**Chapter 18: Day 18 – Night – Inn "White Pervert" / Girls' Room**
At the inn, we split into five four-person rooms and one single room.
The single room went to Haruka-kun.
The girls were grouped four to a room partly to save money, but mostly for protection.
We could switch to pairs later once everyone got used to things, but four per room felt safer in case of emergencies.
The goal was for everyone to learn both Presence Detection and Search. So far, only half had one or the other, and just four people had both.
That was already plenty, though.
We'd only been practicing for a week. Most of the girls who already had the skills barely knew how to use them before. Now they could take turns keeping watch properly.
The only abnormal one was the person who kept saying "Oh, I got it" and casually picking up skills left and right.
And he looked happier when he caught fish than when he gained skills…
Saying things like "I thought I could fly?" or "Flight didn't appear"… that person was the weird one. Everyone else was trying hard.
Today we only had half a day, but we split up and gathered a lot of information thanks to the girls' chatter ability.
We accidentally terrified the entire guild and left everyone speechless, then isolated the culprit.
In the middle of it, the person whose chatter ability had destructive power got called over, pulled aside, and had to explain everything again.
We asked for special permission to sell magic stones, but the buy counter turned into chaos because of that same person. We made him sit in seiza.
There were all kinds of trouble, and the cause of the problem never really reflected… but we summarized what we wanted to know beforehand and split the work among twenty people, so we gathered most of the information we needed.
Both good news and bad news.
The good news: this town was relatively safe.
Because Oda-kun's group appeared periodically.
Oda-kun's group had an instinct to avoid anything dangerous or suspicious.
"Periodically" meant they were either traveling between towns or had a nearby base.
This way, Shimazaki-san and the others could finally meet them. They had truly changed—everyone was shocked.
But after talking properly, we understood.
The current Shimazaki-san and hergal gang were the real ones we know and love. The ones we were studying with.
They must have gone through a lot of painful, awful things. That's why they were always aggressive, always exclusive, always acting tough.
They protected themselves with bravado. They were scared.
But in this world, bravado alone doesn't get anyone to help you. Still—they couldn't show any weakness.
And so they had no allies.
In the forest,
with monsters,
with the boys going crazy,
and us… abandoning them.
They were going to die. They were really going to die soon…
That's what they thought. And the ones who had been helping them through all of it—
were the very same Oda-kun group they had treated so horribly.
Somehow, they had become the ones doing awful things.
They nearly got killed, fled, and no one helped them escape.
So before dying—they wanted to apologize.
Before dying—they wanted to say thank you.
We… never believed them.
Even so, they apologized to us.
They headed into the forest—the forest where Oda-kun's group went… and disappeared.
Honestly—if things had continued,
five girls who had never fought, still at Lv1… would have disappeared.
No one would have been saved.
Everyone of us would have closed all of our hearts.
And we too… would have disappeared in the forest.
But the future where no one was saved was massacred.
The death in the shape of monsters was wiped out.
Shimazaki-san and the others.
And us.
Saved? Rescued?
Our end, it was trampled. Our end...
our despair,
our death—
was trampled.
Right in front of us.
"What are you doing in a place like this?" he said.
Death? Just trample it, right?
Despair? Just beat it to death, right?
The end? Just stretch it out and it becomes eternal…
There's no way that could be possible.
Anyone would think that.
That's what we thought.
But right in front of us,
as if it were normal,
as if it were obvious,
he showed us.
He did it.
He forced us to see.
That "impossible" was just an excuse.
Our resignation was massacred by Haruka-kun.
We somehow became able to laugh.
Became able to talk about tomorrow.
Became able to think of fun things.
Because tragedy would just get beaten to death anyway.
Dead ends would just explode anyway.
"If you kill it, you can do it."
Everyone froze.
So did I.
But he killed it.
That's Haruka-kun.
Finally, Shimazaki-san and the others could meet Oda-kun.
But Haruka-kun would then disappear.
If the end could be stretched into eternity,
then our farewell to Haruka-kun—we could just trample it ourselves.
We had done it so many times before. No complaints allowed.
And Haruka leaving is the bad news…
**Day 18 End**