Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 154: Alternate Worldbuilding
As expected, the force of two dozen and more simultaneous stares was... heavy.
Cecilia flinched. The heat that had barely receded from her cheeks roared back with a vengeance.
"W—w—?"
She groaned internally. Ahhh, to be a rabbit in a spotlight. They knew. Of course they knew. The hallway spectacle had ensured that.
Even the man beside her, who understood precisely nothing of whatever it was, registered the violent shift in focus. Oathran flinched slightly, a minute tensing of his shoulders.
His head turned, those mist-grey eyes abandoning the front of the room to fix upon her curiously. His gaze was a piercing question mark.
Just as Cecilia felt she might actually combust into a pile of ash and shame right there in her seat, a lifeline was thrown.
"Ahem."
A dry cough came from the front row. A young man with neatly trimmed black hair and a posture that screamed ’responsible’ even in a school uniform, turned around. His eyes, when they finally landed on Cecilia, held a flicker of weary recognition.
He was—Stevan?!
Huh?! The Chief Warden of the Iondora dungeons? Here? A teenager?
Why would the empire’s most formidable jailer be planted in a high school AU? Was the System just populating the world with anyone from her mental rolodex?
"Please stop teasing Miss Araceli, guys..." he said, his voice calm but authoritative. It, of course, sounded decades older than his face. He turned his attention to the professor. "Professor, Mr. Edengold is having his yearly family’s signature magic initiation. The absent permit is on the table."
Professor Suna let out a huff. "That boy—! He dodged my assignment again!" She snatched the permit from her desk, scanned it with a scowl, and seemed to file it away as a grudgingly acceptable excuse.
Her sharp eyes then pivoted to Stevan. "You too. You have returned for a week from your initiation now. Hand over your assignment."
Stevan’s veneer of calm cracked for a second. He cleared his throat helplessly. "...Yes."
He rummaged in his bag and produced a sheaf of papers, walking up to place them on the professor’s desk.
Cecilia watched, noting everything. Family signature magic initiation? What even was that? Some fabricated noble clan ritual? It was a convenient, world-building excuse, but the specificity of it piqued her mind.
Professor Suna picked up the top paper, her eyes scanning. Then she froze. Her eyebrows shot up towards her hairline.
"This is not yours!" she announced, her voice ringing with academic outrage. She held the paper aloft. "Look at the name—Angel—why would you turn in the princess’s assig—?!"
"A—!" Stevan jolted as if electrocuted. His face, previously composed, flooded with a crimson so deep it was almost purple. In a panic, he lunged forward and snatched the incriminating papers from her hands, scrambling to stuff them back into his bag. "Please forgi—I mean, that’s a mistake, I—"
It was too late.
The dam broke.
"Pffftt—" A snort escaped from somewhere in the middle rows.
"Whoooop!" someone else crowed.
"Bwahahahh! Class rep, please don’t show off!" another voice yelled, thick with glee.
"Yeah, we know you’re the princess’s little boyfrie—"
Knock-knock.
All heads swiveled again.
Angela stood there, leaning against the jamb with an air of supreme, unbothered arrogance, a few loose papers in her own hand. "Excuse me. Professo—"
She didn’t get to finish.
"AYYYY—" A collective, knowing shout went up.
"HAHAHAHAH—" The laughter was unrestrained now, the classroom transforming into a theater of delightful scandal.
"Here we go, the other half!"
Angela flinched, startled by the sudden, raucous commotion. Her brows furrowed in genuine confusion, her gaze darting around the gleeful faces. What had she missed?
Then her eyes landed on Stevan, frozen by the professor’s desk, the guilty papers half-shoved into his bag, his face was of acute horror.
Her gaze flicked to the papers in her own hand, then back to his. Understanding dawned, followed swiftly by a tide of fury and profound embarrassment. Her cheeks flushed a furious red.
"Hmph!" she snarled, stomping into the room, her pride clearly wounded. She thrust her own papers at the professor. "That’s why you should look at what you put in your bag, you idiot!"
"AHAHAHAHAHAH!"
"YOOOOOO—"
The uproar was complete. The morning’s tension, starting with the eerie silence around the new transfer student, and the pointed, uncomfortable stares at Cecilia, had been somewhat alleviated.
Who could blame the glorious, chaotic romcom of the princess and her flustered boyfriend?
Nice information. Her mind filed away the Stevan-Angela dynamic as a useful piece of this world’s lore.
It seemed that she didn’t see them in her week-long scenario with Eastiel because they were also away because of the family initiation thing.
Cecilia felt the weight of attention lift from her shoulders. She could breathe again.
Until—
"I see," Oathran mused, his tone thoughtful. "There are two famous relationships in the school."
He paused, his gaze holding hers.
"And one of them," he stated, "is yours."
Cecilia froze.
It was a bit... strange.
The words, the context, the very premise of his observation, it all felt like a reflection in a warped mirror.
At the start, her bond with Oathran had felt like a temporary, desperate thing. A contingency. His death-wish and her own survival instinct. Even the gacha system’s intervention was rooted in his dying plea. A wish to be connected to her before the end.
So, to hear him, or this amnesiac, teenage facsimile of him, casually categorize her connection with Eastiel as a "famous relationship," something current and ongoing... it felt... inverted.
Her entanglement with Arzhen too had been a mistake later revealed in betrayal. It did also happen when they met and bonded, but it was also completed. It was a closed Chapter. So...
Strange.
Because her first real relationship had been...
...with this man.
"Heh, not really. You guys kept it ambiguous, right?" one of the students sitting in front of her, a boy with freckles and a knack for gossip, twisted in his seat to tease, breaking her reverie.
His deskmate, sensing an opportunity for social scoring, chirped in. "Right, it’s a situationship?"
The term was just thrown out to the air, implying all the delicious, unresolved tension the student body thrived on.
"That’s unexpected though," Freckles continued, shaking his head. "You and Eastiel? That bastard..."
Her head snapped up, her gaze sharpening. "Don’t call him a bastard," she said, her voice low but firm. "Eastiel is a good person."
The two boys blinked, momentarily chastened by the unexpected steel, before breaking into subdued, embarrassed chuckles and whoops, turning back around as Professor Suna’s stare swept over them once more.
But Oathran’s eyes never left her face.
He hadn’t been part of the teasing. His gaze wasn’t pointed, mocking, or salacious. It remained simply... there. Polite. Curious.
As the room settled into the forced quiet of a lesson about to begin, he offered her a small, polite smile. Then he turned back to his own pristine textbook, aligning his pen parallel to its edge.
"I’m just wondering," he said, "what kind of man deserves such a lady."
Oh, fuck.
It’s happening again.
Oathran... in this world too... do we have a secret childhood history?
