Chapter 79
[What if the teacher catches us!]
[Why? It's not even a real cigarette.]
[But still! Even so...]
Yuna couldn't hide her unease at Name's brazen behavior.
Although the principle was that inhaling a potion expelled only its bitter components as smoke, the sight looked far too much like smoking a cigarette.
Yuna herself had initially been unsure, but once Name had flatly declared that the principle was exactly the same, she was even overcome by guilt for standing by while her friend indulged in such delinquency.
Yuna's heart was scorched black as her sympathy—wondering how hard it must have been for Name to drink potions—clashed with her conscience, which insisted that, as a student, she still had to observe certain basic boundaries.
‘We weren't supposed to use magic recklessly on school grounds in the first place...!’
Perhaps Name had truly gotten hooked on it, because after that, going to the back courtyard at lunchtime became part of her daily routine.
Yuna even imagined that, if she were caught by a teacher from another class or an academy official, she might be expelled in the worst-case scenario.
Lunchtime had originally been Yuna's self-study period.
She would quickly eat her school lunch, return to class, and review her lessons, or memorize runes while fighting off her post-meal drowsiness.
However, she couldn't very well leave Name there alone.
It was always Yuna's job to keep watch so Name wouldn't be caught.
“Is it really okay to use magic so recklessly?”
“It seems to be fine up through the second circle. We haven't been caught so far, after all. Oh, right. The sixth period is the last period for the performance assessment, isn't it?”
Name said this while calmly exhaling smoke.
Normally, Name's face showed so little emotion that Yuna had thought of her as nothing more than a pretty, doll-like child. But seeing her like this, she also looked like one of those scary delinquent older girls from a back alley.
“Yeah, thanks to you, Name, I think I'll do well on this performance assessment.”
Yuna hadn't gone back empty-handed, either.
Whenever Name was alone with her, she explained the model magic circles, and Yuna was now even confident that she could draw one with her eyes closed.
“What's your favorite fruit, Yuna?”
“Fruit? Why all of a sudden? Hmm... An apple?”
“An apple. Right, what was the code for apples again?”
Name took out her phone and searched for something, then modified the engraving magic circle.
Then, with a satisfied smile, she clamped the ballpoint pen between her lips again.
“Do you think this will smell roughly like apples?”
A whirring sound came from inside the ballpoint pen as the heating and vaporization took place.
Acrid smoke once again burst from Name's mouth just as before.
“Apple scent...?”
However, when the mist pricked the tip of Yuna's nose, she couldn't help looking bewildered by the sweet fragrance.
The bitter smell that had scorched her entire throat was nowhere to be found. Only a sweet apple scent remained.
“Aw... It tastes the same. So it only changes the scent.”
“What? How did you do that?”
“Do you like the smell?”
“Yeah! It's really sweet.”
“That's a relief. I tried it because you seemed to really dislike me smoking this.”
“Was it... that obvious...?”
Yuna asked in a tiny voice.
Only then did she remember that Name was exceptionally good at reading people's emotions.
Even when Yuna had been hostile toward Name out of nothing more than jealousy, and even when she had kept silent out of guilt for causing trouble, Name had acted as though she could see straight through her head.
Name approached Yuna, who was sitting on the bench, and took the seat beside her. Yuna soon looked embarrassed and avoided Name's gaze.
“Professor Cheon says he can make pill-form potions soon. I'll keep smoking like this until then. It must be annoying for you to follow me here every time, too, right?”
Professor Cheon said that, as a result of relentlessly pressuring the professors in the Department of Food and Nutrition, a prototype pill-form potion would be ready soon.
As Name stroked Yuna's head and asked for her understanding, Yuna's head whipped back toward her.
“No, it's not annoying at all...! That's not it, I just... Sob... Damn, why am I crying...?”
Yuna rubbed her eyes, desperately trying to hide her tears.
She had tried the potion herself, so she knew what an absurd liquid it was.
Yuna couldn't imagine drinking the potion as casually as Name did when it caused a burning sensation and nausea to surge forth the instant it touched her tongue.
Since Name never seemed to show much pain, Yuna had simply assumed she was used to it.
She realized that when Name had told her on the bus that it was tolerable, she had only been saying it to reassure her.
Saying that she was fine as long as she took potions was, in other words, the same as saying that without potions, she was no different from someone with a terminal illness.
‘Name doesn't want to take them, either... So why am I only thinking about myself...!’
The more she thought about it, the more tears slipped out as negative emotions such as self-loathing and pity, of which even Yuna herself was unaware, became hopelessly tangled together.
“I'm not crying! I'm really not...”
At the same time, she felt embarrassed that she had shown her tears to a friend her own age.
She had already lost count of how many times she had cried in front of Name.
Before she knew it, Yuna was in Name's arms.
As luck would have it, the scent coming from Name's body today was Yuna's favorite: apples.
Before her head could melt even further in the swamp of sweetness, Yuna barely came to her senses and stopped her tears.
“I'll try it too. No, I will.”
“Try what?”
