Chapter 72: A Perfectly Normal Snack (By Local Standards)

All the girls were at the table.

As was her habit, Freya sat at the far end, watching everyone while tapping a finger against the wood, letting the silence settle with carefully calculated slowness. Her expression was neither grave nor cheerful, simply neutral, moving from one of them to the next.

Naïa straightened a little in her chair. Laïa stopped swinging her legs. Mei looked down at her knees entirely.

Kaguya, meanwhile, was still smiling, both hands folded neatly in front of her.

And Aria stood behind her mistress, perfectly upright, giving nothing away.

Everyone was waiting on Freya’s words, and Freya was deliberately saying nothing at all, purely to draw the moment out.

Does it give me something, toying with everyone like this every single time? Yes.

Am I ashamed of it? Absolutely not.

She eventually caught Aria’s eye, and Aria raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, with that small tilt of the head that meant are you planning to keep them waiting much longer, madam?

Freya answered with a flutter of her lashes that very clearly meant a little longer, yes.

Then, after a moment more, she dropped the act and returned to her warm smile.

"Snack time, girls?"

"Yaaay~!"

Laïa was up before the sentence was even finished, already standing on her chair with both arms in the air, singing something about how madam was the kindest, the prettiest, and above all had frozen mangoes.

It should be said that these snacks were among the most extravagant imaginable, featuring delicacies from every corner of the planet, all of which she’d been enjoying daily for two weeks.

More than enough to never leave her wanting, and that was putting it lightly.

"Get down from there, I’ve told you a thousand times to behave yourself in front of madam!"

And Naïa punctuated the sentence with a small smack on the leg, entirely without force but with thoroughly established authority, which brought the little one back down rubbing her thigh and still humming under her breath.

The rest unfolded in perfectly ordinary chaos.

Freya opened the back of the room, a stone door Mei had carved with fruit and interlacing branches, and a wave of cold rolled through the entire hall. Behind it was their cold room, dug out by her mining Mycofoxes and packed with enormous blocks of ice bought from SkyStrategist with her surplus mana, which had incidentally made the other Dungeon Lord considerably richer in the process.

And laid out on top of them was very nearly everything this world had to offer. Frozen mangoes, moonberries, mist pears that steamed the second you took them out, sealed jugs of juice in every color, game hanging from braided silk cords, rows of fish coated in frost...

Mei carried absolutely everything, refusing to leave any of it to the others while stammering that it was faster this way. Laïa managed to disappear inside before being extracted by the collar with an entire mango already in her mouth. And Kaguya stood rooted in front of the mist pears, eyes wide, explaining that her mother used to tell her about them when she was little and she’d never once gotten to taste one.

And so a genuine feast began.

Laïa had already abandoned all restraint, accompanied for once by a second person with no more of it than she had, the two of them eating at precisely the same speed, which the little one appeared to interpret as a personal challenge rather than a coincidence.

Mei, for her part, was cutting everything into minuscule pieces and turning red whenever anyone looked her way, which of course did not escape Kaguya.

"Hey, big girl, you’re barely eating anything!"

"M-me?! I— I do eat! I eat a lot! Well... not a lot... normally... um..."

"She eats like four people!" Laïa announced with her mouth full, delighted to be contributing.

"LAÏA!"

And Naïa landed another smack, on the head this time, without even needing to turn her own.

Aria hadn’t taken anything at all and remained standing behind her mistress, simply refilling her glass the moment it dipped below halfway, with timing worthy of a maid.

They ate like that for a good long while, until Freya finished a mouthful of her purple nectarine juice and set the glass down.

It was refilled within the second.

She then set her elbows on the table, laced her fingers together, rested her face against one hand, and asked with a smile of entirely feigned innocence.

"So then, Kaguya. Why exactly did you want to marry me?"

Laïa choked on the fruit she was in the middle of devouring.

"Koff... koff..."

Naïa patted her back without once looking away from Kaguya, and every single gaze at the table converged on the same spot.

Kaguya answered without a moment’s hesitation, mouth still half full.

"My father always told me to marry someone strong."

That damned father again! Could he not simply have told her to marry someone she LOVED?!

And it was on that thought that she realized something.

Hold on. If she has power on Aria’s level, or even a little below it...

Wasn’t that quite simply a scheme to ensure his darling daughter never married anyone in her entire life?!

Maybe the man was just an overprotective dad?

Returning to the conversation, Freya raised an eyebrow to indicate she still wasn’t following the reasoning.

So Kaguya went on.

"So when I fought Aria to a draw for the very first time, I knew I’d finally found the love of my life~"

She was clutching her chest as she said it, eyes lifted toward the ceiling, as though recalling a beautiful and distant memory.

So she really is as strong as Aria after all...

"Aaaah... she was so beautiful and so strong~"

Freya’s smile stiffened ever so slightly, and behind her, the jug stopped mid-pour.

"Hmmm... hmmm..."

She cleared her throat to bring the dragon back to the conversation.

Does she have the faintest idea what she’s doing, talking about Aria like that in front of me? Or is she somehow even more naive than Medor?!

