As Hajime and Yue reached school and started heading toward the shoe lockers, they continued attracting the attention of everyone around them. But now that it was mostly fellow classmates, the attention was a lot less bloodthirsty. When they’d first started going back to school, everyone had hung around Hajime and the others in clumps, curious about the kids that the media was going crazy over. Within the school grounds, Hajime had been reluctant to use perception-altering Artifacts or to use his intimidation to cow his fellow classmates. The last thing he’d wanted was to mess up his school life. Besides, he’d wanted everyone to think that the students who’d finally come back weren’t special in any way and had just been caught up in an unfortunate kidnapping.
As expected, young teenagers had short attention spans and their curiosity quickly waned. At this point, none of them got prying questions about what had happened. That being said, it wasn’t as if Hajime and the others had stopped attracting attention. It was just a different kind of attention. As Yue opened her shoebox, a deluge of letters spilled out.
“Mrr...”
She frowned as she looked at the pile. Sending love letters was a pretty retro way of conveying one’s feelings in this day and age, but none of Hajime’s classmates had any other way of contacting her. They certainly didn’t know her phone number or email address. Both of those pieces of information were SSS-tier rarity. No one who knew them was going to tell anyone else, and naturally, Yue wasn’t going to tell anyone who just wanted to confess to her either.
It was also impossible for anyone to directly confess to Yue, since she didn’t agree to meet up with anyone who asked, and anyone who tried to just walk up to her and confess was met by a glare so cold that they clammed up. And so, no one had successfully managed to convey their feelings to Yue in person.
“Some things never change,” Hajime said with a wry smile.
“Mmm... I even put up a note telling people not to bother.”
Annoyed, Yue picked up the pile of letters and put them to one side. As she took her indoor shoes out and closed her shoebox, everyone could see the note conspicuously taped to it that said “No love letters!” The note clearly wasn’t working, since it seemed everyone was willing to ignore it as long as they all put their letters in together.
As Yue quickly skimmed over the letters, she muttered, “I knew there’d be a few,” and took a few of them aside. The rest she shoved into Kaori Shirasaki’s shoebox.
“Did you get love letters from girls again?” Hajime asked.
“Mhm...” Yue said with a nod. The letters she’d set aside had all come from girls. Indeed, about thirty percent of the letters she got each day were from girls.
“They’re not exactly love letters... Most of them just want to be my friend, or are saying they’re fans of mine. I don’t care about the people trying to confess their feelings for me when I already have you, Hajime, but I don’t want to ignore letters from people who just want to be friends.”
“That’s probably why you’re so popular.”
Despite how she looked, Yue was an adult woman. She had an air of maturity that her classmates lacked, and while she was cold to guys who weren’t Hajime, she was generally kind to girls. Plus, she was an unparalleled beauty, so it was hardly surprising even girls were falling for her.
While Yue was a bit overwhelmed by her popularity, she didn’t dislike the attention. Hajime smiled at her and opened his own shoebox. There were a few cute pink letters in his box, and Yue’s expression darkened.
Indeed, even Hajime was getting love letters. Because Yue, Shea, Kaori, and Shizuku all adored him, the girls were more interested in him than they used to be. Furthermore, he possessed an air of confidence that he hadn’t had before, which really excited a certain subset of girls.
“I wonder why any of them think they have a chance when I have you guys...” Hajime muttered.
“Maybe that’s exactly why. You already have multiple girlfriends, so they think maybe you’ll be okay with one more,” Yue explained.
“I see...”
Sighing, Hajime took the letters out and placed them into Kouki Amanogawa’s shoebox.
Meanwhile, Yue silently used restoration magic to look into the past and see who’d given Hajime these letters. After a few seconds, she grinned and said, “Hajime...are you sure you don’t want to read the top letter?”
“Like the one on the top of the pile? Why?”
Yue took it out and said, “Mmm... You see, it’s a love letter from a guy.”
“Oh god!”
Hajime snatched the letter out of Yue’s hands, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it far into the distance. His pitch put world-class pitchers to shame, and as the letter sailed away, a rather effeminate boy yelled, “Oh, my letter!” and started chasing after it.
“That’s so cruel, Hajime... How could you throw away his feelings like that?”
“Sorry, I just did it reflexively. All of those cross-dressers we met in Tortus traumatized me...”
“I’m surprised you haven’t realized it, Hajime... You’re really popular with some of the guys.”
“I mean...if they just want to be friends, I wouldn’t mind, but those looks they give me are terrifying. It just brings back memories of Crystabell staring at my ass.”
“Crystabell’s a good person, though...”
“He traumatized your boyfriend!” Hajime exclaimed. However, Yue just chuckled. Some students stopped to stare at her smiling face.
While people didn’t go out of their way to stare at Yue anymore, if she happened to be doing something exceptionally cute as they were passing by, they still stopped to look.
Hajime swiftly grabbed Yue’s hand and rushed over to their classroom. Their classroom was on the top floor, in the very corner of the building. It was a section of the building that had very few other classrooms. Most of the nearby rooms were prep rooms or lab rooms that saw infrequent use. It was the only classroom they could put all the kids who’d come back from Tortus in.
The school didn’t want to be branded as a cruel administration that kicked out kids who’d been missing for a year, while the parents and guardians of the children wanted to ensure they could study somewhere free from prying eyes, and naturally, no one wanted everyone to have to transfer to different schools and get split up. As a result, the compromise had been to keep them enrolled in the same school, but to give them a special classroom away from most of the other students.
Naturally, the teacher assigned to watch over their class was Aiko. She hadn’t been the homeroom teacher for any class before this, so in a sense, this was a promotion.
“It would have felt weird to be with the other second-years even though we’re still second-years too,” Hajime muttered, thinking about his situation.
“Hm?” Yue asked, looking up at him.
Hajime had been a second-year a year ago when he’d been summoned to Tortus, and since he hadn’t done any studying in that time, he was still a second-year.
It would have been weirder for him to go up a grade without having actually finished the second-year curriculum. But at the same time, it wasn’t like he’d gotten held back. He and his classmates were being treated like students who were coming back to school after an extended absence due to illness.
Considering the situation, it was a reasonable course of action, and this way neither the education administration nor the parents would have any reason to complain. Since they weren’t being treated as remedial students, Hajime and the others didn’t mind this compromise either. Most of them wanted to get back the year of school life that they’d lost, anyway.
But still, there was a bit of consternation over the fact that their friends in other classes were now a year above them, and their old underclassmen were in the same grade as them. Had Hajime really wanted to go up a grade, he could have used Limit Break and focused solely on studying for a few weeks to catch up on the year he’d missed. However, that would mean he’d graduate in less than half a year. The last thing he wanted was to spend less time with the friends he’d made in Tortus before everyone graduated and went their separate ways.