As I held Claret to my chest while I stroked her silky hair, my eyes went up, imagining what sort of person the Scarlet I was named after was like. People always had good things to say about her, but it was like reading about some historical figure. Even the image Claret painted with her words didn't do much to improve that image.

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After spending a little while thinking about it and giving in and doing some wishful thinking, I snapped out of my little distraction.

(Right. One more, I'll do one more pass.)

Switching back, I read through the code for my new skill line by line, checking all of the references and subroutines. Even the code I simply copy pasted were checked so I could confirm that I hadn't introduced some sort of weird and unexpected interaction.

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I've never made so many passes on a piece of code before in my lives without test running it first. If it wasn't for Alicia, I wouldn't have bothered putting so much effort into it.

I reached the end of the skill and my confidence in it was at an all-time high. No matter how many times I went through it, there wasn't even a hint of trouble, though admittedly that's how all code looks like right before you find a massive bug that requires weeks of rewriting to fix. That was how things went on the game I made which lead to all of this after all.

But after spending days doing nothing but debugging and not even finding any bugs to fix in the last dozen or so passes, activating it was the only way to make sure there wasn't actually any bugs.

Even still, I was hesitant. If there was anything I had missed, there was a chance that I would do something irreversible. But at the same time, if I hadn't missed anything, my timidness would keep stalling Alicia's return. I had already spent more than a day doing checks that found absolutely nothing, and while I didn't think that in itself was bad, I could easily continue to check the skill's code endlessly if I didn't gather myself to take the plunge.

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I took in a deep breath, then exhaled.



Claret looked up at me and tilted her head.

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A familiar sounding voice echoed through my head, but the pain made it difficult to place. My entire head felt hot and hurt, like the inside of my head had suddenly turned into a pressure cooker but the relief valve wasn't working right and was threatening to explode.

"Aaaahhhh...!"

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A small, distorted voice escaped my lips as I held my hand in my hands, as if I could contain the pressure by simply pushing back in with my hands. The fever from my head transmitted to my hands, clear that the heat wasn't just my imagination.

"Master! What's wrong! What's happened?!"

Claret's voice penetrated through the growing fog of pain, but I could only barely understand her words, and didn't have the leeway to respond. Just trying to think made my head feel even hotter.

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