WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 545

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The Hardest Place to Flee Is the Bedroom

The regressor was asleep on top of me, dead to the world, as if the ground itself could open up and she wouldn't notice. That was no exaggeration, either, since her hammock had actually given out from under her. Caught off guard, I flinched on reflex, and the regressor scrunched her brow and let out a small moan.

"Mmnh..."

My first thought, plain and simple, was that I was done for. This volatile, unreasonable regressor would hack off your right arm without a second's hesitation, and waking up on top of someone wasn't going to change that.

Fairies were what you were supposed to find visiting in the night, not a killer who'd slice off a stranger's arm without blinking. How did this even happen? Why was there a bomb in my arms?

I glanced up carefully. The rope holding the hammock in place had gone slack, drooping loose. The camp had sat untended so long that the tension finally gave out, and with the regressor having climbed in right at that moment, it let go. Luckily it hadn't snapped clean through but slid, so she'd settled down without waking.

Rotten luck, honestly.

Right now, the regressor was a bomb. Wake her? She explodes. Leave her? She wakes up eventually, and then explodes anyway. Every possible ending had me getting blown apart, even though none of this was my fault.

But I was the Magician. No matter how bad things got, I was supposed to find my way out with style. I took stock of what I had to work with: a few minor spells, my body, and the hammock rope still holding the regressor up.

Right. That was it. A levitation trick.

Levitation acts mostly come down to thin thread. Whether the trick lands depends on how smoothly and naturally you move whatever's hanging from it.

I'd never lifted anyone over fifty kilograms before, but given how much stronger I'd gotten, maybe now I could.

Let's feel out the center of gravity. Her face was pressed against my chest, her body curled up like a shrimp. I pinned one side of the rope against the wall with my left foot, wrapped the other side with my right, and pulled. The hammock went a little taut.

I drew a careful breath and lifted the hammock rope, matching the balance.

"...!"

Even with everything I'd gained, hauling a human up through hammock tension was brutal. With my arms and legs pulling from both ends, it felt like being wrung out from the inside.

Still, the terror of dying does remarkable things for your strength. The regressor's hammock slowly rose.

Good. Lift her up just like this. Lock the rope to the wall with earth arts and alchemy, then slip out underneath.

Living as the Magician hadn't been entirely useless. I was pulling off this stunt without dropping the regressor by so much as a hair.

She rose about ten centimeters above me. Enough clearance. I fused the rope to the wall with alchemy, then started sliding out while keeping the other side steady. Once I was clear, I'd tie the rope off again and that would be that.

I was going to survive. I let myself feel the relief, just for a moment. And then, halfway out, I locked eyes with Azzy.

"Bork?"

Why are you over there watching me.

I froze like I'd been caught doing something wrong. Azzy opened her mouth, then closed it, and asked with total cheerfulness:

"You're up? You're up!"

"Shh. Can't you see what's happening? I'm up, so don't bark."

"Bork? That one's still sleeping! I'll wake her up real good!"

"Quiet! Don't light the fuse! Let her sleep!"

Of all the timing...! Move! I need to get out!

"Mmm..."

But I had overlooked one thing.

People move. When they move, their center of gravity shifts. When the center of gravity shifts on something balanced as tenuously as a thread, the whole thing flips.

The hammock flipped in an instant. The regressor, suspended in midair, experienced a sudden drop.

In that split second, she snapped her eyes open and swung Skywarbler.

The Heavenly Mirror prepares the right defense and the right counterattack at all times, in any situation. Even dead asleep, it moves fast and true toward any threat that comes near.

Without accounting for the fact that the one who had come near was the regressor herself.

Skywarbler went for my neck. If she had swung it consciously, I could have read it with mind reading and countered, but this was a strike carved into her body.

Mind reading can't catch it. Dodging or countering was next to impossible. All I could do was hope my regeneration held.

"Huh? Hughes?"

Right then. The regressor jolted awake and stopped herself just before the swing landed. Her balance broke in the same instant, the hammock lurched and turned over, and the world spun two or three times.

"Ah!"

The result was that the regressor and I ended up wrapped in the hammock together like a pair of pupae.

I had watched the whole sequence from start to finish, so I at least understood how it had gotten this tangled, but the regressor had just woken up knowing nothing, and she shouted:

"What-what is this! Why are you in my bed?!"

"My bed? That's my line! You're the one who fell into my bed!"

"What are you talking about! There's no way I wouldn't have noticed myself falling!"

"Exactly! And by the same logic, if I had crawled into your bed, there's no way you wouldn't have noticed! Not that I had any reason to crawl into your bed in the first place!"

"Then why are you here with me?!"

"That's what I want to know! How did you end up all the way over here without waking up once? If you'd woken up at any point, this whole mess wouldn't have happened!"

Thank everything that my neck was still attached. She had at least grown patient enough to ask questions before cutting. I was grateful, even if I was the one who had nearly been decapitated.

"Get off me first!"

