The Simulacrum - Chapter 77~ Part 1

“The weather forecast said it’s going to rain all week,” Josh noted absent-mindedly, and I responded with a similarly half-hearted grunt.

“I guess that means rooftop lunches are off the table for the foreseeable future.”

“Probably.”

For one reason or another, my friend seemed really distracted, to the point I had to nudge him a little so that he’d notice that the line in front of the cafeteria counter already moved.

“Hey, pal? Are you all right?” Josh gave me an uncertain glance in exchange for my concern, so I guessed, “Are you still stressing over what we talked about on Saturday?”

“What? Nah, man,” he denied with a lazy wave of his hand. “I just woke up today, looked at my calendar, and realized that the exam period is starting next week.”

“Oh, that?” I mused as the line moved again. “I thought it was something serious.”

“Exams are serious business,” my friend huffed, but then a moment later his eyes lit up as he looked at the blackboard above the counter. “Hey, look at that! Caviar is back on the menu.”

“I’m not buying you any,” I told him with the kind of gravitas I usually reserved for more dire circumstances, such as refusing some especially adamant door-to-door salesmen (it’s a long story), and he promptly rolled his eyes at me.

“I wasn’t asking! I just pointed it out because it’s unusual, that’s all,” he grumbled, but I knew better than to give him an inch.

In the meantime, we finally reached the counter and we made our orders. For once, even Josh picked a fairly normal dish, and as for me, I went with fried chicken and onion rings. I asked for an extra serving of the latter, because Judy liked them and tended to snack from my plate whenever I ordered some.  I also ordered a slice of apple pie, and while the lady on the other side put our dishes together, I couldn’t help but notice how she was eyeing me after I made my order.

“Is that for Lili?”

“You mean the pie? Yeah. I give her more than enough allowance to buy it herself, but for some reason she never does, so I figured I’d get her a slice.”

“How very big-brotherly of you.”

I had a feeling he was poking fun at me, but I saw absolutely no problem with what he said, so I answered with a humble, “Thanks.”

Once we got our food, I turned on my heels and headed for our usual spot in the dining hall, with Judy, Elly, and Snowy already seated there. Josh also caught up to me in a second, and once he did, he let out an unusually dejected sigh and did a sudden verbal U-turn.

“Seriously, man. With all the chaos of the last three months, we really need to start cramming. If my average gets under three-point-seven, my parents are going to flay my ass.”

For the record, the school was grading on a five-point system, and they would round the averages up from the seventh decimal instead of the fifth, meaning that Josh, contrary to all of his complaints, was actually aiming for some pretty decent grades. More importantly, there was one particular pronoun in what he said that piqued my interest.

“‘We’ need to start cramming?” I repeated after him with extra emphasis, and he nodded right away.

“Well, yeah. I mean, we agreed that we’d study together, but never got around to it. It’s now or never.”

“Good point,” I noted as we reached the table. My girlfriends left a seat empty between the two of them, so I naturally sat there, while Josh picked the empty spot beside my sister.

“Hi, Lili,” my friend greeted her, only to pause and lean closer to take a better look at her. “You look a little strange today. Did you catch a cold?”

“Can Abyssals even catch a common cold?” my dear assistant followed it up with a question of her own.

“I… don’t know. I’ve never been sick since I was a child, but I’ve never been out of the Abyss for this long, so I honestly don’t know.”

“In that case you better take some extra vitamins,” I told her with a smile as I carefully handed the slice of pie over to her. “Apples are a great source of vitamin C.”

“Oh, wow. Thanks, Leo,” my sister finally smiled, and I returned the gesture even as a wave of killing intent was washing over me. More on that later.

“So if you aren’t sick, then why were you looking so down?” Josh asked once he finally sat down.

“It probably has something to do with her,” the princess noted with an irate growl, all the while she was cutting her steak with the elegance of a pure-bred noble lady. It wasn’t hard to figure out who she meant by that, and I didn’t even need to look over to know that the subject of her comment was watching us from afar even now.

“By her, do you mean the new girl?” Josh asked, and unlike me, he made a point of glancing around. “Is she bullying you?”

“N-No, not quite,” my sister said in a mousy voice. “She’s just… not very friendly. Also persistent.”

“Translation: she’s trying to pick a fight, but she can’t do it in the school, so she’s just glaring at Neige all the time,” Judy stated while simultaneously reaching over and taking an onion ring from my plate without even asking. See? I knew this would happen, and thus my preparations ahead of time once again justified having that ‘S.’ in my middle name.

