Chapter 230: ~Chapter 76~ Part 2

"Morning."

My greeting sounded soulless even to myself, and Josh returned it with a lazy wave of his hand as I sat down at my desk. I was honestly feeling a little under the weather, and quite literally at that; it's been raining nonstop since last night, and it came with a cold wind that chilled me to the bone by the time I got to school. In retrospect, refusing Elly's offer to come to school in her family's limo wasn't a great idea, but there's no point crying over spilled milk now.

"It's rare to see you get here so early," I noted, and my friend shrugged his shoulder.

"Angie has morning practice with her club, and she dragged me to school." He paused here for a moment and glanced around, culminating into a curious, "Where are the girls?"

I used my head to gesture towards the door of the classroom and told him, "They took the class rep to the toilets to interrogate her."

"Interrogate? About what?"

"You know? Girl stuff?"

My less than descriptive answer was apparently satisfactory enough, as Josh let out a disinterested 'Ah, got it,' and then turned away from me. To be fair, I could've given him a more detailed reply, but considering that Judy and Elly wanted to decisively and one hundred percent certainly know whether Ammy was dating Mike, I figured it was a topic that would only complicate Josh's life regardless of her answer. I mean, at this point I was fairly sure she was out of the race for our resident harem protagonist, but one could never know what kind of reaction that would elicit from the nebulous Narrative, or just my friend in general. The last thing I needed now was some kind of unnecessary jealously or, heaven forbid, NTR plot rearing its ugly head.

Not that I pegged Josh as the jealous type, but neither did I expect the class rep to entertain Mike's advances, so who the hell knew at this point? Not to mention, Josh was a little melancholic by the looks of it, so a silly romance drama was probably the last thing he needed. In fact, he looked so down that after putting my bag away, I turned around on my chair and casually asked, "Why's the long face?"

My friend exhaled a long breath and answered with a dour, "I couldn't sleep well lately."

"Ah, that sucks," I uttered with all the sympathy a guy who doesn't actually need to sleep could muster. "Is it because the weather is crap, or something else?"

"Lots of stuff," he responded in the company of a shrug, but then he shifted on his seat so that he was facing me directly and asked, "Are you free tomorrow?"

"I guess so."

"That's good."

I was a little taken aback by his straightforward question, but I could understand where he was coming from. I promised that I'd hang out with him a bit one of these days, but yesterday I was already reserved by Judy, and today all of us would gather at the base for our regularly scheduled training session, so it was this weekend or never, and he was obviously running out of patience.

"At your place, after classes are over?" I asked, and he nodded after a moment of thinking.

"Sure." I thought this would be the end of the conversation, but then my friend gave me an odd look and asked, practically out of nowhere, "Speaking of classes, why do you think Mrs. Applebottom is teaching all of them?"

Oh. Oooooh? What's that? Did Josh just notice one of the peculiarities of the Simulacrum all on his own? Was the perception filtering failing? Or did I or the girls accidentally say something in his presence that gave him a clue?

While all of these questions raced through my head, I masked my shock with an amicable smile and said, "I don't know. Any ideas?"

Josh remained silent for a few short seconds, but then he sharply exhaled through his nose and shook his head.

"Nah, I just found it peculiar. I know the school is just a cover for the magical underground base or whatever, but you'd think they'd hire more than one teacher per class. Oh, wait. I suppose your ninja is teaching here too." He paused here, only to whisper. "Wow. That's another sentence I never thought I'd say in my life."

Well, that was a bit anti-climactic. While he apparently noticed the discrepancy, he didn't dwell on the logistical impossibility of a single teacher being present everywhere at once. Still, just the fact that he noticed was noteworthy. Maybe the perception filtering was also weakening with the loss of plot armor?

Wait, scratch that. Those two should have nothing to do with each other. That said, it couldn't help to poke around a little bit, so while feigning disinterest I casually asked, "Yeah, it's a little weird. How come you just noticed?"

"Hey, man. Cut me some slack," he abruptly huffed as he crossed his arms. "I had a lot on my plate and didn't pay attention to small things like that. Hell, I don't even know why I noticed it now in the first place. You'd think I have more important things to think about."

"Such as?" I probed further, and my friend promptly stifled a groan.

"Like how to avoid getting killed the next time I run into that girl with the floating arms," he hissed in a low voice, and this time I couldn't hide my surprise, despite my best efforts.

"You mean by Sahi? Why would she want to kill you?"

This time I received one of his increasingly rarer yet not one bit less cutting single, skeptically raised brows, followed by the words, "Dude, if you didn't show up in the nick of time the last time, Ammy and I would be both dead."

"Oh, come on. Don't exaggerate. You weren't in any serious danger." He still looked about as skeptical as a Phd biologist at a young Earth creationist lecture, so I let out a long sigh and told him, "Listen, Saahira is weird, annoying, overbearing, and the less said about the whole 'pretending to be a middle-schooler' thing, the better. However, she's not unreasonable."

"How do you know that?" he asked back, still critical of my words, so I answered frankly.

"Because I've been keeping an eye on her since the first time she came to the island, or rather since I first met her in person. If she was an actual threat, I wouldn't have bothered trying to negotiate with her; I would've just stabbed her in the back or bonked her over the head or something." My explanation seemed to be at least semi-effective, so I decided to top it off by saying, "Not to mention, technically she wasn't in the wrong, you know? You guys were the ones who broke into magi property and took classified documents. I get that it was for safekeeping and all, but technically it was still illegal."

