Course Registration
It had been nearly two months since I realized I'd been transmigrated into this world.
The entrance ceremony was now only four days away. Today was all but over, so once the three-day weekend passed, the new semester would begin come Monday.
At Cheonmu Academy, almost no professors canceled class just because it was the first day, so I figured a string of busy days would start the very morning after the ceremony.
One thing was certain: I was about to have far less free time than I did now — even less than these days when I was already splitting each one into pieces to meet Choi Marie and Han Sora, with Cha Eunju, Kim Isabel, and even Min Yewon squeezed in between.
"Hey, junior, spacing out again, aren't you? Hmm?"
"…Sorry, sunbae."
"Eh, it's fine. I was the same when I first enrolled. Watching you just brings back old memories, hehe."
Choi Marie smiled and walked over to me as I stood dazed for a moment, worn out by the evening workout.
The day she and I would sit in the same classroom at the Academy was drawing closer and closer.
"It's only been a year for you, sunbae. How is that 'old times'?"
"Huh? When your goddess-like sunbae says it, you're supposed to just nod and agree. Cheeky, aren't you?"
Wham!
"Aagh, s-sunbae…! When you do it with your strength, it actually hurts!"
I played along, hamming it up as she cinched me into a playful headlock.
Not that it really hurt, thanks to the cushion pressed against my right cheek.
Maybe her easygoing nature kept her from noticing, or maybe she simply didn't care — either way, for now I was content with this level of skinship, her chest rubbing lightly against my face.
In my head, I'd already devoured that pink ponytail more times than I could count, but Choi Marie was nowhere near ready for the real training program to begin.
My basic approach to conquering heroines was to fill whatever 'missing piece' they secretly longed for.
For Cha Eunju, it was courage. For Kim Isabel, immunity to men. For Han Sora, her archery accuracy.
The problem was that none of them could be approached until they themselves recognized that flaw as a deficiency.
Park Hana, who refused to admit her simple-minded nature because she hated being compared to Park Cheonho, and Choi Marie, who believed she charged ahead and abandoned her teammates because the teammates were the problem — neither had acknowledged her own 'deficiency' yet.
If I barged in at this stage, pointing out their flaws and offering to fix them, they'd only take offense. It would be like offering free personal training to someone who had zero intention of ever dieting — nothing but an insult.
Besides, once they enrolled at the Academy, opportunities to discover their own weaknesses would come up again and again. All I had to do was quietly wait for the right moment.
"Oh, that reminds me — isn't course registration coming up for you guys soon?"
"Ah, yes. Registration opens at nine tomorrow morning, apparently."
"Right. Skip morning workout tomorrow and just get your registration done. Screw it up once and the headache follows you into next year."
"Is that from personal experience, sunbae?"
"…Not particularly, no. Anyway."
So she was leaving out the part where she hard-trolled her own team project and dragged the entire group down to an F.
Well, fair enough. It's not exactly the kind of achievement you brag about anywhere. And Choi Marie probably didn't even think of it as her fault in the first place.
"Hey, you know what?"
"Yes, sunbae?"
"…There's a first-year course called 'Teamwork and Strategy.' You're in the Support Department, so you should really take it."
"Huh? Why's that?"
"…It's mandatory for Combat Department students, but an elective for Recovery and Support kids. And when you build teams, the rule is you basically have to include at least one Recovery or Support student — so taking it makes it easy to get close to the other Combat students."
"Oh, really? Thanks for the tip, sunbae."
"…Yeah. You'd better take it."
…Now that I knew what she was thinking, there was no way she couldn't look transparent. It was honestly a little heartbreaking, watching her try so hard to drag me into her own retake course.
Since the class required at least one Support student anyway, I could understand her wanting to bring along the most reliable one available — me. Still, she didn't have to bury her real motive that deep in polite small talk.
Wanting to prick her conscience a little, I gently probed at what was underneath.
"Is there a class you're taking too, sunbae? It'd be nice to share at least one course with you, since we've got the chance."
"……There might be, or, uh, there might not. No idea."
