Amano Ririsa, who had been playing the wronged victim for a long while now, held Hikigaya Hachiman in her arms while she watched Inui Sajuna and Inui Shinju.
Seeing Inui Sajuna collapsed on the ground, the white stockings on her slender legs long since soaked through, she was struck by a sudden impulse. Her intense love as the 'victim' got the better of her, and she went and picked Inui Sajuna up off the ground of her own accord.
"Huh? Ririsa?!"
Amano Ririsa had done it so suddenly that Inui Sajuna didn't react until she'd been carried by the backs of her knees right up in front of Hikigaya Hachiman. Only then did she look back at Amano Ririsa behind her in disbelief.
'Weren't you supposed to be playing the victim?! Why are you helping this guy go at her?!!!'
"Shhh..."
Amano Ririsa held a finger up to her lips. Looking at the slender, delicate white-stockinged legs Inui Sajuna had instinctively pressed together, she slowly let go of her, leaving Inui Sajuna to hang on Hikigaya Hachiman by herself.
"Hehe, since Juju-sama isn't saying no, let's all play together! Shinju, come on, come on!"
Kitagawa Marin watched her absolute favorite Juju-sama finally enter the white-stocking th*gh-job doujin scenario of her Fu Xuan cosplay. Paying no mind to Inui Sajuna being in the way, she pounced on Hikigaya Hachiman with a big smile and hugged him together with Amano Ririsa.
She even waved at Inui Shinju, who was kneeling on the grass and still hadn't caught up, to get up and join the hug.
"???"
Sandwiched in the middle, Inui Sajuna stared blankly up at Kitagawa Marin, Amano Ririsa and Hikigaya Hachiman, who were already kissing right above her head.
'Do these people have to be this perverted, this slutty?!'
And she was still stuck in the middle!
———
The Service Club, the family restaurant.
While Inui Sajuna was suffering, squeezed in between Kitagawa Marin and the others, Elf Princess Iris and Dragon Clan Chief Ursula, both back from the other world, sat on opposite sides of a row of tables, each sizing up the reinforcements the other had brought back.
The reinforcements they had brought were sizing each other up face to face too, studying the 'opponents' they would be fighting alongside from now on.
Still, there was no smell of gunpowder between the reinforcements of the two camps. Far from being at daggers drawn, they were chatting together peacefully.
"I am Celestine Lucullus. A pleasure to meet you, Lady Wridra. I have long heard of the legendary Magus Dragon who holds the power to 'guide' the world. I never imagined that one day we would meet in another world."
Golden hair, white skin, a full bosom, a green wreath of grass on her head: the high elf Celestine turned a gentle smile toward the dragon camp, at the black-haired, mature dragon beauty whose figure was a match for her own.
"The name of Magus Dragon is only the world's flattery. It is you, Lady Celestine, who are the goddess the world adores."
The Magus Dragon Wridra smiled faintly. Around Ursula she had no dignity at all, but now, in front of everyone, she had to keep up at least some manners.
"Wridra, and the young lady beside you is...?"
Celestine, the goddess reincarnated, didn't keep the flattery going with Wridra. Instead she steered the conversation to the dragon woman beside Wridra, who had black hair as well.
Like the Magus Dragon Wridra, this dragon woman had quite a voluptuous figure, but she was clearly younger than Wridra. She was more a girl than a mature beauty, and not nearly as strong.
"My name is Tio Klarus, of the Klarus family. I had the good fortune to be invited to come to this world as well."
At that, the dragon girl Tio, dressed in a black kimono and white tabi socks with her chest bared, introduced herself to Celestine, and Wridra added from beside her:
"Tio is a princess of the dragonmen. We happened to run into her while we were out looking for people, so we brought her along."
They hadn't originally planned on looking for dragons. Dragons had strong bodies, sure, but a lot of dragons didn't like using their heads, and dragging them along could easily backfire.
But Ursula, wandering all over pulling people in, just had to run into Tio, who had been off searching for a hero from another world.
With help showing up right on their doorstep, it would have looked a little stupid not to bring her in.
"So you're a princess of the dragonmen. The dragonmen, too, were once a noble race that kept the world at peace. As I recall, the dragonmen vanished without a trace five hundred years ago."
Celestine looked at the very well-mannered dragon girl Tio, and a flicker of surprise crossed her eyes.
Though she'd heard Tio was a princess, she didn't take Princess Tio for Ursula's daughter.
Dragons and dragonmen were much the same, but in fact only the dragonmen counted as demi-humans.
The most obvious difference between the two was that Tio not only had no racial features like dragon horns on her head, she didn't even have a tail behind her rear.
A dragon's true form was a giant dragon that could take human form with magic. A dragonman's true form was human, and turning into a dragon to fight actually cost a great deal of mana.
Though once they were strong enough, there was no real difference between dragons and dragonmen anymore. They could switch forms at will anyway and use whichever one suited them better.
"We dragonmen suffered heavy losses in that great war as well. The survivors now live in seclusion on a small island somewhere. I only left the island because I had heard that visitors from other worlds were appearing more and more often of late. I never expected to run straight into Lady Ursula and Lady Wridra."
Tio smiled and shook her head. She didn't much want to dwell on the past either, and she turned her gaze to the blonde, pointy-eared elf beside Celestine, whose looks were unusually, stunningly beautiful.
"Lady Celestine, I imagine the elf girl beside you is no ordinary person either, is she?"
"Seras Ashrain."
The blonde elf girl Seras lowered her head slightly and gave her name, short and simple.
"Seras previously served as Holy Knight Commander of the Holy Kingdom of Neia, and as the personal guard of Neia's princess. Later she was caught up in the struggles between the human kingdoms, and now she has returned to the elves.
"Seras is not an elf born in the Elven Forest. She had already lost her memory when she appeared within the borders of the human kingdoms. From searching through the old records, we suspect Seras comes from a high elf kingdom that once went into hiding, and she may even be its princess."
Some of these guesses weren't easy for Seras to say herself, so Celestine explained for her, while Seras silently nodded along.
She didn't know herself whether the guesses were right, but she felt they must be. Otherwise there was no explaining the special spirit-form armor she had.
But why would her memories have been erased and she be cast out?
Had she committed some terrible crime?
"A princess of a lost elf kingdom... Something must have happened to Seras for her to have no choice but to seal her memories and leave."
Wridra looked thoughtfully at Seras's earnest, serious face. She didn't care about Seras having been a knight commander for a human nation. What she paid particular attention to was Seras's peerless, kingdom-toppling beauty.
For a race like the elves, who were extraordinarily good-looking to begin with, a stunning beauty enough to bewitch the world was practically the same thing as talent and potential. It had to mean some special status, so guessing that Seras was a princess was perfectly reasonable.
Still... peerless beauty, lost memories, a seal. This Seras's traits were an awful lot like that blonde vampire girl of theirs, the one who'd been sealed deep in the Great Labyrinth.
They'd thought they'd gotten their hands on a trump card to match Elf Princess Iris, but the elves had gone and dug up a princess of a lost elf kingdom who was not one bit inferior to Elf Princess Iris...
The elves might even be hiding elf girls with top-notch talent and looks, saving them to call out once they made their move...
They really had underestimated just how shameless the elves could be, dragging over even a member who had only just been taken back in by the elves.