There was a brief commotion, but Aiolette, Gladia, and Cruje soon returned to the topic of clubs. Their opinions, however, refused to converge.
"How about this one! What do you think of the Baking Club? Doesn't making bread sound fun?"
"You can just buy bread. Why go to the trouble of making it yourself?"
"Oh… then what about a Restaurant Tour Club! What about this one?"
"You can go to restaurants without joining a club for it."
"But if you join a club, the academy gives you a budget! Wouldn't it be fun to go eat good food on the academy's coin?"
"Hmph. I have plenty of my own money, thank you."
"…Then why do you take mine every single time?"
"Just because."
"…You're awful. You really are."
The one doing most of the talking was Aiolette and Cruje. Gladia sat beside them, quietly sipping her tea and listening to the two of them bicker.
It wasn't that Gladia had no opinions of her own and was keeping her mouth shut.
It was more that just listening to the two of them squabble was, in its own way, a little entertaining.
At their core, Aiolette and Cruje were fundamentally incompatible personalities.
Aiolette was, at her baseline, the type who simply didn't care much for people in general.
Cruje, on the other hand, had no reservations whatsoever about making friends.
The fact that she was going around calling Aiolette and Gladia her friends and tagging along with them was proof enough of just how free of prejudice Cruje was.
Of course, being free of prejudice was one thing—she'd gone so long without friends that certain awkward quirks surfaced every now and then.
Still, compared to Aiolette, she was well within the range of normal.
…Though the fact that Cruje considered the people she regularly borrowed money from to be her friends did suggest she wasn't entirely normal either.
In any case, with their personalities sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum, there was no chance their opinions on which club to join would ever align.
The two of them were running in parallel lines with no sign of intersection—and as Gladia listened to their argument and sipped her tea, one particular thought crept into her mind.
*…When did those two get this close?*
The realization that Aiolette and Cruje had grown closer than she'd expected.
From the outside it looked like two people fighting because they couldn't agree on anything, but Gladia knew better.
If Aiolette had truly disliked Cruje, there wouldn't have been an argument in the first place.
The fact that Aiolette was firing back at every single one of Cruje's suggestions wasn't because she wanted to torment her—it meant something else entirely…!
"Ugh! Then which club do *you* want to join, Lady Aiolette!"
"How would I know?"
*…Or maybe not.*
…Then again, she might just be tormenting her.
Either way, Gladia found it oddly amusing—and faintly worrying—to watch the villainous noble daughter and the saintess, who in the original story had driven each other to ruin, getting along like this.
Because the thing was…
*Cruje is totally fine with girls too…!*
She could feel it, she could absolutely feel it—somewhere in the air, the faintest trace of a very particular kind of fragrance drifting in and out…!
As a veteran of *Saintess & Hero*, Gladia knew all about a certain potential in Cruje that Cruje herself had no idea about.
The fact that she was, at her absolute limit, the kind of person who was fine with anything as long as it tasted good!
*Isn't this a classic flag? The relationship that starts with bickering and ends up getting way too cozy—that's a cliché for a reason, isn't it?!*
Gladia had wanted her young mistress and Cruje to get along, yes—but not like *that*. Internally, she bumped Cruje's threat level up one notch.
She remained entirely unaware that the things she herself got up to with her young mistress were a hundred times more suspicious.
*Terrifying, truly. The saintess…!*
Meanwhile, Aiolette was watching Cruje with eyes full of quiet wariness.
As it happened, Gladia's instincts were correct—Aiolette had, somewhat unexpectedly, taken a liking to Cruje.
She was fun to poke at, and her reactions were entertaining. She also made a convenient healing shuttle during training.
But there was a reason Aiolette hadn't let her guard down around Cruje, and that reason was Gladia.
*The way Dia treats that quack is not normal….*
From the very first time they'd met Cruje, Gladia had been strangely lenient with her.
On top of that, Gladia somehow knew Cruje's preferences in uncanny detail (because they'd been in the game). She knew Cruje's exact measurements (because she'd read the setting materials). Little things like that kept catching Aiolette's eye.
Over the past few months of spending time with Cruje, Aiolette's suspicion had hardened into conviction.
There was something between Gladia and Cruje that she didn't know about.
Aiolette had always been quietly possessive of Gladia, but the arrival of the pink-haired interloper had made that possessiveness grow sharper with each passing day.
