"Sigh, see? This is what happens with amateurs. Their intentions may be good, and the idea may be good too, but there are always mistakes somewhere along the way."

With a pop, Pink Bear took off the cat mascot head, then opened the bear mouth, stuck out a furry paw, lit a cigar, and took a slow, satisfied drag as he watched the wailing little brats around him scatter in all directions.

Hmph. Trying to mess with me? Do they not know who the strongest "brat" in all of Belrand is?

Too green. Go crawl back into the womb and train for a few more years.

"Come to think of it, that kid Muen is just as green. For a guy who’s gotten involved with that many girls and created that much romantic disaster, he still hasn’t learned a thing from experience."

"Sir Oranriel is absolutely right..."

Parls took off his mascot head as well. Watching a member of the royal family seriously stoop to brawling with a pack of children, he couldn’t help the twitch at the corner of his mouth.

He ran a hand through the hair that had gone slightly messy from sweating inside the costume, yet even so, he still looked tall, handsome, and sharp. As noblewomen passed by, their eyes would unconsciously drift toward him, and even with their husbands standing right beside them, something unusual still flickered faintly in their gaze.

"Young Master Muen’s move really was a bit underconsidered."

Judging it from a professional perspective, Parls said, "I can roughly guess what he was trying to do. He wanted to use this kind of accelerated heartbeat to make Miss Ariel feel stirred, maybe even use a person’s instinct in a moment of danger to make her develop a sense of reliance on him, but..."

The roller coaster tore through the air overhead, but neither Pink Bear nor Parls had the slightest interest in looking up at it.

Pink Bear aside, he could probably move faster than that thing even kneeling on a bed of thorns, and while Parls himself was not especially strong, possessing only the aura of a third-rank warrior, to him that so-called roller coaster was probably about as thrilling as the kiddie ride over there that bobbed up and down while singing "Grandpa’s dad is called Grandpa."

Not to mention Miss Ariel, whose strength, according to the intelligence reports, had already reached the fifth rank and truly stepped into the realm of the powerful.

The fact that she hadn’t fallen asleep on it already was probably out of respect for Young Master Muen.

"The angle is correct. For someone like Miss Ariel, whose heart is firm and steadfast, the hardest thing is cracking open that hard shell around it. But unfortunately, the method is wrong."

Parls sighed.

"What I don’t understand is how Young Master Muen could make such a basic mistake. In his mind, did he really think something slower than the horses at his own house could have anything to do with the word thrilling?"

"Ah, don’t say that. It’s precisely because that kid Muen is unreliable that we get our chance to step in."

Pink Bear swayed his head smugly, cigar smoke curling upward. Now that no one was keeping an eye on him, even the way he smoked looked much more dashing, every gesture full of the air of a seasoned master.

"Oh?"

Parls looked startled. "Sir Oranriel has another way?"

"Heh, who do you think I am?"

Pink Bear pointed at the roller coaster streaking across the sky and suddenly gave a strange grin.

"What powers that thing? Magic. And as it happens, magic is something I understand just a little."

...

...

"This is so boring."

Ariel stared with dead fish eyes as the scenery around her sped backward.

This was even worse than the carriage ride earlier. At least the scenery on both sides had changed back then. But this roller coaster, honestly speaking, was just going around and around in the same place. There was nothing interesting about it at all.

"Uh..."

Muen said awkwardly, "How about I sing you a song?"

He really was out of ideas. After all, on a roller coaster, if you weren’t going to sing, you couldn’t exactly dance.

He really should not have designed the roller coaster to be this long. At the time, he had thought the longer it was, the better the chance of making Ariel’s heart "race," but instead it had turned into one of those trash games from his previous life that kept adding side content just to stretch the runtime—aside from being long and miserable, it had no redeeming features.

But that was also his own fault. The inertia of his past-life thinking had made him forget that in this world, a roller coaster simply did not qualify as thrilling.

"You can sing?"

"No."

"Then forget it. I don’t want my ears desecrated."

"Then how about I hum a tune?"

"What tune..."

Sleepiness washed over her again, and Ariel couldn’t help yawning once more.

So before she could finish speaking, she heard Muen start humming.

He truly could not sing. Even just humming a tune, he was off-key, difficult to evaluate, and could only barely be called not unpleasant.

And yet Ariel felt a strange sense of familiarity.

This melody... where had she heard it before?

Thinking carefully, it seemed to be... a sweet and lovely figure flashed through Ariel’s mind...

Wasn’t this the piece Liya always played?

How did Muen know it... then again, of course he did. Liya must have played it for him all the time.

Damn it. He’s on a date with me and still dares to hum Liya’s tune? Is he not afraid I’ll settle old and new scores with him all at—

Ariel, suddenly overwhelmed again by that sour ache in her chest, flew into a rage and slammed a hand against the bar as she shot upright.

Then she froze.

The scenery in her sight was still racing backward nonstop. The wind roared around her, and the roller coaster screeched harshly against the rails.

