Chapter 73: A Good Daughter Invites the Protagonist to Raid Her Mother's Spawn Point.
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"Kihara, are you up?"
"Yeah, coming down!"
He buckled on his lightweight combat armor and headed downstairs, where a gracious, soft-spoken woman with a figure that defied reasonable description was already setting a steaming breakfast on the table.
"Good morning," Enome said, with the warm composure of someone who had decided domestic hospitality was a personal calling.
"Good morning, Enome. Morning, Eshune."
Her daughter — who had inherited her mother's generous spirit in the most literal sense possible — propped both cheeks in her palms and beamed at him across the table.
"Morning~! Kihara, you look really good in that new gear. Bud Town is so lucky to have a guardian like you — it honestly makes me feel all warm and safe inside~"
"Eshune." Enome gave her daughter the look. "I've told you before — call him big brother. Don't let the baby face fool you, he's only six years younger than me."
"Hmm~" Eshune tapped her chin thoughtfully. "But I'd much rather call him Dad. He's reliable, financially stable, and actually present — which already makes him infinitely more qualified than the father Mom has literally never mentioned once in my entire life."
Enome reached over and rapped her lightly on the head. "Stop saying strange things. Eat your breakfast and go to school."
"I'm not saying anything wrong though... Mom, you don't even know what my biological father looks like. For all we know he might not even—"
Kihara stepped smoothly between them before the argument could achieve full ignition. "Alright, alright. You don't need to worry about me and Miss Enome — these things have a way of working themselves out."
Eshune's eyes lit up like someone had flipped a switch. "Ha! I knew Mom's charms had already gotten their hooks into you!"
Enome turned a quietly suffering look on Kihara. "...Kihara. Even if you're just trying to get Eshune out the door on time, you really shouldn't say things like that so carelessly."
"I meant every word, though."
"You—"
The flush that crossed her cheeks was immediate and involuntary. She opened her mouth, found that nothing she could say would improve the situation, and closed it again. Then, with the quiet dignity of a woman choosing her battles, she lowered her gaze to her breakfast and ate in pointed silence.
Eshune lowered her gaze to her breakfast and ate with an expression of profound self-satisfaction.
Kihara had arrived in this world half a month ago, in a manner that could charitably be described as making an entrance.
He had fallen from the sky. Through the roof. Through the bathroom ceiling specifically — and crashed into the bathtub with a noise that had probably registered on seismic equipment, coming face to face with Enome, who had been enjoying a bath and was now staring at him with the expression of a woman fundamentally revising her relationship with cause and effect.
What spared him from immediate arrest was his appearance. Whatever dimensional transit had done to him, it had given him the face of a twelve-year-old. So when Eshune came sprinting in at the sound of the impact, she took one look at the small bewildered boy in her mother's bathtub and reached for words rather than the guard whistle.
Extensive apologies followed. Then several days of roof repair. Then a full and honest explanation of his situation — actual age included. And it was Eshune, characteristically, who had cheerfully resolved the housing question by volunteering her home before her mother could form an objection.
The half month since had been productive. Kihara's combat ability spoke for itself, and Bud Town's guild had promoted him to Ace Guardian with the relieved efficiency of an organization that had been critically understaffed since their previous Ace Guardian quit to "rediscover his youth" — a phrase everyone had nodded at politely while privately finding very alarming.
In between shifts, he'd been piecing together where exactly he'd landed.
Immoral Guild. He was fairly sure of that much. The specific plot, the character arcs, the story progression — mostly gone, dissolved somewhere in the crossing. What remained was a strong general impression that the women in this series were, without exception, extremely well-designed.
His objectives had clarified themselves naturally from there.
Step One: Build reputation through guild commissions.
Step Two: Let Eshune continue being Eshune, which was already paying dividends beyond expectation.
Step Three: Win over Enome. Bring her and her daughter home to Gensokyo.
Enome's defenses ran considerably lower at home than anywhere else — a side effect of his disarming appearance, which had apparently bypassed the professional composure she maintained at the guild, where she kept a minimum three-meter exclusion zone around any adult male as a matter of policy. Here, over breakfast, that policy seemed to have quietly filed for leave.
Eshune, for her part, had conducted her own intelligence operation and delivered the findings with the gravity of a military briefing: "I did some digging into Mom's past. She used to be called the 'Sacred Virgin' by the Finizask faith. I'm fairly confident she produced me entirely through sheer force of will. So please, become my father without any guilt whatsoever."
