When was my first confession, again?
Right—it was to a girl from the same village.
I'd been pushed into it, more or less, and what came back was a rejection.
On top of that, I was the one who should have been crying, but the girl who'd received the confession burst into tears instead, which made the whole thing bizarrely awkward. I still remember that.
Anyway, after that I hadn't really wanted to think about romance—and yet here I was, confessing again.
Maybe I'm just fundamentally... incompatible with love.
Elline stopped.
As if some invisible hand had reached out and seized her mid-step, she simply stopped.
At first, the words had come out tangled.
But telling her *sorry, this is a forfeit, just bear with me* felt like too much of a betrayal—so I'd decided to just say it honestly.
Like I genuinely liked her.
*Well. I went and did it.*
The comparison might be a little crude, but they say when you're desperate to use the bathroom you're frantic with anxiety, and then the moment it's done, you feel completely at ease.
That was exactly me right now.
The deed was done. Whatever she said next, I felt like I could take it.
Objectively speaking, she was one of the top students even within Alpha Class.
I was... a middling student even within Beta Class.
She was a noble from a distinguished family... and I was a noble from some rural backwater where people farmed.
If there was one thing I had over her, it was that I'd made more friends at the academy.
That was it. Literally just that.
Given her personality, she wouldn't get angry. Maybe she'd look at me with contempt.
Actually, I couldn't picture any expression on her face at all.
Not from the second-year final monster-subjugation exam, not from the troll escape incident in first year that had turned the whole academy upside down.
I'd never once seen her wear a different expression.
And then, slowly, she turned her head.
Her silver hair shifted as she turned to face me fully, and the expression I saw was—
*Wow.*
Nothing.
A perfect blankness—every last trace of feeling, however faint, completely erased.
It made me think that if a god had forgotten to give humans expressions before breathing life into them, this was what they'd look like.
She was alive, of course.
Her eyes were still blinking, and I could see the faint movement of her pupils.
I'd said with confidence that I hadn't seen a different expression from her in two years—but this was something new entirely.
And still, those unwavering blue eyes were fixed on me, boring straight through.
Uncomfortably so.
Only a few seconds had passed, but the silence in between pressed down on my chest all the harder.
Why wasn't she saying anything?
Those eyes, still unreadable, were watching me. Her hair swayed in the breeze drifting through the open window.
Just give me a negative reaction. Get angry, even.
"Um, listen—"
I couldn't hold it in any longer, and the moment I opened my mouth, she cut me off again.
"Why?"
"Hm?"
"Why do you like me?"
The conversation had abruptly shifted into interview format.
*Why do you like me?* That was a line I'd never come across—not in any play I'd seen, not in any story I'd heard.
*Wait, had I?*
I didn't know.
Either way, I needed to answer.
Hmm...
Why did I like her?
Well, there wasn't really a reason—I'd confessed because of a forfeit, hadn't I?
That was the worst possible answer.
Because she was beautiful? Because her presence was striking? Because she was special? Because of her family name?
None of those were right.
No fitting answer came to mind, so I just stared at her.
You don't need a reason to like someone.
"Just... because."
*Just because*, he says.
I should've paid more attention in rhetoric class instead of slacking off. Even a little more would've helped. Years of only hanging around with guys had left me with no idea how to speak considerately to a woman, and now that was coming back to bite me in the worst way.
Even after saying it, I felt pathetic.
"?"
Just a little.
Her lips moved the tiniest bit, and she bit them—barely, almost imperceptibly.
Her expression was still blank, but maybe because of that, the small way she bit her lip stood out all the more clearly.
Was she displeased?
I felt a pang of guilt.
I'd expected rejection, but actually witnessing that look of displeasure with my own eyes made something ache in a corner of my chest.
*I'm sorry... ugh.*
The first time I confessed, I'd done something similar and made the girl cry.
It was only natural to feel uncomfortable when someone you had no interest in confessed to you—I knew that better than anyone. And yet I'd gone and done it anyway, out of some momentary pride. That thought settled over me.
*I should apologize.*
"Sorry."
I scratched the back of my head.
"You're busy with third year, and this was pretty sudden. Answer however you're comfortable."
I looked at her again, hoping my sincere apology had reached her—but she was still expressionless.
And then, slowly, she opened her mouth.
"Okay."
That was the answer I'd expected.
No—
*Okay* was not the answer I'd expected.
"Hm?"
I asked again, but Elline only blinked, her eyes steady.
"You said to answer."
There wasn't a single lie in those unwavering eyes looking back at me.
She took one step toward me, then another, closing the distance, and that moment felt like it stretched into eternity.
