Rock vs. Flight 5
A night visitor had come calling at the manor.
Much to my profound disappointment, it was neither Grace, sneaking into my room with a flushed face and a bottle of liquor she'd quietly swiped, nor Katie, trying to win me over with some technique she'd picked up from a shoujo manga. No such luck.
I'd been nursing a beer, watching Grace and Irene tear into fried chicken with sticky sauce smeared around their mouths, then headed back to my room—only to find a woman in a thoroughly indecent outfit waiting for me on my bed.
…What the hell was this situation?
"Who are you?"
"Heh heh. Please don't bare your fangs quite so readily. I'm just a girl with nothing to recommend her but her looks."
"…For someone with 'nothing to recommend her,' that presence of yours is awfully sharp."
Scraps of thin fabric that only barely, faintly covered her skin—and a midriff and thighs that clearly had no intention of being covered by those scraps at all. If you took a desert dancer's costume and confiscated what little cloth it already had, you'd probably end up with something like this.
The wide, airy trousers were cut in a peculiar fashion: from the waist down the outer thighs, entire panels had been sliced clean away. Pants that only covered from the knees down, leaving her undergarments and bare thighs fully on display—a truly bizarre getup.
And the thin cloth wrapped around her chest went well past sheer and straight into see-everything territory. The room was dark with not a single light on, so it was hard to tell for certain, but beneath that thin, fluttering fabric there didn't seem to be any undergarment at all—just bare skin.
"What business brings you here at this hour of the night?"
"I've merely come to deliver a message."
She smiled sweetly—an assassin in a desert-dancer skin that had, like some heart-sticker reverse bunny girl, gotten axed during development over rating controversies and never even made it into the game, surviving only as concept art.
The fluttering scraps of fabric and that enigmatic smile half-hidden in the soft darkness were full of meaning, but that was all. Digging through my hazy memories, I recalled she was roughly a 4-star assassin's skin, so she clearly lacked the power to do anything to me. My senses weren't picking up any threat from her, either.
Still, the fact that she'd slipped past Grace's passive in the next room over meant she at least had confidence in her stealth. An assassin who couldn't punch through a tank's defenses was thoroughly powerless, so there was nothing to worry about.
"Sir Roland, who displays such valor at the Hero's side—this is a message sent by Her Highness the Princess."
"You sneak in under cover of night and expect me to just take your word for it?"
"Do you, by any chance, remember the token Her Highness gave you when she invited you to the royal palace?"
As if she'd expected my lukewarm response, she reached to her waist and produced something. From the belt connecting her bikini bottoms to those hole-riddled trousers, she drew out an object that looked identical to the princess's token currently sitting snug in Han Se-ah's inventory.
I'd thought the jingling at her waist was just the usual dancer's ornaments, but apparently she'd brought it along as proof of identity.
Assuming I'd recognize it on sight, the nameless assassin stretched out her hand through the darkness and set the token on her open palm. That copper-toned hand, blended into the shadows, looked remarkably delicate for an assassin. As expected of that princess—suspiciously high concentration of starred gacha characters in her orbit.
"Originally I was meant to deliver this message to the Hero herself… but whether by the Goddess's blessing or something else, I couldn't get anywhere near her room."
Well, yeah—if a player logs out and dies overnight, they can't play the game…
Even a gacha character like her couldn't override the game system, it seemed.
I'd seen posts online about people camping out, dying in their sleeping bags, and waking up to the previous morning—but the player base granted for clearing the 40th floor worked a little differently. Having maids and a butler was one thing; apparently it also came with the advantage of a guaranteed safe night.
Well… better that the system guarantee your safety when you log out than end up in some idiotic situation where getting tangled up with the royal family leaves you stuck in an infinite assassination loop from some noble's hitman, completely blocking your progress.
With that thought, I rolled my wrists and loosened up.
"So, about that………… um, Sir Roland?"
"Then tell Hanna yourself tomorrow morning."
"Sir Roland? W-wait a moment…!"
My nights were far too short to waste fretting over political affairs. Unlike the past, when the only entertainment in a world without internet had been women, an endless feast of cyber-world content was waiting to seduce me.
And honestly, if she was just the princess's messenger, there wasn't much room for any improper expectations anyway.
"W-wait, seriously? Why?!"
Operating on that logic, I drove a heavy fist into the soft, firm copper-toned midriff left completely exposed without a scrap of armor. Thud—the clean impact against my knuckles told me the Holy Law of Enhancement had my strength control and body management dialed in nicely.
