I returned to the Bouf d’ete Residence after receiving Furina’s unexpected kiss.
"Avrora! Welcome ba—what’s with that face? You look utterly dazed. Was the exam really that hard?"
"I don’t know… whether it was hard… or easy…"
"You’ve clearly lost your mind. Have some chamomile tea, then go upstairs and get some sleep. I think I need to have a drink and talk things over with that Sergei fellow."
"Oh? You’re the one suggesting drinks first, Angelina? The sun must be rising in the west."
"Did you forget our mission? We have to write a report for Arlecchino. I need a little alcohol in me before the words will come."
"Now that’s a fair point."
While the Fatui pair chattered downstairs, I couldn’t forget Furina’s kiss in my room.
From why she had done it to what I was supposed to do now, all kinds of pointless thoughts filled my head. Thanks to that, I was unable to sleep and greeted the morning after pulling an all-nighter.
Hollow-eyed…
"He looks worse than he did yesterday."
"Hey, Avrora. Are you really okay? Should we take you to a hospital?"
"Please give me some headache medicine…"
Sergei immediately went to a pharmacy and bought headache medicine. I had porridge for breakfast and took the medicine. Even so, I still looked hollow-eyed. I was only marginally better.
"What should we do? Should we tell Arlecchino?"
"There should be somewhere for him to rest inside the House of the Hearth, right? Sergei, carry Avrora."
"Fine. You carry Avrora’s luggage, then."
And so, the three of us left the residence and headed for the House of the Hearth.
What about Furina? In Furina’s room at the Palais Mermonia, Furina was celebrating at last having pulled something off.
"Finally! I kissed him! That means we can progress into a relationship now, right? Hehehe~"
Beneath her blankets, Furina thrashed about wildly, openly displaying her confidence at having stolen Avrora’s first kiss. Neuvillette, who had knocked before entering, saw Furina like that and decided he had come to the wrong room, then left again. He could ask what had happened later.
"But… what happens if Avrora fails the first round…? Don’t tell me he won’t be able to come out until next year?"
Furina was suddenly filled with worry and anxiety. Before long, she prayed and prayed again. It was unclear whom she was praying to, but hoping desperately that Avrora would pass the first round, Furina headed to the bathroom to wash up before today’s audience with the citizens.
House of the Hearth, front gate
"Avrora must have worked hard. Just look at him being carried in like that."
Seeing Avrora on Sergei’s back, Kujavina was relieved that he had not run away somewhere else.
Peruere was pestering Sergei to put her brother down already.
Sergei soon put Avrora down, and Peruere carried him into a room.
Avrora was burning with fever. Peruere panicked, but quickly brought fever medicine for him to take and placed an ice pack on his head.
"Peru…ere…"
"Brother… are you okay?"
"I’m… fine… There was something I needed to think about… I think I thought too much and came down with a fever…"
"Just lie down and rest. I’ll cook you some porridge."
"Okay…"
Cravie and Citra, who had been watching from outside the door, followed Peruere out to help. The three of them made porridge together, fed it to Avrora, and stayed by his side.
"It’s been a long time since Brother was this sick…"
"Yeah… He caught fevers sometimes when he was little, but this is the first time I’ve seen him get one now."
"The Demon King is sick? Is a changing of the guard about to happen?"
"Citra, what do you mean, a changing of the guard? Avrora is our eternal king."
"That’s true. Still, seeing him this sick makes it seem like even the Demon King is human after all."
The three of them were evaluating Avrora.
I was sick for an entire week. When I still had not recovered after four days, even with the medicine in the House of the Hearth, Angelina took me to a Fontaine hospital to get more medicine. Only then did my fever begin to go down. Three days later, I began to recover, and today, the tenth day, my body had finally returned to normal.
"I thought I was going to die… If you don’t get used to an exam like that, it’ll kill you."
"Do you really have to take that exam? I don’t want to see you looking so sick, Brother…"
"Kujavina says I have to take it, so what can I do? Unless I get out of here, I suppose I’ll have to be sick once a year."
"The bitch making Brother sick needs to die quickly…"
"Not yet. You still have a long way to go."
Peruere was still four months away from her eleventh birthday. There were still another five or six years before you killed Kujavina, you know?
"Brother… You keep saying I have a long way to go, but when can I kill that bitch…? Answer me."
"That… I can’t tell you that…"
The trigger would only be fulfilled if I died, so I couldn’t tell her.
"I know you have your own plans, Brother, but I want to leave this place soon. I want to go see the aurora in Snezhnaya that Cravie told me about, together with you."
"People say it’s beautiful, but I’ve never seen an aurora myself…"
"Then shouldn’t you see one? Your name isn’t living up to its meaning otherwise."
"Peruere? Do you know that hurts my feelings when you say things like that?"
The kid just drove the facts straight into my chest. Well, that was just Peruere’s personality.
"By the way, Brother, what did you do in Fontaine? Did you stay inside your lodging the whole time?"
"Um… mostly, I guess…"
Thinking about it reminded me of smacking Furina’s ass, having dinner at a café, and Furina kissing me…
"Brother…?"
"Well, nothing much happened. The exam was just completely insane."
"That filthy exam that hurts Brother… We need to get rid of it quickly…"
"I’m just bad at using my head, so don’t start talking about abolishing the exam over that, okay?"
Handling my little sister was really difficult.
Two weeks after the exam, on the day the results were announced, Peruere and I waited for The Steambird newspaper to arrive at dawn.
"It’s April, and it’s still cold…"
"Seriously. We should have brought out a blanket."
Just as we were complaining about the cold, a motorcycle approached from far away. It was the newspaper delivery motorcycle.
I waved my hand, and the newspaper deliveryman handed me a paper.
"Hey, you two should take a look at today’s paper. You’ll be shocked."
"What happened?"
"Looks like the history of Fontaine’s judicial exam has been rewritten! I only saw the headlines myself, so I don’t know the details, but it looks like a little kid about your age made a huge splash!"
"A little kid?"
"I’m off!"
Vrooom! The motorcycle sped off into the distance. I took the paper inside, turned on a lamp, and read it.
"This… is a lie, right?"
[First-Round Judicial Exam Makes History: Fifteen-Year-Old Tops the Rankings!]
[Exam Committee: The Questions Were Set at an Average Difficulty… Examinees Divided in Their Reactions]
[Orphan-Born Top Scorer: What Is His Secret to Studying?!]
Things were about to get crazy.
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