I Don’t Want to be an Ojakgyo (68)

The three of us began to rush as we got ready for school when Hazel suddenly slapped her head and burst into laughter.

“Puhaha, haha! Shushu! Kyakya, keh.”

Hestia, who was grabbing her pillow and was getting ready to run to her room, paused and stared at me.

“….nooooooo, hold on.”

The two of them grabbed their stomachs as they burst into loud laughter together, rolling on the floor. They were literally rolling on the floor laughing. I frowned. What was it? It was too early for them to crazy like this. We were going to be late. Why were they dawdling around right now?

I shoved the two of them away when the clung to me as they laughed. I rushed to the bathroom to get my eye boogers out.

Then, I stared at the mirror. I dropped my toothbrush when I saw it.

“Bob*……..Mr. Bob.”

A giant orange broccoli stared right back at me.

---

We had braided each other’s hair yesterday. We didn’t remove the braids. My hair was an absolute mess. It looked like a crow’s nest that was too much to brush out. If I didn’t sleep in, I would’ve poured water onto it, but we were moments away from being late so I had to rush to class without a single moment of hesitation.

My hair was already curly to begin with. I occasionally heard comments about how my hair resembled an orange furball, but now I truly had become a ball of fur. It was so bad that my hair was actually covering parts of my face, and some of it was even obscuring my vision.

“Wow.”
“Con….Congrats. You really grew taller.”

All of the students around me seemed to be in awe of my hair. Everyone’s eyes were on me when I walked past. I tried to cover my hair with my bag, but it was no use. I had run out of my dorms without a jacket or a vest, so I had no way of covering it.

I headed over to the green class to borrow Cory’s blanket to cover my hair. Students kept looking my way even as I headed over. They would pretend to look away when I saw them, but the moment I walked past them, they all stared at my hair. I heard someone say something about a lion behind me.

I was rushing and looking down to avoid the gazes coming my way. I hadn’t seen who was in front of me. The person I bumped into held my shoulders and caught me before I fell.

That person turned out to be Yvnes, who was downstairs to visit me.

Yvnes stared at my face for a while before his lips curled up on one side.

“Your hair’s really cute today.”
“…………”

Yvnes was in awe at my voluminous curls. He carefully touched my puffy hair. He began to pet my hair like he would a dog, so I shot him a glare to show him how displeased I was. My hair was getting more tangled than it already was. Yves smiled when he saw my glare.

“I came down to see you. I would’ve been sorely disappointed if I missed today’s view.”
“……..I seriously, honestly want to die right now.”

I muttered quietly to myself, eyes pointedly looking at the floor.

“I really like this hairstyle on you. Can’t you keep doing your hair like this?”

Yvnes grabbed my collar and pulled me into a hug. He put his chin on my hair. When he felt his chin sinking into my hair, he looked surprised as he pulled away from the hug. Then, he began to laugh. It almost sounded like he was laughing at me before he began to exclaim in surprise.

Yvnes occasionally came down to the second year floor. Yvnes, now a senior, was situated extremely far away from my class, but he still came to visit me from time to time. Because of that, I had heard a lot of rumors about how Yves and I was going out together. Just like I had worried, there had almost been rumors about how we were a couple.

But before that rumor actually began spreading, Swanhaden wordlessly appeared when Yves came to visit. He grabbed Yves by the throat and threw him back to the senior class building. That debacle had ended that rumor.

Yvnes seemed to have acquired a fear of Swan after suffering from his for so long. He turned his head this way and that and checked his surroundings warily.

“Thankfully, he seems like he’s not here today.”
“You mean Swan?”
“Yeah. That Blanche.”

Yvnes still held me in a hug as he checked for Swanhaden left and right. But as soon as he had finished speaking, an angry voice came from behind us.

“Hyung, what are you doing right now?”

When we turned around, Swanhaden’s eyes were wide open. His head was tilted slightly in question. He had an innocent expression on his face, but his eyes held a murderous, dangerous aura behind it.

“Damn it…..”

Once Yvnes had discovered Swanhaden, he reluctantly pulled away from me with a disappointed expression. He turned away, face still pulled into a frown.

Swanhaden was smiling brightly, but he was more murderous than usual. I was sure that the academy had given Swan a warning and had confiscated all of his weapons, but in his hands were other dangerous weapons that were definitely not appropriate for school.

Yvnes jumped out of the window to avoid Swan, who was rapidly catching up to him, but windows were Swanhaden’s specialty so his plan failed. It was like a scene out of an action movie. This was definitely one way of showing off their athleticism.

Yves yelled something at Swanhaden as he ran away from him, and Swan’s face grew even more thunderous as he chased after him. The two laughed as they chased each other. Weren’t they a bit too compatible as partners? They were really having fun playing together.

As soon as I was free from Yves, I ran to the green class. I needed to get this hair away from the eyes of the world.

“Shuraina………Your hair…….. Puh. Keugh. Puha. Ah. Keugh. Ha, wait. Puheuheh…….”

