Inside the spiraling staircase that wound straight up, Leo climbed at a speed he'd never managed before, quickly reaching the topmost floor of the Central Tower.
The moment he arrived outside Loki's God's Chamber, he shoved the door open and walked in.
"Loki, help me with..."
The sentence cut off halfway. Having barged through the door, Leo froze on the spot.
Inside the God's Chamber, Loki had also frozen at Leo's sudden intrusion, a golden needle still in her hand, the one she'd just used to prick her finger, squeeze out fresh blood, and press onto the back of a girl seated in front of her.
And there in front of Loki, the Elf girl who'd been waiting for her goddess to update her Status had turned to stone.
She stared blankly at the Leo who'd come barging in, her pointed ears slowly reddening at a visible pace, her small mouth slowly opening wider, her delicate little face flushing a deep, deep crimson.
There was no helping it. To have the Status on her back updated, the Elf girl had already taken off her top.
In other words, her upper body was right now in a completely bare state, taken in fully by the Leo who'd burst through the door and come face to face with her.
The air in the God's Chamber instantly went dead silent.
Leo's face stiffened, his gaze dropping a few inches by pure reflex, then snapping back up as though he'd been electrocuted.
"Pardon me."
He retreated at top speed and shut the door.
"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!"
A second later, a shriek went up inside the room, ear-splitting.
Not long after, the door he'd just closed flew open with violent force, as though someone had kicked it.
Inside, the now fully-dressed Elf girl, eyes blazing like they were on fire, lunged toward Leo without a moment's thought.
"I'll kill you!!!"
Driven by violent emotion, the Elf girl burst into a speed a Lv.3 Mage had no business having, and tackled the unprepared Leo to the ground.
She just sat there straddling him, ears red, face red, whether from shame or from anger no one could say, slender hands clamped around Leo's throat as she shook him hysterically.
"I'll kill you, you pervert! You filthy creep! You pest who clings to Miss Ais all day long!"
Yes, this Elf girl was none other than Lefiya.
"W-wait! I didn't know you were in there!"
Lefiya's grip had Leo half choking. He hurriedly grabbed her wrists and rushed to explain.
"Just because you didn't know I was in there means you can barge in however you like? Is that your room? Even if you wanted to come in, you could've at least followed the most basic manners and knocked! You bastaaaaaard!"
Lefiya had gone completely berserk. She somehow managed to ignore Leo's struggling, choking him and shaking him wildly all at once, her eyes faintly wet now, tears hanging at their corners, plainly having taken a serious blow.
True, she was a sociable Elf, not as obsessive about purity as the rest of her kind, who treated their own chastity as something on par with their lives, but as a girl in the bloom of her fifteen years, to be seen stark naked like that by a man, face to face, was a deeply mortifying thing.
To say nothing of the fact that this man was the one she'd long regarded as her rival, as her opponent.
The instant she thought of how she'd just been sitting there bare in front of him, her whole upper body seen clean through, Lefiya felt like her entire body was on fire, gripped by a shame so total she wished she could die on the spot.
Under the rule of that shame, the girl unconsciously began to move her lips, chanting out the words of a spell.
That's right, she was about to use magic.
"Hey! You yuri-obsessed Elf! You're seriously doing this?!"
Hearing the sound of that chant, Leo lost his composure all at once too.
Loki, stepping out of the God's Chamber, got an even bigger fright, and rushed over to throw her arms around Lefiya.
"Wait wait wait wait! Hold on a sec! Lefiya!"
Loki cut off Lefiya's chant and dragged her off of Leo.
"Let me go! Let me kill him!"
Lefiya thrashed desperately, falling into a frenzy like nothing she'd shown before.
Right now there wasn't a trace of the tension she had facing monsters, none of the timidity she had in front of Ais and the other Familia seniors, only a madness utterly unlike the impression she usually gave. Anyone used to the usual Lefiya, seeing this, would have had their jaw hit the floor on the spot.
"Calm down! Lefiya! This isn't your whole character, is it?"
Loki held Lefiya fast, somehow able to ignore a Lv.3's desperate struggling, dragging her away while pleading over and over.
