"I've brought a way to find the Hero!!"
Cruje planted herself squarely in front of Aiolette and Gladia, chin lifted with undisguised pride.
Her face was practically glowing with self-satisfaction she couldn't have hidden if she'd tried.
She'd spent the entire previous day on the receiving end of every variety of cold treatment Aiolette could dish out—and honestly, from Cruje's perspective, the injustice of it all was staggering.
All she had done was follow the goddess's revelation to Stellar Academy and approach Aiolette!
And for that she'd been called a fraud and had her money taken!
The first time she'd been treated like this since becoming a Saintess!
*Even someone as gentle as me has her limits!*
But once they saw what Cruje had brought today, they'd change their tune.
*It was a long and harrowing ordeal of humiliation and hardship. Thank you, Holy Knights!*
…Well. The fact that the Holy Knights assigned to Cruje had ridden through the night to retrieve this from the Church was, strictly speaking, beside the point.
Anyway!
Cruje squared her shoulders, closed her eyes, and waited for Aiolette and Gladia's reaction.
They had to be dying of curiosity, right?
"…?"
But no matter how long she waited, the reaction she'd been hoping for never came.
When she cracked one eye open, there was no sign of the Drnaris mistress and maid anywhere in her field of vision.
All she could see were other students staring at the Saintess standing in the middle of the path, radiating an overwhelming presence at no one in particular.
Whispers drifted to her ears.
"…What is the Saintess doing in the middle of the road?"
"…No idea. Don't make eye contact."
"…Wow, her chest is massive."
Cruje's face flooded scarlet with mortification.
She snapped her head up and scanned her surroundings.
Far ahead, she spotted Aiolette and Gladia walking away.
That was right.
The moment Cruje had stepped in front of them and thrust out her chest, Aiolette and Gladia had simply walked around her without breaking stride.
There was no stopping those two with someone like Cruje.
"Dia, what should we have for breakfast?"
"What about that café we went to last time? I noticed they seem to have a morning menu as well."
"Shall we go there, then?"
Chatting pleasantly between themselves, the two drifted further away. Cruje broke into a sprint after them.
"W-wait for me!!"
…Needless to say, they did not wait.
***
The three of them ended up at Aiolette and Gladia's regular café.
It was a pleasant place with private rooms in addition to the main seating area—the kind of spot where you could have a quiet conversation without being jostled by strangers, which was precisely its appeal.
"How could you just leave me behind like that!!"
Cruje shook with indignation, her considerable presence quivering.
Aiolette and Gladia, of course, paid her no more mind than they would background noise.
What was Cruje going to do about it, really?
To be perfectly honest, neither of them was particularly invested in finding the Hero. Demon Lords and all that—Aiolette didn't care about any of it as long as Gladia was by her side, and Gladia had defeated the Demon Lord dozens of times in the game and felt nothing resembling urgency about it.
If anything, Aiolette found Cruje baffling.
If she herself were being treated this way, she'd have walked off out of sheer self-respect. So why did that pink-headed girl keep following them around?
*Is the goddess's oracle really that important to her?*
The kind of thought that would have sent any Church clergyman into apoplexy—and Aiolette was having it without a second's hesitation.
To her credit, she had enough social awareness not to say it aloud. That was the last remaining thread of Aiolette's self-restraint.
Regardless, Cruje pressed on with passionate conviction.
"I! Went to the Church and argued very strongly! And I found a way to locate the Hero!"
Regardless, Aiolette and Gladia continued their meal.
"My lady, try this too. The hotcakes are wonderful."
"Really? Let me see—oh! They're so soft!"
Realizing that the two were not listening to a single word she said, Cruje let out a sigh, sat down, and started eating.
At that, Aiolette—who had shown precisely zero interest in Cruje until this moment—was the one to speak first.
"But why do you just naturally eat with us?"
"W-what?! Why—why do you ask?!"
"I mean, every time we sit down to eat, you've been quietly slipping in and joining us."
"I can eat with people, can't I…"
Aiolette's words, entirely without malice, struck Cruje like a blade.
It was true, strictly speaking, that Cruje had no particular reason to be sharing meals with Aiolette and Gladia.
The goddess's oracle had told her to seek help from the Drnaris house—not to become friends with them.
And yet the reason Cruje kept gravitating toward these two was…
*I-I can't ever admit it's because I have no friends…!*
That was it. Cruje had no friends.
Before becoming a Saintess, the women in her village had been too jealous of her to befriend her. After becoming a Saintess, the title itself made forming friendships nearly impossible.
In that sense, Aiolette and Gladia were the first people Cruje had ever met who treated her as an equal—neither jealous of her nor intimidated by her…!
