As the night deepened, Haimer gave up on moving at all. He lay half-propped against the cushions at the head of the bed and let the pack of carefree girls treat him like an oversized, self-warming body pillow. Their breathing slowly fell into one rhythm, and he closed his eyes.
The next morning.
When the first harsh shaft of dawn came through the floor-to-ceiling window,
slanting in through the gap in the heavy velvet curtains to cleave the room open,
the vast interior of the Twilight Manor
was already steeped in an air of misery so thick it would not shift. It was that unmistakable smell of the morning after, the kind that makes a skull feel ready to split.
Low groans of suffering drifted along the wide corridors every so often.
Now and then came the pounding footsteps of some drunk gone well past saving, sprinting for the washroom with a copper basin clutched to his chest.
In the dining hall of the main building.
"Hssss… my head's coming apart…"
Loki was sprawled at the end of the long elm dining table, every scrap of dignity abandoned. Her loud pale-red hair sat on her head like a haystack. She pressed both hands hard against her throbbing temples, her cheeks drained of all color.
On the walnut tray in front of her, a bowl of light hangover broth had been set out neatly, still steaming.
But the goddess couldn't scrape together the strength to lift a hand for the spoon. Her stomach rolled and pitched, sending up wave after wave of sour water.
"Nobody made you drink like a lunatic last night."
A few steps away, Riveria sat on a rosewood chair, perfectly composed. She raised a cup of clear hot tea, took a sip, her eyes bright and untroubled.
Last night this goddess had gone weaving around the whole courtyard with a wooden cup, picking fights with one person after another. Riveria had watched every moment of it.
She had brought it on herself.
Hearing that, Loki showed not the faintest hint of reflection.
She flared up instead and slammed a fist down on the solid tabletop.
She misjudged the force. The broth sloshed hard in the bowl and nearly went over the rim.
"It's all Haimer's fault!"
Loki cursed in a dry rasp, the corners of her mouth dragging down.
"There's no justice in this world!"
"Every single one of us has descended to the Lower World! Every single one of us has our Divine Power sealed!"
"So how the hell can that man drink and never get drunk!"
Loki hurled out the accusation at full volume, fingers clawing at the empty air.
"I'll have you know!"
"I even got my hands on Dionysus's private stash, the stuff at the very bottom of his cellar!"
"That was the real thing! Proper Divine Wine!"
The more she said, the angrier she got, her breathing turning heavy and ragged.
"No. I'm keeping this one on the books."
"Next time I'm finding poison strong enough to drop a dragon, and I'll pour it down his throat till he chokes!"
As Loki ranted on like a drunk still going, a tired voice came from the side.
"Loki, I'd suggest worrying about our Familia's duel this afternoon first," it said.
Finn came through the side door on unsteady feet.
For a Pallum hero who spent his every waking hour weighing plans, today he was a genuine wreck. A clear layer of bruise-dark shadow hung under his eyes.
He pulled out the tall-backed wooden chair beside Loki and dropped into it hard. His face was one long wry smile.
Last night's banquet.
A Tione drunk out of her mind had marked him as prey and chased him around the courtyard with a blade.
To keep both his virtue and his life, Finn had fled all the way up the tallest old tree in the grounds and crouched in the fork of its branches for most of the night. The wind that came through in the small hours went straight to the bone.
It wasn't until the back half of the night that he heard Tione finally pass out and start snoring in the grass.
Only then did he ease himself carefully down the trunk.
"What's there to worry about?"
Loki peeled open one puffy eyelid and cut him a sideways look.
"The outcome's already settled."
Faced with something that defeatist and that blunt, Finn only sighed and let it lie.
Even Riveria said nothing to salvage the Familia's pride.
As the front-line captain and vice-captain of [Loki Familia], after all, the two of them had stood and watched those girls train yesterday afternoon with their own eyes.
Finn understood far too well just how terrifying the girls of [Haimer Familia] were.
Every last one of them, in the space of a few days,
had forced their way across the chasm of excelia and hard experience, monsters who had all climbed to Lv.3 together.
Never mind that appalling gift of theirs, where one glance at somebody else's fight was enough for them to grasp the counter on the spot.
That kind of potential had already ground into powder the common sense veteran adventurers had spent decades setting in stone.
And now the Second Corps, with Raul at its head, was going up against them.
Put politely,
it was a friendly bout, a contest for slots on the expedition.
Put honestly, it was handing over a line of punching bags to be beaten one after another.
Meanwhile.
Unlike the drunks all around him giving off the sour reek of a sewer, Haimer strolled in from the far end of the corridor, calm and entirely at ease.
