Fremd Torturchen - Volume 7.5 - Chapter 10

Hina’s Daily Routine (Front Side)

“So Hina left these diary entries behind before she vanished, huh?”

“What even is a ‘daily routine’?”

It all happened one evening, a short while after the Grand Governor was trounced; Hina and Elisabeth swapped outfits and roles to kill some time, and the group got wrapped up in an incident involving a curse. All the chaos had died down, and life at the castle was peaceful once more.

Or so they thought, until a new incident reared its ugly head.

Kaito Sena and Elisabeth sat facing each other, their expressions clouded with worry.

Sitting them between was a single book with the words Hina’s Diary written on its cover.

Things had all begun a few hours prior, just after dinner.

“Hiiinaaa.”

“Oi, Hina, where are you?”

At the time, Kaito and Elisabeth were both looking for Hina, albeit for different reasons.

Kaito’s motive was that he needed to confirm the number of spare bottles of wine they had in stock. Elisabeth, on the other hand, just wanted to cajole Hina into making her a midnight snack. However, Kaito couldn’t find her in her room, nor could Elisabeth find her in the kitchen.

At that point, though, both of them had yet to realize just how serious the situation really was.

The two of them each casually wandered about and checked the places they thought she might be. The route she patrolled at the night, the pantries she might be reorganizing, even the spirit-filled reservoir.

But no matter where they looked, Hina was nowhere to be found.

“Huh? Where’d she go? Hiiinaaa, where aaare you?”

“Hmm. Not here, either? Hina, where did you wander off to?”

As the two of them called out to her, they bumped into each other. And the moment they did, they realized something.

Something had probably happened.

That mutual hunch of theirs was soon proven. No matter how long the night waned on, Hina never showed up.

They exchanged a glance.

Not only could they not find her, but Hina also had automaton-level hearing. The fact that she hadn’t come bounding over like a loyal hound the moment Kaito started calling for her was strange in and of itself.

They crossed their arms and headed for the throne room. Elisabeth plopped herself down on the throne.

After crossing her fair legs up high, she gave her final verdict with a grim expression on her face.

“’Twould seem we’ve no choice but to consider the chance that she’s gotten herself wrapped up in some sort of trouble.”

“Don’t tell me a demon broke in…”

Kaito’s expression froze. There was precedent for that, as Elisabeth’s castle had once found itself under attack by the Knight’s beast.

He didn’t want to consider the possibility, but he couldn’t deny that it existed. However, Elisabeth shook her head no.

“’Tis too early to make assumptions. Remember that curse that befell us the other day? Not every foe that makes its way into this castle is a demon.”

“Y’know…I really do feel like you should do something about this place’s defenses.”

“’Tis intentional, you fool. I leave the defenses shoddy to lure in demons. I will admit that it’s the mark of a third-rate master to expose her servants to undue danger, but…spiriting Hina away without a trace is a task that would daunt even the Grand King, highest ranked of the remaining demons. Even if demons were to attack, I imagine we’d lose you at worst.”

“I mean, I’d appreciate it if you put a little effort into keeping me alive. Anyway, if this isn’t a demon attack, then what is it?”

“I haven’t the faintest… The worst-case scenario is that she was subjected to some manner of curse or suggestion and left on her own. But if that’s the case, then any technique that could control her with such precision would have required some time to take hold. We’ll need to examine the actions she took over the past few days.”

“Yeah… I really hope that isn’t what happened, though.”

“All we can do is believe. At present, we have but one fact we know for certain.”

Elisabeth rested her chin on her finger. Her crimson eyes gleamed as she made her quiet declaration.

“Trouble’s fell scent is in the air.”

And with that, the story wrapped back around to the start.

Currently, Kaito and Elisabeth were in Hina’s room.

The two of them were sitting cross-legged on the floor and going through Hina’s diary. After reading the entry from the day prior, Elisabeth snapped the book shut. She crossed her arms with a guilty expression on her face.

“Hmm, nothing that particularly strikes me as odd.”

“So you’re the reason the meat keeps going missing at night.”

“Let’s not dwell on that. It’s not important right now.”

“Huh, and when did she have a chance to hear me sleep-talking?”

