And so, the next morning.
“I heard the story! You want me to teach you, right?”
“Eeh…?”
Amber stared at Dia, who was making that triumphant declaration with a completely out-of-nowhere expression.
“Um, I’m not really following. Why is Dia-chan here?”
“I asked her to come. I asked her to look over your studies while she’s at the shop.”
After seeing those girls badmouthing Amber yesterday, I’d had a thought. If things were left as they were, strange rumors would only keep spreading further and further.
As her senior, I didn’t want to see a precious junior suffer under gossip and malicious slander.
“Of course, she’s not the kind of kid who’d get hung up over things like that…”
Still, if you keep breathing in bad air, something is bound to break eventually. It was definitely better to get rid of it before that happened.
“Leave it to me! I’m confident when it comes to teaching!”
“…Then I suppose I’ll ask for your help.”
Amber shook her head as if admitting defeat, a small smile on her face.
In truth, that wasn’t the only reason I had called Dia over.
Since I had to look after the shop for a while, the amount of time I could properly spend helping Amber study was three or four hours at best.
On top of that, I had all sorts of tasks to deal with, from cleaning the store and buying ingredients to checking the machines and tending to the plants, so I was being held back in more ways than one.
In that case, it would be much more efficient for Dia, who was always at the shop anyway, to take over part of it.
“She’s an active student, so she’ll probably be better at teaching than I am.”
I managed to negotiate by offering to make as many desserts as she wanted. It was vacation season, so she seemed to have plenty of free time too.
“But the person beside you is…”
“Please pay me no mind. I am merely Lady Dia’s attendant.”
The maid, who had been drinking black tea nearby, answered Amber’s question like that.
Her name was Ruri, if I remembered correctly. She was the girl who had kidnapped me and taken me all the way to the Brilliant estate last time.
“She’s kind of scary.”
A slender build, short black hair, and a slightly low voice. At a glance, she only looked like an ordinary girl you could find anywhere.
But despite how she looked, she was a monster who had subdued an adult man like me in three seconds and put me on the floor. She had also blocked the magical power Lavi had given me before, so I couldn’t afford to let my guard down around her.
“Then let’s get started right away! What part don’t you understand?”
“Hmm, all of it?”
And so, Brilliant Aste Diamond’s famous lecture began in earnest.
“First, let’s find the truth set of this expression!”
“…What was a truth set again? I feel like the teacher mentioned it a few times.”
A problem about finding the truth set of condition p.
“T-To draw the graph, you need to know the asymptote!”
“…What was an asymptote again? I think I vaguely heard it while I was asleep.”
A problem about finding the asymptote in order to draw the graph of a rational function.
“Hmm, next is the section on one-to-one functions.”
And then a problem distinguishing between one-to-one functions and one-to-one correspondences.
“…What was a one-to-one func—”
“……”
The instant Dia’s atmosphere turned chilling, Amber instinctively stopped asking.
Of course it would end up like this. She didn’t know any of the material at all.
“Did she do nothing but sleep through class?”
Even so, most people at least crammed before finals and stuffed the knowledge into their heads. She probably wasn’t too bright and forgot everything the moment the exam ended.
“…I’m sorry.”
“As long as you understand. Amber, let’s take it step by step from the beginning.”
And so, as they started from the basics and went through various concepts—
“……”
Through the shop’s glass window, I noticed several female students staring intently at Dia.
“Looks like they took the bait after all.”
They were definitely the ones who had hurled insults at Amber yesterday. Now that they knew those two spent time together even in private, they must have been feeling pretty sour.
After waiting a moment, one of them, looking resentful as if she had something to say, boldly stepped into the shop.
“Welco—”
“Lady Dia, I trust you have been well.”
She cut me off immediately, approached Dia, and offered her an extremely blatant greeting.
“I apologize for interrupting. Still, I thought it was quite rare for Lady Dia to spend her precious time teaching someone.”
“……”
Dia stared at her for a moment, then returned these words.
“Sorry, have we spoken somewhere before?”
“…Pardon?”
The female student began making a bizarre expression, as if utterly dumbfounded.
“Wait! I’ll try to remember! I’m not very good at remembering faces…”
“No, it’s all right. Please take your time…”
It was a scene that made me want to laugh without thinking.
She had worked up the courage to talk to her, only to be treated like a stranger and forced to wait while Dia took ages to remember her.
“Could you be Ena from Class B…?”
“No, I’m Cecile from Class D.”
“Ahh! That’s right! Sorry I forgot!”
I had only planned to stir up a little jealousy, but she had gone and self-destructed on her own, needlessly putting herself through embarrassment.
