Elf Sisters' Consultation (3)
Elf Sisters' Consultation (3)
#
"Hee hee. It has been a long time since I shared such a lively meal."
Niniel came down from her room and joined us for the meal, unsteady as she was. From what I gathered, she normally took care of nearly everything in her room with Rebecca's help.
"Sniff...!"
"..."
Reni's voice cracked audibly when she heard Niniel's words. It wasn't as if the woman was about to die—I really didn't know why she was reacting that way.
"Truly, I am indebted to you in more ways than I can count. I shall not forget this kindness."
Ariel expressed her gratitude once again. Ah, come on. I told her not to do that during a meal. It made me far too self-conscious. We hadn't even solved anything yet.
"Still... I never imagined such a method existed. Weren't you referred to as an ordinary priestess?"
"Well, there are various circumstances."
The reason Niniel had been able to leave her room like this. It was because...
[Name: Niniel Ionia]
[Life Force: 1358 / 258]
...Reni had put her into such a state. When the conversation with Niniel was almost finished, Reni entered the room, kicked me out, and then did something together with Ariel. As a result, Niniel had become somewhat more energetic.
"How does one do such a thing? Just a moment ago she was still... Ah, my apologies."
"It is quite all right. It is a simple matter in principle. Yet it is also no simple matter to put into practice."
Yuri asked the question, and Ariel supplied the explanation.
Apparently, they had crammed her full of Cure, Heal, and every kind of buff that removed status effects. It was like the overhealing equivalent of overkill. Even a water jar with a hole in it would remain full if it were held beneath a waterfall.
Apparently, the life force they crammed into her was enough to simply override Niniel's frailty trait.
Well, Reni had beaten down the undead with Holy Light before, and she had put people to sleep with Relax plenty of times, so it made sense. Raw output trumps everything.
It was a little terrifying. The Saintess Candidate's Divine Power. It gave off the feeling that skills were things only the weak resorted to.
Reni wiped lightly at the corners of her eyes before continuing her explanation.
"However... I could not resolve Niniel's fundamental problem. It felt very strange."
"What do you mean, it felt strange?"
"In, in that particular area... it was as if the Divine Power was being repelled..."
That area. She must have meant the region around her solar plexus where the curse was embedded. I nodded.
As I thought, it seemed she could not lift Niniel's curse.
And overhealing had its limits, of course, so Niniel's current state would last about two days. Three days at most.
Now that I thought about it, the Holy Sword had said it sensed something. That one was fairly dense, but since it was supposedly made by the Goddess herself, it might know something.
...
After our somewhat humble meal concluded.
"Lady Niniel. It is time for you to return upstairs."
"...All right. Then I will excuse myself first."
Niniel went back up, leaving only our party and Ariel to share a post-meal tea time.
No one seemed to have anything to say, so silence settled over us while my thoughts churned. There was no shortage of problems to solve: Niniel’s curse, Ariel’s marriage, and the fact that my dick had reacted to that bastard Sivter...
Yuri suddenly opened her mouth.
"But about the mansion—from the outside, it seemed a little..."
Th-this woman, dragging out someone else's shame in the open like that...!
"But the inside was so clean that it surprised me. The study was the same, and even the armory was well maintained. There was a little dust, but..."
...
...Right. She was complimenting it in her own way. Not just running her mouth, but trying to shift the mood. To be fair, seeing her stagger up the stairs like that from behind was enough to make the atmosphere a little strange.
"Hm. Rebecca has been putting in a great deal of effort in many respects."
"By herself?"
"That is correct."
Ariel nodded proudly. Rebecca maintained this entire mansion by herself? Was she a super-butler, or was Ariel a slave-driving employer? Then again, judging by the uproar Rebecca caused in the future, her loyalty was no joke.
"Ah, by the way, there was no one around to ask... What is that bow in the armory without a bowstring?"
"Wouldn't they have removed it for maintenance?"
At my words, Yuri shot me a glare.
"You must think I’m an idiot. That’s not what I meant. The bow was never designed to have a string fitted to it in the first place. It was not decorative either, was it? It looked like it had seen quite a lot of use."
"That is the heirloom of our household. It creates its own bowstring from mana. It also allows one to easily imbue arrows with mana, so it can pierce through most ordinary monsters."
"Huh..."
"I have been considering selling it off."
"What?!"
"There is no one left to wield it, after all."
"I-I see..."
I could feel Yuri's disappointment in real time. But to sell off a family heirloom... She really must have been in dire financial straits. The silence returned once more.
"I shall guide you to the guest rooms."
"...!"
What the—! Rebecca had returned at some point without us noticing and got us to our feet. Then, as she led the girls off somewhere...
"Hold on. Why am I in the east wing while everyone else is in the west wing?"
"...?"
Rebecca tilted her head.
"You are a man, are you not?"
Rebecca stared at me as though no further explanation could possibly be necessary. I mean, yes, but—yes, still. I needed to have sex. Yet the words “I need to have sex” just wouldn't come out of my mouth.
"Eep."
Even Reni, looking flustered, was dragged off by Rebecca. For some reason, Yuri looked as if she was holding back a laugh.
"..."
Fine. Some days were like this. I needed to speak with the Holy Sword tonight anyway. I could live with it.
...Dammit. I should have gone back to the inn.
#
"It's been a while."
"Yo."
The Holy Sword gave me a sullen glare.
"Having fun ditching me and playing around with just yourselves?"
"What do you mean? You were watching everything from outside, weren't you? Did it look like playing to you?"
