Author's Note

EDIT 8/14/16: I fixed some mistakes and added a few words here and there. Should read better now.

Yeah, so this happened. Took me bloody forever and I'm really not satisfied with it at all for a multitude of reasons. But fixing it would just take another few weeks and it really isn't bad enough to warrant spending that much time on it, so I just left it as is.

This chapter's title has nothing to do with its content. The chapter title is "Insert Rule 34 Joke Here", but nothing Rule 34-related even happens in the chapter, unless you're really squinting. But come on guys, it's chapter thirty-four and the entire cast will be naked or close to it in the main scenes! I gotta make a Rule 34 joke, I'll never get such a positively golden opportunity again!

This is the obligatory (and by obligatory I mean I'm shocked I've sunk to this depth) anime/light novel hot spring bath chapter! Because you know, why the fuck not, right? If I can pull it off and make it in any way believable, I may as well try, right?

This one is, unfortunately, not full of sexual antics like you'd expect of a harem anime (well, okay, I prefer it like this, but you ship-thirsty perverts probably don't). I mean, it has a few antics… and by a few I mean one and a half, two if you're being generous. But the point is, the chapter is still majorly about other, more important things. Like, for example, strategizing for the upcoming raid, and a few other things that I can't spoil because they're way too important to blab about.

Get ready for some drama!

Gun Gale Online: The Swordswoman

Chapter Thirty-Four: Insert Rule 34 Joke Here

"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.

The general consensus amongst the three top female clearers gathered in the hot spring changing room seemed to be to stare each other down and not do anything. Seriously, we were supposed to be undressing, but all that ended up happening for an entire minute was them staring at each other and me, and me reciprocating for both of them.

Of course, I had to be the one to break the silence. "The longer we take, the more suspicious it looks to the guys. Let's just hurry up and undress already. The sooner we take our clothes off, the sooner we can put the towels on."

While bathing nude was technically an option here, for the sake of modesty, and the fact that both guys and girls would be in the bath, all six of us had agreed to wear bath towels to cover our private areas.

"If I catch either of you looking at me while I'm undressing, the offender will be shot in the face," Asuna said, walking towards one corner of the room.

As Sinon turned to face her own direction, but stayed in this area, she nodded. "Same here."

I walked off to the corner opposite Sinon, which was directly across from the chestnut-haired sub-leader of the BOA, before making my own retort. "Given the circumstances, I should be the one saying that to the both of you, don't you think?"

"Fair enough," came Asuna's measured reply.

And then, silence. As in, complete silence. Which, of course, meant that nobody was actually undressing, since even doing so from the equipment menu would make a noise for each item unequipped.

I opened up my menu with a haughty huff. As I hit the button to remove all my outer equipment at once, I made a snide comment. "Damn useless virgin babies. You act like nobody's ever seen you naked before."

"You can't honestly expect me to believe that you're not a virgin," Sinon almost immediately retorted, though I could sense some uncertainty in her tone.

"I wouldn't assume anything with her," my chestnut-haired friend warned, around the same time I heard the flashing SFX made when removing equipment again. "For one, she's basically got a gender-insensitive harem aura. And she's also going out with someone right now."

"The hell, Asuna?! Couldn't you tell from how I handled Klein trying to say it that I was avoiding… the… subject…" I shouted and then trailed off, having turned around on instinct to better convey my anger… which I quickly realized was a huge mistake.

Because the sight that greeted me was Asuna in only her underwear. Which, as I noted very quickly, was all pure white. Immediately after taking this detail in, I turned around, utilizing the burst function's speed and control increases to ensure that neither of them caught my accidental peek.

"Yes, I noticed you were trying to avoid the subject, probably so you could tell Sinon yourself later," Asuna acknowledged, apparently not having noticed my transgression. "But knowing you, and how amazingly useless you can be regarding romance, I knew that it was within the realm of possibility that you'd just put it off indefinitely. Or until Sinon made an advance on you, which, given the circumstances, would just give her more to feel guilty about once you finally told her."

"If you know so damn much about my romantic tendencies, then you should also know that since I've only been dating her for less than a week, I obviously haven't done anything lewd yet." This was, honestly, the best thing I could come up with. She hit me right where it hurt, and I didn't really have a good defense against any of her points.

"So then you're still a virgin, too." Honestly, considering what info had just been suddenly dropped on her, Sinon seemed to be taking it rather well. But unfortunately, she still wasn't exactly making the best inferences, and my blunt honesty and the corrections that were needed meant I could neither stay silent nor lie about it.

