Club (3)
After a brief commotion, Aiolet, Gladia, and Kruse returned to the subject of clubs.
Yet their opinions refused to converge.
“This one! How about this? The baking club! Doesn’t making bread look fun?”
“Why bother baking it yourself when you can just buy bread?”
“Uh… then the gourmet tour club! What about this?”
“You can visit good restaurants without joining a club.”
“If we join a club, the academy gives us funding! Wouldn’t it be fun to go eat delicious things on the academy’s dime?”
“Hmph. I’ve got plenty of money.”
“…Then why do you keep taking mine all the time?”
“Just because.”
“…You’re so mean. Really.”
Most of the chatter came from Aiolet and Kruse. Gladia simply sat beside them, quietly listening to their argument.
It was not that she lacked opinions of her own and therefore kept silent.
Listening to the two of them bicker was simply a little entertaining.
At their core, Aiolet and Kruse were polar opposites.
Aiolet was the type who fundamentally disliked people themselves…
Kruse, on the other hand, had no reservations about making friends.
The mere fact that she walked around calling Aiolet and Gladia her friends was proof enough of how free of prejudice she was.
Of course, being free of prejudice did not mean she was free of awkwardness. Having gone so long without friends, she still let the occasional shut-in vibe slip out.
Still, compared to Aiolet she fell well within the range of normal.
…Though the fact that she called the people who regularly extorted money from her “friends” suggested Kruse was not entirely normal either.
In any case, with personalities so diametrically opposed, there was no way their preferred clubs would ever align.
While the two of them ran on parallel tracks, Gladia sipped her tea and listened, falling into a single thought.
…When did those two get so close!?
That was it—the realization that Aiolet and Kruse had grown closer than she had expected!
On the surface it looked as though they were fighting because their opinions clashed, but Gladia knew better.
If Aiolet truly hated Kruse, the argument would never have started in the first place.
The fact that Aiolet was carefully rebutting every one of Kruse’s suggestions was not simply because she wanted to torment her…!
“Ugh! Then which club do you want to join, Lady Aiolet?!”
“How should I know?”
…Or maybe it is.
…She might just be bullying her after all.
Either way, Gladia found it strangely amusing that the villainess and the saintess—who in the original story had driven each other to ruin—were getting along, even as a quiet worry settled in her chest.
Because…
Kruse… that girl is fine with other girls too…!
She could feel it. She could definitely feel it…! Somewhere, the thick scent of yuri was drifting closer…!
As a veteran of Saintess Hero, Gladia knew possibilities about Kruse that even Kruse herself did not.
Namely, that as long as it tasted good, she was an extreme “anything goes” type!
Isn’t this a classic flag? The relationship that starts with bickering and later turns into something more intimate is pure cliché, right?!
She had wanted her young lady and Kruse to become friends, but she had never wanted them to become friends that way. Gladia quietly raised Kruse’s threat level by one stage.
She alone remained oblivious to the fact that the things she herself did with her young lady were a hundred times more suspicious.
Terrifying, Saintess…!
Meanwhile, Aiolet was watching Kruse with wary eyes of her own.
In truth, just as Gladia had guessed, Aiolet had unexpectedly taken a liking to Kruse.
Poking her produced entertaining reactions, and she made a convenient healing shuttle during training.
Yet there was a reason Aiolet never fully dropped her guard around her, and that reason was Gladia.
The way Dia treats that quack is suspicious…
From the very first meeting, Gladia had been oddly lenient with Kruse.
On top of that, she somehow knew Kruse’s tastes perfectly (because they had appeared in the game), and she even seemed to know Kruse’s body measurements (because she had read the setting materials), among other things.
Suspicious little details kept catching Aiolet’s eye.
And after spending the past few months with Kruse, Aiolet’s suspicion had hardened into certainty.
There was something between Gladia and Kruse that she did not know…!
Aiolet had already been rather obsessively attached to Gladia; the pink-haired interloper only made that obsession grow stronger by the day.