The regressor reached out and swung Skywarbler. The rope sheared through with a clean slice, and the two of us dropped to the floor with a thud, still tangled in the hammock. The floor came up much sooner than she expected, and she blinked in surprise.

'Wait, we really are lower down? And where I was sleeping is higher up? What? So I actually did end up in Hughes's bed? Why? How?'

Stop asking why and get out fast if you're getting out! Otherwise..."Sounds like things got lively in here. You're up, then?"

Rashy shoved the door open and stopped dead in his tracks. In front of him were the two of us, tangled up together in the hammock, rolled into one heap. The regressor had been struggling to pull herself free, so she was pressed right against me.

Wow. From a third party's perspective, that really was something. Pretty much like getting caught in the middle of a secret affair.

Neither the regressor nor I could think of what to say. We sat there frozen. Rashy scratched his chin, looked away toward the entrance with an uncomfortable expression, and muttered to himself:

"My, my. It must have been cold last night."

Talking to the wall as though he hadn't seen a thing. Azzy barked blankly in response.

"Bork? It wasn't cold! If anything it was warm!"

Contrary to what I'd braced for, the regressor was quiet. She finished breakfast with a sulky look and pushed us to get moving without a word.

I laid out the evidence and the circumstances, and the regressor couldn't find a single hole in my account. She grudgingly admitted it had been an accident.

At the end of the day, it was nothing serious. Just a hammock that had slipped off the wall and dropped someone. Unpleasant, sure, but that was all, and once you moved past it there was no real problem.

'No, it doesn't make sense. I trained in the Heavenly Mirror. Even asleep, someone was right there next to me. How could I not know?'

The regressor, however, was seething with confusion and wounded pride. That earlier quiet had been the calm before the storm. I kept an eye on her and read her thoughts as we walked.

'Have I been spending too much time around him? But no companion I've ever had managed to get within range of the Heavenly Mirror before this... Was it because I was the one who moved toward him? Or is Hughes just too weak?'

I was the one who nearly got killed, and yet I was the one who had to defend myself. The misery of being the weaker party.

'It doesn't add up. It must be the blessing. Having the Holy Maiden's blessing made me let my guard down. Everything has been going so smoothly, so I relaxed...'

Then, mid-thought, the regressor seemed to notice something and tilted her head.

'...If everything is supposed to go smoothly, why did the hammock slip while I was asleep? That's not a good thing, is it?'

"Master."

"Yes, Rashy."

We were walking to give our legs a rest. Rashy fell in beside me, leaving some distance between us and the regressor, and lowered his voice to a murmur.

"I too had many difficult passages before love found its way. Differences of culture, custom, territorial behavior, physical conditions. My partner and I faced all manner of hardship and worked through it together, adjusting to each other as we went. It was possible because we both had our own abilities and our own resolve."

"That's very sudden. You're scaring me."

Rashy had clearly gotten something seriously wrong. He continued in a tone of genuine concern.

"Even so, that one is still young. The height and roughness of those passages are not yet known to them. A teacher worthy of the name would explain the difficulties first, before anything else. Especially when age, and well, everything else, are all working against you."

Somewhere in the time we'd been apart, something had happened to Rashy, and he was dispensing this advice with the gravity of a man who had lived through it. Deep wisdom drawn from a life well steeped... right.

"What are you talking about? Did you not hear what I said? Mr. Shei is the one who ended up in my bed. I didn't do anything. I was pinned there the whole time, groaning away until I finally woke up!"

It wasn't like I'd gone in there by choice. This was an accident that happened to me too. The regressor doesn't guard against me, sure, but she also doesn't let herself grow attached to anyone from a cycle she knows she'll have to leave behind. Come too close and you might catch a blade before she's even had a thought about it, exactly like this morning.

"So the feelings were one-sided on your end, then?"

"No, there aren't any feelings..."

The regressor was a woman, and she had no feelings for me. The problem was that she kept causing these misunderstandings, which made it nearly impossible to even say that out loud.

But why was that my concern? If she wanted to clear up the misunderstanding, she could do it herself. It had nothing to do with me.

"It's not exactly surprising, is it? I'm an ordinary person who likes women. Whatever she was thinking when she climbed in, the one who's more uncomfortable here is me."

"Hm. Is that so. The young one is having a hard time of it, aren't they."

"That's not what I said!"

The regressor had heard enough. She snapped and stepped toward us.

"It was an accident! The rope just slipped! It's nothing..."

But the question gnawing at her still hadn't let go. She'd been shouting at full force, then suddenly fell silent, caught by a thought that surfaced without warning, and sank into her own head.

'Why is something this trivial happening right now of all times...? What is it? What does it mean? How does this help anything?'

Lost in thought, she let her words trail off and started walking again, as if walking itself were the only purpose she had.

Come on. Give me something to work with. When you act like that...

"Hmm. I owe you an apology, Master. I did not expect the young one to take it so hard. You are the adult here, so please be considerate of their feelings."

Now I'm the strange one.

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