The look that he had received was quickly replaced by a sweet smile as she looked at him and waved casually, making him feel a little confused. Still, he approached the three of them.
"I had a feeling you'd probably come back here," he said to Mai. "I thought you would send me a signal when you found them so that I could come help."
"It wasn't anything big," Mai said.
"Sakurajima-senpai, you are the only one who would say that after getting us through a horde of thousands of zombies," the male said with a wry expression. "Hello there, my name is Yuuma Kunimi. And this is Rio Futaba."
"Orion," he shook Yuuma's hand. "Orion Vaelor."
"A foreigner?" Rio raised a brow, raising her hand in a lady-like fashion as if expecting him to kiss it. "Long way from home, are we?"
Right now, there was nothing more Orion wanted than that inspection rune. More than curiosity, it felt like a matter of personal safety now.
"Something like that," he said with a chuckle while looking at her extended hand and playing along by grabbing it gently. He leaned forward and brushed his lips against her knuckles, seeming uncaring about the fact that they were stained with dried blood. He had to actively make an effort to ignore the chilling aura emanating from the human-sized block of ice beside him. "So? Mai tells me that you've been—"
"Hm?" The Ice Block's glare at him got much more chilling.
"Sakurajima-san," he corrected himself. "I hear you've been helping her."
Rio shook her head. "I was just curious to see how this zombie plague works. I don't have nearly the necessary qualifications to actually research a cure. Please, everybody, come inside. We can clean ourselves off and get something to eat. We got a pretty good haul today with Sakurajima-senpai supporting us to escape."
"It was reckless to get stuck between so many zombies," she said. "Not everyone can handle endlessly killing zombies."
Orion felt that it was a jab pointed at him, but he couldn't come up with anything to say, so he followed along and entered through the main gate. They first washed themselves off in the yard with a hose, except for Mai, who was still as pristine as she was in the morning.
This has to be some kind of cleaning skill. Even without zombies, just walking around all day would get one at least a little sweaty.
Orion noticed that Rio seemed unbothered by the fact that her clothes were completely drenched, showing her underwear. This made him confused when he recalled the reserved culture that he'd been taught about in the Japanese Language dream. Even though her nipples were visibly poking through her shirt, she didn't seem to care and cleaned herself off in front of two guys. He decided to stop observing her further for two main reasons. One, to not come off as a creep, and two, to not end up getting a physiological reaction, which would definitely make things awkward. Rio didn't seem to care much, but Mai was definitely a lot more reserved and in line with what he had learned about Japanese culture in the class.
After cleaning themselves off, Rio handed a towel each to Orion and Yuuma and dried herself off with a third before entering the house ahead of the two, leaving her clothes outside. Still, even though she went ahead and covered herself up, Orion got a clear glimpse of her underwear as she went into the house ahead of them.
Yeah, she definitely doesn't actually care and is only leaving to keep up appearances… I'd have expected him to step in if they were together, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They could always be just fuck buddies. Doesn't matter, really.
As he saw Mai entering the house, Orion quickly stripped down to his boxers and wrapped the towel around his waist before ridding himself of those as well, left with just a towel covering his lower body.
"Mai is your senpai from university, right? What's the deal with her? Has she always been like this? Distant and cold…" Orion decided to take the chance to talk to someone who actually knew Mai and get some information out of him.
"Ah, no, she's my senpai from school," Yuuma said with a chuckle.
"Wait, you mean to say that you are still in school? And Rio as well?" Orion's eyes went wide.
"Why? Were you planning to do something indecent?" He asked casually.
Orion could immediately imagine some kind of multiversal pedo police deploying a team to capture and jail him for life.
"Haha!" Yuuma burst out laughing. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Don't worry about it, we are…well, were in university already. Senpai turned twenty in December of last year. Futaba and I are nineteen."
"Don't fuck with me like that, man," Orion sighed with a wry smile. "I'm twenty-two, and I draw a hard line at adults. I had a friend who got busted for doing it with his seventeen-year-old girlfriend; it still traumatizes me."
"Busted?"
"Oh, um… Arrested by the authorities," he clarified. He'd learned Japanese well enough that it had become commonplace for him to use translated versions of certain English slang directly, which, unfortunately, made no sense in Japanese. "He went to prison for five years, even though the girl consented and everything. She even gave a testimony in court, but it was useless because she was still a minor at the end of the day. The judge and prosecutor were completely rigid... Anyway, sorry. I'm rambling."
"It's fine," he shook his head with a smile and turned around, looking at the bright sky above. "If you are interested, I'll give you some advice, Vaelor-san."
"Please just call me Orion. I'm not Japanese and don't need you to attach honorifics to my name. I definitely don't need you to call me by my last name."