"You took it last year, so you'd know, wouldn't you?"
"How would I know what classes the Support first-years take? I only heard about that one by accident. No clue about anything else."
"…That's a shame. And here I thought, since you were the very first person I met before even entering the Academy, we'd get to share at least one class."
"……."
Watching her flounder with a flustered expression so unlike Choi Marie was a genuine pleasure.
I couldn't wait to see what her face would look like when we ran into each other in the Teamwork and Strategy lecture hall next semester.
Course registration day at Cheonmu Academy. Friday morning.
Right around the time the clock ticked over to 8:55, a message from Han Sora landed in the group chat.
Our group chat had come together naturally in the aftermath of the practical exam and the process of planning our amusement park trip. For the record, it now included Park Hana and Park Cheonho as well — six members in total.
Having another guy in the group chat annoyed me, but then again, Park Cheonho wasn't so much a guy as a species of creature unto himself.
Smiling at the heroines' messages — each one revealing its owner's personality even in a few short lines — I fired back an appropriately casual reply.
I had a rough idea of how the results would shake out, after all. If I remembered right, in the original story the only person who cleared every course in her cart was Kim Isabel.
It was only natural for people to flock to comfortable, easy, popular courses. No matter how combat-oriented you were, if someone asked whether you wanted 'History and Development of Dungeons' or 'Extreme Wilderness Training,' you'd pick the former without hesitation.
Fighting over seats in the popular courses that filled up in seconds, scavenging through the unpopular ones for whatever looked least terrible — that was course registration at Cheonmu Academy in a nutshell.
Course registration has been completed.
…For the record, while everyone else was hyping themselves up, I had already cleared everything.
The Academy's server clock ran a little ahead of local time. Set your computer's clock a few minutes forward, hammer the submit button, and you can lock in every course you want without any competition whatsoever.
And for the record, this was golden information I could never share with the heroines. Their registrations had to fail precisely so I'd have an excuse to drag them into the courses I wanted.
Park Hana's last message had been cut off mid-word, which meant the servers had just opened for everyone else.
I lounged around for ten minutes or so, watching messages trickle into the group chat as the good news and bad news started rolling in one by one.
The heroines posted news full of fury and tears, a living showcase of everything wrong with the registration system.
And through it all, that single number stayed perfectly still. That's right, Park Cheonho — you just sleep the whole day away and pick up whatever lectures are left over.
Seizing the moment, I dropped a CocoaTalk message dripping with the air of mild failure.
Truthfully, I'd never put them in my cart to begin with — but admitting that outright was a far clumsier lie than this, and this version gave everyone so much more to talk about.
Talk about it now, reveal the truth later, and nobody would even suspect me. My timetable hadn't been built around free periods or course difficulty anyway; it had been built exclusively around events I could engineer with the heroines.
If I shared a class with every single heroine, we'd all end up glued together like one big friend group, and that came with complications. As much as I felt bad making them redo their schedules, being split up a little across common courses and popular electives made each of them far easier to conquer.
Just as planned, Han Sora was the only one who'd landed Wednesday's Monster Ecology and Teamwork and Strategy.
Wanting to firm up the overall picture, I casually probed the heroines about their current registration status.
…Not that I needed him there. Well, he came as a set menu with Park Hana, so there was nothing to be done about it.
Kinesiology and Physical Training with Park Hana. Basic Self-Defense with Kim Isabel.
That was the shape of it — one or two shared classes with each of the main heroines, arranged so I could rotate between them and conquer each one conveniently.
In the process, I'd had no choice but to give up some overlap with Cha Eunju. Right now she was, quite simply, the heroine I could summon for a meeting 'with absolutely no reason at all' any time I pleased.
Since I could conquer her outside of class hours anyway, that just meant I'd need to see her that much more in the meantime.
…Then again, no first-year course in the first semester had us fighting actual monsters. Even without me in her classes, I was sure she'd manage just fine.
And summoning her somewhere private to console her would dissolve just about any emotion. For the Cha Eunju of today, that much was more than enough.