"Finn! We're coming in!"
Just as Loki and Finn and the others were discussing how to handle the matter of Leo, the office door was suddenly shoved open.
Outside, several figures filed in one after another, all pouring into the room at once, doubling the population density of the place in an instant.
Watching this group barge in so brazenly without even bothering to knock, Riveria let out a surprised sound.
"Ais, Tiona, Tione, Lefiya... what are all of you doing here?"
Indeed, the arrivals were none other than the Familia's three executives and the successor Riveria had personally chosen.
At the very front were the Amazoness twin sisters, who looked like they'd been cast from the same mold. The one who had just shoved the door open and led the charge inside without a shred of restraint was Tiona.
"Captain!"
Tione was right behind Tiona, and the moment she came through the door her entire attention fixed on the Pallum leader. Her eyes turned to hearts as she pounced, looking every bit a lovestruck maiden catching sight of her sweetheart.
"...Sorry."
Ais came in behind them, and seeing Riveria staring at her in surprise, she found herself apologizing before she realized it.
"S-Sorry, Lady Riveria, we let ourselves in uninvited."
Lefiya stuck close to Ais, looking nervous before her mentor who was also the princess of her people, bowing again and again in apology.
The arrival of four young girls loosened up the office, which had been full of a grave atmosphere, all at once. It no longer felt as oppressive as it had a moment ago.
"You little brats, what are you doing rushing over here all of a sudden?"
Gareth eyed the girls grumpily, seeming to scold them for charging in like a whirlwind, though there was barely any real reproach in his tone.
"Hehe, Ais-tan, did you miss me, so you came all the way here to spend the long, lonely night together with me?"
Loki's grin was especially shameless, and the way she rubbed her hands together looked exactly like she was about to fling herself at Ais and have a good long time toying with that delicate little body.
"No."
Ais denied Loki's claim without the slightest hesitation, her expressionless face sending a shiver down Loki's whole body.
There wasn't a single trace of emotion on the girl's face, but Loki's instincts told her that Ais had already quietly put her guard up.
The moment she dared to pounce, what awaited her would surely be an iron fist powerful enough to silence a large category monster on the spot.
So Loki's eyes turned crystal clear, and she settled right down.
"Knock it off, Tione."
On the other side, Finn was also fending off the lunging Tione, pinning her head down hard to keep her from hugging him.
Unfortunately, his arms were too short. Though Tione couldn't gather him into her embrace, she still managed to wrap her arms around him, bringing a blissful look to the Amazoness girl's face.
"A-As expected of the Captain, I went all out and still got pinned down. The Captain really is the manliest man of all!"
Tione made no attempt at all to hide her love for the Pallum captain, and her fervent display made even Finn's mouth twitch, as though he could hardly take it.
"Hey, Tione, that's about enough, don't you think? Can't you see you're bothering Finn?"
As Tione's younger sister, Tiona really couldn't stand watching the other's lovesick-girl behavior, and she pressed a hand to her forehead with a long sigh.
"What do you know? As an Amazoness, you should chase love bravely. Otherwise, what's the point of being an Amazoness?"
Tione not only rejected her sister's advice but said all that as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
And the thing was, it really did leave no room for argument.
After all, that was just the kind of race the Amazonesses were. They loved to fight, they loved strong men, and once they set their sights on a man they'd use force if they had to in order to seize him back, and they got straight to the point too, going right ahead to make babies. Their directness and shamelessness in how they conducted themselves was known to everyone throughout the entire lower world.
Tione was actually one of the better ones, since at least she hadn't forced herself on anyone. Tiona was even more naive and dreamy, not at all like an Amazoness, more like a Human little girl who hadn't grown up. Were it any other Amazoness, she'd probably already be considering whether to slip her sweetheart something.
This unbridled manner gave Lefiya, standing off to the side, quite a fright, and her face flushed red in an instant.
Compared to the free-spirited Amazonesses, the Elf race were the true conservatives, every one of them impossibly chaste. Even falling in love had to start with the effort of holding hands. Throwing yourself at a man to confess your love right off the bat... that was still a bit too stimulating for a pure and innocent Elf girl.
