Author's Note

This, uh… this is the fourth chapter in a row that takes place in the same goddamn day. How the hell did I drag it out this long…? To make matters worse, this isn't even the last one… there's going to be a fifth chapter before the story's date changes.

It's insane that I've made one day last this long. It's even more insane that I've made the most recent six days in the story last eleven chapters including this one, with it adding up to, including author notes, a grand total of over fifty thousand words. Yup, you heard right: a little less than a week ended up being over fifty thousand words, and by a wide margin, too.

I think we can all conclude by now that I have become a master at dragging things out more than they should in my writing. While I'm not particularly proud of this "skill," I know you guys love me for it. Why else would this become the most popular story across all my accounts? Why else would it have started showing the fastest growth rates it ever has around the time I began dragging stuff out more?

I've rambled enough. Read on before the author's note adds any more to the total word count spent on this one damn day.

Gun Gale Online: The Swordswoman

Chapter Thirty-Three: Ghost Girls and Relaxation Spots

"Hey, let's go check the forest for this girl," I said while leaning towards Argo, making her go rigid and wide-eyed for a few seconds – apparently, I startled her pretty good. "I want to see for myself how much of this guy's story is actually BS."

"Okay… but what are you going to do if we actually find the girl?" she asked, and it was clear from her voice that she wasn't quite ready to drop the matter of me just walking off earlier.

"That's what I'm hoping happens, so I already have a plan for that. Let's go."

After I stopped speaking, I began walking south, towards where the man had said he encountered the girl. It was always best to check around the area mentioned first, especially when the encounter seemed to be recent.

"H-hey, wait up!"

With Argo shouting at me to wait up and walk slower while following close behind, so began the rather rocky start of some of the best days of my life.

"Hey, could you slow down just a bit? God's sake, how is it that I run a pure AGI build yet can barely keep up with a STR-AGI hybrid player? Especially when we both have an AGI-enhancing avatar body type!"

I turned back, but didn't slow my pace, and responded. "The difference in quality of our equipment is cruel, that's how. I'm running a full set of relatively new LA drops with absurdly high STR or AGI bonuses. You're running a set of brown rags."

I turned my head back to keep my eyes ahead as I sprinted through the forest to avoid running into any trees. While the rags part was a bit of an exaggeration, it got the point across. Argo's equipment was more or less all brown leather, which while it did give decent Agility bonuses, was also directly inferior to your standard AGI-based rare drop. She wasn't really a combat-focused character to begin with, and I hadn't seen her pick a fight on purpose even once (barring when she saved me because it was an extenuating circumstance) since the game started.

A few seconds later, we arrived at around the place I wanted to start looking, so I slowed my pace, grabbing and swinging around the trunk of a nearby tree in order to bring my pace to a halt. I had probably been running around fifty kilometers an hour, which was admittedly nowhere near either of our top speeds. But in order to go faster, we'd have to use the burst function, which with my Agility would make me go supersonic and totally go past the area I wanted to be in. Or with this being a forest, I'd run into a tree within a few seconds and lose half my HP or more to the high-speed impact.

The burst function being a sort of action enhancement that unlocked once one's Agility passed the threshold of fifty. It greatly enhanced the power, speed and control of a single action at a time. And while it was essentially able to be spammed a whole lot at once, once you stopped using it, it would have a cooldown that gets longer the more you used it in that one burst. I typically used the burst function for things like blocking bullets or evading large projectiles at the last second. But I personally knew never to use it while running if I didn't want to just about kill myself from the impact of running into things or, in the case of the terrain having no obstacles, traverse a significant portion of the zone in a single second and drastically overshoot my target.

"Hey, Argo. Why don't you wear a dress sometime?" I asked once she came to a stop beside me, having thought about my own comment of her apparel a little and reached the conclusion that I wanted to see her dress up.

I almost immediately got a deadpan response. "Why don't you?"

"Because I can't wear girly stuff to save my life," I countered, gesturing to my relatively masculine clothes – which at the moment consisted of a black shirt and silver breastplate, a jacket that incorporated both colors and had the effect of reducing the cooldown of the burst function, black baggy jeans, and black combat boots with silver trim. Not to mention the fingerless dark violet «Shadow Gloves», of which the most feminine quality was the color. It occurred to me that I really needed to see a tailor to change their color to match my black and silver ensemble.