"So you got your top seen, big deal? What's the harm in that? When Ais-tan got her whole body seen by that brat a year ago, I still let him keep his worthless hide! How's your temper even worse than mine?"
So muttered a certain patron deity who doted to an absurd degree on a certain golden-haired girl.
And her words, before they could even get a reaction out of Lefiya, first stunned the Leo who'd gotten to his feet rubbing his neck.
"H-how do you know about that?"
Leo looked at Loki in utter bewilderment.
This was something only he and Ais were supposed to know about, wasn't it?
How did this lousy goddess know?
"Heh heh, you think just because you two don't say anything, I can't tell?" Loki said with a huff. "Brats like you who can't keep a thing hidden, all I gotta do is poke around a little and I can guess most of what you're up to."
She was, after all, a god who'd lived for hundreds of millions of years. The children of the lower world couldn't even tell a lie in front of them without being seen through, so how could they truly keep a secret hidden?
And Ais was a natural airhead besides; she'd probably been wheedled into talking by Loki without even noticing.
So it was only the two people involved who thought they'd hidden it well. In reality, the very day Leo was brought back to Twilight Manor by Ais, Loki had dug the whole business of their meeting out to the bottom, knowing everything she ought to and everything she oughtn't.
Back then she really had gone on a rampage. Her own sweet, soft, naive little cabbage, raised so tenderly, had been seen by some punk who'd crawled out of who-knows-where. The thought alone was enough to make her boil over.
If Finn, Riveria, and Gareth hadn't stopped Loki, there was a real chance she'd have blown Leo away on the spot back then.
Only, having learned about it, Lefiya's reaction was far bigger than Loki had imagined.
"...He's seen Miss Ais naked too?"
Lefiya stopped struggling, and stopped blushing. Her once tear-filled eyes seemed to go dull, black and fathomless.
A black aura began billowing up off her body in waves, her whole person as though gone dark, her expression turning utterly terrifying.
"Gulp..."
Loki couldn't help swallowing.
Forget Loki, even Leo's mouth twitched a little, and he couldn't help taking a step back.
"Y-you, calm down a little, okay, calm down? Lefiya?" Loki said gingerly. "Why's your reaction scarier than when you got seen yourself?"
Lefiya paid this Loki no mind, only staring fixedly at Leo as though looking at a dead man.
"Seen me... and seen Miss Ais too..."
Like some kind of zombie, she swayed her way toward Leo.
"Maybe I really should just kill him after all... or else gouge out the eyes... should chop off the head... that way he'll forget those things..."
This emotionless muttering had even Loki scared stiff.
"You're way too terrifying, you know that? Lefiya!" Loki shot back. "Your whole character's fallen apart! Hurry up and give me back the Lefiya who got all bashful and wouldn't dare take her clothes off in front of me just to get her Status updated!"
After much cajoling and desperate restraining from Loki, Lefiya finally gave up her decision to cremate Leo on the spot, and left with a black look on her face.
Leo and Loki exchanged glances, watching Lefiya stagger off, and couldn't get a word out for a long while.
"That woman's definitely lost it."
Such was the verdict Leo delivered.
"That's the first time I've seen Lefiya like that too. Pushing that girl into that state, I'll give you credit for the talent." Loki said sourly to Leo. "And you, you've already had your Status updated, so what'd you come running back for all of a sudden?"
"Don't tell me you knew Lefiya was here and barged in on purpose to get an eyeful?"
Loki eyed Leo with a suspicious look.
"Who would've known she was here?" Leo said, his own face going dark. "It's this late at night. Good kids are all tucked into bed and asleep, you know?"
Leo had come to Loki to update his Status only after finishing dinner, then gone to the library, where he'd read the Grimoire and taken a nap.
That nap, while it hadn't carried Leo straight through to the next day, had carried him straight into the dead of night.
It was already nearly the small hours now. By all rights, the people of the Familia should have all gone back to their rooms to sleep.
After all, there was business to attend to the next day. Even with the expedition wrapped up, adventurers rarely stayed up late; they were used to rising early and working late, and anyone with plans to enter the Dungeon would generally set out the next day at the first faint light of dawn, getting in as early as possible, so they could kill more of the monsters that had freshly respawned, hadn't yet thinned out in number, and didn't have too many peers competing for them.
