"Whew~ C.C. getting fired up like that really was hard to handle." Letting out a long breath, Jiu Ming had to admit that her words had indeed struck at the very thing he had always been avoiding. He himself wasn't some flawless existence, either.
What C.C. had said was a flaw that quite a lot of people possessed.
Now that she had laid it all out so plainly, Jiu Ming actually felt less tangled up over it. A decision—as C.C. had said, it wasn't that he couldn't bring himself to say it... it was that he couldn't bear to! Damn it, was it wrong to love beauty!?
Going by Jiu Ming's personality, he feared that speaking up would hurt the other girls... Though there was some wishful thinking involved, he wasn't blind. He could naturally tell whether someone had feelings for him.
That was why he had kept hesitating.
But... this didn't seem to be the topic he and C.C. had started out discussing, did it? Tapping his head, he realized that, before he knew it, she had led the conversation somewhere else.
And he had a feeling that part of C.C.'s reason for doing this was to lay the groundwork for what came next...
Fifty special-made pizzas. Those all had to be ordered in advance, and they took quite a bit of time. Normally, he definitely would have "settled accounts" with C.C. over it. How could he have agreed so readily, without even thinking? "Tch... I actually don't feel annoyed." Rubbing his chest, Jiu Ming shook his head. Having taken just two steps after leaving the Mysterious Shop, a scorching sensation suddenly arose from the three silver claw marks on his arm. Fine... he had still appeared underground in the unknown forest.
So, less than three seconds after appearing,