CabbagePreacher

Despite my plans for a hiatus, I couldn't stop myself from writing another chapter. You shouldn't expect regular chapters for another month, but I might or might not end up end up with another chapter again. It depends on where I can squeeze free-time from and how much I can endure not sleeping for a night.

Body like fine steel
Refined into full sharpness
Let us trade blows

Today was not a special day, for Licorice or anyone else.

“Sweeping, sweeping, this is a whole lot of sweeping to do while making up a tune…”

Going on her business as usual, our heroine was again relegated to the task of sweeping the garden path. The incident with Cirno had made her chances of ever going out without supervision very low, any place outside of the Human Village wasn’t safe for any ordinary folk like Licorice.

Becoming food was a whole lot more likely if she was to wander out, though her chances of becoming food in the mansion was non-zero as well. Still, Licorice had gotten used to working under the mistress, and she was sure of the fact that she wasn’t going to be slaughtered any time soon. Thank you, B-type blood.

Other than her broom, Licorice had also been granted another tool: grass shears. She carried it under her apron, a technique learnt from Sakuya that our heroine did her best to replicate despite her lack of ability in the manipulation of time and space. She’d do her best to trim the plentiful hedges in the garden during her round of sweeping.

“Cutting, cutting, why are there so many hedges in this God-forsaken garden while making up a tune…” Our heroine was surprised that the mansion hadn’t turned to a jungle by now considering how understaffed it was.

She did actually feel bad for the head maid in that regard: Sakuya was doing all the work inside the mansion. Licorice was only helping with a tiny little bit of it. Our heroine couldn’t help but admire how hard-working her boss was, despite Sakuya’s penchant for Timonism.

Her round slowly came over to the gate of the Scarlet Devil Mansion, conveniently around the time where she was getting thirsty. Meiling didn’t move an inch from the premises, so she was always a reliable source of tea and chit-chat.

“Take this!”

“Āiyā!”

Instead, she found Sakuya and Meiling engaging in combat, not of the danmaku kind. First off, they were on the ground not flying, and second off, they were making actual physical contact with each other. From Licorice’s view, the situation looked quite scary. Thankfully, Sakuya didn’t have her knives out, otherwise the situation might have been deadly.

Our heroine didn’t exactly know what to do. It was not like she could intervene in the fight; Licorice was an ant stuck between two elephants crashing into each other. “Hey, could you please stop?” The fighting pair ignored her. All Licorice could do now was watch.

And watch she did, noticing an important detail that she had missed. This wasn’t some petty fight; this was a sparring match between professionals. Sakuya and Meiling were going for punches and kicks that weren’t aimed at anywhere that could be lethal, avoiding the body and allowing the other to block their strike. Their performance looked brutal (yet entertaining) nonetheless; the ground around them shook when they collided into each other.

The match only ended when Meiling took a few steps back, having been left out of breath. “One second, Lady Sakuya…” She sat on the grass to recuperate. The gatekeeper was smiling, despite her tired state. “That was a good match.” She stretched her arms as if she hadn’t been warming up for the last few minutes.

Sakuya joined Meiling in sitting on the ground. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning. In fact, Licorice found her poker face to be less poky than usual. “Indeed, it was. Have you intensified your training lately?” Sakuya took out a cup out from her apron, for all Licorice knew under that apron lay an entire universe the head maid could pull out crap from, and she poured tea from Meiling’s pot of tea that sat near the gate. She handed it over to the gatekeeper. “You look tired. Here.”

“Ah, you didn’t need to… Xièxie, Lady Sakuya.” Meiling took the cup and took a big gulp out of it. “So good… It’s a bit different than usual. A bit sweeter, perhaps?”

“I found a bit of honey in the pantry, and decided that it’d do no harm to put it in the tea.” Strangely, to Licorice, Sakuya was watching Meiling drink the tea instead of doing anything else. Not to mention the fact that the head maid was standing oddly close to the gatekeeper. She didn’t poison the tea now, did she? Is she watching to make sure that Meiling dies?

Licorice didn’t intend to stay unnoticed any longer, not to mention the fact that she had gotten quite thirsty standing out under the sun. She slowly approached them. “Good morning, Miss Meiling and Lady Sakuya.”

“Huh- S- Since when have you been here?” It was rare to see Sakuya act surprised, and Licorice sensed a hint of bashfulness revealed between the broken poker face. “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t interrupt people while they’re on a break?”

In contrast, Meiling was very calm in response to receiving an unexpected guest. “Good morning, Likǎolisū.” She extended the pot of tea toward Licorice. “Tea?”

“Wait.” Sakuya extended her arm to block Meiling from committing acts of handing out tea.

“Hm? What’s wrong?” Meiling held the pot back, worried that something might be awry.

“I…” Sakuya turned her head to avoid the gaze of Meiling. “…prepared this tea specially for you. Don’t go around wasting it on a fool who doesn’t understand the intricacies of tea!”