"That still doesn’t explain why me."

"But it’s obvious, surely!"

Kaguya set down her glass and leaned forward, with the genuinely delighted air of someone finally getting to explain something self-evident.

"If you’re Aria’s boss, then you must be even stronger than she is, which makes you even more marriable~!"

Silence fell over the table.

Kaguya took advantage of it, appearing to think for a moment, then added.

"Isn’t that just common sense? Are you all this strange up on the surface?"

"We’re in a madhouse..." Freya muttered.

"Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying!"

At those words, Freya tipped slowly backward in her chair, until the frame creaked and only two legs were still touching the floor.

She stayed there, head fully tilted back, eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling without looking at anything at all.

Then both her hands came up, fingers together, pressing flat against her face over her nose and mouth. They stayed there a moment, motionless, before sliding very slowly downward, dragging the skin of her cheeks along the way, until they dropped off entirely at her sides.

A long breath escaped between her fingers before they reached the bottom.

Behind her, Aria leaned in just far enough to murmur in her ear, in a perfectly level tone.

"Shall I intervene, madam?"

"...No, it should be fine for now."

"Very good, madam."

And at the other end of the table, entirely oblivious to all of it, Kaguya had just taken the last mist pear off Laïa’s plate.

Which immediately triggered a diplomatic incident between Freya’s dungeon, a dungeon which still didn’t have a name incidentally, and the firstborn and therefore presumably the heir of Nymeria.

What did I do to deserve this?

...

No! Pull yourself together, Freya! Two weeks of letting yourself go, letting everything slide, and here’s where it gets you!

She stood up all at once, her chair scraping backward with a loud screech, and brought both hands down flat on the table.

Everyone went quiet at once and turned toward her.

Laïa put the pear down. Kaguya put hers down too. Naïa halted her own hand halfway.

"Right. We’ve enjoyed ourselves enough, a little seriousness now!"

Kaguya spoke up anyway, absolutely delighted.

"There! There! That’s exactly what I was talking about! Just look at that aura, it silences everyone in the room!"

"Not thoroughly enough, from where I’m standing..."

She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long breath, once and for all.

"Right. Listen to me carefully, Kaguya. We are not getting engaged, still less married, and we will not be having that sort of relationship either. I already love Aria, and she’s more than enough for me."

"...But—"

"No! No buts! Hear me out to the end."

She raised a hand to cut off any attempt at a reply.

"If you want, you can stay here with us from time to time. Or honestly, do whatever you like."

After all, if Aria brought her here despite her marital ambitions, there has to be some use to all this. And that use has to outweigh Aria’s jealousy, which is saying something.

"Speaking of which. Your father and your mother, could I meet them?"

"They’re dead."

"I see... You have my sympathies."

"Why?"

She had tilted her head to one side, one finger against her lip to underline her confusion, looking sincerely lost.

"It’s... it’s a courtesy. A way of showing compassion, where I’m from."

The dragon tilted her head further still, until her horns were almost horizontal, her confusion having visibly doubled rather than cleared up.

"...Never mind."

Freya sank back against her chair, deciding it was probably best to return to the original subject before this one wandered off any further.

Except Kaguya wasn’t finished.

She kept thinking it over in her corner, eyes turned toward the ceiling, while Freya waited patiently for the answer that would finally close the matter.

Then she struck her fist into the palm of her other hand, with the expression of someone who’d just had a stroke of genius.

Which Freya very much doubted, given an intellectual age she placed somewhere around Laïa’s.

"My father also said that if the person didn’t want to marry me, I could call them Boss or Big Brother!"

Aaaah... No comment.

"Perfect! That settles it! I’ll be calling you Big Sister from now on!"

"Me too? Me too? Can I?" Laïa asked immediately, sitting bolt upright.

"Yes, you can, Laïa..."

"Yay~~!"

And the two girls instantly became the best of friends, high-fiving each other before starting to dance together around the table.

Then the air changed.

A dark wave spread slowly out from behind Freya, without any weight to it at all, nothing like the crushing pressure she’d unleashed on the village. Simply an intent. Clean, cold, and thoroughly murderous.

It moved through the whole room and traveled up every spine present.

"...Eeeeek!"

The two girls froze mid-dance, clinging to one another.

"I believe I heard madam say she wanted a little seriousness," Aria said simply, without raising her voice half a note.

And the two girls, heads lowered, returned to their seats without another word.

Freya turned her head slightly toward her and gave her a look that said, with perfect clarity, this is exactly why I missed you so much.

Aria raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, with that same small tilt of the head as before, which without a shred of doubt meant am I not the best, madam?

So Freya let her gaze linger a second too long, a smile creeping up at the corner of her lips, and her eyes replied with something along the lines of you are the best, yes, and I fully intend to prove it to you the moment we get a bit of free time~~

To which Aria responded by lowering her eyelids, very slowly, without ever letting her smile drop.

And while the two women exchanged looks like this, which had become for them an entirely new means of communication bordering on telepathy, every other girl in the room, without exception, simply saw two women openly flirting in front of them without the slightest shame.