Kaito cocked his head to the side in confusion as he thought back over the passage in question. According to Hina, he had said, “I’m stuffed—I can’t eat another bite,” but he had no idea when that might have been. Elisabeth blinked.

“Hmm? When she was pressing her ear against your bedroom door that morning, as she does every day. When else?”

“Wait, hold up.”

A piece of information he would have been happier not knowing had just been mercilessly added to his brain.

Kaito squeezed his temples. Elisabeth tilted her head with a quizzical expression on her face.

“Hmm? Oh, did you not know? She presses herself against it so firmly, and you never once complained, so I’d just assumed it was all consensual.”

“That makes it sound like some sorta weird kink thing! I’m telling you, I had no idea! Eugh…”

Kaito looked up at the ceiling in lament. He crossed his arms and sank into thought.

After thinking it over for a while, he let out a quiet murmur.

“…What does she find enjoyable about that?”

“Oh heavens, I haven’t the faintest. Nor do I suspect I wish to.”

Elisabeth followed him in crossing her arms in thought. Now they had another useless riddle on their hands. However, this was hardly the time to be worrying about it. All of a sudden, Elisabeth rose to her feet and returned Hina’s diary to her desk.

“Anyhow, none of the entries here seem suspicious. ’Twould seem there weren’t any hints inside.”

Kaito nodded. He’d expressed qualms about looking at Hina’s diary without permission, but Elisabeth had informed him that Hina let her read it from time to time anyway. It was nice that the two of them got along in spite of their professional relationship. Unfortunately, though, the diary hadn’t given them any clues into their current missing-person problem.

Hina’s strong. But that’s what makes this so worrying.

“’Tis too early to give up hope, Kaito. Let’s retrace the steps she took today.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah, let’s do that!”

Elisabeth strode off, proactive as always. Worried as he was, Kaito gave her plan his enthusiastic endorsement. If worse came to worst, they might at least find traces of any magic that got used. Kaito stood up.

And with that, the two of them left the room and set off in search of leads on Hina’s current location.

There was nothing to be found in front of the door to Kaito’s bedroom, nor did they have any luck in the surrounding hallways.

After checking them, they headed to the next place that Hina stopped by in the mornings. Namely, the kitchen.

When they got there, Elisabeth proudly puffed out her chest.

“Each and every morning, Hina brews me the finest cup of tea, you know! See, unlike a certain someone, she knows what it means to be considerate! You could stand to learn a thing or two from her, Kaito!”

“Oh yeah, Hina’s great; I’m with you there. But you do realize that if I tried doing the same thing, I’d end up with a cup of toxic sludge, right?”

“…’Tis a mystery to me how your cooking skills remain so singularly catastrophic.”

“You’re one to talk, with that poison cooking of yours and all.”

“You know, if we weren’t in the middle of an investigation right now, you’d be meeting a brutal end for that comment.”

As she spoke of bloody murder, Elisabeth headed to the white cupboard and threw its doors open.

Inside sat Hina’s collection of tea leaves, seeds, and dried flower petals—all of which were sourced from far and wide and arranged into neat little rows. The lowest shelf was home to the silver spoon, small dish, and mortar that made up her mixing set.

Each morning, Hina would carefully consider the ambient temperature and humidity that day to come up with the perfect blend.

Elisabeth circled the cupboard, looking it over from top to bottom. Kaito did likewise.

This was where Hina did much of her work—not just in the morning, but in the afternoon and evening, too. However, they couldn’t find anything out of order in the cupboard or its surroundings. They then gave the rest of the kitchen a thorough once-over and, upon doing so, discovered that it was completely spick-and-span.

Not so much as a single knife was out of place. Elisabeth nodded in admiration.

“Hina’s efforts really do exude excellence, don’t they?”

“Yeah, you can say that again.”

As her beloved master and her master’s master, it filled their hearts with pride. However, this was no time to be getting sentimental. The two of them quickly hurried out of the kitchen.

This time, they headed for the stairs.

“Why, Hina even cleaned the stairs throughout the castle today! Yet another display of magnificent thoughtfulness!”

“Yeah, she said dust was starting to build up in the corners. For the record, I did help her out.”

