The Shut-In Menace
I thought I’d relieved my fatigue well enough.
Staying here a little longer wouldn’t have been bad, but I couldn’t afford to loaf around forever, so I had my fun in moderation.
-srrk
I slowly pushed myself up and walked out.
Maybe it was because I’d been soaking in the hot water for so long, but my face had taken on a faint rosy hue.
That just showed how good the water was here—rich enough to seep into the body and melt away the weariness of travel.
It was a rare luxury you couldn’t find anywhere else.
“Haa.”
The white cloth wrapped around me was damp, translucent with water.
I’d wrapped myself in something fairly expensive, something I could get from the merchant guild, but that still wasn’t enough to completely hide the beautifully curved lines of this body.
Even the pale pink of my chest stood out.
Those two peaks swayed a little with every step I took, and the droplets clinging to the tips fell to the floor with tiny splashes.
Then I stopped abruptly.
The reason was simple: the silhouette of the bastard who’d been sneaking glances at me had appeared right in front of me.
“So you finally came out.”
The quiet hush of the steamy bathhouse was shattered when the true owner of the place appeared.
A woman who looked almost absurdly flat-chested bit her lip and walked toward me.
Her hair… I supposed you could say it had a slight brown tint.
“……”
The woman in the white robe stared at me without saying a word.
White Dragon–specific golden eyes peered out from her face, but because she was a half-blood, her hair was black.
Probably inherited from her father, Mars.
“I figured you’d just keep spying on people forever. So, what did you come to say to me? Draconic Mares.”
【 The Grendel Mountains’ Menace - “Mares” 】
Mares was standing right in front of me.
I didn’t know when she’d gotten there, but at some point she’d come close enough to me that I could’ve reached out and grabbed her.
Strangely enough, she didn’t launch into an attack this time.
She was actually listening to what I said.
And yet she still didn’t answer.
Maybe it wasn’t that she couldn’t understand me, but her setting still required that she be unable to communicate with anyone who wasn’t a child.
“This is my real form, just like you see. I’m sorry I tricked you with a kid’s body back then.”
“……Lie.”
“?”
That was when Mares finally spoke.
Her voice was tiny and quiet, too quiet, carrying a mood that was almost the complete opposite of the one I remembered.
“L, lie.”
“……What’s a lie?”
When I looked at her, clearly not understanding, Mares pointed at her own white horns.
“You do that too, don’t you?”
“Huh?”
So she’d noticed that I was hiding my horns with a transform.
Mares bore the epithet of Cheonma.
“A High Elf doesn’t have that kind of energy. It’s similar, but subtly different from mine.”
And because her power matched that title perfectly, and because she was half-dragon as well, she could read the flow of human energy and mana.
So she’d already figured out long ago that I wasn’t a High Elf.
“Well, that much is true. I’m hiding it for personal reasons, so please understand.”
“……”
Mares looked thoroughly unconvinced.
“Haa.”
I stared at her and let out a sigh.
“I asked why you came looking for me. You didn’t come all the way here just to bring up my real appearance.”
Even after showing herself, she was still on guard.
Was she worried I might ambush her? It would be easy enough to settle things if we fought like this.
I wasn’t a child anymore. I’d returned to my true adult form, and my stamina and mental state were fully restored. It wouldn’t take long to finish this.
“If you want to fight me, I’ll fight you any time.”
She was one of the strongest beings on the continent, but no matter how much of a dragon she could become, the nature of her class was something she couldn’t overcome.
Besides, transforming into a dragon had its pros and cons.
At Mares’s level, turning into a dragon gave her stats comparable to an ancient dragon, and the divine breath she could unleash was powerful enough that even I couldn’t ignore it.
However, she would lose the function of Cheonma.
And her size would balloon, giving me a much larger target to hit, while her speed would drop as well…….
Now that I could return to my original form and use teleportation freely again, no amount of breathing fire with that enormous body would land a hit.
I knew that very well, and so did Mares. She’d already realized that if we fought, she would lose.
“……So how long do you plan to keep me standing here? Even I’m embarrassed to stay like this for too long.”
“Ah!”
But apart from that, I felt something was off.
“……”
Right now, I was seriously starting to doubt whether the person in front of me really was that so-called “menace.”
Just look at her—her personality and speech were completely different. And considering how much my own way of speaking had been influenced by her, there was no way she was really the same person.
“I-I’m s-sorry……”
“……?”
For example, she looked exactly like a little girl.
Not just any little girl—one maybe in the early teens.
Mares was definitely centuries old, but I still had the bizarre feeling I was talking to a child.
No matter how I looked at it, something was seriously wrong.
Her speech was supposed to be similar to mine, but this was absolutely not my style.
-srrk
So, just to make sure the thing in front of me was really Mares, and to confirm whether this was really the menace I knew, I stepped a little closer.
“Eek?!”
“Huh? What are you so—”
And then, all of a sudden, Mares flinched violently.
I’d only moved a little closer, but she reacted like a child who’d just seen some terrifying monster.
“……!”
And that wasn’t all.
-whoosh!
At first I wondered if I’d done something weird, but then I saw Mares’s fist hurtling toward me, and I hurriedly threw myself to the side.
“Tch?!”
That was unmistakably one of Cheonma Divine Art’s techniques.
