The Mysterious Transfer Student
For humans, the number three holds a rather special meaning. Whether I can still call myself human is another matter entirely. The three-legged crow, the Holy Trinity, best of three, three men make a tiger, the Three Sacred Treasures, and on and on.
Even setting humanity aside, there is something about the number three. The minimum number of sticks needed to prop something up with any stability is three. The fewest lines required to form a polygon is three. I have no idea whether this world works the same way, but the third planet from the sun in the solar system is called Earth.
Why am I going on about this? Because right now, including that teacher over there, a total of three teachers had been blatantly ignoring me. First-period history, second-period liberal arts, third-period mathematics. Back in my previous life, the one virtue I could claim at school was that I listened well to my teachers—and now those very teachers were ignoring me.
…So from day one, this academy had completely marked me. It was a noble academy to begin with; of course there was never going to be something like a transfer student.
Maybe there had been one in the original. I had only watched up to episode twenty before that particular plot development slammed my rage button so hard I threw a fit and got dragged here, and there were nearly four hundred episodes still stacked up after that. Somewhere in that mountain of remaining content, a transfer student or two could certainly have existed.
You know the type. The suspicious transfer student with narrow eyes and a massive chest—a beautiful girl who looks dangerous at a glance. Maybe I only think that because those are the only kinds I ever watched.
Still, before I entered the classroom I thought I could hear some chatter and noise. After “that introduction,” though, no one had said a word. Aside from the occasional clusters of kids forming up and slipping out of the classroom, everyone simply sat at their desks doing their own thing.
When my eyes met those of the kids leaving, they flinched and immediately looked away. They were definitely going out to badmouth me. Or maybe it was one of those “going to the bathroom together” things. As a side note, the only people who had failed to form a group were me and the protagonist sitting next to me.
I felt a faint flicker of kinship, thinking maybe this guy was the same type as me—but in the end he was just a fraud. One look at the harem tag proudly slapped on the series and the countless R-19 episodes told you everything. A popular kid pretending to be a loner. An insider doing insider things.
…I was getting even more depressed. The lecture content was not really sinking in either. Liberal arts had been nothing but rambling about gods this and gods that, and it grated on my ears. People who did not even know what a real god was, going on about divine grace and whatnot—it slowly pissed me off.
At least the math I was listening to now was all material I already knew. Back in high school I used to sneer to myself about what the hell these formulas were even for, but who would have thought I would end up putting them to use in a place like this.
“Putting them to use” was a strange way to put it, though. I was simply solving the problems the teacher wrote on the board by myself. Not for the purpose of raising my hand, of course. I did not have the courage for that, and if I stuck my neck out only to get scolded for showing off, my heart might just die on the spot.
Call it a struggle to make this boring math period pass even a little faster. For reference, next period was lunch, and the rest of the day was all physical education. I could feel a rather intense gaze from the seat next to me, but I deliberately ignored it and tried to think about the academy.
In the first year you followed a set curriculum, and from the second year you took subjects suited to your aptitude, or so I had heard. I knew perfectly well what my own aptitude was, but I wondered whether a subject like that even existed here.
I would find out when I got there. Anyway, it was boring. Horribly boring. If there were at least some kids chatting, I could eavesdrop on whatever they were saying to kill time—but even though it was the end of a class, when concentration naturally started to fray, the students had not spoken a single word.
This was too much, no matter how you looked at it. There was a limit to bullying. It was as if everyone had coordinated it in advance—they were only saying the bare minimum necessary.
I was depressed. If it was going to be like this, I should have just stayed on the Eastern Continent. Boring as it might have been, at least they would not have given me the cold shoulder like this. Maybe this was my punishment for stubbornly insisting on going to the academy where the protagonist was.
…Still, the food should be good, right? Around episode twenty there had not been anything about what the meals tasted like, but it ought to be decent enough. It was a noble academy, after all.
They would not kick me out just for being a beastkin… would they?
Had she been pushed out in a power struggle and sent here? No, that was impossible. She was the only daughter of the emperor of the Baek Empire. A precious jewel born late in his life—there was no way that emperor would cast her out.
Then for education? That did not make sense either. Even if Amauros Academy was high-level, considering the prestige of an empire that had nearly swallowed an entire continent, gathering educators for home-schooling would be far cheaper and provide a higher standard of education than going to the trouble of sending her to an academy across the continent.
So then why on earth had she come? I simply could not understand it. The girl in the seat next to me had not opened her mouth or left her seat even once; she just kept radiating an aura of pure displeasure the entire time.
