At the end of a dark alley in Axel, outside the succubus shop filled with pink ambiance and dreamlike temptation, a scream so shrill it could have collectively purified every undead within three miles tore through the silence.
"Don't come any closer! Don't kiss me with that bearded face, aaagh!! Not for one Eris. I won't wash them even for one Eris! Get lost, you stinking orcs!!"
Dust shot upright from the soft bench, his whole body drenched in cold sweat as if he had just been hauled out of a bucket. Even his shabby light armor was soaked through.
His pupils were still shaking violently, and the image lodged in his mind refused to fade. The pure and lovely girl of his first love had suddenly opened a gaping mouth and screamed in a voice loud enough to shatter eardrums, "Kōichi! Buy me some booze already! I blew up the guild toilet!" Then her face turned into a giant Slime with a huge beard and swallowed him whole in sticky goo...
Even worse, at the very end of the dream, he discovered he was wearing a pink maid outfit covered in lace, kneeling in the mud and washing the feet of rows of burly orcs picking at their toes, all for a wage of one miserable Eris.
"Huff... huff..." Dust dug his nails into his thigh, felt the pain, and finally dragged himself back to reality from that nightmare deluxe combo.
He ground his teeth and glared into empty space, his eyes full of the madness and humiliation of someone who had been completely toyed with. "Kōichi... Kazuma... you two bastards! What the hell did you write on that wish form?! This kind of dream... this is straight-up mental pollution!!"
Meanwhile, while Dust was mourning the loss of that one Eris, the atmosphere in the Ruby Salon's VIP suite was plunging at high speed from blissful paradise to public execution.
Kōichi had just been sinking into the tender charms of that fallen noble girl. His fingers had even touched the slick, gauzy fabric.
And then, at the most critical possible moment, a burst of hurried, suspicious arguing suddenly broke out outside the suite.
"I'm telling you, Manager, I absolutely didn't see wrong! Back when I used to do odd jobs at the Adventurers Guild, I saw this blue-haired girl there every single day!"
A young servant carrying a dessert tray was now pointing at Aqua, who was currently stuffing half a cream tower into her mouth with absolutely no regard for her image. His voice had gone shrill with shock.
The manager's fox-like eyes narrowed to slits, and a dangerous chill entered his voice. "You had better think very carefully before you speak. This is Her Highness, princess of the Axis Empire. If your accusation is false, you can forget about making a living in Axel ever again."
"What princess of some empire?! She's that idiot Arch Priest Aqua from the guild, the one who cries for booze all day, owes a mountain of debt, and got ordered to clean the toilets for a month after blowing one up!!" the servant screamed hysterically. "If you don't believe me, just look at how she's eating right now. Does that look even a little bit noble to you? She's even wiping her nose on the tablecloth!!"
Aqua froze.
She was still holding a half-eaten drumstick, with cream smeared all over her cheeks and even hanging off the tip of her nose.
The moment she heard the words blew up the toilet, the aloof facade she had been trying to maintain instantly collapsed, and she jumped up like a cat with its tail stepped on.
"T-that's nonsense! I... I was purifying it! I was making the guild toilet shine with holy radiance! You lowly commoner, how dare you expose... no! How dare you slander me in public!!"
The entire room fell silent.
In a single second, the manager's face went from obsequious to livid, then to black as the bottom of a pot.
He slowly turned his head and stared at Kazuma, who was poking his head out from the next room to see what was going on and had not even managed to pull his pants back up yet, then at Kōichi, who stood frozen at the suite entrance.
"The Axis Empire... the last bloodline?" The manager's voice had dropped so low it sent chills down the spine. He repeated each phrase one word at a time. "The royal guards who split up to interrogate people for the princess's safety? Thirty million Eris in restoration funds?"
Kōichi looked at the elite guards behind the manager, who were quietly pressing their hands to the longswords at their waists, and his mind began racing.
It was over. Forget graduating. At this rate, they probably would not even get the chance to stay back on probation.
"B-Brother Kōichi..." Kazuma clung to the doorframe, his face deathly pale and his legs weak. "I think... if we run for it right now, our Luck stat should still be enough to get us maybe two streets away, right?"
With a heavy boom, the Ruby Salon's massive redwood doors, trimmed with gold, slammed shut behind the three of them, kicking up dust all over the floor.
Right after that came three more sounds, perfectly connected, followed by one heavy thud as the Ruby Salon's massive redwood doors, trimmed in gold, slammed shut behind the three of them and sent dust flying everywhere.
