Chapter 2480 - Movie Watching with Kaori ⑯
Chapter 2480 - Movie Watching with Kaori ⑯
After finishing their third movie, Kaori went back once to pick up a change of clothes and other things, then returned to Kaito’s house. Time-wise, it was already approaching dinner, making the timing just right.
[Kaori-san, about dinner, would you like to eat here or in the dining hall?]
[H- Hmmm, the dining hall is over at Lilia-san’s mansion, right? I remember you usually eat dinner over there, Kaito-kun…… b- but eating in a noble’s mansion surrounded by servants and such feels like a pretty high hurdle for me.]
[We can use the dining room in my house too, you know? Well, in that case it’d probably just be me and Kaori-san, so it wouldn’t be much different from eating in the room.]
[Yeah. If that’s the case, then as long as you don’t mind, Kaito-kun, I’d feel more at ease eating in this room.]
[Got it. Then I’ll have them bring it over here.]
Kaori was acquainted, to some extent, with the residents of both Kaito’s house and Lilia’s mansion. She could at least be considered familiar with Aoi, Hina, Lilia, Illness, Anima, Caraway, and Eta and Theta, since she had gotten to know them when she gave cooking advice at the party on the ship.
However, there were still many people she didn’t know, and given that Lilia’s mansion was a full-fledged noble residence, it was only natural that she would feel a bit hesitant.
[By the way, Aoi-chan and Hina-chan live at your place too, right, Kaito-kun?]
[Yes, but today they went to the trading city where the Adventurers’ Guild branch is, for some kind of adventurer training course, so they’re staying the night over there.]
[Training at a branch in another city…… that means Aoi-chan and Hina-chan passed the intermediate adventurer exam!]
[Yeah. It seems they gained experience as lower-rank adventurers and passed the monthly exam.]
[Ahh, that brings back memories. The training you get when you rank up takes a whole day, so it’s really long. Well, everything they teach you is important though.]
[Come to think of it, Kaori-san, you used to be an adventurer too, right?]
Aoi and Hina had been working steadily as adventurers, and since they already knew magic, they had the ability to rise to intermediate rank. However, due to their lack of experience, they spent a certain period working as lower-rank adventurers to get used to adventuring. After that, they applied for the promotion exam, passed without issue, and went to the Adventurers’ Guild branch to receive the training required to advance to intermediate rank.
[When you become intermediate rank, you start getting requests from cities other than the one you’re based in, so your range of activity expands a lot. Since there are many differences compared to being lower rank, you go to a branch in a different city from your home base to take the training. When you move up to upper rank, on top of that, you also study things like movements assuming joint missions with the knight order, and the basics of operating under their command, so you even go to the knight order’s headquarters.]
[Ah, I’d heard about that, but joint missions only start from upper-rank adventurers, huh?]
[Depending on the scale, intermediate adventurers can get involved too, but in those cases there’s always at least one upper-rank adventurer present, and you form a temporary team. In the first place, joint missions don’t happen that often. I was technically an upper-rank adventurer too, but as for joint missions with the knight order…… I only had one, when a stampede occurred. Well, in my case, I was moving around from place to place a lot, so those kinds of requests probably didn’t come my way very often anyway.]
In Kaori’s case, since she had worked as an adventurer as a means of funding her travels around the world, she hadn’t operated out of any specific base city.
For adventurers like that, joint missions, which often had the potential to drag on for many days, were relatively unlikely to be assigned, and the only such experience Kaori had in the past was an emergency request triggered by a stampede.
As an aside, thanks to her performance during that incident, Kaori came to be known by the alias “Water Blade”. If she had continued working as an adventurer, she would have soon been recognized as a top-tier adventurer…… however, shortly after that stampede, Kaori retired from adventuring, so she was never called a top-tier adventurer.
[Come to think of it, Kaito-kun, you never became an adventurer, did you? Well, it’s not like you need to make money through adventuring, and I know you’re not great at combat, but I thought you might have at least registered just to accompany Aoi-chan and Hina-chan.]
[Ah, no, I actually can’t register as an adventurer……]
[Eh? Why not?]
[……Errr, apparently it’s because I, personally, fall outside the scope of the laws of the Three Human Nations, so it would cause various complications. I have gone along on requests as a companion before, though. Well, it’s not like I particularly want to be an adventurer anyway, so it’s not really a problem.]
[The laws don’t apply to you? You’re not secretly some kind of fixer who rules the world from the shadows, are you?]
[I’m not.]
Faced with Kaori’s wry, somewhat exasperated smile, Kaito responded with a similarly wry smile of his own.
<Afterword>
Serious-senpai : [I- It wasn’t a sugar-sweet episode. Did the flow just change!?]
Makina : [You can punch harder if you pull your fist back before striking.]
Serious-senpai : [……………..]
Read Novel Full