“And you accomplished but a fraction of what she did, no doubt. The difference between your work and hers is as vast as the distance between Heaven and… Hold that thought.”

“What’s up?”

“Now that I say it, something dawns on me. ‘Throughout the castle’?”

Elisabeth massaged her temples. Kaito nodded—he knew exactly what she meant. Not only was the castle gigantic, but in keeping with its fortresslike exterior, its layout was also complex and unintuitive. Elisabeth’s face turned a little pale.

“I-in short, we, too, have no choice but to climb and descend its entire godforsaken span?”

“H-hey, at least we’re just looking around; it’s not like we have to clean it or anything!”

Kaito gave his response enthusiastically, but after thinking it over a little, he, too, came to appreciate how daunting the task before them was. As his mind swam, he recalled the interaction he’d had with Hina earlier that day.

At the time, it was midafternoon, and the hem of Hina’s maid uniform was swaying back and forth in the most adorable way as she diligently swept her broom to and fro.

“Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, my meats are the finest meats around! Filled with love and bravery, they’ll never let you down! Eat them and your courage will increase a millionfold! As always, I’m your friendly neighborhood Butcher! Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho! And I am Master Kaito’s maid!”

While she briskly cleaned the stairs, Hina was also singing, and her revised version of the Butcher’s peculiar song echoed through the halls.

Each time she finished clearing a given step of its dust and cobwebs, she would hop down to the next step in turn without wasting so much as a single movement. It gave her work an almost rhythmic flow to it. Impressed, Kaito walked over to her. She immediately turned around.

When she spotted him, her face lit up like a puppy whose owner had just returned home.

In fact, Kaito could practically envision a little tail wagging back and forth behind her.

“Oh my! I sing Master Kaito’s name, and here he is before me! Surely, this must be destiny!”

“I dunno if I’d go quite that far.”

“In fact, I have half a mind to hold a wedding ceremony right here and now, but when I think about it, I suppose I’m already your eternal companion. Yee! …Ahem. Forgive me, Master Kaito, I let my excitement get the better of me. Is there something you needed me for?”

“Nah, I was actually just wondering if you wanted me to lend a hand.”

“Goodness me! Why, that’s so kind, I could just swoon! I would be overjoyed to have you help!”

In spite of the snarky quip it had been preceded by, Kaito’s offer caused Hina’s face to flush with glee. She was an automaton, so it was unclear if she actually needed the help, but she was clearly delighted by his consideration regardless of its efficacy.

Hina smiled happily. Bliss practically radiated from her expression.

Upon remembering that smile of hers, Kaito clapped himself on the cheeks. When he spoke, it was with renewed motivation.

“And besides, we gotta do what we gotta do! Remember, this is for Hina!”

“Right you are! For Hina’s sake, no task is too onerous!”

Kaito and Elisabeth gave each other a firm nod.

Then they took off at a run.

How did things go after that?

Well, for all his enthusiasm, Kaito ended up being largely useless. Without a supplementary source of mana, his stamina quickly ran out, so despite verbally lambasting him as being a weak-kneed coward, Elisabeth ultimately had to cover the majority of the stairs herself.

In the end, though, their investigation came up empty-handed.

They did receive a scare when they found traces of mana-rich blood on the first floor of the main western stairwell, but they quickly realized that it was just Kaito’s from when he keeled over in exhaustion. “Don’t go leaving red herrings!” Elisabeth cried as she clapped him on the head. And there was something else they discovered as well. It was about the leftmost stairwell in the servant quarters, the one Hina had assigned Kaito to clean. After investigating the castle’s staircases, they discovered that out of all of them, that one was both the shortest in length and had the widest steps, meaning it was by far the easiest one to clean.

“…Man, I’m so tired that I can’t even move, and even so, I can feel Hina’s love.”

“…You’re surrounded by it constantly. You should be feeling it all the time, you dunce.”

During their quarrel, the two of them were both sprawled out on the hallway floor. Kaito idly gazed at the ceiling.

The light streaming in through the stained-glass windows was as creepily ominous as ever. He let out a dull murmur.

“Elisabeeeth.”

“Whaaat?”

“You really should remodel those, y’know.”

“I share the sentiment, but they’re so high up, ’twould be a right royal pain.”