"And you think I can? Also, it's kind of painful to hear that from someone who is distinctly more feminine than me."

I gave her an odd look. "But we both dress about the same gender-wise. How am I more…"

I trailed off as I finally caught the implication. She wasn't talking about our outfits at all… she was talking about my body. In which case, well, sort of? I dunno if I'd call being so incredibly short a desirable feminine quality, and she was a little taller than me… but I definitely had a figure about ten times as curvy as hers, at least. She was kind of flat, so it was actually pretty hard to lose out to her in that department, though. Sometimes I wondered if she resented me for being so much more developed than her despite being younger as far as I could tell, but then I realized that she didn't even know my age, nor did I technically know hers. I just kind of assumed she was seventeen or eighteen, but for all I knew, she could be anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five – her appearance didn't give much away since she was short and her voice sounded older than she looked.

Shit, how old is she?

"Argo, there's something I really need to ask you before our relationship goes any further," I decided to refrain from mincing my words in order to get the point across faster.

I planned to ask her how old she was. I realized that with this being a game, it didn't really matter a whole lot, but I had some… personal aversions to the idea of being romantically involved with someone whose age was over five years apart from mine. If she was in her early to mid-twenties, that would really make it hard for me to enjoy anything we did… since I was only fifteen.

"What the hell am I about to be asked…?" she wondered aloud, kind of muttering to herself in bewilderment. Before I could specify, she spoke again. "Before that, as repayment for just walking off back at the community, you have to answer a question of mine."

I sighed, nodding my affirmative. "I was hoping you'd just forget about that, but I guess my hopes were too high. What's up?"

"Why do you even care about this ghost girl thing? It's not like you to go on a wild goose chase for something that you already think is at least somewhat BS."

At least it was something I had a good answer for. I had thought a lot about this, since I myself thought it weird for me to be so interested in such a fishy story. The conclusion I came to was rather simple, to say the least.

"Because there's a chance that the supposed 'ghost girl' could be a real player with a bugged cursor or something," I explained, averting my gaze. "We're in a safe zone now, but go too far in any direction and you leave it. If this girl wanders out of the safe area and dies…"

"But even then, it's not like you to intervene in the affairs of other players," she responded without missing a beat.

Maybe that was true. I was a reclusive introvert by nature, so I didn't really bother with other people unless I had to. But in this situation, there was something far more important at play than just my social habits. "If I have the power to save or help someone, but I don't, and they end up dying… then it's just as bad as if I killed them myself."

For a few seconds, the silence in the air hung thick. The whiskered girl in front of me had an expression that told me she didn't really know what to make of my declaration. I began to wonder if I'd said something really weird, but before I could ask or criticize myself, her lips broke out into a small smile.

"You sound like the hero of an action manga," she said, cracking up a little as she brought a hand up to hide her grin.

"Don't you mean heroine?"

"Nope. You'd be a hero." She shook her head, her by-then cheeky smirk widening enough to be visible behind her hand. "You may look like a beautiful girl, but you sure as hell don't sound like one when you talk."

I wasn't sure which part to be more caught off guard about, being called beautiful or being told that I didn't speak femininely. So I just kind of stood there, gaping like a fish while staring into the distance of the forest behind my blunt girlfriend. Just as Argo seemed to think of something else to say, I caught something white entering the edge of my field of vision.

"So what were you going to ask me, again? It sounded pretty serious, from the context you gave it."

I heard her, but at that precise moment, I was far more concerned with what I saw beyond her. That something, namely, being a small, dark-haired girl in a white dress that seemed to be slowly walking from the right edge of my line of sight to the middle. From this distance, that was about all I could make out, but there was one other detail not related to the actual avatar that was particularly striking to me.

She didn't have a cursor.

To elaborate on what I thought back in the village, every object in the game that could move, from monsters to NPCs to players, had its own cursor. Additionally, said cursors did not simply vanish if one was too far away from the object – actually, because they changed in size slower than and in the reverse direction of avatars with distance, the farther away a player saw a cursor from, the bigger it would appear to them, especially in relation with what it belonged to.

Which meant that one way or another, the girl in the white dress was some form of anomaly. I couldn't see any cursor above her, or anywhere near her for that matter. And I was far enough away from her that if she had one, it'd be about as big as her entire head. But there was nothing there to see apart from her avatar.

