"I'm back," I announced as I reappeared in front of my swivel chair and immediately dropped onto it. To her credit, my girlfriend sitting on my bed was only mildly startled by my unforeseen arrival. In fact, she looked more annoyed than anything else.

"You're late," she told me in her usual expressionless tone while overdramatically checking the time on her phone.

"I thought that if I was over there anyway, I might as well brief Brang and the rest of the Fauns. They… unfortunately took what happened here as a challenge, but I convinced them to stay away from the crazy huntress for now."

Judy seemed somewhat disinterested in my explanation, and instead she kept swiping on her phone until she finally found what she was looking for.

"Speaking of 'her'," she began, her voice even flatter than usual for some reason. "Did you manage to draw any new information out of her this time around?"

"Not as much as I would've liked," I admitted with an exasperated sigh in tow. I leaned forward a little and clarified, "I mentioned most of this to the others already, but just to reiterate: she's some kind of monster hunter from Japan. She has a hate-boner for anything Abyssal related, and she has a talking Japanese sword." I paused here to wait for Judy to stop typing, then once I had her full attention again I told her, "The keywords we should look into are 'Onikiri', 'Rinne', 'clans' and 'sentient weapons'."

"Which one of them is her name?" Judy asked a pointed question.

"The second one, I think."

"You think," she repeated after me.

"I'm about ninety percent sure, but I'm still not convinced that what she gave me wasn't some kind of ceremonial title."

"I see…" my assistant began typing again, and in the meantime I took a deep breath and prepared myself to breach the main topic. I just had to decide from which direction I should approach it.

"Judy, listen to me for a moment please."

"I'm always listening," she responded and finally looked up at me. I must've had a strange expression on my face, because she cocked her head to the side a moment later and asked, "Is there a problem?"

"You could call it that, yes," I answered as I closed my eyes for a moment, then I steeled my nerves, looked her in the eye again, and told her, "I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I might have, by a complete accident, left an… unnecessarily good impression on her."

All of a sudden my girlfriend's face got so frosty I could swear I was looking at a glacier. A scary glacier, with blank yet chilling eyes and a cute little frown aaand my analogy kinda broke down, didn't it?

"Please elaborate," she spoke softly, though her gaze made sure I realized it wasn't just a polite request but a demand. I decided to subtly roll my eyes at her theatrics and do just that.

"In short, I called her by what I presume is her first name without realizing it was a cultural faux pa, she got flustered, then I tried to touch her, at which point she got really flustered, and then she left in a hurry."

"You tried to touch her?"

"Yes. For Far Sight," I spelled out in a hurry.

"Oh, I see… So? Did you mark her?"

"Unfortunately, no. As I said, she literally ran away."

"I see," she responded a tad morosely before summarizing things by saying, "So you flirted with the woman who broke into your house, she was receptive, and now you don't know what to do. Is that the gist of it?"

"I wasn't flirting with her per se, but yes that's about it," I acknowledged her simplification, though only tentatively.

My assistant gave me a sideways glance, and then she looked away and let out a truly exhausted groan.

"I really can't let you out of my sight even just for five minutes…" she muttered under her breath, and while normally I would've protested, this time I decided it would have been counter-productive… but then she just had to add, "Please at least tell me you're not interested in her."

Now that was a comment I couldn't jolly well leave alone without any protests.

"Dormouse, would you please take this seriously? Would I talk to you about this if I was?"

"You talked about 'letting Eleanor down gently' in the past, and yet look where we are," she countered with a petulant edge to her words, and for a second or two, I was lost for words.

"Apples and oranges," I responded with a non-answer, in place of anything better. "Also, we are veering off-topic. Listen, the point I'm trying to make is that, dumb as it might sound, I might be in need of some anti-harem countermeasures."

"Oh?" Judy's eyebrows rose in surprise (just a little) and she looked me over from head to toe like I was a rare black sheep or something. "So you finally recognized that your constant flirting is a problem. Good, that's a step in the right direction."

"I don't think I'm flirting with anyone but you and Elly, but that's a point we are going to come back to later," I told her a smidgen indignantly. "No, the reason I ask is because I think we have to re-evaluate the world's 'genre' again."

"Again?" she repeated after me. "I guess you have a new hypothesis."

"Yes," I confirmed with a slightly more serious expression. "I believe we are living in a supernatural harem battle school life setting."

"… Isn't that something we already concluded?"

"Yes, but no," I told her as I straightened my back on my seat and gestured with my hands for emphasis. "The key is in the order of terms, and the word 'harem' in particular. Previously I thought it was the generic, extended love triangle kind, where everyone was pining for the same guy without entering into a relationship. I also thought that the harem shenanigans were just a carryover from the early school life period. However, in light of some recent developments, I realized that this world is just a wee bit too accommodating for straight-up polyamorous relationships for that to be the case."