“Yeah, I feel you.”

Both of them sounded like their brains weren’t getting enough oxygen.

Before they even noticed, they got deeper into the night. Normally, this would be the perfect time to start drinking. However, they still hadn’t found Hina yet. The two of them racked their exhausted brains for ideas.

“…Man, I wonder where Hina went.”

“Well, we did cover the whole castle without turning up so much as a single trace of her. It seems rather unlikely it was any sort of curse or suggestion. No mage, no matter how skilled, could have pulled such a stunt off so cleanly.”

The good news was, that meant it was less likely that Hina was in any immediate danger. Even if they hadn’t learned anything else, that alone was reward enough for their trials. Kaito breathed a sigh of relief. If that was the case, though, then where had Hina gone?

Why did she vanish?

Kaito and Elisabeth furrowed their brows.

“Hey, Elisabeth. Are there any other possibilities that come to mind?”

“At the moment, the most likely one seems to be that Hina left the castle of her own volition.”

“What, without telling either of us?”

“Hmm. No, perhaps not.”

The mystery only grew deeper. Another silence descended on them, and they each closed their eyes and thought. Their bodies were hot from running all over, and the hallway floor was cold against their skin.

Right when the two of them had just started cooling down, though, Elisabeth’s eyes shot open. She sat up with a start.

“Wait just one minute!”

“Forget waiting—I wasn’t even moving.”

“Precisely! No, not precisely.”

Elisabeth lay back down, then used her arms to lift her body off the floor and rose to her feet with movements reminiscent of a clockwork doll. She pointed her finger at Kaito, who was still lying on the floor.

“I found it! Something strange!”

And with that, they returned to the starting point.

Namely, Hina’s room. Elisabeth strode over to the desk and retrieved Hina’s diary from between the desk’s bookends. Then she flipped it open to the final entry and pointed at the passage in question.

“Here!”

“Uh… You mean this bit? ‘However, I discovered that one of the rooms that had been listed as empty was actually being used to store grain. And just as I feared, the place was home to a large rat infestation. Perhaps due to the preservation magic that had been cast on the grain, each of the rats had grown to the size of a human baby. Oh my! As a result, we ended up having a rather heated battle.’”

“I often cast magic on grain to preserve it for long periods, then forget that I did so or that it was even there in the first place!”

“I feel like that’s the sorta thing you should try to remember.”

“But see, even eating it would never cause rats to grow as large as babies!”

“Say what?”

Kaito stared at Elisabeth blankly. Being from another world, that was all news to him.

He couldn’t help but glance back and forth between her face and the passage.

“Wait, that clearly means something weird is going on! How could you not notice that?!”

“No, well, they do grow fairly large, so I just overlooked it. But still, I’ve never once heard of them growing to the size of babies. Now that I think on it, these rats could well be someone’s familiars.”

Kaito’s face went pale. If Hina ran into someone’s familiars and got into a fight with them, there was a very real chance she was in danger. He and Elisabeth had inspected the stairwell leading underground and the main corridor at its bottom when they were searching the castle, of course, but there were still a lot of rooms in its branching, labyrinthine hallways that they hadn’t checked yet. Elisabeth snapped the diary shut with a stern expression on her face.

They exchange a pair of grave murmurs.

“So the place we should head to…”

“Aye, ’tis the basement.”

After returning the diary to its desk, the two of them set off, throwing the door to Hina’s room wide-open as they strode through it.

Then they broke into a run. Their destination: the basement corridors.

The basement corridors were dark, stank of rust, and were constantly filled with a noise that resembled a low moan.

On top of that, they had been constructed in an obtuse, winding manner. Setting foot in them without proper preparation was just asking to die lost and alone. However, Kaito’s life experiences had left him with a particular ability—he could remember anything perfectly as long as his memory of it was accompanied by pain. Thanks to the time he got Elisabeth to carve a map of the key areas in his flesh, he knew those spots like the back of his hand. However, there was a limit to that map’s scope.

And unfortunately, he wasn’t familiar with the place that Hina had written about.

“So, you have any idea where this ‘room that was listed as empty but was actually being used to store grain’ is?”

“…About that. I haven’t the faintest.”

“Don’t you own this place?”

