"Lindy... you're completely exhausted. What happened to you?"
Seeing Lindy lying on the living room sofa without so much as a twitch, Anne spoke in an exasperated tone.
Anne herself should have been dealing with enough muscle soreness to make moving somewhat difficult, but even so, she could still get around normally for now.
That was precisely why she had been able to clean the Fusetsu hideout.
Yet Lindy appeared even more utterly drained than Anne.
As an adventurer, Lindy should have trained her body far more than Anne had. Was it any wonder Anne found herself thinking, Why?
"Lindy-neechan had a mock battle with Rei-niichan, you know. I'm so jealous," Camila said, looking every bit as envious as his words suggested.
While Rei and Lindy were having their mock battle, Camila had been fast asleep.
Thanks to that, he hadn't been able to watch—which was probably what frustrated him.
Or perhaps he had wanted to fight Rei himself.
"Lindy wanted to get stronger to protect you and the others. Keep that in mind."
"That's..."
Anne had been about to scold Lindy, demanding to know what she was doing in this state, but after hearing Rei's words, even she couldn't bring herself to lecture her so carelessly.
If she was told that Lindy had pushed herself this far entirely for Anne's sake, then she felt gratitude rather than any urge to scold. She wouldn't scold her, but...
"But Rei-san, is it really possible to get dramatically stronger from just one mock battle?"
She asked Rei this while looking at the utterly exhausted Lindy.
"I wouldn't say it's impossible. It's entirely within the realm of possibility. Of course, it's meaningless unless the foundation of her strength is solid."
There are those who steadily train their basic abilities but can't utilize them effectively in practice.
For such people, it isn't uncommon for abilities honed through actual combat to finally manifest—like a flower blooming from a bud, or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis—allowing them to finally wield the power they've built.
(That said, if you asked me whether Lindy fell into that category, I couldn't honestly nod and say yes.)
Among the mock battles Rei had conducted, it was undeniable that Lindy had improved her actual ability.
During the fight, she had closed the gaps in her combination strikes and even skillfully woven thrusts into those combos.
Even so, it fell short of what you'd call an explosive evolution.
"So did Lindy actually get stronger?"
"She definitely got stronger. ...Though tomorrow might be a bit rough for her."
Even for adventurers accustomed to physical exertion, pushing beyond their limits naturally resulted in muscle soreness.
If it had only been something like running from the Dolan Workshop to the Slum District, Lindy wouldn't have gotten sore.
But she had spent several hours in a mock battle with Rei. It was only natural that the fatigue would be considerable.
She had wanted to get stronger to protect Anne and Camila, yet ending up too sore to barely move... could only be called a kind of irony.
Rei couldn't help but think it was a somewhat unfortunate situation.
That said, it wasn't as if Lindy absolutely had to be the one to move to protect Anne and the others.
Especially since this was the Fusetsu hideout—the Fusetsu members would shelter and protect Anne's group in accordance with their contract with Rei.
In that sense, training Lindy properly here and expanding her abilities wasn't a bad arrangement at all.
In sudden emergencies like today's golem incident, Lindy would still end up being a liability, though.
"Anyway, dinner's been prepared for us, so let's eat. ...What should we do about Lindy's portion?"
"What do you—? ...She's fallen asleep at some point."
Until moments ago, Lindy had been lying on the sofa, looking too exhausted to even move. But when Anne turned her gaze toward her, Lindy had already drifted off.
And it wasn't a nap—since it was already evening, perhaps "evening nap" would be more accurate—but rather, she was in a deep, sound slumber.
"I think it'd be best to wake her and have her eat for now. Alternatively, you could leave food ready so she can eat whenever she wakes naturally. I'll leave that to you, Anne, since you're close with Lindy."
"Then let's wake her up."
Hearing Rei's words, Anne made the decision without hesitation.
For Anne, she didn't want to just let Lindy keep sleeping.
For one thing, letting others see a young woman's sleeping face was inadvisable. And more importantly, Lindy had only given herself a light wipe-down after training.
As a young woman, it was only natural to think being sweaty and smelly was undesirable.
Though there weren't that many people in the living room who would care about such things.
With Anne attempting to wake Lindy in the corner of her eye, Rei and the others enjoyed the meal Fusetsu had brought for them.
Perhaps lured by the smell of the food, several people emerged from the back room, including Ilunara.
The movements of Ilunara and the others were somewhat stiff.
Their muscle soreness from this morning probably hadn't subsided even now, in the evening.
(I wonder if potions would—wait, can potions even cure muscle soreness? But potions heal injuries. And if you consider that muscle soreness occurs as muscles recover from a damaged state, then it wouldn't be strange for potions to cure soreness too... I think. Though if that's the case, it might make the whole point of running meaningless.)
If muscle soreness were cured with a potion, the pain would disappear, but what would happen to the muscle-strengthening effect that was supposed to come with it?
Rei had no idea about that. But it wouldn't be strange for there to be alchemists who, suffering from soreness so severe they could barely move, would rather have it cured with a potion even at the cost of losing the strengthening benefit.
While Rei was thinking about this, Ilunara and the others reached the dining area.
The meal Fusetsu had prepared was fairly high-quality.
For Fusetsu, they probably couldn't serve a poor meal to clients who had come requesting shelter.
What's more, Rei was paying Fusetsu a substantial fee, so it was all the more natural.
