Leave It to Us (2)
Once they had finished hashing out their conclusions and checked the clock, they discovered that a mere twenty minutes had passed.
"Oh my, it wrapped up sooner than I expected?"
"Splendid♡"
"Since we finished early, the Commander will be pleased!"
"He will, won't he? Then we should go report to him right away…"
Having confirmed the time, Belial rose at once and made for the conference room door, intending to inform her Commander, Icarus, of the meeting's results.
At that very moment—
"Hold on, Belial. Are you planning to go tell the Commander right this second?"
"Isn't that the natural thing to do? Better to explain quickly—what's good is good."
Belial answered Griyanaar lightly as she stood, then turned her back and headed for the exit…
"But if we walk out like this, how do you think the Commander will look at us?"
"…What is that supposed to mean?"
Griyanaar leaned back in her chair, set her fidgeting feet up on the table, and laced her fingers together as she spoke. Belial froze mid-stride, still half-turned toward the door, and regarded her with open confusion.
Griyanaar, who had been stroking the "pet tentacle" she had cultured after receiving permission from Oxianor to snip a sample, did more than simply stop. She pivoted fully from her departing posture, faced Belial, and looked straight into the other woman's startled eyes before speaking in a calm, even tone.
"I guarantee you—if we leave at this hour, the Commander will react with extreme disappointment."
"…Explain yourself more carefully, Griyanaar."
Seeing that Belial was taking her words seriously, Griyanaar lowered her feet from the table, unlaced her fingers, and crooked one of them in a casual sit-down gesture.
Belial heaved a long sigh, yet returned to her seat all the same. Once Belial had obediently settled, Griyanaar widened her violet-tinged eyes for a beat, then let them settle again and began explaining why she had made her sit.
"Think about it. This is the first time since the Commander came back that he's properly asking us for real opinions, right?"
"…That much is true, but?"
"And yet we walk out after a mere twenty minutes—no, not even a full twenty? How do you think Commander Icarus will see us?"
"How do you imagine he would see us, Griyanaar?"
When Belial showed genuine interest, Griyanaar resumed stroking the pet tentacle that, despite having been stuffed into the inner pocket of her lab coat, had wriggled free again and was now pressing its squishy head against her. She picked up the thread of conversation once more.
"Nothing complicated. Put yourself in the Commander's shoes and it becomes simple."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Do you think the Commander handed us a full two hours for no reason?"
"…Indeed. That would mean he is placing considerable expectations on us."
Belial might not have possessed Griyanaar's mad-scientist caliber of intellect, but she still ranked among the sharpest minds in Icarus's fleet. She grasped the implication at once, and her expression darkened.
"I nearly committed a grave discourtesy toward the Commander."
"Huh?"
"It's simple. Imagine taking a problem he expected would take at least an hour and bringing the answer back in under twenty minutes."
"Hmm… I don't follow."
"From the Commander's perspective, wouldn't he feel as though we just slapped something together half-heartedly and brought it to him?"
"…Ah."
"That makes perfect sense♡"
With Belial's patient clarification, Ignis and Pashtura—who had not quite caught on—both nodded in understanding.
"I don't know much about these things myself, but… honestly, the Commander fretted over this problem a great deal, didn't he?"
"He did."
"That is correct."
"And even though the four of us put our heads together, taking something he struggled with alone for days on end and dragging it out in under twenty minutes…"
"…Hmm."
Pashtura paused, then slowly shook her head. The motion set her violently ample chest swaying in a way her paper-thin nun outfit (if one could call it that) utterly failed to conceal, underscoring her disapproval.
"It's basically announcing with our whole bodies, 'We solved what you were struggling with in under twenty minutes!' How do you think the Commander would feel?"
"You're right, Pashtura… My thinking was shortsighted."
Even as she casually tore into her, Belial offered no defense. She simply bowed her head in self-reproach.
Yet at Belial's words, Pashtura nodded and then let a remark slip almost as an afterthought.
"Of course, knowing our Commander's personality, I don't think he'd actually scold us over it♡"
"Indeed."
"Wouldn't he?"
"Our Commander does have a rather easygoing side to him, after all."
As they each voiced agreement with Pashtura's assessment of Icarus's leadership style, the four of them reached a consensus: rather than leave immediately, they would wait roughly an hour and a half before going out.
Ten minutes later, however, they found themselves confronting a considerable problem of boredom.
"So… what are we supposed to do now?"
"…Beats me?"
The reason was simple. Accustomed as they were to lives packed with grueling schedules, none of them had the faintest idea how to spend this sudden scrap of free time.
It wasn't as though their Superhumans were complete airheads with no concept of rest. They did have ways of unwinding—but those methods assumed they had finished real work and returned to their own fully equipped quarters. Here, they had left everything, even their smartphones, outside for the meeting. For the remaining hour and twenty minutes, their options were severely limited.
Alongside Ignis's puzzled question, Belial lifted a hand and spoke, apparently equally at a loss for productive tasks.
"Ignis has a point. Does anyone have additional opinions to refine, or anything else to say?"
Griyanaar, who had been staging a slug race with her pet tentacle, shook her head.
"Well… haven't we already covered everything we can discuss right now?"
"True enough."
With nothing further to offer, Belial could only fidget with the hem of her military coat. The atmosphere settled into something resembling a group vow of silence.
Seeing the room go quiet, Pashtura—clad in what she insisted on calling a nun's habit—decided to liven things up by declaring it girls' talk time.
"If we don't have anything particular to do, how about we each name the thing we find hottest about the Commander?"
The instant the girls' talk declaration left Pashtura's lips—
"His face."
"His face."
"His face, obviously."
"…Why is everyone answering instantly? Of course I also mean his face, but still."
Their perfectly synchronized, matter-of-fact ranking of Icarus's improbably handsome face as number one produced a silence so thick it was almost oppressive—if only for a heartbeat.
But as noted, that silence lasted only a single, fleeting moment.
"…Pfft."
"Even so, that was a bit much from all of you."
"The Commander has so much charm overflowing from him—if you only push his face, doesn't that make you the weird one?"
"Exactly. Marianne isn't all googly-eyed and lovestruck over the Commander for nothing, is she?"
Mentioning Icarus's "plot-defying" good looks had been each of their private attempts at a mood-lifting joke. By pure coincidence they had all given the same answer, and the resulting awkwardness had frozen them for a second—only for them to thaw just as quickly, muttering about terrible timing, until a warm, lively atmosphere filled the conference room once more.
And so, with the mood somehow restored, the real girls' talk session raised its curtain…
"So, everyone—what do you like about the Commander?"
"Body or mind… that is the question."
"Do we have to pick only one?"