With that level of inside support, Kihara gave himself three months, comfortably.
The world itself was an interesting construction.
Magic and modern technology existed side by side here without anyone finding this worth commenting on — smartphones and spell tomes, laptops and monster subjugation quests, all of it woven into daily life with the casual integration of things that had simply always been true. Kihara had stopped questioning it after the first week.
Bud Town was a starter settlement in the most literal sense — the kind of place new adventurers passed through before the profession started demanding things from them. The surrounding Bud Forest housed a rotating population of monsters that required regular culling to stay manageable.
Let the numbers run unchecked, and eventually the monsters would decide the town looked more appealing than the trees.
That was what Guardians were for.
The town had been bleeding Guardians steadily — retirement, relocation, the permanent kind of departure — and so when Kihara arrived at the guild with Enome that morning, the first commission handed to him was simple: new recruit, needs a senior.
"She's very sweet," Enome said, deploying the preemptive defense immediately. "You can just feel the good energy coming off her. Please look after her carefully."
"Good energy doesn't stop a monster from eating her."
Enome pressed her palms together, tilted her head, and activated the expression that had apparently evolved specifically to neutralize reasonable objections. "I have complete faith in your ability to keep her safe~ So please~ I'm counting on you~"
Kihara looked at her for a moment.
"...Fine. Since you're asking so nicely."
Before either of them could continue, the guild's front doors burst open.
"Good morning, Miss Enome~!"
"Good morning, Hitamuki."
The girl who came bounding to the counter was immediately, overwhelmingly a lot — beastfolk ears perked high, pale blue eyes blazing with morning enthusiasm, the sheer kinetic energy of someone who had decided today was going to be wonderful and intended to share that decision with everyone in the building. Her fighter's build was compact and powerful, her tail swishing behind her, her belted shorts leaving very little of her considerable athletic physique to imagination.
She glanced at Kihara.
One second passed.
She reached out and patted him on the head with the gentle authority of someone who had already made a decision and was simply executing it.
"Hey there, little guy~ you'll need to be at least eighteen before you can register as a Guardian, okay~?"
Enome cleared her throat. "Hitamuki... this is Kihara. Bud Town's Ace Guardian. He'll be your senior mentor."
The silence that followed had texture.
"—EH?!"
Hitamuki made a sound that had no established orthography and instantly filled with tears, seizing both his hands. "I'm so sorry — please don't hate me — I'll work so hard — please I'll do anything—"
"I'm not going to hold it against you." Kihara retrieved his head, poured one moment of private grief into the memory of the 140cm he'd stood in middle school and had apparently not escaped even across dimensions, and refocused. "Introduce yourself properly before we head out."
She snapped upright, tears gone with
startling efficiency. "Yes! Kyan Hitamu, Fighter class — please just call me Hitamuki!"
"Fighter. Uncommon choice." He extended a hand. "Get your gear sorted and we'll move."
"Sir yes sir!"
Bud Forest in the early morning was the specific kind of quiet that meant the dangerous things hadn't finished waking up yet.
Kihara talked through the layout as they moved — territory boundaries, behavioral patterns, threat tiers, what to treat with caution and what to treat with immediate violence — while scanning the undergrowth for something at an appropriate difficulty for a first outing.
"Slime, ten meters, left of that oak. Good starter enemy. Show me how you fight."
"Yes sir!"
Hitamuki demonstrated why Beastfolk had a reputation for speed — she crossed the distance in the time it took Kihara to finish the thought, came to a clean stop directly in front of the Slime, pressed her palms together, and bowed with sincere courtesy.
"Hello! I look forward to fighting you — please take care of me!"
The Slime launched itself into her face.
She went airborne. She achieved considerable hang time. She covered an impressive horizontal distance.
She landed on Kihara's face.
Seated. Squarely. With the precision of something that had been planned by a hostile universe.
The forest returned to its early-morning quiet.
Kihara arrived, from his current position, at several simultaneous conclusions. He filed them for later processing.
"...Get up."
"I'm so sorry — I'm sorry — I'm so so sorry—"
"It's fine." He stood, recovered his composure, and turned back toward the Slime with the equanimity of a man who had decided that dignity was a resource best spent elsewhere. "Again. This time, don't bow at it first."
(T/N: Because of that Sh*ta thing, i had a hard time coming back to Translating this, but i had come along way already. So i had to endure it!
Anime name is "Immoral Guild" if you're wandering)
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Thank you for reading.