Chapter 5: And There Was Only One Bed

Kalender insisted this time, not to sleep on the floor, but on the bed. Together with Jyn.

“What, are you finally going to take me?” There wasn’t any depressive hint in her voice. She was rather amused.

The guy had ranted for an hour straight, even while dinner had been served. She couldn’t fathom that that was what was truly in his heart—the shadow that outlined a tiger turned out to be a cat!

“Of course not! Sleeping in the same bed with friends is amazing!” was Kalender’s reply. Again, Jyn couldn’t understand the guy.

“Whatever,” she huffed.

She laid down on the wall side of the bed. The bed itself hadn’t been pushed all the way up to the corner; there was a little space for the person near the wall to stand and walk, so they didn’t have to tactically scoot over the other person in the morning if they were still sleeping.

“Why’re you there?” Kalender asked.

“What?” Jyn shot him a puzzled look.

“If you’re, y’know … afraid … of me, it’d be better if you stayed on this side where you uh … can’t be cornered.”

Jyn half-heartedly rolled over, face down on the ‘safer’ side of the bed. “Happy?” she said, voice muffled by a pillow. But really, this man, what is he, a unicorn? Maybe it was the shock of the situation mixed with feelings of resignation—or the charm effects, most likely—she let herself be pushed around by Kalender’s whims.

With that out of the way, Kalender walked around the bed and plopped down beside her with a satisfied smile, thoroughly registering Jyn’s scent as something to be familiar with—though it wouldn’t do to be overly familiar with someone new, so he kept that to himself.

Jyn also let herself relax. She rolled over and looked at Kalender’s face. Strangely, she didn’t feel alarmed—wait, isn’t this an effect of the curse?! Her heart rate shot straight up. She was looking at a man who could potentially attack her at any time, and she was just … going let it happen?

Kalender saw her fear manifest as a sort of paralysis. He, too, had frozen up in trying to process her reaction.

He promptly rolled off the bed and landed on the floor with a light thud.

Comical it may be, it didn’t rid Jyn of her fear. Kalender slowly peeked up over the edge of the bed. Seeing that she was still afraid, he lowered himself back down and out of sight.

He wouldn’t be able to sleep on the floor, that’s for sure—it was cold enough that he could actually die if he did—so he’d need to diffuse this now.

“H-how do you feel?” Kalender asked, but Jyn didn’t answer.

[+1 Affection]

“The fuck—” Indeed. “—uh, I’ll freeze to death down here, so, I’ll just … I’ll just get up and sleep with my head at the foot of the bed. So you won’t see my face.”

There was a bit of ruffling of the bedsheets, which Kalender took as a positive sign. He sat up and, with the delicacy of a fat cat, climbed back on, head-first to the foot of the bed. Jyn found this amusing.

[+1 Affection]

Did it work? The bed was large enough that their feet wouldn’t be hitting each others’ faces. They both tended to curl up, so their feet were even farther away from the other’s face.

Jyn looked down and all she saw was a curled-up ball of what was questionably a man. At an angle like this, she didn’t feel as … confronted.

They went to sleep, just like this. Jyn’s last trailing thought was that none of this would matter in a week. Perhaps there was some sort of powerful sleeping agent that the guards had sneaked into their dinner, as any fears degraded to mush.

***

It was the morning after—the second day.

The serum was known to have the hardest effects on the first day. It did not mean that surviving the first day would see one through the rest of the days, though.

There was a reason the test took 10 days. The serum would wear the Cursed One down, until one day, he would finally crack.

It was plentifully clear to the monitoring guards, however, that if there was going to be an exception, it would be this guy.

“Am I not alluring?” Jyn asked.

Kalender nearly choked on his food at the question. They were eating together for breakfast. The whole thing from yesterday broke down Jyn’s shell of nihilism, replacing it with … a fascinated confusion.

He looked up to her. Now that he was actually looking…

“Huh, you are.”

“What was that ‘huh’ at the start?”

“Oh, sorry—”

“Never mind.”

Breakfast for today included eggs and buttered potatoes. Some type of tea was served as well. Kalender was suspicious that they’d added aphrodisiacs to it. Or not. If aphrodisiacs worked on ordinary people, using it on someone ostensibly on-edge would sort of defeat the test’s point.

[+1 Respect]

“Huh. That’s different.”

“What is?” Jyn asked.

