The Prickly Beauty Who Can't Style Her Own Hair
"Ugh!?"
"Jasmine!?"
My body had already been a furnace for a while, and now a fresh surge of heat began to rise from my waist.
...Don't tell me. I asked about my current affection level, and the answer came back that it had reached twenty.
I had no idea why it had gone up.
"Haa... haa..."
"You okay?"
"My body's just a little hot..."
Affection hitting twenty meant my star rank had reached 2-Star. The resulting stat boost was hitting my body directly.
I asked him to turn around for a moment, then slowly lowered myself into the water and cooled down.
"Hoo..."
At least the rag of an outfit had one advantage. When you had to strip in a hurry, wash, and throw it back on, it didn't take long. My panties had gotten soaked, of course—but they were already wet from something else, so it hardly mattered.
"I'm a little better now."
"That's a relief..."
My temperature had dropped so suddenly that I was shivering, but it still beat the dizziness of heat flooding my head. Looking around, though, more time had passed than I'd expected. It was getting dark.
"Master, I have a question. Was I sitting on this rock for a long time?"
"I kept calling you and you wouldn't answer, so I just waited."
"Hmm..."
Apparently a fair amount of time passed when an Affection Gift took effect. Given that the experience itself had felt like several days to me, some real-world time lag was probably normal.
"Ah—I completely forgot. I said I'd tell you the plan going forward."
"Yeah."
"We don't have much time before the invasion. So including me, we need to gather at least four people."
"So three more, then."
More would be better, of course, but four was the urgent minimum. That was the floor for a clear. Plenty of players had gone into the fight with only four units because of resource shortages, and most of them had posted decent results.
There's a chance we'll get a massive amount of Linger, so I should plan around Hard difficulty.
In the first Deadly Battle, Hard was the toughest setting—Normal below it was honestly quite easy. Even if we decided to clear on Normal, there was no reason to prepare a party around Normal standards. Drop a Hard-ready party into Normal and, as long as the levels weren't too far behind, you'd clear without issue.
So rather than a Normal-oriented party that leaned on large numbers of low-level units, it was fine to keep the roster lean and go for selection and concentration. Honestly, even if we aimed for a big roster, I wasn't sure we could unlock that many characters in time.
"And of course, the easiest people to bring in right now are the members of the Queen's Royal Guard."
The tutorial for acquiring a character through an Affection Gift ran through Jasmine, but there were separate tutorials for other acquisition methods. The tutorial for simply raising affection to unlock a character was Powder. The one for acquiring a character through a practice pull was Aroma. Most of them being tutorial characters, you could pick them up for free during the tutorial. They were famous as the free starter trio the game just handed you early on—and setting Jasmine aside, the other two weren't bad at all.
That part should sort itself out naturally once we get close to them.
Aroma would be harder without the gacha, but there was an event where you raised her affection after pulling her to push her star rank, and that alone was enough to unlock her. So up to here, no problem.
The real issue was finding a dealer. Powder could fill a damage role, but she was half tank—a damage-tank—and not enough as a main DPS. Aroma had human-rights-tier performance, but she was still a healer at the end of the day.
Looking at the lineup of characters who could actually main DPS, the closest option was Fruity. Honestly, if we could get her, she was the best pick by far.
There's a reason she has citizenship.
She wasn't particularly advantaged in the first Deadly Battle, but later on, against humanoid bosses, she frequently locked down the main dealer slot. Higher-tier replacements eventually came out, and even then the meta conclusion was still to run both of them on humanoid bosses. This boss didn't demand any specialized counter either, so she could more than handle main DPS here. Long-term, she was the optimal choice.
Hmm...
I knew where you could farm Affection Gifts for Fruity and Citrus. Once Powder joined up, we could start farming. The problem was that Fruity was a natural 2-Star, which made acquiring her before the Deadly Battle started extremely difficult...
"I'll try."
"What? But it could easily fail."
"Then Citrus too."
"That would be hard on you."
It was the most sensible choice, but I wasn't sure a newbie could handle it. Then again—he had me beside him, so maybe it would be fine? Looking at how smoothly his affection had risen even without gifts a moment ago, if he just got close to them properly, it might actually be doable.
"So, Master, you'll need to go back to the Queen's Royal Guard guild tomorrow."
"What about you?"
"Huh? I was expelled, remember?"
"So you're not coming with me?"
"That's not what I meant..."
I had no intention of abandoning a clueless newbie, of course. I'd help from the sidelines—but I wasn't a member anymore, so saying I was "going back" felt a little off.
