"God, I'm drained!" I exclaimed as I slid into my seat and set my head down on the large table within the newly repaired student council room. The events of the day, from worrying about what branches I should choose to be to fighting for my life under Credo's illusion, had left me completely drained and without energy. Still, I had my responsibilities to complete, and one of those was attending student council meetings with Kami. Although I wasn't really an official member, everyone had just come to accept my presence. It wasn't like I could flake if I wanted to anyways. Suijin would probably hunt me down for it.
Next to me, Kami was staring at my collapsed form with a sly smile on her face. "Was slacking off in class really that taxing on you?"
"Unlike you, I strive to have academic excellence in class. So no, I wasn't slacking. In fact, I was doing much more work than I should have considering it's only the first day back." I fired back a jab when Kami teased me before turning my gaze to view the rest of the table. So far, along with Suijin and Yuri, we were the only ones who had arrived. It made sense, considering the bell had rung only a few minutes ago. The rest of the student council would be taking a while to get here.
The student council room had been completely destroyed in the battle with Greed; however, in just a week it had been returned to its original state. It looked identical to how the room looked before. Everything had been restored, and a few things such as the table and door had even been upgraded.
Turning my eyes to look at Suijin in Yuri, I saw a completely different scene from what I was used to seeing. Usually, Yuri would stand right by Suijin's side, standing over her like a protective hawk. However now, he was standing off to the side, at a distance from here. Usually, there was an air of familiarity between the two, like the one you'd expect from two people who had known each other since they were children. However, now there was a palpable distance between the two of them. If you looked at them now, it would be like looking at two strangers who were meeting for the very first time.
Kami noticed where my gaze was, and she leaned in to whisper towards me. "I never really liked the guy before, but I guess I can't keep hating him considering the fact he lost his memories. Still, even I can tell this distance is hurting the both of them." I nodded my agreement with Kami's assessment. Of course, for Suijin, the pain emanated from the fact that the person she was closest to forgot everything about her and their experiences together. Not only that, but he was treating her like a stranger. In the case of Yuri, he had told me before that it was more the pain of expectation that was killing him. He felt like an imposter that was in the wrong body, and he was worried about not meeting the expectation everyone had of him.
I could understand why both people were hurt, but I couldn't do anything to help them. That was the part that angered me the most. I considered these people my friends, right?
I thought back to Yuri's confession that he thought he and I would be great friends. I remembered the times before when Suijin had helped me. Yeah, I did consider these people friends. So why, why couldn't I help them in any meaningful way?
Frustrated, but with no way to fix things or help, I could only sit in silence and revel in my own inadequacy and frustration. Just then, the door opened.
"The king has arrived!" A loud and rowdy voice shouted as they stepped through the threshold and into the student council room. They were followed by three other figures. It was Ichijo, Genji, Riko, and Ayung. The rest of the student council had finally arrived. Ichijo was the one to make the rowdy entrance that grabbed everyone's attention. Genji smacked him in the back of the head, calling him 'corny,' to which he shouted, "Hey!" and the two of them nearly got into a scuffle. Thankfully, Riko separated them with a simple snap of her finger. From behind her emerged some sort of mechanical arm that picked up Ichijo by the hem of his pants and placed him in his seat upside down. All the while he was shouting and struggling.
After that loud debacle, the rest of the student council members settled down into their seats, and a silence descended upon the room.
"That thing is seriously cool. Did you make it yourself?" I asked, gesturing towards the mechanical arm that hung from Riko's back. She smiled at the compliment before nodding.
'It was something that I and Ayung started working on together. It wasn't anything serious, more of a distraction project if anything. I'm just happy it turned actually functional."
"Yeah, there was like no double-checking or any sort of safety screening beforehand, so I was sure it'd blow up." Ayung commented in a voice that was way too nonchalant for the gravity of what she just admitted.
"And yet you strapped this thing onto my back with a smile, didn't you?" Riko jabbed, giving her sister a hard stare.
Ayung just turned her gaze to the side and pretended not to hear or see her.
After that short conversation, the room descended into silence as we all waited for Suijin to begin the meeting. Suijin cleared her throat before beginning. "I—I guess, just to start, I have to ask you all what you think of our new teacher. Credo. He came directly from his position as the vice president of the Mage's Association, and the headmaster was more than a bit worried about the man's intentions." Unlike normally, Suijin did not start this meeting by asking everyone how their day was, nor did she do her regular routine of just sitting and listening to everyone speak. Instead, she got straight to the point. Normally that shouldn't have been something I gave more than a passing thought; however, right now it stuck in my mind. It was just a testament to how wrong things had become after the attack. Even Suijin, the insurmountable pillar that held Theta Magic Academy together, was affected. She was stuttering, and she seemed less confident. I might have been seeing things, but it also looked like she was having trouble maintaining eye contact.
It was a completely different Suijin than the one I recognized and had gotten used to.
