Club Membership (2)
The Research Building sat in a forgotten corner of the academy.
And of all the rooms in that building, the clubroom for the Ability Research Club was the one tucked away at the very top floor, in the far-right laboratory nobody ever seemed to visit.
So, yeah. It took some work to find.
No wonder students who got interested in joining the club turned tail and ran after getting lost on the way here, muttering that this place was a damn maze.
Still, if I said that out loud, the club’s only member, Meirin, would probably suffer a catastrophic emotional injury, so I kept that thought carefully locked away where it belonged.
“Ah, found it. This is the Ability Research Club. Let’s go.”
“Wow, this is really tucked away. Clubrooms are usually more accessible than this...”
Even now, that clueless bastard was saying things no one needed to hear.
I had no idea how he could immediately drag the mood down the second I started trying to think well of something.
I swallowed the comment I wanted to make and knocked on the door. From inside, someone called out in a bright voice for us to come in.
Thankfully, it seemed she hadn’t heard the idiot’s muttering.
“Welcome!!! C-could it be a dream...? Four research subjects?! Ow, that hurts... It’s real!!”
The tiny, faintly smelly little person greeting us with far too much energy had to be Meirin.
Then the slightly gloomy girl sitting over there, dark all over, must be Lucia.
“Why are you here? And why is he here too...?”
Minho stared at me the second he saw me and demanded to know what I was doing there.
His suspicion was so naked it stung a little, but... I had a job to do.
“Ahaha, well... I wasn’t exactly following you or anything. I just saw the club brochure and thought it sounded a little interesting, so I came to check it out...”
Minho still looked at me with obvious distrust, as if he couldn’t believe a word I was saying.
Yeah. Ouch. That still hurt.
“It’s not like I’m trained in weapon handling, and it’s not like I need martial arts either. And if I went to a magic club, both she and I are special-type users, so...”
“Tw-two special-types?! H-hahahaha, heeheeheehee...!!”
Before the situation could drag on any longer, I casually dropped a piece of information Meirin would lose her mind over.
The moment I did, she cut off our conversation, thrust a pile of forms into our arms, and said that if we wanted to join, we should fill them out right now.
Her eyes were glittering with naked desire.
“I still don’t even really know what kind of club this is—”
Jinhyun raised a hand and asked what exactly the club did, but Meirin shot him a rather eerie look and shouted, “I’ll explain later, just fill it out!”
She was practically trembling with excitement.
Well, of course. She was a total ability nerd.
Special-types were rare enough to get anyone worked up.
As I filled out the profile sheet, I tried to recall what I knew about this club and Meirin.
First, Meirin.
She was the eccentric who loved abilities so much she’d turned down the vice president position in the martial arts club and started this one instead.
Even though this was basically a one-person club, it hadn’t been dissolved because, for now, she kept producing results.
At the academy and in other clubs, people trained their abilities. Here, they analyzed and studied them.
Not “how to make it stronger,” but “how else could this be used?” That was the kind of club it was.
Lucia would join because she wanted to erase her own ability, and Minho would join because he wanted to save Lucia while becoming stronger himself.
As for why Lucia wanted to erase her ability in the first place... let’s just say it was the sort of depressing teenage problem you’d expect from someone that age.
Not looking at me, looking at me; I want you to notice me—something like that.
While I was thinking, I’d already finished everything they’d told us to fill out.
The others were either done or nearly done as well.
“You’re done! Give it here!”
The instant we finished, Meirin snatched the forms out of our hands and started reading with frightening intensity.
“First year, enhancement and transformation hybrid, first year, emission type, first year, special type leaning toward emission... heeheeheehee, firs...t...year...?”
Then she looked up and stared at me.
“You’re... a first year?”
Her gaze dropped to my body.
“Ah... sorry, sorry. A-anyway. A walking chemical factory, huh... wow. Amazing, in a lot of ways.”
