We were walking down the forest, and Sarah was looking at me in a restless way. Something about me was disturbing her, and when we were at the frontier of the woods, she finally broke her silence.
"You guys wait here. I'll bring some clothes for Rick." She said to us.
Alicia was still using my t-shirt, after she had her upper body clothes ripped apart. Because of this, I was shirtless, with my chest completely naked.
"Ah, I almost forgot." I said, carefree.
"Do you want to show your back all around town?!" Sarah snapped at me.
"Sarah, you don't need to get angry at Richard." Alicia said nervously, and she started to shyly take out my t-shirt from her body. "I'll give it back to him."
"W-Wait, wait, Alicia." Sarah said, overreacting, saying Alicia was almost flashing her. "You are a girl! If you give up this shirt, the hood will be the only thing hiding your chest!"
"Sarah, you don't need to be concerned about me." Alicia said in a nervous voice. "If I stay grabbing the hood tight, I can hide my…"
"A girl shouldn't enter a city with her clothes ripped apart!" Sarah replied nervously.
"Our majesty would have a heart attack if he saw this." Diane said, covering her face in shame.
"All right, all right! You girls stop this nonsense. Sarah, I'll wait here. Just don't make us wait." I said, kind of grumpy, trying to put an end to this madness. All of them stopped, and silence permeated the woods for a while.
"Huh, I see. I should go now." Sarah said, ashamed of her earlier attitude.
"Sarah is kind of… intense." Alicia said to me, astonished.
"You tell me." I replied to her stunned state.
"But this is her way to show kindness." She said with a shy smile. "I think I'm starting to see why you liked her."
"Maybe you're right." I let out a small laugh.
We stood there in silence, waiting for Sarah to come back. Alicia was playing with her fingers, and from time to time she took a glimpse of me, but when I responded to her gaze, she avoided eye contact. She didn't bore me, actually I found her shyness cute, but another girl was looking at me like a hawk, and it was starting to get on my nerves.
"So Diane, is there something that you want to talk about? You've been staring at me since you got out of the cave."
"Did you notice?" She asked in a surprised tone. Her eyes filled with guilt when she got caught. "Sorry."
I didn't expect this kind of reaction. It's true that I saved her life and we are some kind of an alliance, but I still feel as if she didn't trust me. 'And I can't forget her with a knife threatening me twice.'
But Diane is a mystery to me. She was a character that was supposed to be dead. I was still learning how her head functions.
"I apologize. I was looking at your tattoo, and I got carried away." She said with sadness in her voice. I could see that Alicia was feeling uncomfortable seeing my tattoo too.
"Oh, this thing. I should apologize, that is not something that people should be seeing." I said, trying to lift the mood, but Diane's expression turned serious, not in an angry way. She was about to tell me something, but then…
"Rick!" Someone broke the mood from afar. From a distance, we finally could see the red ponytail fluttering in the wind.
She returned carrying more than one piece of clothing, with a smile on her face. "I took the opportunity to bring clothes for you guys too." She gave me and Alicia new upper body clothes, and she gave a complete outfit to Diane. "Diane, here is yours."
"But I won't need it." She replied with an expressionless face.
"Why though? Your clothes are torn and with blood marks, just use them while we clean them." Sarah responded, surprised by her refusal.
"I don't intend to enter the city. I'll watch you guys from afar, and prevent further attacks." Diane replied seriously.
"If you say so…" Sarah said, clearly disappointed.
"Hmm… Sarah, why did you bring me a new t-shirt? If you gave one to Alicia, I can just have my shirt back." I asked her, not understanding her gesture, but the redhead narrowed her eyes at me.
"Because you're a pervert. If I did this, you would be sniffing her smell out of your clothes." She said to me in an annoyed voice, and then turned to the blonde girl, stretching out her hand. "So Alicia, give me his t-shirt."
Alicia surprised Sarah by taking a step back.
"Alicia, what is wrong?"
"What are you planning to do with this shirt? I may have used it, but it still has Richard's smell." She said, holding it to her small-sized chest as if she was trying to keep the shirt for herself. "You are the real pervert."
"Am I? So why do you want to be enveloped in a shirt with a strong male essence?" Sarah replied angrily. A war started between the girls over a smelly piece of fabric.
Diane sighed in annoyance, as if she was accustomed to babysitting this kind of childish behaviour. She came to me with silent steps. "Richard, can I talk to you for a moment?"
"We shouldn't watch them?"
"Don't worry. This fight probably won't escalate into something lethal." Diane said in a monotonic voice.
'Probably?'
"And there are things that we need to discuss." She said to me in a serious tone. I thought that it was important, so I followed her lead. The other two were so immersed in their fight that they didn't notice us distancing ourselves to talk in private.
"I'll go straight to the point. Who are you?" She said bluntly.
I tried to keep my cool, but I can't lie that I froze for a second. My mind was working, trying to figure out what were the chances that she knew that I was a transmigrator. "Could you be more specific?"
"A guy living in a little town, in the middle of nowhere, that saved the princess and by coincidence has a special power. I feel that you're going to harm her, and I don't mean to insult you, but it's too good to be true that we are running towards such a sequence of events in our favor." Her expression got colder. "And your tattoos… They are alchemy symbols?"
"Yes, they are. My father was an Alchemist, and these symbols on my back are part of his life's work." I explained to her.
"Was?"
"He died a long time ago. These symbols were all he left to me. I could say that they are my family inheritance. Him, his father, and the father before him worked their whole lives towards this same thing, one inheriting the research of the former. Well, this short family tradition died in his generation." I answered her with a dry laugh.
"What do you mean by this?"
"I wasn't born with the Alchemist class. I received the Everyman class, a useless class, so my father knew that he had to finish what my grandfathers couldn't, and after mom's death he became more obsessed with his research."
Diane was trying to stay emotionless, but I could tell she was uneasy with my story.
"He kept digging and digging at his little lab, day and night. He kept searching until he found what he was looking for. Well, a part of it. He sacrificed his own health, but his search created more questions than answers, an incomplete work. So he used the energy he still had to leave this for posterity."
"Posterity. How could a father do such a thing to his own son? It's…" If she had something to say, she stopped midway. She breathed deeply, trying to stay calm. "No, I'm sorry to offend your father. It's none of my business."
"I'll overlook it. Also, I'm not justifying his actions, only explaining. I know that for most people it's gruesome. Even though most people don't understand what it's written, it's horrible to look at, so I covered it."
"Is this research so worth it to be carved on his own son's flesh?" She asked, with disgust in her words.
"You won't believe it if I told you. If it's about a certain knowledge he didn't want to see lost, or even entrusted to be passed down to my descendants, then the answer maybe is yes. But it is such a pain in the ass." I wasn't trying to manipulate her, I was letting myself be more honest than I should. "Some people want me for this. It's serious, I might die eventually."
"Why are you telling me this?" She said, dumbfounded. "Information is very important. To reveal this kind of stuff to me…"
"You wanted to know more about me, don't you. I still have some secrets, but I will give you the basics. The power that I'm offering Alicia and you is from a lost Temple. Sadly, Sarah is my only witness now. She has some special skills to prove it."
Diane was speechless. For an Assassin to have such a wave of information given by someone, it's something unthinkable.
"The reason why I'm telling you this is because I need your help to deal with the people trying to kill me. Thankfully, it's the same guys looking for Alicia's head." I gave Diane some spoilers from SCRL.
"The Silver Fang! That means…"
"Yes, ma'am. Our enemies are the same, my reward for saving Alicia would be to stay alive until the end of our journey." I said to her, concluding my monologue. "If you girls want to stand by me, I would be happy though."