In light of all that, Leo really hadn't expected that someone would still be coming to Loki for a Status update at this hour.
He'd figured that at this time of night, there'd be at most Loki alone in the room, drinking herself silly.
"That's because you've got no idea how big a shock you gave the kid." Loki shot Leo a glance and went on, "These past few days, Lefiya's been coming back only after the dead of night every time."
At that, Leo started slightly.
"What's she been off doing?"
He asked the question in puzzlement.
"What else would she be doing? Going to the Dungeon, obviously!" Loki said as though it were the most natural thing. "You're already Lv.4. Even Lefiya's getting anxious by now."
"That girl doesn't want to be left far behind in your dust, and she sure doesn't want to keep going on like this, so any spare moment she gets these days she runs off to the Dungeon, sparring in some corner of the Upper Floor region with a pack of monsters that can't threaten her."
"If nothing's off, that girl's probably training her Concurrent Chanting."
Hearing Loki put it that way, Leo realized he really hadn't seen Lefiya in a while.
No, not just Lefiya. Including Raul and the others, it seemed he'd barely seen any of them lately.
Ais, Tiona, Tione, Bete, and so on, people he used to run into now and then, had all been vanishing without a trace these past days.
He'd been immersed in his own training too, sure, but it wasn't like he'd gone and holed up in some corner; more often than not he trained right out in the open in the courtyard. Even if he hadn't noticed them for a stretch, it shouldn't have come to never seeing anyone at all, should it?
"Figured it out, have you?" Seeing Leo wear a pensive look, Loki understood he'd already caught on that something was off, and grinned wide. "Lefiya and the rest, all of them, they've been goaded to no end by that inhuman growth speed of yours, and now they're throwing themselves into it harder and harder."
"The rank-and-file members are one thing, but old hands like Raul, the Lv.4s, now that they've been caught up to by you, every last one of them's striving away. Tiona's lot are even more terrified of getting overtaken by you. Except for Monsterphilia, when they were in the mood to go out and wander around, the rest of the time they're either handling the cleanup work from the expedition or down in the Dungeon grinding away."
"Even with things like that, you, well, you're still in the courtyard every single day working yourself to the bone studying and training. Anyone passing by who saw that would feel ashamed, wouldn't they, like they're not trying hard enough?"
Loki's half-smiling expression left Leo a little speechless.
"It's not like I'm trying to goad them on purpose."
Leo muttered.
"The goading you don't mean is the worst kind of all. Don't play dumb when you understand perfectly well, kid." Loki put her hands on her hips. "Out with it, what'd you come running to me for all of a sudden?"
"A Status update." Leo stopped thinking about other people and said it straight out. "Riveria gave me a Grimoire. I want to know whether I've learned a second Magic."
"A Grimoire?" Loki was startled at first, then sighed with feeling. "That really is splashing out. Looks like our mama-san cares an awful lot about her new student after all!"
As she spoke, Loki's interest was piqued too.
"Come on, come on, let me get a good look at whether you've learned a new Magic, you."
Loki dragged Leo into the God's Chamber, picked up the golden needle, pricked her finger, and squeezed out bright red blood.
Leo sat in front of Loki, took off his top, bared his back, and let Loki do her work.
Loki's work was soon done.
Leo Eligos
Lv.4
Strength: F364 Endurance: F322 Dexterity: S900 Agility: E417 Magic: G205 Mage: G Magic Attack: H Spirit Healing: I
Magic
Meteor Dance · Star attribute. · Extra Mind consumption can increase power. · Extra Mind consumption can add attacks. · Chant: Light of heaven, sword of stars.
Comet Chase · Flight magic. · Star attribute. · Continuous acceleration while active. · Continuous protection while active. · Chant: Race onward like a comet.
Skill
????
※ Unreadable.
Star Soul Eternal · Magic effect amplified. · Development Ability Mage effect amplified. · Basic ability Magic strongly enhanced.
A new Magic had, beyond any doubt, been born.
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