Click.
After finishing my bath, I wiped the moisture from my hair with a towel hanging on the wall and flung open the bathroom door handle.
Intending to properly dress before Amy and Friede woke up.
However.
“Oh.”
“Uh, eh, ah, um, Hilde, Ms. Hilde…? You’re, you’re awake?”
What awaited me as I came out of the bathroom completely naked were the surprised eyes of Amy and Friede, who seemed to have already woken up and were in the process of putting on their own clothes.
“Um… ah, you’re awake…?”
I reflexively spread the towel to cover my body and smiled awkwardly.
Since it wasn’t a very long towel, even if I covered myself, half of my chest and the tip of my crotch were still blatantly exposed.
“Ahaha…”
Heat rushed to my face.
I understand that there’s no need to be embarrassed since we’re biologically the same gender… but human feelings aren’t so clear-cut.
Unless it’s a situation where I’m mentally prepared, like entering a public bath, I felt considerable resistance to suddenly exposing my naked body like this.
Of course, even the public bath being okay was just a figurative expression, I had never actually set foot in one.
Because I would inevitably have to lower my face in such places, and due to the remnants of conscience and shame in my heart.
You see, most public baths in this world are mixed-gender. My skin wasn’t thick enough to boldly enter such places and bathe nonchalantly.
…I’ve gotten a bit long-winded.
To sum it up in one sentence, this current situation was so embarrassing and shameful that it was hard for me to bear.
“Um… First, clothes! Let’s put on clothes first!”
“Ah, uh. Y-Yes. That’s right…!”
I barely managed to answer, stammering with a blank face, then ran to the wardrobe with quick steps and immediately took out and put on new underwear.
After hurriedly covering the important parts like that, I also took out and put on a new pair of pants and a shirt.
“Phew…”
Only then did my chest start to feel a bit calmer.
* * *
After properly dressing in casual clothes.
I sat down on a chair next to the bed, rubbing the towel on my still damp hair.
“Ahem.”
Then, I cleared my throat with a mix of embarrassment while looking at Amy and Friede sitting modestly on the edge of the bed.
“Huuu…”
“Hmm…”
Friede, perhaps recalling the scene from earlier, blushed bright red and avoided my gaze, while Amy had her eyes slightly closed, deeply lost in thought.
“Haah…”
I put down the towel that had become soggy from absorbing moisture on the table, lightly shook my head to arrange my hair, and let out a faint sigh.
I felt a bit stuffy inside. No, should I say bloated? It felt like my throat was completely blocked.
“Um… can I ask something?”
Finally, the moment had come to confirm what had happened last night. It was something I really didn’t want to do, but had to ask.
“…What on earth happened last night?”
So I opened my mouth.
Desperately praying that I wouldn’t get answers like it was a hot night, or that it was their first time.
“Cough…!”
Friede, who had been avoiding my gaze, stiffened her shoulders and let out a dry cough.
“…Do you really have to know?”
Amy looked at me with a face that seemed to ask if I could handle it.
A reaction that suggested something had definitely happened, and quite thoroughly at that.
‘…What’s with this reaction.’
A terrible premonition that my prayers had been betrayed pierced my mind like an awl.
‘No way, no way…!’
A chilling, dizzying sensation as if cold was rising from my toes and freezing my entire body, I stiffened my pale face and trembled my parted lips.
“N-No… right? It’s not that, right?”
Revealing my desperate emotion that as long as it wasn’t what was going through my mind right now, I didn’t care what had happened.
But reality was cruel.
“…Take responsibility. I can’t get married now.”
Amy answered in a whisper, her face turning red as she slightly covered her chest with both hands.
“I-I too, um. It was my first! My first time! Please take responsibility…!”
Friede also shouted with a red face, slightly rubbing her neatly aligned thighs together.
I didn’t have the presence of mind to respond to those words.
Responsibility. Marriage. First time. Responsibility.
Such heavy, such terrifying words echoed and spun madly in my mind, empty with shock.
Words that couldn’t be interpreted in any other way. The inescapable reality struck my mind like a sledgehammer.
I did it.
Was it because I completely lost my self-control while drunk? Though I couldn’t remember anything, I had spent the entire night in a passionate time of ecstasy.
With a legally minor and a visually minor.
I touched them? These kids?
And both of them at the same time? After getting them drunk?
An unbearable, shocking reality.
“Ah, aah, uwaaa…!”
My mind instantly became distant and a strange moan flowed out of my wide-open mouth.
A dizzying sense of falling. It felt like my soul had left my body and was plummeting into an abyss.
As if a dagger had been driven into the back of my head, my eyes rolled back and my consciousness scattered like mist in a storm.
