"Ooooh! I can feel it! My blood is pumping like crazy! It's almost breaking the scale!" Kazuma was so excited he nearly started rolling around in the water, but then he suddenly realized something and whipped his head toward Kōichi. "Kōichi! As your brother, I'll let you take the lesson on the left first. The right side is mine! You are absolutely not allowed to steal my class!"
"At a time like this, why are you even dividing left and right? We should improve together!" Kōichi retorted with righteous conviction, while naturally edging a little closer to sensei and savoring that dreamlike sensation.
Out in the void, the succubus in charge of maintaining the dream was staring at the monitor panel in complete shock.
The gauge labeled "spiritual energy output" was skyrocketing at a thoroughly unscientific rate, nearly blasting straight past the red line.
"Th-these two... are they really human?" The succubus wiped the sweat from the tip of her nose, a faint blush spreading across her face. "This level of desire is even more outrageous than the Demon King's generals! And they've actually started discussing mechanics and biology inside the dream... I have no idea what they're talking about, but it somehow sounds incredibly advanced. Oh wow, this kind of high-quality spiritual energy. Tonight's a massive haul!"
Inside the dream, the tutoring session had reached white-hot intensity.
"Sensei! About gravitational acceleration, if I fall like this, will you catch me?" Kazuma toppled toward her like a giant spoiled baby acting cute.
"Kazuma, that trick is way too old-fashioned!" Kōichi refused to be outdone. Pointing at a copy of Basics of Magic Theory floating on the water, he said, "Sensei, the print in this book is too small. I can't read it clearly. Could you come a little closer... a little closer... and point it out for me?"
Hatano-sensei displayed astonishing tolerance. Like a true saint, she stood at the boundary between hot spring and classroom, patiently indulging the endless unreasonable demands of her two "bad students."
Cherry blossom petals landed in her hair. Droplets of water danced along her collarbone. The whole dream space grew more and more stable under the pressure of the two men's excitement, until even the birdsong outside the window became sharp and clear.
"Kōichi..." Kazuma took a break from his studies just long enough to flash him a thumbs-up. "You're the wizard with the greatest understanding of art I've ever met in my life. If anyone dares call you a sadist again, I'll be the first to hit them for it!"
"Likewise, Kazuma. That spirit of yours, sacrificing your dignity for the sake of learning, deserves to be recorded in Axel's history." Kōichi raised his cup and clinked it against Kazuma's right in front of sensei. "To Hatano-sensei. Cheers!"
"Cheers!"
Within this absurd yet perfect dream, the two of them completely let themselves go, throwing all their real-world worries, the goddess's idiocy, and the threat of monsters straight out of their minds.
At this moment, they were not heroes saving the world. They were simply two pure gentlemen, searching for comfort in the middle of the night.
But just as they were about to welcome the final high point of the lesson, a faint ripple suddenly spread across the sky of the dream.
It was a deeply out-of-place power, filled with pure and holy energy, trying to force its way into this pink-hued space from the outside...
The mist over the hot spring still drifted softly, but somehow, mixed into the originally sweet fragrance was the scent of... cheap sparkling wine.
Kōichi had his eyes closed, feeling Hatano-sensei's soft fingertips glide across his cheek like water, his heart filled with a peace he had never known before.
"Kōichi-san... you really... have worked so hard..."
Sensei's voice was soft as a feather.
Then, in the very next second, that gentle voice shot up by eight octaves and turned into a shrill, tearful scream.
"Then hurry up and get up and buy me some booze already! I'm out of money! The taverns in Axel raised their prices again. Uwaaaaaah!"
Kōichi's eyes snapped open, and the sight before him nearly made his sanity plummet on the spot.
The mature, composed Hatano-sensei in the dark blue yukata still retained her perfect figure from the neck down, but her face was flickering wildly like a broken old television.
One second it was sensei's gentle, maternal smile. The next, it turned into that blue-haired idiot goddess Aqua, with hair hanging all the way to her ankles, crying with tears and snot running down her face, and even hiccuping out drunken burps.
