Late one evening, after the sun had completely sunk below the horizon.
‘CRASH—!’
A loud sound of something shattering rang through one of the offices in the Department of Swordsmanship’s faculty building.
“Haah, haah, haah....”
Professor Oliver Finn, the owner of the office and the man responsible for the noise,
Repeatedly drew and released ragged breaths, his face flushed red with agitation.
The whiskey glass he had been holding had already smashed against the office wall and shattered so completely that its original shape was unrecognizable.
Amid the heavy scent of alcohol filling the room,
Professor Oliver Finn read the letter in his hand once again.
『Until proper instruction has been provided to Luke Raesion, the eldest son of the venerable House of Raesion, we will temporarily suspend our patronage of Professor Oliver Finn.
Our house expects the professor in question to take appropriate measures. Should those measures not be properly carried out, we will request that another supervising professor be assigned....』
“Damn it!”
Professor Oliver spat out a curse filled with rage as he confirmed that the contents of the letter remained unchanged no matter how many times he read it.
Luke Raesion, eldest son of the House of Raesion.
That was the name of the student Conrad Ferdalos had burned with Flame Fortress and sent to the Holy Church before the new semester began.
“If. That. Damned. Little. Bastard. Hadn’t. Pulled. That. Fucking. Stunt...!!”
The brown letter paper in his hands was mercilessly torn apart and scattered across the office floor.
Fragments of paper in several other colors, presumably from letters sent by other families, were already strewn around Professor Oliver alongside the letter from House of Raesion.
The scraps of paper, torn apart without restraint, indirectly revealed the full extent of his fury.
“That damned little bastard from the Department of Magic....”
Professor Oliver stared blankly out the window as though in a daze and recalled someone’s face.
Conrad Ferdalos, a second-year student in the Academy’s Department of Magic.
He was the eldest son of House of Ferdalos and a name synonymous with the Department of Magic’s dullard.
Had he not heard that Conrad had barely been capable of using First-Circle magic until last year?
It already made his stomach churn that someone from the Department of Magic had defeated his students.
The fact that the culprit was neither an upperclassman nearing graduation, a genius who defined an era,
Nor someone from a powerful family that would defend his actions made his stomach twist several times over.
Had the bastard met even one of those three conditions,
Professor Oliver could have used it as an excuse and skillfully replied to the letters demanding that he take responsibility.
However, seven Department of Swordsmanship students being defeated by the Department of Magic’s dullard was not something that could possibly be dismissed with an excuse.
“That insolent little bastard. Why did he have to interfere with my students for no reason...?”
The story that students under Professor Oliver Finn’s supervision had been defeated by a single student from the Department of Magic was already quietly spreading throughout the Academy.
Conrad Ferdalos and Stella Arwen, the people directly involved in the incident, had kept their mouths shut.
However, it was impossible to silence the Holy Church personnel responsible for treating the injured students.
Professor Oliver’s students were already a notorious group of troublemakers.
Their downfall became an entertaining story for the decent students and a fine topic to chew over with their drinks.
Naturally, the reputation of Professor Oliver, who supervised them, plummeted to the ground along with theirs.
“Because of that bastard’s damned meddling, the reputation I spent years building has fallen into the dirt.
Even the private patronage I received from those families has been cut off all at once....”
Professor Oliver followed several criteria when selecting the students he would supervise.
First, he secured students from the best noble or wealthiest families possible and received private donations under the pretense of instructional fees.
Whether those students caused trouble or committed some other offense, he allowed them to do as they pleased and received favorable evaluations from them in return.
He also assigned other skilled students to guard them so that no one could retaliate against his reckless disciples.
Professor Oliver had quietly lined his own pockets beneath what he considered a perfect plan.
However, the fragments of letters from several families scattered across the floor proved that his plan had completely fallen apart.
The letter announcing the suspension of private patronage had not come solely from House of Raesion.
Similar letters had already arrived from the families of several other students he supervised, not merely from the group led by Luke Raesion.
