Chapter 6
Chapter 6
Joshua’s fifteenth birthday had passed.
From alchemy, herbalism, and black magic—starting with everything I could teach her—to the way she could accelerate plant growth with black magic and move them freely even without being taught, there were moments when I wondered if she wasn’t just an ordinary country girl, but some distant relative of a druid.
She would deny it, of course, but she was steadily taking one step at a time toward becoming a proper witch.
If she ever used her power out there, she’d immediately be treated as a witch.
Considering how witches only started gaining a better reputation after the third series, the right answer for a powerless witch in this era was to quietly hide in the shadows.
“The tea tastes good today too.”
I took a sip of the tea Joshua had brewed.
Mmm. That sharp taste.
It seemed she had put poison in it.
Even though I had no intention of raising her into a witch, her witch-like instincts were already at this level.
Joshua kept glancing at me from the side, watching my complexion, and somehow I just found it adorable.
The baby fat had long disappeared, and the curves of womanhood had begun to shape her body. Looking at Joshua now, it felt strange.
It felt like only yesterday she had been a crying, sniffling little child, but now she wasn’t cute anymore—she barely showed her emotions at all.
It was like the heart of a mother looking at her daughter going through puberty.
Girls around that age usually liked dressing themselves up.
I had made her an appearance-enhancing elixir to remove her burn scars, but she rejected it with extreme resistance.
That hurt a little.
I made it for her, after all.
Maybe it was unnecessary kindness from her point of view.
Even inside the cave, lit by dim magical light, Joshua’s silver hair never lost its luster. Combined with the flower stems woven into it, she looked like a forest fairy.
The flower bud blooming over her left eye beneath her bangs, covering it, seemed to act as her eye itself, blooming beautifully.
I had considered removing that flower too, but it had already become a symbiotic existence with her, so I decided to leave it up to Joshua.
A flower that grew by feeding on corpses.
When I had only used it as an ingredient, I hadn’t cared much, but now that the bud had fully bloomed, it reminded me of the Ulysses swallowtail butterfly.
And on top of that, with the witch robe I had given her for this birthday, decorated with butterflies infused with black magic—
the burn scars didn’t even catch the eye anymore.
Instead, a mysterious kind of beauty bloomed around her brilliantly.
I wonder how delicious Joshua’s pure love would taste.
“Please allow me to marry her!”
“Not even if you tank a dragon’s breath!”
“Lady Estelle…!”
Hehehe.
Just imagining Joshua running away for love with some lucky bastard of a son-in-law, defying all opposition, made my mouth water.
It had been over a hundred years since I started living here, but I still hadn’t experienced the sweet fluffy romance or pure love moments I had originally hoped for, and it had driven me half insane.
And there were still another two hundred years left.
The thought alone made me sigh.
Lately, living with Joshua had made me forget my boredom, but recently she hadn’t been playing along with me much.
I was wondering how to tease this insolent little assistant.
“Joshua, could you come here for a moment?”
“No. I don’t want to. Don’t do it.”
“I haven’t even done anything yet!”
Joshua closed the book she had been reading and let out a sigh before sitting in the chair across from me.
“And you said that line should only be used when some creepy old man offers candy and tells you to follow him.”
“Well, your expression just now looked like a creepy old man.”
Creepy?!
You really haven’t met a real pervert yet.
Do you know how much shameless, filthy, perverted stuff there is in this world?
There was a reason the game had even released side stories with an adults-only title and still got praised for it.
Someone like Joshua—pretty, slender, with a body that stirred a man’s heart and awakened protective instincts—
if she went out into the world, life would become exhausting.
If she were a noble’s daughter, or the daughter of a rich merchant, or a witch, that would be another story.
But Joshua didn’t want to become a witch.
To others, she was nothing but prey that looked tempting in more ways than one.
“Listen carefully. There are mountains of things in this world you need to be careful of. Especially for women.”
Bandits seeking sacrifices existed everywhere.
Villages had thugs backed by power.
Pirates roamed the seas.
Even if countries worked to maintain order, for ordinary commoners, staying alive was already a miracle.
From the protagonist’s point of view, adventure and love made it all look beautiful.