Then came three crisp impacts of flesh making intimate contact with hard stone pavement.
"Ow! My butt! My sacred butt is splitting open, aaagh!!"
Aqua let out a scream loud enough to alarm all of Axel.
The gorgeous exiled-princess dress she had been wearing was now little more than strips of rags, and half of a crushed cream tower was still stuck to her once sacred and untouchable face.
The worst part was that the elite guards handling the cleanup clearly had some long-standing resentment toward that toilet-blowing idiot.
The instant they threw her out the door, the one in front had even added a few extra kicks for good measure, landing them squarely on Aqua's round backside.
"Get lost, you lying scam artists! If you dare come within a hundred meters of the Ruby Salon again, we'll chop you into pieces and feed you to the crocodiles!"
The captain of the guards let out a cold snort, even spat at their feet, then finally went back inside with his men, cursing all the while as they returned to that sacred land steeped in perfume and money.
Kōichi and Kazuma lay sprawled by the roadside like a pair of dead dogs. The whole imperial-elite aura from earlier had been completely fed to the wolves.
Kōichi rubbed his aching lower back, looked up at the ruby sign glittering in the sunset, then turned to look at Aqua, who was clutching her thigh, rolling around on the ground, and bawling with tears and snot everywhere.
"It's over... it's all over..." Kazuma stared blankly at the sky, still clutching half a torn suspender stocking in his hand, how he had managed to rip that off in the middle of all that chaos was anyone's guess. His voice was hollow with the emptiness of shattered dreams. "My cat-eared girl... my graduation ceremony... my youth... I was this close, this close to completing the great mission of my post-reincarnation life on that waterbed!! Aqua!! You toilet-blowing idiot!! Why do you even exist in this world?!"
"Waaahhh! How is this my fault?! That servant made the first move!" Aqua cried as she wiped her tears with her shredded sleeve, smearing the cream on her face even more evenly in the process. "And those guards were way too much! They actually kicked me! I'm a goddess! Kicking a goddess's butt is the kind of thing that gets you divine punishment! Uwaaah... Kōichi, I hadn't even finished my gold-leaf cake, and I only drank half that bubbly wine... we have to go back. We have to storm back in and take it all back!!"
Kōichi took a deep breath and barely restrained the urge to shove Aqua into the nearby drain. Then he slowly got to his feet and dusted off the imperial guard uniform on him, which had by now basically become a rag.
The sun had fully sunk below the horizon. Axel's evening wind carried a chill that cut to the bone as it swept through the deserted alley.
Kōichi, Kazuma, and Aqua, who was still sniffling quietly while trying to wash the boot prints off her butt with Holy Water, were now huddled beside a trash can and shivering.
"Listen carefully, Aqua. If you dare tell a single soul that we got kicked out the front door today and didn't even get to finish the gold-leaf cake..." Kōichi fixed her with a dark, chilling stare that looked especially terrifying under the dim light. "I'll have your entire guild alcohol allowance replaced with plain water. You understand me? Plain water. The kind where you will never see so much as one drop of booze again."
Kazuma nodded wildly beside him. He was using that torn suspender stocking to wipe the dust off his face as he added through clenched teeth, "That's right! We're going to come up with a perfect story about an imperial expedition! We were not thrown out. We... we discovered that the salon was hiding a Demon King's Army plot, and for the sake of world peace, we abandoned wealth and glory at the very last moment and made a resolute withdrawal! Got it? That's called a noble strategic retreat!"
Aqua hiccuped from the oppressive pressure coming off the two of them and shrank into a miserable little ball. "O-okay, I got it... but my butt really hurts... ugh... so are we really just going to sit out here in the cold wind? I'm starving. My sacred stomach is starting to digest itself..."
"Shut up! This is to create the illusion that we've just come back from a brutal struggle!" Kōichi tightened the tattered uniform around himself and said through chattering teeth, "If we go back now, those drunk idiots will definitely say, 'Hey, weren't you off becoming nobles? Why are you back after just three hours?' We have to stay here at least six hours, or it won't look like we just went through an epic infiltration mission!"
And so, for the next three hours, if any Axel residents happened to pass this alley, they would see three weirdos in torn fancy clothes gathered around an empty wine barrel, playing a staring contest to fight off hunger and cold.
Finally, when the clock struck nine, the three of them staggered forward with solemn expressions and pushed open the doors of the Adventurers Guild.