Elias stepped out of the shop with visible relief written across his face, and after everything that had just drained his brain dry, he could finally breathe a little easier.
But before he could even let that breath out, Elysia grabbed his wrist without warning.
“W-wait, what?”
He hadn’t even gotten the chance to ask before she was already dragging him along, Evelyn falling into step beside them on his other side, unhurried as ever.
“Hold on, my lady. Where are we headed now?”
“We’re hungry. We’re going to a restaurant.”
“A restaurant?”
Elias could only go quiet at that, wondering if either of them had even noticed how wiped out he already was.
‘I mean, it is lunchtime.
But aren’t they tired at all?’
He hadn’t even had a chance to catch his breath.
He’d barely finished feeling relieved that the whole ribbon situation was over, and now the two of them were already dragging him off to the next stop.
“At least give me a second to catch my breath…”
Naturally, nobody paid his complaint any mind.
Once they got to the restaurant, Elias’s eyes swept across the room, packed with dining tables and customers enjoying their meals.
Once again, he found himself genuinely impressed by the world of Eternal Arcana, since this place turned out to be nothing like the standard fantasy setting he’d expected.
He could spot all kinds of machinery people were actually using around him.
He remembered the street lamps lining the roads they’d walked earlier, all of them powered by Mana Stones.
And it wasn’t just the lamps either, since even the machines that looked like refrigerators, used to keep food preserved, ran on Mana Stones too.
‘So this is what they’ve been running on this whole time.
Back then I never had time to dig into little details like this, but honestly, this is incredible.’
“Don’t just stand there. Come sit.”
At Elysia’s invitation to take the seat across from her, Elias, still thoroughly confused, had no choice but to sit down with them.
For someone in his position, sitting at the same table as his employers wasn’t exactly common practice, which was exactly why he’d deliberately hung back near the entrance, figuring that was just proper etiquette for a subordinate.
From novels and webtoons, obviously, and it wasn’t just fiction either, since even in games it was pretty standard for an attendant to wait while their employer ate.
‘Wait, am I actually their subordinate already, or what?
My job doesn’t even start until tomorrow…’
That thought got tossed aside the moment the food Evelyn and Elysia had ordered showed up at the table.
There’s a saying that a person can’t think straight on an empty stomach, and right now, Elias could genuinely say that saying held up.
* * *
Time flew by faster than he’d expected, and Elias and the twins finally made their way back to the Nocturne mansion after a full day out.
One look at his face, though, and it was obvious the day had absolutely wrecked him.
He probably wouldn’t have been half this exhausted if he’d gone out with literally anyone else.
But no, he’d spent the day with two Villainesses from the Nocturne household, ones supposedly far more terrifying than any Villainess Eternal Arcana had ever seen before.
Elias didn’t fully buy into those rumors, mostly because he hadn’t even finished the Story Patch himself, but that didn’t mean he was ready to dismiss them either.
He kept them in the back of his mind as a reminder to stay sharp and think twice before doing anything reckless.
*SIGH
He let out a long sigh before pushing himself up off the floor and heading toward his soft bed, and the moment he reached it, he dropped straight onto the mattress.
“My sanity took a real beating today. Feels like my head’s about to split from all the extra thinking, trying to figure out what to do to dodge a bad plot.”
He closed his eyes for a moment before speaking again.
“Honestly, this is a pretty good start, even though I ended up meeting them sooner than I expected. But why are they acting like that? There’s a lot that doesn’t add up from today.”
Even without finishing the new Story Update, Elias had played enough of it to know that the Evelyn and Elysia he remembered would never do something like take a stranger they’d just met out for a walk around the city.
They were the kind of people who stayed completely indifferent to anything that didn’t catch their interest, hard to read too, since their expressions barely ever changed, Evelyn with that faint smile of hers and Elysia with that flat, unreadable face.
Even the strongest players out there would get completely overwhelmed going up against the two of them.
If there was actually a route where the two of them never became Villainesses in the first place, most players would probably have jumped at it rather than face down the twin Villainesses head-on.
But the one person who’d actually been experimenting to find that hidden route had ended up dying and getting pulled straight into the game, and whatever hope the players out there still had of finding it had just gotten a whole lot further out of reach.
“This whole thing’s just giving me a bigger headache.”
[Ding!]
[Quest Complete]
Accompany Evelyn and Elysia on a walk around the city.
You received: EXP +100, 5 Stat Points. The source of this chapter is g.com.
[Congratulations!]
Elias just stared at the system notification hovering in front of him for a few seconds.
There was still plenty running through his mind that he wanted to sort through, but his body and brain were both too wiped out to process any of it right now.
With a lazy flick of his hand, he swiped the system screen away.
“Tomorrow, then…”
Ignoring whatever other notifications were still waiting, he shut his eyes right then and there, and it didn’t take long before his awareness faded away completely and he drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Evelyn and Elysia’s room felt far quieter than the rest of the Nocturne mansion.
It was fairly spacious, furnished neatly, with a vanity table sitting near the window while a large bed took up the other side of the room.
Evelyn sat in front of the mirror, running a brush through her long white hair, eyes closed and a faint smile resting on her face, as if she were savoring every stroke of the brush moving through it.
Near the vanity, a small stick of incense sent up a thin trail of smoke, its soft scent filling the room.
The whole scene made her look perfectly at ease.
Every now and then she’d move the brush a little slower, unhurried, letting herself sink into the calm of the night and the soothing scent of incense.
Across the room, Elysia was already lying on the bed, her long black hair spread out over the pillow while her eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling, expression as flat as ever.
The black sleepwear she had on stood in sharp contrast to Evelyn’s white.
Barely any sound filled the room, just the soft rasp of the brush moving through Evelyn’s hair and the scent of incense slowly drifting into every corner.
The quiet sound of footsteps rose behind Evelyn as she stayed seated at the mirror, still brushing her white hair with her eyes closed and that faint smile in place, still lost in the scent filling the room.
Then those footsteps started making their way toward the door.
Evelyn cracked one eye open and spotted Elysia heading for the door, sword in hand, still dressed in that thin black sleepwear of hers.
That made Evelyn’s brow furrow slightly before she finally called out to her.
“Elysia. Where exactly do you think you’re going with a sword, dressed like that?”
Elysia, already almost at the door, stopped in her tracks and slowly turned to face her sister.
“I…”
Color started rising in her cheeks as she scrambled for an excuse, her breathing coming a little quicker than usual while her hand stayed locked tight around the hilt of the sword she was carrying.
“I really…really want to pounce on him…”