Chapter 17: The Ice-Cold Sword Princess Who Makes the First Move.
.....
Ever since delivering her declaration of primacy, Hestia had effectively become a permanent fixture attached to Kihara's person.
She was on him constantly — that soft, warm, thoroughly distracting presence pressed against his side at every available opportunity, up to and including insisting on sharing his bed at night. The sleeping arrangement served a dual purpose: it closed off Lili's late-night access routes, and it meant that over time Kihara's entire presence would gradually absorb her scent.
The strategic logic, as she explained it with complete seriousness, was that a man thoroughly marinated in one woman's fragrance was considerably less appealing as a target for other women with bad intentions.
For Kihara, being this thoroughly attached to Hestia was a specific variety of pleasant torment. She was everywhere, all the time — and entirely off-limits to any follow-through.
The moment he reached the point of doing something about it, she would snap to alertness with the reflexes of someone who had been waiting for exactly this, slip free, and observe him from a safe distance with bright, watchful eyes until the situation resolved itself naturally. Only then would she drift back in and resume her position as though nothing had happened.
Without Shinobu's assistance in managing the accumulating pressure, he wasn't sure how long he could have maintained his composure.
He'd tried asking Hestia directly what conditions would need to be met. The word intimate had caused her to produce visible steam from the top of her head, achieve a full eye-spiral, and lose consciousness for approximately forty seconds, apparently having constructed several extremely vivid mental images in rapid succession.
Further direct enquiry had been shelved indefinitely.
[She's bolder when she's the one initiating,] Shinobu observed from the shadow-space.
[Why does she become so desperately shy the moment Master shows interest?]
[She's one of the three virgin goddesses. It probably ties into her divine authority somehow.]
[Heheheh~ I find myself suddenly very curious about a virgin goddess who is no longer a virgin.]
[Don't start anything. If Hestia loses control of her divine power and gets forcibly returned to the divine realm, that's a significant problem.]
[Mm. I will cause trouble in a very measured and responsible way.]
Kihara shook his head and raised his voice toward the upper floor. "Hestia, Lili — are you ready?"
"Coming, coming!"
Lili descended first, wearing a cream-coloured dress with puffed sleeves. She stopped in front of him and executed a precise spin.
"Lord Kihara — does Lili look good?"
"I picked it out. Of course it looks good."
Her cheeks puffed with immediate dissatisfaction. "In this situation, aren't you supposed to say Lili looks good? Not the clothes?"
"Stating facts isn't the same as flattery. That would just be embellishment."
"Uuu~ Lord Kihara is so mean and yet Lili is incredibly happy right now—!"
She pressed her cheeks between her palms and stood next to him in a cloud of personal satisfaction.
Hestia followed shortly after — still in the cloak-and-long-skirt combination, having run out of new options — and fell into step on Kihara's left, taking his arm with the naturalness of someone establishing a property boundary.
"Shall we go?"
"Mm. Big dinner at the Hostess of Fertility."
The last of the evening light was retreating from Orario's streets when they arrived, the magic-stone lamps outside the Hostess of Fertility kindling one by one in the deepening dusk, casting warm orange rings across the cobblestones.
The noise reached them before the door did. When Kihara pushed it open, the sound rolled out to meet them — the bright clash of cups, the broad laughter of people who had survived something difficult together, chair legs dragging across wooden floors, and somewhere in the middle of it all, an extremely confident dwarf rendering a popular song in a key it had never been written in.
"Another round — four rounds — I took down a Minotaur today, old man deserves a drink—!"
The dwarf had enough beard to upholster furniture and was currently using the table as a percussion instrument.
"To our bull-slaying warrior—!"
"Pure love reigns eternal — death to Minotaurs—!"
Kihara navigated past the general chaos and smiled at Chloe as she appeared. "Three people. Somewhere quieter if you can manage it."
"Understood, meow~ Right this way, all three of you~!"
Hestia kept pace at his elbow, voice dropped to a murmur. "Kihara-kun — how do you know this cat-girl? You seem familiar with each other."
"I came here when I first arrived in Orario. She was the one who served me. We've talked a few times since."
"I see." A pause. "No flirting with anyone outside the house. You already have Lili and me at home."
Lili opened her mouth and then decided against whatever she'd been about to say. She had a fairly clear-eyed assessment of Kihara's actual capabilities in that department, and the arithmetic strongly suggested that defensive positioning was less useful than offensive investment. She kept this analysis to herself.
They had barely settled into their seats when someone arrived at the table uninvited.
A red-haired goddess with narrowed eyes and a chest that lost the comparison to most of the male adventurers in the room looked down at them and opened with no preamble whatsoever.
"Well, well. Little shorty Hestia. When did you come down? Don't tell me Hephaestos had to lend you money for dinner."
Hestia's entire domestic softness evaporated on contact.
She was on her feet with her hands on her hips before the sentence finished. "Watch your mouth, flat-board Loki. I'm here with my Familia members and we're paying with our own money — earned through genuine adventuring, something you wouldn't know about from up here!"
"Oh?"
Loki's gaze moved across the table, paused on Kihara, and settled there. "Isn't this the rookie who beat a Level 3 before he even had a Falna? So that's where you disappeared to — I figured someone had picked you up, didn't expect it to be this walking disaster." She tilted her head. "What do you say? Loki Familia's the best operation in Orario. Why waste yourself in a dead-end startup?"
"You dare—" Hestia lunged. Kihara's arm caught her at the waist. She continued expressing her position from this position with undiminished volume. "You come into this establishment and poach my member to my FACE—"
"He's got real potential. Why should someone like that get buried?"
Kihara waited for a natural pause in Hestia's commentary, settled her back into her seat, and addressed Loki with complete calm.
"I appreciate the consideration, Goddess Loki. But I have a strong personal preference for establishments with more generous proportions. I'll be declining."
Hestia immediately buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking.
Loki's expression cycled through several distinct phases before settling on a colour that could charitably be described as aubergine.
"You chest-obsessed—"
The exchange between two goddesses had attracted attention across the tavern floor, including from a group of adventurers who had just come up from the dungeon and were in the process of celebrating at their usual table.
A golden-haired sword maiden —
composure so absolute it had become her defining characteristic, known to every adventurer in Orario — let her gaze drift across the room as Loki's argument escalated, and found Kihara.
She paused.
Something in his presence registered as unexpectedly familiar — a quality she couldn't immediately name, like recognising a scent she hadn't encountered in years. It didn't make sense. She had never seen this person before. And yet.
She was not, by nature, someone who waited to understand things before acting on them.
"Aiz? Are you going to intervene with Loki?"
She was already moving.
She stopped in front of the table. Looked directly at him.
"Excuse me. What's your name?"
Aiz Wallenstein. The Sword Princess. The most celebrated adventurer currently active in Orario.
Had just walked up and introduced herself to a man she had never met.
The tavern went quiet in a very specific radius.
...
Thank you for reading.