Only Ais stood there quietly through it all like a bystander, yet her presence didn't feel faint in the least.
The girl needed only to stand there to naturally become the focus of the whole room. Even with elven royalty who were said to be more beautiful than the goddesses present, that couldn't overshadow her, and her presence was always impossible to ignore.
"All right, out with it. How is it that you all came over together?"
Riveria picked up where Gareth's question left off, steering back to the topic.
The one who answered was none other than Tiona.
"It's because of Loki, isn't it."
The Amazoness girl pointed at the patron deity, who had at some point gone and sat herself on top of the desk, and said as much.
"Huh?" Loki blinked, pointing at her own nose. "What's that got to do with me?"
"How's it got nothing to do with you?" Tiona said with her hands on her hips. "If you hadn't suddenly started yelling and screaming back at the house just now, how could we possibly have been drawn over here?"
"And it's not just us. Everyone in the Familia is out there talking about it right now, wondering if you're off on another drunken fit, Loki."
"The few of us got pushed forward as representatives, to come see what's actually going on."
Hearing Tiona put it that way, Loki was jolted into realizing it after the fact.
It was true. Because of Leo, she'd just gotten so worked up she'd completely lost any sense of restraint, shouting who knew how loudly the whole way as she ran over here. How could she not have alarmed the people in the Familia?
By now the entire Familia headquarters had probably gotten all riled up, hadn't it?
At the thought, Loki couldn't help but smack herself on the head.
"Sorry, sorry, this really is my fault. I'll head out right now and calm everyone down."
With that, Loki hopped straight down off the desk and ran out of the office without looking back, her frantic manner clearly betraying her worry that the commotion she'd stirred up in the Familia would only grow worse and worse until it became impossible to contain.
"Gareth, you should go out for a bit too."
Finn, while still fending off Tione's undaunted assault, spoke up to the Dwarf great warrior sitting in the corner.
"With a commotion like that, it wouldn't really do for a Familia leader not to show his face and settle things down. Go out and make an appearance, find some excuse to smooth this whole thing over."
At that, Gareth nodded and walked straight out of the office, leaving the place.
"S-So... what on earth happened?"
Seeing that both the patron deity and one of the Familia leaders had left, Lefiya timidly raised her hand and asked, drawing the girls' eyes to Finn and Riveria.
"...Should we tell them?"
Riveria hesitated a little and turned to Finn for his opinion.
"Tell them," Finn said, calm and composed, smiling. "We've already decided to make it public anyway. Even if we don't say it now, they'll know by tomorrow."
Riveria thought it over and finally nodded, agreeing with Finn.
"So it really wasn't Loki on a drunken fit? Something big really did happen?"
Tiona's face was full of curiosity, and she'd practically leaned right up to Finn and Riveria.
Ais too looked at Riveria, no emotion on her face, but her eyes brimming with curiosity, proof that the girl wasn't entirely uninterested in this.
Looking at Ais like this, Riveria could already foresee just how big a shock the news she was about to deliver would bring this girl.
Riveria could only let out a sigh and, in a strictly business-like manner, laid out the whole story.
"It's actually about Leo."
Riveria's words made the girls all start.
"Leo?"
Ais was the first to freeze.
"Him?"
Lefiya was a little taken aback too.
"Ooh, so it's got something to do with the stray man Ais brought back."
Tiona and Tione, on the other hand, wore eager, intrigued expressions.
And then they heard this:
"He leveled up." Riveria said with one eye closed. "Just now, he officially reached Lv.2."
The moment the words were out, the whole room went silent.
"Wha..."
The astonishment on Lefiya's face turned to shock.
"Lv.2?"
The eager intrigue on Tiona's and Tione's faces turned instantly to surprise as well.
Ais, even more so, looked as though she'd heard something impossible, her eyes widening slightly, and for the first time an obvious change appeared on that face that so rarely showed any shift in emotion.
"Ehhhhhhhh...!"
A few seconds later, Tiona and Lefiya cried out in unison, their voices full of disbelief.
"Leo's Lv.2? That's impossible!"
Tiona's cry was almost loud enough to match Loki's shouting and screaming out in the hallway a little while ago.
