13. Yozora Is an Idiot

I started forward, slow, in time with the cue.

Only now did it occur to me that they hadn't needed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to cue me at all. The principal already had the microphone, and he was bringing me up by name, veins standing out in his neck as he declared that from this year's freshmen on, they could train as hard as they pleased. All he meant was that the injuries could be treated. It wasn't as if I wanted to watch anything grotesque. Still, it was only training. No one was going to get hurt that badly. Probably.

Step by step I climbed, and down it all came with me—the genuinely necessary things first, like where the infirmary was, and then the gilding no one had asked for, how tall I was, how fine-looking, the whole of it riding a great booming wahaha of hearty laughter.

Enough. Please, enough.

I dragged a palm down my suddenly burning cheek and stepped up onto the platform.

"......"

Countless eyes pinned me where I stood. From the freshmen on my left. From the heroes of some renown seated on my right, striking their poses. Gazes that, as far as I could tell, amounted to nothing more than He's not that handsome, is he?

A white coat, draped lightly over a uniform identical to the freshmen's, swayed and fluttered among them. A short walk later, by the time that fluttering had stilled—

"...Ah. Um."

The first line, every bit as important as a first impression. Having slightly botched it, I met the eyes of Yozora, planted in the very front and working very hard on her face.

The face that never seemed to stop smirking was plastered over now with a clumsy sort of hatred.

...She's doing her best to get me to fuck her, one way or another. I'll leave her to it.

And beside that ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Yozora stood a young woman whose bright, lion-like brown hair had been tied up any which way and left to spill however it pleased. I was looking at a strangely keyed-up Han Sua—her younger self—and I let my voice out with care.

"...It's a pleasure to meet you. I enrolled this year as the health teach—... as a Health Committee Member. My name is Seo Woojin. I look forward to working with you."

The dreary script clutched in my hand, I ignored entirely.

"I got a boyfriend."

Class 2-A, the class Lee Hayun belonged to. The farthest seat in the back corner, where friends meeting again after a long while were busy talking over one another. A bomb, dropped out of nowhere.

"Hmm..."

"You didn't have one? I thought you did."

No particularly impressive reaction came back. It wasn't as if a quiet friend never showed up after break with her whole image remade. Most of what returned amounted to Oh. And what exactly are we supposed to do with that.

Lee Hayun, hearing it from the seat right beside them, was no different. She sat next to the friend who had just finished announcing the boyfriend she'd picked up over break, quietly sucking on an apple Picnic she'd bought on the way in.

On any other day she would have been losing her mind like a dog and a cat rolled into one—where did you meet him, show me a picture—but today, of all days, Lee Hayun was remarkably well-behaved. Jiyoon had already found out, so she had been measuring the moment to mention it, just lightly, to her closer friends....

Seemed she and her friend had been thinking the exact same thing.

Nothing for it. I'll have to wait for another chance to tell them I'm seeing Woojin.

And so, past Lee Hayun's firmly shut mouth, one generous pair of breasts glided by.

"What kind of guy? Same academy?"

"...A forbidden love."

A forbidden love. Put that way, wasn't her own relationship with Seo Woojin, if you thought about it, a teacher and a student? Woojin was a year younger, of course. Even so, it was exactly the sort of forbidden love that turned up all the time in stories. The thoughts drifted through her along with the taste of apple rolling over her tongue.

"Forbidden love? He's not a minor, right?"

"He is, though. A boys' high school kid who happened to save me when I tagged along on a practicum."

...Crazy bitch.

"Crazy bitch."

"What's crazy about it? If you're twenty-one, isn't it fine to get turned on by a nineteen-year-old?"

"...Hmm. Fair."

"Right?"

"Honestly, every time a younger guy calls me noona, I do get a little hot. And when he smiles all bright like that, I fold."

"The other way around gets me going too.... Is it just me?"

"......"

Two crazy bitches.

No. Three.

Four.

Amid the crazy bitches who had started laying out their tastes, in the very moment Lee Hayun was torturing her poor innocent Picnic, squeezing the life out of it, the classroom's front door opened.

"Good morning. Did everyone have a good break?"

A manner of speaking that somehow called a kindergarten teacher to mind. Replies from the students trailed after the end of it, one by one. From the start she felt less like a homeroom teacher and more like a counseling teacher. A homeroom manager, maybe. A manager who laid out, in careful detail, where you fell short of everyone else, what sort of classes would suit you, whether there was a hero worth studying on the side.