"By recent developments, do you mean Eleanor's family?"

"Precisely," I nodded in agreement. "I originally thought their family tradition was just a quirk, but it might actually be an intentional precedent for polyamory."

"And by polyamory, you mean…?"

"The 'real' harem kind, where one person, in our case probably Josh, is supposed to be in a relationship with multiple love interests at once."

"So it's what you're doing."

"Yes, but on a bigger scale."

"I think I see what you mean," Judy mused while leisurely poking at her phone. "If we presume that this world had planned narrative that involved some form of polyamory, then it would explain why baking such a tradition into the Dracis family's backstory would exist; in order to support such a 'real harem', as you called it. It's a thought worth entertaining."

"Thank you, though I think you are being a bit too much of a reductionist again."

"It's my job," Judy stated while puffing out her chest for whatever reason. "Lately you've been trying to avoid looking at things from a meta-narrative standpoint, so I took it upon myself to do it instead of you. That's what I've been hired for in the first place. "

"I'm not trying to avoid it, I'm just too busy with the surface stuff to worry about the meta at the moment, " I grumbled, but then I closed my eyes, let out a deep breath, and said, "We are getting off-topic again. Whether there is a grand, pre-written plan to this world that pigeon-holes me in, or it comes about just from personal relations and random chance, I still need to make sure I won't accidentally start making annoying people get attracted to me."

"Fair enough," Judy said with a nod. "Self-awareness is the first step in self-improvement. How can I help?"

"First off, I want you to teach me how to be unattractive," I told her as unambiguously as I could, yet for some reason my words earned me a scowl from her.

"Chief, you are really lucky I'm a generous person and I decided not to interpret your words as 'You are unattractive, show me how to be more like you'."

It took me an embarrassingly long time to respond to that, but when I did, I rolled my eyes so hard it almost made me dizzy.

"Come on Dormouse! Weren't we over this already? You know you are plenty attractive, so why would you even think that?"

"Am I?" She gave me an unusually sardonic look, then asked, "If so, then can you name my most attractive attribute?" I didn't even have time to open my mouth, but she already cut me off by raising a hand and declaring, "And you cannot say 'your brain'. You already used that card once."

"Oh please! Can we just stay on topic?" Her expression said she was serious about this, so in the end I gave up and told her, "Fine! It's your voice."

"My voice," she repeated after me, and I'd go as far as to say she was unreasonably surprised by my response.

"Yes, it's your voice. It's soothing and I like it."

"Really?"

"Yup," I told her with a reassuring smile. "So, can we go back to the anti-harem talk?"

"Might as well," she answered with a shrug, though I couldn't help but notice a tiny little smirk at the corner of her lips, so I figured everything was fine. "Where do you want to start?"

"First things first, I want to know what you think constitutes as 'flirting', so that I can hopefully stop doing it by accident."

"Hm," Judy let out a thoughtful sound and raised the corner of her phone to her lips. "To begin with, the biggest problem is that you have no sense of personal boundaries."

"I don't?" I responded in surprise, and she confirmed it again with a nod.

"You don't. You don't possess a shred of reservation towards the opposite sex. That kind of overly confident and casual attitude often comes off as you hitting on someone."

"Wait, hold on!" I stopped her in her tracks with my palm extended towards her. "You want to tell me that just being unreserved equals to flirting around these parts?"

"In your case? Yes," she told me with another nod. "You are tall, fit, and handsome. If you walk up to a girl, make eye contact, and then engage them in small-talk, everyone would think that you are hitting on them."

"Hold your horses again!" I stopped her once more, this time while massaging my temple. "So you want to tell me that, just because I'm conventionally attractive and not socially awkward, every time I talk to a member of the opposite sex, it could be interpreted as flirting?"

"It also has a lot to do with your informal attitude, but yes, that's the gist of it."

"… I'm pretty sure that kind of mindset is some kind of '-ist', you know?"

"I don't know what you are talking about. Also, you asked for my advice, so don't complain."

"Ugh, fine," I slouched my shoulders in defeat. "Anything else?"

"You are also way too direct with physical contact," Judy dealt me another blow with a tone that said it was self-evident. "For example, you said you tried to touch this 'Rinne' woman?"

"Yes, I did."

"Did you ask for her permission first?"

"Well… no, not explicitly," I admitted while absent-mindedly scratching the base of my neck.

"Can you explain to me what happened, in detail?"

"Erm… So, I need skin contact to mark someone for Far Sight. Are we clear on that? So, since she was wearing gloves, with only her face exposed, I had to touch her there without appearing as some kind of creep, so I thought I would do that thing where I casually step up to her and wipe a stain off her cheek, like in the movies, but when I tried to do that, she got really flustered and she ran away." In response to my explanation, my assistant gave a look flatter than the Maldives, forcing me to prompt her with a tentative, "What?"

