Speaking bluntly, it was a convenient place for Runoa to update her Status.
That had made her feel a little guilty, and she still felt rather bad about it.
"Before we eat—here, pie and cookies. It's just the leftovers from yesterday, though."
Dessert before dinner, huh? It must be nice to be a goddess who can't get fat. Runoa looked suspiciously at Demeter's always-thin waist and enormous, jiggling chest as she reached out to take the handmade treats: a tomato pie, which replaced apples with vegetables, and wheat cookies. The tomatoes in the pie were as sweet as strawberries, and the wheat in the cookies was mixed with herbs to draw out the sweetness.
"Mmm…delicious. Your food is amazing like always. Have you considered opening a restaurant?"
"No way! If you praise me too much, it'll go to my head."
Laughing, Demeter made black tea. Runoa smiled unconsciously at her warmth. She enjoyed this time. The only place in Orario that Runoa could feel like this was here.
"Is your 'job' still busy?"
"…Yeah, I have one big job left. But I was thinking this should be my last one. I'm getting a little tired…"
Demeter had never asked what Runoa did. There was no way she should have figured it out. But she would sometimes let her have these calm moments, with those kind eyes as though she were consoling a child.
If it were not for Demeter, Runoa might have collapsed long ago.
"After you stop, what will you do?"
"…"
"Hey, Runoa? If you're interested…why not raise wheat, vegetables, and fruit with us? It's rather hard work, but it's really worthwhile, you know?"
Runoa stared in a daze as Demeter smiled across the table. She had actually considered maybe joining Demeter Familia. Among all the gods she had dealt with up to now, Demeter was the best to work with, and the group members who followed her were friendly. And she felt like a place to return to like this would feel pretty nice.
But Runoa did not do it…
"Thanks, Demeter…but I can't."
"Runoa…"
"I just don't think I can do something like that." Runoa held her hand up and stared at the back of it.
"You've seen my Status, so you've probably figured it out I think, but…I do rough work. I beat people up, spill lots of blood…"
"…"
"My hands…are really dirty."
Runoa's alias was Black Fist. The origin of the name was not the gauntlets she used. It was another name used by people in the underworld in fear at the blackish red stains on her fists from tearing flesh, breaking bone, and spilling blood by the gallon. Runoa could see her knuckles tainted with blood, her hands colored black by beating so many people.
"Wheat, vegetables, and fruit…you work hard to nurture them so that people get to eat them, right? They bring joy to so many, too…If my hands got involved…Yeah, they would probably taste bad."
That was the reason she had kept my distance from Demeter Familia. If other people found out that Black Fist was connected to Demeter and the familia, her reputation might tarnish theirs.
After meeting Demeter, she had not accepted any contracts aimed at the faction the goddess supported, the familias affiliated with the Guild. Though no one else knew that.
Bounty hunters were similar to the mercenaries contributing to the city's turmoil, so it was natural they would be the targets of animosity.
"I'm sorry, Demeter. I should go. Thank you for the pie and cookies."
"Runoa, we…"
"It's okay. Really. I'm going to wash my hands of it after this job."
Standing up from her chair, she put on a full-spirited smile for the sad-looking Demeter. It hurt Runoa to make her worry. It would probably be best to abandon this last job.
But she would not.
Probably, this would be a ceremony that would allow her to break with her bounty hunter past, her new beginning, and also a means to vent her anger.
She felt a childish resentment toward Gale Wind, who had bathed just as much blood as her but still found a place to belong while Runoa had not.
A self-deprecating smirk crossed her face for an instant before she put on a brave smile for Demeter and left the room.
"And if I'm just gonna be hanging out, I should probably do it with idiots like me instead of you guys."
The light from the sea of magic-stone lamps shone brighter than the stars above.
It was hard to see the stars at night in sleepless Orario. Chloe had come to understand that since she had come to the Labyrinth City almost four years ago.
"…She's changed, meow."
Evening settled on West Main Street.
She was staring down at The Benevolent Mistress from a moonlit roof. She was looking down on the elf employee who had just thrown out an adventurer.
Gale Wind…You're a different person from just a little while ago, meow.