…Even if "equal" meant getting her money taken.
Anyway.
Even a friendship built on financial transactions was still a friendship, wasn't it?
Cruje had always harbored a certain romantic notion about the word "friend," and so she'd dragged herself along just to eat with them.
Naturally, Aiolette had no way of knowing any of this.
To her eyes, Cruje was simply a strange girl who kept clinging to people who ignored and mistreated her.
That inexplicable persistence only deepened Aiolette's suspicion.
*…Something's off. Definitely off.*
By her own honest assessment, Aiolette was not the sort of person anyone would want to get close to.
Which meant Cruje had to be after something. And if she was after something…
Aiolette's thoughts drifted toward the most valuable thing she possessed.
*Don't tell me she's after Dia?!*
Aiolette's eyes flew open with sudden certainty.
*That's it, that has to be it. Now that I think about it, she's been shaking those things around conspicuously since the very beginning. It's deliberate.*
It was not deliberate. It was simply a natural phenomenon.
*And Dia seems oddly soft on her.*
Gladia was simply accustomed to Cruje because she was the original protagonist of the game, and mildly fascinated by her extraordinary presence.
But suspicion bred suspicion, and soon Aiolette's mind was entirely consumed by it.
Before she knew it, she was picturing Cruje using that formidable chest to seduce Gladia and whisk her away.
*Your little maid is mine now. Hehehe—!*
…Cruje had never said anything of the sort, nor had she ever laughed like that.
If Cruje had seen what was being imagined about her, she would have had every right to sue for defamation. The fantasy kept spiraling.
It was Gladia who cut through Aiolette's delusion.
"Now, now, my lady. Don't be so hard on her—try this first. Say 'ah.'"
Gladia speared a piece of hotcake on a fork and held it out to Aiolette's lips.
Aiolette took the offered bite without hesitation, her cheeks puffing out like a squirrel's.
Chew, chew.
The sweet, pillowy hotcake melted across her tongue, and with it, every dark fantasy and spike of jealousy she'd been directing at Cruje dissolved just as smoothly.
Through Heart-Sight, Gladia confirmed the shift in Aiolette's expression and allowed herself a quiet, inward smile.
*Our young lady really is easy to manage.*
Gladia had caught the storm brewing in Aiolette faster than anyone else could have.
Though she conveniently seemed to have forgotten that she herself had entertained similar delusions not so long ago.
A truly shameless maid.
Gladia dabbed the syrup from the corner of Aiolette's mouth with a napkin, gentle and unhurried.
Cruje watched the two of them in silence.
*So friends are this physically affectionate with each other…!*
Cruje was absorbing a rather skewed piece of information…!
This might very well have been the moment the seed was planted for the alarmingly open-minded views on romance that Gladia had always worried about.
In any case, the three of them finished breakfast in relative peace.
Once the meal was more or less done, Aiolette—her mood considerably improved thanks to the hotcakes—dabbed her lips with a napkin and spoke with unhurried elegance.
"So then."
She set down her teacup and turned her gaze across the table to Cruje.
"What exactly is this method for finding the Hero?"
"Oh!"
At Aiolette's question, Cruje dropped her fork with a clatter and shot to her feet.
She had been so moved by the fact that she was eating with friends, so absorbed in studying their peculiar(?) bond, that she had completely forgotten why she'd come here in the first place.
"Right! I was going to show you that!"
Cruje's face blazed with renewed purpose as she brought both hands to the front of her pristine white vestments.
Then, without a moment's hesitation, she slipped her hand straight down into her décolletage.
"!?"
Even Aiolette couldn't suppress her shock at the sudden move.
Gladia, meanwhile, registered the remarkable oscillation conveyed through Heart-Sight and thought to herself:
*Huh… at that size, a whole hand just… fits in there.*
Regardless, Cruje reached deep and drew something out with the triumphant air of a fisherman landing a prize catch.
Flash—
The moment her hand emerged, a soft, sacred light suffused the air around them.
Resting in Cruje's palm was a transparent, spherical pendant framed in ornate antique metalwork. Inside the orb, a mysterious swirl of luminescence churned and drifted.
Thud.
The Hero's Blood flowing through Gladia's veins surged with sudden, violent recognition—as though it had just encountered a long-lost kin.
*That's…*
She couldn't see it, but Gladia felt an unmistakable intuition about what Cruje was holding.
"Ta-da!"
Cruje shook the orb and announced it proudly.
"This is the only remaining trace of the First Hero—the one I begged and pleaded with the Church to let me borrow!"
In that instant, Cruje's words and Gladia's thought landed at exactly the same moment.
*The Shard of the Holy Sword!*
"It's the ⟨Shard of the Holy Sword⟩!"