"You said it out loud, and yet you still don't understand?" she asked me with a face filled to the brim with disbelief (full by Judy standards, I mean) and she expounded, "Chief, what you did sounds just like a cheesy scene from a shoujo manga."

"No, it doesn't," I denied on the spot.

"Yes, it does," she doubled down with a frown. "Imagine this from the point of view of the person on the receiving end." She paused here for a moment and continued with a low, husky voice, "Imagine that you are alone with a tall, handsome stranger in a room. Then, without any warning, he takes a step towards you. He looks you in the eye, and there is no threat or reservation in them, putting you at ease. Then he smiles and he gently reaches his hand out towards you and tries to touch your face while whispering sweet nothings…" At this point she abruptly fell silent, shuddered for a moment, and then she added, in her usual voice, "It sounds like a romance manga cliché, doesn't it?"

"When you put it like that, then of course it does!" I protested as all my suppressed indignation bubbled to the surface. "Since when are you an expert on shoujo manga tropes anyway?"

All of a sudden my assistant conspicuously averted her eyes and stated, "Research," with a suspicious amount of emphasis, then she quickly hid behind (for a certain meaning of the word) her phone and continued with, "Don't change the subject. The real issue here is that you have no concept of personal space and, combined with how overly familiar you are, it can make people think you are coming onto them."

My skepticism was wider and deeper than the Pacific ocean, but I also knew that there was no point in arguing about this anymore, so I soon gave up and concluded with, "Long story short, the first step in my anti-harem measures should be trying to be more conscious of women's personal space."

"Other than mine or Elly's, obviously," Judy corrected me.

"Obviously," I agreed. "That's for future encounters. What do I do with someone who may or may not have already developed an unwarranted infatuation on me?"

"I'd like to say you should just reject them outright, but considering your track record, that doesn't seem to work." I wanted to object, but then I thought about it and decided it wasn't a hill worth dying on. In the meantime, Judy was in deep thought, resulting in her suggesting, "How about passing her onto Joshua?"

"That… is certainly something that could work, but I don't think he would appreciate it."

"Then find someone else," she stated like it was an easy solution.

"Honestly, I'd be happy even if she would just leave the island. Some things about her just don't add up, and it bothers me." Judy looked curious, so I elaborated by telling her, "For example, she knew my face, and she even knew where I lived."

"I noticed that too," Judy agreed with me. "Do you think she stalked you?"

"No," I shook my head without even entertaining the thought. "I think someone's pulling the strings from behind the stage and set her up to meet me."

"Who?"

"My money's on Lord Grandpa, but I have no evidence yet," I replied, then after a beat I added, "More on that later. For now, let's focus on this Rinne woman."

"If you just want her to leave, you could try and resolve her subplot," Judy posited. "In my opinion, the narrative introduced her as part of a subplot related to the stray Chimera on the island. If you find it and get rid of it, then it would conclude the plot, and then she would leave the island."

"While that's hypothetically sound, we still don't know enough about how the narrative works and how much it influences things," I countered. "It's just as likely that removing her reason to be on the island would cause another reason to pop up to keep her around." I paused here for a second, and a small grunt later I added, "Not to mention, I think this entire 'subplot' you are talking about is probably all tied to Lord Grandpa, and going after the Chimera just to get rid of her makes me feel like I'm playing into the hand of the old man…"

"Do what you want, so long as it doesn't result in another girlfriend. Or sister."

"Ouch, Dormouse," I whined with a frown. "You're really grumpy this evening, you know that?"

She stuck her tongue out at me, which was both kind of cute and kind of uncanny at the same time, because the rest of her face stayed as deadpan as usual, and I couldn't help but stifle an amused little chuckle as a result. I glanced up at the clock and noted that we still had a lot of time left before Judy would have had to go home, so I asked her, "Do you have anything else to add to this topic?"

"There's a lot to be said about potential subplots and the narrative, but those aren't for now," she spoke half-heartedly, but her fingers suddenly picked up pace as she began flipping through her notes, then her eyes suddenly flashed with what I presumed to be excitement and she declared, "I have another topic we should discuss though."

"Really? What is it?"

My assistant turned her phone my way, showing off some kind of diagram, and then she explained, "I have compiled a preliminary power-level ranking."

"… You were serious," I muttered with a deadpan voice, and she gave me a firm nod in return. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't in the mood for this, but for some inexplicable reason she seemed to be really excited about the subject, so I let out a small sigh and gestured for her to speak up. "Very well, you have my attention for now."

