I was sitting across from Soh'fia in her room, having more or less exactly retraced my steps here.

Immediately after looping, it had hit me that I really didn't have any alternative plans. I could also have spent many loops grinding, but I really did not want to get into that mindset. I wanted to treat each loop as something possible to win. Not to mention, Restoration in particular seemed like a nightmare to raise. I was getting marginal levels from my training with Rose, but I could only imagine what a nightmare it would be to sit down and cut myself up for weeks upon weeks of loops just to heal myself for EXP. Cutting up other people to get restoration levels also seemed pretty sociopathic too. Either way, grinding Restoration in this world was the kind of thing only someone with a fucked up head could do, and I sadly did not have it in me to torture myself or others when there were other options I could focus on. For now, I was better off being content with the incidental level ups I was getting.

Anyway. When it came to solving this issue, my absolute last resort was to try outright kidnapping her myself, but I didn't really want to be hunted down by elf assassination squads for the rest of time, and just foiling the assassination attempt itself seemed like it would be my best option. I would instantly earn trust and legitimacy, at the very least.

The problem was, by my measure, that I couldn't be too specific in general. If I had told the council "a dark elf leaps through the window, then a hidden tree elf or something sings a dagger through her heart," two things would happen. One, everyone would know I had some form of future sight, and I would have been swarmed with questions. Two, the would-be assassins would likely go into hiding and wait for another opportunity, one I couldn't predict. I got the impression they were only still going through with this assassination attempt since they wanted me dead along with her, and they already had everything lined up.

I had noticed a few things while going through the motions of this loop. First of all, the guards not entering the room despite Soh'fia's shriek strongly implied they were in on it (or dead, I supposed). Second of all, I asked a bit about tree singing, and it turned out you needed to be pretty close to the wood to change it—ideally, touching it. The logical leap there was that they had planned ahead of time to position a tree elf near her room, which meant moving Soh'fia out of it should ideally be a huge blow to their plan.

Unfortunately for me... Soh'fia was stubborn as all hell.

"That's stupid," she said when I explained the plan. "Why would a metalhead smash through the window and risk alerting the whole palace? And I don't see greens working with metalheads, ever. This so-called plan doesn't make sense to begin with. The problem with you humans," she paused to sniff, and lost herself for a second. "The problem with you humans is that you only ever think of violence and s... stuff. Violence and stuff. You've got no sense of subtlety. There's political considerations here, okay? Anyone who tried killing me would basically be giving their life up for the cause, and you don't get that kind of dedication when multiple factions are involved. Okay? Do you get how dumb that plan would be now?"

I shrugged. "I guess real life is stupid. It happens."

"Hmph! Fine, be stubborn."

"You're saying that to me?"

"Every elf knows that all humans are stubborn. They love their own smelly dumbness. We have a saying here: You can lead a human to a book, but you can't make him read."

I pointed a finger at her. "That's hella racist."

"It's not racist if it's true. And you're a different species anyway, not a different race. Why are you using words wrong? Why are humans so dumb?"

"Aren't species defined by whether two different organisms can breed and produce fertile offspring? I feel like elves and humans can have fertile half-elf children. Can't they?"

Soh'fia went red with anger. Or embarrassment. Maybe both. "NO!" She slammed a fist on the table. "Elves, w-we, elves only conceive during a holy ritual that is performed once in our lives with our soul partner. An elf would NEVER have a human soul partner. EVER!"

"But what if they did?"

"NEVER!"

"And anyway, wouldn't that only produce one elf for every two elves? Are you guys dying out?"

She sniffed disdainfully. Then again. "Elves are immortal, stupid. If we bred like you monkeys we would run out of space in the blink of an eye. The Goddess will sometimes grace us with triplets and quadruplets to replace lost members, but the overall elvish population remains largely the same over time. This is common sense. Everyone knows this. Why didn't you read a book before coming here? Oh right, human."

"Maybe I did know and I just wanted to talk to you about breeding," I suggested.

Soh'fia pounded her fists on the table. Her face was still red with fury, and she was sniffing her little nose like crazy. Even her ears were flapping. "HUMANS!" she exclaimed. "Always with violence and s, stuff! This is why the Goddess chose us and not you. GEEZ! Aren't you here for an assassination or whatever? ENOUGH WITH THE BREEDING TALK!"

