Gamble Scramble!
Page 2
“A-all right, let me handle it!”
Still a bit red, Darkness got to work on the ropes. They were nice and tight, but I thought we could produce just enough of a gap to free my…you know.
“Okay, good work. I’ve got a pee bottle over there. Could you grab it for me?”
“……Why do you have something like that? Why in the world would you—?”
“A NEET’s gotta do what a NEET’s gotta do. You know how much of a pain it is to get up and go to the bathroom in the winter when it’s freezing cold. That thing’s a lifesaver.”
“I—I had no idea you had sunk so low… Well, I will admit to its convenience in this scenario. I’ll set it right here.” With a look of disgust, Darkness placed the pee bottle in front of me…
“Hey, I can’t go like this. I need you to pull down my pants and help me do my business.”
“What?!”
How did she think this was going to work?
“Don’t ‘what’ me—my hands are tied, and I can’t move an inch. And you’re the one who put me in this situation! Seriously, hurry up! The dam’s gonna burst!”
“Y-y-yeah, but—! Oh, for…”
Darkness, on the verge of tears, looked away and reached out.
Then, with my pants halfway down, she made a strange face.
“Hmm…? Hey, Kazuma, your pants are stuck on something; I can’t pull them down… Wait, is that…?”
“Sorry. Happens every morning. It’s just biology.”
………
“W-waaaaaaaaaaahhhh!”
“Aaaaaagggh!! What are you doing?! Stop it! Stop! You’re gonna rip it off!” I won’t say exactly what it was, but I forgot all about amusing myself by harassing Darkness and gave a heartfelt scream. “What’s wrong with you?! I almost did a class change on my sex! I swear, you remember this, ’cause I’m gonna make you cry when these ropes come off!”
“You’re already making me cry… Hey, Kazuma, how about we give up on this? Come on—Aqua will be home soon, and we can have her use Create Water and Purification to clean everything up…”
“You’re telling me to do it in my pants! You’re telling me to just give up and pee myself! Stop being a moron and help me out! The reason you can’t do it is because you’re trying to look away, but you’re the one who got us into this mess, so take some responsibility and help me!”
Darkness reached for my pants again, her eyes fixed firmly on my lower body this time. “Grrr, it wasn’t supposed to be this way…! I just wanted to keep Lady Iris safe by ensuring you’d stay away from her… B-but now that I think about it, for a noblewoman like me to be forced to take care of someone’s bathroom needs, to be ordered to look—maybe it’s not so bad after all…”
“Listen, you idiot, quit flapping your gums and hurry! We’re almost out of time! …Crap, I can’t do it. I can’t hold it any longer!”
“N-no, Kazuma, I’m taking care of it right now! Don’t relieve yourself yet! Aaarrrgh, if Aqua or Megumin saw us now…!”
She didn’t get to finish her sentence. I felt a pair of eyes on me from the door. I looked over to find Aqua peering through the half-open doorway like a housekeeper walking in on her employers.
“Woooooooow… I had no idea Darkness and Kazuma had gotten to the point where they were doing such dirty things together… I’m gonna go let everyone at the Guild know all about this!”
““Hold it right there!””
“Phew. You saved my neck, Aqua. Thanks to this perv, I almost peed myself.”
Aqua’s magic had broken the item’s Bind. I went in the next room and relieved myself. Darkness was looking weepy and mumbling to herself, “Ohhh… ‘P-perv…’ ‘Perv,’ he called me…”
“That’s nothing new, so I don’t really care, but what kind of game were you playing?”
“A-Aqua?!”
Darkness seemed shocked for some reason, so I offered an explanation instead. “You remember how Iris asked us to do bodyguard work for her? And you remember how Darkness was really against it for some reason? Long story short: She tied me up and was planning to take me back to her house to do all sorts of naughty things to me until I missed my chance to leave for the quest.”
“Darkness, how can you expect not to be called pervy when that was your plan?”
“I wasn’t going to do anything naughty! …I really do think we could get into huge trouble this time, though. Lady Iris’s betrothed is the first prince of Elroad, a neighboring kingdom. I hear he’s really touchy, and if you guys pulled your usual tricks with him, it could end up being a diplomatic incident.”