Normally, around now, the heroine sitting diagonally to my right—Exipri—would come talk to me, but she seemed completely crushed by that girl’s presence and was fidgeting restlessly. Even someone who looked as though she had dumped every last stat point into affinity and appearance was that bad; how were the other kids supposed to hold up?
On top of that, from her first greeting she had been putting out pressure that said don’t touch me, I’m in a bad mood, and she was still blasting out that mind your own business because I’m still pissed vibe at full force. Honestly, I was scared that if I said something unnecessary I would get dragged into a fight.
Normally this was when I should carefully plant flags with the heroines, but if I did that with the white tiger in the next seat, she looked ready to tear me apart.
In the early stages, interacting with the heroines was not that important anyway—and it could even backfire—but I still needed to at least exchange a few words so they would not look at me blankly later when I tried to talk to them. It was a little frustrating.
Hoyeon, who could not care less about any of that, strode out of the classroom the moment the end-of-class bell rang. The second she was gone—with strides that made it clear she wanted nothing more to do with this place—the kids in the class all started talking about her.
Some of them were outraged or dumbfounded, asking what the hell that had been, but most of it was about who she was. Starting with how a beastkin had even gotten in here, whether this academy even allowed transfer students in the first place, and just how much clout the imperial family actually carried that everyone had stayed quiet until now.
She seemed to have become popular—in a bad way. With a background like hers, she could probably punch every student in the academy once and get away with a single day’s suspension.
Anyone who knew the temperament of the Baek Empire would not only refrain from harming her but would also stop anyone nearby from trying. Just think a little about the Baek Empire’s actions in Part Two and the answer was obvious.
They invaded a country because the meal they were served while visiting for diplomatic reasons tasted good. They invaded because it tasted bad. The only way not to get invaded was to sign an unequal treaty. Talk about a situation where the answer was already decided. They were expansionist enough to use a meal as a pretext for invasion—so if someone laid a hand on that daughter of theirs…
A full-scale invasion would probably start.
There was no way to stop an event that only showed up in the second half of Part Two at this point in time. Even if getting a happy ending was hard, I had thought that with my knowledge of the original I could somehow avoid the catastrophic ending of Part Two—but I never expected to step on a landmine right from the start.
—Fssst. Hello~
Ah, I had almost forgotten. A girl’s voice tickled my ear. Hearing it in person gave me a whole different kind of feeling. Exipri, the last remaining cuteness specialist in this academy aside from the homeroom teacher, had come to talk to me.
An essential event for building connections with the other heroines early on, and also the first heroine event. She was also the reason the protagonist ended up rolling around a few dozen episodes later, but if she had not been there, I would have spent this entire world as a loner commoner.
That was a hard pass.
“Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Lady Exipri.”
“Hweh? You know me?”
“As far as I know, there’s no one else as cute as you, Lady Exipri.”
There was not a single exaggeration in saying she looked as though she had dumped every stat into appearance and affinity. She had not invested in any of the others at all. In strength, intelligence, and stamina, it was a miracle she was even at the academy.
Her mind was pure enough that she would genuinely light up even at flattery this thick. Thanks to that, she held the unique position in high society of being one of the few healing-type dog characters.
“Ehehe… Thank you for the compliment!”
“Didn’t you have something you wanted to say?”
“Ah! That’s right!”
Worse than her strength and stamina was her intelligence. Even on the profile posted in the notice, she had been proudly labeled an idiot.
“Um, I got put in a different class from my friends. So, could you walk with me just as far as the other class?”
“Of course.”
I did not bother asking whether she could not go alone. I already knew she got lonely easily, and rather than digging into this and that, just doing what she asked would leave a better impression on Exipri.
When I asked which class, it was two classrooms over. As we walked along lightly holding hands, she asked me:
“Ummm… weren’t you scared of Baek Hoyeon sitting next to you?”
About Baek Hoyeon. Honestly, I was scared shitless. True to this world being based on a novel, she was beautiful—but more than that, she was freely radiating a dangerous aura that could only be called venom, or maybe rage. And her background was straight-up the villain faction of Part Two.
“I am scared. But shouldn’t we still try to get along?”
Still, if I could somehow make her an ally, maybe I could erase the tragedy of Part Two entirely. It might backfire, so I had to be careful, but leaving it as an option did not seem like a bad idea.
“Oh my, Exi!”
Since it had not been far to begin with, we soon met Exipri’s friends. Of course, every one of them was a noble young lady. The girl at the front lit up with delight at the sight of Exipri, then her expression immediately hardened when she saw me nearby. Her eyes said something like, what is this filthy man doing next to my baby kitten?
“…And who might you be?”
Camilla. A friend of Exipri’s, and one of the heroines.