Chapter 61: Love’s Hypocrisy
Freya went from shock to fear, then through everything a human being can possibly feel in the span of a single second, each emotion crashing into the next before any of them had time to settle.
Because her lover, the SSS-rank one, a little jealous around the edges and possibly a little paranoid around the corners, had just made her grand return to the dungeon.
At the exact moment she’d been talking behind her back with another woman.
Another woman she’d kissed a few minutes earlier, and rather more than that if one wanted to be honest about the sequence of events.
Shit... shit... shit...
All the calm of the past few days and all the laziness accumulated on Kumoko’s back evaporated at once.
She sprang upright on the carapace, pushed off one of the ridges along the spider’s back and threw herself into the open air, landing lightly at the center of the Silkweaver nest in a small cloud of silk dust.
The place bore no resemblance whatsoever to the empty, silent chamber she’d discovered two weeks earlier.
Some twenty spiders lived there now, spread across the terraces and ledges cut into the rock, most of them still growing and barely bigger than a dog, moving in tight clusters along the beams strung from one wall to the other.
Those same spiders whose breeding rate had proven absolutely relentless, along with the laying, to the point that they’d more than tripled their numbers in barely two weeks.
Anyway, that wasn’t the issue right now.
Because at this precise moment, Freya was standing in the middle of her own dungeon, shaking from head to foot, in a posture that resembled Mei’s rather closely on the day the Gacha had summoned her.
And because the cheerful humming and Aria’s footsteps were drawing nearer as they came up the corridors, calm, steady, without the slightest hesitation about which way to go.
Her mind was already racing straight into paranoia while desperately hunting for something to reason with.
What do I do?! She didn’t hear me, it was my replica doing the talking! And she’s on the other side of the barony! I’ll grant that she’s SSS rank, but isn’t that pushing it a bit?
She stood motionless for a few seconds, clinging to that line of reasoning like a handrail.
Then the last question that had echoed through the corridors came back to her, from barely a moment ago, with that little drawn-out lilt at the end.
"What were you talking about~~?"
No... no... I must have misheard. Maybe she said "What were you walking about~~?" Which means absolutely nothing, but I’m perfectly fine with that. Or maybe—
Her thought cut off the instant Aria appeared at the entrance to the nest.
Every tremor, all the accumulated fear, everything she’d felt moments earlier evaporated at once, swept away by what she was looking at.
Because standing beside the woman she’d thought about without pause for the past two weeks, the one she’d finally admitted to loving more than anything in the world, was someone else.
Another woman!
"ANOTHER WOMAN?!" she blurted, letting the thought out loud before she could catch it.
Behind them stood the rest of the dungeon already.
Mei, Laïa, Naïa and even a good number of the Mycofoxes had crowded into the corridor, and at that outburst every one of them brought their hands to their mouths in a movement of perfect synchronization.
Because yes, standing beside Aria was indeed another woman.
A gorgeous woman, on top of it?!
The stranger had eyes of a deep pink verging on red, with a white star at their center that made them stand out like two set gemstones, and black hair shot through with blue and pale red highlights that carried the exact same palette.
And above all that, two dragon horns rose from her hair, black and streaked with blue and red, while a long slender tail descended from the small of her back and zigzagged slowly through the air behind her.
Her figure followed the same logic, tall and perfectly proportioned, with a narrow waist that opened out into wide hips and a generous chest her outfit made no particular effort to conceal.
That same outfit being, of all things, a maid’s uniform.
And she’s already got a maid outfit on?! Are you kidding me?!
At that thought Freya lost whatever control she had left and exploded a second time, entirely ready to take it up with Aria herself.
"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! You vanish for two weeks and come back with another woman on your arm?!"
Aria seemed thrown by the outburst, her hands folding together in front of her in a reflex she hadn’t shown in a long time.
Her mistress, normally so composed where she was concerned, had just come completely unglued at her return in another woman’s company.
"But madam..."
"No! Aria! No! No!"
Freya took a step forward, one finger leveled at her.
Aria drew back half a step, her hands clasping tighter against her chest.
"Do you have any idea what I went through these past two weeks waiting for you?! Not knowing whether you were alive or dead? Do you even know we had to fight a monster of at least S rank while you were off somewhere enjoying your life with that woman!"
Her voice climbed with every sentence and she made no effort to hold it down.
Aria opened her mouth twice without a sound coming out, her gaze moving from her mistress’s face to the woman behind her, then back again.
"Is this the devotion you promised me?"
Those particular words landed differently.
Her shoulders drew in sharply, her head pulled back slightly, and her usually flawless composure cracked apart completely.
Freya seemed to grow angrier still, projecting onto her partner the very thing she herself had just done, with a conviction nothing whatsoever justified.
Her gaze slid to the woman at Aria’s side, who was keeping her head down as though she genuinely had something to answer for, which irritated her all the more given that she wasn’t even taking offense at any of it.
"Ma—"
Aria stopped short, swallowed, and started again.
"Madam, it isn’t... it isn’t what you think, I’m begging you..."
Her voice had lost all of its usual cadence. The words came out too fast, too tight, with a faint tremor she couldn’t correct.
She took a step forward, one hand reaching toward her mistress, then held it back halfway without daring to finish the gesture.
"Let me explain, I swear to you that—"
She was cut off again, more violently this time, in word and in gesture both, Freya sweeping the air aside with the back of her arm.