Anne, who had lived at the orphanage, had never been able to eat satisfying meals there due to their financial difficulties.
In that sense, the meals now were actually more luxurious than anything she'd had while working at the orphanage.
As if to demonstrate this, Camila was frantically shoveling food into his mouth.
In Camila's case, being a growing child might also have been a factor.
"Yeah. This is good. This bean and meat soup is quite tasty."
Rei murmured in admiration while eating.
In truth, the soup he was praising was undoubtedly a flavor that would be hard to come by even at an ordinary eatery.
Who on earth was cooking this food?
Given that it was an assassin guild, having a skilled cook was somewhat unexpected for Rei.
Alternatively, precisely because it was an assassin guild, the possibility that they were careful about nutritional intake couldn't be denied.
It was a baseless image in Rei's mind, but he had pictured something ninja-like—making do with meals consisting of random dried meat and herbal pills. Though that was strictly his own impression.
However, the food that had come out since they started sheltering at the Fusetsu hideout was all delicious.
At the very least, it was far better than anything Rei could cook himself.
Not that Rei ever cooked for himself very often in the first place.
When Rei got hungry, he didn't need to make his own meals—freshly cooked dishes were stored inside his Misty Ring.
And the meals stored in his Misty Ring weren't just any dishes. They were food from restaurants Rei had eaten at and found delicious.
...Because of that, when he purchased soups and the like, he ended up buying them pot and all.
Naturally, it cost more than a normal purchase by the price of the pot, and above all, he ended up with a huge surplus of pots.
For that reason, when buying soup, he sometimes had the eatery fill the empty pots stored in his Misty Ring instead. But since that inevitably meant making an unreasonable request of the restaurant, he had to be flexible about it.
For the restaurant, there was the advantage of being able to buy a new pot if Rei paid for the pot as well.
Though there were also some cooks who couldn't bear to part with pots that had been passed down through their family for generations.
Hearing about such cooks reminded Rei of eel tare and soba return-stock being passed down through generations—things he had seen on TV and in manga back in Japan.
"Ah... so good... what exactly was the stuff I was eating when I worked at the Dolan Workshop...?"
One of the alchemists murmured wistfully while eating the food served to him.
His face wore an expression of pure happiness from eating a delicious meal.
"Wait, didn't you get paid quite a bit at the Dolan Workshop? Then shouldn't you have been able to eat good food? You could even go to high-end restaurants, right?"
"The mainstream faction alchemists could probably do that."
The female alchemist eating beside the happily expressive alchemist replied to the woman who had spoken—she was the former illegal slave who had been captured alongside Anne.
As expected, being women, they were eating together.
For the woman who had been enslaved, she had some reservations about the female alchemist belonging to the Dolan Workshop.
However, the ones who had enslaved them were the alchemists currently called the mainstream faction within the Dolan Workshop. She had no reason to resent the non-mainstream faction.
Even so, there were still parts of it she couldn't fully accept emotionally. But in their current situation, this was no time for infighting.
"What do you mean?"
"We in the non-mainstream faction had all the tedious work dumped on us by the mainstream faction."
"...Ah, I see."
For the mainstream faction, they could simply assign tedious work to the non-mainstream faction.
Once they thought of that and acted on it, they would continue passing one tedious task after another to the non-mainstream faction.
Even with such treatment, the non-mainstream faction centered around Ilunara would not quit the Dolan Workshop.
Of course, whether the mainstream faction would straightforwardly accept it if Ilunara and the others did say they were quitting was another matter entirely.
For the mainstream faction, losing people to dump menial chores on would be inconvenient.
"Do you understand? Those people have it out for Ilunara-san. They keep bringing him one tedious job after another."
Ilunara, whose name had been brought up, could only manage to eat while dealing with his sore body, offering a bitter smile at those words.
The reason the mainstream faction had made all sorts of unreasonable demands was that Ilunara held an admiration for the Dolan Workshop, and they believed that no matter what they did, he would never quit.
The steadily increasing menial chores given to the non-mainstream faction were undoubtedly largely due to that.
He also thought it must be a real nuisance for the people who had followed him.
However, those who wanted to quit had already quit. The only ones still working alongside Ilunara now were eccentrics.
"Huh. So even at the Dolan Workshop, that kind of thing doesn't change."
Rei, who had been listening to the conversation from a distance, murmured as he soaked his bread in the soup.
For the Dolan Workshop, Ilunara and the others were probably convenient people to assign menial tasks to.
To Rei, the mainstream faction alchemists of the Dolan Workshop were nothing but a bunch committing atrocities.
Of course, fusing necromancy with golem manufacturing undoubtedly required a considerable level of technical skill.
However, Rei found the current mainstream faction of the Dolan Workshop to be utterly unacceptable.
(There's no denying that golems involve all sorts of things. For better or worse, it's undeniable that my coming to Egginis has caused various problems... but regarding that, they should just accept that it was something that would have come to light eventually. Ilunara and the others probably wanted to know about the necromancy sooner rather than later, too.)
Using human souls as material to manufacture golem cores, and then making the non-mainstream faction use the failed products.
That must have been a devastating revelation for Ilunara and the non-mainstream faction.
Perhaps they would have preferred not to know. But if they were going to find out someday, it was only natural to want to know as early as possible.
As a result, it was an undeniable fact that Rei's arrival in Egginis had triggered major upheaval.
He himself had only come to buy golems, though.