"He's a nutjob." Ichijo shouted out immediately. "Crazy. A genuine psychopath. In fact, I don't think it would be crazy to say that he should just be fired outright. I th-"
Before he could continue speaking, Riko's mechanic arm made a whirring sound as it moved, and the fingers on the end of the arm literally pinched Ichijo's mouth shut. After which, Riko flashed Suijin a smile and began to speak. "Ichijo is still having a strong emotional reaction to everything that happened in Credo's first lesson. What he meant to say was that the guy was a bit eccentric, with an interesting method of teaching." Rephrasing Ichijo's heated spiel into something more proper, she presented that explanation to Suijin.
Suijin listened to their words before nodding her head and turning to face Genji. "What about you?"
Genji, who was playing with the pin on her blazer, turned up to look at Suijin before speaking. "While I don't agree with Ichijo, I do think he was more than just a little bit 'eccentric.' To put it simply, the guy might actually be crazy." Genji gave a ruthless analysis.
Suijin nodded, then turned to me and Kami.
"Well—"
"Well—"
I and Kami spoke at the exact same time. We both shot each other 'back off' looks. Using the sibling telepathy we had, I basically told her I was older, and therefore I should go first. She stuck out her tongue at me as I turned back to face Suijin. "I couldn't really understand what he was trying to do. His very first appearance, and he went out of his way to antagonize every last student within the training arena, and then he began a sudden test in which he used illusion magic in a very elaborate strategy, all to 'test us.' Whatever that meant. And when I talked to him after the lesson, he just said a whole bunch of cryptic things like, 'It was all being done in order to prepare us.' In general, I just got a bad feeling from the guy."
Even with that lengthy explanation, I had still left some things out. His comment to me about being able to cut down the moon. His vermillion eye that had multiple pupils. The fact that he seemed to know I was hiding my own eye under contacts. Thankfully, I had brought a backup, but I seriously wasn't looking to invest any more money in constantly buying new ones because of him.
Kami spoke right after me. "I was going to say the same thing before Raiden rudely interrupted me. He was just excessively antagonistic, and his method for doing things was extreme." Kami poked me in my side as she spoke, and I resisted the urge to reach out and pinch her cheek. God, she was childish.
Suijin then turned to Yuri, who was standing behind her. "What about you, Yuri?"
Yuri froze when she looked in his direction. Clearing his throat, he began to speak, and I could hear hesitation and nervousness in his voice. "Well. I pretty much agree with what Raiden said. He started off antagonizing all of the students and then gave us an out-of-the-blue test. I get that it was the point of his lesson, but I just think the whole thing was in bad taste. Although I don't know if I'd go to the extent to say he deserves to be fired for it, president." Immediately I could see the mistake Yuri made. He referred to Suijin as 'president.'
"Thank you for your response, Yuri. Although I'd like for you to drop the 'president' honorific. Like I said before, this is a school where status does not make any one person better than the other. You can just call me Suijin. In fact, I'd prefer if you just used my name."
Yuri nodded.
Everyone in the room could feel the awkwardness between the interactions of the two. It wasn't something that was pleasant to watch, especially when you could see in person how much the distance was hurting the both of them.
"Ahem." Suijin cleared her throat to break the slowly declining mood of the room and grab everyone's attention. "Well, just like all of you, I definitely didn't enjoy how Credo went about his introduction and first lesson. I like that he was unnecessarily antagonistic towards students just coming back from a traumatic experience. That being said, we don't have any replacements at the moment, so I'll have to selfishly ask that you bear with it for now. Besides, judging by the position he held before he came to teach at Theta, he definitely is a skilled mage. We'll just have to give him time. I thought similar things about Himi—"
Suijin stopped just before she spoke the name of the teacher that Credo had replaced. Himitsu, who was currently presumed dead after having received a fatal wound in battle and being transported straight into the Southern Ocean. The mood in the room took a sudden nosedive as everyone thought about Himitsu. Everyone inside of the room right now, besides me, Kami, and Yuri, had been present and was fighting alongside Himitsu. They witnessed his drive to protect the students, and they also witnessed his death. Suijin most of all. I could tell that she was pinning herself with most of the blame for everything that had happened during the siege on Theta.
That stemmed from the overinflated perception of what it meant to be a leader that she had developed. That horrible mindset of hers had been exposed in the week before the school's culture festival. Yuri had ended up confronting her in front of everyone else, in which she stated that she didn't believe it was right for her to shift her own work onto others. She attempted to carry everything on her back, all the while worrying about everyone but herself, because she believed that was what a leader should do. She believed that because she was president, she should be responsible for everything, and she thought it would be selfish of her to push that responsibility onto anybody else, even people who wanted to help.
I had heard from Kami herself that it took her and Homura drilling it into Suijin's head mid-battle that what she was doing was the selfish thing and that asking others for help wasn't selfish. Kami had to show Suijin that having the courage to ask for help was not weak but instead where true strength lay. Of course, even if Suijin managed to acknowledge that fact, it would take time for her to truly internalize it. And that was where the problem arose. She was confused and overwhelmed. She was blaming herself for things out of her control, all the while having to juggle this thing without her most trusted companion, Yuri.
