Once a promise was made, Andrew would absolutely never go back on it.
For some reason he couldn't quite name—
Even though Andrew clearly felt that all he'd done was agree to a promise that, when he returned to that Monster Hunter world later, he would take Miyabi along with him, he inexplicably felt a heavy sort of pressure settle onto his shoulders. It was almost as if...
As if he had consented to shoulder a portion of the immense responsibility that belonged to the other person?
And Andrew was never one to ignore his own sixth sense, so after thinking it over carefully, he came to realize the true meaning hidden within this promise.
This promise was, in fact, the price of indulging the willfulness of a Void Hunter.
To indulge a Void Hunter's willfulness—even the right to indulge nothing more than a few trivial little things—carried with it an enormous responsibility.
Let alone something like this, where he was directly letting a Void Hunter who was practically like the very pillar that steadied the seas vanish from New Eridu for a full half month, or even, by the original plan, a whole month.
But even after thinking all of this through clearly, Andrew honestly didn't have the slightest intention of taking it back.
Nor did he mind this added responsibility upon his shoulders, the burden he'd taken to share from Hoshimi Miyabi.
After all, to him—
Wasn't the whole reason he'd trained himself so desperately, honing his skills through countless dangerous hunts until he possessed the strength he had now, precisely so that the people he was close to or whom he acknowledged could, just like this, have the right to live a happier life?
It was so for Belle, so for Anby and her Silver Squad, so for Astra Yao and Evelyn, so for Isolde.
And it was exactly the same for Hoshimi Miyabi. The right to be willful, huh...
For a Void Hunter who shouldered what was practically humanity's last hope, in a city like New Eridu that walked along a tightrope and could be wiped out at any moment—
The willfulness of briefly setting down that duty was an extremely luxurious thing.
Hoshimi Miyabi gazed at the earnest face before her, Andrew's face smudged with black soot, and as if guided by some unseen spirit she reached out her hand—but halfway there, beneath Andrew's puzzled gaze, she involuntarily froze.
Hoshimi Miyabi didn't know why she had wanted to reach out, nor did she know what exactly she meant to do once her hand was extended.
She simply, suddenly, purely...
Wanted to touch the person in front of her.
It was as though she feared that this person, who was willing to share the duty that belonged to her, might suddenly vanish in an instant, and that everything she was experiencing now was nothing more than a dream.
But to suddenly touch someone for no reason at all—surely that was very strange?
Then, all at once, Hoshimi Miyabi noticed the black soot on Andrew's face, the ash he'd unconsciously gotten smudged with while grilling, and in that moment her heart found a perfectly reasonable excuse to touch him.
"Let me... wipe off the soot for you."
Before the utterly bewildered Andrew could even voice a question, and to keep Andrew from refusing, Hoshimi Miyabi had already swiftly drawn close to right in front of him.
Accompanied by a faint, barely-there fragrance, a softness that belonged to cloth gently came to rest against Andrew's cheek.
Those slender, exquisite fingers—delicate as if carved from white mutton-fat jade—lightly pinched a handkerchief she had pulled from her bosom, and then she began to gently wipe at Andrew's face with it.
And this faint, ceaseless fragrance was something Andrew found terribly familiar.
This scent...
It was exactly the same as the scent he'd smelled before in the Ancient Forest, when he'd carried the unconscious Hoshimi Miyabi as he moved.
Yet that originally rich aroma that had filled his nostrils couldn't compare to this faint, lingering trace that set ripples stirring in one's heart.
And from the corner of his eye, Andrew could even faintly make out a tiny melon pattern on the handkerchief.
No doubt the identity of this handkerchief's owner was already self-evident.
Pinching the handkerchief, Hoshimi Miyabi rose onto her tiptoes and leaned in close to Andrew's face.
The distance was very close.
Close enough that Andrew could clearly see the curve of Hoshimi Miyabi's eyelashes, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her breath.
In an instant Andrew's body went rigid, like a string pulled taut. The gentle sensation kept coming from his cheek.
Because it was her first time doing something like this, Hoshimi Miyabi's movements were incomparably careful, as if she were handling some immeasurably precious treasure.
Her fingertips, through the cloth, lightly wiped away the streaks of soot on Andrew's face, bit by bit, from his forehead to the bridge of his nose, from the bridge of his nose to his cheek.
Her movements were very gentle, as if she were afraid of hurting him.
Though her movements were quite clumsy, Hoshimi Miyabi was very earnest about it.
The soft handkerchief slowly wiped across every inch of Andrew's cheek, not letting even the most minute detail slip past.
To tell the truth, Andrew felt his face was getting a little itchy.
Looking at Hoshimi Miyabi's face, which had drawn unconsciously close to his own because of her focus on the meticulous wiping in her hands, and that faint, barely-there fragrance lingering at the tip of his nose—
Andrew's heart involuntarily skipped a beat.
