Don't Ruin a Pretty Face
The moment class ended, Arian slipped outside and made her way down the corridor, glancing this way and that as if she were hunting for something.
She kept moving until she found it: a shaded pocket where few people passed and the sunlight never reached.
"This'll do."
Arian crouched and drew a cigarette and a box of matches from inside her clothes.
So this is that little luxury everyone's been going on about...
Cigarettes had been all the rage among mages for some time, but they were still contraband at the academy. Incoming students had their coats and bags checked, yet no one searched their bodies. Every student was an adult, and Avalon Academy's standards were not so low that anyone seriously believed a pupil would walk in carrying banned goods.
Arian had turned that very assumption against them. She had smuggled the cigarettes in a pocket of a decidedly private sort, and now she drew out a stick already warmed by her body.
It was her first time with matches, and they refused to catch nearly as easily as she had expected.
"Why won't you light?"
She put real force into the strike, and only on the sixth try did the cigarette finally take. She swallowed. Even untouched, the lit stick began to shrink, little by little.
Ugh. Why does it smell like that?
The foul stench, nothing she had ever smelled before, made her hesitate to bring it to her mouth. Even so, she couldn't stop here. Not after everything she had gone through to get the thing inside.
"I can do this."
Her face was tighter with nerves than it had been while she was lighting it. She was just about to set the cigarette between her lips when something knocked it from her hand. It hit the ground, and the fire died.
After all that work to get it lit, Arian stared at the fallen cigarette in equal parts resentment and shock that someone was suddenly beside her.
D-don't tell me it's a professor?
She swallowed hard and turned her head, eyes trembling. What she found was not what she had expected. A man was looking straight at her.
"Hm?"
The surprise of a stranger—not a professor—lasted only a moment. The cigarette pack she had left resting against the hem of her skirt was simply taken.
"That stuff's bad for you."
"Hey! What's it to you!"
Arian was thrown. She had gone to such lengths for those cigarettes, and now they were gone, just like that—stolen by some man, of all people. She rose with half a mind to take them back by force, then faltered the instant she realized he was taller than she was.
Is a man even allowed to be this tall?
It was unpleasant and startling at once. In the end she couldn't get a word out, her eyes flicking between the stolen cigarettes and the man who had taken them.
"It'll ruin that pretty face, and the rest of you with it. So don't."
Her heart gave a heavy thump. Complimented by a man she had never seen before, Arian felt it race. No man had ever praised her. The feeling was good, and at the same time she was mortified.
"Give me a break."
She threw the words out as if the whole thing were absurd and fled.
H-he did just compliment me, right? He said I was pretty. Pretty...
The stolen pack vanished from Arian's head entirely. Could praise really feel this good? Using the excuse that she couldn't possibly walk back in with a face this red, she turned away from the classroom and headed somewhere else.
"A perfectly natural skip~"
Her steps were light. The fact that she had been complimented refused to fade, though she was trying to forget it, and simply having walked out of class was enough to leave her giddy. For a proper delinquent it would have been nothing special, but she felt a strange pleasure in it, a thrill.
Is this why students try so hard to ditch class?
Heart fluttering, steeped in a peculiar sense of wrongdoing, she crept about as carefully as she could so she wouldn't run into anyone. Right now Arian felt as if she had committed some enormous crime, her pulse hammering—and it didn't take long at all before she realized it was nothing of the sort.
"But this isn't even fun. Should I just go back?"
She had never been cut out for delinquency in the first place. A bit of rebellion and a little coincidence had overlapped, and she had skipped; there had never been a plan. Within ten minutes everything was boring, and she was already sick of something she wasn't used to.
No. Why go back already? Then there'll have been no point in skipping at all.
If she looked, there had to be something more entertaining. She wanted some reward for all the things she had never been allowed to enjoy, and that was why she couldn't turn around. The place she reached, having gone so far as to cut class for it, was none other than Academy Park, set within the academy itself.
She had no idea what the park was even for. She hadn't attended the entrance ceremony in the auditorium!
They probably just made it so people could rest.
It was only a park. No need to load it with meaning. Thinking that, she went in. Beautiful flowers decorated the entrance, and the farther she walked, the more the particular smell of grass tickled her nose.
Not bad.
She was briefly pleased that her choice hadn't been wrong—and then she ran into a new form of life.
A wet growl. Green skin, and that characteristic long nose. The thing was unmistakably a monster, and a rather famous one at that.
"A goblin?"
It wasn't a particularly strong monster, but Arian had never expected to see one inside Academy Park, and she flinched.
No. No need to panic. It isn't as strong as it looks.
"Hoo..."
She drew a breath and looked ahead again, and the small knife in the goblin's hand caught her eye.
It's a threat. I should kill it first.
She had studied the theory thoroughly before her Awakening. A monster was dangerous enough simply by being a monster. Arian meant to kill the goblin and cast her magic—but the spell didn't activate.
"Huh?"
Of course it didn't. Magic required concentration, stamina, mana, and more besides. For an academy student who had awakened only two months ago, it was a fairly difficult thing to do.
"Nnngh..."
She didn't give up. She tried four times in a row, failed every one of them, and changed her mind: she would run.
I don't know why the magic won't work, but I can still run. Goblins have short legs, they aren't fast, and all it's got is a dagger.
She judged that escape was entirely possible and made her decision. But Arian was far more rattled than she had realized. She tried to move in a hurry, caught her own foot, and went down.
"Ack!"
Why now, of all times... While she suffered with her face planted in the ground, the goblin closed in, letting out an unpleasant laugh.
"N-no!"
The thing answered with a shrill, gleeful shriek.
Of all things, what came back to her was the goblin manga she had only recently picked up in the name of acting out. An ordinary saintess, raped by goblins—and the story overlapped with her own so perfectly that tears spilled from Arian's eyes.
"N-no."
Her body had locked rigid and would not obey her, and the goblin was coming for her stomach with that little knife in hand. In the end she would be ruined by the thing, and to keep her miserable life she would have to give her virginity to a goblin, of all creatures... Picturing the worst, she shed tears fat as chicken droppings and shut her eyes so she wouldn't have to see what she had been reduced to. But the pain never came.
"Hm?"
Had some miracle happened? When Arian opened her eyes again, she could see it: a torso cut in a thoroughly masculine V, and shoulders broad and reliable enough to boast of.
"A prince?"
Arian decided a prince had come to save her.
Right now my Hypnosis sat at level 1. I was in no state to put a normal person under—pathetic, really. Awakening skill or not, the other party was an Awakener too, and my base stats weren't high. Skills expressed themselves as levels as proficiency built, so for the moment the priority was either raising my mana itself or finding something other than a human to practice on.
If the target was Arian, though, that was a different story. She was full of holes, starving for someone's affection, and thoroughly unstable. Thanks to that, she was the only person my hypnosis would take, and I had decided to aim straight at the gaps left by her anxiety and her lack.
I had chosen a goblin out of all the monsters for the same reason. Lately Arian had been carrying a fantasy about goblins, along with curiosity and fear.
No idea why she'd grow that many feelings about a goblin, of all things.
In any case, Arian moved exactly like the marionette I had designed. I appeared in the instant before the blade could touch her and stopped the goblin's attack. Then I swung a fist through empty air and, at the same time, wiped the goblin clean out of her head.
"A prince?"
Arian was staring at me with the stunned face of someone looking at a hero.
...I didn't think the hypnosis would sink in this well.
At level 1 I still couldn't see all the way into her state of mind, but apparently my planning and my staging had been better than I expected.
"You okay?"
I held out a hand as I asked.
"Ah—ah, yeah..."
Only now realizing I was no prince at all, just an ordinary classmate, Arian looked down at the ground with her face gone red. Even so, she took my hand and got to her feet.
"But how are you here?"
"Because it was pretty. Before I knew it."
"Huh?"
"The park was so pretty I was looking around, and then I heard someone groaning."
"Oh. Right. The park is pretty."
I could see Arian's disappointment written all over her face, but I didn't particularly care. My face was agreeable enough as faces went, but it was absolutely not handsome enough for every woman to fall for it at a glance. In the original I occupied the golden-sun slot, so the body was genuinely excellent, but objectively speaking the face was nothing special.
That was why I had meant to leave it at exactly this and stop. Then Arian's tears got to me, and before I knew it I had reached out and wiped them away.
"You really are okay, right?"
"Y-yeah, I—I was j-just startled, that's all."
She looked every bit as flustered now as she had a moment ago.
"The park's more of a maze than it looks. Want me to walk you out?"
"I'm fine! I can get out on my own."
Her face burned red with embarrassment, and she started into the park as if she meant to escape the spot entirely.
"Not that way."
"Ah—aah..."
She went even redder, and together we made our way out of the park as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For all that it didn't look it, the place was considerably large—built, it seemed, for the express purpose of getting freshmen lost.
By the time we got back to the classroom, class was of course already over.
"Hey, Leon. Where'd you disappear to just now?"
Kyle asked it with worry all over his face.
"Good thing they didn't call attendance on the first day. You nearly took a penalty before we even started."
"Bathroom got urgent. Gut's been off lately."
"Ah, well, nothing you can do about that. Everything come out all right?"
Whatever he said, I answered with a vague yes, and I watched to see whether Arian might slip out of the classroom after all. Fortunately she didn't seem interested in enjoying any more delinquency for the moment. She didn't move. Reassured, I turned my attention back to class.