Chapter 125
Chapter 125
Hallway in the Faculty of Magic building.
Seria walked toward Iris's private laboratory with familiar steps, muting the sound of her heels.
A faint crease sat between her brows.
'Why in the world isn't she coming?'
She had clearly said that as soon as her special tutoring session with Cassian ended, she'd come straight to the assistant office to discuss the follow-up research data she hadn't finished yesterday.
Who was Iris von Evergarden, anyway?
When it came to magic and research schedules, wasn't she the very picture of a bloodless human calendar, dividing her time by the minute?
And yet she still hadn't shown her face even though the appointment was twenty minutes past due.
'How did it end up like this, honestly.'
Seria shook her head.
That Iris, who had never shown even the slightest interest in men her entire life—no, who had scorned human emotion itself as a wasteful squandering of inefficient hormones—
would come to her blushing, asking for advice because a man's heartbeat wouldn't leave her head, was something even the old professors of the Magic Faculty probably never imagined.
Thanks to that, she, already buried under a mountain of duties as chief assistant, now looked set to become the genius professor's love counselor as well.
"Phew."
Before she knew it, Seria had arrived in front of Iris's private laboratory and lightly caught her breath.
Knock, knock.
"I'm coming in."
She hadn't intended to wait for a reply anyway.
The moment she knocked, Seria naturally turned the doorknob and stepped inside.
Creak.
"You really are..."
Seria was just about to chide her as she closed the door.
"How long are you going to keep making the person who came to see you wait?"
"......"
"You know it's the busy season and everyone's swamped. Honestly."
"......"
Her reproachful voice cut through the air in the laboratory, but there was no response from the room's owner.
"What? Why aren't you saying anything...?"
…Huh?
Seria turned her gaze toward the sofa, then narrowed her eyes.
Iris was sitting blankly on the sofa, her thick black mage's robe buttoned all the way up to her neck.
Two cold teacups sat on the table.
The sofa by the table was oddly skewed, as if someone had been sitting there and then left.
"Iris?"
Seria called out as she approached, but Iris's red eyes, hidden behind her glasses, drifted somewhere in space without focusing at all.
It was exactly the kind of reaction you'd get if someone had yanked only the logic circuit out of her brain and shut it down.
"...Haa."
A disbelieving snort slipped from Seria's lips.
"She's hooked. Hooked good and proper."
It was a severe case that didn't even need diagnosing.
The instant Seria's brutally accurate assessment hit home.
Jolt!
Only then did her friend's shoulders jerk hard, and life suddenly return to her unfocused eyes.
Iris whipped her head around to look at Seria.
Then, like someone who'd been wronged, she immediately started blaming Seria with eyes brimming with resentment.
"This is all... because you made me do something weird."
"...Huh? Blaming me all of a sudden? What did I even do?"
Seria put her hands on her hips in disbelief.
"You, yesterday."
Iris bit her lip tightly and fiddled irritably with the cold teacup on the table.
"You told me to 'verify' it by specifically imagining pointless situations. You made me keep thinking about Cassian over and over all day."
"Why is that my fault? You agreed to it too, didn't you?"
"Because once I started thinking about it so obsessively, even after I actually faced my student at the training grounds today, I kept noticing him for no reason all day. So it's your fault."
Seria's eyes widened.
Wait, my friend was capable of arguing this desperately?
"So you're saying the reason you were spaced out just now wasn't a private feeling toward your student, I swear on mana, but because of the psychological suggestion I planted?"
"That's right."
"Really? Huh? You think so?"
Seria clicked her tongue inwardly.
Smart people were terrifying once they started rationalizing things for themselves.
"Right. I did give you two instructions yesterday."
Seria flopped down on the sofa across from her and crossed her legs.
"One was to consciously and repeatedly try imagining Cassian as a man and thinking about him that way."
"......"
"And the other?"
At Seria's sharp question, Iris's pale nape turned bright red.
She averted her gaze slightly and answered in a small voice.
"...I did."
"From the front, right up close, exactly as I told you?"
"...Mm-hm."
Iris lowered her head deeply.
The second prescription Seria had given her yesterday.
'You're sneaking around behind his back and probing his mana, so you mistake it for pure academic zeal. Tomorrow, no matter what, do it from the front—put your hand on your student's chest and look him in the face. Then check whether your heart is still beating in some scholarly way.'
"So."
Seria leaned in eagerly and asked.
"And the conclusion?"
"That, that was definitely..."
She hesitated to answer, then suddenly jerked her head up and began vehemently denying it.
"It was because of an unforeseen variable outside my prediction!"
"Ah, jeez! Why are you yelling?!"
"...It's true I was flustered. But I wasn't flustered from a rational standpoint."
"What, really? Fine, let's say that. Then what kind of variable was it?"
"A sudden submerged sealed chamber formed by failed mana control and..."
Iris's cheeks were now red enough to look like they might burst.
"It was the torrential splash of water that came pouring down right after that."
"A splash of water?"
"Yes. My shirt got completely soaked! In such an absurd situation, there was physical contact—what woman in the world, no, what human being could possibly not be flustered!"
"...You actually have a pretty good set of lungs, huh?"
Iris doubled down on her excuses.
"So this absolutely wasn't a situation that happened because I saw my student as the opposite sex, as a man. It was just a reflexive bodily response to a sudden attack. From the start, Cassian suddenly took off his own clothes and gave them to me, so..."