“Can you check your status?”

Jyn narrowed her eyes, but shrugged and did as he suggested. She nearly choked on her tea.

“W-what on Gaia is—Respect?”

The Affection stat had been replaced with Respect.

Kalender sighed. “Honestly, with the way that it’s been ticking up even if I just so much as breathe—” [+1 Respect] “—I don’t know anymore. I’ve given up.”

They both sighed. At least the stat’s name sounded a bit more dignified. Jyn’s own feelings definitely carried more respect than affection when it came to Kalender.

“Ah.” She realized it. She realized her feelings. At this point, she should have been blushing, but that would’ve only been true if she had an Affection stat.

She straightened her back.

" ‘Ah’ ?"

“It’s nothing.”

Kalender shrugged. He didn’t notice. Good.

Conflict and confusion—were they the same? She didn’t know. Right now, if the stat’s name change reflected an actual, concrete change in how the curse worked, then she was now “cursed” to forever respect someone.

That just didn’t sound as horrifying. It just didn’t.

She was beginning to think that if it was this man, perhaps the rest of her life wouldn’t be too bad.

Or was that the curse talking? Every thought just had to be second-guessed. It’s true that her fears last night had been unfounded, and she’d woken up very normally this morning—if just a bit unsightly, since her shirt had ridden up her body, but even with that, there was no evidence that her chastity had been violated. Truly, nothing happened.

No, no, it’s just the second day. Kalender could very well break in the next few days.

… But it was just so painfully obvious that this man was an exception among men. Is he even a man!

She sighed. She’d probably lose her mind over this before she turned 30. At least Kalender was talking to her normally at the moment. Talking to him should be fine.

“What I’d really like to know,” Kalender continued, “is what happens when Respect hits 100.”

“Why 100?” Jyn asked.

“Hm? What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t say anything about a maximum number of points, does it?”

Oh. She’s right. Kalender swirled his thoughts around, just as he did his tea. "Well, if it’s like that, then there are probably milestones, I think? Nothing happened when you hit 10, so it’s pretty likely that something will happen by the time you hit 100.

“Besides, the Blessing’s description says ‘Get that affection up to 100!’—so, something should happen.”

“Hm. I can get behind that reasoning.”

***

They finished breakfast, and promptly found themselves with nothing to do. Kalender sat himself by the reading desk, while Jyn sat on the bed. It’s comfortable.

Kalender felt uncomfortable, for a different reason. There was a whole lot of nothing to do. He reached for a book, Tales of Yurentel. It looked like a safe, general choice.

“Do you want to read?” he asked.

“I don’t read.” Jyn lightly shook her head.

“You don’t read, or you don’t know how?” Medieval times had Medieval problems, after all.

“I—know how to read some.”

Some? He paused for a bit, then cracked a page open and scanned through it. It’s a godforsaken logography. Each character codified its own concept, and there were maybe tens of thousands of unique instances of those characters just in this one book alone. His All-Language Fluency skill was doing all the heavy lifting, and he hadn’t noticed.

It’s not that the language of this place was being translated into his own language from his previous life. No, he really just understood everything as if he were a native speaker.

He thought of teaching Jyn how to read, but they probably wouldn’t be able to take out a book from here and keep working on it even after the 10th day had passed.

Well. Might as well start now.

“Want me to teach you?”

Jyn showed him a disbelieving face. “Do you understand how many years of—”

“We’re doing this because we’re bored, just to be clear.”

“—Understandable. Do we start now?”

She was unexpectedly eager. It wasn’t even the curse at work here. Before becoming a knight, she dreamed of becoming literate. Scribes were paid quite well. Her siblings would have been happy about it.

She pulled up the second chair right beside him. Kalender himself couldn’t help but lean away in surprise.

She looks so ready to learn, though! … And he loved teaching.

***

The white-robed inquisitor was looking at the screens together with the guards.

“I don’t understand.”

"“Us neither, sir.”"

The truest calling of this man is … doing mundane activities in close proximity with women. That was the morally worst interpretation they could come up with, and it didn’t even make the guy look all that bad.

“D-don’t let your guard down. It’s just the second day. We will not be caught lax in our duties. Maintain the same vigilance until the 10th day!”

"“Yes, sir!”"

“… But, you know, the two of you, we’ve been working together at this job for five years. I’m sort of rooting for this one to pass. I mean, finally.”

