Rebecca
"Everyone, let's not go off on a tangent. Please continue the meeting."
Carol smiled brightly, trying to clear the pink-tinged atmosphere Rebecca's self-sabotage had left hanging in the air.
But was it only his imagination that her smile didn't feel like a smile at all?
Even her tone seemed a little forceful.
"Jun, was there something you wanted to say?"
Goooo…
"…No. Nothing."
Carol unleashed a receptionist's full intimidation.
Faced with a pressure that rivaled the Demon King's, Jun fell in line without another word.
He had always wondered why high-ranking adventurers and clan leaders—people who normally strutted around as if they owned the sky—turned into nervous wrecks the moment they stood before her. Experiencing it firsthand, he finally understood.
Why is she working as a receptionist, of all things?
With intimidation like that alone, most monsters wouldn't even be able to move.
The thought barely had time to form before her silent pressure—Why aren't you starting already?—forced him to open his mouth at once.
"Rebecca, you said you've learned alchemy. What can you make?"
"Bombs."
"…"
"…"
A silence no one had expected settled over the room.
Rebecca fidgeted, reading the room. Jun asked, half-dreading the answer.
"And? Nothing else?"
"Th-that's right. I haven't learned any alchemy except what relates to bombs."
"…What about the lowest-grade health potions? You said every skill of yours is at expert level. If your alchemy is expert-grade, you should at least be able to make those, right?"
The first thing any alchemist learned upon starting out was potion-making.
Compared to other fields, the difficulty was relatively low, and it contained most of the foundational techniques of alchemy. Even alchemists who specialized in something else usually reached a certain level of potion craft.
Even if their skill was truly abysmal, they could still make a lowest-grade health potion.
"…"
But Rebecca turned her head away without a word.
Reading the meaning in that gesture, Jun could only sigh.
Come on. There's a limit to how serious you can be about bombs.
Thanks to the Bright God's countermeasures, explosive crafting ranked among the absolute highest difficulties in all of alchemy.
Learning that the moment you first stepped into the field? He couldn't even begin to imagine how steep that difficulty spike would be.
Jun couldn't decide whether to admire or despair at the obsession—no, the sheer madness—of a woman who had pulled off something so close to impossible.
And while he was still trying to decide how to judge her,
Why am I even acting like this?
Rebecca was questioning her own behavior as well.
Why am I reading this man's mood?
Diving into bomb-making the instant she entered alchemy—despite everyone's warnings—had been so grueling that even she, a woman truly devoted to bombs, had considered quitting more than once.
That was why reaching expert rank in alchemy through bomb-crafting alone was her pride and her boast.
But most people only laughed at her achievement.
A few had praised her effort as admirable, but even they still looked down on the achievement itself—on bombs.
She could not tolerate that. So she punished those who mocked her work without mercy.
Using the very bombs born from the achievement they had scorned.
As a bonus, she also blew away the beast-like men who came sniffing after her body.
Before long, adventurers had started calling her the Bomb Mage.
It wasn't a nickname she particularly liked, but she never went out of her way to deny it.
Among those who used it were more than a few who had been unlucky enough to get caught in the blasts of her retribution, or who had been hurt when bombs she sold out of financial need—or gifted as a token of affection—went off by accident.
Anyway. The human in front of her wasn't quite at the level that deserved punishment, but he was well past the point of making her unhappy.
So why, instead of being annoyed, was she watching his face for cues?
She had lived more than a hundred years in rather spectacular fashion, but this was the first time her own actions made so little sense to her.
Is it because my fate hinges on whatever choice he makes as party leader?
Most party leaders were reluctant to take her in.
Her bomb-based combat style pulled far too much monster aggro, and it could easily injure her own party members.
On top of that, beastly men would pull all kinds of stunts to claim her, and ugly women jealous of her looks and figure would start ugly fights of their own—enough chaos that any party leader with a working brain would want to keep her at arm's length.
The only ones who still let her in were brand-new party leaders who had just become adventurers and didn't know any better.
But even they had stopped accepting her lately.
Adventurers who had been burned by her made a point of warning every newcomer about her the moment they arrived.
So this time she had poured everything into finally securing a permanent party slot—only to cause a massive accident instead of any real contribution.
The new bomb she had created through desperate effort was far more powerful, and far more unstable, than she had expected.
