“It’s been just peaceful lately.”
So murmurs Onee while tilting his head towards the sky on a day with gloriously beautiful weather.
This prompts Grace to look up at him with a speechless look.
“Didn’t you just get punched by Her Imperial Majesty Asahi the other day with a ‘stop fricking adding to my workload!’ after coming back from a trip that ended up with plans to build a school as a joint venture with Galdeia?”
“Ahh, that’s different, it’s fine. That’s just playing around with a kitten.”
At least, that’s what Onee says, but what actually happened was a Jolt Blow1 from a full-speed sprint, and the shocking scene that the villagers witnessed was akin to a head-on collision with a dumpster truck.
But in spite of it all, Onee was unhurt.
Before Onee’s brilliantly shining muscles, Ouhi-sama’s punch that has enough power to shatter the ground is but a mere paw punch from a kitten.
“Well then, that’s it for our patrolling for today. Let’s find somewhere to sit down and have a short rest.”
“Haah. I think this every once in a while, but aren’t you actually able to block Her Imperial Majesty’s attacks? Are you taking them on purpose?”
“Oh my, you figured it out?”
“…… So you really were taking them on purpose. But why?”
Upon sitting down on a bench in the courtyard of the castle, the unexpected answer that came back causes Grace to widen her eyes and inquire further.
“I guess it’s sort of because back when she was still alive, she would hit me whenever I made a blunder of some sort. So it feels reassuring when someone gets mad at me for real.”
“……”
Shocking news. Turns out Onee is actually a soft M.2
The attacks from the S side might seem a bit too excessive to use the word ‘soft,’ but Onee’s defensive stats is on the level of a certain super robot who could have been god or devil so it’s fine.3
“But well, I’m sure she went easy on me. When I was a child, I was really very scrawny.”
“I still find that very hard to believe. What did you do to develop your body to what it is now?”
“Let me think. Hmm, boxing was what I started out with. But then again, even that boxing I started because of her.”
Onee chuckles gently with a nostalgic look on his face while speaking.
“I was a weakling, and would cry every time I got bullied. Because I was like that, it was always her who stood up to the bullies to protect me. A pathetic story, don’t you agree? A man should at least be able to protect the girl he loves.”
“……”
What he’s saying sounds appropriate, but because it’s Onee saying it, Grace finds it difficult to readily agree.
More like, in the first place she can’t imagine Onee being a weakling who got bullied.
What on earth happened for an otoko no ko4 to Warp Evolve5 into the Conqueror of Century’s End6.
“Unable to protect the girl I love, yet being protected instead. It was surely because I was such a coward that I had to pay the price for it. On a certain day, I was being bullied like always. Then she protected me from the bullies like always, but ended up getting seriously hurt.”
“What?! Was she alr-…… of course she was, you two got married after all.”
Grace becomes flustered for a brief moment upon hearing that Onee’s wife got hurt, but quickly remembers that this is a story of the past and thus sits back down.
“What actually happened was an accident. There just happened to be a fallen branch right where she fell from being shoved, and the branch stabbed her in the stomach.”
“That… sounds painful indeed.”
“It probably was. It was my first time hearing her scream out loud. And it was also my first time hating someone so fiercely. The heat rushed into my head, and everything went white in front of me. When I came to, I had split open the bully’s head with a rock that I had picked up from the ground.”
“Hou. Well done.”
This is the place where a modern-day Japanese might tsukkomi with “that was way overboard!”, but Grace is a resident of a dangerous fantasy world so she won’t be perturbed by something of this level.
Or rather, she’s raising a thumbs up as if in approval of a job well done. Apparently she’s starting empathizing while listening to Onee’s story.
“But the problem was, anger eventually fades. When I returned to being calm and being my usual cowardly self, I was just so, so scared. Both of someone important to me being hurt, and of me hurting someone else. Because of that, I became afraid to even interact with people, and completely turned into a hikikomori.”
“Yuki, you really are a kind person.”
If it happened to her, she would have cycled through taking revenge on every single one of those bullies. But the fact that she thinks like this betrays the fact that Grace herself also leans quite considerably on the musclebrain side.
“At that point in my life, it was again her who pulled me out and saved me. She dragged the snivelling me out of my house and brought me to a neighborhood gym. ‘I will personally train and temper you!’, she said.”
“Well that was a rather drastic shock treatment.”
To make a child afraid of hurting others learn how to hurt others. Just as Grace says, it was quite the drastic treatment indeed.
“I just got punched single-sidedly, but eventually there was this anger that started building up inside of me. It was like, ‘why do I have to go through all of this?’ When all those emotions exploded, I spontaneously raised my hand and it happened to catch her square in her face.”
“So it was a counter?”
“Exactly. Though it was a mere coincidence, it was a perfectly executed counter. But she just smiled, even while becoming teary-eyed at the pain. ‘You finally got your spirit back,’ she said, with blood dripping down from her nose. That was the moment when I knew that I would be no match for her for the rest of my life.”
“I see. I understand why Yuki is still in love with your wife. She sounds like a very wonderful lady.”
Unlike our Grand Commander.
As Grace is swallowing down those words, Onee laughs as if amused.
“After that, we signed up at a boxing gym. Eventually, I realized it. It turns out that humans are much tougher than I thought, and that they can take quite the beating and still be fine.”
“I’m certain that that fact is applicable only to Yuki and your wife, so you should amend that recognition ASAP.”
Suddenly remembering that she had received complaints from their subordinates about Onee’s training being too harsh, Grace returns to her usual self and throws out a tsukkomi.
Today, too, this otherworld is at peace.
1 From Hajime no Ippo. Supposedly a boxing punch which involves “The combatant charg[ing] head-first at top speed and whip[ping] their arm from an overhead position into a straight.” (Wiki page)
2 The ‘M’ and ‘S’ mentioned here refer to respective sides of sadomasochism.
3 “Can become god or devil (神にも悪魔にもなれる)” is the catch copy of Mazinger Z.
4Otoko no ko (男の娘), more commonly known in English as ‘traps,’ refers to male characters that act or dress in a very feminine manner. Examples include Hideyoshi Kinoshita (Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu) and Totsuka Saika (Oregairu) and Urushibara Luka (Steins;Gate).
5 Reference to ‘Warp Evolution’ (Warp Digivolution in the dub) from Digimon.
6 Conqueror of Century’s End is the title of Raoh from Hokuto no Ken.