How strange. Whether it was before, when he'd carried her around on his back every single day, or two days ago at the training ground when he'd guided her hand-to-hand through the motions of the Tachi—even those intimate gestures had never produced this kind of feeling.
So why this time...
He instinctively wanted to take a step back, yet his body refused to obey him.
Unlike the ripples being stirred up ceaselessly within Andrew's heart, Hoshimi Miyabi, looking at the face she had now wiped perfectly clean, felt a thread of conflict well up inside her.
What should she do next?
Was she to simply let go of Andrew's face she held in her hands, just like that?
No. That wouldn't do.
As Hoshimi Miyabi instinctively began to gently wipe Andrew's face once more, she couldn't help but deny that very thought.
There must surely be steps and things she hadn't yet completed.
Looking at Andrew's somewhat dazed face before her, Hoshimi Miyabi began to feel slightly troubled in her heart.
This wasn't because she found it a bother and was vexed by it.
On the contrary—it was the struggle she put up precisely because she didn't want this matter to end just like this.
And this was also the first time she had ever wiped the soot off someone else's face. As for before this...
The memory of her mother patiently wiping away her sweat and grime after training when she was a child had already grown terribly hazy in her recollection, and so this led Hoshimi Miyabi to instinctively start filling in the gaps using the skills from a similar task she had already mastered.
And after turning it over and over in her mind, Hoshimi Miyabi discovered that the thing she'd done that came closest to this seemed to be...
Maintaining the precious blades she kept collected at home?
After all, the goal of both these tasks was equally to remove the dust and grime smudged on the surface, so the two of them ought to be more or less the same... right?
No—they were exactly the same!
No sooner said than done. Hoshimi Miyabi had never been an indecisive person.
Since she'd prepared to borrow the techniques from maintaining swords to carry on with the steps that followed, then Hoshimi Miyabi would not hesitate.
And when maintaining a sword, after wiping away all the dust and sweat-stains and everything else, what came next should be...
Applying the maintenance oil specially prepared for blades?
That's right, it was time to apply the maintenance oil!
Hoshimi Miyabi arriving at such a thought was of course not some groundless notion conjured out of thin air.
Rather, it was because in her memory, not long ago Tsukishiro Yanagi had said right there in the Section 6 office that, in order to cope with the dryness of autumn, she'd been oiling Soukaku every single day at home.
So applying oil—that could absolutely not be wrong!
As for what kind of oil Tsukishiro Yanagi used on Soukaku...
In her memory she had been in the midst of her Fastest Kill training, mentally envisioning a Piranha enemy in her head at the time, so she hadn't paid it any mind.
And so, after Hoshimi Miyabi's gaze swept a full circle around their surroundings, it came to rest on the one and only oil near the grill—the olive oil used for barbecuing.
It was all oil; there shouldn't be much difference, right?
Wha... what's going on?
By the time Andrew realized something was wrong, his face had already been smeared all over with olive oil by Hoshimi Miyabi's sudden, abrupt maneuver.
It had to be said—during this process, Hoshimi Miyabi's experience from her daily, meticulous sword maintenance played an enormous role in this very moment.
You see, when maintaining a blade, the amount of maintenance oil applied was never just a matter of slapping a whole handful on; rather, it required precise control.
After all, applying too little would easily cause the thinly-coated portions to rust during storage, while too much oil would damage the scabbard.
So with each maintenance, one had to control the application so that the oil formed a thin and incomparably even film across the blade.
And now, just such an oil film had appeared with incredible swiftness across Andrew's face.
The one small consolation was that, in applying it, Hoshimi Miyabi had at least not chosen the brush Andrew had earlier used to coat the matsutake.
Instead she'd used her handkerchief.
Though Andrew honestly had no idea whether that was even worth being thankful for.
Hoshimi Miyabi looked at the trace of helplessness that involuntarily leaked into Andrew's eyes before her, and suddenly realized that this maneuver of hers might just...
Really have a pretty big problem with it?
No, that's not right.
With reason once again seizing the high ground, Hoshimi Miyabi reviewed all of her earlier actions and suddenly realized...
Just what on earth had she done to Andrew after letting her head get carried away in the heat of the moment!
Although Hoshimi Miyabi's face still, as always, showed no violent expression surfacing across it, both the instinctively lowered ears and the face turned aside, not daring to look directly at Andrew and gradually flushing with a rosy glow, made it clear that her heart was, in fact, anything but calm.
Even though she tried to make herself calm down, her face was still red.
It must have been—yes, it must have been the flames of the charcoal fire on the grill that had roasted her face this way.
For a moment, silence descended between the two of them, and a thread of stillness couldn't help but creep into the air along with it.
The dumbstruck Hoshimi Miyabi was pondering why she'd had such a sudden, whimsical impulse to do all those things earlier, while Andrew was busy calming the heart that had been set rippling by Hoshimi Miyabi's intimate gestures.
