"Ger! Ka!" cried a goblin, before its head suddenly flew into the air.
"It's done," Lucy said as he wiped off the blood clinging on his sword with a single swing.
In a flash, he had single-handedly defeated the group of goblins who came to ambush us.
"Thank you, miss Lucy!" Bo, the fat merchant we rescued, excitedly gave his thanks.
"Umu," Lucy simply nodded, and then he went back to his place right beside me.
He didn't even bother to correct Bo's misunderstanding. As I thought, being mistaken for a woman must be a common occurrence for him. Either that, or he simply doesn't care.
"Good work," I said.
At the moment, the two of us are guarding Bo's caravan. We're walking on the road, keeping up with the horses and wagons. The now healed up guards wanted to join us, but we convinced them to instead rest and recover their stamina.
"Hm? Miss Eria, miss Lucy, are you two perhaps master and servant?" Bo curiously asked.
Seeing Lucy wearing a commoner servant's garb, he expectedly came to that conclusion.
"Like we told you, we're both adventures."
As a fix for Lucy's apparent poverty, I invited him to the guild and advised him to become an adventurer.
That day, a monster was born in the guild. On his first three days as an adventurer, he immediately subjugated a Lich, a Gorgon, and two fire Wyverns. He was only supposed to hunt a group of goblins, and he ended up bringing back the corpses of four A class monsters. The guild was naturally baffled, and they had no other choice but to acknowledge his feat and promote him as a C rank adventurer.
He did all that while still wearing a shoddy servant's uniform and only having an ordinary steel sword for a weapon.
Afterwards, for some reason, he asked me for a team up.
"I want to learn from you. You're the only one who can keep up with my swordsmanship," was what he said.
Lucy's swordsmanship is still that of an amateur, but his physical stats are unbelievably high. He's fast, and he can pretty much beat any monster with brute force. However, his biggest strength was his incredible sense in enhancement magic. He can unconsciously wrap his steel sword with high concentration of mana, leaving it undamaged even after cutting through the tough scale of a Wyvern. Furthermore, he can do the same thing to his clothes for defense. It's something that even I would struggle to do.
He's frankly inhuman.
Seeing how much untapped potential he has, I decided to accept his request, although only for a limited time.
Ever since then, we've done more than a dozen quests together. The guild had even given us a few personal requests from the army and the castle itself. Every time I think that we've cleared all the monsters in the territory, they just keep pumping out newer ones for us to defeat.
However, I hide another reason why I easily accepted his request to team up...
"Hm..." I dubiously glance at Lucy's expressionless face.
Although I've mistaken him for a woman at first, I'm pretty much attracted to him still.
I thought I would make a move on him when we first met, but he was so eager to take me around the city, I wasn't able to. And then we became busy doing quests. But my biggest hurdle was his impregnable defense. He just never lets his guard down. It's frustrating.
The scenes of me pitifully trying to seduce him played in my mind.
"Let me help you with that."
I leaned over him as he's shining his sword, giving him a peek inside my shirt and my exposed breasts.
"Thank you, but I'm done."
He practically shoved me to the side as he suddenly stood up.
"Ah! How clumsy of me!"
While walking ahead of him, I pretended to drop my sword. I then suggestively bent over and showed him my backside. I even made sure to wear the most fitting shorts to emphasize its shape.
"It happens," he flatly said.
"How about you show me what you got?" I licked my lips as I whispered in his ears.
I tried to directly seduce him as soon as we became alone on our way to a quest.
"Okay. I'll make sure to satisfy you," he keenly replied.
And then we spent an hour sparring.
Soon, I treated me seducing him as a challenge. Making him blush was the first of my goals. Yet, he never even raised a brow to my attempts.
It gotten so bad, that I demeaned myself by showing him my mouth skills on a hot sausage. He simply stared blankly at me as I do so. In the end, I got so embarrassed, I screamed.
Was he lying when he said he likes women?
I looked at Lucy up and down. No matter how you look at it, he's my fantasy-induced cool beauty. Perhaps he's actually lying from the start, and he's in reality a she?
A while later, we arrived back at the city.
"I'll certainly pay you back, miss Eria! Please come to my shop any time!" Bo was practically begging on his knees.
As I thought, I'm not well-suited to his kind of people. I generally have a soft personally, and I easily fold under pressure. So, I could only nod and promise to visit his shop later.
"I'll see you later," he happily said.
After that short interaction, Lucy and I saw the fat merchant and his caravan off at the gates.
"You seem to know that person well," Lucy comments.
"That's because he's famous," I said dismissively.
Hearing that, Lucy immediately lose interest.
I cannot tell him that he'd actually been a customer of mine in a certain establishment not too long ago...