Honestly, under any other circumstances, I'd close my eyes, rub them a bit with my knuckles, and look again to make sure my virtual eyes weren't playing tricks on me somehow. But at least one other person had seen this same thing very recently, and that was how I knew to look for it in the first place. So I didn't have to doubt the credibility of my vision this time.

"Hey, Kiriko? You spacing out or what?" Argo cut off my thought process by speaking again. "You had a question for me, right?"

"I'll ask you when we get back to your place," I replied, taking a step forward.

"Why the delay?"

I started my response by pointing ahead to my new target, for lack of a better word. "Because I just found the girl we're looking for."

One step turned to five, and the count kept growing as I closed in on the girl at a brisk pace. My whiskered girlfriend followed close behind, able to keep up quite well since we weren't really testing our sprinting speeds.

"What are we going to do with her, anyway?" she asked me in a concerned tone – since I wasn't looking her direction, I didn't see her face. "It's not that I'm not concerned about why she's here, but don't you think we're being a bit rash?"

"Then you can stay back and let me handle it. I don't mind doing all the talking," I responded, effectively shutting down her resistance.

Right after those words left my mouth, something weird happened. The girl in the white dress suddenly fell down flat on the bare forest floor. Seeing this, I sped up my pace to a light jog, closing the remaining distance between us in about five seconds.

She had fallen face first, so I couldn't tell based on her expression, but… with her complete lack of movement, it was a safe bet she was unconscious. Poor thing passed out in the middle of a forest. Even if this was a safe zone, a habit like that would be fatal in GGO.

I knelt down beside her, shaking her shoulder a bit. I didn't get a response. "She's out cold."

Around that time, Argo caught up with me, having chosen to walk the rest of the way instead of speeding up to match my pace. "She can't answer you when she's unconscious. What now, miss 'let me handle it'?"

"We take her back to your place and wait until she wakes up," I countered readily, reaching an arm under the girl's waist and pulling her up. Her head hung to the side, but from this angle, I could see her face, at least.

And what I saw nearly made me drop her. This little girl… her face, hair bangs and hair color… it was uncanny. The similarities were striking, obvious and destructively powerful for me.

She looked just like a younger version of Sachi.

I ended up making the trek back home with the mystery girl riding piggyback. No thanks to Argo, who didn't help me whatsoever – I think she was just doing it to humor/spite me because I told her to sit back and let me handle it.

Once we arrived, I put the girl under the covers in the bed Argo and I shared. It was a pretty huge bed, honestly (seemed to be king size), so it could handle one extra occupant. When I put her there, my girlfriend mentioned that there was a guest room, but I dismissed the idea. I wanted us to be the first thing the little girl saw when she woke up, which I somehow felt wouldn't be for a while, so she wouldn't just freak out and run away after waking up in an unfamiliar house.

Argo's immediate commentary was that I was being too careless. She said I was essentially enabling the girl to sleep PK us if she woke up first. But even if she said that… I just didn't sense anything like that from this girl. Well, I couldn't get any sort of read on her whatsoever. Normally I could gauge how people were relatively easily, even if they were asleep… but this girl didn't show any signs that pointed to anything specific. She didn't seem like a murderer, but she didn't seem particularly innocent, either.

It was kind of unsettling to be unable to read her, but it was still better than reading something bad. And besides, most of my mind was occupied by something else that unsettled me far more. That being, of course, this girl's uncanny resemblance to Sachi.

After we left the room to give her some quiet, I decided to ask something that had been on my mind for most of the walk there. "Did you notice it too? Who she looks like?"

"You knew Sachi in real life, right?" Argo asked, indirectly answering my question. "Did she have a sister?"

"Definitely not a younger one," I responded with a shake of my head. "She lived alone with her single dad who never seemed interested in romance. She told me she had an older half brother who was already an adult, but I only met him once, and she never mentioned having any other siblings. Once she even said she'd always wanted a little sister, which I'd say means she didn't have one. So unless there was another one on her mom's side that she didn't even know about, I'd assume she doesn't have any more."

"So we can't rule out that possibility, then…"

Without being able to talk to the girl, there were too many unknowns to make a definitive judgment about whether her resemblance to my first love was just a coincidence or not. Which meant we had a while to wait before we could confirm anything.

"Oh? I got a message from Heathcliff. It's titled 'Raid result,'" Argo suddenly changed the subject, her words making me turn my gaze from the floor to her. "Give me a second and I'll fill you in."

