By Zephyria 
“I don’t know. It was just the same.”
“The same as what?”
“As before I came here. But why do you keep asking about that?”
“I need to know to decide what to do with you.”
Aska, who had been nonchalantly answering while swinging his legs, turned his gaze to me.
“……”
“……”
After a not-so-brief period of staring at each other, Aska was the first to avert his gaze. He straightened up on the sofa and asked, looking at me.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“You said you weren’t afraid of dying, right?”
“It’s not because I’m scared.”
“Then? Why are you asking?”
“I need to know to decide whether to speak properly or not.”
Seeing him repeat my words while looking straight at me made my vision blur.
“Um……”
I covered my mouth with one hand, groaned, and bought myself some time. I felt like I would burst out laughing if I opened my mouth now. Since I was covering my eyes with my hand, Aska fortunately wouldn’t see my twitching cheeks.
Having barely suppressed my laughter, I pondered what to say first and then asked seriously.
“Then tell me if I still seem like a barbarian.”
“You?”
“Yeah. You said I was a barbarian, right? Do I still look like one?”
“If I answer that, you won’t kill me?”
“It depends on how you answer.”
Aska’s expression quickly soured at my words. He seemed displeased with something, but he was moving his lips as if choosing his words.
“If I say you seem like a barbarian, you’ll kill me?”
“Stop asking me that and tell me what you think. What do you think?”
“……Just.”
“Just?”
“More than I heard……”
Aska mumbled, glancing at me. Then, averting his gaze again, he muttered.
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“You don’t look like a barbarian?”
“It’s not that you’re not at all, just a little……”
“Like a barbarian?”
“That’s……”
Aska, who was stammering with a troubled expression, seemed to realize something was wrong and frowned.
“You barbarian bastard……”
“Why are you always so extreme?”
“Don’t laugh!”
“Hahaha.”
As I clutched my stomach and laughed, Aska jumped up and started punching me.
“I said don’t laugh!”
Thwack, thwack, thwack……. The insignificant sounds of impact echoed repeatedly in the room. He was hitting me quite diligently, but perhaps because of the Sealing Magic, or because he had died and come back to life, it didn’t hurt much. I let him hit me for a while and then calmed him down.
“If you don’t want to die, you should flatter me.”
“Just kill me, you bastard!”
“Stop cursing. Calm down first……”
I was trying to sit him back down on the sofa when there was a knock. As soon as he heard the sound, Aska, who had been huffing and puffing, hid in the bathroom.
Shaking my shoulders and laughing again at his quick movements, I opened the door. An amount of food that could easily feed six or seven people was placed on the table. After confirming that the Servants, who had quickly finished their work, had closed the door and left, I called Aska.
“You can come out now.”
At my words, Aska cautiously emerged from the bathroom, looking around.
“Let’s eat first and talk again.”
Aska didn’t answer and sat down on a chair, grabbing a piece of bread. Then he started eating voraciously.
“……”
Literally, voraciously…….
The bread was just the beginning. He indiscriminately put meat, fruit, salad, soup, fish, and dessert into his mouth, chewing and swallowing repeatedly.
“Eat slowly. I’m not going to take it away from you.”
At my words, Aska slowed down his eating speed a little. But it wasn’t long before it gradually sped up again, making it meaningless. At that rate, he wasn’t eating, he was inhaling.
Was he that hungry? Well, considering the sound his stomach made earlier, he sounded like someone who hadn’t eaten for three or four days.
I was a little worried he might choke, but I thought it would be better to let him eat as much as he wanted for now, so I watched his pig-like appearance for a while. He was eating greedily, but there was so much food that he wouldn’t be able to eat even half of it anyway.
“……”
About half the food was left. He was still eating, so it seemed like he had a bigger stomach than I thought. Or was it so delicious that he didn’t even realize he was full?
“……”
Now less than 30% of the food remained. Wasn’t that beyond the level of a big eater? How could all that fit into his body?
“……”
I couldn’t help but be astonished as I watched Aska finish off all the food on the table. Hadn’t he eaten more than his own weight?
“Are you a pig?”
“What’s this?”
Aska asked, holding up an empty plate, as if he hadn’t heard me. It was clearly the bowl that had contained the dried fruit.
“Dried fruit.”
“This is so delicious.”
“Want more?”
Aska nodded. I looked at him with a dumbfounded expression and then frowned.
“Stop eating.”
“You said you’d give me more if I was short?”
“That’s just a formality. Do you even know how much you’ve eaten?”
“It’s so petty to complain about eating……”
“What if you suddenly get sick from eating so much? Go wash your hands and face.”
Aska looked at me with a dissatisfied expression at my disgusted words and then went into the bathroom. In the meantime, I called a Servant to clear the empty dishes. As soon as everyone left the room, Aska, who had wet his face, slowly came out.
“Did you wash properly? You said you were going to wash earlier and came out in 10 seconds.”
“I washed.”
I only asked once, but anyone would think I had asked about ten times. Aska answered casually, as if he was annoyed. He was flapping the gown he was wearing, as if he was only now feeling the heat after his stomach was full.
“I’m so hot, really. I wish it was winter already.”
“Winter or whatever, now that you’ve eaten, sit down again. And it’s winter now.”
“……What?”
“First of all, are you really of royal blood?”
As I was about to get back to the main topic, Aska came to my side with a pale face.
“It’s winter? Now?”
Taken aback by the sudden proximity, I leaned back and said.
“It’s winter, now.”
“But it’s so hot?”
“It’s not that hot?”
“Are you crazy?”
“I told you not to curse.”
“This insane country……”
Aska collapsed to the floor with the most despairing expression he had shown since coming to Actan.
¸.•¨•¸.•¨•¸.•¨•¸
Because Aska was about to die from the heat, I had no choice but to continue the conversation in the bathroom.
“First of all, are you really of royal blood? I heard that there was something non-human mixed in among your ancestors, did you know that?”
I asked, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with my back turned, looking ahead. I could hear him constantly exhaling deeply, as if he was finally feeling alive after being in the bathtub filled with ice water. As his mood improved, I could hear the clattering of ice as he moved his arms and legs, splashing around.
“I don’t know the details, but I think I heard it from my grandmother.”
“The grandmother who told you to smear mud on yourself? She’s not your real grandmother, is she?”
“She is my grandmother?”
Aska seemed to believe it so firmly, but she was probably a Servant who had been put in charge of him after he was forced out of the royal family for some reason.
“Living in the slums, did you ever hear any stories about your parents?”
“Not really?”
“Didn’t you have any friends there? Is the grandmother you lived with still there?”
“Pie disappeared suddenly in the winter, so I haven’t seen him in a while, and my grandmother came to the castle with me. They said they’d give me a house so I could live with my grandmother when I go back.”
At those words, I glanced back at Aska. Aska, who had been staring at the ice water with his head down, looked at me as if he had sensed my gaze.
“Pie?”
“He’s my friend, but he disappeared suddenly.”
“Didn’t you have any other friends besides him? Is he the only one?”
“He’s not a person, he’s a dog.”
“……”
Did that mean he didn’t have any human friends? More than that, I thought he had died after being caught up in this incident because he had suddenly disappeared, but if he was a dog, that probably wasn’t the case.
I didn’t know the size of the slums, but if the King of Calderia had a similar temperament to Khalifa, the people living there were likely massacred and the houses were all burned to ashes. Aska’s grandmother, who had raised him, would have died as well, of course.
From the beginning, the plan was to kill Aska here, so he probably wasn’t alive now. Because it was more troublesome for information about Aska to leak out somewhere than for an old Servant and dozens or hundreds of slum dwellers to die.
“You’re friends with a dog?”
“Is that not allowed? We grew up together since we were little.”
“You’re still young now.”
“Don’t look down on me because I’m short. Is someone an adult just because they’re tall?”
“I didn’t mention height……”
Aska, who was preemptively stung, glared at me with his eyes wide open. But he just looked like a soaking wet white rat, so he wasn’t very scary.
“You were kidnapped, and when I found you, you weren’t breathing. You heard about this, right?”
At my question, Aska nodded.
“I saw something somewhere, and it was a story about the Calderia dynasty. I remembered something about ingesting blood, so I just tried feeding it to you, and you started breathing again.”
“……”
“And you came to your senses, but then you kept saying you were sick and tried to drink my blood……. Do you remember this?”
“You said you didn’t remember?”
“Of course that’s a lie. How could I forget that?”
I probably won’t forget it until I die. To have my blood sucked by a person, not an animal……. No, when you think about it, Aska isn’t really a person either.
At that moment, Aska raised one arm high and then struck the surface of the water with a thud.
Splash, water splashed everywhere, and a few pieces of ice flew out as well.
“……”
Thanks to that, I closed my eyes tightly after being splashed with cold water and stayed still for a moment before wiping the water off my face with my hands.
“Did you ever have anything like that happen when you were living in the slums or when you came to the castle?”
“No.”
“There’s no chance you might not remember?”
“No.”
I wondered how he could be so sure, but it seemed that Aska remembered everything that had happened at that time without exception.