“Yeah. I'm going to smoke it too. You said it's not a real cigarette, anyway.”
Telling herself that this wasn't delinquency, merely an undercover effort to empathize with her friend's pain, she pressed Name for instructions on using the magic circle.
“Since it's your first time, try 0.5 ohms. You know how to calculate the proper amount now, right?”
“Yeah. I can do it by myself.”
She had already learned enough about the harmonic mean.
However, Yuna decided to be a little more ambitious and raise the coil's resistance value.
Since she was doing it anyway, she decided to show more smoke than Name had.
“Hey, if you make it that strong...!”
“Huu...? Cough! Hwaaaah, this is... Cough! It feels kind of strange.”
“It's a kind of high-concentration mana treatment, so there should be a temporary euphoric effect. It's not addictive like magical herbs, though.”
“Hoo, pffff... Look! Smoke is still coming out of my mouth!”
Yuna puffed out both cheeks and busily blew little breaths of air, as if she had never cried at all.
At her cheerful display, Name smiled brightly and took the potion flask back from her.
“That's enough for now. It wasn't anything special, was it?”
“Yeah. It feels a little like eating a mint candy. There's a tingling sensation in my throat.”
“What are you going to do now that your clothes all smell like apples?”
“It's the same scent as Name's, so won't it be fine?”
“You've suddenly gotten bold, haven't you? Still, you must never smoke a real cigarette later. If you do, I'll tell your mother myself.”
“I will never smoke!”
Yuna stood up from the bench and shrieked.
A model student smoking was utterly unimaginable!
On the other hand, Yuna wondered how Name could be so skilled at it when this must have been her first time, too.
Hng-
Whoooosh-
Name held the potion in one hand while keeping the other in her uniform pocket.
Yuna continued staring intently at Name, who kept puckering her lips with an expressionless face.
After Yuna's relentless visual assault, Name's eyes met hers again.
“By the way, your eyes are bright red after crying. Want me to blow on them?”
“Huh? I'm really fine!”
“Really? Can you go back to class looking like that?”
“Are they that red...?”
Name rose onto her tiptoes and examined Yuna's eyes closely.
With the distance between them suddenly far too small, Yuna reflexively looked away.
Then Yuna's face abruptly froze.
“What is it?”
Following her gaze, Name turned her head.
At one corner of the building, a boy stood with a bewildered expression, covering his own mouth.
“Yoon Sihoo...?”
Yuna's flustered voice escaped her lips.
“What are you doing to Yuna right now, No Name?”
“Uh... How much did you see?”
“Were you two smoking?”
* * *
Yuna ran after Sihoo when he immediately tried to flee and barely managed to stop him.
Even as Yuna repeatedly protested that it was all a misunderstanding, Sihoo continued to look at us suspiciously.
When we returned to class, Teacher Jackie waved and welcomed us cheerfully.
“Kids, did you enjoy lunch? Wow, this sweet smell is wonderful! Did you put on perfume?”
“Ciga...! Mmph!”
“Yes...! I put on apple-scented perfume!”
“Thanks to that, the classroom is filled with a lovely fragrance. Class is about to start, so let's all get ready and take our seats!”
Nice blocking, Seo Yuna.
Yuna quickly covered Sihoo's mouth when he looked like he was about to snitch, allowing us to return to our seats.
While Yuna went to her locker to get her textbook, Sihoo spoke to me gruffly.
“Is it okay to lie to the teacher?”
“I added a fragrance spell formula, so couldn't this be considered a kind of perfume?”
“You smoked a cigarette...”
“A cigarette has to be made from tobacco leaves to be a cigarette. This is a potion.”
It was true, so he probably couldn't refute me.
“Stop teaching Yuna bad things.”
“I only taught her about the performance assessment.”
“How is this a performance assessment?!”
“Believe it or don't.”
“What are you going to do if the teacher catches you?”
Sephyron Academy had a demerit-point system, too, apparently.
But I didn't particularly need good grades. As long as I could use magic to a reasonable degree, that was enough for me.
I was experimenting to see whether I would get caught as I gradually increased my mana usage per single cast.
And finding a tolerable way to take potions this week had been a major gain for me, too.
If I had my way, I would give Yuna a hundred praise stickers for providing the spark of this idea.
“Are you saying that because you want to try it, too?”
“No.”
“If that's not it, is your type a woman who doesn't smoke? I used to think that way a very long time ago, too. For the record, Yuna promised me she'd never smoke for the rest of her life, so you don't have to worry.”
“No! None of that!”
“What are you and Sihoo talking about that's so interesting, Name? I want to hear, too!”
Han Seori had apparently caught the scent and come over to us, her eyes sparkling.
“What are you doing now, Han Seori? You're heavy, so stop pressing down on my shoulder!”
“We were having a very serious discussion about Yoon Sihoo's type. Seori, you see...”
“Ah, seriously, No Name!”
“Sihoo's type? Wow, I'm dying to know!”
“Aaaaaah, please!”
Ah, teasing the kids was so much fun.
Their reactions really were exactly like Hiasen's when he was little.