She began reading the message, and at that point I wondered why exactly he hadn't also messaged me about it. I was a pretty significant person to leave out of the loop, and he didn't exactly know I was dating Argo… but I got brought out of my slightly indignant thought process by something my girlfriend muttered under her breath.

"Holy shit… you're kidding me."

"What the hell happened? Who died?" I asked as an immediate response.

"No one, luckily… but the raid failed," she relayed a startling message. "Apparently, it took them most of an hour to get the boss down to the red – it has decent defense and some crazy high type resistances in addition to its immunities, and because of its quick and unpredictable movement patterns, they couldn't hit it a whole lot."

"So it's evasive. What else?" that couldn't be the only reason they lost to it… because they apparently hit it enough to deplete its HP into the red, at least.

"Apparently, when they finally got it down to the red, when the boss went into rage mode, it gained a strong HP regeneration effect. Within a minute, it was back to full HP, and since it was still in rage mode, it was doing much more dangerous damage. Its increased power combined with its ability to tank and regen all their attacks forced them to retreat to avoid casualties."

This was a whole lot to take in at once. I had been keeping track, so I knew that this was actually the first time in quite a while that the clearers didn't take down the boss on the first try. In fact, we'd only ever been forced into a retreat twice before this – once on checkpoint five, and once on checkpoint fifteen. Every other boss raid so far, including checkpoint ten, had been successful the first time, not counting scouting results, even if at least a few people died to make it happen once or twice.

But at the very least, this result served to explain something. While it was true that the LA bonus of the zone twenty-one field boss was a ring that boosted my attack the lower my HP got, that ring was not actually the only reward I got for beating it. In addition to getting the LA bonus, I also got two drop items, and ten of each. And as far as I could tell, they were the first of their kind. At first, I hadn't quite known what to make of them, but now I understood their purpose and functionality.

Both drops were basically tailor made for killing the checkpoint boss. The fact that I got ten of each was unfortunate, but sensible – it wouldn't quite be plausible for any one enemy to drop an entire raid group's worth of any item. But at the very least, having ten of each meant that I could equip up to twenty different players, including myself, with the means of winning.

"Hey, Argo. Don't reply or spread the info just yet. There's some things you might want to know about first."

Honestly, I had been expecting to be able to spend the entire rest of the day at Argo's log cabin. The current circumstance were, in that sense, drastically and supremely unfavorable for me. It was annoying enough that I felt like berating the people who got me into it by losing against the raid boss.

After I showed Argo the items I got from the zone twenty-one field boss, she set up another meeting for just after sunset and forced me to go to it. She had tried convincing me to decide to do it myself, but I didn't really want to go anywhere – I'd already had more than enough social interaction for three entire days in the past six hours alone. So she lured me out of the house under the pretense of having dinner on the porch, then immediately locked me out, telling me through the window that I couldn't come back in until after the meeting was over, and that I'd attend it if I knew what was good for me.

Thus, I made my way towards the meeting spot – which, interestingly enough, was a hot spring resort on zone twenty-one's main settlement. I came to the conclusion that Argo chose the inside of a building over the many wide-open spaces of the town because she wanted the meeting itself to be hush hush and not attract the attention of passersby. Which made a whole lot of sense, considering the plan we had come up with for tackling the boss.

All things considered, I was glad that the meeting place was a hot spring. Because I was really ticked off, and a nice soak would help me relax. Even if said soak had to be with a bunch of other people, some of which were males. Well, in a way, it was a good thing that this place had a mixed spring for either gender.

For the first time in a very long while, I ended up being the first person to arrive at the meeting spot. Argo messaged me soon after I entered the building, saying that all the people she invited confirmed that they were coming. At the very least, it was good that there wouldn't be any no-shows.

But I got there a whole thirty minutes before the meeting was supposed to take place, and I didn't have much to do. In fact, just about the only thing I could think of was to test out the items that dropped from the boss in order to figure out the mechanics. They weren't consumable, so trying them out wouldn't actually deplete my stock.

The items themselves were strange, yet fairly self explanatory. They were essentially equipment for your equipment – though these two in particular could only be equipped to weapons, it seemed. Basically, once you applied one to a weapon, that weapon would be modified in the way specified in the item's description.

What I couldn't discern without actually trying it was whether I could use more than one on the same weapon. So, as you'd expect, that was exactly what I decided to test out while waiting. And as it turned out, you could in fact apply both of them at once to the same weapon – I did it with my photon sword as my proof of concept.

