Chapter 75: Every Single One of Them is a Walking Disaster.
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"Heyah!! Take my Spear Hand!!"
Splat.
"Shishou!! Hitamuki did it!!"
"Idiot, there's still another Slime right there—!!"
"Ah!!"
THUD.
After the incident in which Hitamuki had landed on top of her and nearly suffocated her into the forest floor, Maidena found that every last trace of her initial bias toward Kihara had evaporated completely. In its place was something that felt uncomfortably close to genuine sympathy.
"You... yesterday must have been incredibly hard," she said, watching Hitamuki bounce back up from the dirt with her signature inexhaustible energy. "Fighting alongside her the whole time."
"Manageable." Kihara watched his apprentice dust herself off. "Though now that a White Mage has joined the party, I'm adjusting the plan. I was going to run outdoor drills with her today — just the two of us — but having a healer changes things. What Hitamuki needs right now is to stop overthinking and let her instincts take over. Real combat accelerates that process considerably. Pain is an excellent teacher."
Maidena blinked. "...You already have a training plan mapped out for her."
"She only became a Guardian yesterday. That gives me roughly a baseline."
She hadn't expected that. The young man standing beside her looked about her age — maybe younger — and yet he'd assessed his new apprentice overnight and produced a concrete developmental approach before breakfast. If she'd walked in here intending to write him off as some precocious kid riding on early talent, that would have been a significant mistake.
Her posture shifted, almost without her noticing. The stiffness in her shoulders eased a degree.
"...As someone without any offensive capability," she said, more carefully than before, "what should I prioritize in actual combat?"
Kihara glanced at her. "Evasion first. Your job isn't to fight — it's to not die while keeping everyone else alive. Find a position where you can support the front line without putting yourself in reach of anything that wants to hit you. Stay there."
He paused, then continued: "When we encounter a monster, both of you engage together. Hitamuki handles offense and covers your safety. Your only objective is to maintain distance from the target and avoid becoming a liability. Get used to reading the spacing."
Maidena's fingers tightened around her staff. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
Her first real combat. Alongside Hitamuki.
Of all the possible partners for a baptism by fire.
Hitamuki, who had been listening with the earnest focus of a student memorizing scripture, immediately turned to Maidena and thumped her own chest with authority. "Don't worry! I'll protect you properly! Fighters have defensive skills too, you know!"
"...I sincerely hope so," Maidena said, producing a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.
The sense of impending doom was vivid and specific.
Kihara clapped once to pull both their attentions back. "Hitamuki. Find us the nearest target."
"Understood!"
She closed her eyes. Her nose twitched — once, twice — in the focused, methodical way of someone running a very precise instrument. For about two minutes she stood completely still, sampling the air for traces of monster mana and scent.
Then her eyes snapped open.
"Found one — that way!" She was already moving, sprinting into the trees with beastfolk acceleration.
"Maidena, keep up."
"R-right—" She broke into a run. "Wait — you're going so fast — I can't—!!"
By the time Maidena caught up, her vision was greying at the edges and she was approximately one stumble away from losing consciousness entirely. She barely registered the clearing before noticing that Hitamuki was already mid-combat — weaving around something considerably larger and more aggressive than yesterday's opponents.
A Giant Slime. Multiple times the mass of a standard one, its pseudopods sweeping the ground in wide arcs.
"You two..." Maidena wheezed, hands on her knees. "Could you not... run quite so... fast...?"
"Stop wasting breath and get into position."
She stared at him. He repeated himself. She still didn't move.
Then, in a voice barely above a whisper: "It's... it's so big... I can't... my legs won't..."
Smack.
Kihara's palm connected with his own forehead with enough force to echo.
He stood there for a moment, conducting a quiet internal inventory of his situation.
A Fighter who bows at monsters before engaging them.
A healer who freezes solid at the sight of anything above Slime tier.
He had a sudden, vivid, entirely unwelcome flashback to a certain genre of ensemble comedy — the kind where the party composition was specifically designed to make the straight man suffer.
"All we need now," he muttered, mostly to himself, "is a Great Mage who can only cast one spell per day and we'll have the complete set."
He absolutely was not going to say I want to leave this party. He didn't have a Maybach. He didn't have golden eyes. He had a job to do.
In the clearing, Hitamuki caught the Giant Slime's movement in her peripheral vision and noticed, with a small internal alarm, that Maidena was standing directly behind her — stock still, staff clutched to her chest, frozen.
She made an immediate decision.
Evasion: cancelled. Defense: activated.