When they first entered the academy she had insisted on separate rooms like a sulky teenage daughter. After Kruse appeared, she had practically moved into Gladia’s room altogether…
For roughly those reasons, Aiolet’s wariness toward Kruse had intensified, and she now tried to keep the girl within her line of sight whenever possible.
Who knows what she might do to my Dia when I’m not looking?
At this point it was only fair to check Kruse’s thoughts as well.
I’m definitely joining the same club as my friends!
…Kruse simply loved her friends.
When Aiolet and Kruse showed no sign of reaching an agreement, Gladia finally stepped in.
“All right, all right, everyone calm down.”
She gave a light clap, drawing both pairs of eyes to herself.
“Young Lady, you want somewhere quiet with few people and no annoying seniors. Kruse, you want to do fun activities together using academy funding, correct?”
“Well, if I had to put it that way.”
“Yes! That’s right!”
“Then there happens to be exactly one place that perfectly satisfies both of your conditions.”
Gladia smoothly pulled the catalog sitting in the middle of the table toward her and flipped through the pages without hesitation.
Even with her Mind’s Eye, she could not read the letters printed in a catalog.
But that did not matter.
She had memorized which page the club was on.
If she could not even remember that much, she had no right to call herself a veteran of Saintess Hero.
Without the slightest pause she flipped rapidly to nearly the back of the book and held it out to them.
“How about this?”
The moment Aiolet and Kruse saw the page Gladia had opened, their faces flushed scarlet.
“…Sexual Activity Research Club? Are you serious?”
“…Even I think this is a bit much.”
Ah, mistake. I turned one page too far.
Faster than light, Gladia flipped the catalog back one page.
The place she calmly indicated this time bore a thoroughly wholesome name.
Hero Research Club
Fortunately, Gladia’s suggestion was accepted at once.
The Hero Research Club—or Hero Club for short—partially satisfied the conditions both Aiolet and Kruse wanted.
A tiny club with only one member in total.
Regular activities once a month.
The activities themselves consisted of wandering the academy’s corners in search of traces of the First Hero, or skimming old documents and submitting a short impression.
At a glance it looked like a club on the verge of collapse, yet Gladia had chosen it for a reason.
“This is the only club in the academy where you can still find information about the Hero.”
Aiolet asked with a puzzled look, “The only one? Why?”
“Because the principal absolutely, utterly despises the Hero.”
Principal Rustiel generally took a hands-off approach.
One look at the club names—napping clubs, even a sexual activity club—made that clear enough, did it not?
Yet there was one existence that made even Rustiel seize up at the mere sight of it: the First Hero.
Well, considering the First Hero played a huge role in making Rustiel take the principal’s seat, it’s understandable she’d hate him.
For that reason, even though the First Hero was the founder of Stella Academy, finding any trace of him inside the academy was extremely difficult.
Rustiel had scrubbed away everything that so much as mentioned the Hero.
It was almost miraculous that the Hero Research Club had managed to survive her purge at all.
“So the Hero Club is practically the only place in the academy where you can still obtain information related to the Hero. Wouldn’t that also help the Saintess achieve her goal?”
“Hmph. Well, I suppose so.”
“Lady Gladia, Lady Aiolet…!”
Kruse looked at the two of them with shining, moved eyes.
Honestly, she had begun to think Gladia and Aiolet had completely forgotten about finding the Hero.
In that state, Gladia’s sudden remark that seemed to take her into consideration made large tears of emotion well up in Kruse’s big eyes.
…It was the classic picture of a woman falling for a bad boy.
You know the type—the bad boy who usually treats her roughly, then is nice once or twice, and she is so moved she can never leave?
Well, even the worst bad boy would probably drop to his knees before Kruse’s overwhelming maternal aura.
Anyway, Kruse was happy, so all good!
Having reached that conclusion, the three of them immediately set off to finish the membership application.
At last they arrived at the most remote corner of the academy’s research building. Before them stood the door of the Hero Research Club, from which drifted the musty smell of old dust.