He came up to the dining table,
pulled out the chair across from Finn without ceremony and settled into it.
"Well now. Looks like you all slept…" Haimer said. "…not too badly at all."
He was even in the mood to needle them.
He plucked a fresh slice of bread from the woven basket in the center of the table, put it in his mouth and chewed slowly, a faint smile in his eyes.
"You've got some nerve, showing your face out here!"
The moment the culprit appeared,
Loki went up like a cat with its fur on end.
She tore the hot towel off her forehead and glared at Haimer through her exhaustion.
"You'd better come clean with me. Right now."
"Did you or did you not pull some shady, underhanded cheat last night?!"
Loki jabbed a finger at the glass Haimer had just poured. "That was Divine Wine!"
"Did you shamelessly slap some forbidden art on yourself, the drink-forever-and-never-fall kind?!" she demanded. "Hurry up and teach me!"
Loki rattled the whole string of it out at him.
Haimer took a sip of the milk in front of him, set the cup down, and found he had no words.
"What sort of pitiful forbidden art would that be?"
"Staying sober proves exactly one thing."
Haimer paused.
"Your tolerance really is hopeless."
Nothing pleased Haimer more than jabbing this hard-drinking colleague of his right where it hurt.
"My tolerance is hopeless?!"
Loki slapped the table on the spot, her voice climbing an octave.
"That's garbage! I can drink anyone under—"
She was working up to proving it when something struck her as badly wrong.
The words caught in her throat, and her long, narrow eyes narrowed further in suspicion.
"Hold on…"
She dug through her memory.
Loki remembered getting blind drunk last night and climbing onto a table to dance.
And at the end of it, she was fairly sure Haimer had slung her over one shoulder and dumped her in a guest room.
"Now that I mention it, when I got up last night, you weren't anywhere in that room!"
Loki clutched at the front of her clothes, which covered a chest with nothing to speak of.
She glared across the table at Haimer, on full guard.
"Confess."
"You didn't do anything less than human to me while I was drunk, did you?!"
Hearing a guess that absurd, the sort that pollutes a mind on contact,
Haimer felt a vein twitch at his temple.
He gave her an even flatter sideways glance.
"You were soaked head to foot in sour booze fumes."
Haimer swallowed the bread without hurry.
"I couldn't be bothered to share a room with you."
"You—!"
Loki ground her teeth.
But she refused to let it drop.
She was a proper deity, after all, and some of her senses stayed uncommonly sharp even with her Divine Power sealed.
So Loki turned into a hound on a scent.
She leaned more than half her body over without a shred of restraint,
sprawling across the cloth-covered length of the table,
neck stretched out, pushing her nose toward Haimer's collar.
The result.
She had barely gotten close before her brows drew together.
Her nostrils flared fast, and after several deep breaths in a row—
"This smell on you…"
Loki's eyes flew open, rounder than the pair of drooping bronze bells they had been a moment ago.
"How do you have this many different women's scents on you at once!"
Haimer put a hand to his forehead.
"Are you a dog?"
He couldn't be bothered to explain how that pack of girls had commandeered his bed.
And there it ended.
Under Loki's shameless racket,
the hangover-soaked breakfast came to its muddled close.
For both sides, today was the day real business had to be done.
The single most talked-about event in all of Orario right now
was the showdown between [Haimer Familia] and [Loki Familia] over the seats for the deep-level expedition.
The match had none of the formal protection that comes with documents issued by the Denatus.
Even so.
Everyone in Orario, from commoners to the great factions, was quietly watching this fight.
They were desperate to see the result.
These newcomers had come down from the heavens only days ago.
They had shattered the record Ais Wallenstein had held for years, tearing upward against every law of sense,
forcing their way past the level gap until all of them stood at Lv.3 in a matter of days. Just how genuine were these monsters?
Because, after all,
killing brainless monsters in the Dungeon with one particular skill is one thing.
Facing the Second Corps elites of [Loki Familia], a first-rank exploration faction, on a wide-open dueling stage,
is something else entirely.
And so.
When the hour hand crossed a certain mark,
and everyone had made their final preparations in the side chambers of the Twilight Manor,
the girls formed up in neat ranks
and followed the Loki-side support staff leading the way to the open dueling grounds behind the manor's main keep.
Only then did they see how astonishing it all was.
Before them stood the yard that was normally nothing more than a sparring ground for the rank and file of [Loki Familia] to drill in.
The raised semicircular stands of hard white stone that ringed it on both sides
were already packed shoulder to shoulder!