I waved a hand. "It happens like hours after you go to bed. I've got time to kill. I'm not even sure how I'm going to handle it when it does. I'm pretty outnumbered here. Can you fight with your bow and daggers or whatever?"

She settled back into her chair, her cheeks returning to their fair, white complexion as she calmed down. "With the bow, yes, daggers, not really. I'm glad you at least understand proper elves use bows. But obviously, a bow is not going to be very useful in a close quarters fight. Not that one is going to happen."

"Hmm," I mused. The best I could do was hold my own against the dark elf assassin, and our clash last night had honestly been short enough that I doubted I had seen all of her tricks. She hadn't even tried to use Reverse offensively, or use telekinesis past the first attempt. Then there was the mysterious tree on top of that. I really had no idea how I was going to do this on my own if Soh'fia wouldn't be helpful in a close-range fight.

"What about Natural magic? Do you know any? I know tree-singing is basically just a tree elf thing, but yeah."

Soh'fia puffed her chest up with pride. Her slight mounds perking up was cute. They were big enough to make indentations on her shirt, but not big enough to make any notable cleavage. "I'm a great Nature mage. But not in offensive magic. It's not very princess-like to spit poison or thorn whips, after all. But I can talk to animals, create familiars, scry long distances, alter landscapes, and I even have enhanced senses. I'm also learning to control the weather and bind animals to me. Once I'm queen, then I'll start learning the combat stuff. Bah'loh'kah said I didn't need to know it yet."

"Who is this Bah'loh'kah you keep mentioning?"

"I only mentioned him once, stupid. And he's the high elf councilman. He's like a father to me. But a really old one. Did you really not even learn the names of the three councilmen before coming here?"

"And I presume the familiars aren't very good in battle?"

"Nice change of subject. They're fairies and stuff, not combat familiars. I mostly just talk to them sometimes, and have them watch the door for me when I don't want to be surprised or interrupted."

Interrupted while in the middle of doing what?

"Okay, I've concluded that the only way for you to survive the night is to leave your room. Maybe we can hang out in the guard room or something."

"N-NO!" she shouted. "This may be my only chance to... I mean, no. This is my room. Why should I leave it?" she lifted her chin and turned her head away from me, scowling.

"Uh... The assassins?"

"They're not coming, like I said."

"Is there anything I can do to convince you?"

"Hmmm... No."

"Seriously? This is your life on the line here, not mine."

Soh'fia scowled at me. "Look, human, I get what you're doing. I'm smart, unlike you, so I can put the pieces together. You're not fooling anyone. I know you're just some lowly, smelly human who wanted to meet an elf princess. The more you make me think I need you to protect me, the more I'll owe you when I'm queen, right? Well, it's not working. Your puny human plans mean nothing to me. Like I said, no sense of subtlety. So here's how it's going to go. I'm going to stay in my room. You're going to stay here with me. I'm going to sleep. You're going to guard me and make sure NOTHING happens, since only you'll be in here. The end. Okay?"

"If you don't think there's an assassination coming, why do you want me to stay in your room at all?"

She turned her head. "I don't have to explain myself. The subtle machinations of a queen are far behind your understanding. Maybe study elf history for a thousand years first. Oh wait, you'll be dead before then."

"I suspect the Heir of the World contract might have an immortality clause."

"Not that it would matter to you!"

And so it came to pass that I was once again shooed out of her room so she could change into that half-translucent babydoll dress. I eyed the guards outside.

"So..." I said. "Who paid you off?"

Not even a blink.

"If you didn't get paid off, they're going to slit your throats at night. Be careful."

Silence.

OK.

Soh'fia called me back inside, and she did the same routine as last time, wearing the same light-green babydoll dress. "Listen here, human. I'm going to sleep. You're going to sit silently. Don't do ANYTHING! Don't even THINK of doing anything, okay?" She jabbed a finger in my face. "ANYTHING!"

"Okay."

"GOOD!"

And into bed she went, stomping just like last time. I sat down in the same chair as before, back to the door, facing the window.