"Ghk—ghk—"
Sprawled on the floor without coughing up blood or spitting out bits of organ, so she was fine. Satisfied, I stretched out on the bed and opened the internet through a hologram window.
A speedrun of that new horror game had gone up twenty-three minutes ago.
Warda
"Flower That Blooms in the Shade"
The beauty with copper skin and deep auburn hair who had introduced herself as the princess's agent sat at the table across from Han Se-ah, clutching her fully exposed midriff, eyes brimming with tears.
The moment Se-ah logged in, a 4-star beauty had suddenly appeared at the base—that is, the manor. And not just any beauty: a provocatively dressed character whose outfit barely covered the essentials.
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call it Roland-sensei's type… no, no, I just mean he was subduing her. It's not like he can just chop someone on the neck and have them go 'ugh' and pass out like in the movies."
Thanks to that, both Han Se-ah and her viewers were making a racket with an uninvited guest sitting right in front of them. The rest of the party was no exception—everyone was looking at me with distinctly complicated eyes.
"She says the princess sent her. But why at night…?"
"Hmm, I don't think Roland's into that kind of thing."
An uninvited guest showing up in the middle of the night, getting knocked out in one hit, and me subduing said guest—none of that was particularly new. Roland's body was tough enough that whether someone came calling at night or not barely registered.
But when the night visitor in question was a beauty whose outfit left everything hanging out and covered almost nothing worth covering… apparently that changed the conversation. Two pairs of meaningfully loaded stares were boring into me uncomfortably, so I gave Han Se-ah—currently lost in conversation with her chat—a little nudge.
"Hanna. This woman claimed to be the princess's messenger and was looking for you. She said she had a token to prove her identity, but I had no way to verify it, so I subdued her."
"A token? Ahh, the one from the palace?"
At my words, she reached into her inventory and pulled out the token. The moment the princess's token left her inventory, the two tokens pulsed in tandem, resonating with light. Like inhale and exhale—when Han Se-ah's token shone bright, the assassin's token answered a half-beat later.
So this was how they were designed to prove identity—through resonance.
Warda, who had been shrinking into herself somewhat, straightened her shoulders and shot me a pointed look, as if to say see? Given her profession, she must have had a fair bit of confidence in her looks and her femme fatale act.
"So what was so important that the princess had to send a message in the middle of the night…?"
"Ah, th-that's…"
But that self-assurance crumbled instantly under Han Se-ah's quiet mutter. After all, there had to have been a reason she'd snuck in at night—and now here she was, captured in broad daylight, thoroughly embarrassed in front of everyone.
She'd no doubt intended to play the mysterious, skilled beauty who appears under cover of darkness, putting on airs of coolness and lethality while delivering the princess's message… but the bar for looks around here had gotten way too high.
Starting with the familiar East Asian beauty that was Han Se-ah, then Grace—lively and easygoing most of the time, yet adorably quick to melt in bed—and Katie, who tried so hard to act mature only to break down bawling like a little kid. And Irene, who showed nothing but her face from within that thick nun's habit and still held her own against all three as a gentle, compassionate beauty.
The Roland of two years ago might have played along. The me of now, however, was thoroughly unmoved by such half-baked seduction. Though if the young lady calling herself Warda had simply shoved me onto the bed without any preamble, I might have gone along with that.
"Um, there are rather a lot of eyes here… could you perhaps clear the room?"
"Huh? Oh, sure… Miss Emma? Mr. Sebastian? Sorry, but could you give us some privacy?"
At Han Se-ah's words, the household staff nodded and filed out in a flurry.
Our party watching with open curiosity was one thing—but having maids, a butler, a gardener, and even the handyman who'd come to deliver cooking ingredients all gawking at her had apparently been too much. Freed from her status as a zoo exhibit, Warda finally regained her composure.
She moistened her parched, full lips with the tea Maid Emma had prepared, rolled her eyes thoughtfully, and after a moment's hesitation, opened her mouth.
"Her Highness hopes that the Hero will continue to distinguish herself in service of the kingdom… and wishes to share in that glory."
"Political reasons, then."
"…Yes, that's correct, Sir Roland."
Unable to deny it, Warda nodded with a distinctly sour expression.
Close siblings, my ass.
So that was why they'd given us a base manor that became safe the moment the player logged out.