Finally, finally, the group makes it back to The Shoebill with their first haul of logs.

But that’s just the very first haul. There is still plenty left for them to bring over that was left back in the forest, and there is more work to be done over the coming days.

But for now, they may relax, and relax they do.

“I’m so tired,” Fenrir groans.

“Stop your complainin’. Ya think your girlfriends want a whiny boyfriend?” Tabitha asks him.

“All I think is that I want to sleep.”

“Ya know we’ve still got to load all this up onto the boat and take it down the river, right?”

“How the heck are we going to do that?”

“Well, you like swimmin’, so I can rig somethin’ up to lower a container down the side of her, then you swim over, drop the logs into the container, and we pull it up! The fox can fly some over, too.”

“You just want to use us as slave labor.”

“Ya got a better idea?”

Cassiel walks up to Fenrir and sits down next to him, resting her head on his shoulder. “We can rest a little before using him,” she says.

“Thanks, Cass Cass,” Fenrir says, tilting his head to the side to lean it against hers.

Fenrir looks around after remembering something, and his thoughts are proven correct.

Oleander and Corwin are already missing. He has no idea where they went or when, but they’re missing.

Fenrir isn’t the only one who needs a break.

Then there’s Azalabulia. While she wants to try and totally-subtly flirt with Fenrir some more, she can’t just go and do that while he’s cuddling with his girlfriend!

Cassiel notices Azalabulia just sort of awkwardly standing around, and part of her does feel a bit bad and know that it’d be helpful to get off of her boyfriend so that Azalabulia has an opening.

The other part of Cassiel knows that she needs a rest and needs to be more assertive, and right now, she wants to relax with her boyfriend. As much as she might support Azalabulia joining their relationship, she needs some Fenrir time for herself right now.

Fortunately for Azalabulia, Fenrir has always been good at making sure people feel included.

“Seriously though, Aza, that rocket spell of yours was crazy,” Fenrir tells her.

Azalabulia perks up and walks over to them with a smug smile on her face. Cassiel may still be cuddling with Fenrir, and he might have an arm wrapped around her, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still talk to her.

“H-heh, I know! My awesome power can do anything!” Azalabulia declares.

“Including breaking wagons, setting us back, and almost getting yourself and others killed,” Fenrir teases her.

While he may have tried to use a tone to make it obvious that he just wants to tease her, Azalabulia takes it more seriously than that and tears up just a tiny bit.

“I – I didn’t want to hurt them!” Azalabulia whines.

“It’s alright, I’m just teasing you. I’m sure they know that you didn’t want to hurt them,” Fenrir says.

“Is that why they’re off screwin’ for their lives in case she tries killin’ them again?” Tabitha cuts in, making Azalabulia feel even worse.

“To be fair, you wouldn’t be inspired to build a rocket now if she didn’t do that,” Fenrir says.

Despite Fenrir not exactly trying to stick up for Azalabulia with that remark, that’s exactly how Azalabulia sees it.

This handsome, younger, taller man is defending her! He’s making her heart flutter and her eyes sparkle as she sniffles and wipes her eyes.

While she normally wouldn’t care about potentially blowing up bystanders, she doesn’t want to hurt the friends of the man she’s trying to seduce! That would ruin her plans!

But, he’s defending her, so she’s safe. Now she knows she won’t have to worry about potentially blowing any of them up since he’ll still defend her in the end.

She looks down at her chest. She really tucked her breast back into her uniform after the slip from earlier, but maybe it would be okay to just… subtly tug her uniform down a little bit so that everything important is still hidden while giving just a bit more to show.

While Fenrir and Tabitha talk about rocket towers again, Cassiel blankly stares at Azalabulia as the older woman tries to obviously tug her uniform down. Of course, she manages to tug it too far down by mistake which results in her frantically pushing everything back in and then looking at Fenrir to make sure that he didn’t see.

This is when she notices that Cassiel is staring right at her with one unimpressed look on her face.

Azalabulia chuckles, looks away, and stops trying to tug her uniform down again.

That is, until she sees Cassiel turn her head away.

Then she tries to expose more of her cleavage once more.

Operation: Seduce Fenrir must not end in failure!

If it does, she knows that she’ll have to surrender and deal with being single forever and probably buy a bunch of cats. If she can’t seduce a man who clearly likes women and dates so many of them, just what odds would she have with anybody else if he won’t take her? She could never find another man if she can’t even land a womanizer!

Fenrir sneezes.

“Oi, watch where you’re pointin’ that nose of yours,” Tabitha tells him.

“Sorry, I have no idea where that came from,” Fenrir says.

“Maybe somebody’s talkin’ about ya behind your back. Or thinkin’ somethin’.”

“Are you thinking about how much you want to impale me from behind again, Cass?”

Cassiel sighs and answers, “Now I am, and not in an Olly-approved way.”

“Now I’m just imagining Oleander having a book of stickers with his face and a thumbs-up on them, and the text above and below it says ‘Olly Approved!’ Then he just hands those stickers out whenever anybody does anything lewd.”

As dumb as Fenrir’s imagination might be, Cassiel still chuckles. “He’d probably have a gold sticker version for anything involving butts.”

“He’s actually more of a mouth guy than a butt guy.”

“Wait… really?”

“You couldn’t tell? Don’t tell me that you’re thinking he must love anal and all that just because he’s gay.”

“I – I…”

“Wow, way to stereotype, Cass Cass. I thought you were different! Next thing I know and you’re going to think that I like sniffing asses just because I’m part dog!”

“I’m going to—” Cassiel cuts herself off and huffs before resorting to a threat of violence.

Meanwhile, Oleander is sneezing elsewhere.

While he’s thinking of dogs, he looks over at Rock and Shogun. They’re just being cute and lying down in the grass next to each other with their bodies touching, similar to how Fenrir and Cassiel are sitting with each other.

“You know, onii-chan, I’m surprised that Aiko became Nyaiko instead of Wanaiko,” Saya tells Fenrir in his head.

“Oh, hey, Saya. I kind of understand why she didn’t. Dogs are obviously the superior animal and cats suck in comparison in every single way, but all the hentai she saw of mine included cat girls just because catgirls are stupidly popular. But yeah, if she was really trying to make a character based off of my top interests, she probably would have been a dog instead,” Fenrir thinks back to her.

“Hmm…”

“What?”

“Wo-woof, onii-chan. Or – or should I go ‘wan?’ Wan, wan! Do you like this, onii-wan? N-not that I want you to like it or anything, wan! I’m just a new and improved model of little sister that comes with dog ears and a tail included now!”

Fenrir is torn into two. One half of him knows that he shouldn’t be getting excited by an artificial intelligence pretending to be his little sister acting like a dog, because that’s something that only a degenerate would get excited by.

The other half of him is extremely excited by the fact that so many of his favorite fetishes are being combined into one. Not only is she calling him onii-chan, but now she’s making cute puppy noises by barking and whining inside of his head.

Cassiel nudges his arm. When he looks at her, he sees her pointing down at his crotch where it’s very obvious which side of his is winning.

Fenrir strategically positions his legs to hide his blatant erection, but now he has to answer Cassiel when she whispers, “Why?” into his ear.

How is he supposed to answer her that his little sister of a virtual assistant is pretending to be a dog?

“W-wan, awooo, perverted baka onii-wan,” Saya continues.

As soon as she busted out the “awoo,” it was all over.

Fenrir can never escape just how much of a degenerate he truly is. He may as well admit it.

“My virtual assistant is pretending to be a little sister and a dog,” Fenrir whispers to Cassiel.

“I’m judging you,” Cassiel whispers back.

“I deserve it.”