House of Graybeard, the Sepia Trading Company, and House of Rosewin.
The precise details written in each letter differed slightly.
However, every one of them included a statement that they would suspend their patronage of Professor Oliver or cease sending educational support funds for the time being.
After reading the same message several times over, Professor Oliver Finn was consumed by rage so intense that he could no longer control it.
“He should’ve just kept looking the other way like he always did. Now he has to make a fucking spectacle of himself like some champion of justice. Damn it!”
After gathering and organizing the testimony of his defeated students,
Professor Oliver learned that Conrad Ferdalos had first defeated three of the seven through surprise attacks.
His students claimed they had merely been caught off guard by the use of magic.
Had they regained their composure and fought properly, they insisted they would never have been defeated so easily.
Even though a mere dullard from the Department of Magic had defeated seven students,
Professor Oliver decided to conclude that it had happened through nothing more than luck.
He immediately prepared a very special plan of revenge for Conrad Ferdalos, the man who had utterly ruined his arrangements.
“That damned little bastard. I’ll make sure he pays for carelessly destroying my life.”
Professor Oliver imagined Conrad being beaten to a pulp and collapsing before countless students because of his plan.
A sinister smile quietly spread across his face.
***
That day, I had eaten with Lulu for the first time in quite a while.
Several different matters had overlapped and prevented me from visiting her.
Lulu also seemed to have been busy with matters of her own, since she had not contacted me at all.
Including the time before my regression, it was my first meal with her in nearly a year and a half.
“It’s hard just to get one meal together.”
“...Tell me about it.”
Lulu offered the simple response to my remark,
Then took a bite from the chicken-cutlet sandwich in front of her.
“I was too busy to contact you at the beginning of the semester, but why didn’t you contact me even once this entire time?”
“Are you asking because you really don’t know?”
“I’m asking because I don’t know.”
The girl with black cat ears stared at me as though she could not believe the question.
Then she quietly confessed why she had refrained from contacting me first.
“Even though we’re friends, your fiancée wouldn’t like it if you and I kept meeting alone.”
“Huh?”
“I didn’t want to invite some pointless misunderstanding, so I kept my distance. If I get dragged into a romantic feud between nobles, a commoner like me will be the first one cast aside.”
Hmm.
I did not understand a single thing she had said from beginning to end.
What fiancée?
And what romantic feud was she talking about?
“I have a fiancée?”
“That blond freshman you’ve been with all the time lately. Professor McDowell’s daughter.”
“Stella?”
“I thought we were fairly close, so I’m a little disappointed that you kept your fiancée a secret from me.”
Where had this misunderstanding even begun?
There were facts that needed correcting, so I offered the girl sitting across from me an explanation that was not quite an excuse.
“Let me make this clear first. Stella and I aren’t engaged.”
“Then what is she? Your girlfriend?”
“We’re nothing more than an ordinary senior and junior.
We’ve happened to run into each other a lot recently, so we’ve spent quite a bit of time together. It isn’t the kind of relationship you need to worry about, so don’t get the wrong idea.”
We had genuinely only happened to meet frequently, so it felt unfair that she had misunderstood our relationship because of that.
“Senior Conrad, what a coincidence! Are you going to eat now?”
“Senior Conrad, what a coincidence! Did your class just end?”
“Senior Conrad, what a coincidence! Are you exercising again today?”
...Come to think of it, I did feel as though I had been running into Stella unusually often lately.
At that frequency, perhaps there really had been enough room for a misunderstanding.
“You’re really just an ordinary senior and junior? Even though you belong to different departments? You’re incredibly shy around strangers.”
“We kept running into each other because of various incidents, so we became close quickly.
You already know how I am. Once I let my guard down around someone, I become close to them quickly.”
“Hmm. I suppose that’s true.”
She crossed her arms and leaned back against her chair, letting out a sigh of relief.
She looked as though something that had been troubling her had finally been resolved.