The question was, really, whether it would ever be possible to get Soh'fia out of this room. She seemed absolutely adamant that she sleeps here and I guard her. Now, I wasn't dense. She was clearly excited to meet a human for possibly the first time and unleash the full brunt of her species-ism against them. It was like a teenage atheist practicing for years to dunk on religious people, and then finally meeting the perfect target. She was probably giddy with excitement for me to make some human blunder and have the guards stab me to death while she did a dance about having been right all along. The more time we spent together, the more chance there was of that happening, so she didn't want me to leave the room. Simple stuff. Soh'fia said I lacked an appreciation for subtlety, but this was all pretty obvious stuff, if you asked me.

With that in mind, outside of actually kidnapping her, I didn't see a reality in which I convinced her to leave. Maybe there was some high IQ plot wherein I set fire to a corner of her room and convinced her to leave, or dressed up as a guard and said Bah'loh'kah or whoever summoned her, but I felt like all of that just ran me the risk of getting caught and stabbed. Not to mention the assassins could just come back the next day, anyway. It wasn't a permanent solution.

I felt like I both had an immense number of options, but not many options at the same time. Soh'fia was the key, obviously, and even though I had been allowed access to her room... suspiciously easily, in retrospect... she was still under guard for the whole day. She didn't have a wide range of movement, and that was on top of refusing to leave her room. Getting her off the beaten path would take a lot, and wouldn't be permanent unless I kidnapped her. It felt like I was being increasingly railroaded into the kidnapping option. Oh well.

Having nothing else to do for the next two hours or whatever, I stood up and walked over to Soh'fia's bed to see how she was holding up. I peered down and saw that her face was... twitching? Her lips and cheeks in particular were trembling, as if she was fighting back the urge to grin. Actually, she was shaking a bit too. What the hell? I kept watching for a bit, and eventually she cracked open an eye, then instantly shut it. Was she faking being asleep for some reason? Her flowery, grassy, smell was getting increasingly sweet, it felt like. Or no... Some other sweet smell was mixing with it.

Oh god...

I sat back down in the chair. She was, in truth, so scared about the assassination that she had probably peed herself a little, and now was trembling with fear over me noticing. For all her blustering about the assassination definitely not happening, she wanted me, a "smelly stupid" human, in the room alone with her at night, all so she could be protected. She was swallowing her hate and, indeed, speciesism, all in desperation to be protected. All the anger was just blustering to cover her fear and shyness.

Or, alternatively, she had a lust for human dick and the smell of mine had been driving her crazy all day, thanks to her enhanced senses. But that sounded really conceited to me. In the first place, it was based on the false premise that elves were lewd. They weren't. Elves were a pure and noble race that had intercourse exactly once in their lives, purely for the purpose of procreation, and they would certainly not lust for human dick. The chances of Soh'fia wanting me to pin her down with my big, strong human arms and go to town while she was defenseless on her bed was exactly zero. Call me idealistic, but I wanted to believe in things. Believe in elves and their purity.

What I should have believed in, though, was the dark elves' propensity for violence. The assassin came in through the door this time and threw a dagger which I narrowly dodged by tilting my head to the side on pure instinct. It flipped around in the air and came rushing back, which I dodged with another tilt of my head. I was scrambling to get out of the chair, surprised by both her early appearance and the different nature of her appearance, when the dagger pierced my back. Fucking infinite-spinning boomerangs. Fuck fuck fuck.

The conclusion I came to as the assassin's sword pierced my neck from behind was that I had lost the second my back was to the door. When she had come through the window, I was facing her and had something of an advantage with the expertly-timed Reverse spell, but I had no chance in hell of beating a highly trained assassin that came from behind me.

Well, that was kind of anticlimactic.

"Listen here, human. I'm going to sleep. You're going to sit silently. Don't do ANYTHING! Don't even THINK of doing anything, okay?" Soh'fia jabbed a finger in my face. "ANYTHING!"

"You know, that line takes on a whole new meaning now."

She gave me a weird look, but stomped to bed anyway. Hello darkness, my old friend.

There were two obvious questions here: how would I beat the assassins, and would I pass the time before they came by sexually teasing Soh'fia in bed.

