Chapter 4 An Otherworlder Too Busy for the Dungeon

“Mm, very well. I shall prepare a modest gift to cover your ceremony. As for the paperwork, I shall have the Adventurers Guild draw it up for you. Princess, or rather, Laualliuna, and you, Souya, interracial marriage is not without its difficulties. You two must take each other’s hands and embark on this adventure, together.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Uh, yes, Your Majesty.” I copied Lana’s answer. We still held hands.

The king stood from his chair, followed by his son; we bowed our heads to them in unison. Left completely out of the loop, Pops scratched his beard out of apparent boredom. I looked out the window onto the scenery in this foreign land and thought of my sister, so far away.

Yukikazzie. Looks like your big brother’s getting hitched.

“Souya, we’re here.”

“Huh?”

The next thing I knew, we’d arrived back at the campsite. I saw the carriage out on the meadow, returning to the city. My brain had reached its processing limit, so I had no memories of anything after about the time we left the castle.

“Now, then.” Time to make some lunch, I guess—

“Please forgive me!” Lana got down on the ground in dogeza, prostrating on the earth.

“Hmm? Wait, what?!” It all happened so fast that I couldn’t take it in. I let out a shrill squeal and bent into a funky shape.

“Lady Mythlanica and Machina explained that in the country called Japan, you assume this pose when you want to make the most sincere of apologies or entreaties!”

“You don’t need to know that!” How dare they go around sharing the worst parts of my country!

“No, I refuse to lift my head until you forgive me! I’m so terribly sorry! I didn’t even ask how you would feel about the matter and did something so preposterous all on my own. The things those beastmaids said to you made me panic, and I seized upon this sudden impulse. You have saved me time and time again, and I still haven’t even returned a single favor. How could I dare burden you yet again?! I will do anything within my power to atone for this! I know better than anybody that I am unworthy of being with someone like you! However, we cannot now go back on what we said before the king! So only until you find someone you truly love, just until then, please pretend to marry me!”

I see, so you’re telling me to marry you for show. Wait, wait, wait, hold on.

“Mr. Souya.” Machina poked my back from behind. “How can you let a woman go on like this? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

Huh?

“Squad Member Souya.” Isolla, at my hip, clutched my poncho. “Prove to us your sincerity as a man. Machina and I refuse to support someone who cannot manage that.”

Huhhh?

“Souya,” said Lady Mythlanica as she came out of the tent. “I’ve gleaned the general picture. Good luck, I suppose.” Right.

I had an elf prostrate on the ground, two AI machines criticizing me, and a goddess in her feline form. Amid this most chaotic of scenes, I got down to one knee and lifted Lana’s head.

“Lana, will you……pretend to marry me?”

“Yes, thank you very much.”

It would’ve been a pretty nice scene without the pretend. The AI units played the sounds of applause.

“Congratulations. We have a saying in my country that goes, ‘Marriage is an adventure.’ Isolla and I will do everything in our power to support you two as you embark on your journey.”

“I have nothing to add.” Lady Mythlanica’s comment was exactly on point.

“Whaaat, you’re home? Where’d ya gooo?” A sleepy Éa came out of the tent.

Lana smiled as she said, “Éa, your big sister has decided to marry Souya.”

“Whyyyy?!”

It took half a day to explain everything.

[12TH DAY]

The next day, I went to the Adventurers Guild and submitted applications for both a new party and our marriage license. When I filled out the permit, I realized that elves practice polygamy. According to Lana, this tradition dated back to the days of old. She said elves have long life spans and low birth rates, which I figured must have played a part. Maybe they’d settled on that custom for lack of other choices.

I made a few errors on the form and had to write it again. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I kept making a ton of tiny mistakes. After struggling for about half a day, Isolla took over and used a laser to burn the information into the allotted spaces. It took thirty-five tries, but my paperwork finally passed all the checks, and Lana and I officially became husband and wife. Still, it was only a marriage on paper. I hardly felt anything.

“Congratulations.” Evetta looked at me like a doting mother and clapped. I couldn’t tell you why, but the Guildmaster collapsed behind her.

[13TH DAY]

We rented out Tutu’s place to hold our humble “fake” wedding ceremony. Who knows how they’d heard about it, but the Zavah Night Owl Trade Group and the Ellomere Western Peng Traders dropped by while we set everything up and offered to supply whatever we needed. I didn’t want to owe them any favors, but they said something about how this kind of party provided the perfect platform to advertise their businesses. Satisfied, I asked them to handle the drinks, food, and party favors.

After we finished all the preparations, I ran around town to invite our guests. Fortunately, it only took me about two hours to gather everyone. And so, surrounded by not too many but not too few people, we began the ceremony. Lana and I called upon our respective gods and exchanged our vows before them. One was a cervine god named Lord Ezeus; the other, a feline goddess, Lady Mythlanica. The god and goddess offered their blessings and grace to each other’s respective devotees and brought the ceremony to a close. Lord Ezeus’s speech took up most of this part, but Lady Mythlanica read the room and simply muttered, “You have my blessing.”