The black tail extending from behind her swayed gently.
“Seriously? I got worked up over nothing.”
Lulu’s concern was entirely understandable.
Had Stella and I truly been engaged, and had Stella developed negative feelings toward Lulu because she was my female friend,
The person most likely to suffer the greatest harm would have been Lulu, a commoner caught between nobles.
Stella would never do such a thing, of course.
However, it was entirely possible in an ordinary relationship between nobles and commoners.
Since nobles and commoners lived together at the Academy,
Lulu was far from the only student who could be used as an example of such a tragedy.
“Ah, come to think of it, did you hear that story?”
“What story?”
“You know that Raesion gang from the Department of Swordsmanship? Apparently, someone finally handed them the justice they deserved.”
...Could she be talking about me?
“I heard seven of them were beaten by one student from the Department of Magic. I overheard some Holy Church priests talking about it.”
She was talking about me.
I had repeatedly warned Stella to keep quiet because troublesome rumors would spread otherwise.
It seemed there was no way to prevent the rumor from leaking through the Holy Church personnel who had treated those bastards.
“Come to think of it, you’re also in the Department of Magic. Do you know who did it?”
“......”
“You aren’t answering, so I suppose you don’t know either.”
I spent a moment wondering how I should explain it.
Fortunately, before I could offer an excuse, Lulu misunderstood the situation on her own and reached her own conclusion.
“Anyway, it was so satisfying! I’ve wanted to beat the shit out of those bastards at least once!”
“Did they do something to you too?”
“They got me indirectly a few times.
Last year, those bastards were smoking in front of the Department of Technology dormitory, accidentally set fire to the flower bed, and ran away.”
“Come to think of it, that did happen.”
Every piece of circumstantial evidence had pointed toward Luke Raesion’s group.
For some reason, however, the investigation had ended with the case remaining unsolved and eventually fading away.
Seeing how even such troublesome rumors were settled without incident, Professor Oliver’s political ability within the Academy was certainly considerable.
The greatest problem was that he used that ability solely to protect his own students.
“Are your midterm preparations going well?”
“I’m not the one preparing them. The professor is.”
“Fair enough.”
“Just thinking about what kind of skull-splitting traps and locks Professor Trea has prepared this time makes me sick.”
Naturally, the Academy had several departments unrelated to combat.
The midterm and final evaluation examinations had certain elements in common regardless of department.
However, the Midterm Comprehensive Evaluation and Final Comprehensive Evaluation used clearly different standards for combat and noncombat departments.
They could hardly push students from Lulu’s Department of Technology or the Department of Alchemy into an arena and evaluate them through fistfights.
Instead, those departments conducted specialized practical assessments and used the results for evaluation.
Of course, even the combat departments did not all fight in the same manner.
For one-on-one evaluations such as evaluation matches, students were always paired against others from the same department.
For example, what would happen if a fast swordsman fought a mage with poor stamina?
If they possessed roughly equal skill, the mage would be at a considerable disadvantage.
None of the mage’s attacks would reach the swordsman, or even if they did, they would fail to inflict a fatal wound.
The moment the distance between them closed, the mage would be struck by the swordsman and collapse.
Therefore, except during special event matches that did not affect grades, It was reasonable to assume that students from different departments would almost never face each other in an evaluation match.
“Since you’re done eating, why don’t you check the matchups? They should be posted on the Academy bulletin board by now.”
“Good idea. I should check before going to my next class.”
In truth, I already knew who my opponent was supposed to be.
If the future continued as planned, I would be facing a fourth-year senior from the Department of Magic who was nearing graduation.
Naturally, I had trained for the evaluation match under the assumption that I would fight that senior.
Unlike in my previous life, I was confident that I could win this evaluation match with ease.
With that thought, I walked toward the bulletin board displaying the evaluation matchups.
The moment I checked the name of the person paired against me, “Department of Swordsmanship... Dike Osman?”
A name that seemed to announce that the future had changed was posted directly beside mine.