24 3.3
Ira spent the days sleeping and watching the drama that was his Host and her mission. The merman had managed to find wood, probably from a shipwreck, and brought it back to Ira so he could light a fire and avoid death by hypothermia. He kept track of time by his internal clock, that was correct down to the millisecond, but there was no place that he needed to be, so he didn't change bodies. His Host's mission was literally to die, there was no reason for Ira to be present to make sure it went according to plan.
If he had to help his Host when the mission was to simply die, they would never make it anyway.
The bed Ira had messily fashioned for himself was made of seaweed that the merman had gotten him, not so much braided together as just twined around and around. At the very least, it was more comfortable to sleep on than the cold ground.
As there wasn't much to do in the underground cave, Ira spent most of his time observing his Host. Thankfully, despite the fact that she was a teenager (he held out hope that the next one would be an adult) she was smarter than his previous Host and nowhere near as clumsy. At some point, that behavior just made him straight-out homicidal.
During the days that had passed since the shipwreck, his Host had been swimming around in the sea near where the Captain had ended up, with a rather serious head injury to boot. That meant that the mermaid princess had stayed to nurse him back to health.
His Host spent most of her time chasing after the princess, or sighing and cursing her fate. It appeared that the idea of dying for the mission didn't appeal to her. Ira didn't understand why, if she died successfully, she would succeed the mission, and be out of the Tutorial Mode and receive missions with a higher degree of difficulty. Which couldn't be achieved by just dying.
Turning around on his makeshift bed so he didn't get a bad back, Ira ignored what was in front of him in favor of watching his Host pace in the water while nervously waiting for the mermaid princess to return. Just the other day, the princess' father — that is, the King — had found out what his daughter was up to and been predictably furious. Not only was she literally playing with her food, she was putting herself in needless danger. When mermaids were caught, they weren't kept as pets. No, they were straight-out killed, because nobody sane wanted a pet that would eat you the first chance it got.
So to say that his Host was panicking because the King was Not Happy with her was an understatement. She was honestly considering just kidnapping the princess and dragging her back to her father if her mumbling was to be taken seriously.
An annoyed hiss dragged him out of his thoughts and he zoned back into his physical vision to the sight of the merman lying on the ground next to the water, more seaweed in his clawed hands. Not that that was going to change the fact that he was literally hours away from dying, due to starvation and dehydration, considering that there was no drinking water around. He hadn't told the merman because he didn't think it mattered.
Ira had already picked out a new body in the prince captain's court. That way he would once again be in the same area as the main characters and not be accused of not doing his job seriously.
It was always a drag, defending himself from such true accusations.
There was so little strength left in this body that he couldn't even get off the bed and greet the merman like they clearly wanted him to. Or so it seemed, by the hissing. Now, Ira was a system, there wasn't a language in all of universes that he couldn't understand, but where was the fun in that? It was more amusing to guess what the merman wanted.
Especially when he got it wrong, the merman made such hilarious expressions then.
A part of him was going to miss the merman when he switched bodies. He wondered why. Was this what humans called friendship?
He kind of liked it.
As the seconds ticked by and then the minutes, Ira felt calmer and calmer as his heart slowed down to a sluggish degree and he found it hard to keep his eyes open. Things were beginning to blur before him. This should probably be an uncomfortable experience, but Ira had turned off his ability to feel those things in preparation.
The more he blinked, the more suspicious the merman looked. As his vision failed him once more and he abandoned it in favor of his system sensors, he watched as the merman crawled closer to his body and appeared to wonder what was wrong.
Was the merman going to eat him? Ira really wanted to know.
His heart stopped.
Ira left the body that was now only a cooling corpse in a cave, never to be found.
They observed as the merman appeared to panic, shaking the corpse and trying to get it to wake up. When he realized it wasn't going to, that there was nothing in there, he looked around as if he would be able to see Ira.
Ira wandered around him in their incorporeal state and rose what could pass for an eyebrow. So the merman wasn't going to eat the body? What a disappointment. Ira would have really wanted to see that. Well, nothing more to it. The kisses were nice and all, but they had things to be doing and things were about to start heating up.
With a last look at the increasingly furious looking merman, Ira set off to find their new body.
The new body was that of a servant in service to the royalty.