She stepped in front of Maidena and dropped into her stance. "Fighter Technique — COUNTER!!"
Counter was one of the cornerstone techniques of the Fighter class — a skill designed to intercept an incoming attack, absorb its force, and redirect it back at the source with compounded momentum. In principle: elegant. In the hands of a master: devastating.
In practice, it came with two fairly significant operational caveats.
The first: once activated, Counter could not be interrupted or cancelled mid-execution. It ran for a full ten seconds, or until a successful redirection occurred — whichever came first. During that window, the user was completely committed.
The second: Counter had no taunt effect whatsoever. If the enemy simply chose not to attack, the user stood there glowing like a decorative lamp until the duration expired.
The Giant Slime registered the pale gold light wrapping around Hitamuki's form, processed this information with whatever passed for intelligence in a Giant Slime, and smoothly redirected its pseudopod mid-swing — curving around her entirely and coiling around Maidena's ankles instead.
"...Eh?"
"NO—!!"
Maidena's shriek cut through the clearing as the pseudopod yanked her skyward, dangling her upside-down over the forest floor at a height that promised a very unpleasant landing.
"MAIDENA!!"
Kihara exhaled. It was the specific exhale of a man watching an inevitability arrive on schedule.
His hand moved to the void at his hip.
The blade came free in a single motion — Youto: Shindo, its edge catching the filtered forest light for less than a second before silver threads of force unspooled through the air like silk drawn taut. The cut traveled the distance between them in silence.
The Giant Slime separated cleanly at the midsection, core and all, before either half registered what had happened.
Maidena fell.
Her left hand pressed her skirt flat. Her right hand locked around her staff. Her eyes clamped shut — she had a single, crystalline moment of certainty that her first field mission was about to end with several broken bones —
Two arms caught her.
She opened her eyes.
Kihara looked down at her with the expression of someone running a quiet status check. "Hurt anywhere?"
She shook her head. Once. Very small. The tears clinging to her lashes hadn't fallen yet — she'd been too frightened to cry properly, and now she was too embarrassed to start.
Hitamuki came sprinting across the clearing, still trailing the fading glow of Counter, and folded herself nearly in half bowing at Maidena's eye level. "I'm so sorry —
Maidena — I'm so sorry — it's my fault — I'm so sorry—!!"
"One Giant Slime," Kihara said, setting Maidena carefully back on her feet. "For new Guardians, that's a legitimate result. We're done for today."
Neither of them argued.
Back at the guild, Enome listened to the debrief with her hands clasped, and then broke into warm applause. "A Giant Slime on your second day — that's genuinely remarkable. Giant Slimes are a nightmare for most new Guardians."
"It's all Shishou's doing... Hitamuki didn't help at all... awuu..."
"Aww, Hitamuki~ don't cry~"
While Enome moved around the counter to comfort Hitamuki, Maidena slipped quietly around to Kihara's side and tugged the edge of his sleeve.
He looked down.
Her cheeks were carrying two small, distinct patches of red that had nothing to do with exertion. She addressed a point approximately level with his collarbone.
"...Thank you. For earlier. You saved me." A pause. "You're genuinely skilled. More than I expected from someone our age."
"Our age?"
She looked up. "Yes. We're the same age, aren't we—"
"I'm in my twenties."
The silence that followed was geological in scale.
Maidena Anger stood completely motionless for a full three seconds, as though her internal processes had encountered a critical error and were waiting for a reboot.
Then, with the stiff careful diction of someone reconstructing their dignity from scattered components, she straightened up and shifted into formal address: "I... see. Then... Senpai. I am fifteen years old. I attend the first year of high school."
She had walked in here this morning intending to prove herself to a peer. She had sized him up, felt the competitive instinct kindle, decided she would show him what a Finizask prodigy could actually do —
— and then needed to be caught like a dropped teacup.
The shame was total and specific. Maidena pressed both hands over her face, held that position for a moment of private reckoning, then turned and walked briskly toward the guild's exit with the decisive energy of someone leaving before further damage could be done.
At the door, she paused just long enough to deliver her exit line:
"When I don't have classes, I'll come and assist you, Senpai. I look forward to working with you going forward — please take care of me!!"
She was gone before he could respond.
"Hitamuki will work harder too! Shishou — same time tomorrow, please take care of me as well!!"
Kihara watched the guild doors swing shut behind both of them.
[So tomorrow I'm eating the full spread of homing gluteus again.]
[Look on the bright side, Master. At least it's soft, warm, and smells faintly of a young girl's exertion.]
[That's not the bright side. That's the problem.]
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Thank you for reading.