Ordinary Daily Life (3)
"As of yesterday?"
"Yes. But I heard that this morning, roughly two thousand more showed up all at once."
"That's what she says, Oppa."
"Ah."
So that was the "neutral forces defecting to the pirates" news I'd seen this morning.
I'd already confirmed the number of commanders now belonging to the pirate faction. While I was at it, I figured I might as well check in on Griyanaar, who should be grinding levels right about now, and head straight to the biology lab to meet Oxianor, the Space Kaiju envoy.
Of course, the biggest reason for this sudden urgency was Leonard's glare boring into me from behind Marianne — a look that screamed, You're the bastard who put me in this mess.
But before I could escape that particular cause, our Marianne suddenly stepped into my path.
With the raw physical ability of a superhuman, she appeared in an instant and blocked the way out. Jessica, startled by the move, fixed her with a puzzled look.
"What are you doing, Marianne?"
"No, it's just… that is… uuuugh…"
Even after planting herself in the doorway, Marianne seemed unsure what to say. A moment later she let out a long, heavy sigh and carefully opened her mouth toward me.
"Oppa… I think I have to head back to the den now…"
"Ah… is it already that time."
Marianne had a setting where leaving her post too long weakened her control over the pirates. I nodded and answered as if we'd be seeing each other again soon enough — but she shook her head and pressed on.
"But this time it's going to be a pretty long… no, a really long stretch apart."
And with that, she threw herself into my arms without warning. The soft press of her chest against me made me suck in a breath before I could stop myself. Somehow I managed to keep a grip on my reason, but her clinginess felt stickier and more desperate than usual, and that set off a flicker of suspicion.
We've been apart more than once or twice… wait, this is the third time now.
It could just be that she still wasn't used to it. I took the hand of the girl who still looked like she hadn't left her teens and said,
"Even so, Marianne — you're an adult now, and the head of an entire faction. Don't you think you should show the responsibility that comes with that?"
"I know, but…"
She admitted the point while still looking thoroughly dejected. At that, I decided it was time to ask what was actually wrong.
"Is there something else going on?"
"Well… this time so many commanders like you poured into our faction all at once, right?"
"Mm, yeah. I heard about that."
"So for a while I have to stay at the main base with the officers and manage the whole organization. I probably won't be able to come here for at least a month."
"Ah."
A month.
For Marianne, who had been dropping by every two or three days to top up her Icarosneum, that was a genuinely long stretch of time. So that was why she'd been burying her nose in my clothes and inhaling mid-explanation.
I started wondering whether I ought to do something to settle her fraying nerves — but only for a moment. Once the Icarosneum hit was done, Marianne peeled herself off me with a reluctant look, then dropped something genuinely shocking.
"And since I can't come in person, I can't just leave a single pirate crew stationed here forever, can I?"
"…I suppose not?"
"So I'm taking the ones already here with me, and instead I'm going to station Leonard and the royal guard."
"…"
The instant I heard that, I slowly turned my head — and locked eyes with Leonard, who wore the expression of a man hearing this news for the very first time.
"Marianne. So you're saying you're going to station Leonard… and part of your royal fleet here?"
"Yes, of course."
Maybe it was because our first meeting had gone so spectacularly wrong. Even knowing Leonard's character performance and the strength of the fleet he commanded, I still found myself thinking, Couldn't she just leave the existing pirate fleet on long-term deployment?
As if reading my mind, Marianne added more.
"Among the pirate crews I can actually station here right now, Leonard is the only one with a male commander."
"Mm… does it specifically have to be a man? I wouldn't particularly mind a woman."
I offered a quiet counter, but she shut it down immediately.
"No. A few days or a week would be one thing, but a month or more is absolutely out of the question."
"Is that so."
"If I put a bunch of bitches in here, there's a high chance they'll try to plunder Oppa's chastity."
"Ah… um… right."
"So I'm stationing Leonard here — someone I can trust — to guard Oppa's chastity."
"…"
Watching one of the top pirate executives, a superhuman the player base ranked among the Seven Seas, get reclassified on the spot as my chastity guard left both Leonard and me wearing extremely complicated expressions.
Whether we felt that way or not, Marianne had finished her real objective — the Icarosneum top-up — and was done here.
"Well then, see you next time! Oppa!"
"Y-yeah."
She left without taking a shred of responsibility for the bombshell she'd just dropped. The moment her lord — her Ma'am — was gone, our chastity guard… that is, Leonard, decided there was nothing more to see and returned to his fleet's flagship.
I, for my part, forced my rattled mental state back into order, ordered the reception room door repaired, and set out to find out how many commanders the Kaiju faction actually had. That meant a meeting with Oxianor, the Space Kaiju envoy stationed at our base — and, while I was at it, a look at Griyanaar, who had been barricaded in her lab grinding levels and research. I left the reception room at once and headed for the biology laboratory and neural network sector for the first time in a while.
Along the way we passed through a grotesque corridor where machinery and living tissue seemed fused together, something that called to mind the biomechanical aesthetic of Contra. Dragging a Jessica who was visibly shuddering at the surroundings, I reached the door of the former biology lab — currently a living door-panel — touched it, and stepped inside.
"All the lights are out."
"…So they are."
For reasons unknown, most of the lights were off. The floor was slick with viscous slime, and lumps of flesh and something like blood vessels had sprouted across it. A few of them were pipes or cables rather than vessels, but the boundary between the two was so blurred that the dim lighting made them nearly impossible to tell apart.
Faced with that nightmarish scenery, Jessica and I scanned the room with heightened tension — until a familiar voice cut through.
"Oh my, Commander? What brings you here~?"
I turned toward the voice. Tentacles like blood sausages, pipes, and cables tangled together in a chaotic mess, connected to opaque test tubes inside which something seemed to writhe. From those tubes, more hose-or-tentacle things snaked up and half-fused into glittering monitors and machinery. At the center of all those branching "pipes" sat Griyanaar, on what might have been a sofa — decorated with something like rough, protruding blood vessels and giving off a distinctly writhing impression.
She'd kicked her shoes off somewhere, toes wiggling, and was beaming at me with a smile full of mischief. I shrugged as if none of it were a big deal and casually opened her status window.
The reason, of course, was the surrounding visual insanity. For all I knew, instead of doing the leveling I'd ordered, she was currently in a Kaiju tentacles are incredibleeee! I've wasted half my lifeeee! state of mind.