I could tell that she was going to crack eventually. There was no way she could keep going on like this. Just like how I almost lost myself under the pressure of everything I had seen after Ariel lifted the spell that sealed my memories. But back then I also didn't have the guilt of hundreds of lives weighing on my conscience. Once again I was truly impressed by Suijin's strength. But I knew that strength could not last forever.
At that moment, a loud ding! could be heard. Reaching out into the pocket of her blazer, Suijin pulled out her phone. Normally phones weren't allowed within the Magic Academy campus for privacy and security reasons; however, it seems like Suijin had an exception made for her. She stared at the message she received on her phone, and I could see her eyes widen.
"Oh god, I'm sorry. I'll have to excuse myself for a moment." She stood up, the panic and nervousness in her expression and actions painfully clear. "Genji, please take heed of this meeting while I'm gone." After giving that order, Suijin rushed outside.
Click!
As soon as the door shut behind her, Genji stood up. Her snow-blond hair bounced as she walked towards the head of the table where Suijin sat. She didn't sit in Suijin's seat, but instead, she stood right next to it. "Alright, I don't think I have to explain what the big problem is here, right?" She asked, glancing at each and every one of us.
"Suijin needs help." I said simply. Genji nodded.
"Are we all on the same page about that?" She asked everyone else.
Everybody nodded.
"Obviously, she has a lot of things on her mind, and as the student council president, she has lots of responsibilities on top of that. And we all saw what happened in the week before the attack, right? When Yuri had confronted her"?
Yuri's body tensed as his name was brought up in an interaction she obviously didn't remember. I only needed one look at his face to see that he was more than just anxious to find out the context of what Genji was saying.
Everyone nodded once again. "Suijin used to think that because she was the president, she had to take on all of this responsibility on her own. It was only after I explained to her that it was okay to ask for help that she truly began to understand. However, it seems that notion still remains with her." Kami spoke up next.
"That doesn't even address the fact that she's a daughter of one of the 10 grand magic families. Rumor has it things involving them have started to become busy." Ayung added.
"That begs the question, how can we help her?" Ichijo asked,"
No one had a good answer to that. Well, it wasn't that we didn't have a good answer to that; it was more of a fact that the answer everybody had to that question wouldn't be able to work.
Slowly, eyes began to shift towards Yuri. Noticing this, he took a step back, unable to comprehend what was going on. "M-me?" He asked. I could tell the pressure was starting to get to him.
"Right now, Suijin's main worries revolve around you." Although Genji didn't say it directly, Yuri read the subtext easily. Essentially, he was the reason behind Suijin's horrible state of mind. Because he had lost his memories, he had hurt Suijin, and now, he was hurting everyone else. And even now, he couldn't even help fix the situation. He was only making things worse.
I scared myself with how easy it was for me to fall into his line of thinking. And that was because it used to be my line of thinking not too long ago. Blaming everything on myself. I could see the shift in his expression in his eyes. No longer did he wear his sunglasses. He had stopped wearing them after they had broken in our fight. Those dark shades hid his eyes from the rest of the world. I realize now that he must have worn them because they let him feel without anybody judging him. But now, his emotions were on full display. He looked hurt, confused, and most of all, scared.
"We don't want to put any pressure on you. But if you could just talk to Suijin, it would kickstart things for the rest of us." Riko said. "Right now Suijin's slowly been building a wall. We need someone to get her to open up that gate before the rest of us can enter and truly help her."
I could hear Yuri's unspoken question. But am I really the right person for the job?
"I understand that you may be a bit apprehensive. After all, you probably don't remember the relationship you had with Suijin before. However, both of you knew each other since you were children, and you were great friends. If anyone can do it, it's you." Genji reassured Yuri once again that he was the man for the job. However, Yuri still looked unsure, and most of all, he still looked confused.
In the next moment, something seemed to shift behind his eyes. Almost as if he suddenly remembered something. His hands began to shake, and his breath began to quiver. In his eyes, fear and, most of all, regret could be seen. Before anyone could ask what was going on, Suijin re-entered the room.
"I'm sorry about that, some personal th-" She lapsed into silence as she noticed the tension within the room. She then turned to see Yuri, standing in the corner, looking shocked and scared. He was trembling and on the verge of hyperventilating. Her expression morphing into one of concern, she walked forward and reached out her hand, asking if Yuri was okay.
When Yuri suddenly grabbed her hand right before it touched him. It was a fast and swift motion that showed the muscle memory his body had. He moved like a soldier. Quick and fast, and he held a tight grip on Suijin's arm.
"Agh!" Suijin shouted in pain at the sudden grabbing and squeezing of her wrist. Just as quickly as he had grabbed it, Yuri let go, realizing what he had done. He backed away from Suijin, unable to even look her in the eyes. "Sorry! I-I'm sorry!" And then, he rushed out of the room.
All the while his face was pale and his eyes were wide, as if he had just seen a ghost.
Everyone stood in silence, unable to understand what had just happened.
Not even giving it a second, I rose from my seat and decided to go after Yuri.
The look I had seen in his eyes. The way he acted just now. His sudden departure. I was sure of it.
Yuri Hamani had remembered something.