, “I see... So I’m a woman not even worth feeding ‘Aah’ to.”
“...................”
Yeah, I don’t understand.
What the heck does “worth feeding ‘Aah’ to” even mean?
I mean, how could that gross act have any value...
So,
“Liera. It’s not that your worth has gone down—no.
On the contrary, the value of ‘Aah’ has gone down. ‘Aah’ is too good for you.” I offered her that baffling reassurance.
Apparently, those words put Liera in an excellent mood.
I even heard a rumor that she’d been happily humming as she cleaned the manor while I was at the training grounds.
...Honestly, I still couldn’t understand women. Even considering my previous life, I was once again struck by how difficult it was to understand a woman’s heart.
And then.
Well, Enrique didn’t really matter.
He seemed to be doing well at the training grounds, too.
Just the other day, he was talking to a young soldier:
“What does it mean to be strong?”
“Strength... means never wavering.”
At first glance, it sounded like a pretty cool conversation, but I happened to walk by and felt oddly conflicted listening to it.
No, Enrique. You’re F-rank, aren’t you?
And you used to be F-rank, at that.
Once an adventurer has been expelled, it’s difficult to get back in.
Which means Enrique probably can’t raise his rank any further.
That’s right. He’ll be F-rank for the rest of his life.
...W-well, since they seemed to be enjoying themselves, it wasn’t really my place as an outsider to say anything, so I quietly slipped away.
Even more than that, Carla-san—the wildly popular heroine I’d recently met, the super-strong big-sister type—was acting strangely too.
The aloof mage who rejected everyone.
Her contrast—an aloof exterior, then slowly opening up to the protagonist and eventually falling for him—had captured the hearts of countless players. Every time she saw me, she’d...
“Mm.”
...turned into a pervert who hugged me whenever she saw me.
I’d met with her several times since then to learn magic, but every time she saw me,
she’d say, “...It’s okay,” and pat my head. I wish she’d stop.
And wasn’t that a pretty rare thing she did near the end of Carla-san’s route, when her affection reached its peak—hugging the protagonist...?
Since Carla-san did it as if it were perfectly ordinary, my sense of wonder was rapidly fading.
And every time she did that, the maid would glare at us from some hiding place, so it wasn’t okay at all.
Still, I felt like I was inching closer to a background-character life, slow as my progress was.
—But I should have realized.
The original story’s plot was steadily beginning to move forward.
One day, Liera came rushing into my room, which was unusual.
“Ultos-sama! It seems your father and mother are coming back.”