"Just because I've never dated anyone before this doesn't mean I'm a virgin, Sinon," I countered as I hit the button to remove my underwear, then grabbed a white towel and wrapped it around myself. "Sorry to break it to you, but my life hasn't exactly been a fairy tale."

Neither of them said anything after that, not that I could blame them for being speechless at my implications. And even if they had said something, I likely wouldn't have been paying enough attention to discern their specific words. I was too absorbed in my own mind, in examining surprisingly freshly opened wounds that I thought had closed for good a year ago.

By the time the three of us finished undressing and putting towels on, then went out to the mixed hot spring to meet up with the guys, I had more or less crushed the sliver of brutal reminiscence that had sprung up like a whack a mole. For a few seconds, I had felt surprisingly raw considering I had more or less moved past the incident, but that ended real quick once we rejoined the males, who were already soaking happily in the steamy spring by the time we joined them.

Well, Agil and Klein were soaking happily. Heathcliff, on the other hand, seemed so unaffected by the current setup that you could take him, put some clothes on him and put him at his legion work desk and he wouldn't look at all out of place. This guy really had a good handle on which of his emotions he let people see, didn't he?

The spring itself was actually an instance map generated just for the six of us when Klein paid our way, so we wouldn't have to worry about anyone else listening in. While we all relaxed in this place, we were in complete physical isolation from the rest of the zone, or on a grander scale, the rest of the virtual world in its entirety. Which really helped the whole secrecy aspect of this meeting out on a huge scale.

I'm sure some would wonder what the point of making this secret actually was. Simply put, the answer would be that I didn't want anybody interfering with what would, from the outside, look like a positively insane plan that I had come up with to take down the checkpoint boss. Frankly, more people meant more potential liabilities to look after this time.

To specify, my plan was basically to equip the six of us with the weapon equips I had obtained from the field boss, then have just us six take on the boss alone. Which, as I was sure I would be made aware of upon stating this plan, meant I'd be using only a tenth of the maximum raid capacity.

But in all honesty, if I wanted to, I could probably take out the boss myself, without the other five. They were only included to speed up the process a little. That was just how situationally overpowered the combination of the weapon enhancing items and my photon sword's damage on contact effect was. I didn't really need them, but the support would help, so I decided to include them.

Or rather, Argo forced me to include them because she didn't like the idea of me soloing another checkpoint boss, even though it was entirely plausible that I could win again. The way she put it was, the more overpowered I made myself out to be, the more the frontlines would depend on me in order to get stuff done, and the bigger a target for PKers I'd make myself into.

Personally, I didn't give a crap about either of those things. At all. I mean, the clearers already depended on me (or for a while, someone filling my role who was secretly me anyway) for literally everything they'd accomplished so far in terms of game progress, and I was already the biggest PK target in the game. It couldn't exactly get much worse in either of those respects.

But since I cared about Argo, I went along with it for her sake rather than my own. For that reason, I picked the five people who would least hinder me in combat, and then had Argo send out invitations to them in order to hold a meeting to inform them of the new strategy for taking down the boss, which involved the two weapon equips that only I possessed.

That was around the time the disagreement over what time the meeting should be held that eventually led to me being locked out of the house started. Damn, I was already feeling angry again just thinking about it… well, at least I was about to be soaking in a hot spring.

The last time I'd bothered with anything like a bath in GGO was back in the beta, on zone four. That experience was not exactly a pleasant one. One of my quirks was that I could always discern positively minute differences between sensations that other people wouldn't be able to tell apart at all. It reminded me of obsessive compulsive disorder, but on a level of pure sensory, considering I didn't care about keeping things tidy or orderly.

And, well, the bath I'd had in the beta was… well, there were a bunch of differences between an actual bath and that. The pressure of the water, the feeling of the hot liquid on my skin, the way the light refracted off the surface… and those were just the obvious differences, there were several other more subtle ones I could pick out.

I didn't normally value baths or showers all that much – to the point that in real life, I would sometimes go for several days without them because I'd get so absorbed in my work with computers. And because I didn't sweat very often to begin with, and I never exerted myself to the point of sweating, this never really became a problem, so it never got addressed.

But even though I normally wouldn't give a damn… all the differences from the experience I was used to having bugged the hell out of me. Enough so that I never bothered with a bath in GGO again, even after hearing that they got better with every passing checkpoint clear.

But this was a whole different league. We were now on zone twenty-one, over forty percent through the game. And this wasn't just a bath, it was a hot spring. To compare this and the shitty first experience I had with VRMMO baths would be an insult to this whole establishment – no, to the twenty-first zone itself.

