The Witchs

Beako

It was a room that basically screamed "library" at you.

The room was twice as large as a 350 square foot room, and there were bookcases set up all over the place, going from one corner of the room to the other. Every bookcase was so tightly packed with books that it was hard to imagine how many books it truly held.

Books took up a lot of space and were heavy, so it was a problem to have so many. In Subaru's case, his whole family loved to read manga, and there used to be a room on the second floor of his house that was filled to the brim with books, especially manga.

One day, without any warning, the floor fell through, and it was a complete renovation disaster. Fortunately, no one was injured, and Subaru had since put them all in a dedicated book storage room, so they should never experience that kind of catastrophe again.

Even from the perspective of Subaru, who has had such an experience involving books, the number of books in this room exceeded the number of books in his house even with the floors removed. Of course, the structure of the mansion itself was much sturdier than that of his house.

Finding even one book to read-that Subaru could understand-would be a tall order for him considering the enormous amount of books in his view.

"With so many books here...there must be one that I can read, right?"

A quick glance around the library revealed that there were no spine covers written in Japanese. There were no alphabets here as far as he knew, and most of the letters were characters based on what he'd seen on the signboards while walking around the capital. These were the commonly used characters of this world, after all.

If Subaru wanted to live in this world, it was going to be essential to learn it. For him, who had even dropped his language classes in middle school, it already felt like such a drag.

Subaru sighed while envisioning his coming difficulties. Then-

"Gazing at other people's bookshelves, and even sighing as you do so... So you're trying to be offensive, I suppose? Shall I respond in kind, I wonder?"

Subaru didn't have the communication skills necessary to talk to someone he just met without any sort of preparation, so he had no choice but to say, "I'm really not good at talking to people I've never met before, so I'm gonna have to head out for a sec, sorry. I'll be right back for a Take-Two!"

After he raised his hand to the little girl who stared at him with her unmoving eyes, Subaru casually walked out of the room.

Then, after a few moments, he opened the door, re-entered the room, and looked at the little girl who hadn't moved an inch from where she had been standing.

"Oh, look who's here. Hi! Nice to meet you! Can I have a word with you?"

"I knew you were making fun of Betty, I suppose. Don't you think you deserve to be punished for entering my library without an invitation, I suppose?"

The little girl laughed adorably and cruelly at Subaru as he tried to start their encounter over from a better starting point.

How many times had he seen this sight in this other world? -She was a beautiful, sweet girl.

She appeared to be younger than Felt, perhaps eleven or twelve years old. She was wearing an indigo-colored dress with lots of frills and had a lovely face that suited her ornate hairstyle and clothes.