Afterwards, once the long journey had begun, a somewhat bored Shu fell into conversation with this cat-eared girl.
"What's your name?"
"Nya~ my name is Lanlan. And your name, sir?"
A name of the sort very common among demihumans, made of simple words and carrying no particular meaning.
"My name is Shu."
"Nya? Do you not have a surname either, sir?"
"People from the countryside don't have that sort of thing. Though if there's an occasion where the name has to be written formally, you can use Shu Glenholt. That's the name of our village."
Seraphia bit down on her straw, her pale gold eyes resting on Shu as he talked with Lanlan the cat-eared girl.
Truly the protagonist of a harem game. Here came the customary business again.
Seraphia recalled, though, that this cat-eared girl was not one of the people on the game's cover, so she presumably was not any sort of important character.
But simply watching this harem king chatting with a cute girl was infuriating.
Seraphia did not want to admit the envy in her heart.
"Nya? What a familiar name. Nya, there seems to be a village like that back home too. I remember the cured meat there was very good."
"Mm...? Are you from Kalam as well?"
"Nya nya! Sir is from my home country, nya!"
It had abruptly turned into a hometown association.
Lanlan and Shu began communicating in a language Seraphia could not follow very well, presumably a dialect belonging to their Kalam Kingdom, distinct from the common tongue.
A sensation of being suddenly shut out.
Seraphia's eyes lost focus slightly, and she began blowing bubbles into her drink through the straw.
Shu noticed this sharply, gave a helpless smile, and then switched seamlessly back to the standard common tongue for the conversation, so that Seraphia could follow.
The chat and pleasantries between strangers from the same home region soon settled onto an exchange about each other's family circumstances.
This cat girl called Lanlan: while her mother was pregnant with her, her biological dad performed a vanishing act off the face of the earth. Then, after her mother had found a new husband, and after she had become pregnant with Lanlan's younger brother, he performed the same vanishing act a second time.
Among cat demihumans, this situation was in fact fairly common—
Probably because cat demihumans still carry a good many of the traits their prototype animal carries, a cat demihuman father abandoning wife and child is an extremely widespread thing. For a cat demihuman father, coupling with more females is important, but the raising of offspring is a matter the cat demihuman mother has to handle herself.
And while society does not forbid marriage between humans and demihumans, because of the difference in lifespan between them, a union of demihuman and human comes with a very great deal of assorted trouble. Take, for instance, Lanlan's third father, a Kalam merchant of lively mind.
After marrying Lanlan's mother, he decided to go abroad to do business, took the family away from the Kalam countryside, and came to live in the Kiden Federation some years ago.
And not long after arriving here, Lanlan's mother caught an illness and died. After that, Lanlan's human father contracted a serious illness as well, and the parents' serious illnesses drained the family's savings dry.
As she reached this part, the little cat girl's ears and tail both drooped.
"I see... your father fell ill, so now you have to support your brother and your father on your own."
Shu was somewhat moved. Among cat demihumans, someone like Lanlan was rather rare.
After all, for cat demihumans, responsibility and burden are things they want nothing whatsoever to do with, and Lanlan actually had it in her to look after her human stepfather and her brother rather than simply bolting on the spot.
That already made her a 1000-percent stand-up cat.
"It is, nya, so nya treasures this job very much, and likes it a lot too."
Lanlan pinched the hem of her maid's outfit and turned a circle in front of Shu and Seraphia.
Beneath that hem, the slender lower limbs wrapped in white tights and black Mary Jane shoes were the thing holding her family up.
"...A tip."
Seraphia, maintaining the poker face she had held from a moment ago until now, took a gold coin out of her own pocket, set it on the table, and pushed it slowly across to Lanlan with one finger.
"?!"
Shu's eyeballs very nearly popped out.
That was a gold coin issued by the largest country in the human world, the Mitran Empire.
Shu's commission fee for this trip was probably not even a tenth of that coin, and a single Mitran gold like that one already amounted to roughly three months of expenditure for a household of the citizen class.
【She handed over a Mitran gold as casually as that... her private purse looks as though it still holds a great deal of money. Still... Miss Seraphia really is very kind.】
Shu looked at Seraphia and smiled faintly.
"Nya nya!? Is this for nya? Can nya really accept it!"
Lanlan's cat ears gave a slight twitch, and the tail behind her immediately stood bolt upright towards the sky like an antenna. This expression of emotion through extra organs looked, to Seraphia, genuinely very like a cat.
"If you don't want it, I'll take it back."
"Nya wants it, nya wants it!" Before anyone else further off had noticed what was happening over here, Lanlan swiftly tucked this Mitran gold away inside her clothes, then leaned in eagerly once more. "Madam, madam, what would you like to drink, nya! Would you like nya to pound your legs for you!"
Excitement, happiness, relief.
Strong emotion, flowing out and being caught by Seraphia once again.
【What is this... if it's expressed as directly as that, then the next time I run into something similar... I'm going to give in again...】
Seraphia sighed faintly inside.
The feedback from helping another person had flowed across as clearly as that.
A weak-willed creature like her might well turn into one of those soft-hearted saps who help people regardless of the consequences.
Then, as Miss Angel turned her head, she met Shu's not-quite-smiling face.
【Infuriating!】
"Get me another cup of strawberry juice!"
"Nya nya! Right away!"
Having shouted out what she wanted to drink, Seraphia turned her face aside and looked out through the window at the scenery beyond.
But those faintly flushed cheeks were reflected in the glass, and Shu saw them perfectly clearly.
Shu felt as though he had got some slight hold on Seraphia's character.
She was the type who would want to act as though nothing were the matter whatever the circumstances; across the several incidents since they had met, it had been like this every time.
When she felt her own thoughts had been read, she became very insecure. That was the sense of it.
【So when necessary, go along with what she says and play dumb.】
Shu silently added one more principle to the 《Manual for Getting Along with Seraphia》 in his heart.
And Seraphia, with no idea what Shu was thinking, swept her eyes aimlessly across the view outside, meaning to settle the swell of her own feelings.
But at that moment, within her field of vision, she locked onto a black dot rushing towards them at extreme speed from far off.
"Enemy!"
Almost instantly, she caught it, and said it aloud.