Flying was so enjoyable that I was still late anyway.
Thus, I had successfully completed the sidequest of being late for a total of 69 times this school year.
I could have stopped at 67, but I think 69 was still more universal, unlike an ancient 'inside joke', which I think only those like me, who can only browse the 'old internet' for lack of gear, still know the meaning or lack thereof a billion years later.
I got another late slip under the gaze of the guidance counselor, who looked quite disappointed for some reason, even though I had just completed his NPC side quest of getting that nice even 69, which I had explained... But he just 'nicely' threw another alarm clock at me after saying mine must be broken.
In any case, today my first class was the fascinating and tedious play of numbers that is Math, which I suppose is kind of important to those who have power that needs some geometry and vector calculations, like that one kid in the front who can only manipulate straight colorful bricks, I think his name was Tetris.
While I was walking in the hallways, the people all around me looked at me rather strangely, like I had just grown three more heads and an equal pair of arms.
What, are they starstruck by my new fit or something? Oh yeah, I did make myself more aesthetically pleasing. But other than clearing up my face and making myself a little neater, I really haven't changed much; it certainly wasn't some fancy facial and body restructuring that those climbing the path of ascension often get every other major realm or so.
"Elexys, is that you?" An NPC, I know not the name of, randomly greeted me as I took my stuff from my locker.
"Well, hello there, uh... NPC A, how may I help you?" I greeted back perfunctorily so as not to be rude.
"NPC A? It's me, Miryo, your classmate in General Combat class, don't you remember?" he said.
"Oh, right, Mario, I remember, of course," I said, smilingly, causing his eye to twitch and smile to falter a little for some reason.
"....Did you go to some fancy Looksmaxxing parlor something? I barely recognized you," he asked as he looked at me all over.
"Yup, neat, right?" I said, holding my math binder and notebook under my arm, then said, "Well, I'll be going then, I'm already late as it is, see ya' at Combat Class then Luigi~"
With that, I went my way before he could say anything else.
Arriving in math class, I thought it was oddly quiet, which prompted me to realize we would have the test we missed yesterday before I even arrived. Another test which Mr. Richards so like to give.
But I'm growing tired of writing all these numbers, brackets, exponents, arithmetic symbols, algebra symbols, and random skibabidi symbols, so I just made my pencil solve the problem on its own.
It wrote the numbers, letters, symbols, graphs, lines, exponents, and brackets in the same messy, careless way I do them, which was the subtle part, and the not-so-subtle part was writing the utmost correct answers step by step, which I could only vaguely understand the tedious need for, since the answer seemed pretty obvious enough in both the calculator and in my head.
Then, as I had set out to do, I also conducted a little experiment on perception, so that others would see me holding the pencil rather than playing a portable gaming console I had just created out of thin air.
And just as I want it, no one could see or hear, even if I flash its lights straight at somebody's eyes or blast it at full volume. Since no one looked like they'd seen anything abnormal, I pumped my fist in triumph and proceeded to play some game about a tattooed bald man who slays gods in 8k OLED at a 1000fps.
Soon, the pencil was done, so I levitated the test paper to Mr. Richards' table while making it seem that, in everyone's perception, I stood and handed it in myself.
Then I saw Mr. Richards thank the air and promptly start grading my test paper, probably to make an example out of me and lecture us on common mistakes, as usual.
However...
Mr. Richards soon graded my test papers as being 101% correct. Which, I admit, was my own silly little thought of payback cause I hate quizzes, plus it also doubles as an experiment. Two bids with one stone, as they say. And also, I guess I won't need to review for any test from now on, ever the genius that I am.
The 1% seems to have baffled Mr. Richards to the very depths of his mind, though, as he starts mumbling 'How!?' again and again, louder and louder as he keeps redoing the grading to no avail. Eventually, Mr. Richards let out one final 'HOW?!' in an uncontrolled scream of madness.
Cause he seems rather mad, and I'd rather not explain, I directed him not to come to me with questions, thus successfully manipulating his actions. Instead, he walked out of the classroom disheveled, clutching his hair in a seeming frenzy under everyone's gaze, and did not return.
Soon, a substitute teacher took over the class, announcing that Mr. Richards was feeling rather unwell and had gone home to rest.
Mhm... it seems I just drove my Math teacher to the brink of insanity.
A bit of an overreaction if you ask me. The other students seemed to think so as well, giving me a confused, questioning look, to which I just shrugged to convey my own bemusement.