For a moment, the two of them, frozen on the spot, were both rather at a loss for what to do.
"Little Andrew~ Little Miyabi~ come have dinner, meow~"
At last, Granny Meow's call came drifting out from inside the tree house like a savior, and it made the two who'd been pressed close together spring apart in an instant.
"Coming right away, Granny!"
Granny Meow's gentle call came from inside the room. The creamy mushroom soup, which hadn't taken too much time to begin with, was already finished.
The mellow, rich milky fragrance of butter and cream intertwined wrapped itself around the distinctive, unmistakable aroma that belonged to the matsutake, paired with the fat of bacon and the slightly pungent scent of black pepper, all blending together into a mellow, rich aroma that whetted the appetite to the fullest.
It was simply impossible to refuse.
Andrew swiftly tossed the matsutake slices he'd earlier left on the grill—which by now could only be called charcoal chips—straight into a corner of the tree roots to serve as fertilizer.
Quickly arranging the matsutake slices he'd already grilled well onto a plate, Andrew slipped into Granny Meow's tree house behind Hoshimi Miyabi.
Seeing Andrew come in carrying the grilled matsutake, Granny Meow was just about to offer a few words of praise, when she caught sight of the state Andrew was in now. The corner of her mouth twitched, and she barely managed to hold back her laughter.
But the tip of her tail, which had already begun involuntarily twitching like mad, had already exposed Granny Meow's current mood.
Meanwhile, Kaelu, who'd been bored out of her mind off to one side because Hoshimi Miyabi had gone outside, lifted her head and saw Andrew's face, all glistening with oil in the candlelight.
She froze for a moment, and then immediately burst out with a "Pfft" of laughter.
"Nyahaha! Andrew, what's with you...?"
It was only at this point that Andrew suddenly remembered the painted-up mess of a face he'd completely forgotten about because of the atmosphere just now.
Truth be told, Hoshimi Miyabi's technique was actually pretty good.
The thin layer of oil film gave not the slightest uncomfortable feeling—Andrew had even instinctively forgotten about its very existence.
It would have been even better if what she'd used hadn't been cooking olive oil.
"Mm..."
Looking at Granny Meow, who hadn't shown it openly but in truth wore an expression just as curious as Kaelu's, Andrew in the end still didn't tell the whole truth.
Instead, without batting an eye, he spun a lie for the two of them:
"This is actually a maintenance method I learned in the new world—rubbing a bit of oil on your face can make your skin smoother, you know."
"Just take it as the truth and go with it."
Visibly, Hoshimi Miyabi quietly let out a breath of relief.
Andrew felt that if he had actually told the whole truth about everything Hoshimi Miyabi had just done, then Hoshimi Miyabi would probably put on a performance of vanishing on the spot.
Watching the subtle, hidden little interaction between the two of them, Kaelu slightly furrowed her brow, and her tail flicked twice behind her without her meaning it to.
These two—just what in the world was going on with them?
They were obviously a three-person group that had only just been formed, so why did she feel like she'd inexplicably been shut out of it?
She clearly hadn't had this feeling earlier on the way back, had she?
Seeing the suspicious look in Granny Meow's eyes—obviously not buying it—Andrew suddenly scratched his head a little awkwardly, and then immediately changed the subject:
"Ahem, it's getting late. Let's eat, let's eat."
Hoshimi Miyabi sat down by Andrew's side holding her bowl of soup, the aroma of the creamy mushroom soup spreading across her lips and teeth, the warmth sliding down her throat and into her belly, dispelling the night's chill as well.
The stewed meat that had been prepared well in advance had a touch of sour cream added to it, lending it a unique flavor.
The grilled matsutake, after coaxing out the matsutake's fragrance to the greatest possible degree, also had a crisp, charred crust and soft, sweet, succulent juices.
Paired with freshly baked bread and melted cheese.
It could be called an utterly perfect meal.
If only the portion in front of Hoshimi Miyabi weren't just as enormous as the one in Andrew's hands.
Oh no.
The impact of what had happened with Hoshimi Miyabi earlier had been too much for Andrew, making him forget that every time he ate here at Granny Cat's place, he had to endure the legendary "Granny-thinks-you're-hungry" trial.
Now, it seemed the only option was to grit his teeth and eat it all down.
Looking at the troubled Hoshimi Miyabi beside him, Andrew in the end still quietly spoke up:
"It's fine, Miyabi, just eat as much as you can. The extra you can't finish... leave it to me to deal with."
This one meal also successfully left both Andrew and Hoshimi Miyabi so stuffed that, for the time being, they had no desire to move at all.
And Granny Meow, seizing this opportunity, took the chance to extend an invitation for them to stay the night here and head back to report in tomorrow instead.
Because of that earlier incident, the two of them—who were a bit unsure of how to face each other—took the chance to agree as well, and settled down peacefully to rest in the room Granny Meow had arranged for them.
____
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