Haimer walked to the door.
He reached out and pushed open the heavy double wooden doors. The roaring noise of the tavern, thick with the smell of roasted meat and ale, hit him full in the face like a ladle of steaming broth.
Compared to the stale, musty air of the underground altar, this very mortal kind of clamor was infinitely more pleasant.
Standing in the doorway, Haimer's gaze swept past several tables of adventurers who were half-drunk, pounding the tables and trading tall tales — and locked with perfect precision onto an enormous pushed-together table at the back of the hall.
He couldn't very well have missed it. The commotion coming from that direction was impossible to ignore.
The moment he stepped through the door, he spotted Hestia — one hand clamped in a death grip around a bone-in chop that was bigger than her own head.
Rich honey-glaze barbecue sauce dripped down the meat in glistening rivulets.
Hestia's face was half-buried in grease. Her two iconic blue ribbons were whipping through the air as she wrenched herself backward with all her might.
"Mine! I saw it first!" she protested, voice muffled around a mouthful of food.
The other end of the chop was being gripped by another hand — slender, fair-skinned, and utterly unyielding.
Haimer followed that hand upward.
A pretty young woman with long golden hair was puffing out her cheeks, golden eyes fixed on the disputed chop with the solemn intensity of someone prepared to settle this matter through force of arms.
It was the naturally airheaded swordswoman at Loki's side — Ais Wallenstein.
One of the strongest female swordswomen in all of Orario, a Level 5. Normally she looked as cool and porcelain-perfect as a delicate doll — but when it came to claiming food, she wasn't the slightest bit delicate. The force she was exerting had Hestia's teeth grinding and her body actually skidding forward by a few inches.
"…" Ais said nothing. She simply added a little more pressure to her grip.
Beside Ais sat a young elf girl who was looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Lefiya was wedged between Ais and Kikakujou Mary, holding a large wooden cup in both hands. She had knocked back several cups of fruit wine in quick succession and her cheeks were flushed red as a ripe tomato. Her eyes kept darting frantically between Ais and Hestia, utterly unsure whether she should intervene.
"Um, Ais-san, maybe we could just… order another one?" she ventured meekly — but her voice was instantly swallowed by the tavern's roar.
And as for tonight's designated host, the one who had promised to foot the bill — the chief deity of Hephaestus Familia.
Hephaestus was propping up her forehead with one hand.
She was leaning back in her chair, watching Hestia make a spectacle of herself like someone who hadn't eaten in three days. The single red eye not hidden behind her eyepatch was broadcasting, with perfect clarity, the expression of someone who had been thoroughly worn out.
Loki had wandered off to the adjacent table to torment some other Familia's members tonight, which was probably a mercy — if that one had still been here, this whole table would have been flipped by now.
Then Hephaestus caught sight of Haimer approaching.
The exhausted resignation in her eye finally gave way to a faint gleam of relief — as though she had at last spotted the only person capable of wrangling this lot.
"You're finally here," she said, exhaling.
At the sound of her voice, Hestia's head snapped around.
She dropped the tug-of-war entirely, letting Ais claim the chop without a fight, and launched herself off her chair.
"I'm almost full and you only just show up!" she complained, already grabbing at Haimer's sleeve with her grease-smeared little hands.
"Got held up taking care of some private business." Haimer walked over without breaking stride.
He didn't dodge Hestia's oily grip. Instead he plucked the clean white napkin that Hephaestus was already holding out to him, bent slightly at the waist, and with perfectly natural ease wiped away a droplet of sauce clinging to Hestia's chin.
"Still eat as messily as ever."
That casually intimate gesture made the complaint Hestia had been winding up die completely on her lips.
The soft roundness of her cheeks turned visibly, unmistakably pink. She muttered something under her breath — "not my fault she had to fight me for it" — and then settled back into her chair without another word of protest.
Having managed his own resident troublemaker, Haimer pulled out the empty chair beside Hephaestus and sat down.
Along the far side of the long table, the girls of his own Familia were already seated in a row.
The moment their god finally took his seat, the handful of girls who had been relatively well-behaved up to that point immediately brightened up.
"Kami-sama, Mama Mia's grilled fish is incredible! I saved you the biggest one!"
Aihara Enju's new silver-white metal boots swung happily under the table as she beamed, clearly in the best mood. She picked up a large platter and slid it across to Haimer like she was presenting him with treasure.