A prince with his head up his ass? All the more reason I had to protect Iris.
Aqua, meanwhile, got a gleam in her eye.
“Elroad? Did you say Elroad? As in, Elroad, the Casino Kingdom?”
I didn’t recognize the name, but Aqua obviously did. A casino kingdom sounded like fun, though.
Now Aqua was fully on board. Darkness frowned and said, “Aqua, just to be clear, we’d be going as bodyguards, not to play around, okay? Hey, if you really want to go to Elroad that badly, let’s make it our next vacation! We don’t have to take a job to get there. We have plenty of money; we can enjoy ourselves!”
Despite Darkness’s desperate attempt to dissuade her, it was clear from Aqua’s face that she already had her heart set on going.
I nodded with satisfaction. “Cool, looks like Aqua agrees we should take this quest! When Megumin gets home, maybe we should put it to a vote. Not that I expect her to turn down the chance to go out on a quest!”
“Ugggghhhh……”
Darkness put her head in her hands. I smiled, confident I had her beat.
3
“Count me out.”
That evening.
Megumin arrived riding on Yunyun’s back—she must have been out for her daily Explosion—and managed to cough up an exhausted but resolute answer.
I didn’t know why, but Megumin had turned into quite the contrarian ever since we got back from beating Wolbach. These days, she’d even started taking Yunyun on her “Explosion walks” instead of me.
“What do you mean, count you out? Normally I’d expect you to be all, Is this some powerful opponent we haven’t faced yet? and hop right on board.”
Megumin, settled deep into the sofa in our living room, quickly glanced at the kitchen, where Aqua and Darkness were making dinner, then looked back at me. “There is no what or why about it. This man! He wants every excuse not to move a muscle, but then someone mentions Iris, and suddenly he cannot wait to get involved.”
Now she was baiting me, and I bit: “Ooh, is that jealousy I hear?”
But instead of getting angry like I expected—like she always did—Megumin just looked at me levelly. “Yes, I am jealous. After what happened between us, would it kill you to give me a little more attention?”
“Huh? …Oh, um, right.” Confronted by Megumin’s absolute seriousness, I found I was the one who felt my face getting hot.
When she said “what happened between us,” she probably meant the night we nearly crossed the final frontier. But hang on a sec… Had Megumin ever been the type to say things like that? She seemed…less reserved, more assertive, like she wasn’t willing to keep anything inside anymore.
“Does Iris really mean that much to you, Kazuma?” Megumin asked, still looking straight at me.
“Er, w-well, I kind of can’t let her go. Not so much as a woman, y’know, but more like as a little sister who always has to ignore what she wants because of her position. She spends all her time worrying about everyone around her, so she must be kind of lonely.”
I might have been a NEET, but I was no lolicon. Iris was nothing more than an adorable younger sister to me. Though I admit that in the future, if she grew up and said, Big Bro, I wanna be your bride, well, I wouldn’t necessarily be against granting that wish.
Caught off guard by Megumin’s attitude, I found myself talking a little too fast and worried that my face was turning
red. “Anyway,” I babbled on, “if you’re really against it, Megumin, then I’ll think of some other way. If we were to take on bodyguard duties, I would want us all to do it together anyway. I’ll miss seeing Iris, but…”
“Let us accept, then,” Megumin said shortly with a small sigh. “I’m concerned about that girl myself. This was nothing more than a passing fit of jealousy.”
“Uh—sure!”
What was with this honest display of affection? My ears were burning hot. I was just thinking about casting Freeze on my own face (I couldn’t believe a younger girl was leading me by the nose like this) when Darkness and Aqua emerged from the kitchen with dinner.
“Megumin, you’re back,” Darkness observed. “It’s our treat tonight! …Kazuma, why is your face so red?”
“N-n-n-no special reason! Right, Megumin?”
Unlike me, deeply shaken to have had Darkness point out the color of my cheeks, Megumin smiled. How could she be so calm? She was making me look like a trembling idiot.
