“Hide out here?” Blythe repeated, consternation twisting her gut.

  Cole didn’t have to explain, because the voices outside grew increasingly audible.

  “Where is he?”

  “How could you girls lose sight of him? You were right in front!”

  “Stop fighting! We need to look for him. We haven’t given him our chocolates yet!”

  “She’s right. Keep your eyes peeled, everyone!”

  Cole heaved himself up onto one of the wooden desks, his long legs dangling off the side. The lounging pose he somehow managed to strike up made him look cool and handsome despite the uproar outside.

  “They’re looking for you,” Blythe said. “Why do you need to hide? Aren’t they just going to give you chocolates?”

  He looked at her in despair. “Blythe, have you ever been chased down by one hundred girls who all want to ensure you take their chocolate over the others’? I shouldn’t even be here. If my professor hadn’t needed to talk to me about something, I’d be in my room by now.”

  “Excuse me? One hundred?” Blythe was too incredulous to suppress her grimace. “Just how many girls do you flirt with on a daily basis?”

  “Hey, I don’t appreciate what you’re implying,” he said, wagging a finger at her. “For your information, I don’t flirt with girls. I can’t help it if they like my sincere compliments.”

  “Are you serious about the hundred girls? Are there really that many?” Was that why it sounded like a stampede of elephants outside?

  “Might be a little more than a hundred,” he admitted, averting his gaze. “They didn’t get to give me their chocolates during lunch, so they ended up gathering after school.”

  “Wait, isn’t it too much that they have to chase you down to foist their chocolates on you?“ It matched what the game described about Cole’s experience with Valentine’s Day, but she’d only found it amusing because it was fictional. Now that this was playing out in real life, it was a terrifying notion.

  He shrugged. “That’s why I’m hiding out here.”

  A loud voice pulled Blythe’s attention away from her conversation with Cole. “He must have gone into one of the classrooms!”

  “Let’s check every room!”

  “Mavis, we’ll do that one room at a time! It’s not fair to everyone if we split up and the one who opens the correct door gets to enter first.”

  “That’s right. We should all be on a level playing field when we go in.”

  “Agreed!”

  “We’ll start with the leftmost classroom.”

  Shoes tapped around.

  “He’s not here,” someone announced.

  “Let’s try the next room!”

  Another series of multiple footfalls seemed to grow louder.

  With sinking horror, Blythe stared at Cole. She couldn’t remember how many classrooms were before this one. How long until they flung the door to this classroom open and flooded in till she was crushed? She hated crowds even on her good days. How was she going to handle being surrounded—and possibly even being squished against—a bunch of people?

  Cole turned his troubled gaze to the closed door. “If the windows would open all the way, or at least enough that I could jump out …”

  “Pretty sure that’s why they don’t open all the way. How about you leave through the door and run to your dorm?”

  “Blythe, I said there were a hundred of them.” His voice was lowered to a whisper, but she could still hear the horror in it.

  “So? Are you saying you can’t outrun them?” She didn’t believe that for an instant. All the love interests were strong and fit. Even Noel, who was supposed to be the weakest out of them, had been capable of sweeping Daisy up into a bridal carry in the game.

  He blanched. “They’re in a very, very large group, okay? Adrenaline can enable you to do some incredible things.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Some incredible things that have happened before?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Cole refused to meet her eyes.

  At that moment, the outside voices came again. “He’s not here either. Let’s move on to the next one.”

  “Together, Libby!” one of them barked. “I saw that!”

  A muffled apology followed, and then the mass of footsteps tromping down the hallway seemed to grow closer in sound.

  “Oh, this one’s locked.”

  “Cole can’t be inside, then.”

  “Is there anything I can help you young ladies with?” a gruff voice said suddenly. “I’m cleaning.”

  “Oh, our apologies for interrupting your cleaning, Janitor Beck. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Cole Tempest anywhere, have you? We lost sight of him moments ago.”

  “No, I’ve been cleaning. I do apologize, but I must get back to it.” Janitor Beck sounded more irritated than apologetic, which was frankly quite understandable.

  There was a door slam, and the girls were quiet for half a second.

  “Next room,” someone said briskly.

  “Cole, where are you? I promise we’ll give our chocolates to you one by one!”

  “We’re sorry we overwhelmed you last year. It won’t happen again!”

  Questions and concerns about how exactly these fangirls of his had ‘overwhelmed’ Cole last year flew through her mind. Panic rose up her lungs, choking out any calm, rational thoughts that might have been left in her brain.

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  Those girls were getting close. Any minute now, the door to the classroom would open, and then she would drown in a sea of fangirls.

  Before Blythe could properly think about it, she snapped into action. The desk closest to the classroom door, despite its heft, was moderately easy to push forward. She nudged it just enough so that it met the sturdy wooden door without producing noise from the contact.

  She could leave it at that, but it was safer to add another desk on top of it to ensure that those girls would think this classroom was locked too.

  Her muscles began complaining as she tugged another desk towards the door. The process itself was surprisingly quiet; there was none of the screeching she’d grown to expect from dragging furniture across the floor.

  After a deep inhale, Blythe gripped two of the desk legs and heaved. She had just barely managed to lift the two legs off the floor, already feeling the strain in her muscles, when red light flashed repeatedly before her eyes.