Kaito frowned. If Elisabeth didn’t know where it was, then they were at an impasse. Elisabeth impatiently glanced from left to right and back again. After painstakingly racking her brain, she let out a shout.

“Well, you can hardly blame me! This is me we’re talking about, remember—the person who shoved the grain into some random room, forgot about it, and listed the room on the map as unused in the first place! Why, it would be contradictory if I did remember where it was!”

“You don’t have to get so defensive, geez! It’s not like I’d get anywhere by pointing fingers… So, uhhh, I guess our only option is to figure out which rooms you listed as empty, exclude the ones I remember, and go check all the others.”

“Aye. If we’ve other options, I certainly can’t think of them.”

Elisabeth readily nodded. It was a boring plan, and labor-intensive at that.

However, this was no time to be losing heart.

Hina does so much for us; this is the least we can do for her.

And with that, the two of them began their search of the basement.

As they walked through the cold and the dim that permeated the basement hallways, their footsteps echoed in a manner that was downright unsettling.

Although there were magic lights dotting the walls, the night down there was far deeper and darker than it was aboveground, and the shadows lurking in the nooks and corners seemed to defy any attempt at illumination. Elisabeth trembled just like she had the last time they found themselves wandering about down there.

“Urgh, how do I describe it…? As always, this place is disagreeably disquieting. It plays on a person’s childhood scars in a way demons can only dream of… Not that I’m afraid in the slightest, mind you!”

“…I still can’t get over how much being down here bothers you.”

“Don’t you take that tone with me! Why, I’ve half a mind to subject you to the same ghost stories that Marianne and that wretched uncle of mine so gleefully tormented me with in my youth!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever you say,” Kaito listlessly replied as he took the lead and strode on. The two of them turned away from the main hallway, which led to the teleportation circle, and headed even deeper into the basement. Eventually, they reached an area that was predominantly filled with storerooms. It was dead quiet there. Just like Hina had reported, none of the traps were turning on when they weren’t supposed to. However, that only served to accentuate the basement’s gloom. Elisabeth trembled even harder, a fact that Kaito found downright astounding.

“Seriously, what gives? How is it you can fight such horrifying enemies without even flinching, then get freaked out by your own basement? Actual real-life monsters have to be scarier than stuff from made-up stories, don’t they?”

“…Our grim tale begins just after a young bride meets a most untimely death.”

“Wait, hey, no, I don’t wanna hear this.”

Apparently, Elisabeth intended to make good on her threat. The darkness of their surroundings did a perfect job of setting the mood, and Kaito couldn’t help but break out into a cold sweat. Elisabeth ignored his pleas and went on.

“The nightmare first took root in the manor’s exquisite flower garden. Before anyone noticed, the rosebushes underwent a horrible change.”

“Elisabeth, man, you gotta cut it out—I’m not kidding around… Huh?”

Suddenly, Kaito arched his brow. The bend in the hallway in front of him was almost completely cloaked in darkness, but he felt as though he could make out something writhing within. When he realized what it was, his eyes went wide.

“Wait, what?”

Just around the corner, there was a thick tangle of bizarre, undulating ivy.

In fact, it almost resembled the plant from the ghost story that Elisabeth was telling him. He frantically yanked at her arm.

“E-Elisabeth! Elisabeth!”

“The first tragic victim was the gardener… What is it now, Kaito? We’re just getting to the good part. At least let me get through the first night before you… Ah!”

When Elisabeth caught sight of the aberration, she froze in place. The moment she did, Kaito realized something.

This was bad news.

Maybe getting Elisabeth’s attention was a mistake. However, hindsight was twenty-twenty. He hurled himself backward, and without a moment’s warning, Elisabeth let out a yell.

“Death Rain!”

“I knew it!”

A surge of jet-black miasma and crimson flower petals whirled through the air, and red-hot lead began raining down from within it.

The mysterious plant found itself completely dashed by molten metal, and Kaito had to frantically scurry around to avoid getting splashed.

Then they heard a horrible “Screeeee!”

Apparently, there had been something under the strange vegetation.

