Sepakai (GXG) (GIRLXGIRL) (GL)

54

Chapter 7
Section 5: Emerging Thoughts
After Toslin finished making her report to the receptionist, we all moved over and took a seat at an empty table. And then as soon as a bowl of steaming hot soup was set down in front of her, Carol jumped right in.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm~!! Hot! Tasty! I am aliveeeee!!”

Draining her soup, Carol reached for some bread. It had apparently only just been baked, because steam rose up after it was broken in half, and the sweet smell of butter drifted over to my nose from across the table.

“Uu, it looks so good……”

“Aren’t you going to eat Iris?”

Carol tried sharing some of her bread with me, but I had to turn her down. Saluena and I had breakfast before we came here. No matter how good it smells, if I give in and eat here, my lunch will be completely ruined.

“Uwa, this meat’s really good too. Iris is losing out by not eating here.”

“How nice. I’ll be sure to let my mom know you said that.”

Carol was currently sinking her teeth into some herb grilled barbato. The Shining Hen in Rifront had a dish with the same name, but while they grilled the meat as is, this place minces the meat before kneading it with the herbs to make something similar to a hamburger. The juices overflow as the knife cuts through the meat making me hungry just looking at it. But, is there something in there besides the herbs?

“Oh my god, is there an entire sausage packed in here? Woohoo, my excitement is reaching its peak♪”

“Rather than exciting, isn’t this dish more like they just took a whole bunch of things that they liked and rolled them all together? I mean, I guess I don’t hate that way of thinking.”

“T-This is……perhaps a little too heavy for me……”

While Carol was delighted by the dish, Rose-san’s face was a little cramped as she looked at her own hamburger. But that can’t be helped. After all, this is a place with an overwhelmingly high male ratio, so naturally the menu would reflect that.

“Does that mean I can have your sausage!?”

“Sorry Carol-san, could you please?”

Breakfast finished just like that, and as I was getting started on my second cup of tea, “So about those ruins……,” Toslin started talking about their job.

♠

“Eh, so there weren’t any ghosts?”

With Carol and Rose-san popping in to add on a detail or two, the story goes that after the three of them left the city and entered the mountains, there wasn’t a single undead among the monsters they encountered.

They had only managed to explore a small part of the ruins for now, but Rose-san could not confirm anything unclean inside either.

“Like we said though, the mines are a complex maze, and we’ve only been able to investigate about ten percent of the ruins. So, there might still be something there deeper inside.”

Carol patted her bulging belly, and with a relaxed, satisfied look on her face, muttered,

“If a certain somebody hadn’t lead us down the wrong road, we could’ve gotten more done.”

“You picked the wrong road too though?”

Even together these two have zero sense of direction. But the job takes place in a mine this time, so it can’t be helped if they get lost in there. They showed me the map the church gave them, and it’s as complicated as an ant farm. Plus this map is old and hard to make out. The paper has faded in some areas, and in others, I can’t tell if that’s supposed to symbolize something or if it’s just a stain.