Late at night, in Room 3 of the "Calm Waters" inn, moonlight spilled through the thin curtains and across the wooden floor.
The room was so quiet that Wiz's steady breathing was the only sound. The former Demon King's General was wrapped up like a giant silkworm cocoon on the other bed, sleeping soundly while occasionally mumbling vague dream-talk about interest rates or expired magical items.
On the other bed, however, the atmosphere was stretched to the breaking point.
Kōichi lay flat on one side, his body as stiff as a slab of aged cured meat freshly dug out of a cellar.
To his right stood the "Wall of Sighs," a barrier made from two long pillows stacked together. And on the other side of that wall lay the source of his inevitable insomnia tonight.
Darkness, who usually wore heavy armor and looked gallant, and perverted, was lying on her side beyond the pile of pillows.
She had changed into a thin silk nightgown. Since the inn's sizes clearly had not accounted for bodies outside Crimson Demon Clan standards, the fabric was stretched almost transparent in certain places, the edges pressing tightly into her skin and outlining curves that made his blood run hot.
(...This isn't just against the rules. This is a crime. A cruel public execution of my sanity!)
Kōichi screamed inwardly, his eyes locked onto the wood grain in the ceiling as he tried to distract himself by counting the patterns.
To his surprise, Darkness, who usually got excited enough to roll around on the floor at the mere mention of humiliation or rough treatment, was strangely quiet right now.
From the other side of the pillow pile came faint, slightly hurried breathing.
Kōichi stole a glance from the corner of his eye and saw Darkness clutching the edge of the blanket, her whole body curled into a tight ball.
That pretty face of hers, which could normally discuss perverted tastes in public without changing expression, was now so red it looked ready to bleed. Even the tips of her ears were tinted an enticing pink.
"...K-Kōichi." Darkness's voice was as faint as a mosquito, carrying a shyness and tremor he had never heard from her before. "Are... are you asleep?"
"The only people who could sleep in this situation are probably that mentally challenged Goddess next door or the Lich over here," Kōichi answered irritably, his voice a little hoarse.
"...I-I'm sorry." Darkness shrank deeper under the blanket, her chest rising and falling even more sharply from nerves. "I've... I've imagined this kind of scene countless times, being forcibly taken by a sadistic team leader. I even prepared lines for begging for mercy... But actually lying in the same bed as you, feeling your body heat and your breathing... I-I realized my body is really trembling..."
"Of course it is! That was a fantasy. This is reality!" Kōichi rolled over, facing the pillow wall. "Real men don't just drool like the monsters in your imagination. You're scared now, aren't you? Then close your eyes and go to sleep. Otherwise, I really am going to climb over this wall."
"!" Darkness shivered like a startled fawn, but immediately after, a conflicted light flashed in her damp eyes, mingling fear with anticipation.
"...Scared... Yes, I'm scared." Darkness turned her head and looked at Kōichi through the pillows, her gaze filled with an almost masochistic honesty. "But this fear, so real it makes my fingertips go numb... feels heavier than every fantasy I've had over the past twenty years... Kōichi, if it were you... if it were you, even if you really crossed over, I think... I think I would just cry and accept it..."
After saying that, Darkness seemed to lose all her strength. She squeezed her eyes shut, her long lashes trembling uneasily, looking as if she were offering herself up while being scared out of her mind.
Kōichi looked at that exquisite face so close to him, as beautiful as a work of art and yet written all over with the words "please bully me," then at the voluptuous body rising and falling under the moonlight. A rush of heat shot straight to his head.
(Calm down, Kōichi! She's a noble! She's a comrade! She's Chris's friend! If you actually do anything, Kazuma will absolutely use Lurk to sneak up behind you and stab you tomorrow morning!)
Just as Kōichi's reason and instincts were tearing each other apart, an extremely loud, heavy thud came from the next room. Immediately after came Aqua's piercing wail.
"Waaahhhhh! A cockroach! There's a flying cockroach! Kōichi! Kazuma! Come save me!"
Then came a frantic pounding against the door. Clearly, a certain Goddess was trying to demolish the wall between the two rooms by force.
The atmosphere, which had been so suggestive it was about to explode, was blown clean away in an instant by Aqua's idiot-scented scream.
"...That moron." Kōichi covered his face in agony and let out a deep sigh. Every last impulse drained into helplessness.
Darkness seemed to come back to her senses as well, collapsing weakly onto the pillow. A trace of regret flashed through her eyes, but there was even more relief, as if she had survived a disaster.