When they'd first enrolled at the academy, she'd insisted on having a separate room from Gladia—sulking like a teenager—but since Cruje's appearance, she'd reached the point of practically living in Gladia's room altogether.
For roughly those reasons, Aiolette's wariness of Cruje had intensified, and she made a point of keeping Cruje within her line of sight whenever possible.
*How am I supposed to know what she'd do to my Dia when I'm not watching?*
At this point, it was worth checking in on what Cruje herself was thinking.
*I'm definitely joining the same club as my friends!*
…Cruje just really liked her friends.
With Aiolette and Cruje's opinions showing no sign of converging, Gladia finally stepped in.
"All right, all right. Let's all calm down."
Gladia clapped her hands lightly, drawing both pairs of eyes toward her.
"My lady wants somewhere quiet with few people and no bothersome upperclassmen. And Cruje wants to do something fun together using the academy's club budget—is that right?"
"Well. If you're going to put it that way."
"Yes! Exactly!"
"Then as it happens, there's exactly one place that perfectly satisfies both of your conditions."
Gladia slid the catalogue from the center of the table toward herself and began flipping through the pages without hesitation.
Even with Heart-Sight, she couldn't read the text printed in a catalogue.
But that didn't matter.
She'd already memorized which page the club was on.
If she couldn't remember even that much, she had no right to call herself a veteran of *Saintess & Hero*.
Without a moment's pause, she flipped through the pages and opened to a section near the very back, then held it out to the two of them.
"What do you think of this one?"
The moment Aiolette and Cruje saw the page Gladia had opened to, their faces went scarlet in an instant.
"…Sexual Practice Research Society? Are you serious?"
"…Even I have to draw the line somewhere."
*Oh. My mistake. I went one page too far.*
At a speed that would have put light to shame, Gladia flipped the catalogue back one page.
The page she calmly landed on this time bore, thankfully, a perfectly wholesome name.
[Hero Research Club]
***
Fortunately, Gladia's suggestion was accepted without much resistance.
Because the Hero Research Club—the HRC for short—partially met the conditions both Aiolette and Cruje were looking for.
A small club with a total membership of one.
Regular meetings: once a month.
Activities: wandering the corners of the academy in search of traces left by the First Hero, or skimming through old texts and submitting a brief reflection.
It looked, at a glance, like a club one step away from disbandment—but Gladia had her reasons for choosing it.
"This club is the only place in the academy where you can actually find information about the Hero."
At Gladia's explanation, Aiolette tilted her head with a puzzled look.
"The only place? Why?"
"Because the headmistress despises the Hero. Absolutely, viscerally despises her."
Rustil generally leaned toward a hands-off approach when it came to running the academy.
One only had to look at the club names to get a sense of it—there was a Napping Club, and apparently even a Sexual Practice Research Society—which made the picture fairly clear.
And yet there was one thing that made even Rustil twitch at the mere sight of it: the First Hero.
*Well. Rustil becoming headmistress in the first place had a lot to do with the First Hero, so the resentment is understandable.*
For that reason, despite the First Hero being the very founder of Stellar Academy, traces of her within the academy were extraordinarily difficult to find.
Because Rustil had swept them all away the moment anything Hero-related appeared.
It was almost remarkable that the Hero Research Club had survived at all under Rustil's relentless purging.
"So the HRC is essentially the only place in the academy where you can get information related to the Hero. Shouldn't that be useful for the Saintess's goals as well?"
"Hmph. I suppose it would be."
"Gladia, Lady Aiolette…!"
Cruje looked at the two of them with eyes full of emotion.
Honestly, Cruje had started to worry that Gladia and Aiolette had simply forgotten about the whole business of searching for the Hero.
So when Gladia suddenly said something that felt like she was looking out for her, Cruje's large eyes quickly filled with glistening, overwhelmed tears.
…It was a textbook example of someone who kept falling for the wrong type.
You know the kind—where someone treats you carelessly most of the time, and then does one or two kind things, and you're so moved by it that you can't bring yourself to leave?
Well. No matter how bad the type, they'd still have to kneel before Cruje's overwhelming maternal energy.
Anyway—Cruje was happy too, and that was good enough.
With their decision made, the three of them immediately set off to complete their membership applications.
At last, in the most remote corner of the academy's research wing, they arrived at the door of the [Hero Research Club]—old, dusty, and carrying the faint smell of something long undisturbed.