A string of accidental detonations had forced several of the fledgling parties that took her in to shut down operations.
Every last one of them had been after her looks and body rather than her skill, so she felt not a shred of guilt—but the guild's resulting warning weighed heavily on her mind.
Because it meant she could no longer count on the Church's protection.
The only reason she had never been punished for her countless acts of retribution was that she was registered as a subject of the Church's Special Protection Status—the Church being the guild's superior authority.
But after more than ten years stuck on the lower floors with novice adventurers, the Church had grown passive about protecting her. She could barely rely on their cover anymore.
To keep punishing people as she pleased and to erase the guild's warning, she needed to make a conspicuous showing on an expedition as soon as possible.
And the best way to do that was to join the party of the human sitting in front of her.
Even she, with her extremely narrow social circle, had heard of him—the one marked as essential to the conquest of the Labyrinth, the Demon King's Castle.
If she could just get into his party, outstanding results were practically guaranteed.
On top of that, Carol—one of her very few friends—had said that with his abilities, he could cover for all the problems that came with a bomb-based combat style.
In every way, he was a lifeline heaven had dropped for a woman in crisis.
She had to grab hold of him by any means necessary. If she let him slip away, she would be in real trouble.
In the worst case, she might be driven out of Lemumni and forced to go to Elangs, where elves—the natural enemies of dark elves—held most of the key positions.
Thanks to her love of bombs, Rebecca was not as obsessed with her race as other demi-humans, but the demi-humans of Elangs would not be so indifferent. She wanted to avoid going there if she possibly could.
In short: whether she got to stay here and enjoy a peaceful life occasionally blowing up people she didn't like depended entirely on his decision.
So of course she had to watch his mood.
Yes, yes. That must be it. If it weren't…
It still wouldn't explain why her body flinched every time his gaze touched her, or why she fretted inside that he might be disappointed in her.
Another reason rose at the edge of her awareness, but she refused to acknowledge it.
If she admitted it…
I'd be far too easy. I, Rebecca, am not the kind of woman who falls just because someone is kind-hearted, knows how to truly empathize, and has a nice voice.
She shouted the vow inside herself, then shook her head hard, scrubbing the reason she didn't want to accept out of her mind.
But then—
"I look forward to working with you, Rebecca. I'm expecting great things."
Just as Jun, having decided to treat her purely as a combatant, resolved to take her into the party—and, at Angel's urging, switched off the mask's facial-recognition interference and revealed the bare face Angel had so carefully crafted—
"Ah. Aaaah!"
—her mind flooded with the very reason she had tried so hard to erase.
BOOM!!!
And then Rebecca heard it.
An explosion larger and more magnificent than any she had ever heard in her life.
Unfortunately, she was the only one who could hear it.
Because that explosion was the sound of her heart going off.
"Ugh. Uuuugh."
Rebecca hung her head and groaned.
Her face was hidden behind the hair that had spilled forward, but the crimson flush of her ears made it easy to picture what it looked like.
"…What do you think?"
"She's completely smitten."
"I concur."
"I thought so. Still—wouldn't it have been better to wait a few days and observe her before showing my face?"
Jun still couldn't decide whether she would be a gain or a liability for his and his two wives' future.
There was simply no predicting what her madness for bombs might bring about.
To that concern, Angel thrust out her full chest with complete confidence.
"No. That girl doesn't need watching. You grab her right away."
"Why? Looking at all the incidents and accidents, her luck doesn't seem particularly good."
"Think about it the other way, Jun. She's faced that many disasters and still doesn't have a single serious injury. What do you think that means?"
"…Ah!"
Fortuna's words made him realize something he had completely missed. Jun carefully reexamined Rebecca's body and her self-introduction form.
Even pushing his radar to its limit, he couldn't find a single scar on her, and her résumé held no record of any major injury.
This, despite the countless people who had been hurt by her bombs.
Wondering if he might have missed something, he asked her directly whether she had ever been badly wounded.
"Not particularly."
"Even when making bombs? I've heard more than a few people die while crafting them."
"So they say. But it never happened to me. Ah—when I was testing the new bomb I developed recently, a few strands of my hair got singed."
That was the answer that came back.
And with it, Jun understood.
The Bomb Mage standing before him had every scrap of her luck invested in danger avoidance.