"Th-That can't be, can it?" Lefiya covered her little mouth, unable to believe the news she'd heard, and said in utter astonishment, "H-How could he possibly reach Lv.2 already?"
Indeed, how could he possibly have reached Lv.2 already?
It hadn't been long at all since he'd received the Falna and become a Lv.1 newbie adventurer.
Whether it was Ais, or Tiona, Tione, Lefiya and the rest, they had all been paying a great deal of attention to Leo.
So they remembered very clearly that it hadn't even been a month since Leo became an adventurer and received the Falna.
"To be more precise, it's twenty-seven days." Finn, as though he could read the girls' thoughts at this very moment, tapped the desk and said calmly, "Twenty-seven days ago, in the morning, he met with us right here. At that time he'd just come out of Loki's God's Chamber, and he'd had the Falna on him for less than half an hour."
What this meant, what it was reminding everyone of, no one could fail to understand.
Finn was telling them that Leo had indeed taken less than a month to go from someone who'd only just received the Falna to reaching Lv.2.
In that instant, Tiona was at a loss, Lefiya was struck dumb, and even Tione, who'd been trying to throw herself at Finn this whole time, halted her movements and sank into an indescribable silence.
As for Ais, she stood there in a daze, with only a single phrase echoing through her mind.
"Twenty-seven days..."
This was simply a terrifying figure, one enough to set off a tsunami across the lower world.
Ais still remembered the kind of uproar everyone around her had made back when it had taken her a whole year to reach Lv.2.
Her comrades in the Familia had cheered, the people of the city had marveled, and even people from outside the city would come here from time to time to express their admiration for the time it had taken her to reach Lv.2, calling her the fastest person ever to reach Lv.2, a record-breaking genius.
Ais hadn't much cared about all that, but even she understood just how unbelievable a thing it was to reach Lv.2 in only a year.
You only had to compare her with the sisters Tiona and Tione to see it.
Because of their birth, Tiona and Tione had had the Falna inscribed on their backs from the very moment they were born, and in the end the two of them both reached Lv.2 at the age of five.
Ais, on the other hand, had received her Falna at seven and reached Lv.2 at eight, becoming Lv.2 a full three years older than Tiona and Tione.
Yet now, whether it was Ais or these twin Amazoness sisters, they were all exactly sixteen, the very same age, and Ais, who had become Lv.2 three years later than them, was now just like them, a Lv.5 first-class adventurer.
From this you could tell that in terms of personal potential and rate of growth, Ais was a fair bit better than Tiona and Tione.
And Tiona and Tione, who had been able to become Lv.2 at the age of five and were now Lv.5 first-class adventurers, clearly had potential immeasurably higher than that of ordinary adventurers.
Compared with even the likes of them, Ais was still that bit more outstanding, which showed that she ranked among the very top even among geniuses.
The feat of her reaching Lv.2 in only a year was still talked about with relish to this day, the world's fastest leveling record that no one had been able to break even after eight years had passed.
But now, that record had been brutally shattered by someone, in a span of time that could only be called the stuff of dreams.
Twenty-seven days!
In a mere twenty-seven days, Leo had reached Lv.2!
This... how was it possible?
"...The Captain wouldn't joke about something like this."
Tione said this in a calm tone, but her shaken manner made it clear her heart hadn't fully settled yet.
"Someone can really pull off a level up in under a month?"
Tiona's eyes went perfectly round, and her overblown reaction wasn't a bit better than Loki's, when you got down to it.
"That person... how could he..."
Lefiya's pointed ears twitched, and she murmured under her breath, still not quite daring to believe it.
Ais, on the other hand, said nothing at all, staying silent the whole time.
"We've already prepared to file the report with the Guild." Riveria glanced at Ais with concern as she said this. "Tomorrow, word of this should spread far and wide."
"As the core members of the Familia, remember to keep a close eye on Leo."
"He's going to draw a lot of attention from here on."
When Riveria's voice fell, the girls made no further reaction.
They only thought silently about it all, their expressions impossibly complicated.
This was a night many people were destined not to sleep through.
Especially a certain golden-haired, golden-eyed girl, who would in all likelihood lie awake until dawn.
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