The Dragon and the School Trip Aftermath
The day we headed home.
"That was one long week..."
"Siu. A week is already a long time."
"I mean it felt even longer than that."
Ha-yan and I naturally chose seats next to each other on the plane as well. And with her temper fully soothed, she leaned against my shoulder the moment she sat down and started humming under her breath.
"I should've just let them fight it out to the bitter end. My Ha-yan... my Ha-yaaan..."
"If you had, both of us would still be frozen solid by now. Or we'd have exploded from sheer frustration and died."
"Ah. Okay, that's a bit much."
"We might not even have made it to the souvenir shop."
"That is so much worse!! Hey. Hey. Good thing you made up. From now on, just don't fight, all right? Please?"
"What do you want from me..."
Choi Hoon and Do Ji-yeon, seated behind us, poked at my shoulders and tossed out that completely unhinged conversation.
Apparently, when the two of us had walked into the hotel lobby hand in hand — successfully, more or less — Do Ji-yeon and Choi Hoon, who had been vacuuming up a mountain of Jeju Island snacks, had both let out sighs of relief.
And right up until the very last moment before we entered the airport, Choi Hoon had been throwing flirtatious glances at Rhea, only for Do Ji-yeon to grab him by the ear and force a tearful farewell out of him.
Whatever the two of them were muttering about behind us, Ha-yan leaned against my shoulder and whispered in a small voice.
"Hiiing. But once we get back, I have to start practicing for the magic exam for real, and prep for finals on top of that."
"Wasn't that supposed to be fine as long as I help with both?"
"I'm not worried. I just hate the fact that I have to study."
"Can't be helped. For the magic exam I can teach you plenty through mana control, but finals you actually have to study for yourself. Or should I just dump the entire finals content straight into your head?"
Ha-yan lit up for a second, about to jump on the offer — then deflated again and said,
"Tch. Then you'd find out every single one of my memories and every emotion I've ever felt."
"Ah. Close one."
"What do you mean, close one!!"
Ha-yan pinched my cheek with her fingers, but it didn't hurt at all. Part of it was the teasing, but more than anything, the simple fact that we'd made up safely had me feeling like I could fly for the rest of the day.
And just like that, we finished our week-long money-burning school trip and made it home in one piece.
"All right, all right... A school trip is a school trip. But you fine students of mine? We still have to settle the accounts, don't we?"
"Boooo..."
"Who's booing right now, you little—"
"Teacher! It was money they gave us to spend, so getting chewed out over how we spent it feels a little much!"
"Shut it. Then go complain to the person who gave you the money. The sponsor for this trip said it was fine, so what are you going to do about it? Your teachers got so much we still have to do our jobs!"
"Boooo~~"
Even after the homeroom teacher's words, the class's jeering didn't stop.
It was the first school day after coming back from the trip and spending the weekend. For some reason, every class's first period that morning was with their homeroom teacher — and of course, this was why. Well. I had told them to do it that way.
Ha-yan, who had spotted me sitting in the seat next to hers with a smug little smile, asked me through a mana-voice.
"But why bother?"
"Why else. My mother worked herself to the bone teaching me all these social skills, and I figured the other kids could stand to learn a few of them too."
"...And this has nothing to do with wanting to watch your friends suffer under the homeroom teacher?"
"About ninety-five percent?"
"That ratio is way too high..."
Ha-yan let out a quiet sigh so the others wouldn't hear and went back to listening to the teacher.
"I warned you once, didn't I? That every single expense you put on those cards would come back to me? Let's see, let's see... shall we dig through the hit list?"
"Aaaaah~~~!! Teeeacheeer!!"
"This is too much! We only spent the money they told us to spend freely!!"
"Quiet! How much could a bunch of high schoolers even spend goofing around on Jeju Island? Ah — and I was extremely generous about the big-ticket tourism stuff. Scuba diving, ocean expeditions, that kind of thing. Even if the amounts were steep, I cut you some slack there, so don't panic too hard."
"Aaaaah!!"
The teacher said she was cutting us slack, but the kids from the other classes — who'd gone completely feral the first time in their lives they got their hands on a corporate card — had spent far more than "just that much."
I'd been spending company money either way, so I hadn't thought much of it, but when I went into the office over the weekend and looked over the corporate card statements Rhea had compiled for me...
Yeah. Fair enough that the teacher was this angry.
"Jeju Island yacht tour... Hmm. Fine. It's 'tourism,' so I'll let it slide. Even if you added up everything the other groups spent over five days, it still wouldn't match this one tour. Other expensive tours. Fine, that can happen. Fancy restaurant meals? Sure. It's a once-in-a-lifetime school trip, I'll allow that too. But this — no matter how many hundred times I think it over — I cannot let this go. The little brats who bought luxury goods at Jeju designer shops, get out here right now!!!!!!!!"
Flipping through the neatly organized spending lists for each group, the teacher finally lost it, a vein standing out on her temple as she roared.
