Chapter 17: Somebody Else’s Problem
The teacher found them in a cloud of barbecue smoke.
The tent was still standing. A small fire crackled beside it, neat and deliberate, and Tina had threaded their remaining food onto stripped branches and arranged them over the flame with the focus of someone who takes this sort of thing seriously. She passed one to Uriel, kept one for herself, and shook something out of a small pouch onto hers — some kind of seasoning — with the calm of a person for whom a dragon incident is simply a gap between meals.
Down the slope, the noise hadn't fully settled. The occasional shout still drifted up from below.
The sheltered hillside held the warmth well. The fire was even. The food, Uriel was discovering, had actually improved since the last batch — the timing was better. He was about to say so when he heard footsteps coming up fast, accompanied by ragged breathing.
He and Tina looked at each other.
Then the homeroom teacher crested the slope.
His hair had been rearranged by the wind into something that had given up on having a shape. His robe had taken several hits from passing branches. He was holding his staff in both hands with the energy of a man who had been fully prepared to use it. When he saw the two of them — sitting there, unhurt, eating — his momentum simply stopped. He froze at the top of the slope. His boots slammed to a halt, his entire body stiffening as if someone had just hit the pause button on his reality.
"Are you — " He caught his breath. "Are you two all right?"
"Fine," Uriel said. "Sir, are you okay? You look like you sprinted the whole way up."
"Am I — " The teacher steadied himself with one hand on his knee. "There was a dragon. Did you not — the entire mountain was in a panic, how are you just — "
He stopped. His eyes darted from the crackling fire, to the skewers of perfectly browned meat, and finally to the unbothered expressions of two students who looked mildly annoyed to have their picnic interrupted.
"Are you ... having a barbecue?"he asked, his voice cracking slightly.
"There's extra," Tina said, extending her skewer toward him. "Would you like some?"
The teacher's expression went through several stages, none of which turned into words.
Uriel stepped in before the silence could develop a personality.
"The dragon left," Uriel said, delivering the lie with the stone-faced, unshakable confidence of a hostage negotiator. "We think it must have passed through without noticing us. We stayed in the tent until the noise stopped, then came back out." He paused. "It's fine now."
"It just... left."
"Just left," Uriel confirmed, nodding.
Beside him, Tina turned her skewer over the flame with an expression of complete innocence, like a woman whose only concern in life was even heat distribution.
The teacher stared at their innocent faces. His lips twitched. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again, ultimately saying absolutely nothing. The sheer exhaustion on his face screamed: "Nothing here makes sense, but I do not have the stamina to care right now."
"...Right." He exhaled. "Good. As long as you're safe." He straightened up and assumed the posture of a man reasserting professional authority. "Pack up. We're heading back. The group is regrouping now."
"Of course," Uriel said, standing.
He glanced at Tina. She was already in motion.
The dismantling was so efficient that, in hindsight, it seemed slightly suspicious. The unfinished food was wrapped and stowed. The tent came down in sections, folded, and disappeared into her pack. The fire was managed. By the time it was done, the site looked cleaner than when they'd arrived.
The teacher watched all of this without comment. Uriel could read the two thoughts running through the man's head with reasonable confidence: one was how are these two children so completely fine and the other was if the special scholarship student had come to harm on my watch I would never have worked in education again. Both threads ended up at the same conclusion: stop asking questions and head downhill.
Works for me, Uriel thought, and followed him down.
---
The group reformed and turned back down the mountain.
The atmosphere was nothing like the morning.
They'd come up loud and loose — running ahead, dragging behind, the general chaos of a group that hadn't encountered anything yet. Coming back, they moved closer together, quieter. Most of them were still processing. They walked in clusters, voices low, checking the sky every few minutes with the reflex of people who had recently been reminded that the sky sometimes had things in it.
Uriel and Tina settled at the back of the column, the same gap between themselves and the group as always.
The fallen leaves crunched in a steady rhythm. After a while, Uriel glanced sideways.
"Mom."
"Yeah."
"That stuff you were saying to it. Was that from a book?"
"What stuff?"
"The shouting is unacceptable behaviour. You've caused a lot of trouble. Think about what you've done. The counting to three."
"Oh." She considered. "No. I came up with it. Isn't it good?"
"...You thought of it yourself."
"I saw a mother doing it once," she said, chin lifting slightly, "when a child was misbehaving. I thought she handled it very well, so I remembered it."
Uriel kept walking. His brain stalled for a moment.
"You remembered it."
"Yeah." Her eyes held a quiet smile. "And today I got to use it."
He absorbed this.
"...Do you use that on me?"
Tina turned to look at him. She answered without any hesitation at all.
"No. Little Uri is a good boy."
"..."
"Whatever you do," she added, with the serenity of someone stating a natural law, "is always right."
Uriel walked in silence for a few seconds, listening to that sentence settle.
Whatever I do is always right.
He kept his eyes on the path ahead.
Mom. You understand that unconditional validation is actually a form of neglect, right.
...And seriously, if you weren't going to use that lecture on me, who the heck did you even learn it for?
He breathed in, and let the rest of the commentary go quietly out with the exhale.
The leaves kept crunching. The trees swayed in the mountain wind. The column moved slowly downhill, and the world settled back into something that resembled normal, or at least its outline.
---
At the front of the column, the principal and vice-principal walked side by side.
Neither of them had spoken for some time. Eventually the vice-principal angled slightly toward the principal and dropped his voice.
"Principal. About the dragon."
"What about it."
"I mean — why it appeared here at all. I had someone check with the Adventurers' Guild."
The principal glanced at him. "And?"
"According to the Guild," the vice-principal said, "the dragon had been driven from its original territory. That's why it was moving — it ended up here because it had nowhere else to go."
"Driven out? By what — a larger dragon? Are there nesting conflicts in the range right now?"
"Not a dragon." The vice-principal paused. "The Guild report says three individuals."
"Three — " The principal caught himself and brought his voice back down. "Three people drove a dragon that size off its own territory?"
"The Guild has it on file. Adult red dragon, established range. The commission rating on that alone would be Mithril-tier, minimum."
"Which Guild branch handled that commission? Mithril-rank operatives — we don't have anyone at that level stationed here, and if a party like that was operating in the region I'd have heard—"
"That's just it." The vice-principal reached up and raked a hand through what remained of his hair. "They're not Guild. No registration.No affiliation. There's only a single name on the incident report."
The principal waited for the answer.
"Magical Girls."
The principal’s next step missed the ground entirely. He stumbled, catching his balance just in time.
An awkward, heavy silence descended upon the mountain path.
"...Magical," the principal muttered, sounding as if the word physically pained him to say. "Girls?"
"Three of them. That's all the file says."
The principal clasped his hands behind his back and walked. His expression moved through several intermediate states.
"Origin?"
"Unclear. The Guild has no further information."
"Demon Realm?" he said, after a moment.
The vice-principal turned it over. "...Possibly. The naming style doesn't match anything from the human side. It has that kind of feel to it."
"If it's Demon Realm," the principal said, voice dropping lower, "and they're active in this area — is this the beginning of something? A probe? A vanguard?"
"Can't say." The vice-principal shook his head. "No prior incidents connected to the name. No documented MO. Just the three of them, no Guild record, a very strange name, and one very displaced dragon."
The principal said nothing, and they kept walking. After several more steps, the silence finally settled again.
He exhaled.
"What a headache."
"Yes," the vice-principal agreed, with feeling. "Really."
They walked on together, the mountain road still long ahead of them, the autumn wind pulling loose leaves off the branches and sending them spinning slowly down through the grey afternoon air.