"...Pfft, hehe." Darkness suddenly laughed softly. "My apologies, Kōichi. It seems even the gods do not intend to let things go smoothly for us tonight."
"I'd rather not have gods like that." Kōichi sat up irritably, glancing at Wiz still wriggling under the blanket and then at the continuing pounding from next door. "All right, stop being horny, Darkness. Go put some clothes on. If that moron barges in and sees us like this, by tomorrow the whole city will be talking about an Eris cultist and a black-haired Adventurer performing a cult ritual at a hot spring inn."
With a tremendous crash that shook the entire inn, the not particularly sturdy wooden partition between Rooms 3 and 4 collapsed under Aqua's so-called "Divine Shatter," which was in truth nothing more than "idiotic brute force."
Wood chips and dust filled the air as the idiot Goddess in her light, fluttery blue dress crawled through the hole, clutching a soaked pillow with tears all over her face.
But when her big, clear eyes, which obviously held very little intelligence, took in the scene before her, time seemed to freeze.
Under the moonlight, Kōichi was half-sitting on the bed, while Darkness, dressed in a semi-transparent silk nightgown and flushed a dangerous red all over, was curled up in an extremely suggestive posture on the other side of the pillow wall.
Not only were they sharing a bed, the atmosphere had clearly reached the edge of something forbidden, only one step from crossing the line.
"...Waaahhhhh! I knew it! I knew it!" Aqua froze for two seconds, then let out a scream a hundred times more miserable than the one she had made after seeing the cockroach. She pointed at Kōichi, her finger trembling like it was plucking cotton. "Kōichi! You hopeless sadist! Pervert! Public enemy of the Axis Order! While this Goddess was fighting an evil flying monster, a cockroach, next door, you were in here performing this immoral, unnatural, possibly world-destroying obscene ritual with this big-breasted perverted Knight!"
"Who's performing an obscene ritual?! Is your brain full of sparkling wine?!" The veins in Kōichi's temples throbbed so hard they nearly burst. He instinctively grabbed a nearby pillow to shield his chest, although Darkness was the one who actually needed covering. "And that was a wall! You tore down a wall! Are you the reincarnation of a demolition crew?!"
"I'm not listening, I'm not listening! You must have been brainwashed by Darkness's evil aura! Waaah, this is horrible. This Party has completely fallen!" As Aqua babbled nonsense, she dove like a drowning person into Wiz's arms. Wiz had only just been woken up and was still dazed. "Wiz! Save me! Kōichi is turning into an Orc! The look he gave me just now was so vicious, it was like he wanted to sell me to a slave trader for drinking money!"
"A-Aqua-sama... please calm down..." Wiz was nearly knocked breathless by the impact. Immediately afterward, Aqua's tears, packed with high-density sacred energy, began pouring down over Wiz like a fountain.
"!! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts! Aqua-sama! Your tears! Your tears are purifying me!" Wiz wailed. Because Aqua was so worked up, the purifying power in her tears was comparable to concentrated sulfuric acid. The instant they touched Wiz, her body started turning transparent, with wisps of white smoke rising from her. "Help... Kōichi-san... I'm disappearing... I'm turning into air..."
Kōichi looked at Wiz, whom Aqua was tormenting to the point of practically ascending to heaven, then at Darkness beside him, who had been caught in the act by Aqua and had slipped into some even higher level of delusion, now hugging the blanket while making strange giggling noises. Finally, he thought back to that hard-won ambiguous atmosphere from moments ago, one that might have allowed him to say goodbye to his virginity, probably.
In that instant, something inside Kōichi snapped completely.
He stood up expressionlessly, radiating a sadistic aura that seemed to drop the room temperature by five degrees.
He strode up behind Aqua, who was clinging to Wiz and rubbing against her like mad, then grabbed Aqua firmly by the back of the collar as if picking up a quacking duck.
"Huh? K-Kōichi? What are you doing? Your eyes are terrifying! I'm a Goddess, you know! The one who bestowed a blessing on you. Waaah!"
Kōichi ignored Aqua's struggles completely. Carrying the idiot Goddess by the collar, he headed straight for the door to the next room. Since the wall was already open, he simply went through the hole.
He kicked open the door of the neighboring room, where the two PTSD patients were staying. At that moment, Kazuma and Dust were huddled back-to-back under the blankets, shaking from the sound of the wall being demolished.