I wasn’t exactly built like a first-year student, but was that really worth that much shock?
She seemed a little deflated compared to a moment ago.
Was height really a complex in the original story? I didn’t remember it being mentioned.
Meirin kept staring at me for a while, then glanced down at her own feet and let out a little “ngh,” as if she’d hurt herself somehow.
What the hell? Did she have some hidden illness setting or something?
“...No, wait. That’s great. That’s great! Anyway, welcome to the Ability Research Club! First years, you’re all still chicks, hehe.”
Meirin welcomed us warmly and handed over the club chatroom info along with the club plan document.
Thursday at 4 p.m., huh.
“Then... uh. You can go now. I’m probably going to spend the whole day analyzing your profiles. Two people would’ve been fine, but four takes a while!”
“I see... All right. Then I’ll see you at the next club meeting.”
Lucia replied in her same listless voice and left the clubroom.
Jinhyun also said he looked forward to working with us and took off.
Just as I was about to leave too, Minho called out to me.
“Blanca. I wanted to talk to you for a second. If you’ve got time, would that be okay?”
“Huh?”
Minho? Me? He had business with me?
That wasn’t in the script.
“Y-yeah, of course! But, um, here?”
“No, not here. It’s a little awkward to say it here, so how about a café near the student cafeteria?”
I was completely thrown. This was so far outside my expectations it felt surreal.
It was like your idol suddenly walked right up to you and you forgot how to breathe.
That was exactly how I felt now.
I was happy, flustered, excited, and at the same time I wanted to politely say I wasn’t ready yet and back out by an inch.
But there was no way I could refuse.
“Got it! I’ll pay!”
I practically stood my tail on end and volunteered to play the sucker.
— — — -
I could tell her interest in me wasn’t hostility, but something closer to goodwill.
Otherwise she wouldn’t have ordered something pretty expensive and then cheerfully let me pay for it.
But that was all I knew.
Why did she keep following me wherever I went? And how did she always show up wherever the major incidents were about to happen?
And why was she trying to get close to me?
I didn’t know a single thing, so today I planned to dig until I was satisfied—if not completely, then at least enough.
“...What did you want to talk about?”
Blanca looked unusually bright, but also a little tense.
“Ah, it’s nothing major. I just had a few things I wanted to ask. About the entrance exam and the entrance ceremony. Is that okay?”
I watched her closely, hoping for some strange reaction, but there wasn’t one.
“Yeah.”
“Got it. Then... could you tell me what exactly happened during the entrance exam?”
“Ah... that. Well... looking back on it now, it’s a little embarrassing...”
Blanca averted her eyes, saying it like it was nothing, but what she was describing was anything but casual.
She said that, in order to knock out all the competition and leave a strong impression on the academy staff, she’d released sleep gas recklessly the moment the exam began.
So it was because of her.
That’s why the beast attack during the entrance ceremony had been canceled.
I didn’t ask whether she’d done it expecting that outcome.
It was too early to jump to that conclusion.
“Wouldn’t you have died if you messed up?”
“Ah, I adjusted the concentration so it wouldn’t be poisonous, of course. Don’t worry. I’m pretty familiar with that sort of thing.”
She said it with the smug air of someone boasting about something trivial.
“...I’m genuinely glad you’re an aspiring hero and not a villain.”
That was my honest, unvarnished feeling.
If I had to face a villain with that kind of skill and that level of control...
I didn’t even want to think about it.
“Huh? Oh. R-right...?”
She seemed to have taken my rather rude remark as a compliment and only gave me an awkward smile.
“Well, I get what happened during the entrance exam. No wonder your classmates were pissed. Anyway, how did you know something was going to happen at the entrance ceremony?”
“Uh... huh?”
As soon as I brought that up, she looked flustered.
“Uh, wait. You knew about that too...? More importantly, how did you know what I knew?”