The moment Hylli saw me, his face turned bright red as he burst into raucous laughter.

Cory, who had his legs on his desk as he ate an apple, stood up to walk towards a nearby window. He let the wind blow on his face as he stayed still. His back was shaking slightly. When I looked closer, Cory was also laughing so hard that he seemed like he was going to topple over.

“…….Shushu, do you think you can store things in your hair?”

Cory stared at the window for a while as he caught his breath before staring at me once more. Cory put his hand in his pocket and fished out a small piece of chocolate. Even when his arm was carefully stretched out towards me, he seemed desperate to hide his laughter.

“Are you craz……….”

But unlike what I had thought would happen, the chocolate was safely stored in my hair. Cory quietly looked back out the window before he clung to the windowsill to look away. Hylli seemed to be in awe when the piece of chocolate disappeared in my hair before bursting out in laughter again.

I snatched Cory’s blanket away from him and tied it around my hair. My entire face was red at this point, and even my hands seemed to be redder than usual. I had to hide from everyone’s sight for the entire day.

“Shushu, can’t we just try and see how many pieces of chocolate can fit in your hair? Please. I’m begging you. Just once? This is a royal order. Come on, please.”

Just like a main character of a tragic romance novel, Hylli was incredibly obsessive.

---

I walked to the building where the girls’ changing room was before I headed to my afternoon swordsmanship class.

I could hear the loud chatter of students right outside of the changing room.

Just until last year, there was only me and a handful of female students who had been using this changing room. But more and more female students began to choose a wider range of majors, and now the changing room was full of students.

When I first entered the swordsmanship class, it had still been slightly strange for women to focus on the sword. But change had continued to happen in the past few years, and now there was a higher percentage of women who were joining the ranks of the knights.

Compared to my past world, this was a very strange place. Thanks to magic, the evolution of technology was lightning quick. It seemed like just yesterday when we were riding around horses. Now, car-like magic devices were driving down the streets. The royal palace was currently researching a way to create a flying machine.

It seemed that the underlying reason for how quickly technology evolved in this world was because magic was basically a higher tier of science in this universe. If the world in my previous life seemed to think of science and math like basic binary codes, the magic in this world was basically like a well-organized coding language that people could easily use.

If the people in my past world struggled hundreds of times to figure out how to fly, the citizens of this world would just think about how to fly for a few hours before creating a magic circle to do just that.

All of this meant that the general public was confused at the lightning fast developments of technology, but welcomed new ideas and adapted to them quickly. I personally thought that the reason why this happened was because it was so much easier for people to express their ideas with the magic they possessed compared to the world in my past life. The outfits and overall culture of this world seemed to be shifting quickly to the culture of my last world, too.

Of course, some of the developments could be pointed back to me. Magical technology began to progress faster after my inventions hit the market.

‘What if smartphones started popping up soon?’

This world was still medieval in some ways. Smartphones? That would be such a mood killer……..

I couldn’t help but laugh quietly as I changed into my training uniform and shut my locker. It wouldn’t be bad if I just made a smartphone and sold it first. I could just combine the phone device, photography device, and the recording device and hundreds of other circles and shove it into one. Wouldn’t that be cool? Of course, it was kind of unreasonable to shove all of those circles into one before meticulously planning it out, but it probably wasn’t impossible.

No. It would still be better for me to get into the order of knights as a magic knight. There was talk about how knights would slowly begin to disappear as technology evolved, but that only really counted for knights in the countryside.

If I became a royal knight, I would be able to earn my own titles and get benefits from the country. Moreover, there weren’t a lot of wars these days so I would be paid a much higher wage compared to the time I worked. It also seemed like the royal order of knights seemed to be shifting more as honorary ambassadors of the kingdom more than anything these days.

I put a dry towel around my neck as I was walking out of the changing room when I heard a some girls talking to each other around the locker behind me. The girls’ faces were hidden by the lockers.

“Oh, right. And you know Shuraina in our class, right?”
“Shuraina West? Oh, the one who helped us with our subjugation last time?”

My hair got caught in my locker just when I was about to leave. I frowned. My stupid hair was giving me such a hard time today. My hair was still a giant fur ball and was so tangled that I was scared to touch it. I carefully touched a section of my hair and sighed. Daaaamn it. It was completely tangled.

“Apparently she fainted after the subjugation ended. She was totally fine in front of us though. She was like, held by Swanhaden or something?”
“Honestly, I didn’t think like this at first, but she’s super suspicious. Shuraina, that girl, she’s always surrounded by a bunch of guys. She’s always with his royal highness during swordsmanship class, and she’s with Cory during club activities. Oh, there’s also that senior, Yvnes? Seriously, it’s no joke.”

My hair was giving me too many struggles today. Why was it getting more tangled the more I tried to untangle it? I felt like I was trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. I seriously thought about cutting off the tangled parts before calming down. I slowly continued to work on untangling my hair.

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T/N: