episode_0007

I took the last spoonful at a pace that matched Ion and Lulu’s eating speed, and somehow the three of us ended up eating at a perfect pace.

“…You, are you eating at the same speed as us?”

“Yes, I believe that is table manners.”

I nodded at Lulu’s question. Funny enough, Lulu will teach you these dining etiquettes early on in the game, taunting you. I remembered them as I ate with her, and I tried to pay attention to them.

As I said that, Ion smiled faintly and glanced at Lulu. Lulu had a vague expression on her face, and I wondered if she didn’t like it.

“Did I commit a mistake?”

“Oh my, who said that? No. ”

At my words, Lulu frowned, folded her arms, and turned her head away. A beginner might think, ‘What kind of a girl is this?’, but someone who has been playing the game for a long time like me knew that she was acting embarrassed, so I just laughed.

“What, what’s so funny?”

“No, I just thought it was cute.”

At my words, Lulu froze, and Ion burst out laughing.

“Hahaha, this is the first time I’ve seen a male who says that hairy body and Lulu are cute!”

Lulu’s face turned bright red once again at Ion’s words. Without saying anything else, she quickly cleaned up her plate and left the restaurant in a hurry.

“Ah, I laughed so hard. Junior, this was the most enjoyable mealtime of the year. I’ll get up first. Is that okay?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Ion waved at me and left, and I also got up from my seat as I saw the restaurant staff come to clean up the dishes that were left behind.

When I saw the characters in the game, I just thought they were pretty, but now they are alive and breathing right in front of me, so it’s fun and unsettling at the same time.

Anyway, I finished eating and since I have a lot of starter funds, I slowly come down the stairs with the intention of looking for some essential items to start with.

Academy Story 2 also has weapons, shields, armor, and other items found in regular RPGs.

However, since this is an academy, a place for learning, there are special equipment, and those are ‘school supplies’.

Notebooks and writing instruments are basic, and among the accessories, there are various ones that go beyond simply increasing strength, stamina, and magical power, and among them, the one commonly referred to as the ‘study set’ is one of them.

On the first floor of the Academy Store, there is a school supplies corner on the right. Players who have collected enough gold in the beginning or increased their starting gold with mods usually reset the sales list by entering and exiting the store and buy school supplies with the ‘increased academic achievement’ option. This is the standard play.

I have a feeling that that method won’t work here, so I’m slowly looking around, thinking that if I’m lucky I’ll buy it, and if not, I’ll wait until later.

“What, you’re selling all the options.”

In the original game, when you entered and exited the store, the options for several items would change randomly, but here, because the store was so large, most of the school supplies with options were laid out by type. Fortunately, thanks to that, the amount of grinding to do was reduced.

I pick up the shopping cart on one side of the school supplies corner and examine each of the school supplies closely. When a character starts growing, flashy weapons and armor are more like a burden. They are also rarely used anyway.

Because the displayed school supplies had different values even though they had the same options, it was an enjoyable process to find the most efficient items by comparing them as carefully as possible.

When I had filled my shopping cart about halfway, I heard a familiar voice.

“… Seriously, who would have thought that there would be two male members in that group of nerds! In the Vision Puppet Club! ”

Thinking I had misheard, I hid in the corner of the writing desk and took a peek, and to confirm that I had not misheard, I saw two familiar faces.

The one who mostly speaks is a female fox. She is slightly over 170cm tall, and has pink hair that grows down to her waist. Her fur color is a bright and pretty sandy color, but because she wears her academy uniform loosely and comfortably, you can see white fur from below her collarbone to her slightly exposed belly.

“Hey, how nice it would be if we could help each other out. You don’t even care about the things around you, you fucking dolls, and you all just flock together. You should have seen that happen, Bandi.”

She is wearing a thin red coat that reaches down to her elbows to look stylish, and with her large bust and hips and slender body, she is a beauty at first glance.

“I thought it was going to be really amazing when I went up to see the male members for a moment. But when I actually went to see them, I couldn’t even say a word!”

The female lop-eared rabbit on the other side nods her head attentively as she listens to the story of the laughing female fox.

“That’s right, Hoyo. But so are we.”

A female lop-ear rabbit, 15 cm smaller than the female fox called hoyo, the bandi has folded ears that hang down to the neck.

She wears horn-rimmed glasses the size of a king’s bell, has dark wavy white bob cut to her shoulders, and is dressed in an academy uniform that looks stuffy, but her figure is far more impressive than that of Hoyo next to her.

Hoyo Iron Foxtrot and Bandi Gold Bunny. This is my favorite duo among the safe assets I mentioned.

Their appearances are so appealing and their abilities are so outstanding that there is no reason not to become close to them, but if I had to point out a shortcoming, it would be that in the original game, they were all procedurally generated characters created by AI, so compared to the main and sub heroines, their lines are overwhelmingly lacking and their interactions are boring.

That’s why they’re often recommended in strategy guides, but almost no one uses them. Among the friend characters with similar or slightly better specs, there are many characters with more lines and exclusive events.

You could say that this is a secret that only I know about.

Moreover, I expected that the vivid, almost realistic appearances of the characters I met when I started using VR would change them as well, and my prediction seems to have been correct.