"...Anyway, let's leave it here for today and think about it tomorrow. I'm exhausted. I barely slept last night."
"Okay."
I'd somehow held on through the day, but I was hitting my limit. The moment the explanation ended, my eyes started to close on their own. When I swayed on my feet from sheer fatigue, he caught me and scooped me up.
"Hwah!? Wh-what are you doing!"
"You looked sleepy."
"I can walk, you know?"
"Can you?"
"Of course!"
How was this man so calm while doing this much skinship? It made me feel like the weird one for jumping every time. ...This game was originally the opposite atmosphere. It was a world that didn't even have the concept of men, so the women naturally treated the male lead the same way they treated each other—and the protagonist, head full of dirty thoughts, was the one who usually panicked.
"Haa..."
I was spent. The moment we got home, I collapsed onto the bed on pure instinct and fell asleep without a single thought left in my head.
"Mmh...? Haaah..."
The glittering sunlight stung my eyes and dragged me awake. The hazy feeling faded little by little. As I slowly sat up, a damp towel slid off my forehead with a soft thup.
"This is..."
I looked beside the bed and found him dozing in the little vanity chair. Had he stayed up all night nursing me because I was in bad shape? I'd been so exhausted I hadn't even noticed.
"Master."
"Ah... you're up?"
"Yes. I'm sorry. I was completely out of it yesterday."
"Doesn't matter. I'm just glad you seem better."
"That's thanks to you. Thank you."
My condition had improved a lot, but I'd fallen asleep looking like a wreck last night, and my whole body felt sticky and unpleasant. The bedding would probably need washing too.
"I should wash up."
"Ah, right. Go ahead."
...Did I smell? Come to think of it, I'd just collapsed into bed yesterday too—this would be the first time I'd washed since possessing this body. I might have been a little ripe.
By the way, how do you even wash as a woman...
Not like I'd ever bathed a woman's body before. I was washing more or less the way I knew how, but a few major ambushes were waiting for me. First, my naked body was so beautiful that every glance in the mirror made something that no longer existed threaten to grow. Second, soaping the sensitive parts of that body kept pulling strange little gasps out of me until I could barely stay upright. And last—hair so long it was completely unmanageable.
"This is driving me insane..."
I'd swaggered in thinking I could handle it. The result was pathetic. Where had the pretty girl gone? I looked like a virgin ghost with hair plastered weirdly to her face. A pretty virgin ghost... that might actually work.
"...Something happen?"
"Don't ask."
I'd somehow dried the water off my body, put my clothes on, and come out—and of course it looked strange to someone else too. I reached for the hair dryer to dry my hair, only to be stopped immediately and have the dryer taken from me.
"Eh."
"I'll do it."
I thought of the panty-changing incident from before and tried to stop him—but the moment his hands took hold of my hair and started drying it, the strength drained out of me and I gave up.
"Hauu...! Nnh..."
"It's a little damaged."
He seemed to know exactly how to touch a person's hair to make it feel good. It was like having every weak point exploited—the warm air, the hands working through it, the combing—and my waist trembled faintly. It was so pleasant it blew the stress clean away...
"Nnhyaaa..."
"Done."
The result in the mirror was something I never could have produced myself. The warm air should have left me drowsy. Instead, I felt wide awake.
"...Let's eat breakfast at the guild."
"Okay."
I'd gotten a little wet again this time, but it would dry soon enough, so I decided to just go. Drawing that kind of reaction every single time and risking getting caught was worse. ...If he found out, I might actually die of shame.
"This way."
"Okay."
The road to the Queen's Royal Guard headquarters had nothing particularly unusual about it—but something felt empty. I fidgeted with my hands, and before I knew it I'd grabbed the hand beside me and pulled.
"...Ah."
Then I realized what I'd done and panicked. I'd thought I had perfect control, but every so often an action would leap out of the memories stamped into my head. ...Holding hands like it's the most natural thing in the world—you idiot.
"You okay?"
"...I'm fine. I just felt like I was losing somehow, and it put me in a bad mood."
He looked at me with eyes that clearly said that did not sound fine, but I pointedly ignored it and fretted over how to fix this stifling feeling.
...Wait. The fake me in those memories only ever held his hand, right?
"Hm?"
"C-come on. Let's go, Master."
If I linked arms entirely, it wouldn't be something that guy had programmed into me—because that experience didn't exist. In other words, it would be an action of my own will.
As expected, I was a genius.