Andrella Vellaria did not look away.
Even when the headmistress stepped up beside her and began the morning address in a calm, elegant voice, those ice-blue eyes stayed fixed on me like a targeting spell that had already locked on.
The temperature around our section of the formation felt several degrees colder than the rest of the courtyard.
A few girls nearby shifted uncomfortably, glancing between the podium and me.
Lilia noticed. Of course she did.
She leaned in slightly, and spoke in a low voice that only I could hear. "Okay, she's really staring. Did you do something yesterday that I don't know about? Because the last time she looked at someone like that, they got three weeks of cleaning duty and a formal reprimand."
I didn't answer. My mouth had gone dry.
In the game, Andrella's route was one of the hardest to unlock.
She was the living embodiment of the academy's rules. The absolute ban on male students was her personal crusade.
Every event involving her reinforced the same point: this school existed to cultivate pure feminine magical potential, free from distractions.
A boy walking around in a student uniform should have been impossible. Yet here I was, and she did not seem to like that.
The headmistress continued speaking about the new semester, upcoming evaluations, and the importance of discipline.
I barely heard a word. My mind raced through every scrap of game knowledge I had, sifting through memories that felt both distant and too close, like reading a strategy guide for a game I was now trapped inside of.
When the assembly finally ended, the formation began to dissolve into clusters of chatting girls.
Uniform skirts rustled, ribbons caught the light, and voices rose into the easy chaos of morning. Lilia grabbed my sleeve.
"Come on, we should move before—"
"William."
The voice cut through the noise like a blade of ice and it was impossible to ignore.
Andrella Vellaria stood only a few steps away. Up close she was even more striking than her in-game model.
Silver hair fell in a perfect curtain past her shoulders, her posture was flawless, and her expression was perfectly controlled, the kind of stillness that came from years of never once allowing herself to slouch.
The student council ribbon on her chest caught the morning light like a warning label.
Lilia froze. "P-President…"
Andrella's gaze never left me. "You were late to formation. Again."
I forced my voice to stay steady. "Sorry. Won't happen next time."
"See that it doesn't." Her eyes narrowed a fraction. "Additionally, you will report to the student council office after your first period. There are matters regarding your enrollment that require clarification."
Lilia made a small, strangled sound, as if she'd already started composing my eulogy.
I nodded once. "Understood."
Andrella held my gaze for another long second, as if searching for something beneath the surface, some proof of whatever it was that had made her single me out of an entire formation of students.
Then she turned and walked away, the crowd parting around her without a word, the way water parts for a blade.
Lilia waited until she was out of earshot before exhaling hard. "You're dead. You're actually dead. What did you do?"
"I exist," I muttered.
She blinked. "What?"
"Nothing. Let's just get to class."
She didn't let it go entirely. As we crossed the courtyard, she kept shooting me sideways looks, like she was building an entire conspiracy theory in her head and hadn't decided yet whether to share it.
I was grateful when the lecture hall came into view and gave us both something else to focus on.
---
The first class period was Fundamental Mana Control, held in one of the lower lecture halls.
Rows of desks faced a wide crystal board that shimmered with floating diagrams, arcane notation drifting and rearranging itself in slow, lazy loops.
I took a seat near the back, trying to look invisible. It didn't work. Every few seconds I caught another pair of eyes glancing my way, quick and curious, then darting off again before I could meet them.
The instructor, a tall woman with sharp glasses and a no-nonsense expression, began the lesson without acknowledging anything unusual.
I recognized her from the game as Professor Elira, the strict but fair magic theory teacher. In the original story she was one of the few faculty members who treated the professor character with professional respect, and watching her now, I understood why.
Here, she simply called attendance, and when she reached my name, she paused only a moment before continuing.
"William Ardent."
I raised my hand. "Here."
A soft ripple of whispers moved through the room, quickly hushed by a single look from Professor Elira.
The lesson itself was basic: sensing and circulating internal mana.
Things I had done hundreds of times in the game's tutorial segments, back when it was nothing more than a progress bar and a soft chime of confirmation.
When we were told to practice, I closed my eyes and reached inward the way the interface used to guide players, feeling almost foolish for trusting a memory built entirely out of menus and numbers.
Mana answered immediately.
It felt nothing like playing a game. It moved through my body like liquid light, pooling and threading itself through channels I had no name for outside of the game's tutorial text. For a second I almost forgot where I was.
Then a soft voice spoke beside me.
"You're circulating it wrong."
I opened my eyes.
The girl sitting one seat over had long black hair tied loosely at the nape of her neck and calm violet eyes.
I recognized her instantly. Celeste Myrren. The quiet library-route heroine. In the game she barely spoke to anyone except the professor, and only after several affinity events, usually triggered by returning an overdue book at exactly the right hour.
She was watching my hands with quietly like she was solving a puzzle.
"Your flow is unstable near the third circuit," she said softly. "If you force it, you'll get a backlash headache." She hesitated, then reached out and lightly adjusted the position of my fingers. Her skin was cool. "Like this."
Mana smoothed out almost instantly, the uneven pull in my chest easing into something steadier, quieter.
I stared at her. "Thanks."
Celeste gave a tiny nod, then returned to her own practice as if nothing had happened.
But a faint pink had touched the tips of her ears, and she kept her gaze fixed very deliberately on her own hands for the rest of the exercise.
Around us, more girls were watching. Not staring the way Andrella had, but more like they were genuinely curious.
I was starting to understand the real problem.
It wasn't just that I was a boy in an all-girls academy.
It was that the academy, and everyone in it, was already reacting to me like I belonged here.
And Andrella Vellaria clearly disagreed.
When the bell rang, I stood up with a growing sense of dread. Lilia caught my arm at the door, her earlier bravado was gone and was now replaced by something closer to genuine worry.
"Hey," she said quietly. "You're really going, right? To the council office?"
"I don't think I have a choice."
"Just… don't argue with her. Whatever she says. Andrella doesn't like being contradicted, and she really doesn't like being wrong." Lilia hesitated, then added, almost too quietly to hear, "And try not to disappear on me, okay? Two weeks isn't very long to make a friend, and I'd rather not lose the only one who talks to me at lunch."
That caught me off guard more than anything Andrella had said all morning.
"I'll be fine," I told her, with more confidence than I felt.
The walk to the student council office took me across a courtyard lined with pale stone archways, past windows where more than one curious face turned to track my progress.
By the time I reached the heavy double doors at the end of the east corridor, my heart was hammering against my ribs like it was trying to warn me about something my head hadn't caught up to yet.
I knocked once. And with it, the first real test of whether I could survive in a story that was never supposed to include me.