The first question was simpler. I gathered from the assassin's change in approach that they were listening in on our conversation, somehow, and went through the door instead of the window since I had mentioned the window. Thus, this time I repeated the conversation from last time (as well as I could, anyway), and I had turned the chair around to face the door instead. My plan was to backpedal to Soh'fia, get her away from the stabby bed, maybe jump through the window, but either way, flee from the deathbox.

The second question was more complex. Let it be known that I would have gotten a kick out of jumping on her bed out of nowhere and seeing her reaction. However, I was kind of trying to approach these loops in a way that didn't make me a genocidal maniac slash rapist. Just like it would have been possible to genocide the elf village for EXP, it would have been possible for me to begin each loop with some quick elf rape then quickload to get back on track. But I didn't want to do either. Imagine how terrible it would be to sexually antagonize Soh'fia here and then accidentally win the loop. That was the mistake I made with killing Jeffrey, and I didn't plan to make it ever again.

That said, I did have a bit of time to kill, and it felt like my mind was slowly bending beneath the sheer weight of all the sluts that surrounded me. Only pure, pure Rose was the light of reason in this fucked up world of incredibly sexy and horny women. God bless her soul.

Thus, I lost to the temptation to tease her just a little bit. But nothing that would, hopefully, compromise my morals in an unforgivable way. Just a little jape, albeit a crude one.

I walked over to her bed once she had started to fake sleep. Her face was twitching just like last time. I admired the comical nature of it, then stuffed a hand down my pants and rubbed it around. Then I took my hand out and held it about a foot above her face.

Her nose started twitching, and then sniffing. She kept her eyes closed, but sniffed more and more, faster and faster, until her head was lifting up off the pillow slightly while her nose twitched furiously. I noticed her lips part and her tongue start sliding out, perhaps unconsciously. I moved my hand to the left and her head followed. I moved to the right and her head followed again. Just before the tongue could reach my hand, I moved it back to my side and stepped back. She sniffed the air, frowned, and then froze. Several moments passed, and as if snapping back to reality from a trance, she slowly rested her head back down to the pillow.

Jesus Christ elves are sluts.

Reality crashed against me like a wave as I staggered back to my chair. It was obvious, in retrospect. What do you get when you mix a species with bodies to bring a single time in a perfect moment of holy union and sensual connection, with a species that has bodies built to more or less fuck all the time to maximize offspring? You get what you fucking expect: A forbidden cross of the chaste and sexual, of purity and corruption, of procreation for duty and procreation for pleasure. Elves and humans should never have met. It honestly made sense why the high elves were so racist against us. A single human could fuck his way through the entire elf population in the time a single elf man had his single "holy union" with his wife. It was honestly a disaster waiting to happen. I could imagine an alternate reality where a human like me was isekai'd into the middle of this elf village and fucked his way to the top until he held total control of the entirety of the elf civilization. It would take deft political maneuvering and tactical brilliance to avoid being stabbed in the throat midway through the rise to power, but it could happen. Not even the fucking elf princess, soon to be queen, could resist her urge to breed with a prime human specimen such as myself. Female elf bodies just weren't capable of resisting humans. It was sad, and I felt like crying, but elves were not a pure and noble race after all.

The real question was how they even survived this long, but in retrospect, the signs were all there. The high elf's racism was cocklust in denial. The black elves wore armor like chastity belts, but even then their lewd inner desires compelled them to wear less effective bikini armor. Tree elves sunbathed naked, and while I had been told they didn't view the naked body as sexual, no doubt they were just the most honest. Elf society was dripping with signs of trying to maintain a sense of pride despite essentially all of their women being prepared to grovel before human dick.

OK maybe I was going completely off the rails there. Sorry. I was kind of emotionally damaged by this revelation. Maybe Soh'fia was just especially susceptible since she had enhanced scent. Right, right. She was just a victim of circumstance. Elves were pure, it just so happened that a magically enhanced sense of smell didn't mix well with the Heir of the World's heroic genes. Or something. Please god just let elves be pure, this is all I have in life.

This is stupid.

Luckily, my emotional breakdown was interrupted by the assassin creaking the door open. As expected, saying she would come through the window influenced her to go through this door instead. I reversed the dagger, which she threw despite me facing her, and then she slammed the door open. If there were any guards out there, I didn't see them.