The core of support-branch magic is quick judgment.
But right now, that judgment was crumbling completely.
I just stood there, still, as she came closer.
Her footsteps stopped in front of me, and she stared at me from very close range.
"I understand your feelings."
"Oh... yeah?"
"Yes."
She nodded, matter-of-fact.
As naturally as if she were telling me tonight's dinner was a delicious stew and steak.
I nodded back.
From a third party's perspective, would I have looked like a complete idiot?
I didn't know.
Right now, with Elline right in front of me, my mind was too scattered to think straight.
So this was what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the atmosphere.
*But what exactly does she understand?*
She turns her head.
As if everything is settled, she walks out of the classroom without a backward glance.
As if the entire exchange had been a hallucination I'd conjured myself, I watched her to the very end—the way she reached for the door handle and opened it, so naturally it was almost surreal.
Her steps didn't waver. That retreating figure was the same Elline I'd always watched from a distance.
Thud.
The door closed.
I'd always been the one left behind, so I'd never noticed—but the empty classroom was eerily vast and quiet.
The tension drained out of me all at once, and I stood there in the hollow silence for a long while before—
"...I'm hungry."
I was hungry, so I decided to leave.
In the evening, the academy dining hall was always packed.
The rich, savory smell, the clatter of dishes, the lively noise, and the ceiling washed in amber light—a striking contrast to the mountain air outside—made it a place that always felt alive.
"Over here! Rutess."
I picked up my tray and looked around. At our usual spot, Ross was waving at me, and Balrod was already eating.
I made my way through the crowd and sat down. Balrod looked like he was nearly finished, scraping the last of his bowl.
"How are you already done? When did you even get here?"
"Five minutes ago."
Does he have a bottomless pit for a stomach?
Ross shrugged, as if he understood my feelings perfectly.
"It's not like this is anything new with him."
"It's normal back east. Respect regional culture."
Balrod, true to his roots in the rugged eastern mountains, always had an impressive appetite—but what was even more impressive was that he never gained weight.
He claimed it was genetics, but with twice the food going in, how he stayed the same size was genuinely baffling.
"So."
Ross propped his chin on his hand and looked at me with that sly expression of his.
God, I really want to smack that face.
"How'd it go?"
"How'd what go?"
He flicked his eyebrows up lightly, as if to say *you know what I mean.*
"I gave you three days, but realistically today was your only shot, wasn't it?"
"Say that one more time and I'll actually break your face."
Ross, unbothered by my threat, flicked his eyebrows up again a couple more times.
"Try it."
"Come on, why are you putting so much pressure on me? Obviously nothing happened."
Balrod, who had just set down his bowl after licking it clean, let out a satisfied belch and looked at us.
"You know how he is—can't talk to girls."
"?"
What is he on about?
"I talk to plenty of girls."
"Professors don't count."
Hm... do they not?
"No, I really do talk to... quite a few?"
Maybe not that many, actually.
Ross thought about it for a moment, then nodded slowly.
"Come to think of it, remember first year when Sereen tried to talk to you and you couldn't even respond?"
Balrod laughed heartily at the memory.
"Sereen was so thrown off, wasn't she? Everyone spent ages trying to smooth it over."
"..."
I wanted to protest, but nothing came to mind.
Thinking back on it, it really did feel that way.
Unable to find a rebuttal, I just stirred my soup with my right hand, fishing for pieces of meat.
"Anyway—one year. If it starts tomorrow, you know that's still two months after graduation, right?"
Ross gave a wicked smile and held his fork—speared with a piece of steak—out in front of me. Drops of red fell from the rare surface.
I stared at it for a moment, then snapped it off the fork in one bite. His face twisted.
"You want to fight?"
Academy food really is good.
"Hardly."
I shrugged and downed my soup in one go.
"I did it. The confession."
The sound of the bowl hitting the table felt unusually loud. I looked up to find Ross and Balrod both staring at me.
Eyes wide.
They're going to choke.
"...Seriously?"
"You actually did it?"
Both of them slowly leaned their faces toward mine.
"Yeah, after class today. If you don't believe me, go get a truth-detection artifact."
I said it with complete confidence, and they looked at each other, then turned back to me.
"No, no—you actually did it? For real?"
"Why?"
*You're the ones who told me to, you idiots.*
"So?"
"Hm?"
"What did Elline say?"
...What did she say, again?
She said *okay*—but the tone and the whole situation had been genuinely strange.
"She said... okay."
"Okay?"
Ross looked horrified, eyes practically bulging behind his glasses.
"I mean, the situation was kind of weird."
I thought it through calmly and reconstructed the scene for them.
I confessed. Elline looked at me.
