The Flunkie, Kayla Aleberry

"Huh?"

The window that popped up in front of my face threw me for all of a second.

What hit first, cutting straight through the translucent pane, was Kayla's razor-sharp stare.

I snapped back to myself.

If she really was a heroine, I needed to start farming affection from this exact moment.

"Ah, uh... no, um, I'm sorry. Go ahead and sit."

I kept my voice as easy and gentle as I could manage, and Kayla clicked her tongue and leaned back in the chair.

I read through the file with her personal information on it, sneaking glances at her the whole time.

If I had to sum up the first impression in a single line—

She looks like she doesn't listen to a damn word anyone says.

Skin white as paper, and platinum-blonde hair so white I couldn't begin to guess how she'd bleached it. On top of that, eyes cocked up at the corners, a mouth that didn't so much as twitch, and an expression that regarded me with a faint, unmistakable disgust—all of it stacked into one overwhelming synergy. She radiated the classic aura of a pain-in-the-ass schoolgirl.

Yeah, I know this type. I saw plenty of them in Daechi-dong.

Those kids have zero manners. None.

"H-hi. I'm Kim Jinsoo, the teaching assistant who just started here. I'll be counting on you."

"......"

Okay. Refusing to answer a greeting was basically a required course.

The four before her had already put me through it, so I barely felt a thing—except this one was the heroine the system had assigned me.

Couldn't the first one at least be normal? A childhood friend! That's classic!! And the difficulty's low!

But from everything I'd pored over in the gallery's reactions so far, the game I'd been dropped into—Love & Secrets IN Academy City—was anything but easy.

Like SSS-Rank Hunter said, if it had been easy, my turn as number 429 never would have come around.

After that I asked her the same questions I'd asked the others.

The answers that came back were, of course, nothing.

Arms locked tight across her chest, Kayla wore a bored look and pointedly paid attention to anything but me. The attitude—ignore whatever I asked, no exceptions—was seriously pissing me off, except for exactly one thing.

"Looking over your file, it says your ability still hasn't manifested... Have you felt anything different lately?"

The moment I brought up her ability, Kayla locked her eyes on me and opened her mouth.

"Hey."

"Yeah?"

"In front of me, don't you dare say a single word about abilities. Because I want to kill you."

Hostility: MAX!

The look in her eyes was genuinely furious, and my skin prickled under it.

So shooting killing intent is actually a real thing.

Even then, I kept the smile on my face by pinching my thigh ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with the opposite hand until my head cleared.

Why?

Because if I folded here, heroine or not, every interaction after this would become impossible.

I'm Kim Jinsoo, the guy who kicked the door in at Seoul National through top-tier regular admissions.

I already said it. I've tutored those infamous Daechi-dong kids more than a few times.

Rule one for dealing with nightmare parents and students with no sense: keep the smile on, and speak in a soft voice.

If you're not part of some giant academy cartel and you're just a freelance tutor hustling in Daechi-dong, you need at least this much nerve and ambition. I may be hopeless at romance, but I can win a battle of wills against high schoolers who don't know how the world works.

"Hmm... but this is the Bureau of Ability Remedial Education, isn't it? An institution that exists, literally, to remediate abilities. And from what I see here, you were still receiving related training as recently as last week."

"...Do I not sound like I'm speaking words to you?"

Killing intent, fired again. The first time is the hard part. Holding through the second isn't difficult.

And then, step two. If they still won't bend, you drop your tone even further and put weight behind a polite voice.

I set the pen in my hand down with a sharp tap and looked Kayla straight in the eye.

I pictured the Crying Angel student from a moment ago.

Meeting this one's eyes is less scary than meeting hers, at least.

"Student. I'm here to help you."

"......"

"You've been through counseling nonstop up till now, haven't you? And every time you act like this, they don't even figure out what the problem is before they let it slide. So why are you here at all? Just go back."

"That's—!!!"

"Shh."

Volume. Do not raise your voice.

She clearly hadn't expected me to take her killing intent head-on and still do this. The look on Kayla's face was something to see.

"Anyway, let's end today's interview here. The next regular session is in two days, so have a proper answer ready by then. If you need help, I'll back you with everything I've got."

She looked ready to boil over again, so I clapped my hands once to snap her attention back.

In the end Kayla, completely dragged into my pace, clenched her teeth and shot to her feet.

"Forget it. I don't even want to deal with someone like you. I'm going to request a change of assigned assistant."

"Sure, sure. That doesn't matter to me either way. This is just work for me, after all. But no matter who you switch to, won't it be the same?"

"...What would you know?! Every single time, you people dangle hope in front of me, and you don't have the first idea what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking while I'm stuck in this place, and you just run your mouth because it's open—!!"

Kayla all but screamed it and stormed out of the interview room.

Bang!

The door slammed shut, and as if it had been waiting for exactly that, a status window rose in front of me.

"Ah."

Affection going down was a problem too?

Why is it only a dating sim in the parts that screw me over!!

Once I'd finished the paperwork that came after the interview, I clocked out properly and went back to the dorm.

Then I logged straight into the gallery and wrote a post.

Oh, and while I was at it, I changed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my nickname too.

I'd thought about picking something else, but according to the mod, the unwritten rule while you're still alive is to just stick the number you were assigned onto your real name. My real name was already out in the open anyway. If I could get decent information out of it, a gallery handle didn't matter in the slightest.

Meeting a heroine at all was clearly that hard. About half the comments were people congratulating me on the encounter.

The other half were locked onto the information I'd attached about Kayla.

The second batch was obviously the more useful, but a few of the words didn't come easily.

A reply landed on my comment almost immediately.

Aha. So basically a Level 5 kind of deal.

Sure enough, the more information I put out, the more new information came back. I started organizing everything the gallery had given me, piece by piece. Post a single thread and the seniors who'd already cleared the game tossed this and that my way. Was this what it felt like to be a newbie dropped into a game full of veterans?

When it had said Ability: Community Access, I thought it was screwing with me. For gathering information, though, this thing really was on another level.

No matter how many comments I checked, all I got were fragments. Nobody could tell me, with any certainty, what problem Kayla was actually dealing with right now. They were all just confused, or interested. It made sense. They hadn't all lived through the same run, so none of them could jump to a conclusion.

I was going through the other materials the Remedial Bureau had on Kayla when it hit me.

"...Weird, though. She's listed as a heat type, but the only experiments are flame ones?"

A clear sense of wrongness brushed the back of my mind.

Thermal-energy control. Unfortunately I wasn't a science kid, so physics wasn't my strong suit—but I did know the basics I'd picked up from the engineering and natural-science students.

Heat doesn't only mean fire.

If there's release, energy thrown outward, then wouldn't absorption—pulling in the heat around you—also fall under thermal-energy control?

I read the file over again, carefully.

Three keywords stood out. The attempt to force an ability to manifest through high-heat and overcurrent stimulation: a complete failure. Actual output held at 12.0% or below. Possession of flame resistance.

The pieces started locking together in my head.

If flame stimulation didn't drop her output to zero, but held that output at a constant, then of course someone could mistake her for having a flame-type ability. And the file said she had flame resistance on top of that.

So what if.

What if the reason Kayla didn't burn wasn't that she resisted fire, but that she instinctively absorbed the high heat being applied to her?

I posted the theory to the gallery.

And then a username that had never once commented on anything I'd written appeared.

He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he left a comment in a tone that carried a fair amount of certainty.