To love a sword

Chapter 14: To be a man

Beta read by Shigiya, Paragon of Awesomeness and Darklord331

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-Sainan High-

To say that his day had proceeded smoothly after this morning's fiasco… actually wouldn't be far from the truth, surprisingly enough. 

Emiya honestly expected there to be another alien fight involving the kidnapping of the girls and him fighting a weird kind of species from a different planet. That was the image of the future that Zastin alluded to when telling him of how these other fiancé candidates would eventually appear on Earth. 

Yet here he was in the middle of class, pretending to take notes about subject material he’d already learned from his math teacher while Lala peacefully slept on her desk next to him. Why was she allowed to sleep during class? 

Mostly due to the teacher having given up on teaching her anything new, from what he could tell. Whereas he was a warrior with eons of experience to provide him knowledge, the princess was a genius who solved complex equations with just a single glance and gave an answer before the teacher even finished his sentence. Their math teacher had even started to intentionally ask Lala higher level questions, all of which she answered correctly without missing a beat, and also correcting mistakes in the teacher's own calculations a couple of times. 

In the end, she was left alone and never bothered, as she was clearly beyond the teachers’ ability to teach. 

"Can anyone solve this equation?" The teacher looked around, many of the students were conveniently in the middle of taking down the notes and were too busy to answer. It wasn't until the man's gaze landed on Emiya and Lala's side that he already chose his next victim. "Ah, how about you, Emi—"

"The answer is x = √6 + 1!!!" Ren instantly answered, turning around and giving Emiya a smug look as if he had beaten the redhead in both speed and problem-solving. Though his smirk froze in place as he found the boy gently pushing back the pink locks over Lala's face — making sure the girl slept comfortably without any strands irritating her nose. 

"Hehehe… thank you… Shirou." Lala whispered with half-closed eyes, her smile lighting up the room and making every boy and girl blush from the cute action. 

"Hn, you really do have a terrible sleeping posture, you idiot. Did you stay up all night again to work on your… inventions again?" 

"Yup! I know you told me to stop, but I wanted to see what went wrong with them initially. And I promise that I won't use them inside the house, intentionally." 

"It worries me why you decided to add that last part," Emiya said, quickly grabbing her left wrist as she tried to touch his hair. Their interaction was seen by everyone in the classroom, and it made many cry in jealousy with a few of the girls squealing at how cute they were, while some others were feeling jealous at Lala getting his attention. 

The math teacher on the other hand couldn't help but sigh, lamenting about how carefree young kids were these days before resuming his lesson. The students followed suit with the boys cursing the redhead's name a couple hundred times under their breath while for Ren…

"…"

He just stood there with his jaw hanging open, both ignored and forgotten with the winds blowing across his face. Lala kept trying to break that damnable Emiya's defense with her attempts at flustering him or touching his face — at some point even using her tail as a weapon which no one in class seemed to take notice of. That human dared to show an annoyed face at this, using his left arm alone to deflect and block the countless moves from his neighbor and Lala just giggled the entire time!?