“Now she’s starting to look pitiful.”
If that had been enough to discourage her, I would have liked her to give up and leave, but as if she still had something to say, she reached out toward Dia—
“Lady Diamond, I—!”
“Please refrain from approaching Lady Dia more than necessary.”
“……”
Ruri stepped in between them as if stopping a suspicious person.
“…Excuse me.”
At that response, the girl ultimately bit her lip and trudged back the way she had come.
“Hmm… What was that all about?”
“Who knows.”
Let’s call it a success. After that, the group of female students never came to Eclipse again.
***
And so, before I knew it, the first day of summer vacation arrived.
[ Then, everyone, without wasting your potential, put it to use and— ]
I was cleaning the shop while listening to the dean’s speech echoing from the auditorium.
“Maybe because the facilities are so big, the sound reaches all the way here.”
The fact that the auditorium was nearby probably played a part too. In any case, it gave me a strangely nostalgic feeling, like listening to a principal’s lecture after a long time.
[ The world has already entered the ubiquitous era. In keeping with the flow of the times, our students must also— ]
Forcing in trendy words that didn’t suit either his age or the situation. It seemed that was universal all over the world.
While I was tidying up the inside with the dean’s voice as background music—
Chiring—
“……?”
All of a sudden, I heard the shop’s front door open softly.
Everyone should have been in the auditorium right now, so who on earth had come?
Before that question could even cross my mind properly, my body was driven down to the floor.
“Jade, affiliated with the Silver Order’s Operations Support Department. Records show that you made contact with Magical Girls Ruby and Sapphire and showed them kindness.”
“……”
“You may already know this, but do not try anything foolish. If I see any suspicious movement, I will dispose of you immediately.”
The magical power I had received from Lavi wasn’t working, just like last time. And this familiar voice—could it be…
“Ruri?”
“Just as you imagined.”
I could more or less guess why she had attacked me.
She must have investigated the Gaia Foundation, the Silver Order’s public camouflage.
To make matters worse, she seemed to have figured out not only my identity, but also the fact that I had approached Lavi and Sophia.
But I had managed to dig up some information on my end as well—
“Don’t tell me. You’re a magical girl?”
“…You realized even that? As expected, it seems I cannot simply let you go.”
Magical Girl Mica. Even if she wasn’t as famous as Ruby or Sapphire, who were active all around the world, she was one of the magical girls with quite an impressive track record.
Her most distinctive trait was probably that, compared to the other two, she possessed less magical power and instead defeated monsters with overwhelming physical techniques.
“The technology developed by Brilliant Company to block magical power. That invention was made for your magical girl activities, wasn’t it?”
“……”
I took her silence as affirmation.
If she wasn’t confident in her magical power, there was no need for her to expose that weakness.
Rather, she removed her disadvantage and forced battles with monsters into a favorable pattern. That was Magical Girl Mica’s tactic.
“I was pretty surprised. If I had to guess, I thought your master was the magical girl.”
“You do enjoy making jokes. There is no way the one who will someday shoulder the world would involve herself in such base work.”
“…Base work, huh.”
At one point, out of needless concern, I had asked Amber whether Dia might be a magical girl. There were precedents in the form of her classmates, Lavi and Sophia.
Of course, Brilliant Aste Diamond was neither a magical girl nor anything of the sort. If she had been, I would have noticed right away from those huge breasts.
That was why I hadn’t been wary of her and had simply thought of her as a noble young lady with an ugly cry.
But who could possibly have known? That her attendant was a magical girl, of all things.
“The other two used pretty similar aliases, but how does Ruri become Mica?”
Lavi to Ruby. And Sophia to Sapphire. They were fairly easy-to-understand names.
But this girl had twisted her name so much that I hadn’t been able to infer it at all until now.
“Those two were simply too careless. In fact, you discovered their identities, so they brought it upon themselves.”
In any case, now that an enemy magical girl had discovered my identity, escape was out of the question. In that case, at the very least—
“…I don’t care whether you boil me or roast me, but give me a little time. At this rate, Amber’s efforts will all go to waste.”
If I, her senior, got dragged away, there was no way she would be able to focus on something like a retest. She would probably throw her studying aside and come looking for me right away.
“Do I have any guarantee that you will not run away?”
“The retest is tomorrow morning. She’ll be coming here soon to show her face, so you can take me away right after that.”
I pressed my head to the floor and pleaded desperately, and perhaps my sincerity reached her, because Ruri lifted my head as if she had no choice.
“For now, I will follow what you say. Even if you ask that person for help, I can subdue you in an instant.”
“……”
It seems I’m well and truly fucked for the first time in a while.