She had spectacularly tossed an adventurer who had made a pass at one of her coworkers out of the building, and she had received a round of applause. She looked hard to deal with, but the smile she directed at the platinum-haired girl she just helped was like a flower emerging from melted snow.
No…she's returned to how she was, meow.
As if sensing Chloe's presence, her sky-blue eyes looked up.
Wearing a hood low over her eyes, Chloe suddenly flipped over like a stray cat. She soundlessly crossed the roof and landed in the shadowy backstreet.
"You found a place you belong, meow?"
She spoke to herself in the empty, dark alley, her cat ears making two little peaks in her hood.
She took Gale Wind's information sheet out of her breast pocket. The Guild had not released this likeness of the mask-wearing adventurer, and they didn't know her face. This bounty that had been put out by adventurers and merchants.
Gale Wind had gone too far. She had incurred the wrath of too many people and now had a bounty on her head.
If you can make a face like that then…if you've found a place you belong
in the daylight, at least be a bit smarter about it, she thought.
She sighed with a heavy heart as she trudged along.
"If you're going to mature, there are easier ways, meow…"
People could be tenacious about clinging to life. Sometimes that made the job hard to do. She knew that from firsthand experience dating back to just after she was born.
—Chloe Lolo had been a member of a criminal familia that was whispered of in secret all around the continent.
Before she was even given the name Chloe, she had to perform a job in order to join the familia. How to handle poison, how to build resistance to it, how to use a knife—she was taught all of it from birth. With a starting point like that, developing a logical point of view was hopeless from the start. If she took out a target whose name she did not know by pretending to be an innocent little girl, she was praised. If she took poison and just barely survived, writhing in agony, she was praised…Life was probably most pleasant when she did not know anything.
The familia I belonged too, well, they were pretty much garbage.
The deity who established it called it role-playing.
"If there are guys who want dirty jobs done, then there's no way around it. I'll wear the mud." Cheerfully saying such absurdities, the patron deity sowed blood and death through the underworld—garbage presiding over slaughter.
She eventually got fed up with the familia when an assassin who was like an older sister to her—the mother who had given birth to her and watched over her without ever sharing her secret—messed up on a mission and died. Going against the rules of the organization, she had lost her life shielding Chloe.
Learning the truth later, Chloe also discovered how useless tears were. Doubting the organization and rebelling against the rules, she told the founding goddess she wanted to quit. Chloe could still remember her smirk even now.
Her ceremonial assignment to be able to leave was an unreasonable string of deadly demands to test her resolve. She had almost fainted when she was told to take out a certain empire's Level 3 upper-tier knight with a single knife. But Chloe had done it. Thanks to that, she leveled up, too. The goddess was trash, but she was honest enough to uphold a contract signed in blood. —Well, what I'm doing didn't really change much, though.
Chloe had gained her freedom, but she was still lost.
She did not know what she should do. She did not know what she should live for. Knowing nothing but how to kill people, she was missing something. She was damaged.
If you traced back the secret to her success to its source, it lay in the expressions and tone of voice she had learned just mimicking ridiculous gods.
If I hadn't adopted this stupid speech pattern and personality, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The real Chloe that no one ever saw was scared, a crybaby.
In the end, the business she had chosen was assassination.
One kill, lots of money. For earning cash quickly and efficiently, there was no other choice.
There was a relatively large number of vermin in the world. So it was rare that a job would bother her. Sometimes, she was even like a chivalrous thief and became a hero for orphans to mimic. That was a pretty pleasant. Particularly the soft feeling of getting hugged by little boys. That was around when her sexual inclinations started to twist, and she started becoming filled with desire.
—I was sure there was no one who could stop me.
Thinking back on it, Chloe had gotten carried away when she waltzed into Orario.
It had the worst public order in the world at the time, and stepping into that city unconcerned about jobs and without taking it seriously was the first mistake. Orario was a den of thieves. The stronghold of adventurers, sealed in those giant city walls. Chloe had just been a big fish in a little pond. The cat who did not know the depths of the abyss known as the Dungeon received a baptism from the monsters born and tempered there.
—The first time I thought, "Ah, I'm dead!" was when I took a contract on Ganesha Familia, meow.