I told her to answer however she was comfortable. She said *okay* and left.
That was it.
Balrod listened, considered it briefly, then leaned back in his chair as if his interest had fizzled out.
"So you got rejected, then?"
Ross crossed his arms and started puzzling over the genuinely ambiguous answer.
"What does... what does *okay* even mean?"
He was covering his mouth with his hand, bouncing his leg, approaching it with the careful deliberation of someone working through an exam problem.
"You confessed, she didn't say *no*, she didn't ignore you, but she didn't say *yes* either. And she just left without saying anything else to you?"
"Yeah."
I nodded, and his expression grew even more serious.
I was the one who'd confessed and received the answer—so why was Ross the one looking so grave?
Balrod, meanwhile, was already shaking his head like he knew the answer and started clearing his dishes.
"You got rejected. I said so."
At that, Ross shifted his gaze to Balrod.
Balrod was in Alpha Class and had probably seen more of Elline than any of us—and he looked at me with a pitying expression, as if he'd already figured out what her answer meant.
"*Okay* just means 'I understand your feelings.' Exactly that and nothing more."
"...Who answers like that?"
Ross asked, incredulous.
He genuinely couldn't understand what kind of person would respond to a confession with a single *okay* and walk away.
Someone pours out their most sincere feelings, and the response is just *yeah, got it, understood*?
"I think he's right, actually."
I turned it over in my mind and found myself siding with Balrod.
Her expression at the time had been perfectly blank. No emotional shift whatsoever, no tremor in her voice.
Just like Balrod said—she'd probably answered simply to acknowledge that she'd received my feelings.
That was entirely something Elline would do.
In the end, Ross thought it through carefully and nodded, as if arriving at a weighty conclusion.
"Yeah. You got rejected."
Thanks a lot, you bastard.
And so dinner came to an end.
For some reason, the two of them kept looking at me with pity and pushing extra pieces of meat onto my plate, which only annoyed me.
The forfeit was over.
Leaving nothing behind but a wound.
Night.
If the first thought that crossed every new student's mind upon seeing Irasion Academy was *it's enormous*, then the thought shared by every returning student was *it's absurdly enormous*.
Just walking from the dining hall to the dormitory took a good fifteen minutes.
The distance between the two felt so deliberately vast that I sometimes wondered if the founding headmistress had designed it as a kindness—*eat your meal and take a little walk to digest.*
*Tomorrow is...*
The weekend.
What did I usually do on weekends?
The third-years I'd watched over the past two years were always rushing around or frequently absent from the academy, but I was nothing like that.
*Maybe I'll play some chess.*
Chess, or a walk, or reading, or meeting friends and fooling around. That was the extent of it.
The year had changed, but not much else had.
Was it because I had no real anxiety about the future?
Well—after graduation, I'd return to the domain and help my older brother, the firstborn, by sitting in on estate management lessons and preparing for that life.
That was the future that had been laid out for me.
I'd never really thought deeply about it, and... I didn't think I minded it, either.
Various idle thoughts drifted through my mind, but one thing was certain: the weekend was always a comfortable thing to look forward to.
Tonight, too, I'd go back, laze around, and sleep with my legs stretched out.
"Hm?"
Someone was standing beneath a streetlamp.
At this hour—were they waiting for someone?
That was my first, passing thought, and I nearly walked by without a second glance. But as I drew closer, the figure came into sharper focus.
A girl standing beneath the mana-stone lamp with her arms crossed, waiting with an air of complete indifference.
It was Elline.
I was thrown.
Why was she here of all places?
She was someone I'd never once crossed paths with on this route—so why, of all days, today?
*This isn't even in her direction.*
Her dormitory was in Alpha Class, right next to the academic building. There was no reason for her to be anywhere near the Beta Class dormitories over here.
So why?
I stopped walking, and she sensed the presence and slowly turned her head.
Our eyes met, and her pupils narrowed—just slightly.
Right. If I were to read her emotions from that one tiny movement...
*Irritation?*
Was she irritated?
Why? Surely not because of one confession. Had she come all the way here to retaliate—
"Listen."
She spoke into the silence.
"...Wha?"
Ugh, my tongue slipped.
"This is too far."
So what?
You came here yourself and now you're complaining?
"And?"
At my genuine confusion, her frown deepened, her feelings becoming more legible—which only made me more flustered.
"Next time, you come to me."
"Why would I?"
Elline brushed her hair back from her face as the night breeze caught it, and looked at me clearly.
"You said you wanted to date."
There was the faintest tremor in her voice, and the last words hung in the air between us.
"If we're together, shouldn't you be considerate of me?"
....
What?