“What?! Why!?”

“You’re one of the better-looking slaves here, and you’re not shy. You’d do well peddling stuff, I’m sure.”

“I . . . I would? No! I don’t wanna!”

“Don’t worry. Just be yourself. People are even tougher to deal with than monsters. You’ll enjoy it!”

“Coming from you, Bubba Shield, that only makes it scarier!”

Was it something I had done? Having Keel in the vending division seemed like a good idea. If I dressed her like a boy and had her sell accessories or something, I bet the female customers would love it. And then if I paired her with Raphtalia, we could take everyone’s money, man or woman.

“By the way, Keel . . .”

“What?”

“The reason you were being rebellious toward me in the beginning is because you had a thing for Raphtalia, right? It’s too bad you’re a girl. But then again, no one is going to end up pregnant and unable to fight if it’s a same-sex relationship, so maybe I should allow those?”

Before the Spirit Tortoise incident, Keel had been a bit on edge around me. She was always glaring at me and going on about Raphtalia this and Raphtalia that.

“Wh . . . what?! You’ve got it all wrong! Don’t be ridiculous!”

Keel started trembling for some reason. She was looking over at . . .

“Mr. Naofumi . . .”

Raphtalia was walking in my direction with a big smile on her face and eyes aflame with murderous intent. Hmm . . . I guess this kind of topic was off limits, after all.

“And that’s that. Now get out there and see what you can catch, everyone!”

“Okay!”

After it had been a while, Keel and the others returned.

“Bubba Shield! We caught all of this!”

An ecstatic-looking Keel came over with a net full of fish and shellfish in her hands.

“Yeah, yeah.”

I already had the griddle nice and hot. All that was left was to clean the fish and cook them up.

“I’ll make some sashimi, since I learned how in Kizuna’s world.”

Raphtalia started preparing sashimi to go with my cooking. Parasites could be a problem, but everything looked fine, as far as I could tell, using my appraisal skills. And so, just like that I ended up cooking again today. Seriously, enough with the cooking already!

Oh yeah! It was about time to hatch the monster eggs. We had built up a pretty good supply of food. That shouldn’t be a problem.

“We’re heading back after everyone finishes eating.”

“Okay!”

Just past noon, we all left the ocean behind and returned to the village. I wanted to hatch the monster eggs before anything else. I’d already finished binding them to myself yesterday, for the most part. I checked on the eggs, which were lined up in a row in the shed that we were using as a storeroom.

“What are you doing, bubba?”

“We’ve built up a reasonable stockpile of food, right? Now it’s time to get ready to move on to the next stage of my plans.”