  Startled, she loosened her grip and just barely closed her fingers around the legs again in time to keep them from thumping onto the floor.

  Two system windows popped up.

  You have to be kidding me!

  Blythe would’ve flung the table aside in her frustration if not for the fact that she was literally too weak to do it. She couldn’t even lift a classroom desk, never mind that it was significantly sturdier and denser than her old high school ones.

  “Why are you so weak!” she whisper-shouted, her hyper-awareness of the horde of the girls outside the only reason she managed to hold back a scream.

  With gritted teeth, she whipped her head around to glare at a gawking Cole.

  “A little help here?” she whispered harshly. “Those are your fangirls. Can’t you see I’m having trouble with this?”

  Cole leaped off the desk he was sitting on. In a flash, he was right by her side.

  “Uh, what should I do?”

  “Help me put the desk upside down onto this one. Hopefully, they’ll think the door’s locked and move on.”

  “I’ll handle it.” He waved for her to stand back.

  Sure enough, Cole lifted the desk all by himself and placed it atop the other desk. He showed no signs of strain.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t ask me to do it to begin with,” he commented, facing her again with his still-surprised expression.

  She frowned at the door. “I didn’t think of it.”

  He had a point. The original Blythe probably wouldn’t want to lift a finger for menial labor when she could get others to do it. She was just so used to at least attempting, if not doing, most things by herself in her original world.

  A flash of green light.

  “He’s not here either,” another voice reported.

  The shuffling of shoes against the floor layered over each other. It sounded like they were right outside the classroom Blythe was in. Her heart sprang to her throat, pounding aggressively enough to make her dizzy.

  As the doorknob jiggled, she held her breath. She assumed there was an attempt from the other side to push the door open, but the stacked desks seemed to hold their own against any attempted force.

  “This one won’t open too,” said a disappointed voice.

  The footsteps grew softer as they moved away.

  “Cole?”

  “Cole, where are you?“

  All the tension evaporated from her body, and Blythe sagged against the desk. She raised her eyes to Cole, who was right beside her with his back leaned on the desk.

  “You saved my hide,” he said, his voice hushed. “I can’t believe it. Thanks.”

  He looked over his shoulder to stare at the door again.

  She scoffed. “You didn’t give me much of a choice when you chose to waltz into the classroom, did you?”

  Her muscles were still aching from that futile attempt at lifting the desk.

  “You could’ve just walked out and left me here,” he pointed out. “I don’t think any of them would’ve stopped you. Doesn’t the female student population in Novalbus quake before you?”

  His words hit her like a brick to the head.

  Blunt though they were, they helped her recall the way Titus’ fangirls had parted for her to give him the obligatory chocolates. Maybe she really could’ve strolled out and left unscathed.

  She had to stop thinking like Mira and think more like Blythe, someone who apparently had the power to intimidate many other girls in school.

  But it wasn’t a guaranteed thing.

  These particular girls had sent Cole into hiding after all; a horde of them clogging the hallway was different from a group of fairly civilized girls surrounding Titus’ desk. What if today was the one special day they were so rabid that Blythe’s presence wouldn’t faze them one bit?

  “You said there’s a hundred of them,” she reminded Cole. “What if they trample over me in their excitement to get to you?”

  He winced. “They wouldn’t. At least, I don’t think they would …”

  “Very reassuring.”

  “We should wait it out here a bit more,” he whispered, straightening up and away from the desk, “until we’re sure they’ve left. Well … you could leave first if you want to. I really doubt they’d do anything to you.”

  She considered the idea while listening to their muffled voices out in the hallway.

  “I knew I should’ve tried to give him my chocolates during lunch,” one of them wailed.

  “Me too. I shouldn’t have been overly concerned about being tardy to class. I should have persevered!”

  This truly stank of the machinations of fictional media at play, where the most popular boy in school had a whole unofficial fanclub—replete with a club president and a treasurer—dedicated to stalking him all year round. Nobody did this in real life.

  Blythe supposed this was her real life now, but she’d also been compelled to act out an in-game harassment scene a week ago. As far as she was concerned, while it was as ’real’ as it got in basically every aspect of the senses, this wasn’t a normal world either.

  “Nah.” She braced a forearm against the underside of the desk Cole had placed atop the other. “I don’t want to risk it.”

  Green light again.

  “That’s considerate of you,” he whispered, gazing down at her.

  Bemused, she stared back at him. Cole was a bit shorter than Magnus, but he was still easily a head taller than Blythe. The one thing that was easy to grow accustomed to in this world was Blythe’s height. She was about as tall as Mira, who was five foot, two inches.

  Since they were standing beside each other, although he was facing the door and she had her back to the door, Blythe could feel the strain creeping into her neck as she looked up.

  “I’m doing this for me,” she whispered back. “But, I mean, if it helps you as a byproduct, sure.”

  The voices and marching footsteps outside grew ever more distant. Blythe could still hear them calling for Cole.

  “I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but there’s something really different about you lately. Especially your manner of speech.” He glanced over at the textbook lying open on Blythe’s earlier desk. “And I wouldn’t have expected you to stay behind in a classroom today. Shouldn’t you be with Magnus right now?”

  Magnus this, Magnus that. I’m sick of hearing everyone talk about Magnus!

  She scowled at him.