As soon as I got home and dropped my bag, Siyeon blurted out the schedule for monster hunting.
Hmm, isn’t it enough to just separate them into even days and odd days?
If we have extra time, we’ll handle it ourselves.
I couldn’t react to Siyeon’s loud voice as if she had decided something monumental; I just blinked.
We already had assigned dates, so what was the point in splitting them further?
A brief silence hung in the air.
“…Isn’t it fine like this?”
Breaking the silence, I questioned Siyeon.
Siyeon would take care of odd days, I would take care of even days, and whoever had extra time would handle it.
What more could be needed? I let the bag strap I was holding drop to the floor as I turned back.
Siyeon vigorously shook her head as if dissatisfied with the current agreement.
“Not like that! Odd days are odd! Even days are even! No helping each other!”
‘Ah, that part.’
If we have extra time, we’ll handle it ourselves.
Was that the one part that she didn’t like? Siyeon always adding ‘no helping each other!’ at the end.
So, the idea was that only the assigned person would fight the monsters on their respective days.
Usually, I was the one with the extra time, so she was saying she would contribute to monster hunting so that I wouldn’t have to interfere.
It was admirable to think that way, but I couldn’t help but worry about Siyeon’s confidence.
Crossing my arms like an older sister, I asked suspiciously.
“…Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, I’m not going to the academy anymore!”
Right, the academy.
Thinking about it, whether it was odd days or even days, that was the place where I ended up taking care of all the monster hunting.
Skeptically, I asked Siyeon, who seemed proud of quitting the academy.
“Are you sure… you didn’t quit the academy just to catch monsters?”
“N-no, not at all!”
Siyeon, with her usually gentle character, was defensively insisting it wasn’t true, over-exaggerating her reason for quitting.
She insisted it was definitely not true, layering on another layer of denial.
Her expression of utter disbelief made me think, ‘Is this not the case?’
Luckily, my concern about whether she quit the academy to avoid burdening me turned out to be my own misconception.
“Hmm, that’s a relief.”
“Will you… allow it?”
“…”
Just a moment ago, she was so adamant about not helping each other, yet here she was waiting for my permission until the very end.
Whether I allowed it or not, the truth was that I was in no position to give permission.
If a magical girl catches a monster, then she just does it. Does she really need to get permission from another magical girl?
The answer was obviously no.
Originally, magical girls were encouraged to deal with monsters as close to home as possible.
Even so, she was waiting for my approval.
That meant she relied on and respected me that much.
Reluctantly nodding my head, I decided to respect Siyeon too.
“Yeah, okay… let’s do that.”
“You promised!?”
“Yeah, yeah, I promised.”
As soon as I said that, Siyeon shot her pinky towards me.
We crossed our pinkies and then put our thumbs together, a childish promise.
There was no real need to do it, but I participated in the gesture for no good reason.
I didn’t even know why she looked so thrilled; it just meant more work for her.
As the monsters predicted, from that day, the times when monsters appeared started to shift slightly.
Most often, they showed up between the scheduled times, but…
Sometimes they showed up in the morning when I had to go to school or appeared right when I was about to fall asleep in the early morning.
I felt the tension of not knowing when I would have to rush out after a long time of forgetting.
And, I regained the unwelcome occupational hazard of sleep deprivation.
“I’m so sleepy…”
On a weekend afternoon, Siyeon complained of sleepiness as soon as she woke up.
“Ugh, you’d better get used to it.”
After a short yawn at Siyeon, I left her with a piece of advice as a senior in sleep deprivation.
But I thought it was better than when we were in elementary school since, after all, there were two of us carrying the burden.
Siyeon used to be completely excluded from monster hunting tasks because she was too young in elementary school.
When she had to deal with multiple monsters appearing all over the place by herself, it was really a living hell.
Thinking back, whose idea was that?
“I’m going to sleep more…”
After experiencing a dawn call-out, Siyeon crawled back to her room.
It was 4 PM; after going out in the early morning and holding out without sleep, this was the result.
When the daily routine goes awry, it’s only oneself who suffers.
“If you sleep now, how do you plan to sleep later?”
“I don’t know, I’m sleepy…”
I called out to Siyeon, who had turned off the light in her room, but she must have been so tired that she flopped onto the bed.
