Academy First Week (2)
I followed Chae Yujeong as she strode straight into the store the moment we reached the entrance.
It was a large convenience store stocked with pretty much everything you could need, and with barely anyone inside, it was surprisingly quiet.
"Guess lunch was pretty good today."
I muttered as I grabbed a basket by the door, and Chaea flinched for no real reason beside me.
Was she feeling guilty that I'd made the trip just because of her?
I gave her crumpled shoulders a light tap to reassure her.
"Whatever. I barely eat the cafeteria food anyway."
"…W-we've only been enrolled for less than a week, though……."
She was starting to get more comfortable around me—stammering less, and managing to get her own words out with some stubbornness. I snorted a quiet laugh.
"Don't worry about the prices. Just pick whatever you want. You know how much you've already bought for me, right?"
I said it just in case she started second-guessing herself again, and Chaea gave a tiny nod.
"You're buying mine too, right?"
A voice cut in from the side without missing a beat.
I turned to Chae Yujeong with a look of pure disbelief.
"What are you talking about? You pay for your own food."
"Ha. You dragged me here and you can't even buy me something? How cheap can you get?"
"Since when does a princess sponge off a commoner? Are you joking?"
The moment I brought up the princess bit while she kept whining, her eyes sharpened in an instant.
"Hey. You're dead. You know exactly what you're doing and you still keep going?"
"Why are you so sensitive about it? It suits you. Potion Princess Chae Yujeong. Sounds good, doesn't it?"
"You little sh—"
Leaving a Chae Yujeong who looked ready to lunge at any second behind me, I picked out my items from the shelves.
One sandwich and one Forest's Eye drink.
When I glanced over at Chaea, she had already dropped a heavily caffeinated energy drink into her basket and was fretting in the snack aisle.
What? Was she planning to make a meal out of snacks?
…So that was why she was so short.
Deeply concerned about her eating habits, I added a roll of kimbap to my basket for corrective purposes.
If she insisted on only eating snacks, I was going to force-feed her the kimbap too.
A moment later, Chaea came trotting over with nothing but a single bag of snacks and the energy drink in her basket. I sighed.
"All done?"
I asked, glancing sideways. Chae Yujeong nodded as well.
Two breads and a coffee in her basket—exactly the tastes mentioned in the original.
"Then let's go."
Since everyone seemed finished, I herded Chaea along with us and headed for the register.
"Chaea. You're really going to eat snacks for a meal?"
"Yeah…."
"…Fine. Okay for now."
At the counter I took Chaea's basket from her and set it down with mine.
Then I looked at Chae Yujeong, who was still just standing there blankly.
"What are you doing? Put it up already."
"Huh?"
I snatched the basket from her dumbfounded hands and plopped it onto the counter as well.
"Please ring these up together too."
"Sure~ Do you need a bag?"
"No, we're fine."
I went to tag my watch to pay. A flustered voice rose behind me, but I ignored it and finished the transaction.
"Thank you for shopping with us."
Chaea had the sense to grab her own snacks and energy drink, while Chae Yujeong was still standing there completely blank. I stuffed the bread and coffee into her arms.
"…Thanks."
As we left the store, Chae Yujeong whispered a thank-you so quietly it was almost inaudible. I just snorted, gave her shoulder a light shove, and that was that.
Afterward, while we sat at the tables set up beside the store and laid out the food, Chaea started to open her snacks. I immediately snatched them away and pressed the kimbap into her hands instead.
"Eek—"
"Here, Chaea. Eat this first, then the snacks."
Chaea looked up at the snacks still in my hand with the most pitiful expression. It almost made me cave, but I held firm for her own good.
"C-can't I just eat the snacks…?"
"Snacks aren't a meal, Chaea…."
"B-but……."
While she was still whining, Chae Yujeong cut in flatly.
"That's why you never grew."
She said "height" with her mouth, but her eyes were aimed a little lower than Chaea's face.
Chaea clearly felt where that gaze landed, because she flinched hard.
"…!"
She looked back and forth between me and Chae Yujeong with those cute, upturned eyes, but then her face fell and she stared down at her own chest.
With zero energy left, she started peeling the wrapper off the kimbap.
That pitiful sight made me smack Chae Yujeong across the back.
"You crazy bitch, what the hell are you saying?! Why are you crushing the kid's spirit?!"
"What did I do? I was just talking about height."
Chae Yujeong played innocent. Unlike Chaea, she had at least some curves of her own—nowhere near mine, but still.
…Unlike Chaea's rather modest situation.
I hurried behind Chaea and tried to pull her into a tight hug to comfort her.