"...Never mind that."
Th-this damn brat, look at her changing the subject!
"That's beside the point. Look, look at this. This."
"What now— H-hey, hey, hey, stop it!"
"Why? You told me to look at it."
"No, no, hey! Wait!"
Th-this damned artificial intelligence, I told you to stop! You had the face of a pretty girl, so thrusting a diagram of genitals into my face with such a serious expression was incredibly awkward!
"No, just look at this. Isn't this strange?"
The Holy Sword flipped the page wide open and thrust a drawing of female genitalia directly at my face.
Female genitalia.
If it were during sex, I'd be biting, sucking, and licking all I wanted. Hell, even if I were watching porn, I'd have enjoyed it. But the genital diagrams in a sex ed book were just excruciatingly awkward beyond belief.
That was right. A sex ed book. Since it was an educational book, there was no eroticism, only embarrassment and a sense of the bizarre!
"You said you would teach me!"
When I whipped my head back and forth to dodge, the Holy Sword finally screeched at me.
Yeah... in the end, the moment I could no longer avoid had arrived...
"...Fine. What's so strange about it?"
"Here. The drawing here and how mine looks... I think they're shaped differently?"
The Holy Sword held the picture out to me, looking a little anxious. She had never actually met anyone, so... no, wait. She had been observing the outside world the entire time! In that case, she must have seen plenty of me having sex with the girls!
"Y-you've seen plenty already. Other people's..."
"...Because you dump me against the wall, I can't see properly, you know!"
"I-is that so..."
As if she truly couldn't understand, the Holy Sword pointed at the diagram.
"Look at this. The one in the picture is dark, but mine isn’t."
"That—that's called pigmentation... Ah, anyway, having a lighter color is a good thing."
"Really? Why?"
"Th-that is... well, it's the same reason people just tend to like fair, clear skin. I mean, you wouldn't like it if your skin broke out in something either, right?"
"I never break out on my skin, though?"
"..."
Fine! You were just perfect!
"Then, if the color changes like this one, is that bad?"
"N-no..."
This was bad. If I gave her the wrong preconception here, she was definitely, one-hundred-percent going to blurt out something awful someday.
"Th-that's just... well... something that varies from person to person. Yeah. Everyone wants to have clear skin, but not everyone can, for a whole bunch of reasons... so, so you must never go somewhere else and make comments about that, that sort of color, do you hear me?!"
I suddenly felt something deeply wrong with this situation. Somehow, I had ended up educating a child when I had never even had one!
"Hmm..."
The Holy Sword tilted her head, lifted her skirt, and thrust her hips toward me.
"Then take a proper look. What do you think?"
"No, no, you don't need to show it to me. Don't do that."
"Why? You said you were curious before, didn’t you?"
"..."
You idiot! If you approached it in such an educational, academic way, even a hard dick would shrivel up and die!
"Also, this area has hair, but I don't have any at all..."
"Th-that... varies from person to person. Some people have a lot of hair, some people have none... and this drawing is exaggerated to show a lot of hair."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
The women I'd been with in this other world all seemed to have little or almost no body hair. Then again, there had only been two of them. Still, that was how it seemed.
"Then, does it cause problems for having babies?"
"...Who knows. Probably, if you could transform into a person, there wouldn't be a problem..."
She was still harbouring those pointless fantasies, I saw.
"Then what about menstruation? I don't do that sort of thing. How do I handle that?"
"...!"
Mentally, I felt as if I had just spat out a mouthful of water.
"Th-that, that book—it's a book from the world I used to live in, so there might be parts that don't match up exactly with the people of this world. You have to read it while keeping that in mind."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
Please, just stop asking questions.
"And furthermore..."
This time the Holy Sword pushed a diagram of the male reproductive organs right up to me. I was seriously about to lose it...
...
"...Are you finished now?"
"More or less."
The Holy Sword stacked the book to the side and seemed to be lost deep in thought about something. Before she could drag this topic on any further, I quickly spoke up.
"Now that I think about it, earlier you said you felt something strange when you saw those scars on the elf."
"Ah, yeah. That's right. I'm sure of it."
"What are you sure of?"
The Holy Sword murmured, knitting her brow.
"I didn't sense it from the very start. Right. At that time, my consciousness was a little hazy."
"What do you mean, 'at that time'?"
"When you released my seal and defeated that... skeleton? That thing. That was the first time I sensed something wrong. Then I felt it again from that strange old man. And now I sensed it once more from that long-eared woman. It felt strangely unpleasant."
So that was it. When I thought about it, all three cases had something in common. Static had accompanied their speech, and this time the system had shown me a broken string of text.
In that case, perhaps...?
"Did you get a similar feeling from that... pig bastard?"
"I don't know."
Boundlessly disappointing. This one really knew nothing... The Holy Sword saw my expression and quickly added more.
"No. It's not that. It's more like... I have this feeling that I'm forgetting something. That I could be doing more, but I've forgotten how."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. At first my consciousness was so hazy that I only did what you told me, but every time y-you sprayed me with that, I remembered a little more..."
"..."
So she was saying that getting hit by my Divine Semen made her realize something? Come to think of it, she couldn't even speak from the very beginning. But still...
"So... receiving Divine Power from Reni doesn't help you remember anything?"
"......It seems that way."
"......"
Did that mean I had to keep spraying semen on her from now on...? She seemed to realize it too, because her expression grew gloomy.
"Ah, wait. Someone just came into your room?"
The Holy Sword activated a screen and shoved it toward me.