**Day 18 – Night – Inn – White Weirdo Pervert – Girls' Room**
At the inn we took five four-person rooms and one single room.
The single room went to Haruka-kun.
The girls were in four-person rooms partly to save money, but mostly for safety.
Once we got used to things we could switch to pairs, but when something happened, four people felt necessary.
Our goal was for everyone to learn Presence Detection and Search, but right now only half of us had one or the other, and only four had both.
No, that was plenty.
We'd only been practicing for a week. Most people who already had the skills could barely use them before, but now we could take turns keeping watch.
The only weird one was that someone who went "Ah, got it" and kept popping them like it was nothing.
Plus, he looked happier when he caught fish…
The person who said stuff like "I thought I could fly?" or "I didn't get Flight" was the strange one. Everyone else was working hard.
And today, even though it was only half a day, we split up and gathered a lot of information. The girls' chatting ability brought in quite a bit.
We isolated the culprit who suddenly terrified the entire guild and left everyone unable to speak.
In the middle of it we had to call over the person whose chatting ability had destructive power, pluck him out, and redo the explanations.
We made the person who turned the special magic stone exchange counter into a panic sit in seiza.
There were all kinds of troubles, but the cause of the troubles wasn't reflecting at all… Still, we organized the questions in advance and split the work among twenty people, so I think we gathered most of the information we wanted.
Both the good news and the bad news.
The good news was that this town seemed relatively safe.
Because Oda-kun and the others apparently appeared here regularly.
Oda-kun and the others had an instinct to stay away from anything dangerous or suspicious.
The fact that it was regular meant they were either traveling between towns or had a base nearby.
With this, Shimazaki-san and the others should finally be able to meet them. Shimazaki-san and her group had really changed—so much that everyone was shocked.
But after talking properly, we understood.
The current Shimazaki-san and the others were the real ones.
They must have gone through so many awful and painful things. That's why they were always so aggressive, exclusive, and acted tough.
They put up a front to protect themselves. They were scared.
But in a world like this, putting up a front didn't get anyone to help you. Even so, they couldn't show weakness.
And so they had no allies.
In the forest,
with monsters around,
the boys went crazy,
and we… abandoned them.
They were going to die. They thought they would die soon…
And the ones who had been saving them were
Oda-kun and the others, the very people they had treated so badly.
Before they knew it, they had become the ones doing the awful and painful things,
and the ones they had treated so badly were Oda-kun and the others.
They were nearly killed, forced to flee, and ended up running away with no one to help them.
That's why they wanted to apologize before they died.
Then they also wanted to say thank you before they died.
We… didn't believe them.
Even after hearing Shimazaki-san and the others' words,
they still apologized to us,
then disappeared into the forest—the forest where Oda-kun and the others had gone… and vanished.
If things had gone normally, they really would have disappeared in that forest…
Five girls who had never fought and were still level 1… would have vanished.
No one would have been saved.
Everyone had closed off their hearts.
And we would have vanished in the forest too.
But the future where no one should have been saved was massacred.
The death that took the form of monsters was slaughtered.
Shimazaki-san and the others.
And us too.
Were we helped? Were we saved? No, that was trampling.
Our end,
our despair,
our death
was trampled.
Right in front of us.
With a "What are you doing in a place like this?"
Death? Just trample it.
Despair? Just beat it to death.
The end? Just stretch it out and it becomes eternity…
No one thought something like that was possible.
Everyone thought that.
We thought that.
But right in front of us,
as if it were the most natural thing,
as if it were normal,
he showed us.
He did it.
He made us watch.
He proved that saying it was impossible was just an excuse.
Our resignation was massacred by Haruka-kun.
Before we knew it, we had become able to laugh.
We had become able to talk about tomorrow.
We had become able to think about fun things.
Because any tragedy would just get beaten to death anyway.
Any dead-end would just get blown apart.
"If you kill it, you can do it."
Everyone froze.
So did I.
But he would just kill it.
That was Haruka-kun.
Finally, Shimazaki-san and the others would be able to meet Oda-kun.
But Haruka-kun would disappear.
If the end could be stretched into eternity,
then our parting with Haruka-kun could just be trampled by us.
We had done it plenty of times ourselves. We won't let anyone complain.
And the bad news was… going to be trampled