Chapter 32: Aiz: Want to Touch It?
....
Half a year passed.
The joint expeditions with Aiz had driven their stat growth at an impressive rate, but both of them had run into the same wall: parameters maxed out, and no Heroic Feat materialising to break through to the next level.
Kihara tried to apply the same logic that had worked for Level 3 — find the floor boss, kill it alone, collect the Feat. The target was Amphisbaena on the twenty-seventh floor. What he had underestimated was the dungeon's capacity for making identical-looking environments actively misleading.
Without proper deep-floor intelligence, he was stuck by the twenty-second floor. The forest there looked uniform from any given vantage point and was anything but — a visual trap that had him walking in circles like someone who had lost the thread entirely. If Aiz hadn't come to find him, he would have been seriously considering the risk of breaking through the labyrinth wall just to get out.
Breaking dungeon walls was not a casual option. The Guild and every Familia's chief deity hammered the prohibition into every adventurer's head from day one, and not without reason. Damage the dungeon's structure and it responded like a wounded animal — generating black creatures that ignored the normal rules governing monster spawns entirely, attacking every adventurer in sight without discrimination, and capable of pursuing targets across multiple floors.
The Astrea Familia — once among Orario's most celebrated, functioning alongside the Ganesh Familia as one of the city's two guardian organisations — had been wiped out by exactly this kind of creature. They had been no ordinary Familia.
"Why did you come to the twenty-second floor alone? Aren't we supposed to be partners?"
Aiz's voice carried something that wasn't quite anger but was closer to it than her usual register. Her face remained still, but the look in her gold eyes had the quality of something being pressed against a surface with considerable force.
"I wanted to solo Amphisbaena and get the Heroic Feat for Level 4."
Silence.
Aiz understood the frustration of a stalled advancement better than most — she'd been stuck at Level 5 for long enough that food had started tasting like nothing and sleep felt like an obligation rather than rest. The difference was that Kihara had the kind of raw potential that had made both Finn and Riveria stop mid-sentence when they'd seen his numbers, and he was sitting at Level 3 for reasons that made no obvious sense.
If I were stuck at Level 3 with his potential, I'd be considerably more desperate than he is.
The sharp edge in her gaze softened. She wasn't good at finding the right words for moments like this — comfort was a skill she'd never had occasion to develop. She stood there in the silence and, for some reason, remembered something Kihara had said months ago about her breastplate.
A thought surfaced.
...Should I let him touch it?
Aiz was genuinely oblivious about many things. This did not extend to physical self-awareness — even Loki, who lived under the same roof and had been trying for years, had never once successfully made contact without receiving immediate and proportionate correction. Every attempt ended the same way.
But Kihara occupied a category that didn't map onto anyone else in her life. His presence registered as familiar in a way she still couldn't explain — something that made proximity feel natural rather than something to manage. Riveria had encouraged the friendship explicitly and with a warmth that she reserved for things she considered genuinely important. Six months of steady time together had built something she didn't have a precise word for.
He wasn't family, but she trusted him the way she trusted family. When the tension of the dungeon and the Familia's internal dynamics built up past a certain point, he was the one she'd talk to. Loki's relentless harassment. Bete and Tiona's endless arguments. Riveria's smile when someone mentioned her age — the one that made experienced adventurers find urgent business elsewhere.
After each of those conversations, something in her unwound slightly. Lili had commented, with characteristic bluntness, that she occasionally made an expression that looked almost like a smile and definitely wasn't not a smile.
All of which meant she saw nothing wrong with what she was about to offer. He'd helped her considerably over the past six months. It seemed reasonable to reciprocate.
"Kihara."
"What?"
The Sword Princess stopped walking. Something moved across her features — brief, faint, the kind of colour that's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. She straightened her posture and asked, quietly:
"Do you... want to touch it?"
"...How exactly would that work?"
"However you want. But — only once."
I have been your sounding board for six months and this is the test you choose to give me.
Kihara briefly considered whether Lili might be hidden somewhere nearby pulling strings. The idea didn't hold up under examination — he'd specifically told her to wait in the safe zone on the eighteenth floor before heading down. She wouldn't have come to the twenty-second alone.
He looked at the gap along the lower right side of the silver breastplate. The one that was approximately hand-shaped. He swallowed.
"You're... actually certain about this?"
"If you ask again, the offer is withdrawn."
Free opportunity. Decisive action required.
He reached out with his left hand toward the gap at the bottom of Aiz's breastplate and slid it inside.
His fingertips crossed the threshold and immediately registered: warmth, slightly above body temperature, with a trace of humidity — the residual heat from someone who had crossed four floors at full speed to get here. Then contact with something that was, without question, as soft as anything he had ever had the occasion to touch.
He didn't push his luck. He committed the sensation to memory with precision and withdrew his hand.
Aiz looked at him with an expression unchanged from baseline.
"What did it feel like?"
"One word: sublime."
"Oh."
She accepted this and resumed walking, her demeanour suggesting that nothing of any particular note had just occurred.
Kihara didn't have much to add either. Six months of observation had made one thing clear: Aiz's relationship with the concepts of romance and attraction was something that had simply not yet become relevant to her in any active way. She had no particular guard up around him — she just genuinely wasn't thinking about it in those terms.
[Heheh~ The training arc for the oblivious Sword Princess has quite a long road ahead of it, Master~]
[I'm looking at the situation at home first. The useless goddess has been fully cultivated.]
[Sometimes I think you're more yandere than anything else. You actually got a goddess to the point where she can't function without you.]
[That's unfair. What we have is pure love.]
They parted ways at the surface. Kihara collected Lili from the eighteenth floor — she spent the walk back delivering a thorough critique of his solo expedition decision — and arrived home to have his face immediately absorbed into Hestia's chest before he'd gotten a word out.
"I'm ba—mmph."
"Welcome home, Kihara. I'm hungry."
"Lady Hestia," Lili said, "are you aware that you become more helpless with each passing week?"
"As long as Kihara's here, I'm perfectly happy being a goddess who can't do anything!"
Lili pressed her hand to her forehead. "You shouldn't say that with such confidence and pride."
.....
Thank you for.
(T/N: New translation will be coming soon....)