After seeing Xueli off, Baiye and Ningning turned back once more to pack up every material worth collecting from the giant spider's body, and only then left the mine, satisfied.
On top of that, brainwashing Xueli had eaten up quite a bit of time.
One thing after another, and by the time the two of them left the mine, the sky overhead was already near dusk.
"Will the three of them get worried if they can't find us all day?"
Baiye looked up at the sky, rubbing her chin with her fingers, her expression as gloomy as the heavens.
Seeing this, Ningning reached out and gave Baiye a hearty slap on the back:
"You're completely overthinking it."
"Ow... why?" Baiye stumbled from the smack.
Ningning gave a light shrug and counted off on her fingers, one by one:
"Leilei, that social-anxiety case, is surely thrilled for the quiet; she probably holed up in her own room all day and didn't step out once."
"Biluo goes around with a stony face all day too, and looks like she couldn't care less about adventuring, so she probably won't mind either."
"As for the Hero..."
At this point, Ningning suddenly found herself at a loss for words.
She actually had no idea at all how the Hero might have spent this day.
"Yeah, a day off like today is probably a rare, wonderful day the Hero gets to not die, too."
Baiye nodded with a sigh, her mood looking a little low.
Ningning could tell Baiye had gotten snared again by that captain's-responsibility baggage of hers, so she offered a word of comfort:
"Don't dwell on it. At the very least we earned enough today to cover living expenses for a few dozen days. No loss at all, no loss at all."
"No, far from no loss, we made an absolute killing."
Baiye fell silent a moment, then turned to ask Ningning:
"...Right, how much will these materials sell for?"
Ningning did some math in her head:
"If we take them to Lilith's, this haul should fetch around two hundred gold coins."
But to Ningning's surprise, the first thing Baiye latched onto wasn't the enormous sum of two hundred gold, but rather that name, Lilith:
"...Do we have to go to that creature's shop?"
Ningning didn't know whether to laugh or cry — that underground merchant Lilith seemed to have left a rather terrible impression on Baiye:
"I don't have any other connections, Baiye."
"Then maybe I'll just go sell the materials at the Adventurers' Guild after all."
"They'll slash the buying price to the bone, you know. You might not even clear a hundred gold," Ningning reminded her.
Baiye weighed the heavy sack on her back, deliberated at length, and gritted her teeth hard:
"...No matter. A gentleman loves wealth, but takes it by proper means."
"'A gentleman loves wealth, takes it by proper means,' honestly... You just don't want to lay eyes on that Lilith, that's all; quit putting on airs, would you!"
Ningning was so exasperated by this contrary creature she could've torn her hair out, and mercilessly laid bare Baiye's little secret.
Ears flushing red, Baiye turned her face slightly away and met the awkwardness with silence, not realizing she'd only made the atmosphere more awkward still.
Ningning sighed and added:
"All right, all right, I understand how you feel. But Baiye, you're in luck; Lilith isn't in Tati City today."
"Huh? She's not?"
Seeing Baiye whip her head around, a pair of crimson eyes sparkling bright, Ningning was exasperated into laughter all over again:
"So you really do just plain hate that Lilith!"
And so the two of them made their way back into Tati City, roughhousing the whole way.
Once through the city gate, Ningning reached out and poked Baiye again:
"You go sell the loot yourself. I'll head back on my own first."
"Mm."
Baiye didn't ask why, assuming Ningning just wanted her to practice her haggling. After a brief goodbye, she headed off toward that underground shop.
Seeing that Baiye hadn't pressed for a reason, Ningning secretly let out a breath of relief.
Because her undergarment was about at its limit.
Today's adventure had been positively lethal: first the whole run chasing after Baiye, panting and wheezing, and then all the theatrical god-and-ghost play in front of Xueli, big sweeping movements she couldn't afford to flinch through.
Ningning had long since worn herself out, drenched in sweat and gasping for air.
And after that, Baiye had stayed at her side the entire time, giving Ningning not a single chance to change her clothes.
If she didn't hurry back to the inn soon, she'd probably turn into a slimy slug in public again and die another social death.
So Ningning could only do her best to seek out the most deserted route, slipping back to the inn as inconspicuously as possible to change.
Perhaps because she'd helped an innocent, pitiful little girl today, Ningning felt her luck was especially good.
She was lucky enough to find a small side path, without seeing a single soul the whole way, and slipped smoothly into the inn and back to her room.
"Truly a karma jackpot today, heh heh."
Muttering to herself, Ningning reached back to shut the door and carefully began to change.
But though she seemed carefree on the surface, there was still a slightly weighty matter on Ningning's mind—
Only a short while ago, chatting with Baiye, she'd realized she seemed to know absolutely nothing about the Hero.
In Ningning's eyes, the Hero seemed to be nothing more than an anti-Demon-race special-attack relic, or a tool-person to punch her way into the Demon Lord's Castle.
Apart from the fact that this Hero had high attack and low HP and died easily, Ningning found she seemed to know nothing at all about this boy she'd spent every day with for over a month.
This was, in fact, only to be expected.
Because all along, Ningning had deliberately kept her distance from the Hero.
Not that Ningning disliked the Hero.
It was simply that this Hero happened to be male.
In Ningning's impression, when you said "Hero," you meant a pack of invincible, lecherous, philandering bastards who loved building harems.
True, when it came to winning over girls, Ningning, a veteran of a hundred battles (in galge), had absolute confidence she could beat the Hero.
But if you moved the battlefield to the bedroom, Ningning, with her maxed Sensitivity, knew perfectly well she wouldn't stand a shred of a chance.
It'd be an instant kill the moment she got pinned.
If she got even the slightest bit closer to the Hero, and then some accident left the two of them alone, and then the Hero's brain glitched even a little.
The very next second Ningning would be force-marked as his target.
And then the not-safe-for-children CG of a successful conquest would start playing.
And then she'd become the so-called "official main heroine," the first one conquered in the Hero's adventure tale, trampled underfoot by countless later heroines climbing over her, maybe poisoned to death one day, turned into the forever out-of-reach white moonlight—
"I don't want that!"
Ningning clutched her head and cried out, struggling to drive this all-too-plausible vision from her mind.
Sure enough, she really did need to keep her distance from the Hero.
Ningning peeled off her White Mage's robe and tossed it onto the bed, changing out of her innerwear, when a thought suddenly struck her—
If she kept her distance from the Hero the whole time and wrecked their relationship, then the whole business of conquering the Demon Lord's Castle might grind to a halt instead.
After all, the Hero was the one and only human who could kill the Demon race.
This dilemma really did make her hair fall out.
"Maybe I ought to build a decent relationship with the Hero after all..."
"Really? I'm so happy, Ning-chan!"
Hearing this delighted voice, Ningning, mid-change into clean clothes, stiffly turned her head.
A head was poking in through the door she'd forgotten to lock.
The Hero was leaning in, grinning at her.
Grinning at her before she'd managed to get her new clothes on.
"...Ning-chan? What's wrong?"
"It's the pervert Hero, the giant lecher, aaaaaah!"
Ningning shrieked and sent a foot flying.
And so the Hero's death record gained yet another surreal new entry—
Head crushed in a door.