“Gosh, Megumin, if you’d come home sooner, you could have seen the funniest thing. Darkness had tied Kazuma to the bed and was trying to pull his pants down!”
“Oh-ho,” Megumin said, surprised by Aqua’s entirely unnecessary information.
“Stop that, Aqua—I wasn’t doing anything naughty! Yes, I did tie him up, that’s true, but like I explained—” Darkness, her hands full of dishes, kept stealing little glances at Megumin to see how she was reacting.
But me, I said: “Yeah, and if Aqua had gotten home a little later, Darkness actually would have pulled my pants down. She really saved me.”
“Whaaaa—?!” Now the crimson of Megumin’s eyes flashed. “…Well, whatever Darkness (who is constantly horny) does and whomever she does it with is no concern of mine. But still, I can hardly approve of the daughter of a good family forcibly making someone her prisoner!”
“Th-th-th-th-th-that’s not—! Megumin, that’s not what happened; I swear there was a reason for this! And don’t call me ‘constantly horny’!”
Darkness launched into a desperate attempt at an explanation, but the rest of us already had our eyes fixed on the dishes piled on the table.
“I wonder if you’ll recognize what I’ve set out here, Kazuma,” Aqua was saying. “I know how sharp your senses are from the food tours we’ve done. That’s right: Tonight’s dinner is blowfish! And not just any blowfish but the Paradise Blowfish, the king of them all. Its poison is a lot more powerful than any other blowfish, but true gourmands say that if they died eating this food, it would be worth it! And it happens to be in season right this moment.”
“I don’t know if the name describes the fish or where it sends you when you eat it. I’m impressed you know how to cook blowfish, though. I always took you for a party clown, but you do have a real skill or two.”
Megumin and I took our seats, enamored by our dinner. Blowfish sashimi, blowfish stew, blowfish chawanmushi. There was a little plate of what looked like roe, along with a tiny cooking brazier filled with blowfish fins. It was enough to make you drool just from looking at it. I couldn’t wait; I reached out…
“Of course I don’t know how to cook blowfish. If you feel yourself going numb, let me know, and I’ll use antidote magic on you.”
“Hey.”
And that, right there, was another loud reminder of how sketchy this world could be…
I had just put back the chawanmushi I’d picked up when I heard a slurping sound from beside me.
“Delicious!”
“Don’t eat that; don’t you know it might be poisonous?!”
Megumin had grabbed the dish I’d set down and was devouring it. In fact, before I knew it, Darkness, sitting across from me, had stabbed the blowfish sashimi with her fork and was shoving it into her mouth.
Geez, didn’t these people ever hesitate?
They assumed blowfish and antidote magic went hand in hand. I guess in a world where magic was real, that made a certain kind of sense, but…
Darkness saw me watching her and grinned. No doubt looking for a little payback for earlier, she said, “What’s wrong, Kazuma? Is our big, brave adventurer afraid of a little fish? Aqua’s a superb priest, if nothing else, so what’s there to worry about?”
“Uh, Darkness, did you say ‘if nothing else’?”
“…No,” Darkness answered, going for another dish. Beside her, Megumin was happily sipping at the blowfish stew.
Blowfish, huh…?
Come to think of it, I had never even had blowfish in Japan. “Darkness is right—everything else aside, you’re pretty good at healing. Okay!”
“Uh, Kazuma, did you say ‘everything else aside’?”
“…No. Wow! That’s incredible!”
No sooner had I tried the stew than I was marveling at the flavor. I don’t have a big vocabulary, so the best I could do was to describe it as absolutely delicious.
Aqua watched us with satisfaction. “I’m so pleased you’re all enjoying it so much. That blowfish is from Cecily. She usually uses it to help convert new worshippers. You draw in passersby with blowfish, then you promise them antidote magic if they convert. It’s a great strategy! But then Cecily got arrested…”
“That’s what you’ve been up to? I thought I told you to stay away from that woman.”
