It was the kind of PTSD that sank all the way into your bones.
In Dust's eyes, Aqua's face, which had been fairly pretty a moment ago, suddenly began to warp and swell, until it perfectly overlapped with the giant Slime from his dream, the one with a huge beard and slime spraying from its mouth.
"That's the voice!!!"
Dust let out a scream ten times shriller than before, tears pouring down his face. "That's the voice that tormented me all night in my dream!! Aqua!! You vicious moron of a woman!! Give me back my pure first love!! I'm gonna shove your head into the guild toilet and let you experience what a real baptism is, aaaaargh!!!"
Dust completely gave up on Kōichi and Kazuma. Brandishing his stick, he charged at Aqua with the force of something bent on total destruction, like an Orc in heat.
"Waaaahhh! Don't come any closer! Help! Kōichi! Kazuma, you two heartless creeps! Why am I always the one who gets hurt?!"
Scared out of her wits, Aqua scrambled over the tables on hands and knees, knocking over who knew how many mugs as she bolted wildly around the guild with her head in her hands.
Dust chased after her without letting up, leaving chaos and a trail of furious shouting from the adventurers in his wake.
Kōichi and Kazuma climbed back to their feet and dusted themselves off.
The two exchanged a glance, let out long sighs of relief at the same time, then calmly walked over to Aqua's seat, picked up the fried chicken she had left unfinished, and settled in to leisurely watch this late-night chase through Axel.
The guild doors were smashed open amid Aqua's shrill screams and Dust's beastlike roars. One after the other, they charged into Axel's cold night, and soon vanished at the far end of the street.
The once-noisy tavern, after being hit by a brief human hurricane, fell into a strange silence for a moment.
Kōichi and Kazuma sat there in Aqua's former seats, looking perfectly at ease.
Kazuma even elegantly picked up the cheap ale and took a light sip, as if the one who had just barely escaped a life-and-death crisis hadn't been him at all.
"Phew... finally, some peace and quiet." Kazuma set down his mug and sighed in an utterly punchable tone. "Kōichi, that move where you redirected the disaster somewhere else really speaks to me. Though honestly, Aqua can run pretty fast. I've never seen her this motivated when I tell her to go lure monsters."
Kōichi grabbed a half-eaten fried drumstick Aqua had left behind and took an absent-minded bite. "Well, when it's a matter of whether you're about to get your head shoved into a toilet for a baptism, the potential of a person is always limitless, let alone a god. Still, Dust is running on a double berserk buff right now, shattered first love plus one-Eris foot-washer. With Aqua's pitiful stamina, she probably won't last much longer."
Kazuma's eyes lit up, like he'd just smelled a business opportunity. He leaned in toward Kōichi, lowered his voice, and broke into his signature creepy grin. "In that case, Kōichi, how about we make a bet? Let's bet on whether Aqua can escape Dust's pursuit alive, or at least in one piece, before sunrise."
Kōichi raised a brow and spat the chicken bone onto the plate. "Oh? Now that sounds interesting. What kind of bet?"
"I bet Aqua won't last half an hour!" Kazuma declared confidently, slapping the table. "Her IQ's way too low. She's definitely going to panic and run straight into a dead end, or try to brainwash Dust with her useless party tricks, and then get pinned to the ground and wrecked by him. As for the stakes... we bet every last coin we've got left in our pockets!"
Kōichi felt the pitiful five Eris in his pocket and let out a cold laugh. "Kazuma, did you forget you're broke too? Still, since you're that confident, I'll bet Aqua gets away. She's enough of a freak to gross out even Giant Toads. Even if Dust catches her, he'll probably end up getting his brain polluted in reverse by her stupidity."
Just as Kōichi and Kazuma were enthusiastically betting on their teammate's life, and dignity, without the slightest concern for the poor blue-haired Goddess sprinting through the freezing wind, a familiar voice drifted over from behind them.
"Excuse me... sorry to interrupt you two young masters while you're enjoying yourselves."
