“Ok, Melt. Open wide.”

“Aaah~n.”

Chomp.

It had been a day since the incident that had troubled Chaldea. From having found her beloved Senpai tiny beneath her butt to going through all of the strangeness that came with Servants taking advantage of the situation, a lot had happened. Some of it, she felt, had been enjoyable, but she tried to shake those thoughts out of her head. She had been under Meltryllis’s influence after all. After confirming that every Servant was safe and accounted for, Mashu Kyrielight arrived at the medical bay.

Her eye twitched seeing the culprit happily being fed an apple that had been cut into a rabbit shape by her Senpai.

“Senpai… Meltryllis… What are you two doing?” the bespectacled girl asked.

“Oh, Mashu,” the Master waved at her. “I was making sure Melt had something to recover her energy.”

“Are you jealous, Mashu?” the Alter Ego smugly smiled.

“J-J-! Not at all. It’s not like I’m envious you’re in a position for Senpai to feed you or anything. It’s absolutely not like that at all,” the Shielder’s defense was haphazardly set up. “But Senpai, you sure are acting friendly to someone who treated you like a bug yesterday.”

“You get used to it,” the Master sighed. He understood Mashu’s worry for taking care of Meltryllis, but he was an experienced Master of Chaldea. He both met with numerous farewells and betrayals by versions of Servants only to encounter them again later. Having Meltryllis be the troublemaker behind the entire ordeal did not mean he would stop treating her normally. Besides, she couldn’t easily feed herself with her arms the way they were.

“I said I was sorry,” Meltryllis opened her mouth to be fed once again. After she chewed and swallowed, she continued talking. “What else can I say? I can’t even remember everything that happened. It feels like I had a good dream, but can you imagine waking up black and blue all over and then getting shouted at by that loud-mouthed author and tactician?”

That was the other issue as well. Meltryllis’s memories, like someone who had gotten completely drunk, were hazy regarding the incident when she woke up. It was actually quite the sight seeing her suddenly being scolded and shouted at by an angry Andersen and Lord El-Melloi II right upon waking up. Both were so irate after being eaten, there was no way any of them could stop the pair of Casters from shouting sharply analyzed critiques about her character and endless strings of English curses and complaints. And because she had no idea what was going on and couldn’t move her body because of her mana exhaustion, she had to bear it all.

“I think Melt’s gotten a decent enough punishment… Though Da Vinci is going to make her pull triple duty on resource gathering when she gets better.”

“You guys beat the intoxicated me even with all those handicaps and cheats,” Meltryllis stated, impressed. “Really, as expected of Master… Although did you really have to make BB jab me there? I can still feel where she stabbed my butt.”

It couldn’t have been helped. He didn’t have any other ideas at the time. Trying to determine a proper strategy to handle the giant Meltryllis on the spot was not something he had thought he’d have to do. However, he did and it had succeeded. The entire incident had gone by with no major issues and no casualties. That was all that mattered to him.

However, Mashu was still concerned.

“Still, I do wonder, Senpai. Meltryllis, just made you go help Osakabehime in the first place?” Mashu asked. “I’m sorry to point this out, but you can’t really hold a pen for drawing, right?”

The Master blinked. Mashu did have a point. It had surprised them in the first place when Passionlip pointed them to Osakabehime’s room. Meltryllis wasn’t the type to make small talk with the hikikomori, so why had she been there?

To both the Master and Mashu’s surprise, the purple haired Alter Ego began looking in a different direction. Her face was a little red. “A-Ah… Do I really have to answer that? You already had to deal with one of my deepest dreams. Isn’t that enough?”

It wasn’t. Not only was Meltryllis acting strange, but her answer could actually tell them a lot more about the reason she had ended up the way she did. He wasn’t just referring about the grail and the energy drinks - if she wasn’t there in the first place, none of this would have happened.

“Melt...” the Master raised his hand. One of his command spells had regenerated over the course of the day.

“O-Ok. I’ll say it. You don’t have to waste a command spell for that,” the Alter Ego caved in. 

She didn’t have the chance or the need to answer though. Before she could properly tell the two, the door to the sick bay opened up.

“Mel-Mel!” “Hey Ballerina Girl!”

