The door opened.
Lor was already sitting at the dining table with her notebooks spread in a rough line in front of him. He had looked through them while she was gone. The same messy equations. The same half-erased circles.
The same pages that had been written, scratched out, and written again.
Kuri came out of the hallway.
She had changed.
The soaked black top and pants were gone.
In their place she wore a loose, thin white shirt that hung off one shoulder and stopped high on her thighs.
The fabric was soft and a little too big, which only made the shape of her chest more obvious whenever she moved.
Under it she had on dark grey shorts that sat low on her hips and left most of her long legs bare.
Her short dark hair was still damp at the ends.
The bruise along her left jaw looked darker against freshly washed skin.
She smelled of cheap soap.
She sat down beside him without asking, close enough that her bare thigh almost touched his.
Lor glanced at her once, then at the damp hair, then back at her face.
"Did you masturbate in the bathroom?"
Kuri’s head snapped toward him.
"What THE! Shut up."
She punched his shoulder. The hit had almost no force behind it. Her ears were already turning red.
Lor giggled and looked back down at the books.
"Just asking. You took a long time."
"I was washing juice off my chest, you idiot. Thanks to you, it was sticky."
"Ah." He flipped a page. "That also takes time."
She made a short, annoyed sound and pulled one of the notebooks closer.
For a few seconds neither of them spoke. The lamp on the wall hummed faintly. Outside, the street stayed quiet.
Lor tapped a diagram she had drawn three times and crossed out twice.
"You’re strong," he said. "I saw it in the forest. Magic and body both. You almost had the angle on me before I ended it. So why is this so hard for you?"
Kuri’s mouth tightened.
"I know how to use magic. I can throw it, hold it, hit with it. That’s different from this." She flicked the page with one finger.
"Spell theory sits in my head for two seconds and then it’s gone. Same with maths. Numbers go in and then they just... leave. Studying is bad. I never wanted to sit in a classroom."
She stopped, then kept going anyway.
"The princess wanted a spy in Class D. That’s why I’m there."
The second the sentence left her mouth she shut it again, hard. Her eyes flicked to him, waiting for the reaction.
Lor did not look surprised.
"No need to cover it," he said. "I already figured you were hers."
Kuri stared at him.
"...You look dumb. Everything about you is dumb. The face, the voice, the way you walk around like you’re half asleep and that stupid grin of yours. And then you’re actually smart. It’s irritating."
"Thanks."
He said it like she had complimented his handwriting.
Then he pulled two notebooks into the space between them and turned one so she could see the page properly.
"We’ll start with mana. Not how to throw it. How to use less of it and still get the same result. That’s what they ask on the theory paper."
Kuri leaned in despite herself. The loose shirt slipped further down her shoulder. The soft upper curve of her breast showed at the edge of the fabric. She did not notice. Lor did, and said nothing.
He pointed at a question she had left blank.
"This one. ’A student casts a basic light spell and empties their mana in twelve seconds. How do they make it last longer?’ They don’t want you to write ’get stronger.’ They want the method."
"What method?"
"Don’t dump it all at once. Feed it in a thin stream. Same spell, smaller amount, longer time. If you push everything in the first second, the spell burns bright and dies. If you trickle it, it stays."
Kuri frowned.
"That’s it?"
"That’s most of the paper. They dress it up in longer sentences, but that’s the answer."
He took her pen and wrote three short lines under the question.
Do not release all mana at once. Feed the spell in a steady stream. Keep a little mana back in case the spell breaks.
"Copy that in your own words. If you copy mine they’ll know."
Kuri took the pen. Her first attempt was almost the same as his. He made her rewrite it until it sounded like her.
"See? You already know how to do this in a fight. You just don’t know how to write it down."
"That’s because writing it down is stupid."
"Writing it down is how you pass."
She muttered something under her breath and turned the page. The shirt slipped again. This time the neckline dipped far enough that the inner curve of both breasts showed. Lor’s eyes dropped for a second, then went back to the paper.
Kuri caught it.
"Stop looking."
"I’m teaching."
"You’re looking."
"I can do both."
She pulled the shirt back up her shoulder. It slid down again two minutes later. She left it.
Lor moved to the next question.
A simple one about what happens when two students use the same spell with different mana amounts.
"If you use too much, the spell gets wild and you waste it. If you use too little, it fizzles. The exam wants the middle. Enough to form the spell, not enough to empty you."
He made her say it out loud before she wrote it.
"Enough to form it. Not enough to empty me."
"Good. Write that."
She wrote it. The letters were ugly and pressed too hard into the paper.
They did three more theory questions the same way. What a basic shield needs. Why a force burst dies if you hold it too long. How to restart a spell that broke halfway.
Each time he boiled it down to one or two sentences she could actually remember, then made her put it in her own words.
Kuri hated how simple it sounded once he said it.
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