“We fully understand you, sir.” “My wife is urging me to seek therapy.”

“Worry not, Ron, for HQ has granted us the budget to hire an occupational therapist!”

The trio cheered.

***

Three more days passed to no incident—except perhaps when Jyn started ranting about how her mother had been neglectful in her childhood. The most debauched thing that Kalender had done was to pull her into a hug, at which the guards squinted very hard to make sure he wasn’t sneaking in a stealth grope.

It took the two experienced guards the whole of 10 seconds to realize that they were staring very hard at a woman’s boobs through a screen. It was all professional, they reassured themselves. Even if it was true, they still felt a bit embarrassed about it.

***

Day 6. Jyn’s Respect was at 99.

It was the moment of truth. They both decided to attempt to train the stat to 100 while they were still in a controlled environment, just to see what would happen.

Well, they meant to “train” it, but they were just interacting normally.

Granted, they both knew about how a cursed girl would eventually become obsessed over the man, and they’d hypothesized that this would happen once Affection reached 100—but this wasn’t Affection, this was Respect, and no one knew what would happen with it.

So, they took that chance.

“I want to be good friends with you,” Kalender said. “I hope that you can truly make the choice for yourself … to be my friend. It won’t feel right if you did something just for my sake, curse or not. Whatever you choose, my impression of you won’t change. You’re a good person.”

“… Somehow this sounds like a proposal, but if I listen carefully, it’s just an incredibly sappy man.”

[+1 Respect]

“Nevertheless,” Jyn continued, “I will whip you if you do not show the same kindness to others as you did to me.”

“For reference, is that considered a serious pledge or an idiom around here?”

“Some take it literally. Personally, I wouldn’t use a whip. A good slap will suffice.”

“Ah, that’s alright.”

They held it in—then they laughed.

Kalender was in bliss. Normally, this wouldn’t be the case, but the serum was making him feel extra.

And that’s why he hugged her out of nowhere.

Truth be told, Jyn’s heart stopped for a bit, but this wasn’t the first time he’d hugged her; though, normally he’d ask first before he did so, so this spontaneity was rare.

She’d recognized by now the difference between a ‘You poor thing, c’mere’ hug, and a ‘You’re great!’ hug. This one’s the latter.

The guards nearly dismissed the hug, if only because they knew that this guy always gave harmless hugs. Still, they were diligent, and at least sent a scrutinizing glance at the hug before going back to whatever they were doing.

“So, did anything change?” Jyn asked. Kalender pulled out of the hug and opened his stats, eyeing his Companions.

***

[Companions]

Minimine (Flagged)
Vice-Goddess of Reincarnation
Affection: 11

Jyn (Sworn)
Knight of Lyrica
Lvl. 11 Human
Respect: 100 Companion Skills: N/A

***

… Of course, there was a different problem slowly ticking up there, one of a divine nature, but he couldn’t do anything about that anytime soon.

Rather than that, he also had a new notification.

***

[Please select a new skill for Companion: Jyn]

Gatekeeper: Active skill. Single-target, single-activation. Uses MP. Block/unblock charm effects from being inflicted on a non-Companion by the Companion leader.

Stand as Equals: Passive skill. Permanently nullify all charm effects between self and the Companion leader.

Respect Begets Respect: Passive skill. Earning respect from Companion leader also counts to one’s own Respect.

***

“I can give you a Companion Skill, apparently … but the choices aren’t clear.”

Kalender told her about her options.

“I’ll admit, I questioned why you said they weren’t clear when Stand as Equals exists. I shouldn’t only be thinking of myself, after all. Others will come after me … and as disgusting that initially sounds, I would not be alive right now had you any ill intent in the first place. Regardless, we shouldn’t be victimizing anyone in the first place.”

They discussed their options, ignoring the fact that there were probably the magical equivalent of microphones surveilling their voices—they didn’t care about that right now. The choices they had could benefit them almost immediately.

Chiefly, they were fixated on Stand as Equals.

Respect Begets Respect would earn Jyn more Companion Skills in a shorter amount of time, and thus, she would grow more powerful faster. Gatekeeper would allow Jyn to keep Kalender from accidentally charming every girl he meets. Neither of them would like that.

… but, to stand as equals. Jyn wanted the certainty. She wanted to see Kalender clearly, and without a doubt. Kalender wanted to know that she was genuinely choosing him as her friend.