With exams right around the corner, I wondered what she was going to do.
Though, it wasn’t as if it was an unrelated matter…
‘Well, what’s the big deal if you don’t score perfectly?’
With that casual thought, exam day arrived.
One step, psychologically viewing the exam from afar.
With the feeling that it wouldn’t matter if I messed up, I casually filled in the multiple-choice questions without much thought, leaving the rest to the gods.
During the breaks in between the exams, I saw my classmates with the ‘good grades’ papers pile up.
Unless a student had no interest in their scores, even the worst student would sneak into the crowd.
The overachievers, passing their test papers like bait, focused on the next subject.
As the short day of four exams wrapped up, everyone started eagerly counting down the time to go home from their seats.
“Ah, I totally bombed the exam…”
I quietly turned my head at the complaints coming from the side.
The seat change in early April had me paired with Eun-young, who had bangs.
One of the girls who fell into the category of “good students.”
Thanks to the noise from the female students crowding around every break time, it had been super loud.
Anyway, it was quite tragic to hear that such an impressive friend bombed the exam, and curiosity got the best of me, so I casually asked.
“Why, what did you get?”
“91 points.”
“…”
Hearing a two-digit score with a 9 in the front left me speechless for a moment.
What? Did the dictionary definition of ‘bombing’ change somehow?
To say it was a bomb, wouldn’t it need to be that those scoring 100 or even 90 had their 9 turned into a 6?
Was this a high-level deception aimed at me?
If Seo-hyun, who aimed for an average of 70 in all subjects, heard this, it would have been an outlandish comment for sure, something like ‘Ugh, how annoying.’
But still, if she thought she bombed it, I couldn’t dismiss it outright.
Some families might say that only scores of 100 are acceptable.
Since scores are relative, right?
Some might not mind if they did their best…
“Still, with a 9 at the front…”
“This easy question, I made a mistake! Ugh! So annoying!”
Eun-young didn’t seem to register my words of comfort at all; instead, she scratched at her head in frustration and lost her temper.
Hmm, so there are types who can’t see past their anger.
I could already picture what her high school life looked like.
After leaving the unconcerned Eun-young, I meandered over to Seo-hyun.
Seo-hyun looked like a dying green dinosaur.
“Hey, why do you look so miserable?”
“Ah, I messed up on the score.”
Her target score was 70, and it sounded pretty clear that she didn’t reach it.
The result was evident, but I still asked to confirm.
“Why didn’t you score over 70?”
“Is it really reasonable to have gotten a 69….”
On Seo-hyun’s desk lay her English test paper, rolling listlessly.
A score counted carefully compared to studious classmates.
It seemed she calculated the points assigned for each question and reached the simple addition equation near the score box: 69 points.
Seo-hyun’s dream of getting a new smartphone for scoring over 70 across all subjects had been crushed on the very first day.
This was indeed a bomb.
Failing the mission of reaching 70 points across all subjects by just a single point, Seo-hyun got hit hard.
Feeling that my clumsy words of consolation would only provoke her further, I decided to ask about her scores in other subjects.
“How about the scores in other subjects?”
“78 in Korean, 70 in Math…”
Math was at the cutoff line, while Korean was 8 points higher than her target.
Honestly, I thought it was absurd pity or obstinacy, but I said what came to mind.
“Can’t you just appeal to add some points from other subjects to make up for the deficit?”
“I’m going to try to push that after the exam…”
To pull in 8 points higher in Korean to make up for a 1-point deficit in English was her dilemma.
Hearing that, it seemed she’d already planned on it, as she answered without hesitation.
‘She’s stubborn too.’
Guess the one with the more stubborn attitude will win, I thought as I made my way toward Siyeon’s seat near the hallway window.
I grabbed both of Siyeon’s shoulders while she was seated and casually threw out the phrase usually said after finishing an exam.
“Did you do well on the exam?”
“…”
Instead of responding to that formal question, the sound of her putting her test paper away rustled in my ear.
As I leaned in toward her left cheek, she turned her head to the right and subtly avoided my gaze.
The shadow of her score was visible in her reaction.
Yeah, it’s okay to mess up sometimes.
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