Chapter 19
Chapter 019
Lily gathered herself after her embarrassment and greeted her in a trembling voice.
"I-I greet Your Highness the Princess……."
But Evelyn didn’t even glance at Lily.
Her gaze was fixed solely on me.
'You aren’t going to greet me?'
Ah, yes. I should.
I got up from the bench with a shuffle and bowed politely.
"It is an honor to meet Your Highness the Princess."
Two greetings are bad luck.
You asked for this.
"……."
Evelyn’s brow furrowed deeply.
So you wanted it, and now that you’re actually getting it, it sucks, huh.
And then, after lowering my head slightly, I noticed.
The hand in her white glove was trembling.
She looked ready to grab me by the collar any second now.
She suddenly opened her mouth without preamble.
"You."
"Yes?"
"You said you solved Professor Iris’s exam question, didn’t you?"
Her voice dropped low.
"Answer me. Is that true?"
"Yes. Well, I solved it."
"……."
Evelyn’s brow wrinkled hard.
You wanted it, and now that you’ve actually got it, it’s awful, huh.
And then I noticed something while I lowered my head slightly.
The hand in her white glove was trembling.
She looked ready to grab me by the collar any second now.
She suddenly opened her mouth without preamble.
"You."
"Yes?"
"You said you solved Professor Iris’s exam question, didn’t you?"
Her voice had gone low.
"Answer me. Is that true?"
"Yes. Well, I solved it."
"……."
Evelyn took a step closer and pressed me.
"What answer did you submit?"
You’re a bit close.
"Pardon?"
"What method did you use, what logic did you lay out, for the professor to admit it was correct on the spot? Explain it right now."
How should I put it.
She doesn’t have much of a silver tongue, huh?
No matter how I look at it, this woman’s getting worked up and going off the rails right now, isn’t she?
"Answer me!"
Damn, she’s really rushing me.
"I just solved it."
"……."
Silence.
A stillness so complete it felt like even the wind had stopped.
And then.
Crack!
The sound of teeth grinding inside Evelyn’s tightly pressed lips rang out clearly.
Oh, wow.
Nice teeth. Very nice teeth.
One of the five blessings, I see.
She looks like she could chew rocks. Is that where the expression "a youth who can chew rocks" comes from?
"……Just, solved it?"
"Yes. I just looked at it and wrote down the answer."
"……!"
Evelyn’s face went beet-red.
...What? Why is she acting like this?
"You…… are you insulting me right now?"
"I told the truth. Why are you getting so worked up?"
Evelyn drew out her staff.
A lump of mana began to gather at the tip of the staff.
"Prove it."
Evelyn leveled a murderous stare at me.
"Prove right here whether you’re truly a genius or just a lucky con artist!"
"……Ha."
I let out a deep sigh.
A sudden challenge to duel?
"I can’t."
"What?"
"I don’t understand what it means to ask me to explain how I solved it just because I solved it."
Admittedly, saying I solved it because it solved itself is a bit of a deceptive way of putting it.
Whatever. She threw the first punch.
"Is it really okay for a princess to bully people for no reason like this?"
At times like this, I really feel grateful.
That this is a romance fantasy world.
And that my father is a court count.
Both of those.
* * *
After Evelyn left, the lab once again fell silent.
Iris set down her teacup and clicked her tongue briefly.
"What a shame."
Since she was of imperial blood, I’d hoped she might be different, but as expected, she wasn’t.
So maybe there really isn’t another genius after all.
Rough and blunt like Cassian, but with an intuition that grabs the right answer by the collar and drags it in one shot.
That’s not something you can teach.
Bang!
The door was flung open roughly, without even a knock.
Among the visitors to this lab, the only one who could come and go as if it were her own room without irritating Iris was
Seria, her blue-haired graduate-student best friend.
"Hey! Iris! Are you out of your mind?"
The moment she came in, it was obvious a rapid-fire scolding was about to start.
Iris replied without even blinking.
"I told you to knock. So rude."
"Manners aren’t the issue right now? You... what the hell are you wearing?!"
Her eyes swept over Iris from head to toe.
A silk dress that blatantly revealed the lines of her figure.
The curves of her waist and hips stood out every time she moved.
