“You lost for one reason. Even at death’s door, you still chose mercy.”

She finished, and her right hand, cold as iron and humming with magic, cleaved the air as it swung.

THUD—!!

Magic amplified the punch. Power rippled like a quake. At the moment of impact, Sans’s body twitched. The fist buried deep into the ground. From a distance, it looked like a little girl’s hand swallowed by the earth.

Is he dead?

The Skeleton—did he die?

Dead, right?

He has to be.

A fist that shivers the ground isn’t something carbon-and-calcium bones can bear.

That merciless punch spelled ruin for the Skeleton—maybe cracked to chunks, maybe ground to dust…

“Ahh… my bad. Eyes were off.”

She said it lightly and pulled the hand wedged beside Sans’s round skull out of the dirt.

Pebbles came up with the motion and pattered onto Sans’s face. Bone kissed stone with a soft clack.

Sans: HP -0.5

She rose slowly off Sans, turned, and patted away dust that didn’t exist from her clothes. She even wiped the sweat that also didn’t exist from her brow.

Sans still didn’t get up. The skeleton frame lying motionless finally had the proper feel of a corpse.

“Why didn’t you aim for my head?”

Ling turned back, facing Sans. One small hand cupped her chin. Half-lidded eyes, thought weighing like mist.

“I didn’t buy your ‘eyes were off’ excuse. So I started thinking about the real reason. Because I was thinking, I didn’t have time to aim before I struck. So I ‘very unfortunately let my eyes go off,’ and then the punch ‘naturally went wide.’ Got it?”

It felt like listening to a tongue-twister, but Sans understood. His ever-unchanged grin bobbed twice. It looked odd, yet it somehow felt like a smile from the heart.

“Heh heh heh… you’re unexpectedly cute, kid. So we’re done fighting, yeah?”

Ling turned her back again. Arms crossed tight over her chest. Eyes closed, lips in a pout—every angle screamed tsundere.

“Hmph! We’ve been at it this long and neither of us got hurt. Keep going and it’s pointless. Better to stop.”

“But that pebble just now shaved ‘-0.5 HP’ off me…,” he muttered.

“Hm? What did you say?”

“Nothing. Don’t mind it.”

He said it as he braced his fallen body up with skeletal arms that had no muscles. He patted the thin film of dust off the back of his blue jacket. On the surface, he looked more or less like before, though the grit that had slipped into the frame was a pain to deal with.

“Alright. Since it’s nothing and the fight’s over, I don’t have a reason to stay, do I?”

Sans voiced the hint that he planned to leave. If he truly wanted out, a few teleports and Ling wouldn’t catch up. But they weren’t enemies now. He told her just to check whether she still had something to say.

Ling did have something to ask this bun-shaped Skeleton, Sans—but she wasn’t the one to ask. Alicia was.

She hopped lightly to Alicia’s back, nudged her forward, then slid into background mode.

“Cough, cough…”

She copied the old king’s habit of clearing his throat before speaking, and fixed a serious gaze on Sans’s pure-white pupils, no longer flickering yellow and blue.

“Can you tell me everything you know?”

No answer. With a dusty skeletal hand, from a dusty coat, he fished out a bottle of… ketchup, and tossed it toward Alicia with practiced ease.

Alicia blinked at the bottle flying in, but her arm still shot out on reflex and caught it.

She stared at the ketchup in her hands, at a loss. She wouldn’t drink this, obviously. But throwing it away right in front of him felt rude.

“Drink. It’ll settle you. Put your thoughts in order, then ask.”

Sans’s words snapped her awake. She’d just asked a very dumb question.

What does “tell me everything you know” even mean? He doesn’t know why she’s here. How could he know what she’s asking? And “everything you know”… was he supposed to tell her his birthday too? Was she here for a blind date?

Her cheeks reddened for no reason, probably as red as the ketchup in the glass bottle. It wasn’t shyness. It was the heat of public stupidity, shame detonating like a flare.

Luckily Alicia was mature at heart. She took a minute or two to settle down. Across from her, Sans finished a bottle of ketchup in that same span. Her restlessness calmed, and her mind’s questions lined up clean.

A pair of red eyes, filled with thought, met those tiny pure-white pupils.

“What I want to ask is…”