Emilia cleared her thoughts and eventually calmed down. She then took a deep breath and exhaled out.
Lith shivered slightly as he felt Emilia blowing some hot air in his ear. He tapped her lower back to get her attention and wrote on her forearm slowly word by word:
‘Miss Emilia, are you trying to seduce me?’
“What!?” Emilia said in alarm as she understood what Lith wrote.
‘Oh crap! I accidentally flirted with her despite being mute. Shit, think of something to turn this situation around!’ Lith thought to himself.
He soon came up with some ideas but quickly acted on the one he thought made the most sense.
He wrote on Emilia’s forearm again:
‘I am kidding. Anywho, something’s up?’
Emilia sighed in relief realizing that he was just joking with her and probably trying to tease her.
The usual joking tone wasn’t there when Lith wrote that and Emilia thus didn’t understand that he was just teasing her. But when he clarified, she understood that it was just the usual and he definitely didn’t mean it.
She stopped panicking and brought her face close to his ear again.
This time, she didn’t have her lips graze his cheeks and said to him in his ear, “do you want me to ‘see’ things and get this treasure hunt over with?”
She said it in such a manner because she felt that it was cheating and felt slightly guilty for doing so. She couldn’t come up with other solutions yet and so thought that this might be the best option to do so.
The competition was of a low level and she was an Emperor Rank. She could easily use her prowess without triggering any sensor in the stadium but since she liked fair play, she didn’t do so and did things normally along with Lith.
Now though, since she wasn’t able to come up with a solution, she decided to cheat a bit. Of course, she wouldn’t break the rule of having her vision blocked, she would simply already her spiritual sense and look for things. It wasn’t really seeing but sensing things so she felt that it might okay to do so.
Lith thought for a bit and wrote on her hand:
‘No, let’s search normally. It’ll be more fun.’
“Alright.” Emilia gave up on her thoughts and decided to do what Lith had asked her to do.
The two walked in a certain random direction that Lith picked after tossing a coin and walked there. Lith was on a lookout for anything odd that was present while Emilia was trying her best to feel things around her as well. She couldn’t see but the rules didn’t say anywhere that she couldn’t sense things either, so she did just that.
While sensing, she thought to herself, ‘it seems dark everywhere. I wonder how that stupid lizard goes about her day while being blindfolded.’
Emilia’s thoughts drifted and she was thinking about Arya. She was Emilia’s only friend and it wasn’t a surprise that she thought about her like this.
Emilia had nothing better to do as she wasn’t able to sense anything around her immediate surrounding and also couldn’t look. She could only wait for Lith and thus was currently thinking about other things.
Lith soon found a fist-sized rock on the grassy ground. Normally, it would get ignored by everyone but Lith noticed it because there was no other rock present on the grassy ground. At least the areas from where Lith came from.
Lith rubbed his thumb on Emilia’s palm to tell her that he found something and Emilia walked close to him and sensed the things around. She too found the rock stranger after sensing it.
“It’s the rock.” She said.
Lith nodded. He crouched and turned the rock. There was nothing present there. He then decided to look under the rock but there still wasn’t anything.
Finding nothing for another few tries, Lith decided to crush the rock and see if there was anything present. If there was nothing, he would simply move to another place.
Lith curshed the rock and found a paper slip fall out. He took a look at it and the slip read as:
‘Where the crowd is most dense, you shall find a mop.’
Lith smiled after finally getting a clue of some sort. He got up and tried to high five Emilia but realized she couldn’t see his this gesture and simply lowered his hand down in awkwardness.
He walked close to her and instead hugged her, surprising Emilia. But she didn’t call him out for it and simply hugged back.
Maybe there was something that asked him to hug her? She thought and dropped the topic of him hugging her.
Lith, for the first time had his nostrils struck with Emilia’s scent. Her scent was a mild… orange flavor? What the fuck?
Lith got confused and wasn’t able to understand what scent it was. It surely was very fragrant and nice to smell and also wasn’t overpowering or strong. It was mild and sweet, perfectly aligning with her gentle and kind attitude.
‘Ugh… what am I thinking? We are in the middle of a competition.’ Lith thought to himself and let go of the hug.
He cleared his throat, trying to pretend that nothing happened a few seconds ago, but no voice came out of his coughing.
Lith grabbed Emilia’s hand again and wrote on it:
‘Found something. Let’s go.’
Emilia nodded and interlocked her fingers with Lith’s and held his hand once again. She didn’t feel shy at all for doing so. She was technically blind right now, and needed help. This was a good excuse– ahem, reason, for her to hold Lith’s hand. It’s not like she liked him or anything of such sorts.
Or did she?
Well she didn’t. She only thought of each other as good friends as of now. Most importantly, student and teacher, and nothing more.
But despite that, she was slowly opening up in front of Lith and also was getting more and more free. Handholding thus felt normal to her, despite it being a scandalous sort of thing in the Angel Continent.
Lith felt nothing about this as he handholding felt nothing much to him. He had done things much more… let’s say… interesting than handholding.
He walked with Emilia and was in search of a dense crowd. He soon found the spectator crowds sitting on the stadium seats to be more dense than the ones participating. He walked towards them since there was no such thing as the crowd being that of the participants only and soon reached towards the most dense crowd.
The people sitting looked at Lith with curious gaze and wondered why he had come up towards them from the ground. Though they were curious, they didn’t talk to him so as to not disturb him.
Lith looked around with Emilia and soon found a mop present below one of the person’s seat.
He got close to it and took the mop out. As he did so, a slip flew out along with the mop.
Lith held the slip and looked at what it was. There was a line written on the slip that read:
‘Only a maniac would mop the…’