小嫂子的味道

"You would\'ve got me killed if you applied the same reasoning, but I was being kidnapped for real!" I stated.

"That\'s entirely wrong; no one in their right mind would signal to leave when they\'re getting abducted, albeit when it is just what they want," he corrected.

"Even so—"

"Enough! I won\'t be answering any more of your questions. I had no need to answer this too, but I did, so be thankful for that and keep quiet," he said, gesturing to me to shut my mouth by putting his index finger in front of his lips.

I clicked my tongue, then buried the words I wanted to say and the questions I wanted to ask deep inside my heart.

"You\'re an interesting fellow, Zero Blanks. However, at the core, you are nothing but a student at this academy, but I am a professor… It\'ll be good if you keep those words in mind before doing anything else, that\'s all I\'d say," with those words he left the room, closing the door shut again.

Now, I was alone again. The room was mine, but I was back after quite a few days, this felt weird. I sat there on my bed, staring down into nothingness and thinking about what Ryfin said before he left.

\'You are nothing but a student at this academy, but I am a professor,\' was it?

As much as I hate to admit it, there\'s no changing the fact that I couldn\'t figure out if these words carried a hidden meaning in them or not. Maybe he was just toying with me, maybe he wanted to warn me about something. Either way, I was not really in the mood to dwell on it right now.

I raised my head, looking forward. I cast my gaze on the closed door and stared at it for a while as I waited. Though when it seemed like I wasn\'t going to get anything from waiting…

"Come out if you wanna say something, making an injured person wait ain\'t considered good manners," I said.

A few seconds later the sound of the doorknob unlocking was heard followed by a creaking one as the door opened and gently swung to the side. It was closed soon enough by a red-haired girl and by sheer coincidence, she was also the one who opened it.

Likewise, the one waiting for Ryfin to leave the room so that she can come inside was her, too. It was all just sheer coincidence, a matter of fate…or so I\'d like to say.

"I was waiting for him to leave," the girl said as her red hair swayed above her head, she used her hands to move the bangs covering her eyes and adjust them to the side.

Needless to say, the girl was Ellyn, the only red-haired girl I was aware of.

"I didn\'t ask for excuses, did I?"

"That wasn\'t an excuse, okay? Mr. Ryfin is a slow walker," she mentioned.

"Some info you\'ve got there. Anyway, let me start with this: you did a great job handling things while I was away."

"Why does it sound like you\'re reading it out of a script?"

Because I am; I mean, I don\'t go around complimenting people all day. Besides, I wasn\'t complimenting her, as of now I don\'t know if the things I wanted her to do were done right or not. You can think of my words as a formality of sorts.

"But it\'s okay, I\'ll accept that compliment," she added.

"What happened to Anya and Leon?" I asked, coming straight to the heart of the matter.

Yeah, this is what I wanted to know the most. Or, in fact, I was dying to know if things went right or not. Because if they didn\'t and Anya ended up sleeping with Leon while I was away, I won\'t be able to digest that fact.

I\'ve mentioned this before, but I don\'t have any problem with her having a relationship with Leon. What I do have a problem with is that I don\'t want her decisions to be affected by anyone else. Now, whether it be me or X.

By faking my death in the same time and way as it happened in the novel, I trigged the route where Leon would go to her room at night to comfort her—since she would be crying due to the loss of her brother, and they will end by having sex.

Though, things here were different. From what I observed, Anya didn\'t have any feelings for Leon, she saw him as unreachable. Now, if that very same guy—who was like a faraway star for her, whom she could only admire but never reach—were to come into her room at night and try to get physical with her…

I don\'t think she\'ll be able to deal with it, her mental condition being what it was at that time. No, maybe she would have punched him right in the face and kicked him out of the room; she is the type of person who can easily do something like that.

But I\'m not. I\'m not so courageous to gamble on a thing such as that.

You may call me a coward, pathetic, and wrong for thinking so little of my sister, but I couldn\'t care less. Because this is my life, not yours. I am the one who gets to make the decisions.

Hence, I wanted to be sure about everything and commanded Ellyn to follow Leon that night and storm into Anya\'s room—for any silly reason she could think of—a few minutes after Leon.

"So?" I repeated, looking in her direction.

"To be honest, I don\'t know what to say. How did you even predict what Leon will do? I mean, he went into her room almost at the same time you said he will and—"

She swallowed her words when she saw that my gaze was not shifting, nor was I saying anything either.

"It didn\'t happen. I made it in time, but it was over even before that. From what I was able to hear and the atmosphere inside the room when I got there, it seemed like she had denied him directly," she explained.

"I see."

"Leon…he was pretty embarrassed and depressed about it for the next few days—he thought that he tried to force himself on her," she mentioned.

"That doesn\'t have anything to do with me," I clarified.

She went quiet, most likely because I ended the conversation in such a way.

"Did anything else happen at the academy while I was away? Something that I should know about?" I inquired.

She shook her head. "No, nothing of sorts," she said.

"I see. For once, there isn\'t anything else I need to worry about at the moment," I mumbled. These, of course, were words I was speaking just for the sake of it. There weren\'t going to be any incidents that required my attention—at least not according to the novel.

Though now I don\'t know for sure. I have made it back alive and soon the word for it will spread as soon as I give the cover story for the incident. It won\'t have any direct effect as the students didn\'t even know about my kidnapping, but I\'m sure it\'ll affect the plot in some way.

No, not just that. From this point onward, my very existence will interfere with the original plot and things will start to change. There\'s no escaping it. I did the things I did, knowing that this would happen, so there\'s no going back. I\'ll just have to deal with what fate has in stock for me.

I was lost in thought again, then as if remembering something I looked at Ellyn. She was still standing beside my bed in a rather nervous way.

"Oh, sorry. You can go now," I added.

"... Hmm? Ah…okay," she replied, however, didn\'t move an inch from her place.

I eyed her, curiously. "Do you have anything else left to say?" I queried.

"Huh? N-No! It\'s just…"

"Just?"

She looked as if struggling to find the right words or a way to deliver them. I don\'t know. The way her body was trembling slightly, her wavering eyes and uneven breathing. This is not what a normal and fine human behaves like. It was weird, at best.

"What were you up to?" she asked, finally finding the will to speak her mind out. "You were gone for a week, and you faked your death—no, wait. Was that faking? If so, then it was genuinely a good one; because at that time when the room blew up, I thought you were dead for real! And now that you\'ve come back, you\'re covered in bandages from head to toe. Just what the hell were you doing?!"

If the doors were not closed or the quality of the walls wouldn\'t have been as good as it was, I\'m sure the students next door would have heard her as well. That was how loud her voice was.