Kaito turned back to look at it, then tilted his head. There were large piles of clay lying on the floor. However, he didn’t see any collapsed walls or anything, so it seemed odd for there to be so much clay in the closed-off underground basement. But he didn’t have time to ponder the mystery for long. The lead had started loudly cooling and hardening around the ivy, and a writhing swarm of something else entirely had emerged from beneath it. Kaito desperately tried to keep his cool and hold his ground.

He squinted at the swarm to try and identify what it was composed of. Then he finally came to a realization.

“It’s some sort of weird plant…and a swarm of giant rats!”

“Hmm? But why? There were no rats in the ghost stories I was told.”

“Those never had anything to do with anything!”

As Kaito let out his exasperated bellow, the rats continued crawling over their comrades’ corpses and advancing toward the two of them.

Their size was just as Hina had reported it. They were about as large as human babies.

The bigger problem, though, was just how damn many of them there were.

The rats’ noses twitched as Kaito and Elisabeth became the new targets of their single-minded hunger. The creatures seemed absolutely ravenous.

As far as Kaito was concerned, this was far more terrifying than the ghost story had been. To Elisabeth, though, they didn’t even register as things to be feared. She immediately regained her usual composure.

Then she clapped her hands together.

“I see, I see! I’ve cracked all the mysteries!”

“Wait, you figured it out? You know whose familiars they are or whatever?”

“No, no, these are no familiars! They’re normal rats, born and raised!”

“They’re what?!”

“Even if they ate magically preserved grain, rats would never grow to this size! But take a gander over there!”

Elisabeth pointed toward the rats’ feet. Kaito was confused, but he squinted in that direction regardless. There, he saw the odd pile of clay from before, the one that seemed so out of place. Now he realized that pile was where the ivy had sprouted from.

Elisabeth puffed her chest up with pride.

“That, right there, is the remains of a golem—likely one that got too old and broke down of its own accord!”

“Oh, huh. You store unused golems down here, too? …No, you don’t. You were just running it ragged until it up and died on you. Isn’t that dangerous? C’mon, you gotta keep a better eye on your stuff.”

“Yes, yes, many apologies, so sorry! Anyhow, when the rats were carrying the grain back to their nest, one of them must have dropped some in the golem’s clay remains, and the mana stored in the golem caused the seeds to germinate. The rats weren’t just feasting on the mana from the grain, but from the golem as well—that’s why they grew so large!”

“Ohhh… Wait, hold on a minute.”

If that was the case, then that put them all the way back at the beginning. Just as they’d originally concluded, there wasn’t, nor had there ever been, an intruder.

So where had Hina gone?

But right when Kaito was about to ask that, Elisabeth looked up with a start. She strained her ears.

“Hmm, hmm… Hmm… Hmm?”

“C’mon, Elisabeth, listen to me when I’m talking to you. Hina is—”

“There’s something behind the rats…and it’s moving? I have a bad feeling about this. Fall back!”

“Huh? Hwah!”

Elisabeth grabbed Kaito by the collar, then fled with him in tow.

In the blink of an eye, they rounded the previous corner they’d turned. Elisabeth came to an abrupt stop. She crouched down with the wall to her back and dumped Kaito on the floor beside her.

The rats chittered as they drew ever closer, and the ivy rustled along with them.

Suddenly, both those noises were drowned out by a bizarre, intense FSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

“…Huh? What?”

“Good going, me. Call me forgetful if you will, but my intuition is as sharp as ever.”

Elisabeth nodded proudly. Some wispy smoke flowed over from around the corner.

It would seem that the noise had been from some sort of vapor billowing out. Kaito and Elisabeth were fortunate enough to have avoided a direct hit, but that wasn’t enough to save them from being assailed by its horrid, pungent odor. They frantically covered their mouths.

Still holding her breath, Elisabeth snapped her fingers. A whirl of black darkness and crimson flower petals coalesced, then began rapidly spinning to blow the vapor away. Luckily, that was enough to thin out the smoke.

The two of them cautiously rose to their feet and slowly made their way across the corridor.

They peeked out around the corner where the rats just were.

“Huh?”

“Hmm?”

And what they saw there—

—was some sort of bizarre life-form.

“…It’s a space alien.”

“The hell is a space alien?”