Or so I hoped as I stared into the steamy surface of the volcanically heated water. I wanted to at least be able to enjoy this experience. I needed at least that much… or I was gonna fricking lose it because of all the shit I dealt with today.

For a few seconds, Asuna and Sinon waited behind me, as if telling me to be the first one to enter. But when they realized that I would probably be a while, neither of them stuck behind me any longer. My chestnut-haired friend walked right past me, walking down the stony steps under the water's surface until her body was submerged up to her waist. She waded over to the right side of the spring and leaned back into the rock wall, sighing in contentment.

The sniper and my current partner walked up to the spot beside me, then pointed to the middle of the steps, which, coincidentally, was also the middle of the entire spring. She then moved her finger up and down an imaginary line that cut the pool of steamy water in half.

"See this line right here?" she asked, giving all three of the men currently in the spring a hard stare. "This line I'm pointing out divides the spring. On my left is the men's side. On my right is the women's side. You have five seconds to arrange yourselves accordingly."

When saying the last part, she gave one man in particular a menacing glare: Klein, who was slightly to the right of the line against the back wall, and therefore, on the women's side. From this distance, I couldn't really make out any details below his face through the steam, but considering there weren't any other redheads here, that was enough. He got up and moved to a spot beside Agil further to the left, quietly uttering what I could discern as a swear word I'd rather not repeat.

After that, Sinon entered the pool herself, walking until she was at the bottom of the underwater steps before pausing for a moment. Then, she walked over to the right side of the edge closest to me and turned to face me.

"Kiriko, come here for a second," she called, waving me over with her hand. Her face didn't give anything away at all, which was sort of unsettling considering who I was dealing with here.

I would have had to be a total moron to not notice that she was planning something. But at the same time, even though I could discern that her conduct was beyond suspicious, my complete lack of social experience was coming back to haunt me. I'd never been to a hot spring or even a pool before outside of school classes, so I had no idea what kind of things people did in this context.

Without so much as an inkling, I couldn't even come up with ideas because I didn't have anything to go on. This wasn't simple like building a computer, so I couldn't just envision all the possible combinations of parts in my head. This was a social interaction, and as such, it didn't have restrictions – there were no distinct rules to follow.

But I knew I couldn't just ignore her, either – that would probably end up being more detrimental than just going over and dealing with whatever she was plotting. I wanted to have a good relationship with the sniper who would have my back in the coming boss battle, lest she get mad at me and shoot me instead of the enemy.

So I uneasily walked over, hoping that whatever she was planning, she'd get it over with soon. I made it to the spot right in front of her, wondering what in the hell I was about to be subjected to.

Even though I knew something was coming, the knowledge still didn't prepare me for what ended up happening. Before I had a chance to react at all, Sinon's hand was firmly grasping my left ankle. And half a second later, with the supreme power of video game-level superhuman stats, she somehow managed to overwhelm my STR-AGI hybrid build's raw power and pull me right off balance.

As you probably expected by this point in the narrative, this unexpected turn of events resulted in me falling into the water. Face first, I might add, and I came inches away from what would have likely broken my damn nose if this all happened in real life. I could see individual grains in the texture used for the visual aspect of the bottom of the spring.

It had all happened so suddenly that I hadn't even taken a breath or attempted to hold what little was left in my virtual lungs. In GGO, you didn't need to breathe to live… in most cases. But if you happened to be underwater without any sort of device to help you, be it diving equipment or a device that allowed you to breathe the water itself…

Well, let's just say that if I weren't in a safe zone, I definitely would have lost some HP over this.

I slammed on the bottom as hard as I could with my hands and my limited strength, crippled from lack of oxygen and water resistance. Which, considering my superhuman Strength stat, still sent me back above the surface of the water in a single second. I coughed and sputtered and overall reacquainted myself with the pleasure of having actual air to breathe, even if it was virtual.

And then, when my voice finally regained its strength and my lungs calmed down a little, I turned to Sinon with what I could only assume was a positively terrifying glare. For a brief shining moment, she looked like she actually feared for her own life. Which, considering the circumstances, felt really satisfying.

"What the actual hell?!" I shouted, righteous fury burning inside of me with the intensity of the center of the sun itself. "What the hell could have possibly made you think that was a good idea?!"

