By the morning two days later, Kaku deliberately left the inn an hour late. When he encountered the girl again, he became even more certain that there was definitely something wrong with their meetings!
"Oh, what a coincidence! We meet again, kind Mr. Long Nose." As soon as the girl saw Kaku, she smiled and struck up a conversation with him.
Although people often called him that, he still objected whenever he could. "I have a name. It's Kaku..."
The girl covered her mouth and giggled. "All right, I understand. Thank you for your help yesterday, Mr. Kaku. If I'd gotten home late, my stepmother would have scolded me."
"Stepmother?" Kaku paused and looked her over again, then asked in puzzlement, "Judging by your appearance, your family isn't very well-off, is it?"
"We're actually doing fairly well," the girl said casually. "My father treats me quite well, really."
"Then what's your name?"
"My name is Cinderella. Everyone calls me... Cinderella."
As she spoke, Cinderella gave a helpless smile.
That was right. Kaku had entered the Cinderella story instance from Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Cinderella was roughly the story of a girl whose father remarried after her mother died. Her stepmother had two daughters of her own, and the three of them abused Cinderella in every possible way. Later, when the Prince held a ball, Cinderella attended with the help of magic despite her stepmother's attempts to stop her. She became the most beautiful and dazzling person at the ball, caught the Prince's attention, and eventually married him and lived happily ever after...
That was the gist of the story.
But Kaku knew nothing about this fairy tale.
His training had left him no spare time for anything else since childhood, so he knew very few stories like this.
Like Enel, Kaku