Unintentional
The next day, Minho was looking at me with a little more warmth than he had before.
He was still wary, but it had gone from the gaze you’d give a tiger to the one you’d give a feral alley cat.
...Can I say it worked, at least a little?
Honestly, I had no idea how much of my lie had actually landed.
Right. It had all been a lie.
The sensitivity thing, the childhood kid I used to help out—everything.
I’d just made the whole thing up on the spot.
So, yeah, it had been a bit sloppy.
There was no way the protagonist would fail to see through such a half-baked lie.
He’d figured it out for sure. And if he hadn’t pressed me any further, maybe it was because he’d already learned everything he wanted to know.
...Haa, this isn’t easy. He really is the protagonist.
I couldn’t be certain what kind of answer he’d been hoping for, but I had a rough idea.
Maybe he’d been about to ask whether we were the same kind of transmigrator.
Minho’s mind worked fast.
Seeing the things he knew keep tangling up one by one because of me, it made sense that he’d start suspecting things.
More than that, I hadn’t even realized he’d been watching me too. But apparently he had.
I already knew this body drew attention.
Still, I hadn’t expected it to pull the protagonist’s gaze as well.
How had these tits never once been useful for anything? I was starting to hate this body even more.
...And yet, just for yesterday, I was sincerely grateful to have transmigrated into it.
If I’d been an ordinary human, I would’ve been ten times more on edge trying to come up with a convincing answer.
I never thought I’d live long enough to get any real use out of being a beastkin.
Of course, I still got treated like a beastkin discrimination was just part of breathing.
Right. I had cat ears on my head and a tail on my ass.
But that didn’t mean I was actually a cat.
Caffeine was still allowed, for one thing.
It was just that the effects tended to be a little more dramatic than they were for other people, so I didn’t drink it often.
How dramatic, you ask? One cup, and I’d been unable to sleep properly last night.
I’d already been a night owl, sure, but I hadn’t managed to fall asleep until four in the morning.
So now I was dead tired.
Lunch was creeping closer, sunlight was pouring in through the window, and I was caught in a miserable cycle of dozing off, waking up, dozing off again.
I wanted nothing more than to sleep in peace, but Lapis kept waking me up, so there was no chance of that happening.
Lapis seemed very busy, diligently taking notes while also poking my tail awake with her own whenever I started to nod off.
It was touching, really, that someone pretending to be a friend was taking care of me because she actually thought of me as one. But could she maybe just let me sleep?
I wanted to say that.
“B-Blanca, j-just hang in there a little longer... L-Lunch is almost here, s-so you can sleep then. T-The teacher has been staring at you hard from the start...!”
“I-is that so. Haaam...”
From now on, when I went to cafes, I wasn’t going to order coffee just to look cool. I’d get white chocolate instead. Or just hot chocolate.
Come to think of it, I was a high school girl, so I could eat all the sweet stuff I wanted and no one could complain, right?
Yeah, that sounded good.
I should enjoy the privilege of being a schoolgirl. I never asked for this body, but a person ought to live with what they’ve been given.
I was so tired that nothing from class would stick in my head.
And if you asked whether it was different when I wasn’t tired, the answer was... not really.
Still, there was a pretty big difference between retaining a few words and having the whole thing go in one ear and out the other because it didn’t even sound like human speech in the first place.
I was glad there wasn’t anything like a conduct score. Or... was there? Did they have one?
Who cared if I lost a few points? It’s not like I’d get expelled over it.
Half-asleep, I half-listened my way through class, and before I knew it, I was sitting in the student cafeteria.
“Blanca. By any chance... what time did you go to sleep yesterday?”
When did we get here? I’d definitely just been in the classroom a second ago. That was strange. Had the protagonist teleported me? No, wait. That was later. Way later.
“Blanca...? Blanca!”
Only when Yeonhwa shouted my name did I finally manage to surface from the fog.
“Huh? Oh. Four in the morning. Haaam... Haaah... Sorry, I’m kind of wiped out. This tonkatsu rice bowl is good...”
“My goodness, what were you doing that kept you awake so late?!”
“Just drank some coffee... So, what were we talking about again...?”
There had definitely been some kind of conversation, but I’d been too busy dozing to catch any of it.
As expected of someone with a Golden Retriever personality, Yeonhwa just smiled brightly again and said they were talking about where to go after school to hang out.
“But... you look so exhausted. Maybe we should go another day. Ugh. We were going to celebrate making it through the first week safely.”
“No, no. I can just nap during training time when no one’s looking. Um... was it a board game cafe? We’re going there?”
“What, you were listening after all! Yeah, we’re going to a board game cafe!”
Excited, Yeonhwa kept talking after that about how it might help with hero work.