“Aaaahhhh…”
I fainted on the spot.
“Uh, uhh…? Hilde!? Wait, get a hold of yourself…!”
“Ms. Hilde?! It was a joke, a joke!”
I felt like I heard the panicked voices of the two people fleetingly pass through my buzzing eardrums.
Since my hearing was also almost gone, I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
* * *
Forty minutes later.
I barely regained consciousness. In a state of being neatly laid on the bed.
“What… was it a dream…?”
A voice so weak it was closer to a groan than speech.
I kept my eyes closed and placed my trembling arm over my eyes, like a terminal patient whose last leaf had fallen.
Yes, it must have all been a dream.
Waking up nearly naked, Amy and Friede being in the bed, the bath after that, and the shocking story I heard from the two of them.
It was all a nightmare. If I think about it carefully, it’s obvious. There’s no way I could have done such a thing.
Really, what kind of dream was that? Had fatigue unknowingly accumulated from all the battles so far? Or was it because of the alcohol?
Yes, I should refrain from alcohol from now on…
“Ms. Hilde! Are you awake! Thank goodness, thank goodness!”
The escape from reality ended there.
As I removed the arm covering my eyes and lifted my eyelids at the voice piercing my ears, I could see Amy and Friede looking down at me with worried faces.
Both were dressed exactly the same as in the ‘nightmare’.
…So it wasn’t a dream. Fuck this world.
“Maybe I should… just sleep forever like this…”
“No, you can’t!”
As I was about to close my eyes again after saying such words, Friede urgently grabbed my shoulders and shook them quickly.
“It was a joke! A joke! Nothing happened! Nothing happened at all!”
While saying something hard to believe.
“…A joke?”
A joke…?
What.
That?
…So, nothing happened?
The moment my wandering mind, drifting like duckweed in a hazy consciousness, touched the meaning of that sentence, my awareness instantly became clear and my half-closed eyes flew wide open.
“It was a joke?!”
I shouted as I sprang up.
Whack!
While headbutting Friede with my forehead that shot out like a spring.
“Kyaa!”
With a dizzying impact like sparks flying before my eyes, Friede, who was struck by my forehead, fell off the bed with a scream like a kicked chick.
“Kyaaah?!”
Amy, who tried to quickly dodge with a startled jump of her shoulders, lost her balance after getting caught on Friede’s arm.
With a clattering noise, the two women rolled amicably on the lodge floor.
“Ow ow ow…”
I glared at the two girls while clutching my forehead that was stinging with pain.
I would have been clutching my forehead even if I hadn’t headbutted anyone.
A little while later.
Amy and Friede, who had untangled their limbs and gotten up, explained to me the full story of what had happened last night.
The talk about spending a hot night and taking responsibility was nothing more than a joke.
In reality, they had supported me, who was staggering drunk, to my room and laid me on the bed, but I started taking off my clothes saying I was hot, and in their bewilderment, they fell onto the bed while trying to stop me.
Right after that, they too could no longer withstand the intoxication and fell asleep.
The talk about responsibility was just a joke the two of them had conspired to play while I was in the bathroom washing up.
Amy had suggested it, and Friede, after some hesitation, eventually agreed after being persuaded by her.
Because of the lingering effects of alcohol, they thought it would be funny to see me turn pale.
…I really can’t believe this.
“There are jokes you can make and jokes you can’t!”
I made the two of them kneel on the floor below the bed and delivered an angry lecture.
There’s a line even for jokes, and how could they make such a line-crossing joke?
“Do you understand? Even between close friends, there’s a line that must be kept―I mean, manners―you’re two years younger than me―I’ve been too lenient with you―how surprised I was―”
Like that for thirty minutes.
“Um… hey, Hilde? We were wrong, so can’t you let us off now…? You’ve been repeating the same thing for thirty minutes now…”
Amy, who had been holding both arms up unable to withstand my pressure, pleaded for mercy in a trembling voice.
“What? Are you bored? Keep listening anyway. This is advice and admonition from your elder.”
Of course, I flatly refused. The current me had become a merciless judge that even the devils of hell would applaud.
Compared to the shock I had felt, the numbness in their arms and knees was hardly even pain.
“But, I’m the same age as you…”
“You acted exactly the same!”
Friede, who had tried to protest meekly, shut her mouth with a flinching face.
Until finally, after nearly an hour of long lecturing, permission was given that they could lower their hands.
I wanted to continue the lecture for two more hours, but since I was starting to get hungry, I decided to let it slide just this once.
Really, what kind of joke were they thinking of pulling?
I thought my liver was going to fall out.