"No! Everyone out! I want to be alone!"
Aria’s hand dropped back to her side.
Everyone in the corridor hesitated, exchanging glances without daring to move.
Then, seeing their mistress enraged to that degree for the first time since they’d known her, they left one by one without another word, leaving her to calm down alone.
Aria didn’t move right away.
She stayed where she was, eyes fixed on her mistress’s back, her lip pressed thin and her gaze clouding over all at once, her breathing gone shallow.
But Naïa took her by the arm and led her away, leaning toward her ear to say something quietly, which finished off whatever patience Freya had left.
She turned then toward the poor little spiders, still clustered on the ledges and perfectly still.
"YOU TOO! OUT! NOW!"
The spiders scattered in a frantic clatter of legs against rock, dispersing toward the upper galleries, and silence dropped over the nest all at once.
Leaving Freya alone.
She stayed standing for a few seconds in the middle of the empty chamber, her breathing still short, fists clenched at her sides.
Then she lay down on the floor, on her back, arms spread, and looked up at the vast ceiling of the nest, now draped with sheets of silk in places and clusters of eggs hanging from the beams.
"Aaaah..."
She let out a long breath, staring at that ceiling over and over for several minutes.
The anger took a while to recede. It pulled back in waves, each one leaving a little more room for something else.
She came back alive... After two hellish weeks wondering whether an SSS rank could actually die, whether I should start grieving, start getting used to it, start picturing a life where she never came back... she finally came home, and my first reaction was to scream at her...
She brought a hand to her face.
What possessed me to lose my temper like that? I should have thrown myself at her, hugged her, welcomed her the way I’d promised myself I would for two whole weeks.
She replayed the scene in her head, image by image, and every detail she’d ignored in the moment came back with unbearable clarity.
Aria hadn’t walked in triumphant. She’d walked in humming, like someone coming home.
And the other woman had looked uncomfortable, not remotely proud of the accusations flying around, which was normally the exact opposite of how these things went. After all, the mistress of a woman bold enough to walk into the other one’s home would gloat at least a little about what she’d done, wouldn’t she? If only with her expression?
And I, like an idiot caught up in my own feelings, didn’t even let her explain herself... Aaaah... why? Why do you act like this, Freya? When are you going to become a real adult, someone people can lean on, someone people can count on?
She started blaming herself in earnest, spiraling further and further into it, alone, exactly the way she always had back on Earth after her sister left.
She brought her arm up over her eyes.
And that was when the real question arrived, the one she’d been carefully stepping around from the start.
Why did I react like that, exactly?
Because it would have been easy to chalk it up to worry, or exhaustion, or two weeks of waiting.
Except that wasn’t it.
She thought back to what she’d done earlier with Kyiara. To the fur. To the heat. To the precise moment she’d stopped resisting without even noticing.
And above all, to what came afterward.
I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. I told myself it was a skill, that it didn’t really count, and that technically I hadn’t chosen anything at all. Then I told myself I wouldn’t mention it to her, that it would be simpler that way and would save us both some complications.
She’d treated it as a joke, the way she treated everything, telling herself it was nothing more than a duel, a simple exchange of skills between her greed and the fox’s lust.
She’d even found it funny at one point.
And in all that time, not once did I stop to think about what it would do to her.
Then Aria had appeared with somebody else, and the whole machine had turned around on her at once.
The doubt. The stomach dropping. That immediate, absurd need to know who this woman was, since when, and what the two of them had been doing for two weeks.
So that’s it... that’s what it feels like!
She’d spent two weeks in the dark about whether Aria was alive. She’d found herself, in the space of a few seconds, in the dark about her relationship with the dragonoid woman she’d brought home.
And she’d hated it instantly, completely, with an intensity that had her screaming in front of the entire dungeon.
It took me a few seconds to find it unbearable, so how long was I planning to put her through it? Months? An entire lifetime?
She hated the feeling.
And more than anything, she hated herself for having been willing to inflict it on the woman she loved so much.
That same woman she’d just projected her own wrongdoing onto, the one she’d unloaded two weeks of pent-up strain on, the one she’d...
The one I... the one I...
She stalled in the middle of the thought.
Because there was a word for what she’d just done, and she didn’t like it one bit.
She had accused Aria of the exact thing she was guilty of, louder than was called for, in front of everyone, and without letting her get a single word out.
And the worst part was that some part of her had known. In the moment. While she was still shouting.
The tears started coming on their own, silently, sliding down her temples and into her hair.
And what if she hates me now? What if she doesn’t want me anymore?
Then she felt a light touch on her cheek, at the exact spot where the tears were running, a thumb wiping one away with infinite gentleness.
She slowly moved her arm away from her eyes, afraid of what she thought she’d find.
And she saw her.
The woman she was crying over, the one she felt every emotion in the world for.
Aria.
Kneeling beside her, wearing that compassionate, loving, protective expression, the one that normally gave Freya safety and warmth, but which at this precise moment stirred nothing in her but resentment and shame toward herself.
Aria took in her mistress’s face, her expression, her reddened eyes, all of it.
Then she said nothing at all.
She simply took her by the arms and lifted her upright against herself, little by little, without a word, before closing hers around her in a real and warming embrace.
And Freya couldn’t hold it back any longer, breaking into tears all over again, harder than before, and not silently this time.
"Aria... I’m sorry... I’m so sorry..."