Beyond the Loki main-branch members in uniforms bearing crescent-moon insignia in every sort of pattern,
in the prime rows where nothing blocked the view,
sat several faces they had crossed paths with before.
They were right there in their seats, plain as day.
Miss Tsubaki sat sprawled in the very front row, long legs propped up on the railing post in front of her.
Hermes, in his feathered hat, was working a folding fan.
Beside him, Asfi wore that same familiar, tired poker face.
Further along the row,
Miss Shakti sat in the light off-duty clothes of a guardsman.
And Demeter as well.
"Even Demeter came out in person to enjoy the show."
Haimer stopped below the railing at one side of the stands, looked up, and raised a hand in greeting to the row of gods and captains seated above.
"Speaking of which, where's Hephaestus?" Haimer called toward Tsubaki.
"How come she didn't come along with you this morning, Miss Tsubaki?"
"Oh, Lord Haimer!"
Tsubaki heard the shout, dropped one leg down at once, propped her chin on one hand, and hollered back down at him without a care who heard.
"Hephaestus is out with the construction crew right now, wrestling with the drawings for that monster of a castle."
Tsubaki waved a hand, helpless about it.
"The schedule on the new city build is brutal."
"Word is they mean to have every last part of the main structure sealed off within the next two days."
"Hephaestus says she can't get away."
Tsubaki tugged one corner of her mouth into a grin.
"So she sent me to have a look at how your Familia handles a real fight, Lord Haimer."
Not far behind Tsubaki, at the edge of the wooden walkway.
Just then,
Onigawara Rin, who had finished adjusting the straps of her chest armor, swept her gaze across the second row.
Sharp-eyed as ever, she spotted two girls hunched and shrinking in the middle of the crowd.
Two very familiar figures.
"Mikoto? Chigusa?"
Rin waved hard up at them, her voice clear and direct.
"What are you two doing here?"
Named without warning, Yamato Mikoto flinched.
The pair scrambled to their feet, hands pressed flat to the sides of their thighs,
and bent into a rigid ninety-degree bow toward the ground below.
"L-Lady Rin."
With so many people staring at her at once,
Mikoto's voice snagged on her nerves and her cheeks went scarlet.
"Our patron god and Captain Ouka…"
"went to the Guild hall this morning to file a new escort request."
Mikoto swallowed and forced her trembling voice level.
"Chigusa and I heard you would be holding a match here today…"
"We wished to see your blade techniques more clearly, and to sharpen ourselves against them."
Mikoto kept her head down as she made her report.
"So we presumed to… come and observe on our own."
That earnest answer, paired with Mikoto's stiff, old-fashioned way of addressing her,
left Rin, who had been ready to charge in a moment before, feeling awkward instead.
She scratched the back of her head, went red, and lowered her hand.
While those few were trading greetings across the stands,
the mood on the other side of the grounds had tightened to the breaking point.
The Second Corps members of [Loki Familia] had already taken up a loose defensive formation along the white line at the far diagonal of the field.
Raul wore a full set of standard light metal armor.
His left hand held a solid black round shield, his right a one-handed longsword of second-grade material.
But a closer look told another story.
For a battle-hardened adventurer who had fought his way to Lv.4,
Raul's knees, above the greaves covering his shins, were knocking together and would not stop.
"Hey. Quit shaking. Nobody ever died of embarrassment."
The cat-person girl Anakity stood a little behind him, exasperation all over her face, and toed the back of Raul's heel with the tip of her boot.
"I can't help it, Anaki…" Raul glanced back at her, his face collapsing.
Finn carried his command spear with its gold-bright tip. He walked steadily to the referee's position marked out in white.
He looked left, at Raul, drenched in sweat.
Then he looked right, at Narukami Koharu, radiating killing intent, the famed blade "Weeping Blood" already a third of the way out of its sheath.
Raul had lost the contest of presence by an embarrassing margin.
"Do your best, Raul."
"Put those years of crawling through the deep levels to work."
"Don't make any mistakes."
With that said,
Finn looked at the man he had been grooming as his successor, and could only sigh.
____
📢 WANT MORE CHAPTERS? HELP THE STORY GROW!
💬 Reviews: Leave your review! Every 5 REVIEWS unlocks 1 bonus chapter.
💎 Power Stones: Reach 100 POWER STONES and another bonus chapter drops!
🚀 P@treon: Want to read ahead? Support on P@treon (Walnut-chan) to access over 60 stories and 40 chapters ahead!
🔥 New history: DanMachi: Collecting Goddesses Right from the Start! — posted on The_Mikudayo