They'd probably start thinking it's just another random eldritch attack from beyond, influencing another poor random victim's mind from the unseen folds of space, which, I suppose, is common enough to not seem strange.
Just how strange is it for just an extra 1% to appear in a test designed to only get you 100% to the utmost? I don't know, nor do I care, but apparently Mr. Richards does know and care quite a lot, ever the man of logic he was.
After the period was over, it was History class, which I found to be the most boring class ever. You would have thought that in a world as crazy as ours, history would be a little more exciting.
But I suppose after going through the bits and pieces everybody agreed has happened in the mysterious thirteen million years of the Evocalyptic Era, also known as the Apocalyptic Evolution Era, in which gods, angels, demons, devils, celestials, transcendent cultivators, grand sages, eldritch horrors, cosmic entities, and sorts of horror beyond imagination fight for sovereignty, every other tales in the so-called 'verifiable' history would become boring.
That's the problem when entities that can manipulate the timeline go to war, I suppose; no one is ever really certain what actually happened.
Good thing the Order of Time Keepers was established. After they started uploading all the changes to the timeline on the net, which was updated in real time, things finally started to stabilize, of course aside from mishaps every now and then that they promptly corrected and then updated like it was a bug patched in a computer program.
Still, history teachers were not even sure where to start, so they just left that part of history to 'self-studying'; instead, they'd rather teach about recent events of the past million years or so after the Evocalypse Era, which was comparatively duller.
However dull it was, it definitely did become more fun after I managed to make a holographic panel showing an anime that visually and acoustically showed to me alone what happened in that part of the book in the dramatic 'anime' fashion, which mere informatively written text or a slide show presented by a teacher's mock enthusiasm could only convey so boringly.
By the time the bell rang, I felt like history class was a little more bearable and entertaining even, as if I were watching an anime the whole time...
Maybe because I was.
At lunch in the cafeteria, I bought a sandwich stuffed with ham and cheese with money I had made experimentally in my pocket, which I devoured within seconds. But maybe because I used a great deal of energy this morning while flying around, I felt it wasn't enough.
So, showing my empty cafeteria carton lunch box in a sleight-of-hand magician-like manner to Eric, who still looked at me strangely every now and then cause of my new aesthetic as he sat in the chair in front of me, I closed it, gestured towards it, blew on my closed fist, and threw it at the lunchbox as I very smoothly pulled out another sandwich.
Or at least that's what he thought would happen.
What I pulled out from my little lunch box, however, is--
A whole roasted cow.
His jaw dropped like a fat man in the ancient city of Nagasaki, and his eyes were so wide they almost popped out of their socket as he eyed the roasted cow served on a silver platter covering the entire table, which was definitely too big for the little lunch box to even fit a quarter of.
"What the heck? Did it just... HUH!?" Eric exclaimed in disbelief, blinking his eyes so rapidly, as if he thought they were lying to him and he was refreshing them, or maybe he was about to start seizing.
Others were also looking in, blinking their eyes in wonder where the golden roasted cow the size of a freaking cow had come from.
"A magic trick, of course; what else could it have come from?" I said with a smile as I easily severed a leg from the roasted golden cow and started devouring it.
"No recent changes in the electromagnetic field, so where the heck..." Eric started darting his eyes around in total confusion, as if to see if he was dreaming, maybe he was checking if cameras were filming him around for a prank show, or perhaps he was starting to think he just saw a glitch in the matrix, which, I suppose, technically is if you consider reality a matrix.
With everybody looking at the cow and at me, mostly the cow, maybe I shouldn't have been so showy. But I was really hungry, so hungry that I thought I could eat a whole cow, and so I created a whole cow to see if that was true.
Thus, I started devouring the golden cow, with surprisingly thin, crispy, golden-brown skin and melt-in-the-mouth wagyu beef, while Eric started inspecting my lunchbox to see if it had a hidden pocket dimension that could fit a whole darn cow, served on a big silver plate.
It was a whole wagyu beef feast that he also partook of after I gave him a leg, which I had turned to two right before his very eyes, causing him to blink some more while rubbing his eyes, mumbling something about quantum entanglement or particle duality or whatnot before saying it doesn't make sense anyway.
When he found out that it was still warm, he became even more intrigued as he asked me all the questions his mind could muster, which I could only all answer cryptically along the lines of 'a magician does not reveal his secret'.
Hehehe, now he's even more confused, as he started accusing me of being an actual wizard with actual magic.