Chapter 19: Change of Plans
One week. That was all it took.
In just one week, Uriel realized things had gone completely off the rails. They had turned around entirely and were now heading the wrong direction at full speed.
It started one morning when he walked into the classroom and someone came down the corridor from the other end, shoulder catching his in passing — not stopping, not looking back, just continuing on as though the collision had been an accident of geometry rather than intent.
He stepped aside and watched the back of the retreating figure.
Yesterday too. The day before that. Different people. Same weight behind it.
Oh, great. So we're doing this now. Actual, targeted bullying. Fantastic.
He sat down and ran a quiet sweep of the room.
The boys: whatever hostility had been present before had escalated. What used to be cold jealousy had developed teeth. It wasn't quite at the stage of direct confrontation — something was still holding it back, some last threshold — but it was getting close.
The girls: different shift, different direction. The careful neutral distance of before had changed into something he recognised. He'd seen that look directed at other people plenty of times. Never at himself.
Contempt.
That was the word. He couldn't find a more accurate one.
---
He spent two days running a quiet investigation. Detective mode, activated.
Nothing elaborate — just moving through the right spaces, letting fragments of conversation drift his way, assembling them into a picture.
When he had the picture, he sat down on the steps in the corridor and looked at it.
Case closed. He'd cracked it.
The ten-foot rule, as observed by his classmates, had been interpreted as exactly one thing.
A breakup. Or at minimum, a very serious fight.
He reconstructed the cleanest version of the rumour: something had gone wrong between Tina and Uriel. Since Uriel had been the one to pull back, the problem was clearly on his side. Meanwhile, Tina — despite being the one who'd been left — hadn't stopped watching him. Ten feet of distance, and her eyes still found him. Which made her the devoted one. The one who still cared. Which made him—
A player. The guy who’d gotten bored of the most untouchable girl in his year, treated her badly, and walked away.
Uriel almost laughed. It came out wrong — more like a sound of disbelief escaping through his nose.
A player. Me. I'm the villain of this arc.
He looked down at his hands.
He had spent his entire time at this academy trying to be furniture. Background. A person-shaped object that occupied a seat and attracted no attention whatsoever. And somehow he had ended up with a reputation as the school's most prolific heartbreaker.
This is not what I planned. This is the opposite of what I planned.
The boys' escalating hostility made sense now. It had started as jealousy, which was manageable. Now it had a moral justification attached — the specific frustration of he doesn't deserve her and we can't do anything about it. That energy needed somewhere to go, and apparently that somewhere was his shoulder.
The girls were simpler. They'd decided Tina was the wronged party and recalibrated accordingly.
Apparently, several of them had already gone to console her.
Uriel pictured that scene briefly, then stopped himself. He didn't have the bandwidth to imagine it properly.
---
He didn't have to imagine it. It found him the same afternoon.
Two girls talking around a corner, normal conversational volume, not particularly trying to hide.
"...I told her he's not worth it. And she just — she defended him."
"What did she say?"
"That Uriel isn't like that. That she probably misunderstood. And then she started listing all these things about him — like, good things, just one after another."
A pause. When the voice came back, it had something complicated in it. "Watching her do that actually made me feel worse."
"I know," the other one said. A long exhale. "She's too good for this."
Uriel stood on his side of the corner and listened to the whole thing.
Then he turned and walked the other direction.
He stopped in an empty corridor, put his back against the wall, and looked up at the ceiling.
Good things. A whole list of them. Just volunteered.
He stood there for a moment. The particular pressure that had been sitting in his chest since the shoulder-checks began eased, just slightly.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, he stopped feeling quite so sorry for himself.
---
The plan was officially declared dead on day eleven.
He gave the plan a small internal obituary: the idea had been fine, the execution had been fine, and the result had still been a disaster. Not his fault. Everyone else had taken it the wrong way.
He would be terminating the plan.
The problem was that Tina didn't know it had failed.
Worse: she thought it was going well.
He reviewed the evidence. Every morning in the dorm, she'd hand over breakfast with the quiet satisfaction of someone watching a strategy pay off. Every evening when they came back to the room, she'd sit on her bed reading, and occasionally look up and smile at him across the distance — a smile that said very clearly: little Uri's plan is working. Mom approves.
And every time he saw that smile, Uriel would turn back to his book and stare at a page he wasn't reading.
Mom.
Your son has been officially designated the academy's most notorious heartbreaker.
You think the plan is succeeding.
He couldn't tell her.
Not because of pride. Because of the face she would make. That specific expression — the one that meant oh, Mom made a mistake — accompanied by a small, genuine apology, and then: is there something I did wrong, little Uri?
He didn't want to see it.
So he didn't tell her. He endured.
---
Three more days.