"Sensei...?" Kōichi called out tentatively.
"Yes, I'm right here... God Blow.!!!"
With that sharp cry, the teacher's delicate hand, which had been about to massage Kōichi, suddenly turned into a divine fist blazing with holy light. It swept past Kōichi's ear and smashed the blackboard behind him into dust!
"Waaaaah! Help! Blasphemy! This is blasphemy against art!" Kazuma's miserable scream rang out from the side.
Kōichi turned his head and saw that Kazuma had clearly suffered an even greater shock.
He had just been about to accept sensei's riding-crop punishment when, in an instant, the riding crop in her hand turned into a giant folding fan. She started wildly smacking Kazuma over the head with it while cackling in Aqua's signature voice. "Ku-ku-ku... Kazuma the shut-in NEET is fantasizing about dirty stuff in his dreams? That's so gross! Behold my Hanafubuki!"
In the dream, Hatano-sensei suddenly pulled out two folding fans from her yukata sleeves and began performing a spectacularly useless artistic routine right there in the hot spring.
Water splashed all over Kazuma's face, while her own face kept flickering back and forth at sixty frames per second between peerless beauty and Aqua's idiotic expression.
"Kōichi! Do something. Hurry!" Kazuma shouted while covering his eyes and dodging the folding fans' physical attacks. "My brain's going to fry! What kind of sadistic abomination is this, a mix between a mature older woman and an idiot stalker?! This isn't healing, it's mental contamination!"
Kōichi gritted his teeth. He could feel Aqua's magic in the real world crashing into this dream like a tidal wave.
"Damn it... that bargain-bin goddess must be outside getting drunk and firing off skills at random!" Kōichi roared into the void. "Succubus! Hey, Succubus-san! This is not what we agreed on! Does this Hatano-Aqua crossover version cost extra or what? Cut out the blue part already!"
The succubus's tearful voice sounded in both their minds. "I can't! That priest's holy power is too pure, she's literally purifying my dream space! If this keeps going, all of sensei's data will be overwritten by Aqua! And then... then your dream will turn into doing homework with Aqua in a hot spring!"
"Who the hell would stay in a nightmare like that?!"
Kōichi and Kazuma howled in despair in perfect unison.
Just as the two of them were about to be driven insane by Aqua's face, flashing with the glow of wisdom, the succubus's nearly collapsed voice rang out again from the depths of their consciousness, filled with the resolve of someone marching to her death.
"You two, listen carefully! I'm giving up my year-end bonuses for the next three years. I'm burning my succubus soul right now to forcibly reinforce this dream for you! But that priest's power is just too unreasonable... I can only keep this up for ten more minutes! Ten minutes, that's all!"
With one final roar, the succubus shouted, "Ignore the flickering blue hair! Just think of it as some kind of special... special mosaic or filter! Hurry! Seize these last ten minutes, bought with money and soul!"
As her words fell, the dream space, which had been on the verge of collapsing into an Axis Cult sermon hall, suddenly shuddered.
Although Hatano-sensei's face was still flickering every second, and although she occasionally blurted out things like "Kazuma, you NEET," under the succubus's forceful correction, her body movements returned to that intensely alluring tutoring mode.
Kōichi and Kazuma exchanged a look. At the same time, a sharp light of resolve burst into both their eyes.
"Kazuma! There's no time to complain!" Kōichi wiped the holy water off his face, which was actually just hot spring water, and let out a soul-rending roar. "Ten minutes! This is our last stand as men! Even if sensei turns into a giant cabbage in the next second, I'm finishing every lesson in these ten minutes!"
"Ooooh! I get it, brother!" Kazuma fired up as well. He clamped his eyes shut and relied only on touch and that faint trace of uncorrupted fragrance to guide himself. "As long as I don't look at her face, she's the perfect sensei! As long as I don't listen to her voice, she's the incarnation of salvation! Charge—!!!"