How to Claim a Fallen Noble Lady (5)
"The future... is what matters?"
That evening, after returning home from her conversation with Kim Hyunseong, Iris began turning his words over in her mind, again and again.
He hadn't blamed her at all for trying to kill him. Instead, he'd simply comforted her, telling her that what came next was what counted.
"How...?"
But to a woman who had lived her whole life believing that failure meant the end, who had built herself around the pursuit of perfection, this was a difficult idea to grasp.
The concept of after failure was, to her, an uncharted world.
Confronted with the unknown for the first time in her life, Iris began to agonize over it, alone and endlessly.
And the conclusion she reached was:
"Really, how...?"
'I don't know.'
Everyone struggles with firsts, of course — but for her, this assignment was especially brutal.
'I'll have to ask him...'
In the end, embarrassing as it was, she resolved to go straight to Kim Hyunseong himself and ask what he'd actually meant.
Having made up her mind, Iris threw herself onto her bed.
She had agonized for so long that the moon had long since taken the sun's place in the sky.
"...Huh?"
As she lay there, she noticed something was different.
Her bed, which lately had felt neither sleep-inducing nor comfortable, felt oddly cozy tonight.
Moreover, the thought that had greeted her every time she lay down — I wish tomorrow would never come — was nowhere to be found. Instead, she caught herself wishing tomorrow would hurry up and arrive.
The worries that had been gnawing at her had been resolved, but Iris had no way of knowing that was the reason.
'Because we'll meet again tomorrow...'
And so, for the first time in ages, she sank into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Lunchtime, the next day.
"He's not coming..."
She'd finished her lunchbox and was still sitting at her seat, her face scrunched up as if something didn't add up.
Under normal circumstances, he would have arrived before she even started eating, and they would have eaten together.
But today, even after she'd cleaned her plate and waited, not so much as the tip of his nose appeared.
'When is he going to get here...'
Presuming something must have come up, Iris kept waiting. And she had a strange certainty about it. The conviction that if it were him, he would naturally come.
1:00 P.M.
And just like that, while she waited, lunchtime slipped away.
Class was about to start, so there was no more waiting to be done.
'Come to think of it...'
As her mind turned, Iris began recalling something from that morning's assembly.
Iris, demoted to Class B. Kim Hyunseong, promoted to Class B.
The two of them had been in the same class, which meant they could see each other's faces. They'd simply been too self-conscious to speak — but they had always been within sight of one another.
And in her memory of that morning assembly, Kim Hyunseong hadn't come to the Academy at all.
He hadn't even contacted the professors, she'd heard, so she'd shrugged it off as him just being late... but apparently not.
'An unexcused absence?'
Why, though?
She had no way of knowing.
Only one thing was certain.
Today, she would not see him.
"..."
At the uncomfortable heat simmering up inside her, Iris frowned.
There was nothing she could do.
All she could do was wait through an eternity for tomorrow.
And so she spent the day.
"What the— why, why isn't he coming..."
Four days had passed.
The long, long Academy weekdays had ended, and the weekend had arrived.
Sitting on her bed, her mind thoroughly unraveled, she muttered with an anxious face.
Iris's current mood was roughly that of a kid trudging for five straight days toward the beating she'd get for showing her mom a ruined report card.
"The truth is, he hates me— huh?"
Midway through her spiral of self-blame, she suddenly stopped, as if something had occurred to her.
What followed was a display of madness so deranged it would have made even Kim Hyunseong — a man who had seen everything — flinch.
"He said the future is what matters..."
Did that mean he wanted her to serve and worship him of her own accord?
And the moment that thought landed, she shot upright out of her seat.
That was it. That's why he hadn't come.
Because he couldn't realize it himself unless she personally sought him out and gave him the chance.
Had Kim Hyunseong heard this, he'd have asked what kind of crack-brained nonsense that was — but to her, it was a hypothesis with a certain plausible ring to it.
At the same time, she put on her going-out clothes for the first time in ages and dabbed perfume on her skin.
Having never once gone full prep for meeting another person, her technique was clumsy — but her wardrobe was so absurdly overpowered that the end result looked fine anyway.
There were plenty of people who would have liked her even more for the fresh, untouched quality of it.
There was exactly one reason she had suddenly dressed to the nines like this.
'I have to go see him myself!'
As for his home address — she'd obtained it from a professor under the pretext of checking whether something was wrong with Kim Hyunseong, who had been missing for five days straight.
And so she left her room — a place she'd rarely ventured beyond except for the Academy and the training grounds — and stepped out into the world.
"...What brings you here?"