“Yes, she’s bothering her a lot,” the princess suddenly spoke up with a determined expression. “You could even say that she’s ruining sister-in-law’s school life! I believe the most prudent thing to do is to resolve this by going over to her and beating her up. Who else agrees with me?”

At this point she tried to jump to her feet, but I was one step faster, and I put my hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her back onto her seat, accompanied by another spike in ambient bloodlust.

“Easy there, princess,” I soothed her by patting her head, and somehow the killing intent directed at our table rose a whole notch, but the moment I glanced in the direction where it was coming from, it disappeared. Behind a column. With a high-pitched ‘Kyaa!’. Go figure. Anyhow, I turned back to my girlfriend and told her, “You promised not to make a scene, remember? I still need to make some preparations, so until then, please don’t confront her.”

“But she’s bothering sister-in-law…” she muttered with a crestfallen look on her face, so I immediately redoubled my head-patting effort. It resulted in another wave of bloodlust, but this time I completely ignored it and focused on my food instead, allowing Josh to make a grab for everyone’s attention.

“So, back to that thing we were talking about…” he began, but before he could get to the point, our attention was drawn to a certain loudly complaining Celestial arriving at the scene.

“I can’t believe they did this! What were they thinking!?” Angie fumed even as she unceremoniously sat down next to Josh.

“You need to calm down. You’re bothering the other students,” the class rep, arriving in her wake, tried her best to pacify her, but with little apparent success.

“How can I calm down?! This is a travesty! A betrayal! Treachery of the highest order!”

It was at this point that I sent a glance at Judy, and her eyes asked, ‘Aren’t you going to ask her what she’s talking about?’, so I used my eyebrows to communicated, ‘Nah, I’m just going to wait for the punchline. It’s probably going to be something silly.’, and my girlfriend immediately answered with a tiny twitch of her left eye that said, ‘That’s more or less guaranteed.’

“What are you talking about? What happened?”

Since I remained silent, it was Josh who asked the obvious question. What he received for his trouble was an angry Celestial all but grabbing him by the collar.

“Don’t act like you’re innocent! It’s your fault this happened! You and your vocal minority must’ve threatened the producers into bowing their heads with your deluded demands and proclamations!”

“… I… I think I completely lost the thread. Does anyone know what she’s talking about?” Josh muttered while glancing around the table, and when his eyes met with the recently seated class rep’s, she let out a shallow sigh.

“They are rebooting Trucy the Werewolf Huntress,” she stated in a voice that said she really didn’t want to hear any more about the topic, but my friend apparently didn’t pick up on it.

“Really? They are?”

“The news just leaked,” Angie explained while still sending a death glare at her childhood friend. “Apparently ‘some fans’ were unsatisfied with the ending of the series, so the network greenlit another season where they will completely erase the original ending.”

“How?” Josh blurted out in surprise, and the Celestial girl’s face scrunched up like she was smelling something really foul.

“Time travel.”

“Seriously? Man, that sucks.” Normally that would’ve been the end of it, but then Josh’s eyes suddenly lit up and he asked, “Wait, but if they are redoing the last season, does that mean that Trucy and Ceraph might end up together after all?”

“I knew it,” Angie exclaimed as she grabbed his collar again. “It was you and your toxic brood! Why couldn’t you just let Trucy be with Elliot!? Why must you ruin everything with your bulldozer of toxicity running of high octane entitlement?! Why, oh why…?!”

“Angie, please behave yourself. We’re trying to eat here,” I sternly warned her, and after locking eyes for a mere second, she finally let go of Josh and turned to her food (a plate of lasagna, in case anyone was interested) with a pout the size of a small planet.

“It’s so unfair…” she grumbled, and this time it was Josh’s turn to act.

“Come on, Angie. Don’t let it get to you. Look on the bright side: if it’s good, it’s going to be another kickass season of our favorite show, and if it sucks, we can just pretend it never existed and go with the previous finale… even if it sucked that they shafted Ceraph at the very end.”

“Don’t you get started again…” she hissed back, and my friend immediately raised his hands in surrender.

“All right, I got it. No more Trucy for the day. We have something important to discuss anyway.”

“Something important?” Snowy echoed him, and Josh responded with an unusually dramatic nod.

“Yes, very important. You see, the exam period is just around the corner, so we really need to start preparing for them, or we’re going to be in trouble.”

The moment the word was mentioned, Angie’s expression darkened again and she all but smacked her head against the table with a lethargic groan.