"I have one announcement, so could I have your attention for a moment?"

Friends drifted back to their seats in twos and threes. Lee Hayun, seated in her own place like the rest, met the teacher's eyes with a straw chewed nearly to pulp still between her teeth.

"A Healing-type Transcendent has joined the academy as a health teacher. Students who get injured often, like Hayun, or students who put their bodies through the wringer—do keep that in mind..."

The conditions for becoming a spy.

The most important of them, above all else, was this: how smart are you?

And so.

"......"

Shut away in the student council room, the student council president of Miren Academy, Baek Seoyeon, was wasting the hours alone, head in her hands, groaning.

Of course, it wasn't as if Yozora were stupid through and through, with nothing to her at all. From what Seoyeon had heard, back in Japan she had attended a middle school and a high school of fairly high standing—the kind stuffed wall to wall with model students. And hadn't she picked up Korean remarkably fast as well? A year, was it? That was all it had taken, from what she'd heard.

But that was the story of Yozora's high school days, when Japanese heroes were hunting her. Baek Seoyeon and Yozora were both twenty-two this year, which made it a story from roughly five years back. The Yozora of now did nothing but pour alcohol down her throat day after day, and would call out of absolutely nowhere to babble about the red string of fate and whatever else no one had asked to hear. An alcoholic idiot. That was all she was.

"Why in the world would that idiot..."

If only she had never known Yozora at all, her mind would have been at ease. Why did she have to be someone who knew Yozora?

Baek Seoyeon, who had been dry-washing her face, took out her phone instead of signing the few documents set before her. What she searched for was the number of Kwon Namho, representative of The Company. Between the strands of cyan-white hair falling straight to her waist, the ringtone spread—trrr, trrr.

With a low groan, Baek Seoyeon leaned back into the chair, and her voice stopped.

She had called in a rush, but now that she thought about it, the student council room was far too open a place for talk like this. Unlike a private space where everything from the door to the windows was under her control, this room might have a listening device for all she knew. Someone might walk in. She hadn't made any serious slip yet, at least. With no other choice, Baek Seoyeon began picking out safe words and tossing them out one at a time.

For Baek Seoyeon, who had no criminal record, none of this particularly mattered. Yozora was another story. An undocumented foreigner who didn't even have an ID to her name, she had clearly walked in on the back of several forged documents. And could Yozora actually be trusted to remember every piece of that forgery? Wouldn't she just stand there among the freshmen, grinning like an idiot, and introduce herself as Yozora?

The mere thought of it dried the blood in her veins.

Baek Seoyeon let out a long sigh in time with Kwon Namho on the other end of the line. Once she had scrawled a rough signature across the vending-machine paperwork in front of her, his voice went on.

At the name, Baek Seoyeon's head nodded, slow.

Well, fame aside, the freshman representative's address had gone to someone else. Lee Jiyoon, she thought it was. Both of them had posted perfect scores on the practical, and yet their written scores had differed by a wide margin, or so she'd heard. Baek Seoyeon didn't bother saying any of that. She just worked the knots in her stiff shoulders between her fingers.

Could Yozora actually see a request through ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to the end?

Wouldn't she simply get exposed because of Yozora, and be left holding the mess?

While those worries kept turning over, one more thing she wanted to know came up.

Strange.

Then the brown-haired girl who had been grinning and chattering right beside Yozora—was she a friend made before the entrance ceremony had even started?

...Someone she met while out drinking?

Who?

...I get that they're excited about starting school. I just wish they'd shut up already.

"He's twenty, apparently? It comes up if you search."

"If you fake being sick, would he know right away?"

"Wouldn't he? Probably?"

"If you go, 'Teacher, my heart hurts because of you, Teacher....' then he'd have no choice but to..."

"They said he's a Health Committee Member. Not a teacher."

"What's that?"

"...Who knows?"

"Anyway, the second you get even a little hurt, you go straight over and..."

It wasn't because of the Seo Woojin talk drifting in from all around her. From the moment they had started whispering during the entrance ceremony, she had expected a reaction about this size. The person Lee Jiyoon, sprawled flat across her desk, wanted to please shut up was someone else entirely.

Right in front of her. Lee Jiyoon had built herself a cozy little nest in the prime seat by the window, and there they were.

"Sorry.... Korean, I'm still not used to it."

Two people, chattering loud enough to punch straight through her earphones. And those two—whose top buttons were screaming for their lives—were precisely the culprits.