That was as far as Iris got as she rattled on.
"Iris."
Her words were cut off by Seria's utterly calm, dry remark.
Seria propped her chin on her hand and stared at her friend with eyes that said she was pitiful beyond belief.
"You do realize how contradictory what you're saying is right now, don't you?"
"Contradictory? There's nothing inconsistent in my logic..."
"That wasn't the kind of person you used to be."
Seria tapped the table lightly with her fingers.
"Don't you remember? Last year's Magic Tower academic conference. There was a mana rampage in the laboratory, and a high-ranking noble young master was rolling around right in front of you with all his clothes burnt off."
"Of course I remember. Which house he was from, and which master taught him, too."
"Then you remember how, back then, far from being flustered, you just said, 'First-degree epidermal burn from mana reflux. Observational result: interesting,' and expressionlessly cast healing magic on that naked man, too, right?"
Iris's eyes began to tremble slightly.
"You were the type who, even if driven into that kind of situation a hundred or a thousand times, even in a sudden incident that would shock and fluster everyone on earth—"
Seria drove the point home.
"At the very least, you were a stubborn blockhead who would never, ever get flustered because of a man."
"...!"
A suffocating silence fell.
Iris's lips moved a few times, but not a single logical rebuttal came out of that brilliant genius's head.
She was left completely tongue-tied.
Seria found the sight oddly fascinating.
'Wow. So even she gets this dumb sometimes.'
Iris von Evergarden.
A person who had lived her entire life by rational, logical thought alone.
She knew Iris was severely lacking in the ability to empathize with others' feelings, but that had never made her seem stupid.
She was simply an arrogant genius, too accomplished and too smart to understand ordinary people.
But.
In the Iris standing before her now, cheeks red and eyes darting around in a panic,
'she smelled intensely human.'
And not just human, but the smell of someone young and childish, a fool feverish with love.
"Pffft."
In the end, Seria couldn't hold it back and laughter burst out between her lips.
"Ahahahaha!"
As Seria clutched her stomach laughing, Iris's brow twisted frighteningly.
"W-Why are you laughing!"
Iris snatched up a cushion and hugged it tightly to her chest in a sulk.
"Don't laugh. I'm serious. This isn't a logical fallacy, it's..."
"Yeah, yeah. It isn't a logical fallacy."
Seria wiped away the tears at the corners of her eyes and chuckled.
'...Yeah. She definitely likes him.'
They say when love begins, people get flustered, childish, and let emotion come before reason.
The sight of Iris huddled on that sofa, huffing in a tantrum, was exactly that.
No matter how much you prattle on about truth-seeking or observation, in the end you can't fool the heart when it reacts.
"Anyway."
Seria wiped the smile off her face and spoke again with a serious expression.
"Keep your promise. Until you can logically explain to me why you absolutely don't see that guy as a man."
"......"
"Keep your current stance and stay confused. Don't run away by carelessly deciding it's just academic enthusiasm. Got it?"
Under Seria's gaze, Iris pouted.
She glanced at the empty sofa, where it was obvious someone had sat and then left, then let out a small sigh.
"...Fine."
The voice that answered unwillingly was already thick with a deep resignation and confusion even that idiot genius couldn't do anything about.
* * *
"...Haa."
Iris curled up on the plush sofa and let out a thin, hot breath.
She was confused.
In truth, even she no longer knew what to define, or how to define it.
...'I don't know'.
As a genius mage who had spent her whole life pursuing the truth of magic, Iris had always been extremely wary of carelessly using an ambiguous phrase like 'I don't know.'
Because she believed there was no phenomenon without cause and effect, and no unknown that couldn't be analyzed.
That was why she'd categorized lazy people who constantly resorted to such evasive remarks as the kind she hated most.
And yet.
At this very moment, though, she felt like she could painfully understand the frail feelings of the people she had despised so much.
She really didn't know.
Or maybe she just desperately wanted to 'not know.'
Either way, it was an impossibly difficult problem for her right now.
Swish.
Iris quietly looked down at the tips of her white fingers.
Even if she blocked out her sight, every sensory cell in her fingertips remembered vividly.
The hot, powerful beating of Cassian's heart, pulsing through the thin school shirt just a few hours ago.
'It's not like I'm some kind of pervert.'
Iris took off her glasses for no real reason and set them on the table.
She had definitely been flustered. That much was an undeniable truth.
But was the source of that fluttering the dazzling microcosm within Cassian, which she couldn't help but admire as a mage?
Or was it simply because she had faced Cassian at such close range and heard his strong scent and his heartbeat,
and because they had breathed together inside the sealed space created by the water column?
By now, she could no longer sort it out rationally.
"...I don't know."
She uttered the irresponsible sentence that she couldn't even excuse to herself.
Overwhelmed by embarrassment, Iris pulled her outer robe tight once more even though she was alone in the room.
Soon, on the blank screen of her mind, that impudent student's face began replaying once again.
The water column collapsed, and when he saw her shirt soaked through, the tips of his ears had turned bright red.
Cassian's expression as he fumbled to take off his jacket and cover her with it.
"......"
Iris buried her face deep in the sofa cushion.
His flustered voice seemed to buzz in her ears, and she sincerely wanted to force her brilliant brain to stop spinning altogether.