Kōichi and Kazuma turned around and saw Luna, the guild receptionist, standing behind them.
Her face, usually lit by a gentle smile, was now shrouded in a dense black aura, and in her hand she held a bill so long it nearly dragged on the floor.
"I really hate to interrupt your little bet, but as Aqua's teammates, shouldn't you settle the bill from earlier first?" Luna's smile turned extraordinarily gentle as she tapped the figures on the bill with a fingernail. "Three overturned tables, twelve chairs, twenty spilled mugs of ale, and the fried chicken Aqua ate without paying for... total, 158,000 Eris. So, how would you two like to pay. Cash or card?"
…
The lights of the Adventurers Guild gradually faded behind them. With Luna's soft, gentle, "Thank you, we can finally replace them now," ringing in their ears, Kōichi and Kazuma hobbled along arm in arm toward the home that smelled of hay and horse dung.
"Damn it... 158,000 Eris! Do you know how many meals of fried chicken that is? How many bottles of good booze?!" Kazuma kicked a pebble off the roadside, only to yank the muscles around his crotch from that earlier sliding tackle because he put too much force into it, making him bare his teeth in pain. "Kōichi, I've decided. When Aqua gets back, I'm hanging her from the stable beam and whipping her ass with hay! It's all because of her that our graduation trip turned into debt hell!"
Kōichi was gloomily patting the dust off his uniform. That once-smart Imperial Guard uniform now looked like it had been torn apart by a pack of wild dogs.
"Give it a rest, Kazuma. With Aqua's divinely thick skin, even if you hung her up, she'd just cry that she was hungry and steal the last little bit of snacks you had hidden away." Kōichi sighed and pushed open the stable's creaking wooden door. "The important thing right now is that thirty-million check. If the manager of the Ruby Salon really tries to verify it with the Axis Empire, then paying off debt will be the least of our problems. We'll probably end up wanted across the whole city."
Kazuma shuddered and quickly stuffed that torn-off piece of garter stocking deep into the haystack to hide it. "Don't say that, Kōichi. As long as we don't say anything, and Aqua doesn't say anything, who's going to know it's fake? From now on, if we just kill a few more frogs, we'll still be Axel's most promising adventurers... probably."
The two lay side by side on the hay, staring up at the drafty roof, and sank into a long silence.
Time passed second by second. At around two in the morning, an extremely faint, utterly miserable scratching sound came from outside the stable door.
"Scritch... scritch..."
Kōichi and Kazuma both sat up at once, a flicker of alertness flashing through their eyes.
The door slowly opened a crack, and a blue, soaking-wet object giving off an indescribable smell wriggled its way inside.
It was Aqua.
Her once-gorgeous dress had been reduced to strips of rag hanging from her body. The blue hair she took such pride in was now a complete bird's nest, with a few strands of unknown waterweed hanging from it.
Worst of all, her face was streaked with tears and mud, and the whole of her looked like a stray cat that had just crawled out of a sewer.
"Ugh... uwaaahhhh! Kōichi! Kazuma!!"
The moment Aqua saw the two of them, the fear she had been suppressing all night finally exploded.
She threw herself forward and grabbed both their legs, bawling so hard it shook the heavens. "That lunatic Dust! He really tried to shove me into the toilet! If I hadn't thought fast and used Create Water to flood the entire guild bathroom so I could escape in the chaos, you two would be fishing your Goddess out of the cesspit right now! Uwaaah... I'm so scared, so hungry, and so cold!!"
Kōichi shoved her mud-soaked head away in disgust. "Get away from me! What is that smell on you? And wait, did you just say you... flooded the guild bathroom?"
Kazuma's face instantly turned blacker than the bottom of a pot. "Kōichi, I don't think we need to wait until tomorrow. Right now, immediately, this instant... we pack up and run. The repair bill for the guild bathroom is probably going to be more than ten times that 158,000 Eris!!"