“Argh! You just had to do it! I thought my day couldn’t get worse after Team Trucy’s abject betrayal, and then you just had to remind me of the exams! Tu es terrible!”

“Why French?” Judy whispered in mild confusion, and all I could do was an equally uncomprehending shrug between two bites.

“I’m not Tu es terrible! ” Josh protested in return (with rolling ‘r’-s to boot) and put both of his hands onto the table, probably for emphasis. “I just think that it’s better to be safe than sorry, so we should—”

However, before my friend could conclude his sentence, he was once again interrupted by a new voice entering the scene.

“Dunning,” the voice called out to me from behind, and when I turned around, I found Armband Guy walking towards me with measured yet evidently hurried steps.

“Hello, Pascal,” Josh greeted the newcomer a tad grudgingly, apparently not too happy about getting interrupted again, and Armband Guy returned the gesture with a curt nod aimed at the whole table.

“Hello, Bernstein. I need to talk with Dunning for a moment.”

“Is it public, private, or classified matter?” I jested, yet the guy seriously considered his answer.

“It is technically classified, but the details are public.” Saying so, he glanced around the dining hall and then took a step closer to the table, practically looming over it. “I wish to call in a previous favor from you.”

“You owe Pascal a favor?” Ammy inquired on the side, and following her, the rest of the girls (plus one guy) were giving me curious looks.

“It was something related to Sahi, and it wasn’t a big deal,” I told them off-handedly, and Armband Guy immediately nodded along.

“Precisely. My request also concerns her, and it should not be particularly taxing.”

“Oookay, what is it then?” I asked to keep the conversation rolling while simultaneously ignoring the newest actor on the stage in the form of a certain brown girl sneaking up behind Armband Guy with comically over-mimed steps.

“I am certain you are already aware, but Arch… Sahi officially transferred to Blue Cherry High.”

“Yes, we noticed,” Josh noted just a touch nervously, probably still a little on guard after what happened between the two of them. The incognito ex-Arch-mage, on the other hand, just put a finger in front of her lips, already bent into an impish smile, and she continued her over-exaggerated sneaking act.

“So… Do you want us to help her fit in?” came the next question from Angie, and the guy promptly shook his head.

“Nothing so vague. The issue is that she transferred into the second year, because—”

“Because I’m a child genius who skipped grades!” Sahi suddenly exclaimed while she simultaneously threw her arms around Armband Guy’s waist with a beaming grin that said ‘Gotcha!’. Pascal, on the other hand, only stiffened for a moment before he slowly looked over his shoulder and gave her a not at all amused look, but then a second later he was looking at me again while staunchly ignoring the girl clinging to him. If I had to make an analogy, it was like an old Saint Bernard ignoring a playful tabby kitten.

“It is as she said,” he stated with a voice as dry as an old broom sweeping a dusty sidewalk. “Since you are here, you should explain your predicament yourself.”

The girl, currently wearing her hair in a long braid and in a new uniform that perfectly fit her, let out a semi-embarrassed giggle and looked at me without loosening her grip on the guy.

“You see I, like, enrolled with the pretense that I skipped grades, but it’s been, like, decades since I studied this stuff, so I could totally use a refresher course.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you came up with that cover story,” I pointed out, which naturally earned me a frown.

“I was, like, under a lot of time constraints, and this was the bestest option at the time.”

“What she is trying to say is that this was the only option where she could pretend to be a genius and brag about it,” Pascal commented on the side, and in response, the alleged teen genius immediately tightened her grip on him.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be on my side! Endy told you to support me!”

“That is precisely what I am doing. I am protecting your dignity by attempting to explain your frankly inexplicable thought processes.”

“Agh! You used to be so respectful just a few days ago! This is lame. You’re lame. Stop being lame!”

Completely ignoring her nagging, Armband Guy looked me in the eye again and bluntly stated, “I don’t have the time to tutor her, and you owe me one, so take responsibility.”

It was at this point that Josh cleared his throat to gain his attention, and once he got it, he explained, “Actually, your timing is perfect, because we were just planning to get together to study for the exams. One person more or less shouldn’t make a difference.”

“Really? Thanks! You’re total lifesavers!” Sahi beamed at us, and at first I thought that was the end of it, but all of a sudden she set her feet and, with a heave, he began dragging the guy still in her grasp, one step at a time.

“What are you doing?” came the deadpan question from the mouth of Armband Guy, and the girl dragging her let out an enormous huff before answering.