Two Servants loudly barged in. From the voices and how they address Meltryllis, the Master knew just who they were before they came over to approach the recovering patient.

Jeanne D’Arc Alter and Osakabehime had arrived, holding a book in each of their hands.

“Alter? Osakabehime? What are you two doing here?” Mashu was surprised by their intrusion, however, what she was more surprised about was the dark rings under both of their lifeless eyes.

“... Ngh?” Jeanne Alter glanced over Mashu with a tired expression. It seemed she had pulled an all-nighter. Did the two of them keep going working on their doujinshi even after the incident was over? Come to think of it, they exited the Halloween Singularity through BB’s power, so they never did end up back in Osakabehime’s room in Chaldea. 

“We finished, Mel-Mel,” Osakabehime tried to sound happy as she placed a copy of her doujinshi on Meltryllis’s bed but she was too exhausted to muster the effort. “Thank you. Your references were just what we needed...”

“Here,” Jeanne Alter tossed her self-published book over Osakabehime’s as well. “As promised, a copy. Now if you’ll excuse us, the Princess and I need are going to use that giant hippogriff plushie in nap room.”

“You guys! You’re supposed to keep this a secret!” Meltryllis blushed, flusteredly trying to hide the two thin books while the two doujin artists left. There was nowhere to hide them though as Mashu and the Master had already seen them. “D-Don’t get the wrong idea, Master. They were the ones who were paying me for my help. I just wanted a copy to remember the occasion. I didn’t request the genre or anything.”

The genre? The Master took a closer look at the covers and titles of the doujinshi Osakabehime and Jeanne Alter had drawn. The moment his brain processed what he was seeing, his smile disappeared.

‘Master 1/100’ and ‘Giant Babbage 2: Super Dreadnought Fran’ - the underlying theme behind both books was the same. And the first one in the particular pictured his plight perfectly. The fact that the cover of the first was a drawing of him trying to escape a foot and the other was of a gigantic bandage-clad Frankenstein looming over a city told him more than enough. So this was why Meltryllis had gotten so involved.

Those two were the ones who had sparked her interest.

“Mashu…,” the Master mumbled, standing up. “I’m going to go get Da Vinci. Those two aren’t going to be getting any sleep anytime soon. They’ll be getting the same punishment that Melt is getting.”

“Y-Yes, Senpai,” Mashu nodded as the Chaldean Master stood up and walked off.

When the door to the infirmary closed, Mashu and Meltryllis were the only ones remaining. An awkward silence fell between the two - the Master’s kouhai and the one who put him in danger. Meltryllis tried to hide both thin books under the pillow she was resting on. As she did, Mashu’s eyes restlessly followed the covers of both books.

Memories of sitting on her Master, stepping on him, and even kissing his tiny body entered her mind.

“U-Um… Meltryllis…,” Mashu called her name. 

“Hm…? What is it?”

Mashu swallowed her saliva, trying to work up the nerve to speak up. “C-Could I take a look at that Master book for one minute?”

The Alter Ego took a moment to process the request. When she did, a smirk appeared on Meltryllis’s face as she raised an eyebrow. “Oh my, did you take an interest, Mashu?”

“N-No. N-not at all,” the bespectacled girl nervously denied, but her blush betrayed her. She had recalled what she had done to her precious Senpai. The memories made her cheeks flush red and her face feel numb.

“Well, you can go ahead and read them first if you want.”  The sadistic Alter Ego’s smile only widened. She lifted her body up so that the girl could pull the two doujinshi from beneath the pillow. Mashu took them wordlessly.

“I-I’m just inspecting them to make sure they’re nothing inappropriate,” Mashu made a poor excuse as she flipped open the Master 1/100 book. The moment she did, she began to sweat. “H-Hyah!”

‘Well, isn’t this something,’ thought the Alter Ego. Despite having lost against Master, Meltryllis had won in the end. The influences her [Sadistic Constitution] had on the other girls may have been necessary to some, but it seemed Mashu had no need for its addition. As Mashu became heavily focused in her reading material, the prima donna ballerina took the second book to join her in reading. A light giggle escaped her. She had found two things in Mashu: some teasing material and a future comrade.