Just as planned, I held up my sword defensively and backpedaled to Soh'fia's bed. "Up!" I said.

"O-Okay!" she stammered, standing up. I ignored the wet spot on her bed and her gleaming thighs.

"To the window!"

"D-Do you even know how high this is?!"

"Eeeh?"

I had previously thought about what spells would be good for jumping out of the window, but it seemed kind of like our best bet was to smash through the window a floor below, or failing that, land on my sword to break the momentum. Landing on your sword after a long fall broke momentum, right? OK no it didn't, but it would be close to our only option.

The assassin didn't wait for me to explain my plan to just jump out and try to land on tree branches below, though. She threw more daggers, and I... Oh fuck. Three were aimed at Soh'fia, and two at me. I could only reverse one at best. I...

In a split-second decision, I threw myself in front of the three daggers aimed at Sophia. I managed to parry one and reverse another, but the third got me in the chest. Not enough to kill me, but not a very pleasant thing either. The assassin expected the reversal and caught the dagger in midair—damn—before throwing it back again and charging. I shattered the window with my elbow, grabbed Soh'fia, and jumped.

I should have expected there to be archers hidden in the branches outside.

On my fourth try, I audibly talked aloud about how I had a history of beating dark elf assassins. Soh'fia called me out on my bullshit, but the tree elf pierced the back of my head with a branch before I even knew what was happening. Apparently the tree elf was only waiting in reserve in case the dark elf wasn't enough, and if they gave up on the dark elf being able to beat me, the tree elf would launch the attack.

On my fifth try, I did that again, but kept an eye out for the branch. I dodged it, but Soh'fia was in bed and didn't dodge hers. Wasted loop.

On my sixth try, I tried to convince Soh'fia not to get in bed and stay far away from any wood, but she was absolutely adamant. Goddamn horny elves. I tried, ultimately, to indirectly mention my future sight, but she interpreted everything I said as a ploy to curry favor with her. It was madness. The phrase "the wicked flee when no one pursues" might as well have been "a slutty elf accuses all humans of being horny." I envied those who never have had to deal with a stubborn, horny elf in denial.

Ultimately, I fought off the assassin, but was left staring at the ceiling, trying to ignore Soh'fia's corpse by the dresser. Getting her out of bed and guiding her away while managing to marginally outfight the assassin hadn't mattered. There was just so much wood in here. Why the fuck was tree singing so deadly?

I was starting to get depressed. If there was some genius way to resolve this encounter, it wasn't coming to me. They had numbers on us. My future sight didn't mean much when Soh'fia stubbornly refused to listen to me, and broadcasting future sight too much would just make things harder, like them moving the stage of the assassination to another time I couldn't predict. I was getting stronger each loop, having earned quite a few One-Handed Blades and Dodging levels from fighting the assassin over and over, but it would be... another ten, twenty loops before I could dominate her in a fight, probably? And even then I would have to fight off the deadly fucking assassin branches. I couldn't go out the window without learning to block arrows, and who knew what was out in the hall. Not fucking guards, that's for sure.

I got up and moved the dresser to check for something under it. What I expected was there. I moved to the bed and pushed it aside. What I had found there last loop was still there. The knowledge didn't help unless I could be in two places at once, though. Alerting either Soh'fia or the councilmen or the guards would probably just get the assassination date moved. I needed the attack to happen, so there would be evidence and Soh'fia would understand. Or so I figured, anyway. Maybe I was missing something.

I leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling some more. What was I missing? Surely there was some solution here. It was my belief there was always a solution to something, no matter how much it looked like there was no solution. Every time I had given up in the past, thinking there was no solution, I realized later on there had been a solution there all along, just one that I hadn't been able to figure out at the time. The same had to be true here. It just wasn't coming to me. Unless kidnapping her really was the best option, regardless of the political ramifications.

I was so lost in depressed thought I didn't realize how much time had passed.

"It is called Doomed for a reason, young one," came a gravelly voice that sounded both like rocks grating and fire roaring from behind me. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

I didn't even need to turn around to know who it was. "Quickl-" I began, but didn't finish before the mace smashed into the side of my head.