"Since I had nothing better to do while you had your fun bullying Joshua and the Fauns, I decided to interview everyone and try to figure out the combat rankings of the people we know, for future reference." She fell silent for a long while at this point, and I was just about to ask her to continue when my phone buzzed. I picked it up from the computer desk and found a new email with an attachment in my inbox. Unsurprisingly enough, it was the same diagram she showed me just a few seconds ago. In the meantime she got up and stood beside my chair while she waited for me to open it up, then she said, "The rankings you see here are based on the interviews, my own observations, and my educated estimates of how much each of the participants was holding back during the sparring matches. You can also find yourself on the list."

"I see…" I began and then immediately raise a single, surprised brow at the name on the top of her list. "Snowy is number one?"

"Yes," she confirmed with a smirk, apparently amused by my reaction. "If you tap on her name, you can see that she has very high scores in mobility, offensive capabilities, and utility. Her skill score is also above average, with only her defense being sub-par."

I gave her a skeptical glance, but then I followed her instructions, and when I tapped on her name, it actually brought up a pop-up page with one of those hexagonal skill diagrams you would see on a game character's wiki page.

"… I would be lying if I said that I wasn't impressed by this, but… when did you even make it?" I asked the obvious question, but it was like water rolling off a duck's back.

"If we consider her sigils and the general combat performance she showed during her battle with Eleanor and the school incident, I think there is no doubt she is currently our strongest combat asset."

"You are using words that are scaring me a little," I whispered as I closed the pop-up page and looked at the second place, and it made me raise my bafflement-brow once again. "Elly is the second?"

"You sound surprised," Judy said as she leaned even closer, as if to get a better look at me. "Did you expect you would be second?"

"No, actually. I expected Brang would be."

"Not a chance," my assistant honest to goodness scoffed at my response. "Eleanor is leagues above him."

"I can't help but recall her getting her shapely posterior consistently handed to her by Brang though," I murmured, earning me another scoff.

"You should not consider the results of a sparring match as a clear indicator of power levels," she told me with such certainty I was momentarily tempted to believe her. "Eleanor was holding back a lot during today's training in order not to cause any harm to your Faun friend. She never used her claws, nor her beam attack, and after interrogating her, I'm fairly certain she would also win in a contest of raw strength if she was serious."

"Really?" I glanced between her and my phone a few times, and she responded with a satisfied grunt. I scrolled down and raised my brow for the third time in a row and the question, "What am I doing at the third place?" involuntarily escaped my mouth.

"Is there a problem with that?"

"Yes! I mean…" I scrolled down the list and back up again before I explained to her, "I kinda get why Josh is at rock bottom. Angie being above the class rep, I can also understand, with her combination of healing and ranged firepower. I also get why Brang is above them on the rankings, but why am I above him?"

"Look at your stats," she prompted me, and I did so. "Your mobility is excellent, you have high scores both in skill and utility, and, most importantly, the Faun said you are better than him."

"He did?! Wait, when did you even ask him? I thought you were afraid of him."

The corner of Judy's left eye suddenly twitched in a very, very conspicuous display of… something, and then she told me, "I asked Neige to be the messenger between us. My point still stands."

"No, it doesn't," I protested while closing the unnecessarily detailed diagrams.

"You realize that you took on the entire Faun squad and won, right?"

"That doesn't count," I grumbled as I waved in dismissal. "They are mooks."

"Come again?"

"Mooks? You know? Minions, goons, henchmen, small fry…"

"That's not an argument," Judy cut me short with a huff. "Also, according to both Eleanor and Neige, they wouldn't have been able to defeat them as easily as you did. In fact, I believe that if you had a real weapon, and didn't try to fight your opponent head-on, you are potentially the most dangerous person in our group."

"And I think you are just biased."

"No, I'm not," Judy denied with an imperceptibly puffed-out cheek. "Listen Chief, you might not have the raw power of Eleanor or the numerous spells and abilities of Neige, but you have a unique, out-of-context power set. Your ability to freely teleport and your precognition might look unassuming at first glance, but they are incredibly effective. All you need is a way to deal damage, and you—"

"Wait, wait! Hold on for a second!" I cut her short as her monologue suddenly reminded me of something. "So… you are saying that I have a game-breaking set of powers that is easy to underestimate because they are not flashy?"

"Yes. Just like how you underestimate yourself," my assistant confirmed my words, defiantly crossing her arms in the process.

"And apparently I'm attractive and my natural behavior somehow appears seductive to the opposite sex."

"I don't know how it relates to the previous question, but yes."

"Oh my god," the words slipped out of my mouth before I knew it. "Judy, you might want to sit down before you hear this."

"Okay," my assistant responded immediately by sitting on my lap. Normally I would've pointed out that I didn't mean it quite so literally, but I decided to let her have her way, and instead I took a deep breath.

"Judy…" I began, my voice exactly as grave as my recent revelation demanded, and I told her, "I think I might be actually turning into a battle harem protagonist…"