Cheonma Divine Art, First Form — Fist
Attribute: Physical / Range: 100m / Maximum Targets: 1–100
Infuses the fist with qi and releases a powerful shockwave within a certain range.
-KWAANG!
The shockwave that burst from the end of Mares’s fist tore straight through the Grendel Mountains with a deafening roar, and its force was so immense it made the surrounding area tremble.
I barely managed to avoid it, but even the slightest brush against it sent the towel wrapped around my body flying.
More precisely, it was shredded to pieces by the shockwave.
“Tch, you want to try me on—?”
I was just about to respond to the menace’s incoming attacks when I saw what was happening in front of me and stopped dead.
“……What are you doing?”
I rubbed my eyes and looked again, just to make sure I hadn’t misread it.
“Sniff, ngh, gnnh……”
She was crying.
The Mares who had just punched a hole through a mountain seconds ago was now hunched over and trembling as if her life were in danger.
And yet I was the one who’d been threatened, while she kept twitching her thighs and acting like she was the victim.
What the hell was wrong with this girl?
I started my stalled thoughts moving again, wondering if this was really the same menace I knew.
“I-I’m sorry…… I’m sorry I dared to speak to someone like me…… Please, just don’t kill me…… I’m begging you…… I’ll do anything you say, so please, just spare my life……”
Then she even threw herself to the floor at my feet and started pleading like that.
It reminded me of a certain red lizard who wasn’t here at the moment, but that image and the girl who’d just put a massive hole in a mountain with one punch simply refused to match.
That power had definitely been real, so this girl had to be Mares.
And yet the person standing before me didn’t look like it at all.
“If you tell me to lick your foot, I’ll lick it……! If you tell me to take my clothes off, I’ll strip……! Please just don’t kill me!”
“S-stop getting away from me! What the hell are you?”
By then she’d started bawling her eyes out along with those words.
I was so flustered by Mares’s behavior that I actually stumbled backward.
This was the first time I’d ever been this thrown off.
If Louis acted like that, I’d just kick her and be done with it, but I wasn’t used to dealing with someone trembling and prostrating herself like this.
I’d rather deal with those perverted High Elf twins.
Or the perverted god who raised those twins. Either way, at least that kind of problem could be solved by just stepping on it hard enough.
“What’s going on he—huh……!”
“Ah! Rain, please turn your head away!”
Just then, Rain and the others rushed over, startled by the sudden roar and earthquake.
“……Rain? Huh?”
“Ugh, g-gah, na—naked.”
-thud!
And then Rain saw me standing there naked and stiffened completely before collapsing.
It was because he’d seen my smooth chest and thighs, fully exposed without a single scrap of cloth covering me.
What’s more, I didn’t even try to hide it. In fact, I was standing there brazenly, showing it all off, so the effect was spectacular.
In the end, the exact same sight he’d once seen before appeared in front of him again, and Rain lost consciousness just like he had then.
(See Episode 32, Part 1 of The Red-Eyed High Elf.)
“Oh my, what do we do! Sian! Thomas! Rain isn’t breathing! And there’s blood coming out of his nose too……!”
And so, you could say the situation turned into complete chaos.
“I-I’m sorry……”
Mares, the so-called menace, was still shuddering and sniffling, while Rain, who had fainted, was saved only because tentacles attached themselves to him and attempted artificial respiration.
The tentacles were especially professional about it.
So professional, in fact, that even Aria—the party’s actual healer—seemed impressed.
Particularly the way they put a tentacle into his mouth to blow air into him, while another tentacle performed CPR at the proper pressure for five straight minutes, was knowledge this world simply didn’t possess.
I had no idea how those tentacles knew how to do that, but since Rain was alive now, I wasn’t about to make a big deal out of it.
“……What the hell is this.”
Anyway, as I kept watching that scene, I started feeling like my mental energy was being drained dry, so I quickly threw my clothes back on and left the place.
Seeing the true face of the Cheonma I’d liked as a game character had been shocking enough, but then I got a second shock from the dress-wearing tentacle on Aria’s shoulder.
So yeah, maybe it was best if I just cleared my head for a while.
If I stayed here any longer, I was honestly worried I might turn into that too.
“I’m going to stop by the Turk Merchant Guild for a bit. I can use teleportation, so I’ll be back before long.”
-paaat!
……And as an aside, there was one thing Sian had overlooked.
The draconic woman Mares had spent nearly five hundred years living alone in a deep valley of the Grendel Mountains.
Her only conversational partner there was the ghost of her dead father, and even he rarely came out of his room unless some “special event” occurred, so speaking to other people was an extremely rare thing for her.
As for the reason she was called a menace, that only happened during those “special events.”
At those times, Mares herself supposedly felt as though she wasn’t quite herself.
When that wasn’t the case, the result was a Cheonma who had spent centuries shut up alone in a corner—someone not only terrible at communicating, but afflicted with social anxiety to boot.
In other words, just a shut-in.
She hadn’t spoken to people for centuries, and the few she did meet had to be driven out of the mountains against her will, so it was hardly surprising.
That was the menace Mares.
The world’s strongest shut-in madwoman, quite literally able to blast a mountain apart with one punch.
And Mares finally managed to calm down only after her father arrived much later.
Until then, she added two more holes to the mountain.
Thomas sealed those holes with earth spirits.