But there had been no humming at all. That familiar sound just now had apparently been nothing more than an illusion.

At some point, she had actually fallen asleep.

"Damn it, what kind of stupid dream was that?"

Ariel shook her head.

She was on a date with that guy, and yet she still dreamed about Liya getting stolen away by him... Had she awakened some kind of strange tendency?

No, no. It was just symbolic, that was all.

"At the end of the day, this is still your fault!"

Ariel shot an irritated glare to the side. If his dating methods hadn’t been so boring, how could she have started thinking such nonsense...

"Hm?"

But the moment she turned her head, Ariel froze again.

Because the seat beside her was completely empty.

"Muen?"

Her anger vanished instantly. Ariel called out tentatively,

"Where are you?"

There was no answer at all. Only the shrieking wind.

It was as though the entire world had been reduced to her alone.

"What’s going on?"

Ariel instinctively tried to release her senses, but only then did she remember that right now, she could not use any power at all. She was no different from an ordinary little girl.

And then the situation changed again.

The wind was getting stronger.

Even without spiritual perception, Ariel could clearly feel through touch alone that the wind was growing increasingly violent. It scraped across her face like blades, one after another, making it hard for her to keep her eyes open.

And it wasn’t just the wind that surged around her. There was also the crushing weightlessness that slammed into her body in wave after wave like falling boulders, as if it wanted to drive her soul out of her body.

The world seemed to keep flipping upside down, then righting itself, then flipping again, then righting itself again, and it never seemed to tire of it.

Ariel forced her eyes open into a narrow slit and discovered that the scenery on both sides was no longer merely retreating. It had nearly turned into an oil painting soaked through with water, the colors all blended together—because it was moving too fast for her eyes to catch any more detail.

The roller coaster was racing.

Racing at dozens, hundreds of times the speed from before. It had truly become a steel beast, no longer bound by the rails, dancing madly through the sky.

Sparks exploded, steel thundered, and even the laws of physics atop the roller coaster seemed to have been completely twisted. And the dance was still going on, growing only more frenzied by the moment.

The wind pressure had long since crushed the air from Ariel’s lungs, and having lost all her strength, she had no way to resist at all. She could only curl up her fragile body and cling tightly to the safety bar, the only thing still giving her even the slightest sense of reassurance.

She could feel her heart pounding wildly, her blood racing through her veins. This was not fear, but the instinctive reaction of a body subjected to extreme stimulation. If Muen had designed this thing to achieve that effect, then she admitted he had succeeded.

But...

Creak... creak...

It still was not over.

The roller coaster, hurtling forward in mad flight, had long since surpassed the durability limit it had been designed for.

As it danced recklessly through the air, parts that could no longer bear the strain began breaking off from its massive steel body one after another.

No, not falling off.

They were being flung away.

Every piece became a shooting star, embracing the earth in the most self-consuming way possible, leaving not even the tiniest fragment behind amid the high heat and violent impact.

Ariel felt that she was about to become one of those fragments herself.

Creak... creak... crack!

The wobbling safety bar finally reached its limit with a shrill cry of agony. With all restraint gone, Ariel was violently swept away, like a fragile sheet of paper caught in a storm.

If she had been nothing more than an ordinary girl, her body would have been torn apart completely by that terrifying force the instant she was flung out.

Fortunately, although Ariel had lost all her power, the quality of her body itself remained. She did not die on the spot.

But that did not mean she would escape unharmed.

At this speed, she could no longer open her eyes, but she knew she was now plunging toward the ground like those meteors, at a speed far greater than even the roller coaster’s.

Even though she had once fallen from a tower a thousand meters high and survived without injury, this time was completely different. Right now, she could not mobilize even a trace of battle aura or magic for protection. So no matter how well-trained her body was, the outcome awaiting her would be no surprise.

She would slam into the ground, bones and flesh shattered, reduced to a heap of mangled pulp.

A death uglier than anyone would ever wish to accept. By then, even if someone spent as much money and manpower as it had taken to build this amusement park, they still would not be able to gather all of her remains.

Without question, this was a dead end.

Ordinarily, faced with such a dead end, even Ariel should have grown tense. Panic should have risen in her heart, and she should have racked her brain desperately to search for that faint thread of life that might exist somewhere.

She had never given up, not even in the face of death.

Every time she had faced a dead end before, that was what Ariel had done.

But this time, she remained calm the entire while.

From beginning to end, she watched all of it happen in silence, like a fisherman at sea watching monstrous waves rise without the slightest change in expression, as if unaware that in the next instant those waves would swallow her whole.

This was not because her heart had grown tougher than that of any human being, nor because she had given up struggling.

It was only because she still remembered who had been sitting beside her before all of this began.

Even though she could no longer see him with her eyes, for some reason, she believed from [N O V E L I G H T] the bottom of her heart—

"Muen."

"I’m here."

This time, her call received an answer.

Ariel opened her eyes, and in the afterglow of burning steel falling from the sky, she saw that man smiling as he reached out his hand and took hers.

"I’ve been here all along."