When she tried to target a certain adventurer in the elephant god's faction, she almost got herself killed. She ran for her life from the terrifying heroine known as Ankusha.
For the girl who had boasted of a perfect kill record outside the Labyrinth City, it was the first frustration, the first failure.
The difference in strength between Orario and the outside world was exceedingly large; it was not something Chloe could measure with tools she had gained from the familia that had raised her.
Remembering the fear that made her tail stand on end, Chloe started picking her jobs carefully.
Her assassinations had rules.
First, she would not kill children. Especially little boys who were the treasure of the world. Robbing the world of that treasure was unthinkable.
Also, she would only kill people who were human filth, or else were mentally prepared to die. If a target broke either of those rules, she would throw the client's money back and cancel the job.
Fortunately, if it could really be called that, she had never had to cancel a job once (though she had failed before). As if to mock the supposed upheaval of the Dark Age, the contracts that made their way to Chloe were generally just thugs taking each other out or groups throwing their weight around in their power struggles. Laughing bitterly at the pointlessness of it, Chloe easily completed those jobs. She leveled up again and was now Level 4.
However, no matter how many she killed, assassination contracts never ended.
The rewards were gold coins: chips in exchange for red drops of life.
Just how much blood have I soaked this blade in?
She had gotten here on inertia alone. Or possibly, what little pride Chloe had had not allowed her to stop.
However, her heart was starting to get melancholy. She was used to being alone due to the nature of her work, but more and more, she found herself wanting a place to rest. A place she belonged, like Gale Wind.
Under the starry sky, she held up her assassin's knife to the moon, soaking in her emotions in a way that was unlike her.
"I'm tired, meow…"
Sighing, Chloe put away her knife as she sensed the presence of another person. Leaving the backstreet, she turned onto Southwest Main Street. Lost in thought for a long time, she had wandered so far south that she had ended up here.
Resting her shoulders on a wall, she casually watched the flow of people.
"Meow?"
She noticed a certain god.
His brown hair was pulled back behind his head. His masculine face was a prime example of a good-looking man. He wasn't wearing a top even though it was halfway into fall already, which brought the phrase "man of the sea" to mind. Next to him, a follower was helping by pulling a luggage cart.
"…Mya-ha!"
Recognizing his figure in the midst of the crowd, an evil smile crossed Chloe's face.
She leaped out the next instant, jumping onto him.
"Guoh?! Wh-what?!…Guh, Chloe Lolo."
While his helper was shocked, the god murmured the name of the person who was clinging to his back. His face twitched. Chloe smiled suspiciously as she also responded to the person she had happened to notice in the crowded road.
"Long time, no see, Njörðr. You doing well?"
"Maaan, I'm lucky, meow. Since we bumped into each other, you're treating me to a drink, meow."
"You're just dragging me along…"
A room in a high-class bar in the Shopping District that covered southern Orario.
In a sound-proofed individual room, alone with Njörðr, Chloe had stripped down to just one piece of underwear.
"By the way, why do you always undress completely when you show me your Status…?"
"That's rude, meow. I'm wearing panties, meow! It's just so I can keep up with your exhibitionism, meow!"
Like a certain bounty hunter, Chloe had converted and contracted with Njörðr. He was the god who ruled over the fish who lived in Port Meren to the southwest of Orario.
The faction he managed was in the fishing business, operating in the ocean, starting at the brackish Lolog Lake that connected with Meren. They repeatedly went out to sea to catch lots of fish. The fresh seafood caught by Njörðr Familia was sold in Orario, and just like the agriculture managed by Demeter Familia, it made a big impact on the city's food situation.
He had apparently come from Meren today with his followers to sell seafood. The fisherman who had been helping him out until earlier had already headed back.
The reason why Chloe had contracted with Njörðr, who lived outside the city…
"Is it okay to take a tone like that, meow? Should I expose your smuggling, meow?" "Guh…!"
It was because of that.
Thanks to one of her jobs, Chloe had infiltrated a suspicious place and happened to see Njörðr taking freight from a shady group to secretly smuggle into the city.
He had apparently helped out with the smuggling on the condition that it was necessary for the fish, but Chloe did not know the details. Even without knowing, it was still sufficient for extortion.