"Fruit wine too!" Hiruko Kohina announced right on her heels, hugging a glass pitcher filled with amber liquid. Without checking whether Haimer actually wanted any, she filled the empty cup in front of him to the very brim — stopping just before it could overflow.
Then she turned those bright orange eyes on him, staring up with an expression that said plainly: praise me.
Haimer lifted the cup and took a sip.
On the sweet side, heavy on the fruit, easy on the alcohol — perfect for cutting through the richness of the food.
"Good."
He nodded, then took the grilled fish from the platter, used his fork to pick out the bones, and slid the tenderest piece of belly meat onto Aihara Enju's plate before cutting another piece for Kohina.
"Eat plenty. There's a lot of good things in this world."
"And as long as you want them, this table will never run short."
"That patience of yours when it comes to coaxing children along — you're getting better and better at it," Hephaestus remarked from beside him, gently swirling her ale cup as she watched the scene unfold, with a tone caught perfectly between amusement and gentle ribbing.
"Tonight was expensive." Haimer raised his cup and tapped it against hers. The glass met with a dull clink.
"One meal, what does it matter."
Hephaestus rolled her eye without a shred of ceremony.
"Compared to those monstrous weapons you were handing out like pocket change earlier, what I paid for this dinner probably doesn't even cover the scrap metal from one of your shortswords."
She let her voice drop slightly as she spoke, glancing toward the entrance through the din of the crowd.
"By the way — that trip to the Guild today. The old man didn't cause you any real trouble, did he?"
The question was casual. But everyone at that table understood perfectly well that Haimer was currently the quietly-watched center of attention for every major faction in Orario — wherever he went, the rumor mill started turning.
"The old man poured me a cup of tea that had gone cold. We talked a bit about how this city ought to be run." Haimer delivered this with a completely straight face.
A noisy dinner table had at least a few dozen pairs of ears nearby.
This was not the place to discuss the black-market operations buried in the depths below — the kind that never saw daylight.
Whether it was Onigawara Rin with her cup of ale, or Inaba Tsukuyo resting with her eyes closed against her chair, they were all in perfect, wordless agreement: not a single mention of what had happened on the nineteenth floor of the Dungeon.
"Even your deflections are this lazy? Who do you think you're fooling."
Hephaestus snorted — but she showed no intention of pressing further.
And then, from the next table over, came a commotion.
"Oh my oh my~! Look who finally decided to show up! Haimer actually graced us with his presence?"
A voice, thick with the loose tongue of someone well into their cups, cut through the noise.
Loki came staggering over, nearly empty bottle raised in one hand, footsteps decidedly unsteady.
She had just peeled herself away from a table of female adventurers at the far end of the hall.
Though judging by how visibly relieved that entire table looked to see her go, it was pretty clear she had been forcing her company on them entirely uninvited.
She plopped herself onto the bench beside Ais, crowding Ais sideways, then reached up to ruffle her hair — and got smoothly dodged by a completely unhesitating tilt of Ais's head.
Haimer rolled his eyes.
"You were harassing those women again?"
"Harassing?! How could you call what I do harassing?!" Loki shot up as though she'd had her tail stepped on — then broke into a crafty grin and leaned in toward Haimer.
"But speaking of which, what were you doing at the Guild? Were you there to squeeze some serious coin out of the old man?"
"No comment." Haimer picked up his cup and finished the last of his fruit wine. "Eat, drink, enjoy yourselves — once the bill's settled, you can all head home and take your curiosity to bed with you."
He rolled his eyes as he set the cup down.
And with that, the dinner rolled on — and the atmosphere grew lively indeed.
With Haimer present, Hestia reined herself in considerably.
Ais maintained her usual steady rhythm of eating. Lefiya shed her earlier awkwardness and began whispering with Kikakujou Mary about magic and swordsmanship.
The evening stretched on into the deep of night.
When Manager Mia herself came over and slapped a very long bill down in front of Hephaestus and Tsubaki, both of their eyes twitched in unison.
"Right then. Let's go."
They filed out of The Benevolent Mistress.
The night breeze had taken on the sharp chill that only comes in the small hours.
After parting ways with Hephaestus and Loki at the corner, Haimer led the girls toward the upscale residential district.
Back at the manor.
The moment the door swung open, the warm air from the magic-stone heating system chased away the cold of the night.
After a full day of chaos in the Dungeon and a few cups of wine on top of it, every girl wore a tiredness she couldn't hide.
