Chapter 117 - Soirée four years later
"I want to graduate already..."
"What are you talking about, Aurea? With your brains you could graduate today if you really wanted to."
"I know, Bertha. But Mother wouldn’t accept it. She is adamant about me staying here until I’m 17."
We are having a soirée at my place. Bertha, Sieghilda, Liudolf, Ingela, and me.
Over the last few years, we’ve become a closely knit group of friends. A group that one could say gravitates around me, which feels kind of weird.
In my second semester at the school, I made an effort to become closer to them, though Ingela was the one harder to get to.
She was just too shy to easily get into a group with nobles and a fucking princess. Though the fact that I stood up for her and managed to end the bullying directed at her was a great icebreaker.
Over time, she became one of the brightest students in our class. The barrier of entry for commoners is still so high that they can only enter (and stay) if they are the best.
I also stopped fighting so much about rights for nonhuman people. Not because I cared less, but because I compromised so I don’t trigger a full-on confrontation with the Church.
And this is how we arrived at this point, four and a half years after I came to school for the first time. My fifteenth birthday is next week, so I’m a full teenager now.
And these people sure make it easier for me to keep up with this. If I continued all alone in this place, I would have run away a long time ago.
"But why? Wouldn’t she be happy if you managed to graduate early? It’s a huge accomplishment."