He was in the corridor when someone hit him from behind. Not a shoulder this time — a proper shove, enough to send two pages of his notes spinning off across the floor. He crouched down to pick them up, and heard, from behind him: "Quit performing."
He collected the pages, dusted them off, stood, and kept walking.
At the end of the corridor, he stopped.
He stood there for a moment. Then he turned around and went to find Tina.
If I keep suffering alone, she'll just end up suffering with me when she eventually finds out. There's no version of this where that's better.
She was on a bench outside the dormitory building, reading. Three steps away, as always these days.
She looked up when she heard him approach. Didn't speak. Didn't move. Just waited — maintaining the distance, quiet and patient — for him to say whatever he'd come to say.
Uriel walked up to her.
He didn't stop at the ten-foot line.
He walked straight past it and sat down beside her. The gap between them collapsed back to its normal size — one ordinary step, nothing measured about it.
Tina blinked. Checked, in a small uncertain way, whether she was supposed to shift over.
"Little Uri?"
"Plan's cancelled," he said.
"Cancelled?" She tilted her head. "But — it was going so well, wasn't it?"
He looked at her.
Going so well. Mom. Define 'well'.
"No," he said. "It backfired."
"Backfired?" Tina closed her book and turned toward him, gold eyes carrying a genuinely puzzled attention. "It seemed like it was working — all those people who kept coming over and talking to you, that died down. Mom thought that was what you wanted."
Uriel opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
...Oh.
She’s measuring success by how many people have stopped coming over. And yes — by that metric — it absolutely worked. Nobody's approaching her anymore because they all think she's in the middle of a messy breakup, and nobody's approaching me because they've decided I'm the one who caused it.
She has no idea what they're saying behind our backs. She only sees the surface.
He swallowed what he'd been about to say.
"...You're right," he said. "That part worked. But it created a different problem."
"What problem?"
"It doesn't matter," Uriel said. "Plan's over. Back to normal."
Tina looked at him for two seconds.
Then she smiled — the kind that reached her eyes without asking permission.
"Okay. Then tonight Mom will take your laundry."
"I can do my own laundry."
"You always miss the cuffs," she said. "Mom has checked. There's always a spot right at the edge you don't scrub."
"..."
Uriel let the argument go. It had nowhere to win. "Do what you want."
She opened her book again and settled back into reading — unhurried, unruffled, as though the entire ten-foot episode had been a minor administrative footnote rather than two weeks of accumulated social disaster.
Uriel leaned back against the bench and looked at the courtyard. The trees had shed most of their leaves. The branches moved in the afternoon wind, bare and slow.
The malice this Isekai world holds toward me is absolutely unreal...
Two weeks of planning. Two weeks of execution. And the conclusion is that I apparently cannot function more than arm's reach from my mother.
Fine. I'm done fighting it.
---
Once things went back to normal, the atmosphere began to shift. Slowly — like a tide pulling back, the surface first, the depths after.
The boys let go of the moral outrage before anything else. The shoving stopped. The little gaps people used to leave around him disappeared. Eye contact became possible again; occasionally, when he got an answer right in class, he'd catch the reluctant exhale of someone who didn't want to be impressed and was anyway.
Jealousy came back. Jealousy was workable. What had been there before wasn't.
The girls dropped the contempt, too. It reverted to the original register — a certain deliberate distance, nothing hostile in it — and when they passed him in the hallway, they simply passed him. No hostility in it.
One afternoon in the dining hall, he was looking for a seat when a girl near the end of a bench shifted over, making space. She didn't say anything. She didn't say the seat was taken, either. He sat down, said thanks, she nodded, and they both ate without speaking.
He decided this probably counted as progress. Small progress, but real.
---
After dinner, he returned his tray and headed toward the door. Tina was already waiting outside, and when she saw him, she pressed a small cloth bundle into his hands.
"Take this. You've got afternoon classes still — you'll be hungry before dinner."
He looked at it. Still warm. Pastry of some kind.
"Mom," he said. "I'm not a little kid anymore."
"Big kids need to eat too. Come on."
Wait, hold on! When I said 'I'm not a little kid anymore', I wasn't talking about my daily caloric intake! I was trying to make a point about my independence as a growing teenager, damn it.
...The pastry is good, though.
He kept that last part to himself, pocketed the bundle, and fell into step beside her.
In the corridor, heads turned as they passed — the usual sweep of eyes, the usual register of expressions. He knew all of them by now. Envy. Wistfulness. Something he still couldn't name precisely, that might have been a kind of longing.
He walked through all of it without flinching. Steady, unhurried. Something close to comfortable.
No friends to speak of. That was just how it was. Some things you couldn't change, so you stopped spending energy on them.
He tightened his hand around the bundle in his pocket. The warmth came through the cloth, small and even, and stayed with him the rest of the way.