Well, there went a grand total of five minutes. Twenty-five more to go. I knew I could go for a soak in the hot spring to kill some time and calm my nerves, but I decided against it, opting to continue sitting in the comfortable chair I'd made residence in near the hallway that led to the changing rooms. I kinda wanted to be a bitch to them when they showed up. I hadn't gotten a chance to really do that, to really lay into someone, in quite a while. The last time I could could do in any way was with Sinon before we made amends, and that was just too long ago.

Speaking of whom… when we were together earlier that day, I essentially gave Sinon free reign regarding her apparently lingering feelings for me. Well, I mean, she already had that freedom, but she didn't really think so, because of her ridiculously stubborn and harsh guilt complex. Which I couldn't really criticize without looking hypocritical, I knew. But back to the point… for all the shit I gave Asuna in my head for not making my position clear enough, I didn't really do any better. I was probably going to have to tell her in the near future that even she could love me all she wanted, she couldn't pursue me, since I was already taken.

Maybe I could do that after the meeting. Sinon was one of the less than ten people invited, so she'd be here. I could just pull her aside once we're getting set to leave, then talk to her about it. And even if I somehow didn't get to, we were still going to be partying up for a while. I had an ample amount of time to have this talk with her.

I looked at the clock in the corner of my vision. I had deliberately slowed my thinking process down to mere fractions of fractions of my normal thought speed in order to kill more time. But unfortunately, I'd only managed to kill another three minutes. Twenty-two left before the meeting started. Why did the suffering in my life always have to drag on for so freaking—

"I know this meeting isn't supposed to be public, but a hot spring? Really? We're going to be bathing while having a boss strategy meeting?" a familiar female voice resounded from right in front of me.

I looked up past the set of pale, slender legs that had suddenly cropped up right in front of me and found myself face-to-face with Asuna, sub-leader of the BOA. Right behind her was Heathcliff, actual leader of the same legion, who seemed remarkably unfazed by the location compared to his subordinate.

"Thank god, some people got here early," I praised a god I didn't really believe in – I heard a few Americans preface their sentences with it when they were relieved, and the saying kind of caught on for me, even though I was not a remotely spiritual person. And if I were, I'd probably be Shinto anyway, like my aunt and sister/cousin were. "I was about to die of boredom. I can see the headline in Argo's newspaper now: Strongest Player, Soloist of Bosses, Dies to Ten Minutes of Sheer Boredom."

"You're being unnecessarily melodramatic, now there's a bad omen," Asuna's rejoinder hit hard and fast, as usual for her.

I ignored it in favor of answering her initial question. "But anyway, yeah, a hot spring. I got locked out of where I've been staying to force me to come here even though I was mentally and socially exhausted, so a soak sounds pretty good to me. And besides, with how thoroughly I hear the clearers just got trashed by the boss, you could stand to blow off some steam with some actual steam too, right? Win-win."

"Well, at least you're saying whatever the heck you want just like normal."

"That does seem to be my specialty, as we both know."

It was probably very strange that I considered this to be a nice, refreshing chat, but I never really cared about being weird. Since I had been all my life to some degree, there was never any point in getting bent out of shape over it.

"You two are getting along well, as usual," a remarkably deep voice called out from a meter or so behind Heathcliff. "I'm sure you both know how your banter gives people the wrong idea."

The leader of the BOA stepped aside silently to allow me to see the one who spoke. As I'd expected, it came from the immensely powerful mini-gun user, Agil. I flashed him a peace sign and gave a toothy grin.

"Well you can tell those people that I'm going out with someone else entirely, if that'll get them to shut up. You're part of an info networking legion, so use your connections," I told him, smirking when my retort left him floundering for a second. He hadn't quite been expecting that.

Yet another voice interrupted before Agil could get another word in. "The infamously untouchable Kiriko, dating someone? Now that's a headliner I'd want to read about!"

The source of that call was none other than my redheaded goof of a best friend, Klein, who had walked up to the spot beside Agil. As usual, he sported a cheesy grin that would either put one at ease or make them wary. Luckily, for me at least, it did the former.

"Well, too bad, because I'm not gonna give enough info about this for an article," I told him, my earlier peace sign turning into a thumb pointed downward. "I'm of the school of thought that people's private lives should stay private."