“If you’re going to ditch me, then the least you can do is to buy me lunch first!”

“You have your own budget now, so I have no reason to do that anymore.”

“Stop being so ugh and just come with me already!”

Honestly speaking, if he didn’t want to go, I was pretty sure Pascal could’ve stopped her at any time, so just the fact that he let her drag him away meant he was playing along. As for why, I had no idea. Maybe it was because he was ordered to keep an eye on her? Or maybe he was messing with her? Maybe not; the guy never struck me as the playful type. But then again, he never struck me as a professional level Street Combat player either, so what did I know?

Anyhow, once they left, Josh clapped his hands and declared, “It’s settled then! We’re going to have a study meeting. No, let’s make it two. As many as necessary.”

“You’re already moving the goalpost.”

Hearing Angie’s grumbling, he turned to the girl and emphatically told her, “I know that you already gave up, but I still have a chance to have my three-point-seven average, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to give it my best shot.”

“If you are trying to do your best, why don’t you aim higher?” Ammy cut in with a small frown, and after a moment, my friend let out a defeated sigh.

“Cut me some slack, please. Three-point-seven is high enough for the likes of me, and it’s hard enough even with the guaranteed fives in PE and Arts.”

“I’m okay with not failing any of my subjects, really,” the Celestial girl whispered while absent-mindedly playing with her food.

“With how hectic things have been recently, I’d be okay with a four-point-five average,” Ammy admitted a little sheepishly, earning her a couple of boos from the childhood friend duo suddenly on the same wavelength again. It was at this point that I decided it would be for the best that I grabbed the reins of the conversation, so I conspicuously tapped my fork against my plate to get everyone to listen to me.

“Before you guys get off-topic again, let’s come to an agreement on this whole study group idea. Anyone who wants to take part, raise your hand.” Naturally, everyone did so, though in the case of Judy and her photographic memory, I figured she was only tagging along to hang out. She didn’t know yet, but I was planning to put her in charge of reviewing the rest of the group at the end, and I wasn’t about to tell her yet either. “Next, where should this study group be held? If Sahi’s also coming along, then my living room might be a little cramped, but we can’t exactly take her to the base either. How about the library?”

“Objection!” Angie cut in with a finger pointing at me. “That way we can’t have snacks! You can’t have a study group without snacks!”

“Yeah, that’s just common sense,” Josh agreed like it was absolutely evident.

“In that case—”

“Why don’t we hold the meeting in our mansion?” the princess proposed out of the blue, and when I directed a questioning gaze at her, she hastily explained, “Mom and Dad said they wanted to meet the rest of my friends anyway, and we could use one of the guest rooms.”

“Wouldn’t Sahi pose a problem?” Judy asked the question on my mind, but Elly immediately shook her head.

“Not a problem at all. If we are just studying, there should be no problem, and even an Arch-mage would think twice before causing an incident in our home.”

“In that case, I have no further objections,” Judy concluded and raised her hand. “I’m for.”

“Me too!” Angie agreed right away. “I’ve never seen Elly’s place from the inside!”

“I’m a little curious too,” Snowy whispered with a raised hand, and soon even the rest followed suit.

“Very well. The last matter is this: when?” I imposed the question, and Josh immediately came forth with an answer.

“Angie’s having tennis practice today, and I also have some stuff to take care of in the afternoon, so that’s a big no.”

“In that case, tomorrow?” I proposed, and after a long beat, everyone nodded. “So, just to summarize: tomorrow, after school, at Elly’s place, we all gather and study for the exams, unless something uselessly dramatic happens in the meantime. Are we clear on that?”

“Chief, you are jinxing things again,” my dearest assistant warned me, but I placated her with my patented Disarming Smile ver.0.7.3.

“Nah, I simply learned that optimism doesn’t work. This way if I’m wrong and nothing happens, I will be pleasantly surprised, but if we do run into some annoying developments, I would at least have the option to smugly smile and say ‘See, I told you this would happen!’.”

“It fills me with shame that I can’t refute your logic,” Judy grumbled in response, so I did the responsible boyfriendly thing and put my arm around her shoulder to cheer her up, all the while ignoring the sudden spike in bloodlust filling the air around me. Again. The fact that I was getting used to it was pretty alarming, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t have to put up with it for long before the Knight girl would cause a huge incident that would spiral out into another epic flustecuck.

In case it wasn’t obvious yet, friendship ended with optimism. Now pessimism is my best friend.