"Y-you hadn't come for five whole days, so I thought something might have happened... I came to check."
"Hmm."
I'd been a little worried, since I hadn't been able to keep up the gaslighting over lunch hour, but seeing her show up on my doorstep like this, something must have gone right after all.
Honestly, gaslighting someone this hard did prick my conscience a bit.
But if I wanted a good subordinate, there was no way around it.
Besides, my original intent was to drag her up out of the gutter and put her to work as an actual functioning person, so you could generously call it a benevolent scheme.
"Come in, for now."
I couldn't exactly tell her to get lost after she'd come all this way, so I let her inside.
"P-pardon the intrusion..."
Iris glanced briefly around the apartment, then scurried in on quick little steps.
"What the hell is with that woman."
At the same moment, Cthugha, sprawled on the sofa scratching her belly, spoke up.
She was perhaps a little too comfortable in her own home, because her outfit was... let's say precarious. Somewhere in the gray zone between R-rated and PG-13.
"Th-that person is..."
"Ah... yes... my, uh... my roommate."
And the two of us — not yet close enough to be sharing a view like that — were subjected to pure, distilled awkwardness.
Imagine it. The feeling of watching porn alongside an ordinary friend.
"Get in here, you useless waste of a woman."
"Why the hell are you picking on me!"
Thankfully, Nyarlathotep, scandalized by the state of Cthugha, dragged her back into a room in one motion — but the image wouldn't leave our heads, so we carried that awkwardness with us as we sat down at the table.
"I never heard you had a roommate... I'm sorry if I've intruded on something..."
"You're fine. I'm the one who should apologize for the indecent sight."
BANG!
"—Indecent?! You call this INDECENT?!"
"—Shut your mouth, you lunatic!"
The instant I finished speaking, a thunderous roar erupted from inside the room the two had vanished into.
Iris flinched hard, looked toward the room, and spoke with a frightened expression.
"I-it's okay, right?"
"...It'll be fine. Probably."
To change the subject in a hurry, I mixed up an instant coffee mix and handed her the cup.
I'm not a tea-time person by any stretch, so instant coffee was my opening move.
"Thank you very much."
But she, too, had only been postponing tea time to dominate the mood — she wasn't actually a tea person either — so she accepted the coffee with gratitude bordering on excessive.
Now, my reason for serving her coffee was similar to hers for serving me tea, but also different.
Mood softening.
Where she'd used tea to press down on the atmosphere, I used coffee to loosen a stiff one.
Things are awkward, we sip coffee and make small talk over it — works out perfectly, doesn't it?
On top of that, she gets treated as a guest, and I get to plant the perception that she and I are equals. Best possible play.
"Mm... well, to start — there wasn't any particular reason I skipped the Academy for five days."
To make it easier for her to open up, I started the conversation first.
"I just needed a little rest. My mental strength's been getting sapped lately."
The Academy was structured somewhere between a university and a high school.
And unlike high school, where missing class is fatal, universities tend to be lenient about absences.
At its core, the Academy ran on pure meritocracy.
A hopeless case could show up every single day and still get expelled; a prodigy could saunter in as rarely as rain in a drought and still sit in Class A.
In short: if you had the chops, they couldn't care less whether you rested at home or not.
The one catch — any knowledge you missed by not attending was yours to eat, in full.
Plus the minor drawback that if a professor pegged you as 'that slacker kid, huh?' your Academy life could get a touch more difficult.
But I was currently riding the promising-talent title after jumping straight from Class F to Class B, so it'd be fine.
'Did he calculate all of this?'
Everything was slotting into place with an almost unnatural smoothness.
The Academy absence slid by on promising-talent buff, and though I'd left the Iris campaign untouched for five days, her affinity had somehow gone up.
Had Nyarlathotep planned it all? The thought crossed my mind.
With that overwhelming brain of hers, it was entirely possible.
'Then again, why couldn't she predict the length of my stay in R'lyeh, then.'
Whatever. It was all water under the bridge now — a dream already half-forgotten. No point dwelling.
"I... see."
Iris bowed her head deeply, her expression complicated.
Ah. Don't tell me.
"I'm not saying my mental strength got drained because of you. I genuinely just needed the rest."
"A-aaah! Understood, sir!"
Apparently she'd interpreted the 'sapped mental strength' line as a side effect of being around her.
When in reality, only my mind had been trapped in R'lyeh, flailing helplessly.
"But I doubt you came all this way just to check on me... what's your real reason?"
"..."
Iris put on a grave expression at my question, then said:
"Let's go on a date."
The hell is this woman saying, for fuck's sake.