The curious Oliver Mylor couldn’t remember hearing about anything like this before. In fact, considering how much the Academy loved casually mentioning every possible advantage it could offer prospective cadets, wouldn’t something like that have come up already?
Surely, aside from the usual spiel about better career prospects, prestige, higher survival rates once deployed, superior resources for high-performing students, and the opportunity to mingle with the Empire’s elite, someone would’ve used this as yet another reason to convince people to enroll!
It probably wouldn’t have mattered much these days, considering more and more people were already dying to enroll because of DG’s admittedly unhinged popularity. But knowing those prideful Academy officials, they would’ve at least made use of every nice-sounding perk they could!
Well, in the grand scheme of things, Ollie’s concern was fairly reasonable.
Then again, did it really matter when one of the other people who’d reacted most strongly happened to have considerably more influence over whether this field trip would actually see the light of day?
And judging by just how excited that person looked, the blonde had a feeling their chances were already pretty good.
Luca Kyros.
Of course, perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising that the golden-eyed cadet had become so invested.
Unlike the others, Luca’s closest experience with anything resembling a field trip had been many years ago, when the children at the orphanage were sponsored for a visit to a carnival that had temporarily set itself up back in Tesseris.
Even then, there hadn’t been any buses or other forms of group transportation involved.
The carnival grounds had been close enough to the orphanage that everyone had simply walked there.
Luca still remembered the children being arranged in pairs along the way, talking and singing while some of them bounced excitedly with every step.
Everyone except him.
For safety, Luca had needed to keep his distance from the rest of the group.
So he’d followed along while listening to their songs from farther back, watching the others hop around together and share the sponsored candies and snacks they’d been given along the way.
At the time, Luca hadn’t really minded.
He’d already thought it was wonderful that they’d allowed him to come.
He’d been able to look around the carnival just like everyone else, and because most of the people there didn’t know anything about him, strangers hadn’t immediately looked at him with extreme caution whenever he walked past.
For the young Luca back then, that had already been more than enough.
But things were different now.
He was older.
More importantly, he had friends—people he could sit beside, eat with, talk to, laugh with, and act ridiculous around without constantly worrying that being too close might somehow hurt them.
And now he was finally being allowed to go on a field trip with everyone else.
Luca’s golden eyes began to sparkle.
If they had to ride a bus or some other form of transport together, he would finally get to experience what that was like.
Now, one might argue that Luca had already done plenty of traveling with his friends and family over the past few months, but somehow, knowing this would be an actual trip with people his own age still felt different.
Besides, as much as he’d enjoyed those journeys, they’d usually spent most of the travel time inside the dungeon space and only stepped back out once they’d arrived at their destination.
Surely there was something different about simply sitting there with everyone else instead of trying to be extremely productive the entire way!
Then again, Luca supposed it didn’t really matter what kind of transportation they ended up taking or how many chaperones came along.
The simple fact that he wouldn’t be standing behind a classroom window this time, watching a yellow school bus depart without him, was already more than enough to make his heart flutter.
How exciting, really!
The golden-eyed cadet practically glowed as he sank deeper and deeper into all the wonderful possibilities.
__
Unfortunately, while Luca, Kira, and Ollie seemed to have simultaneously discovered the greatest news of their lives, Butler Gary finally noticed something rather concerning.


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