“Ah~~ You shouldn’t beat me with facts like that~ You’re so cowardly~ Huh? ”

“You actually wanted to go see Hoyodo, right?”

“Ugh, isn’t it too late now?”

I was thinking about what to do next to the stationery corner for a while, but since I couldn’t come up with any good ideas, I decided to just confront it head on. Surely I shouldn’t have eaten it?

“Hello.”

I acted as if I had just naturally encountered them, as if I had just left the stationery corner, and greeted them first.

Then I expected him to say hello, but this time I found out that I was wrong.

“… … …”

“… … …”

The two of them froze in their conversation and turned their eyes towards me… Did I do something wrong?

As far as I remember, Hoyo is from a count family and Bandi is from a marquis family, but since they are not characters that show off that in the game, it seems like I was wrong in judging that they wouldn’t be inferior.

“I go to our temple!!”

“…Did we do that?”

Bandi looked very nervous and shouted at me like that. I was surprised, but why was Hoyo, my friend next to me, also surprised?

“Yes?”

“Oh, right? Then you recommend me to sign up for non-disaster insurance?”

“…Huh?”

“Oh, right? I’m not buying the magic plate!”

“…?”

As I was quietly rolling my eyes wondering why he was doing this, Hoyo poked Bandi in the side and whispered (audible) to him.

“I don’t think so?”

“…If not, why do males talk to us?”

“I don’t know? ”

Because Hoyo made such an idiotic expression while saying that, I burst out laughing without any resistance like a superconductor.

“Ahaha.”

I couldn’t check properly, but when I burst out laughing, the two of them had dazed expressions on their faces.

“Hoyo Iron Foxtrot Countess Youngae, and Bandi Goldbunny Marquis Youngae. Let me introduce you. My name is Ain Frostgarm. I am the son of Baron Frostgarm.”

“I, I, I, I, it’s nice to meet you…”

“Ban, Bandi Gold Bunny…is…”

If it’s the Countess Youngae and the Marquis Youngae, it’s okay to think lightly of the Baron family, but it seems that their personalities have changed a lot in the VR version. However, since they are characters that I always carried around with me out of affection whenever I played the game, it’s much better to see them develop their own personalities in this way.

“Treat me comfortably. I’m just Baron Youngsik.”

At my words, Hoyo and Bandi looked at me with expressions of bewilderment. It was nonsense for a male to speak, and the words asking them to be comfortable didn’t even exist in their brain data.

“Uh, yeah, yeah…”

When Hoyo barely managed to come up with an answer that sounded like a gasp of air, I could only laugh. In the case of the princess, Lulu, and Ion, they would come first and talk to me, and I would take care of everything on my own, but this time, I was the one who spoke first, so I had to do something.

“What were you two doing?”

“I have nothing to do… I’ll just shop around a bit.”

Hoyo, who seemed to have barely managed to come out of a panic (for some unknown reason), answered in a crawling voice. Fortunately, it was not so loud that it could not be heard, so he could tell that the two were free.

“I also came here because I have something to buy. If it’s okay, would you be able to join me? Since I’m a freshman…”

Of course, I remember the inside of the store perfectly, but if I don’t have an excuse like this, I’ll have to go through the trouble of finding an opportunity to raise my intimacy with these two. If I raise it on this occasion, it’ll be easier to meet them again next time.

In the end, the two who couldn’t resist my advice and were caught…? dragged…? no, who ended up accompanying me, couldn’t say a single word until I spoke to them.

Do you hate me? I don’t think so. If you didn’t like me, you would have made up an excuse and left a long time ago.

Is there a personality problem? This is not the case. The two of them had a normal conversation before I spoke to them, and I didn’t see any of that in the previous work.

What on earth could be the reason? No matter how much I think about it, I can’t figure out why those two suddenly became dumb.

I’m suffering from the double whammy of having to sift through the highest academic achievement-boosting options for school supplies while also trying to squeeze out some words for both of them.

“The quill design is pretty. What color would be good?”

“Uh, anything…?”

“Everything might be okay…”

“Which do you like better, small or large glasses?”

“No matter what I write, it looks pretty…”

“Me, me too.”

No matter what I say, it’s like this, so should I say it’s reading sutras to a deaf ear or chanting in vain? Since the reaction was like that, I also started to babble nonsense while choosing items.

“It’s hard to find good dual options like increasing order slots for school supplies…”

“Order slot…?”

“Yes, I heard that when wizards use magic, they use something called a spell slot.”

That’s what makes Academy Story 2 different. Unlike other games where the wizards use resources like mana to cast spells, they use something called a spell slot.

Wizards have spell slots that are categorized by level, such as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. If they have 4 1st level spell slots, and they use 4 1st level spells per day, they will generally need to rest for about a day to recover 4 1st level spell slots the next day.

“Um, how is it? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“It suits you well.”

So, unlike other normal RPG games where you can use magic by using a certain amount of something like mana and recovering it by using something like potions, the wizards in Academy Story 2 had to put more thought, choice, and decision into using magic.

This system essentially makes it imperative for wizards in Academy Story 2 to learn as many spells as possible.