Ana followed Eva; even if Eva hadn't asked him to, he would still have come to her, but ofcouse, after changing back to his 'normal body'.
This time, Eva took him to the main Academy office, a big space, however, empty currently due to a certain commotion which Ana wasn't aware about.
"What are your contract conditions with him?" Eva came upon her desk and sat down.
"No specific conditions actually…" Ana shaked his petite body nervously, trying to act innocent in order to fool Eva, and also, he understood that he couldn't behave like he normally does, so he quickly came up with a believable persona that Eva wouldn't find suspicious.
"Then is it a permanent contract?" Eva intertwined her fingers and rested her chin on them before looking at the girl she had picked up while killing the academy intruders.
To Ana though, it looked like he was being interrogated for a crime, but he couldn't understand why since he hadn't been the one to attack those men first, and killing them was absolutely just a part of his 'self defence'.
"No, it's not permanent…" Ana obviously had no intentions of keeping any connections with this side, so he replied accordingly.
Eva deceitfully covered her mouth with her alluring hands but Ana could still see her sigh in relief a little.
"How many other hunters do you have?" But she returned to her questioning soon though.
"I only have 'him'?" Ana acted shy, covering his mouth like a stupid young girl, thinking his acting was going great. "And no one else…"
"Tch." Eva, however, didn't like it, and she clicked her tongue in anger; her eyes, which had become more red, bore into Ana's pretentiousness.
But at that moment, Ana's smart watch rang and Ana checked the message he had received from his degenerate roommate.
[Toti: Where are you, Ana?
Toti: Klara is continuously asking about you.
Toti: You should come to the gymnasium, right now.
Ana: I'm busy
Toti: Huh? What happened? Is something wrong?
Ana: Nothing is wrong, I'm only hanging out with an old friend. Just tell me when the classes start in case I don't return tonight
Toti: Oh sure, they start early, 8 am. First class is physical education…]
"Who are you texting?" Eva, after seeing Ana type with his little fingers, asked him about his chatting partner as she picked up the documents required to enrol 'Reina'.
"Oh no one. It's just a friend." Ana replied with a loving smile.
Rip
Seeing Ana's cuteness, Eva ripped the documents she was holding, wanting to ask 'her' who this 'friend' was and how long she'd known him.
But she stopped herself from killing her new student and instead asked Ana, "Reina, correct? What is your full name?"
"Uh…" Ana thought about it for a second. "It's Reina Viktor Kramling."
Yeah, that's the best he could come up with.
Eva glared at him for a second before jotting down 'her' details and proceeding to ask Ana the next question, "And what is your Matriarch Rank?"
"Rank?" Ana didn't expect this question, so he was surprised because he hadn't prepared for it beforehand. "Uh, it's…"
"You're unranked." Eva got up from her seat, and went to a nearby desk. "A contract with an unranked girl? What was he thinking?"
Eva sighed as she took out another one of those crystal balls that she had used to test Ana earlier in the day, and looked at it with a depressed face.
"He could have just come to me if he was that desperate…" Eva softly mumbled to herself, wishing she could have met Ana earlier, and not knowing that was he not contracted to anyone yet.
"Uhm, Madam Poli?" Ana, on the other hand, had no clue what Eva was saying.
"Tch." Eva clicked her tongue again and offered Ana the crystal ball. "Put your mana in it."
She, without any pleasure or happiness, looked at him sternly, carefully monitoring everything that Ana was doing.
Ana, on receiving the ranking machine, again found himself with a 'little problem'.
The problem, this time though, was that Ana was far too overpowered for that machine and even a little bit of his super body's mana would destroy that machine and Ana, very well, knew it.
"Uh…" So he again started to think about a plan to deceive, while still acting naive and gullible. "How do you do this again…?"
"..." Eva seemed to hate Reina's cuteness, so she crossed her arms in reply, and not actually verbally answer Ana's slutty question.
Ana realized that he wasn't going to be able to talk Eva out of this so he decided to rely on his old trick again.
"What's that! A cockroach!" Ana pointed to the opposite wall, intending to deceive Eva while he worked out a way to trick the machine again in the meantime.
"!!!" Eva's face dropped, and cold shivers ran down her spine as she began to tremble in fear, but she didn't turn around, her plan was to fully monitor her new student afterall. "Do-Don't try to fool me. There is a pest control machine installed here."
"But that really is a cockroach, Madam Pol-"
Slam
Eva slammed her foot on the ground, making a noticeable depression in the marble floor.
"Focus on your task." Eva's crossed arms quivered in frenzy. "And do not talk."
She didn't want to hear that a disgusting, black winged, dirty creature with spiked limbs was flying behind her, so she distracted herself by scolding Ana.
Ana had no choice now, he had to do this. Win or fail, he now faced a problem of having to reveal his super powered identity.
Gulping a little, Ana decided to pour the least amount of mana that he could imagine, into the crystal ball, deciding to get the worst rank possible in order to not appear suspicious.
The machine however was calibrated to read the mana density, and not the quantity, so Ana's plan was bound to fail, but lucky for him, his screen opened up just in time to save him.
[Matriarch System Unlocked]
[Currently Contracted Characters: 0]
[Matriarch Rank being set to F]
[Contract more Characters and cultivate their powers to increase Matriarch Rank]
[Pending Contract Requests: 1]
As soon as Ana touched the crystal ball, the letter 'F' popped up.
The reason that happened, is because Ana's system deemed his matriarch powers, that is his boosting ability, to the lowest level, creating a different mana from the destructive one flowing inside his SSS body, in order to fulfil the criteria of the game that required a Matriarch to have a special awakening, different from normal hunters; so his system, trying to mimic the mana common in this world's matriarchs that could both destroy and provide boosts to their hunters in the form of support, inadvertently created a new one that could take up the role of support.
[Matriarch System being linked to male body (F)...]
[Linking complete]
His system then linked this newly formed mana to Ana's weaker male body, segregating the roles of the two bodies in a more defined manner, his female side tasked with the role to fight and his weak male side, tasked with the job to support.
[Patriarch System currently active]
And Ana had unknowingly become the first male matriarch, or better called, Patriarch, a person capable of boosting not just hunters, but also, matriarchs.
"That's it, then." Eva grabbed the ranking ball and went back to her seat, thinking that Ana was an idiot for contracting himself to such a weak girl, and ofcourse, she didn't know that Ana, himself, was F-rank.
She took up her pen and began to finish Reina's information when suddenly, a thought, an unlikely possibility, very rare in this world, and only possible among friendly Matriarchs, flickered in the back of her mind.
"Does your hunter…" Eva was talking about Ana. "Is he contracted to someone else too?"
Ana remembered Toti's speech about fierce competition, so he said what he believed to be normal.
"No, he only has me." Ana smiled brightly, thinking he was being smart and honest about this non existent person.
Crack
But Eva's rage boiled over and she cracked the pen in her hand, a mix of emotions making her heartache and a little sense of relief that she only had to kill one person if worse came to worst.
She finally decided to properly ask what relation Reina had with Ana, ready to stab her lover if she found he was cheating on her, but just when she parted her lips to word out her sentence, someone knocked at the door and came in.
"Poli, where were you?" A girl with chiselled muscles came in.