"I… can't really argue with that," Josh conceded with a hint of a pout, which was quickly washed away by a sigh. "That doesn't mean I want to encounter her ever again. Not meeting with her for the rest of my life would be too soon."

"I don't want to make you feel worse than you already are, but that's probably going to be inevitable. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into her in a couple of days."

"What? Why?"

Josh had a 'Are you adopting/hiring/dating her too?' kind of look in his eyes, so before he could get himself worked up into a misunderstanding, I hastily raised my palm and shook my head.

"Simply put, Sahi is probably going to enroll into the school."

"What?! Why?!" he echoed his previous words, this time not even bothering to keep his voice down.

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"I'll be damned if I know, but those are the facts."

"That's messed up, man," Josh grumbled, but before I could respond to him, a new voice entered into our conversation.

"I see that you're already aware of the new transfer student," Mr. Spiky, one of the four creepy amigos noted without even bothering to get up from his desk a couple of seats to our right.

"News travel fast," Mr. Bowl Cut commented from the other end of the classroom.

"It's only natural," Mr. Bedhair stated a seat behind him. "As we all know, news about beautiful new transfer students are the most important news possible."

"Preach, brother," Mr. Crew Cut agreed from the front row.

There was a moment of silence, broken by Josh uttering a confused, "What?"

"Just ignore them," I told him in the tone of a veteran soldier instructing a greenhorn. "They are an annoying bunch, but if they say we already have a transfer student, it could only mean—"

"Leo! Help!"

My words were abruptly cut short by a panicked voice entering the fray, drawing all attention to the half-open back door of the classroom, and my sister awkwardly standing under it, hesitating over whether she should enter or not. It didn't last for long, as there was some kind of commotion, and after glancing over her shoulder, Snowy's eyes opened wide and she dashed into the classroom and practically jumped over Josh's desk so that she could hide behind me.

I could barely even digest the situation when the sliding door was thrown wide open, followed by the words, "Stop running away you tart and face me like a…!"

The brand new voice slowly trailed off as its owner, a short-ish girl, looked into the room, and she fell completely silent the moment our eyes met. She was petite, with long, wavy red locks cascading around her flushed, lightly freckled face. Her previously thundering green eyes were currently wide open in shock, and on closer look, I could see a pink unicorn hair clip holding her hair in place just over her right ear. Moreover, she was actually wearing our school's winter uniform, complete with the bag still slung over her back.

For a second we just stared at each other in dead silence, and I would've had to be an idiot not to immediately realize the identity of the girl in front of me, but before I could get a word in, I was once again cut short by another new voice.

"What's going on here?"

The question came from the princess, who just returned to the classroom in the company of Judy and the class rep, and the moment the new girl saw them, she…

"Awawa! Th-this is not the end of it, you hear me?!"

… ran away in the opposite direction. Also, call me crazy, but that noise at the beginning…

"That sounded eerily familiar," my dear assistant noted as she made her way over to our side, and I couldn't help but exclaim:

"So I wasn't the only one who thought so!"

"… What are you talking about?" Elly muttered, conscious of the way we were looking at her, yet none the wiser as to why. I would've told her, but I had more important things to worry about, so I decided to leave this up to my other girlfriend and focused on the white-haired girl awkwardly shuffling behind me instead.

"Are you all right?"

"Y-Yes," Snowy answered with downcast eyes, but a moment later she looked back up at me and words started pouring out of her like water through a broken dam. "I was just really startled because she just showed up all of a sudden, and you told me I should try avoiding her and not fight, but then she started following after me, and then I didn't know what to do, so I came here."

"Calm down. You did well," Judy comforted my surprisingly rattled little sister by patting her back.

"Who are you talking about?" Elly blurted out, even though she was there.

"Yeah, what's going on? What did I miss?" came the next question from the freshly arrived Angie, with her gym bag over her shoulder.

I waited until everyone was gathered around my desk, then told them, "By the looks of it, the Knight girl who caused the utility-pole incident transferred to our school."

"What? Where's she?!" my draconic girlfriend immediately perked up, ready to bolt out the door at any moment, so I immediately grabbed hold of her right hand. To my surprise, Judy took hold of her left pretty much simultaneously, without even a momentary break in her patting of Snowy's back.

I sent my assistant an acknowledging nod before turning back to Elly.

"Calm down, princess. Don't make a scene at school."

"I'm perfectly calm," she answered a little sheepishly, yet the way she was still eyeing the back door told me she was probably itching to go out and find our newly transferred troublemaker. I glanced back to Judy, and she understood my intent without any need for words, as she immediately stepped away from my sister and instead used both her hands to cling onto Elly's arm. Of course, she could shake her off without too much trouble, but we both knew the princess wouldn't do something like that, so for the time being she was effectively held back.

Once I made sure she wouldn't go on the warpath, I let go of Elly's hand and turned to the class rep.

"Anything to comment on the situation?"

"I have no idea what's going on," Ammy told me without a hint of reservation. "This is the first time I've heard anything about another transfer student, let alone one of the Knights."

"So maybe she didn't actually transfer in?" Josh proposed on the side. "Maybe she's just here to pick a fight?"

"I… don't know. I should ask grandfather," the class rep muttered while adjusting her glasses, but I put a hand on her shoulder before she could get going.

"Don't bother. I'll do it myself." I waited to see if anyone had any objections, but when they remained silent, I looked over to my girlfriends, Judy still holding onto Elly, and the latter still raring to go, and told them, "If I don't get back by the time the class starts, tell Mrs. Applebottom I went to see the principal."

And with that, I headed out to have a long talk with Lord Grandpa and just what exactly was he thinking.

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