Chapter 74: The Homing Gluteus.
.....
A Fighter. She said Fighter. Not stand-up comedian. Fighter!
No matter how many angles Kihara approached it from, he could not construct a reality in which the correct response to a perfect ambush opportunity was to walk around to the front of the target and bow at it. This wasn't a dojo exhibition. This wasn't a sparring tournament with a referee and a handshake tradition. This was a real forest, a real monster, and a very real possibility of dying to something with the intellectual complexity of a stress ball.
He had Shinobu send a shadow blade through the Slime's core from a distance, then reached down and peeled a thoroughly bewildered Hitamuki off his face.
"Awuu... Kihara-san... I'm sorry..."
"Hitamuki." He kept his voice level. "Explain to me why you greeted the Slime."
"Because the way of martial arts begins with courtesy and ends with courtesy. If you don't greet your opponent properly, the fight can't begin."
Kihara pressed two fingers to his temple, where a headache was forming with quiet determination.
"...Do all Fighters do this?"
Her tail, which had been wagging with anxious energy, drooped completely. "No... it's just Hitamuki."
Of course it is. That explained why Enome had handed this particular mentorship assignment to him specifically. Any Guardian of average ability would have been obliterated — not by the monsters, but by their own trainee's commitment to etiquette.
He pushed the thought aside and gave her shoulder a light pat.
"Being polite is a good quality. But from now on, say it in your head before a fight — don't announce it out loud. And when you're fighting a Slime, don't punch randomly. Find the core and hit that."
Hitamuki's ears flattened with visible distress. "But... if I only say it in my head, does it really count?"
"Hitamuki." Kihara turned, fixed a flat stare on a wild boar monster that had just nosed its way out of the bushes fifteen meters away, and said absolutely nothing.
The boar took one look at him, made a sound like a creature that had suddenly reconsidered all of its life choices, and fled back into the undergrowth at full speed.
Kihara looked back at Hitamuki. "See? I didn't say a word. It felt my greeting anyway. And then it felt something else and decided to leave."
Hitamuki's eyes went wide and luminous, the complete picture of someone in the presence of something they didn't fully understand but deeply respected. "A-amazing... as expected of Kihara-san..."
She fidgeted for a moment, tail resuming its cautious wag, then asked with visible embarrassment: "Um... would it be alright if Hitamuki called you... Shishou?"
Kihara considered this for approximately one second. "Fine. Fight the way I just described, and I'll take you on as my student."
"Yes! Shishou!!"
The tail went from cautious wag to full helicopter rotation.
[Beastfolk, she said... but honestly she seems more like a dog girl.]
[Dog girls are beastfolk. Perfectly accurate.]
The rest of the morning's patrol confirmed that Hitamuki was, in fact, an extremely obedient student.
The problem was that obedient students still needed to survive long enough to learn things. Hitamuki's combat ability was raw at best, and she had a gift — seemingly innate and completely involuntary — for attracting monster aggression. She got launched. Repeatedly. By different monsters. Via different methods. Each time, with the consistency of a law of physics, she achieved significant airtime and landed on Kihara's face.
The specific point of contact was consistent in a way that began to feel personal.
After the fourth incident, Kihara made the executive decision to call it a day and escort his battered apprentice back to town. Partly because she needed rest. Partly because continuing to operate under these conditions was becoming a test of willpower that he wasn't confident he could pass indefinitely.
Raising her combat stats had to take priority over drilling technique. There was no point refining form if a Slime could send her into low orbit.
"Three Slimes and a North Sea Bear on your very first outing — that's genuinely impressive, Hitamuki!"
"Awuuu... that was all Shishou's doing..." Fat teardrops rolled steadily down Hitamuki's cheeks as they walked. She'd been quietly crying and blaming herself the entire way back, tail dragging along the ground. "I really am still so weak..."
"Everyone starts weak. That's what tomorrow's for."
"Yes sir...!" The tail lifted slightly.
Enome watched from behind the counter, warm amusement playing at the corner of her mouth as Hitamuki straightened up under Kihara's encouragement. Her internal assessment of him ticked up another notch.
Eshune was right, she thought. He really is good at taking care of people.
"Oh, and Kihara — there's actually another new recruit I'd like to introduce you to today. She's just as adorable as Hitamuki~"
"...Another one already?"
"Hitamuki is pretty ordinary, actually... Miss Enome is being way too generous."
