Inside the room, Shiro finally released Alfia, whose entire face practically screamed humiliation.
The instant she was free, she shot away like an arrow from a bow. After confirming Shiro had no intention of chasing her, her body dissolved into specks of light and vanished into the air.
Having thoroughly enjoyed petting the cat, Shiro turned around and found the Vouivre staring at him with shining eyes.
That look was only one step away from having the word "worship" carved directly into her pupils.
Apparently, seeing Shiro effortlessly toy with the Alfia who had bullied her had raised his status in the Vouivre's mind even further.
"I almost forgot about you."
Muttering to himself, Shiro crouched down and untied the ropes around her. He also removed the cloth stuffed into her mouth and casually healed the injury on her leg.
As for whether she might run away once her wound recovered, that possibility did not concern him in the slightest.
For one thing, there was no fear in her eyes when she looked at him.
More importantly, if a monster whose potential had not even reached Level 4 somehow escaped right under the nose of a Level 7 like him, Shiro might as well walk outside and smash his head against a tree.
"My foot... doesn't hurt."
"Hm? You can talk?"
The moment her restraints came off, the Vouivre gave Shiro an unexpected surprise.
She stood up with an expression of wonder, hesitated briefly, then lightly kicked the ground with the left leg that had been injured before.
Once she realized the pain was gone, a bright smile blossomed across her face like a child who had just received a new toy.
At the same time, several halting syllables slowly emerged from her mouth.
Her speech was awkward and broken, but there was no mistaking it.
It was human language.
In other words, the Vouivre was not incapable of communication. She simply did not understand the meanings of certain words.
For Shiro, being able to communicate at all was already enough.
"Then I'll ask directly. Besides yourself, do you know any companions in the Dungeon?"
"Com... panions?"
"People you can live together with. Or someone who treats you kindly and who you'd want to live with in the future."
Shiro considered the possibility that she had not yet been accepted into a group of other intelligent monsters, so he deliberately defined "companions" as those who had treated her kindly.
That should naturally exclude human adventurers.
After all, almost any adventurer who encountered a monster would attack first rather than walk up and check whether it could communicate.
The wound on her left leg might very well have come from exactly that.
Which meant that anyone who had encountered the Vouivre without immediately attacking her was quite likely another intelligent monster like herself.
"Mm..."
After listening to Shiro's explanation, the Vouivre lowered her head and thought very seriously.
A moment later, she looked up with a smile and pointed one clawed finger directly at him.
"Mother... is companion."
"Heh."
For some reason, a quiet snicker suddenly came from somewhere in the surrounding air.
The instant Shiro glared toward the source, it stopped.
"In our understanding, 'mother' usually refers to the woman who raises a child."
Shiro explained with an extremely serious expression.
"And I'm a man, so I can't be your mother."
It was one thing if she called him that in private.
But if anyone ever heard it in public...
Shiro would have no choice but to move to another planet.
So, if only to prevent his complete social death in Orario, he absolutely had to stop the Vouivre from developing this habit.
"...Not Mother?"
The Vouivre's little face immediately collapsed.
"Mother... doesn't want me?"
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she looked at Shiro like a child who had just been abandoned by her parent.
"That's not what I meant. I was never your mother in the first place."
Shiro immediately began trying to explain.
"Logically speaking, your mother should be the Dungeon. Although I also have... Wait, don't cry!"
The more Shiro spoke, the more tears gathered in her eyes.
Once they reached their limit, they finally spilled over, streaming down her pale blue-green cheeks.
"Alfia, think of something!"
Shiro instantly panicked.
His memories of being a small child in his previous life had already become too vague to be useful.
And in this life, the only person around his age he had known as a child was Toudou Touka.
Because she often helped take care of the children at the orphanage, Touka had also been unusually mature for her age.
In other words, Shiro had almost no experience dealing with crying children.
Naturally, he had no idea how to calm down a Vouivre who had somehow decided he was her "mother."
So he immediately sought help from the one person who might have had some experience in that area.
"Why would you think I know what to do?"
Alfia's voice came from the air.
"Aren't you Bell's au... big sister? What did you and Meteria do when he cried as a child?"
"You've seen my memories. You should already know."
Alfia's voice remained calm.
"Back then, I believed I had no right to care for that child. To keep myself from being tempted, I crushed even thoughts like 'I'll only look at him once, then leave' before they could take root."
In other words, although Alfia was Bell's aunt, she had never actually met him before her death.
Naturally, she had no experience raising children either.
"...Sorry."
"You're annoying."
Alfia sounded faintly irritated.
"The resolve we held back then was not some cheap determination we would regret later."
"If there is anything I regret now, it is only that I failed to stop that child from entering a world of fighting."
Alfia did not regret failing to see Bell once before dying.
Even so, for that brief moment, genuine melancholy entered her voice.
But it lasted only an instant.
By the time she spoke again, her tone had already returned to the cold indifference she had possessed when Shiro first met her.
Had Shiro not personally witnessed her memories before, he might have thought that fleeting softness was only his imagination.
"So what are you planning to do with this child?"
"To be honest, this has gone pretty differently from what I expected."
Shiro sighed and looked toward the teary-eyed Vouivre again.
"And if you hadn't mentioned the word 'mother' earlier, she probably wouldn't even know what it meant yet."
By now, Shiro more or less understood what had happened.
This Vouivre had most likely failed to encounter any others of her own kind inside the Dungeon.
Otherwise, her sense of caution should never have been this poor.
"If we send her back into the Dungeon now and she runs into the people who injured her again, that would be a problem."
Shiro looked at the Vouivre with a complicated expression.
The meaning behind his words was obvious.
At the very least, until she became capable of surviving on her own, he had no intention of releasing her back into the Dungeon and leaving her to fend for herself.
…