But actually living in this world, there was so much you could only understand through flesh and bone.
Especially if you were a woman.
Back when I was traveling the world as a witch—
When I met bandits,
“Hehehe! A woman!”
When I met orcs,
“Kuhaha! A female!”
Even when I saved a noble in danger,
“Milady, would you promise me your future?”
As someone who had once been a man, I could understand their feelings.
Back in my previous life, when I served in the army, there had been times when just seeing a woman made my heart race.
But there was such a thing as moderation.
“Especially when facing orcs, if you smell a sweet floral scent coming from them, block your nose and create distance immediately. Orc pheromones have the effect of arousing women regardless of race.”
Joshua diligently wrote notes whenever she felt there was something important to learn, even from my scattered rambling.
It was admirable.
Then, after thinking for a moment, Joshua seemed to grow curious and opened her mouth.
“But how do you know that, Lady Estelle?”
Damn it.
The misunderstanding was cleared up.
After grabbing Joshua, who had tried to brush it off with a doubtful, “Ah... I see...,” I explained myself over and over again.
That was the answer I got in the end.
I’m still a virgin… believe me.
It was a silent scream.
My grand plan to tease Joshua had completely fallen apart.
“Anyway, when facing orcs, there’s always a shaman in the group, so you have to take out the shaman first.”
In the Aria Chronicle series, the recurring monsters were slimes, goblins, and orc hordes.
Slimes appeared everywhere, but they had no intelligence and fed on corpses, so they weren’t much of a problem.
Goblin appearances were rare here because the territory around this cave was occupied by orcs.
Naturally, that left only orcs.
Orcs lived in groups like humans and even formed tribal cultures, so they usually protected their territory.
But exceptions always existed.
The first Aria Chronicle series had been released in the early 2000s.
It was a classic hero-versus-demon-king story.
Games back then barely had monster variety.
The minor enemies were reused over and over, while all the effort went into the Four Heavenly Kings or the Demon King.
I had skipped most of the first series myself and only knew the story through videos.
The first series consisted of a six-person party: warrior, priest, hero, archer, thief, and mage.
It was famous for its complicated romance lines too.
And since the descendants of the hero’s party were involved later, for Aria Chronicle players it was basically a history textbook.
You had to either play it or watch the videos while crying and forcing yourself through it.
When did witches appear?
In the story, witches appeared as a hidden shop in part one, as a boss in part two, and as an ally in part three.
Slowly, they rooted themselves into the Aria Chronicle world.
Witches in the story could be seen in three ways.
A boss monster that opposed the protagonist.
An ally who helped the protagonist while securing her own benefits.
A hidden shop NPC that appeared when certain conditions were met.
If you dug deeper, they split into the witches representing the four cardinal directions and the faction trying to summon the Demon King.
—Intruder detected. Intruder detected.
The alarm device I had recorded using Joshua’s voice activated.
It looked like someone had entered near the cave.
“Perfect timing, Joshua.”
I stood up and pulled out Triceratops (Untradeable).
That cold, nostalgic feeling.
Thanks to Joshua, my broom had been reduced to a cleaning tool.
Now it was time for it to return to its original purpose.
It was also the perfect chance to restore my dignity in front of Joshua.
And more importantly—
it was time to teach her just how dangerous and merciless monsters really were.
The intruder’s image appeared in the full-body mirror.
There weren’t many things that could approach this close to the cave.
Bandits or an orc group.
As expected, it was an orc horde of at least twenty.
There were still around two hundred years before the original story began, but that didn’t mean there would be no incidents until then.
The Demon King wouldn’t just appear out of nowhere two hundred years later.
There were always signs.
Like the sea withdrawing before a tsunami.
Like the warning signs before a natural disaster—
things too subtle to notice in everyday life unless you paid attention.
The magic stone embedded in the forehead of the unusually large orc, the one who seemed to be the leader—
that was one of those warning signs.
A cursed item.
It strengthened instinct over reason.
The more one gave in to their instincts, the greater the power it granted.
And in the end, only instinct remained, turning them into puppets.
“Come with me. Today, we’ll have a special outdoor lesson.”