Scarlett’s eyes were just a couple of inches from Yuriko, and the petite girl had her forehead and nose scrunched up.

“You’ve changed,” Scarlett repeated as she drew back, her expression flickering.

“In what way?” Yuriko asked casually, feigning innocence.

Scarlett blinked, stared at her for a long moment and was about to reply when the other two girls arrived behind her. The second girl, a brunette who was almost a head taller than Scarlett, smiled at Yuriko. Jenna Chase was another friend, though not as close as Scarlett. She and Lilibeth were part of the same extracurricular club though.

The third girl was also a brunette and as wide as both put together. That wasn’t to say that Nora Brooks was fat; rather, Jenna and Scarlett were just too thin. Well, Nora always claimed she had big bones.

“You dyed your hair. You put on coloured contacts instead of your glasses, and,” Scarlett raised a finger and tutted, “you’re showing off a lot more skin. What’s happening, girl?”

“Nothing,” Yuriko said quickly. “I mean, not much.”

“Uh-huh, and you kicked Evan’s nuts because?”

“Huh?”

“Kicked his nuts?”

“I didn’t,” Yuriko said. “I shoved him.”

Scarlett raised her right eyebrow questioningly.

“Hmm, he surprised me and took liberties.”

“Why’re you talking like an oldie?” Jenna grunted.

“It means he probably groped her in public,” Nora said softly. “I’d do that, too.”

“Do what? Kick him in the nuts or grope Lili?” Scarlett snarked.

Nora grinned mischievously. “Both.”

“Ew.” Scarlett pouted with a mocking lilt, though the twinkle in her eyes conveyed that she was joking. Nora stuck out her tongue, wriggling up and down as though she were licking something.

Yuriko’s cheeks tinted red, and she shook her head while forcing her mind to be still. Lilibeth was close to these girls, and the memories and emotions bled through. Her true body still as she cut a Hunter-killer in twain, and even through the mental partition between the two bodies, the feelings seeped through. Should she cut off the connection? There would always be a connection, no matter how faint, and it could be strengthened at her discretion. Closing the conduit between her thoughts meant that the incarnation body would become weaker though. Perhaps not until she regained her true visage.

The girls spread out to take their seats. Jenna sat to Yuriko’s right, while Scarlett was seated to her left. Nora sat beside Jenna. The bell for the first period rang, and with it came a rush of students who’d been hanging out just outside the classroom. At their heels was the Natural Sciences professor, a white-haired man on the other side of middle-aged. He had thick glasses on that made his eyes look bigger.

At the front of the class stretched a writing board, half white and half black. One for chalk and the other for a temporary ink marker. There was also a projector hanging from the ceiling. The professor carried a tablet with him that he placed on a pedestal. He fiddled with it a bit, hooking it up to the projector. The lights in the classroom dimmed, and a beam of light struck the blackboard, showing the words: Biology.

The professor then thumbed a remote control which changed the image into a model of a dissected animal, a frog, Yuriko guessed. It was slightly difficult to catch up since it was the last third of the semester already, and there was a lot of material locked up in Lilibeth’s memories. The previous classes, unfortunately, didn’t really stick to Lilibeth, or rather, it sloughed away in death. Most of the memories were fragments heavily charged with emotion, glimpses of important and life-shaping events. Whatever the woman had done in her final hours, had erased everything that was of little consequence. Thankfully, she realised that Lilibeth made extensive notes on her phone, using a note-taking app hooked up to the network rather than it being written down on paper. She just had to access it and review.

The professor’s voice droned and he was practically reading off his presentation slides rather than using them as a guide to the lecture. With a class of nearly a hundred, Yuriko supposed any personal teaching would be harder.

Scarlett poked her side, leaned over and whispered, “Aren’t you taking notes?”

Yuriko glanced at the smaller woman, noting that Scarlett wasn’t taking any either. “Aren’t you?”

Scarlett pouted at her. “That’s your part of the job!”

Oh, right. Yuriko was supposed to take notes. She shared it with some classmates for a token amount, a little side job that Scarlett set up and networked for.

“Hmm.” Yuriko pulled out Lilibeth’s phone and accessed it. The passcode came to her by reflex, thankfully. She would lose muscle memory the longer she reforged it, so she’d better get everything down now.

A quick peek at previously shared notes told her that Lilibeth was quite meticulous, almost writing down what the professor said word for word. Yuriko did the same, easily able to recall and capture the memory of the past few minutes. She was a Transformation Stage Ancient, even if this was only an incarnation, it was still several levels above base mortal.

Once she got used to inputting on the device, she simply focused a couple of strands of consciousness on the task while the other eight continued her ruminations. The Torries would help her shortfall but she would need to increase her working hours this afternoon so she could pay rent. She’d give the job a shot no matter how distasteful the original Lilibeth found it, if only for the novelty. She could feel her Anima straining as it sought to expand, but with the hard limit of ten paces, the only thing she could do was slowly grow denser.

Halfway through the lecture, Yuriko felt a tug on her right sleeve that made her turn towards Jenna. She didn’t cease writing on the phone, however. Jenna stared at the screen for a moment, then leaned in to whisper, her face screwed up in curiosity.

