🐦 Magpie Bridge 🐦

19

Once Cory had taken his hands away from his face, I could see that it was slightly red. It was so barely there that I had to look carefully at his pale skin to tell. Cory avoided my gaze as he continued to speak with a small voice.

“I just barely accepted the truth. Stop reminding me like that.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I thought about it for a moment. Then I burst into laughter. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Oh, right. You’re my fan. Puhaha!”

It had been a while since I had laughed so loudly. He was so embarrassed, but still expressed everything he felt anyway. I found that kind of Cory funny.

Cory seemed to be embarrassed: he frowned, muttering, “…..don’t laugh.”

“Do you want a signature, Cory? A free hug? Just say the word. Oh, you got a handshake last time, right?”
“……I don’t need it.”

Cory was definitely sulking.

He turned away from me and pretended to read a book. He was silent for a while, as if he was thinking deeply about something.

Cory roughly shook his hand in his hair, then turned back around and spoke.

“……are you really going to?”

I ended up laughing again.

***

I missed the entirety of morning class for our monster subjugation. The only classes that had their students skip morning class for practical exams were the magic classes and the swordsmanship classes respectively.

The reason was simple. In honesty, the mountains near our school had the occasional monsters intruding in the area, and that was a pretty big problem.

Don’t ask why they built a school near monsters. That’s an answer that only adults can answer.

Anyway, the magic and swordsmanship classes were important to the school: that was because most of the swordsmanship students were aiming to become royal knights, and the magic students were aiming to work at the royal court of magicians.

So they used us as free labor and called it training.

Younger juniors like me would take care of lower-level monsters like slimes that were located in the lower regions of the mountains. As we grew older, the senior-level students would go higher up the hill and deal with higher-level monsters.

Using students as free labor, what a loan shark thing to do. I promised myself that I would get my paycheck from Hylli when he became king.

“Shuraina, are you nervous?”

Hylli, who was wearing a tight-fitting red battle outfit, stood near the lower-level entrance of the hill. He suddenly spoke to me.

I shook my head.

“I was thinking about how to rip you off in the upcoming future.”
“You’re not nervous. That’s good.”

He nodded his head, as if he was used to my response. Hylli had already gotten used to me. Because of that, it had gotten more difficult recently to add more to my Embarrassing Moments collection these days.

The more he dueled me, the more we shared conversations, the faster he matured. It might have been because of me, but I felt that he was getting more cunning as well.

The sad part of all this was that I couldn’t see any more scenes that made me cringe. Maybe the shock tactic worked a bit too well: he fixed it all at once. How boring.