Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 131: Elias Catching Strays

Cecilia wanted to take off her glasses, and as expected, there was no difference between having her glasses on and off. Her nerd appearance was just a fluke to sell the ’cute nerd behind the glasses’ trope. But in her opinion, the glasses made her look cuter.

They walked down a deserted corridor of Scholomance Athenaeum, the echoes of their footsteps swallowed by the heavy, academic silence that had reclaimed the halls after the bell.

Sconces shaped like gilded wyverns held glowing orbs of magelight, their illumination casting long shadows that stretched and yawned across the flagstone floor.

The walls were lined with dark oak wainscoting and portraits of severe-looking headmasters and mistresses from centuries past, their painted eyes seeming to follow the pair with curiosity.

Stained-glass windows at the far ends of the corridor fractured the perpetual grey twilight outside into jewel-toned mosaics on the stone, depicting scenes of alchemical triumphs and legendary beast-tamings.

And through this, Bully!Eastiel walked stiffly beside her, his earlier bravado completely evaporated.

He couldn’t look at her. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, his shoulders tense, his hands shoved deep into his pockets as if afraid they might betray him.

The only sound was the soft scuff of their shoes, the distant drip of water from a leaky gargoyle outside a window, and the almost-audible hum of his bewildered panic.

"Is your brother enrolled here too?" Cecilia suddenly asked.

Eastiel flinched, a full-body jerk as if she’d poked him with a static charge. What? Why? Why was she suddenly asking about his brother?

"Yeah," he answered, the word coming out stiff and too quick. He cleared his throat, aiming for nonchalance and landing somewhere near strained indifference. "He’s a year after us."

Cecilia hummed softly. "Let me meet him sometime."

Huh?!

A bolt of pure, icy panic shot down Eastiel’s spine. His steps faltered for a half-second. Did she... did she like younger men? The thought was a sucker punch to his newly fragile ego.

Was that it? Had she agreed to walk with him, called his bluff with that devastating smile, not because of him, but as some roundabout way to get to his brother? She liked his brother?!

"He’s a snob," Eastiel blurted out, full of disdain that was equal parts genuine fraternal annoyance and desperate sabotage. "Also, he... he rarely showers. Honestly. It’s gross."

He swallowed, then added in a rush, "I... I-I shower twice a day."

The moment the words left his mouth, he wanted to claw them back from the dusty air. Why did he say that?! He sounded like a complete idiot, marketing his hygiene like a virtue in some bizarre, pathetic competition with his own sibling.

"I know," Cecilia chuckled, the sound warm.

She knew?!

Eastiel’s brain short-circuited. The heat that had been lingering in his ears roared into a full-blown conflagration across his entire face. She knew he showered twice a day?! How? Had she... had she been paying that much attention?

Of course, he didn’t know that Cecilia was simply running a quiet experiment, gathering data points in this fabricated reality. She was probing to see if the scaffold of this ’Bully!Eastiel’ world was built on the bedrock of real facts.

The real Eastiel had a younger brother, Elias. Did this constructed version hold to that same truth? His reaction, his confirmation, was just another piece of the puzzle.

Well, whatever she was doing, he was interpreting it all through a lens of teenage angst and blossoming panic. Of course he was entirely unaware that she was only analyzing things.

And as of right now, he was still spiraling, wondering if she was truly paying that much attention to him specifically.

Wait, no, dumbass!

He mentally slapped himself. Cecilia was smart. The scary, all-seeing kind of smart. She noticed the smallest details about everything. Of course she’d know something as basic as hygiene habits.

It wasn’t because she was secretly cataloging his daily rituals! She wasn’t him! It was just because her brain was a terrifyingly efficient filing cabinet for random people-facts!

Idiot!

While Eastiel was lost in his own self-sabotaging vortex, Cecilia was looking around the grand, shadowy corridor with genuine interest.

She hadn’t given her remark a second thought. She’d simply assumed this version of Eastiel, like her Eastiel, would follow the same fastidious routine.

Even though he was a lion, a species famously averse to excessive bathing, preferring to keep their majestic coats dry, her Eastiel had always been an outlier.

She didn’t know the exact origin of his nickname ’the lion who likes baths’ among the werelion community, but it had definitely started circulating after they’d known each other.

Why, she wondered...?

Well, let’s ask.

"The climate here is dry and cold," she mused aloud, her voice echoing softly. "Frequent baths would strip the natural oils, make your skin drier and brittle, no?"

"Yes," he admitted, the word clipped. "But it smells."

"Smells?" Cecilia tilted her head, genuinely curious now.

"I don’t want to be compared with the other boys who shower," he huffed, a defensive edge in his voice.

"Who?"

"Arzhen!" The name burst involuntarily from him.

Silence fell between them.

Huh?

Arzhen... was here too? Another data point confirmed, but loaded with unexpected context.

"Why... would you be compared with him?" she pressed gently.

Because he showers a lot, goddamnit! That preening tiger loves water too much! Is he even a cat?!

But Eastiel couldn’t say that. He couldn’t confess that he’d forced himself into a twice-daily routine he naturally despised as a lion because he was locked in an invisible competition with the other campus heartthrob, the one known for always smelling like rain and sandalwood.

He couldn’t admit he was terrified of being found lacking in some stupid, primal way!

Wait... why did he just think of Arzhen as ’the Tiger’? And himself as a ’lion’? The terms felt instinctive, bone-deep, but they made no logical sense in this context. A flicker of confusion crossed his features, gone in an instant.

"Don’t you like him?" Eastiel deflected, not answering her question but circling around to probe his own fears.

It was a roundabout, clumsy way of asking several questions at once. Do you like boys who shower? Especially Arzhen? And... would you like me if I keep doing this awful, drying, waterlogged thing to match him?

Cecilia actually scoffed at that as she continued walking. "Yeah," she said, her tone light. "In the past."

Eastiel blinked, stopped in his tracks. Then he quickly strutted to catch up, his heart doing a hopeful lurch. "In the past? How about now?"

She glanced over her shoulder at him, a small smile playing on her lips. "I don’t like him now."

Cecilia swore she could see a shadow of something. For just a fleeting second, the contours of the human boy seemed to blur, and in his place, she could almost discern the proud, upright flick of a golden lion’s ear, perked up, alongside a long, tufted tail, held high and quivering with barely-contained delight.

It was an illusion, of course. A trick of the light and her own knowledge of the soul beneath this teenage skin. But the impression was so vivid, so perfectly him, that it stole her breath.

Adorable.