The Choice Question
The second floor of the villa, the study.
Ash sat on the Brown Soft Chair near the window, holding a manga in his hands. Beside him, a Crescent-Shaped Style Lamp cast a gentle glow, illuminating the fantasy world on the pages. Outside, the wind and snow howled, and the cold gusts rattled against the windows, but inside the study there were only faint sounds, making it feel all the more serene.
Igula did not actually like reading. The guy's tastes were, in truth, extremely close to those of a housewife. He especially loved watching those prime-time family Shadow Dramas packed with huge contradictions, huge conflicts, and absurd melodrama—and he watched them at thirty-two times speed. Though his excuse was, "Only works with the highest viewership can accurately reflect the current state of society and its moral values," Ash had discovered that he even watched these dramas to kill time while taking a bath, which made all his arguments seem terribly pale.
But he needed to force himself to read. After all, when your team had one dumbass who only read manga and one Necromancer whose brain was soaked in preservatives, it was hard not to shoulder the responsibility of gathering more information.
It was like a group project where two teammates openly declared, "Work? No way. I've only got one rotten life. At most, I'll handle the presentation," and simply gave up. Obviously, the one person who did not want to die ended up doing most of the work.
Strictly speaking, Ash and the others had only stayed in this villa for one night. The next day, the three of them had been locked up in the Multistar Prison. But Ash still remembered that when he came over the next day and opened the study, he saw