I Didn't Mean To
I hadn't meant to, but—
"Not hungry?"
"…Yeah. For some reason, I just don't have much of an appetite today."
Whatever he was eating, he wasn't enjoying it. He'd never been the type to shovel food down, but today he was barely picking at it.
…No matter how I turned it over in my mind, something had clearly happened after he came back from that shop. I tried to force the memory up, but I couldn't even find a thread to pull on.
I'd think about it later. The fact that I couldn't remember it at all probably meant it wasn't that important.
I could say a lot of things about myself, but my memory had always been one of my strong suits. If even I had forgotten it, maybe it really was nothing.
Still, Dogeon had been staring blankly into space for a while now, looking like his soul had left his body, and I was starting to worry a little.
He looked like he had a lot on his mind. Watching him sit there like a man who had already lived out his entire life made my own thoughts start to pile up, so I decided not to pay it any attention.
Men, by nature, tended to carry burdens they couldn't easily share with others. Whether you were an outsider or the life of the party, the script was the same: You're a guy, suck it up. What's the big deal?
That was why even among family, men so often couldn't open up about what was eating them. Dogeon must have his own troubles, too.
Half-baked comfort would only make things worse. Better to leave him alone with his thoughts.
We were friends, sure, but we hadn't known each other long enough for him to dump something that heavy on me. And how was an outsider like me supposed to understand an insider's problems, anyway?
Say, for example, a girl he liked better than his current girlfriend, and he was asking what he should do about it.
…Just thinking about it made my blood boil.
"…Umul."
That was one thing. Another was that I never expected to taste home all the way out here on this distant continent.
But I could say it with absolute certainty: this was the taste of home. The ingredients were different, sure, but it was exactly the same as what the old cook back home used to make.
I'd been eating nothing but this for days, so I was starting to get a little tired of it. Still, better the familiar than wandering off on some culinary adventure and falling into a trap.
This place's menu had things like hot dishes that reeked of mint—disgusting garbage, basically.
Granted, that was the most extreme example, but none of the other food smelled particularly appealing either.
That first steak I'd had… I might actually enjoy it if I ate it now.
I'd been alone then, so of course it had tasted bad. Even if the fragrance was lacking, it was perfectly edible on pure flavor alone.
Having someone to share a meal with made all the difference.
I finished my plate without much effort and glanced over at Dogeon. The food on his plate hadn't gone down at all.
One piece of meat was missing, so at least I could tell he'd managed to eat something.
Had something actually happened to him? I'd never seen him this drained. Even when I'd gotten angry at him, he hadn't been this bad.
Back then, you could still see him scrambling for a way out.
Watching Dogeon usually meant watching someone who was always trying to do something. Right now, though, I couldn't feel any of that drive in him.
It was like looking at my past self.
I seriously debated whether to get up or stay seated.
If I waited him out, he might stay like this forever. But if I stood up, I felt like I'd be interrupting whatever he was thinking through.
After a fair amount of internal conflict, I rose from my seat.
"…Ah. You've finished, my lady."
Sitting here any longer was clearly going nowhere. I needed to drag him outside.
"And you? Did you actually eat any of that?"
"…Yes."
Now that I looked, he was even avoiding my eyes.
For a second I wondered if he was acting like this because he'd snuck into my room while I was asleep and felt me up—but I dismissed the thought at once. Friends didn't do that to each other.
No. Absolutely not. He did seem to register me as a… girl, but that had been an accident.
If I'd been a guy, and some girl had suddenly dragged me into a locker and her chest had pressed against me?
I wouldn't have held back.
If anything, the fact that Dogeon had stopped at just that much was impressive.
So if it wasn't that, then what? Could he suddenly be feeling guilty about everything only now?
If so, his current state made a little more sense.
I knew the difference between acting to earn forgiveness and simply carrying a guilty heart.
Even after I'd chewed him out, what I'd seen from him wasn't remorse so much as a desperate scramble to be forgiven.
If I asked myself whether I'd forgiven him—I already had.
How was anyone supposed to look at only one person for their entire life? Of course people talked about others.
I'd gotten angry at Dogeon because I'd already been furious, and then I'd seen him like that, and everything had just exploded.
…Honestly, even now the thought of it still left a bad taste in my mouth.
But as long as he didn't openly grope someone's ass, hug them, hold their hand, or stand there grinning into each other's faces right in front of me, I was prepared to be generous.
We were friends, after all.