It exposed nothing of her bust line, but every line on her body was on full display.
Seria stared with her mouth hanging open in shock.
"At school! In broad daylight! Why are you dressed like that right now?!"
"Why?"
Iris tilted her head, genuinely puzzled.
"It’s the brand you told me about. They asked me which clothes you bought there, so I bought the exact same thing."
"……What?"
Seria’s brain short-circuited.
"Wait…… you asked me where to buy clothes so you could wear them at school?"
"Then what?"
"I thought you were going on a date or something!"
She clutched her head.
A few days earlier, when Iris had gone to the Farne estate to settle the question of becoming a disciple.
That evening, Iris went straight to Seria and asked, 'Where’s the shop that sold those dresses you wore last time?'
"I was so excited, thinking this research bug was finally going to start dating that I happily told you. How on earth did you get that outfit ready in half a day? Fine for today, but you wouldn’t have had time to prepare it yesterday, would you?"
"Right after I asked you, that very night I just went and knocked on the shop door so they’d reopen it."
"Ha."
"I mean, it was the first day of welcoming my disciple. It was an official occasion, so I had to be formal."
"Formal?"
Seria let out a dry laugh.
"Hey! That’s formal? That’s a party dress! And most importantly……."
Seria pointed back and forth between her own chest and Iris’s with a slightly offended look on her face.
"Our figures are different! On me it looks neat, but on you…… this isn’t a succubus outfit!"
"How rude. A succubus?"
"Look in a mirror, you little brat! Who shows up in a lab dressed like that!"
Iris found that unfair too.
When Seria wore it, it definitely gave off the vibe of an intelligent, elegant noble lady who still kept her femininity.
'Why is it that when I wear it....'
Why did she have to hear the rude word succubus only when she wore it?
Even Iris herself found Seria’s phrasing rude, but not exaggerated or false, which only made it more unfair.
"Cassian said the same thing yesterday. That it was too much."
"Of course. There’s no reason to put the poor freshman through that."
Seria let out a long sigh and stepped closer.
"What did you wear yesterday? Don’t tell me that was this brand too?"
"Yeah. The red one you wore."
"……You."
Her face went ashen.
"That’s off-shoulder! It shows your shoulders, collarbones, and bust line!"
"That was the first thing that got delivered. I had no clothes, so I wore it in a hurry."
"You’re insane, seriously insane……."
Seria pressed a hand to her forehead, looking dizzy.
The strange rumor that had been going around school yesterday.
'I heard a barbaric freshman is causing trouble for Professor Iris.'
That was the main rumor, but there was another one too, one that had lost some momentum and was spreading by word of mouth.
'I heard Professor Iris locked up a freshman in her lab and seduced him.'
The second rumor had seemed absurd beyond belief, but Seria was starting to understand why it had arisen.
"Quit nagging me. Women’s clothes... I just learned this time that they vary wildly depending on who’s wearing them."
"How are you only figuring that out now, you idiot genius!"
Seria shouted in exasperation.
"Ugh... I told you because I thought you were going on a blind date and I got excited for you. And you came to the sacred academy wearing that? On the very first day of welcoming a fresh young disciple?"
"You wear clothes like that too."
"I did! At undergraduate graduation banquets! At official school events! At graduate school interviews!"
"To me, the first day of welcoming a disciple was just as important an official event."
"I can’t even argue with that."
Seria sighed and went on.
"You didn’t even try it on, did you."
"Try it on?"
"Right. Did you buy it after trying it on? If you had, you’d have looked in the mirror and realized, 'This isn’t something you’d wear just to show a student some courtesy.'"
"...How did you know?"
"It’s common sense."
In truth, Iris regretted that too.
When the package arrived, how flustered she’d been when she first put the clothes on.
And when she acted like it was nothing in front of Cassian, the same thing.
She just kept insisting on dresses, figuring they were better than a suit.
"It was a hassle. I just asked them to use my old measurements."
"……Hah."
This was where the fatal mistake occurred.
Iris had recently been holed up in the lab, subsisting on nothing but highly concentrated sugar.
Using mental strain as an excuse, she’d been living on chocolate and cake; naturally she gained weight.
