After finally returning to Schale, I leaned back heavily against my office chair, loosened my tie, and let out a long breath.
Looking up at the clock, I realized we had somehow actually been dragged all the way into the middle of the night before finally being freed.
Once we learned those icicles were likely unhygienic and could upset the stomach, I immediately ordered Hiyori to throw all the ones she had collected away. As a result, she burst into tears on the spot.
Fortunately, the members of the Sweets Club were present. After realizing Hiyori had not intentionally deceived them, none of them pursued the matter. Instead, they generously shared the snacks they had brought with her.
Although Hiyori stopped crying the moment she tasted genuinely delicious sweets, she still remained reluctant to part with those icicles.
So I gave her all the loose change I had picked up over the past few days while out and about.
As long as she did not buy anything too expensive, it should be enough for her, Misaki, and "Princess" to enjoy proper popsicles for an entire month.
After comforting Hiyori and saying goodbye to her, I brought the girls of the After-School Sweets Club onto the helicopter for the return trip.
Then we discovered we had vastly underestimated the destructive power of those maple syrup icicles.
At first, we assumed the small amount they consumed would not cause major problems. But not even halfway through the return journey, Natsu, who had eaten the fastest and the most, and who had already been slightly chilled, started looking unwell.
Then the other three gradually began feeling sick too, one after another, forcing us to head to a nearby hospital.
Perhaps because I had only taken a tiny lick, combined with Hifumi's poison-resistance Authority constantly active, I was mostly fine.
But as a sensei, there was no way I could just pay their medical bills and leave them alone at the hospital while returning by myself.
Although we handled things quickly, the entire ordeal still consumed a great deal of time.
By the time I sent the exhausted girls back to Trinity, even the Tea Party student in charge of the dormitory was looking at me with an increasingly strange expression.
However, things did not end there.
Because of the information I had obtained from Hiyori, I risked damaging my reputation and personally paid several students visits late at night.
Regrettably, even though I genuinely came for serious matters, everyone seemed to misunderstand something. They all acted awkward just opening the door, and nearly every one of them insisted on changing from pajamas into uniforms before agreeing to see me.
Could this also be one of Trinity's excessively cumbersome and complicated procedures?
Still, it really was very late, so after some brief conversations, I left.
Though I did depart carrying the regret of not getting to see anyone's pajamas except Nagisa's. Even Hanako had not escaped me.
In any case, most of the new questions I gained tonight still required deeper investigation.
For example, why exactly had Hiyori appeared in that cave at this specific time?
Judging by her tone, it was clearly not her first time doing this. Wouldn't Beatrice become suspicious?
At the same time, however, there were also a very small number of mysteries that unexpectedly received direct and reasonable explanations.
Such as why Hiyori knew there was someone at Trinity who ate Swiss rolls three meals a day.
Thinking of that, I took out my phone and opened a newly downloaded social media app, entering a particularly memorable ID into the search bar.
The page that appeared belonged to a pink-themed account with nearly ten thousand followers already.
The account name was "Mika's Prison Diary."
And although most people widely believed it was an impersonator account, according to Nagisa, the person running it really was Mika herself, currently imprisoned.
...Seriously, why could a student imprisoned for a failed coup still use a phone in Kivotos?
Then why had she never once sent me a Momotalk message? It could not possibly be because I never messaged her first, right?
Did she really hate me that much?
Feeling strangely irritated, I gave in to curiosity and began browsing through her posts.
Most of them were complaints about prison life. Things like how she was already sick of eating Swiss rolls three meals a day, how the prison bed was too small and hard to sleep on, how the television only broadcast ordinary programs, how she wanted to eat newly released limited-edition sweets and hoped someone would buy them for her...
Leaving me deeply confused whether this girl had gone to prison or on vacation inside a prison.
There were naturally many comments below expressing thoughts similar to mine, believing the prison life she described was clearly just the account owner's fantasy. But Mika never responded to any of those comments.
Until I reached one particular post.
Mika's Prison Life:
[Sigh, that Schale sensei came to see me again today. Even though I reject every single visitation request, he still comes every day. Seriously, how annoying can someone be? There should be a limit to how clueless a person can get, right? Or is Schale really just that free all the time? If he has so much spare time to waste, maybe he should spend more of it caring about his Nagisa-chan and Azusa-chan instead~]
As expected, because it mentioned me, who was practically a public idol, this post became vastly more popular than all the account's others only a few days after being uploaded.
Especially the comment section, which had completely exploded.
And uniquely, for these comments, whether admiring, mocking, or doubting, Mika had replied to almost every single one.
The thing she repeated most often was still complaining about how persistent and clingy I was.
I thought that probably meant she truly found me unbearably annoying.
After all, I had not actually tried visiting her that many times in the first place. I mostly just asked the guards to lie for me, so I did not really feel disappointed.
And so, I switched to another app and found Mika's profile picture.
Me: Sorry for messaging you at this hour. You should probably be asleep, right?
Me: Anyway, I already saw the post you made on social media.
Me: I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was causing you so much trouble.
Me: I won't bother you anymore from now on.
After sending the Momotalk messages, I worked on official business for a few more hours until around four or five in the morning before finally going to bed.
However, I was awakened by a phone call.
On the screen displaying the current time, 6:05 AM, was a name that left me stunned and bewildered.
"Hello? This is sensei, right?"
Mika's voice on the other end sounded lazy, yet seemed to hide some other emotion beneath it.
"I'm free today."
"...What do you mean?" I asked hesitantly.
"Haven't you been persistently coming to visit me every day?"
Mika said calmly,
"Don't keep me waiting too long today."
Then she hung up.
Amid my confusion, I suddenly grasped onto a faint spark of inspiration.
Switching back to the social media app, I entered Mika's account again and quickly scrolled through it.
A moment later, I finally confirmed one fact.
That post had been deleted.