"Does anyone here have a clue who it could be? I'm dying of curiosity here!" the redheaded man immediately turned to the rest of the assembled group after getting shut down by me.

Asuna shrugged her shoulders before piping up. "Well, I know who it is. But due to Kiriko's stance, I won't be telling anyone."

Did you really even have to bring up that you knew? It seems like you only bothered in order to screw around with Klein… in which case, I fully approve of such a course of action. It's almost always fun to see him suffer for some reason.

It really was entertaining to screw with Klein on so many levels. I'd noticed that since joining the frontlines on zone four, most of the people who interacted with him regularly seemed to always be testing the limits of what they could do to get him upset without making him snap. I myself had to admit that I was among those people. As was Asuna, and sometimes Agil.

"Seems like the party started without me," this call came from a calm, collected female voice that seemed detached, somehow. "But you guys seem to be talking about someone specific. I missed the first part, so can someone fill me in on who we're talking about?"

"Just about Kiriko's—"

"No worries, we were just about done with that conversation anyway," I cut my redheaded friend off, giving him a positively menacing stare. "Weren't we, Klein?"

"Y-yeah…" he caved to my rather terrifying method of persuasion with a face that asked what the hell he did.

I kinda wanted Sinon learning about me already being in a relationship to come from me. It felt more fitting for me to be the one to tell her, since she had expressed her feelings for me very clearly already. She had the courage to be direct about it, so I wanted to reciprocate. That was why I put the brakes on the conversation right there.

I looked at everyone in the assembled group for a second, my face returning to normal without a trace of the menace of a few seconds prior. "Anyway, glad to see everyone could make it. Before we get down to business, let's all get settled into the hot spring's mixed bath. Klein's treat, of course."

"Wait, why me?!"

"Because Agil and Heathcliff were both recently roasted by the checkpoint boss, so their day has already been pretty crappy," I explained, giving him a dirty, but not quite intimidating, look. "Of the three gentlemen here, that only leaves you, Klein. Man up."

"Okay, I get it… I'll go pay."

Another reason Klein was a good choice to mess with/inconvenience: he was always a real good sport about it, especially when it came from a girl. Though sometimes, I had to admit, it seemed like he didn't really see me as one… but I was probably the closest female friend he'd ever had (if what his friends said about him was true, he'd never had any female friends before me, let alone a girlfriend). So in the end, it sort of made sense that he usually treated me as another bro.

After he paid for us all, the six of us made for the changing rooms. It was at precisely the moment that I noticed the changing rooms were divided by gender that I also realized something else that was rather… unsettling.

I'm about to strip down to my birthday suit right in front of not one, but two girls who are in love with me. And one of them has no goddamned idea that I'm not single and therefore should not be advanced on.

As I stared the women's changing room sign down, I began to wonder just how the hell my purity would survive the night, if it would at all.

Author's Note

Me: all right, now what have we learned from this chapter?

Also me: Burst Power is a thing, Kiriko is really adverse to age gaps in relationships, Yui looks like Sachi but younger and even cuter, the clearers are useless without Kiriko, Klein is fun to fuck with, Kiriko has no faith in Sinon's self control, and I actually sunk low enough to make the obligatory anime hot spring bath chapter.

Me again: I really need to stop talking to myself.

But yeah, those are most of the major takeaways from this chapter. Rolled into one giant run-on sentence, of course. Because who needs periods, anyway? I sure didn't!

By the end, this ended up being about 500 words longer than I thought it'd be including the author notes. I guess that's a good thing… since I tend to like making longer chapters now. Dunno how you guys feel about it, since it makes them take a bit longer, but… the irony is that even if I tried, at this point, I don't think I could make them any shorter without just cutting out the author notes. Which we all know are totally necessary, concise and shouldn't even be considered for deletion…

Okay, even if I was being sarcastic as hell, that last line just didn't look right at all. I know you guys probably think that these author notes are long, cumbersome and overall not necessary. And you'd have a few good points if you do think so, I won't deny that. But I'll keep doing them anyway, because this is one of my only outlets of frank self-expression in my life where I don't have to write it from the perspective of a character.

Long story short, the author notes are staying and my chapters will probably stay this long for a while.

See you next time! I hope you're looking forward to the morally questionable (coughcough Imeanfuckingawesome coughcough) and barely not overtly sexual shenanigans that come with the territory in the coming obligatory hot spring bath chapter!