"Chaea, it's okay, it's okay~ So what if you're a little small? For swordwork, being compact is actually—"
Thwack—
Except….
Chaea smacked my arms away and refused the hug entirely.
"Chaea…?"
"Pfft."
Across the table, Chae Yujeong was clearly snickering.
When I froze there with a look of pure shock still plastered on my face, she spoke up.
"Right now even you are the last person Chaea wants to see."
"What?"
"You fraud."
I let her accusation slide in one ear and out the other while I stared hard at Chaea.
…Should I just ignore it and tackle-hug her anyway?
But watching her diligently chew and swallow the kimbap made me feel bad about interrupting, so I just flopped back into my seat.
Quietly unwrapping my sandwich, I asked Chae Yujeong,
"How's the vibe in your dungeon practice team?"
The second she heard the question, her face twisted in pure disgust.
"Ugh, I got completely screwed. The atmosphere is absolute trash."
"Who's even on your team?"
"Would you even know if I said the names?"
"Hmm…. Maybe I would?"
"Whatever. Just two warriors and one mage, and get this—they act like I'm their personal potion supplier."
"So what if they use a few potions? If you get a good score out of it, isn't that a win?"
"It's not just any potions. They want elemental resistance potions and frost enchantment potions. Do they even know how much those cost? I'm so pissed. And even if it were just one or two, fine—but clearing a dungeon swimming in potions? You think that gets you a good evaluation? Do any of them have a single brain cell?"
She clearly had a lot bottled up; the second I cracked the lid, the complaints poured out in a flood.
"Well? Missing me already? You should've treated me better while you had the chance."
"……."
She clearly hated giving me the satisfaction, so she just shut her mouth—neither denying nor confirming. I left her like that and turned my attention to Chaea.
"Chaea, you were on the same team as Yeon Hajin, right?"
"…Yeah."
She had already finished picking her way through the kimbap. When I handed her the snacks, a little light returned to her eyes.
"How's that going?"
"…Just… okay, I guess……."
She answered quietly while munching on the snacks with tiny little bites. Getting any real details out of her seemed unlikely, so I dug into my memory of the original story instead.
Of course Yeon Hajin already knew that Kang Hyun from our team was going to cause an incident. The problem was that Kang Hyun's terror attack was only ever meant to draw attention.
Attack east, strike west.
While Kang Hyun blew something up and pulled the entire school's focus, the Union Church would quietly install a backdoor inside the academy—something that would let them create a temporary portal later.
And that temporary portal would become the foundation for a massive terrorist attack during midterms.
Yeon Hajin knew all of this too, so he was going to dump the Kang Hyun problem on Baek Woohyun and go handle the backdoor himself.
On paper the plan sounded solid enough….
But if it had actually gone that well, the original never would have ended in the world's destruction.
In the original, this team dungeon practice already went sideways, so the first button was sewn on wrong from the start. After that they never managed to correct the twist, the snowball rolled, and everything went to hell.
Our team wouldn't have any deaths, of course. Lee Hayun dies later, but not here. With Baek Woohyun watching everything with those wide-open eyes, Kang Hyun's plan never stood a chance of succeeding in the first place.
But….
In a place neither Baek Woohyun nor Yeon Hajin managed to watch, the Church was going to throw in a variable of their own.
Baek Woohyun was acting a little strange right now, but still.
"If everyone's done eating, should we head out?"
I remembered the original catastrophe well enough that I already had a rough plan for dealing with it. I just needed to prepare a few things first. Thanks to that, this weekend was going to be a little busy.
Afternoon classes were all theory, so they flew by.
I was staring blankly out the window at the sky when, before I knew it, it was time for homeroom.
At the front of the class, Jin Soyoung was delivering the day's announcements.
"Next. The papers being passed out now are club application forms. Look them over and fill in your preferred clubs by morning assembly tomorrow."
With that, a sheet of paper made its way to me from the front.
I scanned the long list of clubs that existed at Inatium Academy and started thinking.
Even so, joining the same club as the protagonists was the right move, wasn't it?
The heroines each joined different clubs that suited their personalities, but at the very least Baek Woohyun and Yeon Hajin chose the same one.
Of course Yeon Hajin deliberately picked the club Baek Woohyun was in, but the main reason was that the club itself was perfect cover for outside activities. From my perspective, that made it a solid choice too.
While I was still checking the club list, Jin Soyoung finished the rest of the announcements and dropped one last line.
"Ah. And anyone who applied for the special training class, stay in your seats. We start today."
Ah.
— Jin Soyoung Illustration —