Unfortunately, after my outburst, she got her back up, and the almost scarily delicious moment of sheer terror I had witnessed on her face completely disappeared. "If I waited on you to get in the spring of your own accord, it would have taken another five minutes minimum. But we're all waiting on you here, so… that… would…"

"Finish your damn sentence, jeez!" I responded, though inwardly I had to wonder just what caused her to trail off.

"Kiriko…" her tone had no trace of the mild anger from before – only bewilderment as she avoided looking at my face, instead pointing her gaze right below it as her face both paled and reddened. "Do you have implants?"

That was a rather odd subject change. I had no idea what she was even talking about. "Implants? The hell are those?"

Then it hit me. She wasn't avoiding looking at my face at all. Her gaze was fixated on something else entirely. I followed her line of sight, and it all clicked into place beautifully. Why she trailed off, why she asked me such an odd question, what the implants she asked about were referring to, and why her face had become so ghostly pale yet also gained a fierce blush.

For you see, when I fell into the water, my bath towel apparently came undone and fell off my body entirely. Which left two very large, distinct objects viewable to anyone who happened to be looking my way. Which, as you probably expected, was everyone on the map, save for Heathcliff, who was tactfully looking to the side. Klein was staring at me, but making his damnedest efforts to keep his eyes on level with mine. Agil seemed to be looking my direction, but from what I could tell, his gaze didn't seem focused on me at all, as if he were lost in thought.

"Oh my god…" I muttered, putting a hand to my forehead and shaking my head. What a stupid cliché I had gotten caught in the middle of. This wasn't an anime, damn it! These kind of sexual antics were not supposed to happen in reality, VR game setting be damned!

I grabbed the towel, which was floating on the water's surface a half a meter away, and wrapped it around myself again. I then began wading over to where Asuna sat against the gray rock wall, looking at me with what I could only assume was the closest she'd ever come to a Cheshire cat grin. She looked incredibly amused.

As I approached her and leaned into the wall next to her, I responded to her look with just one phrase. "Not. One. Word."

"Can you at least tell me the answer to Sinon's last question? I'm curious, too." This bitch knew exactly what she was doing. She was screwing with me on purpose!

"The answer is no, mine are natural," I told her factually, allowing her a moment of satisfaction before narrowing my eyes. "And my response to being asked such a question right after telling you to not say anything is… go fuck yourself, Asuna. Considering what you just saw, it shouldn't be that hard."

In any other circumstances, she probably would have slapped the hell out of me for saying that. But whether out of her own amusement or out of acknowledgement that she sort of deserved it, she merely shrugged her shoulders and looked away, that goddamn grin still plastered on her face.

At around that time, Sinon finally moved from her spot near the steps and went all the way to the far right corner of the spring. She had attempted to come near Asuna and I at first, but a particularly menacing glare from me made her think better of it and go elsewhere.

Looking back on it, that hell of a rocky start was the most eventful part of the entire meeting.

"So let me see if I got this all straight."

At the end of my long-winded explanation of the plan as it stood, Agil's voice reverberated through the spring loudly and clearly. I gave him the nod of approval, knowing that everything I'd just said was about to be regurgitated.

"First off, the zone twenty-one field boss dropped two different items in quantities of ten that can equip to weapons to enhance them," he repeated, pausing for a moment until I nodded my head in affirmative. "And these items directly counteract the checkpoint boss's stronger traits, being its skill combos, its HP regeneration in rage mode and its high type resistances and immunities."

"You sure you're confused about something? Because all that was spot on," I told him, cocking my head to the side curiously.

"That's not what has me confused. What I'm hung up on is the part that comes next," he replied, crossing his arms over his chest. "You say you wanted to take the boss on by yourself because you knew you could win, but a concerned third party convinced you to include a single party of elite players to come along with you as support. Which is why we're all here."

"Yup. What's so confusing about that?"

He gave me a cross look, making me wonder what exactly I did to get on his nerves. "Let me answer your question with another question. When the hell has anybody managed to convince you to do anything you didn't want to do? Because last I checked, that feat was impossible. No offense, but you're the most stubborn teenager I've ever met in that regard."

Well, that sure put it bluntly, didn't it? I knew Agil was the type of guy to just tell it like it is, but that was more… offensive than I expected. Not offensive as in it offended me (because let's be honest, I've been told way worse things than this about myself), but offensive as in he went on the proverbial attack.

This left me with a rather difficult choice. The answer to his question was clear even in my own head, but it would only end up making him ask more questions. But due to my nature, unless I couldn't get out of a potentially dangerous situation without doing it, I wouldn't lie on principle. And this was pretty far from potentially dangerous…

"Well, Kiriko is going out with someone. Maybe they convinced her," a certain someone sitting next to me offered up.