"Maidena, you can come out now!"
From around the corner to the left of the front desk — the hallway leading to the staff lounge — a girl appeared.
She was small. Silver-gray hair fell long and straight past her shoulders. Her features were delicate in the specific way that made people instinctively want to protect her, and on top of her head she wore a small white hat bearing a cross flanked by pure white wings on either side — the unmistakable mark of the Finizask faith.
Her eyes were red.
The moment those red eyes landed on Kihara, something flickered across her expression — cheeks puffing ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly — before she composed herself and introduced herself in a tone that conveyed mild reluctance without quite crossing into rudeness.
"Hello... I'm Maidena Anger. White Mage."
"SO CUTE!!" Hitamuki had already closed the distance, seized both of Maidena's hands, and was shaking them up and down with the unrestrained enthusiasm of someone who had just discovered a new best friend. "Just call me Hitamuki, okay~?!"
"Ah... yes. Hello." Maidena extracted her hands with care, sidestepped Hitamuki entirely, and walked directly up to Kihara with the purpose of someone delivering a prepared statement.
"I'm a devoted follower of the Finizask faith. I'll admit I didn't expect Bud Town's new Ace Guardian to be my age." She met his eyes without flinching. "Fair warning: do not entertain impure thoughts about me. And do not touch me without cause."
Kihara raised an eyebrow. "I'm aware the Finizask faith prohibits impure conduct between men and women. But you've taken that further than standard doctrine — if I can't make physical contact at all, how exactly am I supposed to train you?"
"Ahaha..." Enome laughed with the strained brightness of someone trying to smooth over a situation before it calcified. "Maidena is something of a prodigy within the Finizask church — the standards she's held to are considerably stricter than most."
"If she's a prodigy, shouldn't the church be keeping her somewhere safe rather than sending her out as a Guardian?"
Maidena's chin went up with crisp, practiced pride. "I am not a flower to be kept in a greenhouse. If I want to walk further down the path of the White Mage, hardship is part of that journey — not something to be avoided."
Kihara looked at her for a moment. That was a better answer than he'd expected. His tone softened, fractionally but noticeably. "Fair enough. Show me what this prodigy can do tomorrow."
"Prepare to have your jaw on the floor."
Hitamuki, standing to the side, had accumulated several mental question marks. She was trying very hard to imagine how a White Mage — a healer by definition — was planning to make a jaw drop in a combat scenario.
...Are we going to go find someone who needs medical attention?
The next morning, the three of them headed into Bud Forest together.
Hitamuki, whose senses ran well above the human baseline, located their first target almost immediately — a Slime, sitting in a small clearing, minding its own business.
"Shishou. I'm going in."
"Show me what you've got."
"Yes sir!"
Maidena observed this exchange with the expression of someone watching two people treat a parking ticket as a national emergency. "It's one Slime," she said flatly. "Is the solemnity really necessary?"
"You don't... you don't understand yet."
Before Kihara could finish the sentence, the familiar sequence of events initiated.
Hitamuki was airborne. The trajectory was precisely what it always was. The fluffy tail swept cheerfully back and forth across his forehead with complete indifference to the circumstances.
"HITAMUKI!! What are you doing — you can't just — you're sitting on a boy's face!!"
"Awuuu... I didn't mean to... I don't know why, every time a monster knocks me away I always end up hitting Shishou..."
She wasn't moving. Maidena grabbed her by the collar and hauled her upright, then fixed Kihara with a look of transparent suspicion. "Kihara-san. You weren't just... standing there on purpose, were you."
"Shishou is not that kind of person!!"
Kihara stood, smoothed his hair back into place, produced a throwing knife, and flicked it through the Slime's core with the wrist motion of a man who had long since stopped allocating emotional energy to Slimes. "Hitamuki," he said, with the exhausted patience of someone who had accepted their fate. "What happened this time."
"I... I just gave the Slime a small bow."
"WHAT." Maidena stared. "Why would you bow at a monster —"
She stopped. The gears connected. She listened to the full martial arts philosophy explanation in silence, endured a beat of complete speechlessness, and then turned to look at Kihara with an expression that had quietly transitioned from suspicion to sympathy.
"...I owe you an apology. I think I misjudged the situation entirely."
"Awuuu..." Hitamuki's ears and tail wilted in unified defeat
.....
Thank you for reading.