Great, she thinks of me as a fool now… “If that’s such a problem, then you should prepare something fit for fools.” It was Licorice’s turn to attack. “I’ve had to mooch from Meiling to acquire anything to drink, even water!” Our heroine didn’t even know where the kitchen was, and she hadn’t dared navigate the mansion by her lonesome in an attempt to find it. All her food either came from Meiling or Remilia.

“Āiyā? Is that true, Lady Sakuya?” This was the first time that Licorice had seen Meiling be angry at anything. “Didn’t the mistress tell you to take care of her properly, Sakuya?”

Sakuya wasn’t actually afraid at all of the angry Meiling, she was much more powerful compared to her. “I- I…” Two knives suddenly seemed to materialize in her hand, one flew next to Meiling and the other toward Licorice. Thankfully, both of them lodged themselves on to the ground, but knives flying in one’s general direction was threat enough on its own. “Shut up, all of you!” She swiftly got up. “I just forgot, okay?!”

“Huh?” Licorice was unsure as to how such a thing could happen. “I don’t think you normally get to forget about feeding another person…”

“Look, you suddenly appear, and now there’s some ordinary mortal that I need to look out for! It’s normal for me to miss such a trifling matter in a sea of troubles!” Sakuya seemed to have said enough. “I’ll lead you to the kitchen later.” She sat down next to Meiling again.

“Thank you?” Licorice wanted to switch topics; such needless tension didn’t make her feel comfortable. I guess she did genuinely forget… “Anyways, that match you just had was amazing.”

“Right? People in Gensokyo always talk about how elegant their danmaku is, but they forget about the beauty of martial arts.” Compliment on her close-quarter combat skills seemed to have inflamed the excitement within Meiling. “Compared to four-thousand years of history, the art of danmaku is naught but a child.”

“I wish I could pull off stuff like that.” Licorice was quite worried about her safety, considering that even an idiotic ice fairy could easily pulverize her if things came down to actual, proper fighting.

“To be honest, I don’t think you’ll ever have a chance to reach anything like Lady Sakuya’s level in your limited lifetime. But!” Meiling got up to flex her muscles. “You could still reach a higher level. Come join me in my daily tai chi exercises and you too, may one day be able to draw water from the Misty Lake without problem!”

Is she trying to sign me up for a gym or something? “Sure, it’s not like I have anything else to do other than sweep the garden path occasionally.” A bit of exercise never hurt anyone.

“Perfect! Then we’ll begin…” Meiling stretched and yawned “…the next day. I need to rest now…” She leaned to the wall protecting the garden and closed her eyes.

“Oh. Okay. Good night, Miss Meiling.” Licorice had gotten used to Meiling’s ability to suddenly fall asleep.

Sakuya, who was still sitting next to her, didn’t seem as calm. “It’s far from being a good night, or night at all! Meiling, you’re supposed to be doing your job guarding the gate you fool!” A knife flew out towards Meiling, this one finding itself lodged right in her forehead.

“Āiyá!” It seemed that the knife had certainly helped awaken Meiling.

“Miss Meiling!? Are you fine?!” Licorice rushed over to nurse the skewered Meiling. A knife being lodged in one’s head usually didn’t bode well for the one receiving the knife.

“Ah… It’s nothing, Licorice.” Meiling was certainly not behaving appropriately for someone who had a knife lodged in their head. She calmly removed the knife, with no blood or wound to be seen. The gatekeeper lazily rubbed the place where the knife had been. “That hurt, Lady Sakuya!”

“It’s a knife. I’d be concerned if it didn’t.” And Sakuya was too calm for someone who had seemingly almost committed homicide. Thinking about it further, Licorice realized that this act couldn’t be homicide due to the non-homo (as in ‘not human’) nature of Meiling. She was still sure that this was still an abuse of authority on Sakuya’s part.

Thankfully, for Sakuya at least, the OSHA was like the ocean in Gensokyo: there was no OSHA (or an ocean).

“Right? It’d be pretty bad for us if those knives weren’t sharpened enough.” Meiling cracked a smile and then laughed. It seemed that she didn’t mind being stabbed by the head maid that much, probably due to the fact that such simple attacks didn’t work on her. Licorice would have minded it a whole lot more if she was stabbed, for example.

“Lady Sakuya, please do not use the same methods for waking me up!” Our heroine wanted to make sure of this after having seen the head maid’s avant-garde methods.

“Huh? Why not?” Sakuya seemed a bit puzzled and offended at this request. “Knives are pretty effective at making people wake up. What do you know about my job, anyways?”

“It’s more that I know that I can’t survive being stabbed…” Licorice was even more puzzled. Does she not instinctively know how durable ordinary people are? That’d explain a lot of things, like the time that the head maid had held a knife against our heroine’s mandible. “I’d die if you did this to me, you know. Please, I beg of you, don’t.”

“Really?” Sakuya responded as if Licorice had said something profound about the human condition. It seemed that she seriously hadn’t considered the fact that our heroine was much more fragile than her. “The mistress would be mad if that happened. I’ll try to not do so.”

“Please, do try.” ,

Thus, Licorice saved her life… for now.