Rishia . . . was, what, sleeping in her room? She was supposed to be keeping an eye on him . . . but from everything he had done so far, it seemed safe to trust him at least a little now.

“Ah, Naofumi,” Itsuki said and turned his gaze from the night sky and directed it to me. There was something about how he’d been acting recently . . . He was almost too quiet. It was a bit unsettling. “Passive” sounded nice in theory, but it was also hard to tell what he was actually thinking. “The moon looks so beautiful. I was just taking it in,” he told me.

“It is nice,” I said. These other worlds still had a moon. There was also one in the world I had been summoned to. I mean, it was a world with werewolves and demi-humans liked Fohl and Keel who could transform.

The silence drew out between Itsuki and me. I wondered if I should just leave. As though answering my thought, Itsuki broke the silence.

“You know about me, don’t you?” he said.

“Know what?” I asked.

“That . . . my curse has broken and my awareness is back to normal,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” I wasn’t a moron. Itsuki’s ongoing increase in self-assertion had definitely started to become suspicious.

“I expected as much,” he said.

“I mean, the curse should have definitely lifted by now, so I thought something was going on,” I said. There had also been the possibility that he was just permanently broken, like Motoyasu. If I had to classify it, I’d basically been treating him the same as Motoyasu. But he’d responded to questions normally and talked when required. So long as he didn’t display any hostile intent toward us, and in considering Rishia had been watching him, I had just not been worrying too much about it.

“With my curse broken and having recovered, aren’t you wondering why I remain with you?” Itsuki asked.

“Not really. Having Rishia close to you has settled you down, I thought. That’s about all the thought I gave it,” I said. Of course, I had wondered whether he was broken like Motoyasu.

“That’s just an indication of how broad-minded you are, Naofumi,” Itsuki told me. That didn’t sound right to me—I considered myself to be pretty narrow-minded. I was fine with him having the wrong idea about that, but I knew the truth in my own head.

“To be honest . . . I didn’t have the bravery to say that I was wrong and you were right, Naofumi,” he finally told me. His pride wouldn’t let him accept me, even though inside he knew the truth. A particularly thorny feeling. I had my own times when I didn’t want to acknowledge someone else being right—even when, inside, I knew that they were.

And so, without the bravery to say anything, he had just carried on.