But either way, thanks to her, we got to eat Paradise Blowfish for dinner, and I admit I was grateful for that. I took one of the thin slices of sashimi, while Aqua cooked up one of the fins on the brazier and dropped it in her drink to make fin sake. Sitting there drinking with a side of blowfish roe, Aqua looked less like a goddess or even a heroine and more like a middle-aged guy at a bar.
“Come to think of it, aren’t the internal organs supposed to be the most poisonous of all? Don’t get carried away and eat too much. If you’re paralyzed when we start to go numb, we’re all done for.”
“Don’t be dumb; I’m wearing a divine item, you see? It neutralizes harmful status effects. Blowfish poison can’t even touch me.”
Come to think of it, I guess she had mentioned that once. Knowing her, I was afraid there was some flaw in her logic, but if she was right, then…!
I lost track of how much blowfish I’d enjoyed.
“Hef-hef-hef! How abouf thabh, Kafuma? Wiff my defenfe, I can enthure any poithon…”
“Her tongue is going numb. You can hear it,” I said. Darkness had gorged herself on the most dangerous parts of the fish, and I was thinking it was about time to lay some healing magic on her.
Suddenly I felt something slumped against me. I looked over to find Megumin, her face flushed, leaning on my shoulder right there in front of everybody…
“Aqua, pay attention! Megumin’th almoth gone… Craf, I can harthly fpeak…”
I looked at Aqua, and my blood ran cold.
She was lying facedown on the table. What had happened to her divine item?! Didn’t it work against poison?!
Darkness, picking up on the situation, rushed over and grabbed Aqua…!
“Zzzzz.”
“She’s a lightweight drinker! Wake up! Waaaaghh uuupppp!”
4
The next morning.
“Hey, Kazuma, are you really going to take Lady Iris up on that quest? Let me tell you something: I think that even without your offensive attitude, it would be all we could do to survive an escort quest. I mean, our entire party was almost wiped out by the blowfish we had for our own dinner!”
“Yesterday doesn’t count; we weren’t on an adventure. We’re the number one party in Axel. We’ve beaten more generals of the Demon King than anyone else in the world. I won’t let anyone speak ill of us.”
Yes, we had been brought to the brink of destruction by food poisoning the night before, but now we had made all our preparations to go to the capital and had come to Axel’s transport shop.
We had rushed over to the Eris Church and somehow managed to survive, but I didn’t plan on having any more blowfish for a while.
The only thing we needed before we could leave was Aqua, who had gone to Wiz’s place to drop off our pets. She was probably busy getting in a fight with Vanir or something.
As the thought crossed my mind, Aqua came up, loaded with luggage. “I dropped off the kids. Old Nasty Mask took one look at Chomusuke and started spouting off about ‘Oh-ho, I look away for but an instant and another interesting thing befalls us! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Whatever, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“Interesting thing”? I wondered what that could be. Maybe Chomusuke really would turn into that lady when she got bigger. I was dying to know more, but we had other things to do.
“Okay, guys, when we enter the transport shop, let me do the talking. I’ve been wanting to give them a piece of my mind for a long time now.”
“A piece of your mind? Is there bad blood between you and the owner here?” Darkness asked, but instead of answering, I shoved open the door of the shop.
The seeds of my rage had been planted months before. This was after I had been forcibly separated from my little sister, Iris, and had tried to go visit her in secret.
“Hey, buddy, I’m back! Send us to the capital!”
“Come right i— Hey! You’re that Kazuma Satou the police are after! You’ve got some nerve coming back here… I told you you’re not allowed to travel to the capital!”
Darkness sounded downright frustrated at that. “Y-you dirty rotten— You tried to go visit Iris when I wasn’t looking, didn’t you?”
“Damn right I did. But they wouldn’t let me. I’m sure Claire is behind it. But this time is gonna be different. Here, Buster, feast your eyes on this! A letter of invitation from the royal family! That’s the real goods, so keep your grimy hands off!”
I proudly displayed the letter, but the owner of the transport shop just frowned. “Oh, is it, now? You didn’t forge yourself a letter? Is this like the time you tried to intimidate me by telling me what awful things would happen to me if I tried to go against a close personal friend of House Dustiness?”