“Did it work?”

Yuriko blinked languidly at the other girl. “What did?”

“Oh.” Jenna fluttered her eyes at her. “The ritual?”

Yuriko’s fingers paused for a fraction of a second, but it was enough to catch Jenna’s eyes.

“It did!” She kept her voice low, but her hands clenched in excitement. “That why you look different?”

Yuriko shook her head. “It didn’t.”

Jenna frowned. “Lies,” she hissed.

“It didn’t work,” Yuriko insisted. “Nothing happened.” But her voice rang hollow.

“Sure.” Jenna sniffed as she straightened up.

Yuriko returned her gaze to the professor, but she spread her perceptive aura towards the girl. Jenna fidgeted for the rest of the class, and by the time the warning bell rang, an hour and fifteen minutes after the start of class, Jenna shot up to her feet and rushed away.

“Oi, wait for me!” Nora yelled.

Scarlett goggled at the two, then sniffed as she caught Yuriko’s elbow. “Come on, let’s head to History.”

“Will those two be alright?” Yuriko asked as she made her way towards the door.

“Jenna’s been late lots of times. She’s out of tardies.”

“Oh.”

The history classroom was on the other wing of Palmer Hall. This one was half the size of the previous room and was flat rather than slanted. The desk chairs were in disarray but Yuriko and Scarlett simply took a couple and waited for the professor to arrive. Yuriko checked Lilibeth’s notes, then fiddled with the ones she took from the previous class to share them with Scarlett.

Muscle memory came to the rescue again, but it still took the better part of ten minutes to figure it out. While Yuriko wasn’t unaccustomed to phones thanks to Dragon Fall City’s Autotabs, the user interface for the phones here was different. A bit more primitive considering the ‘chronians could activate and control their devices through a neural link, but the basic functions were pretty intuitive. She’d have to spend some time reading the user manual if she could find one. Otherwise, the network, Astoria’s version of REI-space, though it was supported entirely through electrical technology rather than a fragment of a layer of reality, would be a good place to search for information. In fact, she should do that right now.

Hmmm, oddly enough, fiddling with the phone didn’t trigger her reading nausea, but then again, she wasn’t reading but writing.

She responded idly to Scarlett’s gossip until the history professor came. Yuriko paid a bit more attention to this subject considering she knew absolutely nothing of Astoria other than the little slice that Lilibeth knew.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the subject of today’s lesson was the Altered Human emergence and the following acts of terrorism they caused. For all that the professor, a woman this time, and quite a bit younger than the biology professor, spoke with the same boring cadence, Yuriko had little trouble paying attention. Her fingers danced gracefully across her phone while she transcribed everything the woman said. She caught Scarlett staring at her hands for a long moment, mouth slightly agape. But then, she saw Yuriko looking, so she blushed and looked away.

Her last class for the day wasn’t with Scarlett and she had to cross Trinity Park to reach Benson Hall, the Mathematics College.

It was Arithmetic made far more complicated and annoying.

This time, transcribing the lecture was unnecessary since all the professor did was write a set of problems to be solved by the students. Yuriko scrambled with the task and had to resort to using her perception to watch her classmates finish. An hour and a half later, she was free. Sort of.

Now she had a couple of hours to have her lunch, change out of her uniform, and then go to her afternoon job. It was a bit of a distance from Trinity Valley and in one of Neo Prism City’s outer boroughs. Lilibeth hadn’t been able to take a closer job since none of the others nearby were hiring. Well, it was only half an hour’s ride with the scooter. She could probably run there faster.

She returned to her apartment for lunch, though this time she ate only a single portion rather than double. She had to lower her training intensity, much to her frustration, simply because she couldn’t sustain herself on the food she had available. Some of the ambient Chaos she absorbed as well as the Radiant energy she harnessed from the Sun, sustained her efforts otherwise she would have to consume at least five times as much as her normal food.

Come to think of it, her true body could survive on just Radiant energy, huh. Well, eating was too pleasurable to abandon, so that was that.

Her phone lit up with messages from the other girls, demanding an accounting of the Evan fiasco, but she simply messaged back that she was headed to her job and didn’t have the time for it. Scarlett wanted to come over later that night to chat, but Yuriko declined.

Scarlett: Boo!

Yuriko snorted and didn’t bother to answer. She took the scooter to the city instead of giving in to her training impulse, though she kept her body in a cycle of light restraint and quick Recoveries.

The road, once linked up to the highway towards Neo Prism, quickly grew crowded with vehicles. Halfway there, the traffic flow clogged up, but since most of the vehicles were cars, she was able to weave between them to get ahead. She saw and followed other motorbike riders doing it, so she simply imitated them.

Soon enough, she split off from the highway and arrived at her destination. Where the strip mall in Greyham Park was a one-storey affair, the one she worked in was a massive building that was half as broad as a mega building. It had five storeys and was crowded with people even on the approach.

Ah, no, the crowd wasn’t entering the building, but looking upwards. Yuriko followed their gaze and blinked when she saw a couple of brightly clothed and masked people brawling while flying a hundred paces from the ground.

Her fingers twitched. She wanted to fight too!

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep