Side: Ayukawa Mayu
“This is wrong.”
That was my first thought, in exactly those words.
Palm-top rabbits: beastfolk designated Danger Rank S.
Their queen: designated CALAMITY-class.
Demon-realm nobility from the succubus royal line — and on top of that, Ouroboros, the name that makes entire regions tremble.
—When I saw Ouroboros in a MAID UNIFORM, I did a double take. No — a triple take.
If someone told me a kingdom had emptied itself, dispatching its entire knight order to take this one cabin, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Actually… they’d still probably lose.
This isn’t “unconventional.” This is wrong on axes I don’t have names for.
A middle-aged guy with nothing but farming skills. Useless in a fight.
To women with combat power THIS monstrous, the mister should register as a bug. Nothing more.
And yet the plain fact is: they adore him.
Add ten elves. Add a dwarf child.
The rabbit-elf feud is famous. And the notoriously insular dwarf clans do NOT cohabit with other races. None of this is supposed to be possible.
How on earth did this happen… and the answer dissolved almost immediately.
Mister Tatsuya apparently has an almighty skill that can order anything from Japan. That’s presumably your explanation.
Oh — and the farming skill. That too.
And the food — vegetables grown with that skill, seasoned with those imports — is genuinely, truly delicious.
Because this world’s cooking, to be blunt… isn’t good. At all.
Pay enough and the raw ingredients can beat Japan’s — but the seasoning and technique ruin everything downstream.
Case in point: I’m eating pork shogayaki right now and… I nearly cried.
There’s been so much pain since I came to this world, you see.
It tastes nostalgic, and gentle, and… delicious.
But the REAL reason they all adore him — more than any skill—
—is just… who Mister Tatsuya is.
“I’m sorry. I… I left you behind that night, Mister Tatsuya.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
”…Eh?”
See? This is what I mean. He’s just… like this.
Doesn’t sweat the details — fundamentally, overwhelmingly good-natured.
To a degree that should be IMPOSSIBLE in a world this merciless.
“If I had to guess — you tried to stop them, right? And they went ahead over your objection… that’s about the shape of it, yeah?”
”…Mm. I mean… that IS what happened, but…”
“Then there’s nothing to apologize for. Like you could have defied that crowd anyway.”
When I heard that, I just went blank.
“What’s with the pained smile?”
“It’s… nothing, okay?”
Yeah. This person’s heart is just… big.
No — big, and then the bottom falls out of the measurement entirely.
What we did to him is the kind of thing where he could punch me in the face and I’d have no standing to complain.
And he laughed and forgave it.
He looks a little unreliable, sure — but the smile is the smile of a genuinely kind person.
Which perversely makes the guilt WORSE, looking at it.
If he’d just blame me, even a little… a part of me honestly wishes he would.
Whatever happens from here, whatever it takes… I owe this man amends for that night.
Anyway — setting that aside.
—A lot has happened since I came to this world.
Morals and ethics that bear no resemblance to Japan’s.
People die casually. Robbery sits on the menu of ordinary survival strategies. A world with the safety rails torn out.
They put us through combat training to survive, and it defied every description except “hell.”
I got discarded from the training facility partway as a failure — and through a chain of luck, landed somewhere comparatively kind… but even there, the air itself stayed merciless.
—Looking at Mister Tatsuya, I remembered Japan for the first time in ages.
In the middle of this world, this person is just… a good Japanese ojisan, unmodified, unbroken.
And realizing how hard that hit me — hard enough to make me tear up a little — told me exactly how worn down my heart had gotten.
And it’s BECAUSE he’s that kind of ojisan, I think, that all these women gathered here, drawn in one by one.
Because—
Everyone making noise together.
Everyone being idiots together.
Everyone laughing together.
A place where things that ordinary get to just… BE ordinary — I don’t think it exists anywhere else in this world.
So when this ojisan took me in — something in me finally, finally relaxed.
“By the way, Mayu? Why exactly were you collapsed out there covered in blood?”
“That’s—”