Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 174: Your Boyfriend

Baswara, Serayu, and Lazuardi stood on the gravel path, a tribunal of elders braced for a storm. The memory of yesterday’s recordings, the roar, the clinical violence, the chilling, ancient command was fresh in their minds.

They expected a sovereign, a force of nature wearing a school uniform, perhaps still vibrating with yesterday’s cataclysmic fury.

What they got was... something else entirely.

Oathran stood beside Cecilia, but his posture was different. Less the poised, silent monument, more a lanky teenager with his hands shoved in his pockets, a faint, petulant frown on his face. He seemed... normal. Alarmingly so.

"Cecilia..." he whined, the sound entirely out of place, "why don’t you want to hold my hand?" He tilted his head, his expression a masterpiece of teenage angst and entitlement. "Aren’t I your boyfriend?"

Actually, no, the three observers thought in unison, he wasn’t normal at all.

Cecilia, exasperated and tired, ignored him completely. She turned to Baswara, offering a small, polite bow. "Professor, forgive my hurried departure yesterday. I am still hoping we can continue the initiation today."

Lazuardi, who had taken an emergency leave to deal with the fallout from yesterday’s incident (and was about to embark on the unenviable task of explaining a pulverized Arzhen to the Vasilievs), had stopped by his senior’s residence first.

This... was not what he’d anticipated.

He wanted to scold the boy, to demand answers, to reassert some semblance of order. But the words died in his throat. Even playing this bizarre charade of a normal boy, there was a core of something in Oathran’s presence that made reprimand feel not just futile, but perilously foolish. He was still... scary.

"Why won’t you admit it, that I am your boyfriend?" Oathran pressed, his voice dropping. The petulance vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp edge. His chin lifted, and for a fleeting second, the old, terrifying authority flashed in his eyes and vibrated in the air around him.

Lazuardi flinched back instinctively. Baswara and Serayu’s eyes widened. There it was. The ghost of yesterday’s terror, peeking through the teenage act.

Cecilia, unmoved, simply turned her head and glared at him. "My boyfriend is Eastiel," she stated, her tone flat and factual. "He actually sent me money so I can have this initiation remote and go back and forth using the teleportation gate."

The word struck Oathran like a physical blow.

"Ah." He froze. Money. Money? MONEY?!

The cold authority shattered into pure, sputtering indignation. "You—" he sputtered, gesturing wildly, "What money did he have that I don’t have?! I am the lord of the lords of beasts, I am rich beyond measu—"

"You’re just a normal school boy now." Cecilia cut him off without even looking at him.

For a moment, Oathran just stood there, vibrating with affronted fury. Then he exploded into motion. He whirled around, shoved past the stunned adults without a glance, and stormed into the residence.

The sound of his room being turned upside down, a violent cacophony of drawers slamming, objects clattering, echoed from within.

The three elders and Cecilia stood on the path, listening to the domestic apocalypse.

Just as suddenly as it began, the noise stopped. Oathran emerged from the doorway. His hair was slightly mussed, his expression one of fierce, triumphant resolve. In his hands was a plain wooden box.

He strode over to the trash bin by the door, ripped off a folded letter that had been stuck to the box’s lid, and tossed it carelessly into the bin. Then he popped the lid open and thrust it toward Cecilia.

Inside were neat stacks of crisp banknotes, a smaller pouch that clinked with the heavy sound of gold coins, and a few items that looked like rare, collectible magestones.

"Here," he declared. "My life’s saving. All of it. Yours."

He looked from the box to her face, his grey eyes blazing with a challenge that was somehow both utterly childish and deadly serious. "Now, aren’t I a good boyfriend too?"

Cecilia’s gaze, however, wasn’t on the box. It was on the discarded letter in the trash bin. The three adults followed her look.

The handwriting on the folded parchment was Oathran’s own, neat and precise. The brief message was clearly visible.

"Professor Baswara, please open this after the first fall of snow."

Understanding slammed into them. This wasn’t just pocket money or an allowance. This was Oathran’s entire, mortal inheritance in this world, intended for his caretaker after his erasure. His final letter. His last will and testament.

And he had just dumped the letter like trash and handed the entire, poignant legacy to Cecilia as if it were a bunch of wildflowers, in a demented bid to out-do Eastiel in the boyfriend department.

For a long, suspended second, there was only the sound of the wind in the pines.

"BWAHSHHWAHAHAHWHAHHAHAH!"

A sound ripped through the tension. A loud, wheezing, completely undignified howl of laughter. Baswara doubled over, clutching his stomach, tears streaming from his eyes as he gasped for breath.

The great, grim tragedy of the Key Bearer had, for one surreal moment, been rewritten as the most expensive, most disastrous teenage romantic spat in history. And the sheer absurdity of it was too much for the old professor to bear.

Cecilia turned her head slowly from Oathran and his box of doomed inheritance towards the three adults, her expression wearily apologizing with a touch of long-suffering patience. It was the look of a saint forced to chaperone a particularly chaotic demigod.

Baswara was still howling, his laughter subsiding into breathless, wheezing hiccups. He wiped a tear from his eye, his shoulders shaking.

"Huuu huhuhu," he managed, waving a dismissive hand towards the box Oathran still thrust at Cecilia. "Just accept it, Cecilia. Accept all he gives you. This old man has no use for it... huuuu huhuhuhuhu..." The sentence dissolved into another helpless chuckle at the sheer, morbid irony of it all.

"Like I want money from him," Cecilia muttered, turning her face away with a sniff of disdain. It was the perfect, petty rejection.

It ignited Oathran all over again. "But you said your boyfriend sent money!" he insisted, his voice rising with a teenager’s wounded pride. He shook the box slightly, making the coins inside clatter like a beggar’s cup. "I’m your boyfriend too!"

The declaration, delivered with such absolute, possessive certainty in the wake of the ’last will and testament’ box, was the final touch.

Serayu, her striking violet eyes wide with a mixture of horror and anthropological fascination, slowly turned her gaze from the squabbling ’couple’ to Lazuardi. Her stare was accusatory, as if he were personally responsible for the moral decay of the youth.

"Is that how today’s teenage relationship works...?" she asked, her voice dripping with dry, appalled judgment. "What are you teaching them at school?"

Lazuardi, already stretched thin by terror, bureaucratic nightmare, and now... this, spluttered.

"Why are you blaming me?!" he snapped back, his professional composure cracking under the strain. He gestured vaguely at Oathran, the living, breathing argument against any sane curriculum.

Baswara, finally getting his mirth under some semblance of control, cleared his throat. The academic in him reasserted itself, pushing past the joke.

He turned his twinkling, damp eyes back to Cecilia, the only person in the vicinity who seemed remotely focused on the original, practical purpose of their visit.

"You want to continue your initiation, lass?" he asked, his voice still rough with laughter. "Come in. I’m much more prepared today than I was yesterday."

He gestured towards the open door of his residence. Then his gaze shifted past her, to the white-haired boy still holding his life’s savings like a love token. A fond, complicated smile touched the old professor’s lips. "How about you?"

Oathran scoffed. "Why can’t you just give her the certificate already? Show off."

Baswara laughed and ushered them inside.