"If you're acting like this because you feel bad about what happened in the gym, then forget it. I've already forgiven you."
"…What? You've forgiven me?"
He reacted like he'd just heard something completely out of left field, which made me wonder if I'd misread the situation. But I was going to have to forgive him eventually.
Might as well do it now.
"I have. However… try to be a little more considerate of others. For some people, relationships are a… very, very sensitive subject."
Just remembering him asking if I had any friends still made me angry. But he'd said this, too:
'Friends are supposed to look past each other's mistakes. You mess up, you learn from each other—that's how it works.'
So all I had to do was look past the mistake and correct the error.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll be careful."
Whether it was the sudden forgiveness that cheered him up or something else, Dogeon's expression improved a little.
His face still looked off, but at least I could see some will returning—some desire to actually do something again. Yeah. That was enough.
Hauling him out of the cafeteria in high spirits was the easy part. The hard part was that nothing to actually do came to mind.
In both my past life and this one, weekends had always been for holing up in my room and doing absolutely nothing. The idea of going outside and doing something simply never occurred to me.
A PC café would've been nice. As if a world that couldn't even manage proper soundproofing would have one of those.
"…Did you have something in mind?"
"No, nothing particular. But if you don't mind, Lady Hoyeon… I'd like to look around the academy a little. Would that be all right?"
An academy tour.
It was basically no different from wandering a university campus, I thought—and then I remembered that the last time I'd done that, I'd wandered it alone, quietly miserable.
Having someone next to you made things more fun. And if that someone was your one and only friend, there was nothing more to say.
"Very well. Let's do that. So—where shall we start?"
Seeing a little of the smile return to Dogeon's face made me feel better, too, for no particular reason.
"…In that case, how about the zoo?"
"She's late…"
Seated in her chair, grinding her heel into Iris, Stephania was thinking.
After the first day, she'd figured as much. The girl might have come from far away, but she was a princess—she would hardly take the word of some foreign noble seriously.
On the second day, Stephania had written it off. Plenty of people heard the rumors about her and still pushed forward with a so-what attitude.
By the third day, she'd decided the girl was simply stubborn. After that much time at the academy, there was no way she didn't know who Stephania was.
But once the fourth and fifth days passed, Stephania became certain.
Hoyeon knew exactly what kind of person she was—and was deliberately ignoring her proposal.
Stephania was using Iris like a doormat to cool her increasingly tangled thoughts when—
"Ah!… Lady Stephania…!"
"No, Iris. Doormats don't speak."
Oops. She'd been pressing a little too hard.
Stephania eased the force in her foot just slightly—then, meticulously, began grinding Iris underfoot again, delivering only as much pain as the girl could endure.
Lately someone had invaded her sanctuary, and Gloria had started hunting her in earnest. The pressure was mounting.
If she unleashed the power of the demons, she could take the entire academy down with her—but Stephania had absolutely no desire to die.
With the coming of the Demon God so close at hand, to fall to the Church's hunting dog and some faceless nobody?
Nothing, Stephania thought, was more wretched than collapsing just short of the finish line.
Gloria she could handle by throwing a few subordinates her way. But the sanctuary invader whose face she didn't even know—Stephania had no idea how to deal with them.
All she knew was that this person left no usable traces, had the skill to casually provoke her and escape at leisure. That was far too little information.
Every powerhouse of that caliber was already on friendly terms with her, so none of them would invade her sanctuary. That was Stephania's assessment.
Which meant a newcomer—or some complete outsider she knew nothing about—had breached her sanctuary. That was her conclusion.
Lay out the right bait, and wait for them to bite. That was the solution Stephania had settled on.
Uncovering their identity came first. Once she knew who they were, she could threaten or persuade them as needed.
With a temporary measure in place for her greatest threat, she turned her thoughts to how she should handle Hoyeon.
Unfortunately, Hoyeon had seen through the surveillance magic tool Stephania had gifted her under the guise of a present and destroyed it—so hardline tactics were off the table.
On top of that, the demon's information about a Demon God on the eastern continent made any reckless move impossible.
Hoyeon had come from the eastern empire. There was a chance she was somehow connected to that Demon God.
It might have been an overreach in her reasoning—but Stephania had survived more than once precisely by assuming the absolute worst, and so she fretted over how to build an amicable relationship with the girl.
As for the transparent smear campaign claiming that Hoyeon favored some commoner—anyone could see it for the nonsense it was, and Stephania treated it as such.