61 – Playing With Fire

Dave actually enjoyed a nice morning flirting with Kate. More of their classmates were paying attention to them now and he even caught Mara glaring at the two of them a few times. She actually seemed more interested in the two of them than her boyfriend that she was currently disappointed in. It actually seemed like she was pouting. The moment Dave caught her looking she would look away though trying to feign ignorance.

Kate nudged him with her elbow. "Why does Mara keep staring at us?" she asked.

Dave shrugged. "No idea, she has been doing it since class started," he said nonchalantly.

A smirk formed on her lips. "I heard some rumours saying you were in love with her and pursuing her for years, but that she wanted nothing to do with you," she said.

Dave rolled his eyes. "You shouldn't believe everything you hear. That only contains a little bit of truth," he said.

Though he had loved her they had been childhood friends and she had been the one to pursue him at first. Her rejection of him had only been something of the last few years since high school started. Likely due to her originally believing he held a lot of promise and once she stopped believing that was the case she dropped him like he was some kind of piece of trash.

Kate smiled playfully. "Well I think we should show her what she missed out on," she said.

Dave smiled. This was something he could get behind. "Oh yeah? What were you thinking of?" he asked.

Kate looked over at Mara to make sure she was paying attention. After ensuring she was she leaned in closer to Dave pressing her chest up against him and wrapping her arms around him. "Well we could start by flaunting our relationship," she said.

The idea of showing off to one of her bullies and also flaunting her relationship with her boyfriend held great appeal to her. She might be biased, but she felt Dave was much better than Jeffrey and thought Mara was the biggest fool in school for the way she treated him. The feeling of taking something away from her main tormentor definitely didn't hurt either. She just needed to make sure Mara understood this too.

She looked up into Dave's eyes her head slowly raising closer to his. Her eyes darted to his lips. She licked her own lips. Dave noticed what she was doing with a smile and lowered his head to match hers his lips moving closer to her which were starting to pucker.

Suddenly they were interrupted by a load cough. "Could you save it for outside of my class?" their teacher asked them with an annoyed expression embarrassing the two of them. They quickly broke apart again sitting more properly behind their desk.

Dave nodded seriously. "Yes sir," he said as if he hadn't just been caught.

Kate had a heavy blush on her cheeks. She had completely forgotten about where they were distracted by her goals.

Their second period was English with Ms. Samoine.

Ms. Samoine handed out the test sheets for everyone to pass back.

"Alright, you have 45 minutes to complete the test, when I announce the end of the test put down your pens," she said.

Dave was surprised by just how easy the test seemed to be. After performing amazingly during primary and middle school he had struggled academically for most of high school. Not only did he remember everything from his first life, but since geography, history and a bunch of other classes were entirely new for this new world making much of his education useless he struggled far more than he had expected.

It didn't help that although people were unaware of the special abilities some had the curriculum was affected by the presence of a much larger minority of very gifted students raising the ceiling well beyond what he had been capable of. However every since he got [Enhanced Neuroplasticity] repetition was barely even necessary. Though understanding wasn't improved as much recollection became easy and near flawless. He only needed to hear or read something once and most things would stick in his memory. It was almost like a light form of eidetic memory.

He was finally able to reap the benefits. The questions were easy as remembering what was in the books took virtually no effort enabling him to breeze through the multiple choice questions in just a few minutes. The open ended questions took slightly longer, but for a test they were given 45 minutes to complete it only took him about a third of that to answer everything. Most of the time spent was just the time it took to note down all the answers itself rather than figuring them out.

At this rate even this one ability should make most of school quite easy. Any subject focused on rote memorisation over understanding of some type of theory like math would be easy requiring minimal effort going forward. That would save him a lot of time for other important things such as improving his physique, training his combat skills, and making money. If only he could also get another brain related ability that improved actual intelligence to a greater degree like Jeffrey's then all of school would become a breeze. He could only keep grinding away at things until then.

He flipped over his paper. He was already eager to find out how he had performed. He wouldn't know just how effective his new ability was until he received the concrete results.

Ms. Samoine looked at him in surprise seeing him being the first to finish. This in itself wouldn't have been too surprising as he could have just given up, but his confident demeanour told her this might not be the case this time. She shook her head. 'It would be too much to expect good results from him, but maybe he would beat his usual bottom of the barrel scores,' she thought to herself.