Side: Amahashi Kakeru

Once we got home, I laid out the clothes I'd bought and showed them.

"Huh. So this is the sort of thing commoners wear."

The others, whose expressions had been stiff after everything that had happened, looked happy about the new clothes. Not a bad first impression. Honestly, even at a glance you could tell these were nothing like the high-end stuff they were used to wearing, but…

Sanctina, though, picked up a piece of underwear, spread it open, and tilted her head a little.

"Hero-sama, what is this?"

She was dead serious, the face of someone who genuinely didn't know. Man, that was hard to say out loud.

"It's underwear. You wear it. On the bottom, under everything…"

Sanctina flushed with embarrassment right away, and I felt bad about it.

"Underwear, hm. Elves don't use it."

I'd left some barley tea out before I went out, and I drank it to change the mood—and nearly spat it back out at Filia's offhand comment.

I'd visited an elf village back in the other world, but I'd only passed through, never actually lived there. I figured this was her way of telling me there was a lot I didn't know about elves' values.

Not that I was going to force her, obviously. I just told her that over here, people normally wore it.

"These don't look like commoners' undershirts or underwear to me."

Princess Pricia was bursting with curiosity about the otherworldly clothes too. Underwear I couldn't speak to, but dresses existed in the other world as well. In that sense, the basic sense of aesthetics wasn't all that different.

The reaction I'd been most worried about—Princess Pricia's—wasn't bad, which was a relief. Granted, I figured "not bad" meant something more like "within acceptable limits, factoring in consideration for me" than actual satisfaction.

"This is a bit tight."

"It doesn't fit me either. Not that I can't wear it."

The ones with the problem were the Demon Lord and Filia. For the Demon Lord and Filia, whose figures were not exactly Japanese-proportioned, the big-box retailer's shirts were apparently too snug. And buying for bust size alone would mean nothing else fit right.

Mainly tight around the chest and hips, I guess. If the women of the world heard that, they'd probably have a grudge or two to air, but the two of them were honestly stumped. Hips you could manage with a skirt, but the chest, well…

Princess Pricia had a good figure compared to a Japanese woman too, mind you. The other two were just on another level. Sanctina, for the record, was closer to a typically Japanese build.

After fretting over it a bit, they apparently decided to grin and bear it and wear them for now.

Different clothes cut down on the strangeness. They looked like foreigners now, more or less. In the end, we settled on going to look at shops ourselves once things calmed down, as far as clothes went.

Filia, sure enough, seemed to have making her own clothes already in mind, though.

But before any of that—lunch.

I boiled pasta in a big pot of bubbling salted water. The sauce was the store-bought pre-packaged kind.

I could cook a little myself, since Grandma had taught me, but it wasn't anything that'd pass muster with the upper-class palates they were used to.

And on weekdays I had to go to high school, so I'd bought this stuff to try out, thinking about what they could eat on their own while I was gone.

The menu was pasta, a raw vegetable salad, and a soup you could make just by adding hot water.

If they'd eat at this level without complaint, I'd have a real plan for going forward, but…

"…Is there a cook somewhere nearby?"

When I laid the food out on the living room table, Sanctina was astonished.

How to explain this. Hmm.

"There's stuff that's ready to eat right away, like preserved food."

Magic and magic items. The other world had been pretty convenient too. Even so, there was no way a commoner there could put together a halfway-decent meal in under thirty minutes.

Sanctina and Princess Pricia went ahead and offered their daily pre-meal prayer, while Filia, the Demon Lord, and I waited in silence.

Lifestyles and customs around the gods varied wildly there too, same as here.

When the prayer was done, I quietly watched them eat.

The moment Princess Pricia and Sanctina took a bite and broke into smiles, I felt relieved.

"Delicious, I must say."

"Yes! Honestly, I was a little nervous."

That left Filia and the Demon Lord, but…

"Raw vegetables. It's been a while."

"Similar vegetables, yet not the same. I wonder if the ecosystem is different?"

It was fine. Filia was enjoying it too. The Demon Lord had already launched into her analysis, but for now I figured I could call it fine.

"If a meal like this is good enough, I can serve three a day. Won't cost you anything either. You can take it that the range of dishes is richer here than in the royal capital back in your world."

The others were plainly relieved. Getting flung into an unknown other world, they must have been anxious about how it would go. The Demon Lord, freed from her duties as Demon Lord, seemed to be the exception, though.

"I've got things that should fetch money. Gems, precious metals, all sorts…"

When the talk turned to money, the Demon Lord channeled mana into her right hand. A spatial magic circle surfaced just past her palm, and she reached into it.

When she drew her hand back out of the circle, there were several gems—some I recognized and some I didn't.

Spatial magic was the magic the Demon Lord had favored, after all. She must have been good at it. Using it as what you'd call an item box or inventory in a game, though—I'd never seen anyone but the Demon Lord do that.

"It's fine. Honestly, the ones that don't exist over here I can't sell, and even the ones that do would stand out."

There were ridiculously huge rubies, sapphires, and diamonds set in gold and silver. The Demon Lord was handling them pretty carelessly, but honestly, they were on a level where you'd struggle to find a buyer.

"More to the point, you can't go outside without some kind of ID, so do you have any way around that? You look like the foreigners who come to this country, so if we can put together an ID called a passport, you could walk around freely, but…"

"There's a magic item that won't raise suspicion—that won't make anyone feel anything's off. I used to go into human-race towns with it all the time. I don't have enough for everyone, naturally, but I have the materials, so I'll make some and provide them. As atonement for dragging you all into this."

The Demon Lord, all right. Or rather—this one. She'd been planning to ditch the Demon Lord throne and run the second she got an opening, right from the start.

Between the gems and the magic items, she was far too well prepared.

Here, though, Princess Pricia let a flicker of disgust show.

"To flee from one's own duty—how foolish."

"It is. Foolish. But… isn't everyone waging a war a fool? Just like how, no matter how hard you fought on the battlefield yourself and tried to end the conflict with as few casualties as possible, it was a drop in the bucket. Kicking up a fuss as they pleased from somewhere safe, summoning an unrelated Hero from another world and dragging him into it, then expanding the front lines even further. The human-race royals and nobles, who as a result inflicted enormous damage on both the human race and the demon race, can hardly be called wise either. The demon-race royals and nobles are the same breed, of course."

At the Demon Lord's counterattack, Princess Pricia couldn't hide the sour look on her face.

The fact that she didn't fire back meant Princess Pricia had to understand the Demon Lord's argument. She'd just been dragged into it too, so she probably couldn't help saying her piece.

"Don't get your hopes up too high about this world either. It's pretty much the same everywhere. It'd help if you could try not to draw attention."

Never mind what's past—today and tomorrow. What comes next.

Above all, sending the others safely back to their world would take the cooperation of the Demon Lord, who was skilled in magic. The Demon Lord herself apparently had no intention of going back, but even so, if I cooperated so she could live in this world, she'd probably help with the others' return in exchange.

A strange communal life with the others and the Demon Lord, huh. I was a little worried about what lay ahead.

I was already stuffed full of war and the fate of the world and all that. I wanted as quiet and peaceful a life as I could get.