Normally, I hated it when Asuna told people stuff about me that they didn't need to know. But damn, this time it came in really useful. Because I think both of us knew that it would have taken me an entire minute to work up the courage to say what she could in just a few seconds.

"Right on the money," I responded with a nod, relieved that I got out of saying it myself. "Now then, let's move onto scheduling the next raid attempt. We need to make it at a time where nobody is likely to follow us for any reason. And the time I've been thinking of is… dawn, which is about ten till seven right now. Does everyone here think they could make it to the boss door by six-forty tomorrow? We'll head there separately to avoid raising suspicions about a group of elite players moving together."

Luckily, I didn't get any objections, and the meeting was able to conclude peacefully with everyone in agreement. Everybody else seemed to more or less be okay with the idea of getting there before dawn, which I supposed made sense considering none of the people in this group were really hardcore gamers, and therefore they would have an easier time getting up early. Hardcore gamers in general seemed to have serious time management issues that made going to bed and/or getting up early very hard.

Of everyone here, Klein was the biggest gamer, and even he struck me as a casual one, rather than a hardcore one – he was more concerned with his friends than games, from what I could tell. Sinon didn't strike me as a gamer girl (actually, she seemed like the standoffish bookworm type to me), Asuna was a literal Ojou-sama who'd never been into games even a little, Agil was a family man from what he'd told me as Kazuto once, and Heathcliff… well, he may have played SAO, but other than that, I had no idea. He was pretty hard to read, and he sure as hell didn't talk about himself.

And as for myself, well, sometimes I called myself a gamer girl, but in reality, the only game I'd ever really gotten into was GGO. I'd played others, like SAO, but I didn't really enjoy them all that much, nor did I find myself particularly liking the concept of gaming in general, so I never really got into it.

What interested me most – far more than any game ever had – was computer science. I loved messing with computers. Building them, taking them apart, redesigning them, programming them, reprogramming them, and to an extent, even hacking them. Everything about computers, both software and hardware, was enjoyable to me.

Because unlike the stupid, ignorant, overly emotional, hatred-filled, train wrecks of existence so fucked up you couldn't even recognize the wreckage known as humans, computers actually made sense all the time, no matter what. For everything a computer does, even if it's an error, there is a direct cause, which means that if you know how to identify and respond to that cause, every problem you could possibly have will also have a clear solution.

The reason I accepted Kayaba Akihiko's proposal and tried GGO's beta was an extension of my love of computers. I wanted to figure out the ins and outs of the Nerve Gear and virtual reality, like I had for normal computers. I wanted to learn how to code for the new, complex, amazing system that this complete virtual environment ran on. That curiosity and desire was what drove me to go through with it.

Honestly… looking back on it knowing what I do now, I have some real mixed feelings about my choice. On the one hand, part of me definitely wished that I had refused his offer and not gotten involved in GGO. If that had happened, I would have been able to go on as I always had before then. I wouldn't have had to experience so many traumatic things in this virtual world.

But then… because of playing GGO's beta and getting stuck in the official release, I met so many important friends whom I could no longer imagine life without. Klein, Asuna, Agil – hell, even Sinon would be on the list at this point.

And of course, I also reconnected with Sachi and her group through GGO. Looking back on it, I'm very glad that I got to be with them right until the end. No matter how much I wished they were still alive, I couldn't deny how much better I felt knowing I'd resolved things with them and become their friend again before they left the living world.

And then, last but certainly not least, there was Argo. The closest thing to a good mother figure I'd ever had for a good portion of our time together… and now, after a whole year, my first girlfriend.

I couldn't just universally dismiss all the good things that came out of this game. GGO became the direct and indirect cause of all the best and worst things that had ever happened to me in my entire life – everything back in reality paled by comparison.

If I ever met Kayaba Akihiko again, I'd probably want to kill him for all the shit he put me through… but I'd also want to thank him for all the good times, too. As I emerged from the spring and made my way out at the tail end of the group of six, I decided I'd do both: first I'd thank him for the experiences, then I'd kill him in cold blood.

"Uh, Sinon? Can we walk and talk for a bit?"

Around the time Asuna and Heathcliff, who left together, were far enough away to be out of earshot, I uttered this query in what I hoped was not a nervous voice. It didn't shake and I didn't stutter, but starting any sentence with the word 'uh' typically gave away that you were not perfectly calm.

"Okay…" her reply and her eyes clearly told me she was trying to figure out what to make of my sudden outburst.