“We were sitting next to each other at the entrance ceremony. We were that close, so there’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed you drawing in your mana. You knew, didn’t you? That something was going to happen.”
When I put it that way, she hesitated, looking like she genuinely didn’t know how to answer.
I didn’t want to think about it, but if she had the same kind of original-story knowledge that I did...
Then someone like that wouldn’t be able to answer me easily.
If you asked a student who’d copied the answer key how they solved the problem, they wouldn’t be able to explain it.
They couldn’t very well say they’d seen the answer key, could they?
At the time I’d only thought she’d found out through some roundabout route, but now I needed to figure it out by any means necessary.
To uncover who she really was.
If she had seen the same answer key I had...
...
Blanca fell silent.
That silence felt eternal to me.
“I-it was like this weird chill ran up my spine, and my heart felt like it froze solid. Usually when that happens, something bad is about to show up...”
And then she tapped her own ear as she continued, saying she’d known it by intuition.
“I had this feeling something was definitely going to happen. But, well... nothing happened, so I guess that’s a good thing, right...?”
“So it’s an animal-kin instinct thing.”
Instinct, huh. It was true that beast-kin were said to have unusually sharp senses.
Some of them even had something close to a sixth sense.
If that was how she’d known, then it explained everything.
But... something still felt off, deep in my gut.
What was it? What was I missing?
I thought it over carefully.
And then I remembered.
The reason was so simple it almost made me laugh.
How could you sense something that never happened in the first place?
Instinct warned you about events that might happen. It didn’t warn you about things that would never happen at all.
In other words, there was no way she could have sensed an attack on the entrance ceremony before it was even canceled.
There wasn’t even an attacker to sense.
There was no way her intuition would have reacted.
And more than that, the expression she’d worn back then.
That had been unmistakable: surprise and regret.
The face of someone whose long-prepared project had been turned to ash in an instant.
I was certain of it.
She was lying to me.
Whether that was because she didn’t want to reveal how she’d gotten the information, or because she was hiding the fact that she was a transmigrator too... I couldn’t tell.
But she was hiding something from me. That much was clear.
And if I added that to the strange degree of interest she’d been showing me...
...No, that was too much speculation. Too ridiculous.
Wiping away the impossible nonsense, I focused on Blanca again.
“So beast-kin really do have incredible senses, huh.”
“I guess so...? Ah, not all beast-kin are like that, though. I mean, I’m a little exceptional.”
Still, I could tell she wasn’t doing it to get in my way or anything like that.
My guess was that Blanca hadn’t planned it that way.
If she had, she wouldn’t have needed to feel regret.
She might have been annoyed if she’d gone for a reaction like, Well, of course that happened.
Good. For now, I knew one thing: she was hiding something.
Then the next question was... why was she so nice to me?
I asked the next thing I needed to know.
Why she treated me so kindly.
I could dismiss it by saying I was the heroine.
Even in the original story, there were heroines who just fell in love at first sight.
But Blanca was absolutely not that kind of person.
So I wanted to hear her reason, even if it was a lie.
“...When I was little, there was someone who helped me a lot. You kind of remind me of that person.”
There was no way that was true. Even she had to know it was a stupid excuse.
She said that and took a sip of her coffee.
Truth status: impossible to verify.
Probably a lie.
But it didn’t matter. I’d gotten what I wanted.
She had business with me. And she didn’t want to make an enemy of me.
The fact that she answered so readily instead of storming off after I bluntly asked who she was proved it.
So, was Blanca my ally or my enemy?
...I still couldn’t say.
But maybe I didn’t need to stay quite as guarded as I’d thought.
The best move would be to keep playing along while I kept digging into her identity.
Once I’d sorted out my thoughts, the heaviness in my chest lifted a little.
Maybe that was why a pointless question popped into my head.
“By the way, is it okay for you to drink coffee?”
I’d read somewhere that caffeine was poisonous to cats.
“I’m not a cat, you know?!”
Ah.
Right.