"Finally home…" Onigawara Rin unstrapped [Black Crow] and let out a long, luxurious stretch.
"Same here — all I want right now is a bath and then to collapse into bed." Kikakujou Mary agreed, rolling her aching shoulder.
The mention of bathing made every girl exchange a glance, and the atmosphere shifted into something subtly charged.
Because — well.
For as long as they'd been living here, the girls had always monopolized the spacious stone bath first, and often made quite the ruckus in there too, without sparing so much as a thought for their god's convenience.
That thought prompted Kikakujou Mary to give a small, deliberate cough. A faint blush crept across her pale cheeks as she glanced back at Haimer.
"Well… Kami-sama, given that we've been monopolizing the bath up until now, it really does seem… not quite right."
"So we talked it over, and we think from now on it would be more appropriate for you to go first."
Onigawara Rin was nodding frantically beside her, hands clasped behind her back, eyes darting away.
The others said nothing — but the rosy colour spreading across every face said everything that needed to be said.
It was obvious enough. When these fledgling-hearted girls had sat down to think through this very reasonable suggestion, their imaginations had — inevitably — wandered somewhere that made them want to hide their faces.
Watching the whole lot of them tie themselves in knots over something this straightforward, Haimer found it genuinely, helplessly funny.
He crossed his arms, and deliberately drew out his response in a tone of mild, theatrical regret.
"Is that so…"
"And here I thought, since you'd all called me over together like this, you were planning to join me."
The air in the hall detonated.
Boom.
Onigawara Rin, Kikakujou Mary — and even Inaba Tsukuyo, who had been keeping her eyes shut with studied indifference — flushed scarlet all the way down to their necks.
"K-Kami-sama! What are you even saying?!"
Kikakujou Mary stumbled back two steps, water-blue eyes wide with flustered alarm, whatever she'd been imagining already entirely too vivid. "Even for a god, that kind of thing is — that's — that's completely shameless!"
Onigawara Rin was so flustered she couldn't string a coherent sentence together and had no idea what to do with her hands.
The sole exception was Amou Kirukiru.
She was leaning against the wall, arms folded, and rather than embarrassment, what flickered in her eyes was something that looked distinctly like eager anticipation — a dangerous gleam.
The tip of her tongue traced slowly along the corner of her mouth.
She had the air of someone who would have her clothes off and follow him in before he could finish nodding.
Watching the lot of them flounder in varying degrees of disarray, Haimer gave a helpless, quiet laugh.
"Alright, alright — I'll stop teasing you."
"You've all had a long day. Go sit down and rest on the ground floor for a bit."
"I won't take long."
With that, he sighed with theatrical reluctance, shrugged off his jacket — which carried the faint ghost of wine — draped it over a chair back, and walked off toward the rooms deeper in the first floor.
He left a hall full of girls standing in his wake.
They watched his tall, straight-backed figure disappear down the corridor — and for a moment, every pair of eyes went slightly unfocused, minds drifting somewhere unspecified.
Until.
Sccrraape.
The grating shriek of furniture being dragged across the floor snapped them all back to reality.
They turned as one.
Hestia — no one had noticed when — had already grunted and heaved the softest, largest armchair in the sitting room and hauled it, inch by straining inch, directly in front of the passage leading to the bath.
And then.
This goddess, possessed of a truly formidable figure, dropped herself into that armchair, crossed her arms over her chest, and let that extraordinary endowment press together in a display that threatened to overflow the boundaries of propriety.
"Everyone line up here! Nobody goes near that door!"
...
The girls stared at Hestia's fortress-like stance in speechless, collective disbelief.
And with that, the night passed without further incident.
The following morning.
Dawn was barely breaking. The first light of the rising sun filtered through Orario's cloud cover and fell across the streets of the upscale residential district.
Down on the first floor of Haimer's manor, a quiet, rustling sort of activity had already begun.
After several days, Ryu, Chloe, and Lunor had the morning routine down to a smooth, practiced rhythm.
But today.
There was one more addition to their number — and she was not the settled kind.
"Nya-hahaha~! So this is Kami-sama's manor nya~! It feels super comfy nya~!"
Anya, still in her Benevolent Mistress uniform, was bouncing from one end of the first floor to the other — touching this, peering at that — her tail swishing at a furious pace behind her, practically vibrating with excitement.
____
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🔥 New history: Samsara Game: Starting in The Long Dark with My Waifus
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