"... Mmh?"

Axel opened his eyes.

His mind was still a bit muddled, and his memory was jumbled.

He slowly rose from the bed and shook his head.

"This place is..."

By the fact that the desktop lamp was present, he quickly identified it as his room. Of course, other than that, there were no other landmarks to tell them apart, anyway. Even the "marks" of their last night's activity were already gone as he cleaned it all up with his inventory's purifying power.

"Oh, Sir Axel! You're awake!"

"Huh?"

Right then, a figure appeared at the door to the room.

"Ah, Arianne..." Axel recognized her quickly and asked, "How long was I out?"

"Please don't move yet, Sir Axel. You don't know how difficult your situation was two days ago. Everyone was worried you wouldn't wake up anymore!"

"I see..."

Axel obediently lay down with Arianne's help—only to jump up and shout suddenly.

"Wait, two days?!"

As he rose so suddenly, he ended up headbutting Arianne. Though instead of her getting hurt, it was Axel who started seeing stars as he fell back down.

"Ouch...!"

"Are you alright?!" Arianne worried fast. "That's why I said you should stay still... Look, you now have a bump on your forehead!"

After placing him comfortably in the bed, Arianne then left, saying she'd call the others to check on him. Left all alone, Axel just stared at the ceiling, pondering.

Although his vision was spinning, the impact actually helped him recall what had happened before he lost consciousness.

"Right... I drank a mana tonic and..."

He could remember the pain and the suffering he went through. However, his memory was fragmented. "How did I survive back then...?" he muttered, confused.

[The Loli Witch saved you, Contractor.]

To his surprise, a little penguin popped into his view, answering his question.

"Navi!" Axel groaned. "You fucker... You left me to die, didn't you?!" he grumbled.

[Hey, don't blame me! It was you who did two impulsive actions all on your own without asking! That's definitely not my fault!]

The penguin shrugged, showing a sleazy smile.

[In the first place, I have no functions that could help you physically. As such, it's not that I left you to die, but that I could do nothing but watch!]

"That's the same fucking thing!"

Raising his voice made his temple pulse with pain, so he quickly lay back down and hummed.

"Fuck..."

Axel cursed, placing an arm over his eyes, waiting for the pulsing pain in his head to cease.

"You should've at least warned me firsthand and not waited until it's too late to tell me all that shit..."

[Huh? Don't blame me! If you take a puppy onto an open rooftop, do you assume the puppy would suddenly run toward the edge and jump? No, right? Your actions are worse than that!]

"Ugh..."

He could only groan, realizing that he truly was way too careless.

'I guess the pressure from all my debts was weighing on my mind more than I could imagine...' he reasoned as such.

"...Enough of that." He waved his hand as if erasing something mid-air. "In the two days I was out, did the system get an upgrade?"

[Shelving the matter since it's not favorable?] Navi pointed out, before shrugging its small flippers. [Well, not that it matters. During the time Contractor was out, you received two system upgrades and one new quest. Would you like to see them?]

"Show me."

[Request received! Here are the two upgrades: Batch Auto-crafting and the Map function!]

The first one was quite self-explanatory. It was just an upgrade on the Auto-crafting function that allows batched crafting automatically. Of course, Axel was quite sure there were drawbacks along with it, but he ignored them for now.

"Map? What's that?"

Axel raised his hand, which felt as heavy as lead, and called up the system panel. From there, he skimmed the wheel to look for the new function and saw the map quite easily.

Tapping on it, a new window appeared, showing a top-down view of the current area. However, most of it was covered with a fog-like thing, making it impossible to see the terrain.

'Since there's this long straight line toward the north, I guess the map has a fog of war or something that is only removed after exploring that area.'

Such an explanation definitely made sense.

But still, one thing bothered him. Axel pointed at a few parts of the map and asked,

"So, Navi. What are these big red dots?"

The map wasn't just like a satellite view saved on paper, but it also showed a few dots of various colors and sizes around. To be specific, there were green, yellow, and red dots around the map, scattered quite randomly.

[Those are markers. The green represents the human population. Yellow is a resource spot. And red marks a group of monsters. Sizes of the circle represent the scale, with a bigger size being more of the said entities.]

"Huh..."

Axel checked the map again before feeling bitter. "There's nothing but monsters in the surrounding areas..."

He skimmed the surrounding map and found that 90% of the dots were monsters, about 8% were resource spots, while only 2% were human population. The distance between their camp and the nearest human dot was roughly equivalent to 20 times the distance he had traveled before to save the refugees.

"So about... 500 kilometers?" He shrugged. "Then there's no way we could interact with each other anytime soon."

The next thing that caught his attention was a bright yellow dot nearby.

"This one is..."

And just as he was about to study what it was, the door suddenly burst open as a figure jumped toward him exaggeratedly. "Husband~! You're awake~!"

"BUFU!"

Albeit being on the small side, the figure still managed to squeeze all the air out of Axel's lungs. Just as he recovered from the mix of surprise and pain, he finally got a good look at the intruder.

"P-Princess Teruria...?" He pushed her off him before recalling what she just said. "And what do you mean by husband...?"

Axel had no good memories of that word at all. After all, his former wife also called him the same way intimately. Just hearing Teruria call him that made goosebumps crawl across his skin!

"That..." Teruria acted shyly as she moved away. "Ehehe... Sorry!" she apologized all of a sudden.

Axel heard from Navi that Teruria saved him, and now, this. Putting one and one together, he could faintly figure out what happened.

"... Another oopsie?"

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