Judging by the groans already drifting in from the other classes, it looked like they'd started over there too.
"Do you have any idea how embarrassed I was when the company that sponsored this trip sent me this list!! High schoolers! Buying! Luxury goods! What the hell is wrong with you!!!"
Rhea had told me about it. She'd handed over each class's spending list with a little verbal jab attached, and the teachers had been too ashamed to lift their heads.
Ah — one thing worth noting here.
Almost everyone in our class got along pretty well overall, but that didn't mean we didn't have delinquents.
"Damn it... I told you luxury stuff was going too far."
"I didn't think they'd actually send the whole list. Hell... I'd already sold everything on the secondhand market."
Oh? They'd even flipped the goods for cash?
"That group. All of you, get up here right now!!!!!!"
At the teacher's shout, the "delinquent" group finally climbed up to the front of the classroom, where they were forced to sit through a full hour of the teacher tearing into them with absolute commitment.
Later, according to Rhea, every last won of those amounts was recovered.
From our side, we'd told them there was no need to make things that complicated, but the school decided this crossed a line, so we didn't really have grounds to refuse.
After that whole storm blew over, school settled back into ordinary days.
But one last ripple from the school trip was still waiting for us.
"Cha Siu made Ha-yan mad? That sweet Ha-yan? The Ha-yan who looks a little cold on the outside but is actually soft and fragile like a little girl inside — he made her mad?"
"He made our class idol Lee Ha-yan angry? Has Cha Siu finally lost his mind? He should be bowing to Ha-yan every single day and still not have enough blessings to go around, and he made her mad?"
Just as Do Ji-yeon and Choi Hoon had prophesied, the two of them deliberately started spreading the story of what happened between Ha-yan and me near the end of the trip to every boy and girl in our class.
Thanks to that (so-called) favor, from the very first day back at school I was on the receiving end of some truly spectacular side-eye from the entire class.
"Hey... you actually spread that around?"
I growled at Do Ji-yeon and Choi Hoon while checking the faces of our classmates, but the two of them had already finished their roles, and a growl like that didn't phase them in the slightest.
"Heheh. Well, yeah. That's the price for getting mad at our Ha-yan. You're dating a treasure like her and you still go and get angry?"
"Huh? You're raising your hand? You raised your hand? I'm gonna yell. I'm gonna yell? For real, I'm gonna yell? I'm yelliing right nooow???"
Do Ji-yeon went full reverse-victim, and Choi Hoon used the boys in our class as a human shield to dodge my anger in one clean move, so there was nothing left for me to do.
"Ehehe. But it's fine now, right? I'll clear up the kids' misunderstanding in a few days."
"Yeah. Guess I've only got Ha-yan in this world."
Looking at Ha-yan acting as clingy and cute as ever, I had no choice but to swallow my anger.
"The school trip's over, and finals are fine since I already said I'd give you the summary notes. So then... the magic exam isn't far off, is it? What should we do now?"
"Hmm... Play around?"
"You want to play? Again? Even more?"
"Ehehe. Whenever I come here, there's so much magic I want to try. Maybe because it's your lair — the air is overflowing with mana."
"Well then. It's been a while. Let's mess around with some magic first."
"Really?"
How to put it. The school trip that had felt endlessly long was finally over, and the "handling" of the kids who'd gone a little too hard on company expenses was done too.
Which meant it was about time to shift from the modern world over into fantasy.
From everything I'd confirmed so far, the venue for Ha-yan's magic evaluation was Osaka, Japan.
I'd looked into why Osaka instead of Tokyo, and it turned out Japan had its own fair share of regional politics and talk. Japanese mages were apparently a bit stronger on the Osaka side, so that tracked well enough.
Not that it really mattered where it was held.
On top of that, Ha-yan had already fully absorbed teleportation magic from me — the kind of spell that would get her a perfect one hundred on this evaluation — and even now,
"Yap!"
she could blink in an instant from the training room of my lair into the chamber full of magical tools, skilled enough that she'd already mastered it.
And she was still fretting about a magic exam in this situation?
"Hmm. What should we go do for fun in Osaka..."
I was already completely hyped at the thought of my first overseas trip with Ha-yan.
Turning those thoughts over, I teleported after her into the room packed with magical tools —
"You see, this one? It's the very first magical tool Master ever made. At the time, Master had no idea that ordinary houses came with refrigerators that kept food cold. But back then, Miss Ha-yan told him she wanted something cold to drink. So the moment Master returned to his room, he immediately crafted this tool with magic. Of course, once he later discovered that refrigerators existed, he was promptly crushed by despair."
"Wow... that really happened? Siu never told me any of that."
"Naturally. How could he possibly tell Miss about something so embarrassing? If it were me, I'd just bite my tongue and faint on the spot..."
"That's enoooooooooough!!!!!!!"
I tackled Rhea, who was cheerfully spilling every last scrap of my not-quite-dark-history to Ha-yan — and just like that, another perfectly ordinary day went by.