We were currently standing in front of the hot spring's lobby building, under the shade of a tropical tree that I couldn't identify. Except that the sun had already set a long time ago, so we really didn't need shade at that point. So really, the tree created shadows, rather than shade, because the nearest street lantern was on the other side.

We could still see pretty well, though. The whole town was unusually well-illuminated for what was evidently a backwater volcanic resort village. The teleporter was a three or so minute walk from here, so I'd thought it would be a good idea to talk to her about the fact that Asuna had told her I was going out with someone.

I hadn't really gotten the chance to observe her initial reaction to the information. I kinda wished I had, but then, we were all supposed to be turned away from each other, and I wasn't really an expert on body language… so without a good look at her face, I wouldn't be able to get a good read on her emotions, anyway.

Which was why I decided to bring it up again. However, as you probably expected, this was easier planned than actually said… for the first ten seconds of us walking towards the teleporter, I couldn't muster up the courage to just do it already.

"So what did you want to talk about?" she asked, and a subtle undertone in her voice told me she had gotten fed up with waiting on me.

"About what Asuna said in the changing room," I replied, literally having to force every word out. "That I'm going out with someone already. I didn't get to see your reaction to that and… well, I'm sorry. I wanted to be the one to tell you myself. You were honest and direct about your feelings, so I wanted to reciprocate and be honest and direct."

She sighed, and though I was curious about what was going through her head, I didn't have the courage to try to look at her and get a read. So I just waited for her to say something in response, my anxiety growing more and more with every passing second.

"You don't have to feel bad about that, okay? It's fine," she finally replied, her voice sounding kind and gentle in a way that I didn't often see from her anymore. "And the fact that you're taken won't change what I feel for you. I still love you. But I'll admit that I'm really relieved I was told before I made any advances… I feel like I dodged a bullet."

I smiled softly. This was going much better than I'd worried it would. I couldn't help but feel a little relieved, myself. As the teleporter entered my field of vision, I became hopeful that this talk would end on a wholly positive note.

Of course, Sinon chose that exact moment to dash my hopes entirely. "But something else worried me far more than the fact that you're taken. You implied that you're not a virgin, then implied that it wasn't a good experience. I'm really concerned for you… so could you please tell me what happened?"

Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it! Of fucking course that would be the thing she was more concerned about. It just had to be the one goddamn series of events in my life that was bad enough to get blocked from my otherwise eidetic memory, didn't it?

I knew that I couldn't get out of this without hurting her feelings. I had to say something, at least. But god fucking damn it, this was the thing I had erased from my memory entirely! What little I did remember was painful as hell to recall and had even sent me into panic attacks in the past! It wasn't an easy thing to just tell someone about.

I took a deep breath, then exhaled. We were almost to the teleporter. Just another few meters and we'd be there. I'd just give a bare minimum explanation and then get the hell out of Dodge before she could ask any more about it.

Once we were within range to use the teleporter, I finally answered her. My voice was disgustingly thick with emotions I despised, but it didn't waver or crack, for which I was grateful. "I was young, naïve, easily deceived, and didn't know that it wasn't normal. And until I learned the truth, I let things happen that I never should have allowed."

The last thing I saw before teleporting out was Sinon's shocked speechless face.

Author's Note

Yeah. Uh huh. I fucking went there. And because I went there, we got to see Kiriko totally lose her shit for once and start swearing like a drunken sailor in her head… which would be amusing if it weren't for the overbearing dramatic tension in that scene.

Okay, so I'm sure you guys have a ton of questions about just what the hell happened to Kiriko in her past. But because I'm a complete dick, I'm not going to answer any of them right now. For this plot point, I want to let the story itself do all the answering. I feel like it'll be infinitely more impactful that way, you know?

That said, if you do have questions about that, don't hesitate to ask them in a review! Because honestly, the more questions you ask, the more I'll be able to flesh out the idea and pound out any kinks (get it? Pound? Kinks? It's a joke about the – what, too soon? You're taking it too lightly? You're no fun) so that the end product that makes it into the story is as flawless as possible. Beyond, you know, the obvious flaw of the fact that we're talking about a genuine sex offense here.

Anyway, on a note entirely unrelated to the previous topic, cool, another long chapter. This one's the longest in the story so far, I'm pretty sure. And guess the hell what? We're not done with this day yet! The last scene of this particular day in the story will be at the start of next chapter, back with Argo. And it's gonna make it seem like Sinon confronting Kiriko just now was tame as all hell.

So yeah, you have that to… ahem… look forward to. See you then!