She could have just said she liked that sort of thing and wanted to try it with her friends, and no one would’ve said a word.
But once she started talking about real-world strategy and the like, it was enough to make you wonder if there was actually something to it.
“Okay, okay. You don’t have to sell it that hard. I’ll go with you, so stop now.”
As I forced myself to swallow yet another yawn, I gently told her to cut it out.
No matter how good something was, if someone went on and on about how good it was, people tended to start looking at it suspiciously for no reason.
“C-Can I come too...?”
“Of course, Lapis! A four-player board game would be fun, wouldn’t it?!”
Lapis was coming too, huh. That might not be bad.
After all, experience points always got split when the party had more members.
If Lapis was with us, she might even end up tearing through Minho and Yeonhwa before they could do anything.
If you were wondering what that meant, it was actually pretty simple.
On the way to enjoy the board games, the game’s protagonist party gets ambushed by a villain organization.
By the Suicides—call them whatever you wanted.
A group that hadn’t existed in the original story, made up of complete lunatics who cared more about making a name for themselves than about staying alive.
There was no way these kids could really enjoy a board game outing without something happening.
And yet Yeonhwa, blissfully unaware of that future, kept chatting away as happily as ever.
What had just been a board game conversation had somehow turned into talk about clubs.
“What? You and Blanca are in the same club?!”
“Yeah. He said if I didn’t have anywhere else to go, wouldn’t I want to join the same club as him, so I went with him.”
“What kind of club is it?!”
“An Ability Research Club. Supposedly it’s a club that analyzes abilities and explores new possibilities... but I still don’t really know what they do.”
Minho was telling Yeonhwa about what had happened in his club, and Yeonhwa nodded along, saying that there really were clubs like that.
“That’s a weird place... They didn’t do anything on the first day?”
“What did you all do on your first day?”
“Right. We showed our abilities, and then they matched us with upperclassmen who suited us.”
“I-I was the same as Yeonhwa...”
Lapis wasn’t looking at Yeonhwa anymore, but at me, her eyes full of expectation.
...Uh, good job?
It still felt a little weird while I was doing it, but when I patted her head, Lapis seemed happy.
Like a pet, honestly.
For a moment, I seriously felt like I wanted to raise one.
“Heh, hehe...”
...Though there were a few problems with that, so it’d be impossible.
Come to think of it, she really had no idea she was being treated like a pet.
Mm. Even for me, that made me feel a little guilty. I’d have to be a little nicer to her from now on.
---
Blanca, just as she had confidently declared, was sleeping whenever she could steal a break during training.
I couldn’t decide whether I should wake her or not.
You’re not supposed to fool around during class. But at the same time, you’re not supposed to disturb someone who’s sleepy, either.
So I had no idea what the right thing to do was.
Even our homeroom teacher, rather than condemning her behavior and waking her up, had simply watched over her as she slept, and the other students in class were only sneaking glances at her without interfering.
What was the right choice in a situation like this?
...If it were my idol, what would he have done?
“Minho. What are you doing in front of Blanca?”
“Oh. Well... I wasn’t sure whether I should wake Blanca or not.”
When I said that, Yeonhwa gave me a wry smile, as if to say she’d figured as much, and answered for me.
“Wouldn’t it be better not to wake her? You saw at lunch how tired she looked. Sleeping in class isn’t exactly ideal, but I don’t think waking her up is right either.”
Yeonhwa made the decision for me. But I wasn’t satisfied.
“...Mm. Minho, I think it’s about time you started making some judgments on your own. Things are a little different from back then.”
Yeonhwa looked at me with something like pity. But I still couldn’t do it.
I was scared.
“...Hey, if you’re going to chatter, go farther away. And you— you’re blocking the sunlight. Besides, you can’t even decide something this simple on your own? Honestly. Is that thing on your shoulder just decoration?”
Then Blanca suddenly stood up, snapped at me, and moved away.
“Blanca, th-that’s... Minho has his reasons...!”
Yeonhwa looked a little startled by Blanca’s reaction and tried to defend me.
“Maybe. But if you hesitate like that and fail to save someone, do the bereaved families of the victims you couldn’t rescue care about your reasons one by one? I don’t think so.”
But Blanca only shot back in a voice full of irritation, sharp as a blade.
And that one sentence pierced straight into my head.
“...Sorry. I guess I zoned out for a second because I was tired.”
After saying it, Blanca seemed to realize it had been a bit harsh, and she apologized immediately before leaving.
“Minho... don’t think too hard about it. If Blanca knew your circumstances, she’d feel differently...”
“...No, she’s not wrong. If that person had hesitated back then, I wouldn’t be here.”
Yeonhwa tried to comfort me, but Blanca’s words struck me far more deeply.
I couldn’t keep letting myself be trapped by old wounds forever.
---