Elisabeth reacted to Kaito’s dumbfounded murmur with a frown. She wasn’t familiar with the term. Unfortunately, though, Kaito couldn’t think of any other way to describe it.

After all, the entity before them was clad from head to toe in silver.

It was even holding some sort of copper tublike implement in its hands. It was bizarre, even by space-alien standards. Communicating with it probably wouldn’t be possible. Kaito was at a loss for what to do.

Then all of a sudden, it popped its head off. Beautiful silver hair flowed out and landed atop the entity’s shoulders.

“Wha—?!”

“Oh?”

Kaito and Elisabeth’s eyes went wide.

Then they cried out in unison.

““Hina!””

“Phew, that should finally be all of them… Oh? Why, if it isn’t my beloved Master Kaito and my dearest Lady Elisabeth! Whatever brings you down here?”

““THAT’S WHAT WE WANT TO AAAAAAASK!””

The two of them were relieved, but that wasn’t going to stop them from shouting. Hina blinked her emerald eyes in puzzlement.

Still dressed like an extraterrestrial, she cocked her head to the side. At that point, Kaito elaborated:

“You went missing, so Elisabeth and I have been looking everywhere for you.”

“For me? Oh goodness, I’m ever so sorry. It was all part of my work for the day, and I figured I would be done in no time, so I didn’t think I needed to tell you, but…could it be that it’s much later than I think it is? Eek, oh no! I got so wrapped up in mixing that I lost track of the time! However can I possibly apologize?”

Hina gave a hurried bow. However, Elisabeth told her that all was well.

“A-as long as you’re safe, then there’s no harm done. Come now, raise your head.”

Kaito felt he should say something as well, but his attention kept getting drawn to what Hina was holding. Inside her copper tub, there was some sort of dark-green liquid sloshing about with a number of half-dissolved plants in it. He tried to peer inside.

The moment he did, though, Hina quickly hid the tub behind her back and shook her head.

“There isn’t much left, but it’s still emitting vapor! It’s dangerous to stick your head in!”

“Hina…what exactly is that?”

“A secret mixture for exterminating rats, passed down since time immemorial, that I had stored in my Self-Recording Device! Or to be more precise, a special Murder Supreme Version of it that I came up with!”

“‘Murder Supreme Version,’ huh…?”

That certainly had a scary ring to it. By the sound of it, the rats didn’t stand a chance.

And given that that’s what she was holding, it was easy to surmise the rest of the story.

Hina must have gone back for a rematch with the rats. More than a little embarrassed, she bashfully told them the details.

“You see, I ran into one of their survivors when I was making my evening rounds. After that, I was able to discover that their main diet wasn’t actually the grain, but the plant growing here, and that their nest was tucked away behind it. From there, I went into the basement storage area and retrieved my ingredients and an outfit to safely handle them with…”

“Goodness, I had no idea we even had such things stored in the castle.”

“Wasn’t I just telling you to keep a better eye on your stuff?”

“Then once I was done mixing the treatment chemicals, I evaded the swarm, put the tub in their nest, and finished them off by adding an herb in to release poison smoke! If the unthinkable happened and a rat that large were to bite one of you, why, I wouldn’t have been able to rest until I killed every last rat in the world!”

Hina clenched her fist tight, and the other two nodded in understanding. With that, all the mysteries were finally solved—why Hina had vanished, why they hadn’t been able to find her, and why there hadn’t been any traces of her. Everything was clear now.

In short, there hadn’t been any reason to worry in the first place.

The fact that they were currently embroiled in a series of battles against the demons notwithstanding, it was certainly possible that they had let their imaginations run a little too wild. It would probably have been smarter to at least wait until the next day before sounding the alarm.

But right as Kaito and Elisabeth were about to start reflecting on their actions, Hina gave them a big, bright smile like a flower coming into full bloom.

“I really am sorry about the inconvenience, but thank you both so much. Knowing that my beloved Master Kaito and my dearest Lady Elisabeth were worried for my sake, why…it makes me feel more blessed than I could possibly dream of!”

Overcome with emotion, she blinked happy tears from her emerald eyes. Kaito and Elisabeth couldn’t help but scratch their cheeks.

Then they puffed up their chests like what they’d done was the most natural thing in the world.