"Orion-san then," Yuuma said. "I'm used to it."
"Works. What advice do you have for me?"
"Try to take things slow with Sakurajima-senpai," he said. "If you show her the slightest hint of sincere desire toward her, she will ruthlessly cut you away without the slightest hint of hesitation and in the most feral way possible. In our current world, she might even directly kill you."
"What?" He raised a brow. "What in the world would warrant such an extreme reaction toward a suitor? And the slightest hint? Even someone with a phobia of men wouldn't have such an extreme reaction."
"She used to have an almost endless line of suitors, Orion-san," Yuuma said. "She didn't go to university at all after high school and completely immersed herself in her career. You may not know this as a foreigner, but Sakurajima Mai is the most cherished person in our entire country. Going even beyond a household name, everyone deeply cares for this person. But every once in a while, there were rumors regarding her co-workers expressing their intentions to pursue her. Without fail, every single one of those people had their careers destroyed. With directors refusing to cast them, even firing them on the spot despite existing commitments and more. Such rumors would last no more than a day before being replaced by concrete information about the subject of those rumors being exiled from the industry itself."
"Why?" He frowned. "She doesn't seem like an extreme misandrist, considering my interactions with her. I even called her beautiful once."
"She doesn't hate men," Yuuma said as a sad look appeared on his face. "A little over two years ago, a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, she and her boyfriend were planning to go watch the Enoshima illumination on Christmas. But in an unforeseen turn of events, a car lost control amidst the slippery road and… He didn't survive. That was my best friend, Sakuta, Orion-san. He left this world, giving his life to a little girl in middle school in the form of his heart. That was the day Sakurajima-senpai's world shattered, and she was never the same again."
Orion was silent after listening to Yuuma's explanation. His heart grew heavy, and he found it a little harder to breathe. His face twisted into a grimace, as if thinking of an unpleasant memory.
"Losing a loved one… is enough to leave a person destroyed for a lifetime," he said with a slightly hoarse voice. "Two years, or twenty…you can't be the same ever again."
"This is why I hope that you tread cautiously. For your own sake," he said. "Sakurajima-senpai can be very dangerous."
"You don't need to tell me," he said with blank eyes, recalling the price of seeing through her. "And I don't plan to go after her anyway. While calling her smoking hot is the understatement of the century, I'm not mentally ready for a serious relationship. Especially in this world. Hearing what you just told me… Even thinking of being with her means an extreme commitment."
"Let's go," Yuuma suddenly smiled brightly, changing the topic. "They are probably waiting for us inside."
"You must've taken it especially hard…"
The well-built man paused before smiling.
"It's fine," Yuuma said. "My girlfriend was there to comfort me through the toughest part of it." He put it lightly, but Orion could tell the heavy pain hiding behind his normal voice.
Neither of them spoke for a while and entered the apartment, where Mai and Rio were sitting in the living room, chatting and drinking some tea. Mai had taken off her jacket and was left wearing her jeans and a full-sleeved shirt as she sat politely on a single-person chair. Rio, on the other hand, had changed into pajamas that seemed a size small for her. At least the top, which was halfway unbuttoned and revealed her cleavage while emphasizing her chest.
"Took you long enough," Rio said, turning to the two of them as her eyes brazenly wandered over Orion's body. After being literally reforged using Origin Energy and being enhanced even further, he could be said to have a perfect body exactly according to his perception. He was all muscle but still sported a lean build without being bulky. Standing at a full one eighty-five centimeters, he was even taller than the sporty jock beside him. Orion noticed her lips purse as if she was about to whistle, but then her gaze wandered to Mai, and she stopped herself.
She definitely doesn't care about being decent and is only maintaining that appearance in front of Mai…Maybe because of their senior-junior relationship. Still, those tits…they have to be double D's at the very least.
He didn't notice Mai glancing at him, but then again, she had a superpower where even if she was standing right in front of him, he wouldn't notice. So she could look at him all she wanted, but he wouldn't know. As the thought crossed his mind, the memory of Yuuma's words came rearing to the front of his thoughts, immediately making him feel guilty for having such thoughts about her.
"Were you two having a contest between lengths and girths?" Rio teased with a chuckle. "Come on, sit, Orion. While Yuuma changes, you can talk to us." She patted the couch beside her with a smile that looked innocent on the surface but made Orion wary. Still, he didn't want to antagonize this suggestive woman and played along, sitting down beside her.
"Ahem," he decided to get some initiative in this situation. "Do you guys have a private reservoir of water?"
She chuckled at his attempt and smiled as if seeing through him. "We have a direct connection to the groundwater. It's a bitch when it comes to the legalities, but it is very convenient in the long run."