Next came the banquet for our starving beasts. It turned into a small zoo. Evetta chowed down on an extra heaping plate of food. Shuna and Bel kept apace next to her, heartily devouring their own plates. The young beastmaid who had carried Lady Mythlanica through town before sat in front of them, stuffing her cheeks with dinner.

The Guildmaster, Pops, the boss, and Lord Baafre, who apparently all went way back, cheerfully drank it up together. Ghett sat with the young chairman of the Ellomere Traders and his common-law wife, the mermaid Bambia. The three stayed close to the river and quietly ate their meals. Tutu’s stunningly gorgeous friends refilled the young Zavah chairman’s cup so aggressively that he almost passed out drunk. Lanceil threw her arms around me, then got into a very entertaining scuffle with Lana. Tutu paid them no mind and came to sit on my lap, then wrote down the recipes for the dishes that had been served.

All the people I’d met from a wide variety of races had gathered here. And yet, no other elves came aside from my bride. Éa had been dead set on attending, but her health had taken a turn for the worse early in the morning, so she’d stayed back at camp, sleeping.

In the way of every world, people who heard the commotion decided they had to join in. Some heard about it through friends, then friends of those friends showed up, then people those people knew joined our banquet, ate our food, and drank our spirits. Predictably, we ran out of both. However, we had two heads of trade groups in our midst. Their moment to let their brands shine had come. And yet, both the piss-ass drunk Zavah chairman and the young head of the Ellomere Traders, eager to impress his wife and her grandfather, went more than a little overboard and brought out carts upon carts of food and drinks.

The sun set, and the riotous banquet full of eating and drinking, singing and dancing, reached its highest tide. I did my best to act respectably at first, but even I gave in halfway through, lost my senses, and became just as idiotic as everyone else. Lana took Lord Baafre up on a drinking contest and had him cornered. A woman in a black dress danced atop one of the tables, a bottle of ale in her hands. Did she know someone here? It felt like I’d seen her before. Tutu’s friends started stripping; the middle-aged men howled. Beltriche cuddled up to Evetta. Some faces I knew disappeared, soon replaced by ten times their number in strangers.

The crowd and noise grew so out of hand that the neighbors started to complain. The constable showed up. I offered him a drink, and he didn’t even get halfway through it before he began shit-talking the aristocracy in the Central Continent in a long-winded rant.

Shrieks and angry screams, cheers and flirtatious calls rose to the skies from this feverish, chaotic, interracial feast. I no longer felt alienated like the outsider I’d been when I first arrived. If anything, a sleepy sense of comfort filled my heart.

Ahh, I really have become an adventurer.

[XXTH DAY]

Someone took my hand in the midst of the dreamlike morning mists and pulled me away from the clamor. Walking before me I saw the woman who had just become my fake wife. Dizzily, giddily, we wandered through the streets like a pair of sleepwalkers. We fell in the river.

“Gasp!”

The cold water immediately sobered me and woke me up. The river came up to my waist, deeper than I’d thought. Lana splished and splashed as she swam—wait, no, she was drowning. I immediately grabbed on to her and held her as high above the water as I could.

“Ghah!”

She put both her arms on my shoulders and gasped for air. Drops of water scattered from her long silver hair. Her eyes shone beneath the light of the three otherworldly moons, gold just like them. Out of some coincidence or perhaps fate, Lana gazed at me through eyes exactly like Lady Mythlanica’s.

“Pft, heh-heh, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Then she laughed with an innocent, childlike smile. “You saved me again.”

“Damn right I did.” Two moons leaned in. Neither of us knew quite what to do, and our teeth gently collided. We connected for the briefest of moments, too short to really take anything in.

“I know those aren’t your true feelings. But I have fallen in love with you.”

“What do you—?”

Lana hugged my head so tightly, so passionately, I almost couldn’t breathe. But enveloped by this pair of infinitely soft globes, I stopped caring about anything else.

“I’m in love with you. I love you. I never want to let you go.”

“……”

I couldn’t get my emotions in enough order to respond. It felt far too soon to say, Me too, and I didn’t know for sure if I even had the right to say so.

“I’m only being selfish and pushing this twisted love on you. So I’ll place you under a spell. If you ever truly fall in love with someone else, if I come between you and your happiness, or if I die, I will make it so you forget everything about me.”

That I couldn’t take quietly. “That’ll never happen.” I wouldn’t ever forget the heat of her skin, her warmth.

I saw her smile through tears. “But, you know, in the end—,” she started to say, but my mind slipped into darkness. The uproar echoing in the distance slid further and further away, so far I could hear nothing anymore.

Just like when I first came to this world, I fell into a bottomless—

“!”

—I woke up. Glimpsing the sunrise, I frantically reached out my hand and latched on to……Lana’s breast; she slept deeply at my side. Its supple softness filled the palm of my hand. I could touch this for the rest of my life and never tire of the sensation.

Huh? I got the feeling that I’d been dreaming, as if I’d tasted a vision as sweet as this moment.

“O-ow.” My head pounded. Sleeping on the hard cobblestones all night had left my body cramped and sore. I glanced around to find guests from the banquet sprawled all over the place like me, each and every one of them in awful positions. On top of that, the place had been so thoroughly wrecked that it made the devastation left in the wake of a typhoon look tidy.