✦ ✧ ✦
A few hours later...
How devastating,
and annoying.
The neuralphone hummed through my ears, repeating its "beep, beep" sound.
I got turned down. Rejected.
It's so over.
Yes. Again, for the 58th time.
No male students wanted anything to do with me.
Chat… I'm cooked.
I shut my eyes and let a sardonic smile crawl up — the kind that feels like relief if you squint, or agony if you don't.
Could be both.
This is gonna be a very long and tiring day, huh?
Great.
Long day ahead.
...Anyway.
It's lore time.
Within Lumiere district, the secluded area within Nouvelle-Lutêce-sur-Sumida, there lies an academy.
They call it The Advanced Magical High School. Marketing loves that phrase — sounds exclusive, benevolent.
In practice it's simplistic and rather ruthless.
Used to be Tokyo — before the upgrades, the "national partnership" now rebranded to fit the imperial state's appetite.
The school's divination apparatus — angels, or machines that pretend to be angels, depending on how generous you're feeling — does the sorting.
Whatever suits their bills.
It doesn't decide on talent so much as assign usefulness. Statistics with wings.
The official line brags it clearly:
100% acceptance rate.
Impressive, isn't it?
The kind of privilege people expect me to be dazzled by.
"Go anywhere you want," as if wandering through magic departments is a revolution.
How unbelievably cute.
Right, never mind.
Time to face the cruel reality.
Here's the unprompted version:
Everyone gets in to the system if the humming divination from the machine says so. The machine is fervently worshipped because it's too convenient to worship a thing that turns these talents into tags.
Yes, depending on who you ask, it's a miracle, a machine, or a very efficient illusion.
Whatever it is, it sorts students. Classifies them.
Decides what they're good for before they become their sword. And obviously, for their goods too.
Students are labeled. Tagged as tragic heroes.
Their surnames were rewritten to match whatever the machine spat out. It's administrative alchemy — take a name, polish it, and sell the result as destiny.
They told me, saying "Tradition."
More like a ritual oppression disguised as some kind of foolish occult myth.
Mine? Right...
Fatui itself means "Fool."
The idiot madman who chases curiosities and survives them. The lunatic who comes home with answers no one asked for. A tarot card in a world that forgot how to read symbols without a purchase plan.
Trendy in 2099—symbols packaged for bored prophets and late-stage consumers.
Right next to The Creator, The Hermit, The Magician. Trendy, tragically symbolic — as if the future needed more aesthetics and less conscience.
And of course, I knew.
I lived through it.
So — wanna rewind?
Nope.
Not the shallow, "here's how it goes" kind.
So? Let's continue.
✦ ✧ ✦
"Well... this is gonna be fun."
I muttered to myself, the chuckle vibrating in a throat that felt too narrow, too light.
The sound was so wrong—a high-frequency ripple, a villainous chuckle that didn't belong to the ghost of that male spirit at all.
The one who I used to be.
Perhaps that "Daniel" no longer was—begone.
Rather, just a fading signal, a frequency gradually being overwritten by static.
Apparently, such a transformation had taken a toll.
My internal reflection now was off. Wrong.
Should I look at a mirror?
No.
First, let me inspect the sensation.
Well, this existence of being had weight.
Not metaphorical weight—actual resistance.
Intent no longer propagated freely.
Every thought had to pass through delay, through density, through something that answered back.
I was no longer diffused.
Instead, I was contained.
Perpetually restricted.
It wasn't just soft; it felt… wrong.
There was no structural tension in the muscles, no instantaneous spread of will. Movement required routing: command, response, correction.
The body lagged behind intention, as if unfamiliar with being asked to exist at all.
As if this form had habits.
However, one of them were mine.
There was a boundary now where there had been none before—a surface where "me" stopped and "not me" began. I could feel residue on that surface, not dirt but memory—the echo of a life lived before I arrived.
Those robes we called clothes used to be nothing more than gestures—a fold here, a ribbon of thought there. They were suggestions of shape, suspensions of light and intent that flowed like language.
But no physical shapes.
Now they held something authentic, pooled and pressed, carrying history against the skin.
Ugh, I have to take these clothes off.
I had to reset the surface.
As I leaned back, my eyes caught the ceiling.
Turns out it wasn't just plaster.
Instead, it was a shifting map.
Lines of light, thin as glowing nerves, traced their way across lands marked in deep emeralds and electric greens. It was a map, but it was alive—movements flickered across those lands, forming a futuristic, architectural pulse that beat in time with the room.
Navigation lesson booted in my head; patterns became anchors. My mind aligned like a compass needle finding north. Training steadied me for a second, where the body could not.
Wait. This was not the right time to be amused.
The "dirty" feeling returned—a heavy, psychological grime that stuck in thought. I had to purge it off.
I stood up immediately. Then, I took my clothes off.
Yes, casually. Just like that.
As if I had inhabited this gravity for years.
No dramatic movements, no cinematic flourishes nor exaggerated gestures.
Just the clinical efficiency of stripping this thing.
My hands—pale, unfamiliar tools—found the buttons of the clothes on my body.
The contact was a sensory jolt; the hard, plastic edges of the buttons against the soft pads of my fingers.
I worked them loose, the dry, plastic snick of each release echoing in the silence.
Pressure.
Ridged, punctuate, local.
Where once a thought reshaped an entire room, now a fingertip had to negotiate a series of small mechanical obstacles.
And I slowly, and surely, laid my pajamas down to the floor.
The fabric didn't just fall; it pooled, sloughing off me like a shed skin, collapsing into a soft, fibrous heap around my ankles.
And then, I realized...
Oh? Right.
This cover. The one that concealed my chest.
I reached back to remove the cover's clasp.
The movement was awkward—a test of rotational mechanics my shoulders weren't used to.
My fingers grazed the cold, rigid metal of the hooks, a stark contrast to the warm, yielding softness of the skin on my back.
No, it was never sexual.
The clasp was a lock in a system I had never configured. The muscle memory I used with Silvia was useless, since it should have been much easier.
Just one tap-in and it's done.
But this time, it was different.
My fingers misread the rotation; the body answered in echoes, phantom recoil that belonged to someone else's habit.
Dear God... I have no qualms on Your existence.
I cursed under my breath and tried again—slower, methodical, counting each micro-turn like an incantation.