Ira got to live in an actual castle, not that far off from the ocean, and he got to wear that cool butler uniform that he had seen in Kuroshitsuji. Being nothing but a servant, and from a perfectly ordinary family at that, he was essentially invisible to anybody even remotely important. If he wasn't who he was, he might be offended, but as it was, he was mostly amused.
A few days after he had switched body's, the Captain returned to the castle with hardly any memory of the woman that had saved him, but a feeling of deep gratitude to her. A day after that, he got engaged to a noble girl that had a passing similarity in looks to the mermaid princess. If you ignored that they belonged to two different species, that was.
Watching the Captain trying to woo what was a painfully shy noble girl that had already been engaged since childhood was hilarious. Watching the Captain becoming frustrated because she wouldn't say anything about saving him was even more so.
And then there was the mermaid princess.
The princess was absolutely furious with the Captain, because in his delirium, the man had promised to marry her as thank you for saving him and if there was one thing that merpeople took seriously, it was promises. So with every time the princess saw him with that noble girl, her rage only increased, until finally the camel's back broke and she defied her father's will and set off to find the Sea Witch.
Because Ira was a curious being and he had never denied it, he watched as she searched for the Sea Witch.
Ira actually stopped what he was doing and blinked a few times too many in surprise when he found out that the Sea Witch was the same merman that had found him and dragged him to that cave.
He did not see that coming. Now, this was fun.
For the sake of even more fun, he didn't turn off his ability to understand the merpeople's language that he had done the whole time in the presence of the merman and instead shamelessly listened in to what they said.
The mermaid princess squared her shoulders and tried to look as intimidating as possible. It didn't really work when in the presence of someone as otherworldly as Ira's merman. She breathed in water and demanded, "I need legs."
"Absolutely, Your Highness. Would you like just the legs or them attached to something? And fresh ones or decomposed ones?" the Sea Witch promptly answered without hesitating.
The princess frowned heavily and snapped, "I want legs so I can walk on land, idiot."
"Oh." the merman hummed and swam closer to her. "Now that is interesting. Whatever could you desire on land? A breakfast buffet? But you know how your father will react if he finds out where you've gone. I'm afraid I can't help you. I don't wish to die, you see."
"What's the price?"
The merman smiled, a smile that said that he had just won the whole game. "Your voice."
She gave a mocking laugh. "That's all? I thought you would demand something more precious. Fine, then. My voice is yours. Now get me legs I can use."
"A deal has been struck. A deal shall be honored."
The merman's hand grabbed a tight hold of the princess' neck and with a hiss, it became almost transparent, where it then passed right through her throat and returned holding what was unmistakably her vocal chords. When he let her go and his hand returned to normal, he had already bottled the vocal chords and he gazed upon the princess like a predator who had just eaten its prey. He threw her a pitch-black bottle.
"You'll want to get to land before you drink that."
She glared at the merman all the way through the motions of picking up the bottle and running away. As she did so, she collected his Host that had waited outside the same way one does luggage.
Ira continued his servant duties on autopilot as he watched as his Host trailed after the mermaid princess with a hesitant expression on her inhuman face. Regardless, she still followed closely behind, all the way to the land where the Captain's castle dwelled.
When they arrived and had crawled their way up a beach until they were only partially in the water, the princess drank the majority of the content in the bottle and thrust the bottle in his Host's direction. His Host seemed to be shaking with both anticipation and dread as she took it and swallowed the little that was left.
The change was ugly, and downright unnatural.
It looked painful the way torture did and while the mermaid princess had no voice, his Host did and she screamed.
Ira felt the distinct urge to cackle like a madman.
He knew there was a reason he liked that merman.
Smiling, he preformed his duties with more flair as he observed with half of his mind as his Host and the mermaid princess both passed out from the sheer amount of pain of the transformation. After all, not only did they gain legs, they gained the ability to breathe purely through the air, and lost the ability to breathe in water.
That was quite a lot of internal change. He wondered if either of them would be able to procreate now or if they had lost the ability. In both forms.
Some people caught sight of the two naked woman lying on the beach passed out and called for help. A whole mass of people came to see what the fuss was about and by the time the women were carted off by the town guards, a lot of people had seen them naked, which didn't do anything good for their reputations. People could be so judgmental when they didn't know the whole story.
Ira contained his urge to laugh and instead cast about his attention to the Captain. He was once again in the middle of a date with the noble girl. And he was becoming evermore frustrated.
Who would ever guess that the noble girl was the assassin that would accidentally kill the mermaid princess?