The problem was that the weight hadn’t gone to her stomach or upper arms, but only to her chest and hips.
"You gained weight, didn’t you?"
"A little? Sugar is fuel for the brain."
"Then why isn’t it going to your stomach and only there! The world is so unfair I could scream!"
It was enough to make Seria stomp her feet in indignation.
She had forced her newly more glamorous body into clothes sized for her old measurements.
"This won’t do."
Seria said with a determined expression.
"Soon, go shopping with me again. I’ll pick things out for you. If I left it to your taste, the academy would turn into—"
"Stop with the succubus talk."
"Fine, let’s go. To buy clothes. If you refuse again this time, I’ll drag you there by force."
"Okay. I do need clothes. I’ll have to be more careful about what I wear from now on."
Iris nodded obediently.
Seria blinked in surprise.
Normally, she’d have said, 'It’s a hassle. It’s a waste of time,' and refused.
"Why? Are you really dating someone?"
"No?"
Iris answered with the most serious expression in the world.
"Now that I’m a teacher, I should act like one. With dignity and refinement."
"……."
"Because I need to be a perfect, intellectual mentor that Cassian won’t be ashamed of."
Seria stared at Iris, dumbfounded.
Refinement? Dignity?
Yesterday she wore off-shoulder; today she wore something that only covered her, but was so tight it showed off her figure clearly—and she welcomed her disciple dressed like that?
"It’s not like I don’t have a reason."
Iris murmured while fiddling with her teacup.
*
Though it was a memory from long ago.
Perhaps the reason for this bizarre behavior lay with her teacher.
In Iris’s memories, her teacher was always a perfect adult.
Neatly combed-back white hair, a beard trimmed to the millimeter, and even tidy clothes without a single wrinkle.
He was careful in everything he did, and even his laughter was never frivolous.
And only later did she learn.
It had all been an act for her.
He was actually a laid-back, informal person by nature.
When she learned that he had spent every morning in front of the mirror adjusting his clothes and voice in order to be a model for his young disciple.
Iris was able to faintly understand, for the first time in her life, the feeling called love.
So she wanted to do the same.
Maybe she had even felt a little thrill at the idea of passing on the sort of teacher-student romance she had experienced to her own disciple.
"I wanted to have the dignity of a teacher. An adult is a cultured person who can handle everything from A to Z. I just wanted to show that starting with my clothes."
"So this is the result?"
Seria pointed at Iris’s chest and asked, incredulous.
"I guess it worked? That body and maturity have a sultry vibe no twenty-year-old could ever pull off."
"……Don’t mock me."
"I’m not mocking you. I understand perfectly—you and your disciple aren’t that far apart in age, so you wanted to deliberately emphasize your appeal as an adult. I just can’t agree with it or sympathize with it at all."
Seria folded her arms and nodded.
Iris thought about correcting the misunderstanding, then let it go.
It wasn’t true, but it wasn’t completely wrong either. In any case, she had tried to project maturity.
"So, did it work? Did your disciple get totally intimidated?"
Iris shook her head bitterly.
Far from succeeding, Cassian had taken her embarrassment into account, said he had nowhere to look, and given her a thirty-minute confinement punishment.
It was practically like he was the one taking care of her.
A teacher being cared for by her student, no less.
That was fundamentally very different from the romance she had imagined.
"……No. It failed."
"Oof, yeah. He must’ve been terrified, no doubt. I’ll pick your clothes again. Let’s go to the shop together this weekend. But you."
"Go on."
"When you’re teaching your disciple, just wear a suit like usual. In the lab, that look is the neatest and most scholarly."
"No."
"Wear it. You’re a professor."
"No."
"Why not? Dressing up in a dress just to look good in front of your disciple is even weirder! That’s even more shameless!"
Seria thumped her chest in frustration.
She couldn’t understand why Iris was being so stubborn.
What was with her suddenly, when she normally wore nothing but a suit because everything else was pointless?
Clack.
Holding the teacup, Iris began explaining her logic with the most serious expression in the world.
"It looks like you didn’t put any effort in."
"……What?"
"Wearing the same design over and over without paying any attention to your clothes makes you look uncultured."`,`"……Wow."`,`Seria’s jaw dropped.`,