Shulim arrived at the prep school.
By that point, plenty of boys and girls around her age were already streaming through the gates.
"Morning, Shulim. Long time no see."
"Morning."
After greeting a few familiar faces, Shulim headed for her classroom.
"Well, well. Shulim. Showing up at this hour on the very first day of the new term? I swear, you’ve never been late once in your life."
Just as she was about to reach the classroom, a blonde girl with twin curled ponytails stepped into her path.
She wore a pretty gothic-style dress, crisp white thigh-high socks, and a brand-new pair of little leather shoes. Her expression had that proud, haughty look that seemed glued to her face.
"Unlike me. I was here ages ago. That’s the sort of thing a real noble should do."
Shulim looked at her for a second.
"Um... sorry, who are you again?"
The blonde girl’s face froze.
Then she exploded.
"Fran. I’m Fran Banton. How do you not remember that?"
"Fran Banton..."
Shulim paused, then nodded.
"Oh, right. Fran. Sorry. You changed so much, I didn’t recognize you."
She said it in such a flat voice that it somehow made it worse.
Fran was not fooled for even a second.
"Oh, come on. We haven’t been apart that long. What huge change could there possibly have been? You definitely never remembered me in the first place, did you?"
Shulim said nothing.
"Wait. Don’t just go silent. Why are you suddenly silent? That makes it sound like I’m right. That’s awful. You really didn’t remember me."
"Students in the hall, please get inside. Class is about to start."
The teacher’s voice from the corridor rescued Shulim for the moment.
"It’s time to go in. Whatever this is, we can talk about it later... Fran?"
With that, Shulim slipped past her and went straight into the classroom.
"Huh? Wait. What was that pause supposed to mean? You still didn’t remember my name properly, did you? Hey. Don’t walk away. Explain yourself."
Shulim ignored her and quickly entered the room.
Behind her, Fran clearly had no intention of letting it go that easily and looked ready to keep going.
"That student over there, please enter the classroom at once."
"Mmph..."
Called out by the teacher, Fran had no choice but to stop harassing Shulim for now. She shot an irritated look at Shulim’s back before following her inside.
...
"Students, congratulations on entering a new school year. You learned quite a bit last term. But..."
The teacher stood at the front of the room wearing a smile that looked warm and gentle enough.
No one could see the malice hidden underneath it.
"What I’d really like to know is how much of it you still remember after such a long break. So..."
Slowly, very calmly, he pulled out a thick stack of test papers from beneath the lectern and slapped them down on top of it.
"So today, I’ve decided to give all of you a comprehensive test. Aren’t you excited?"
"A test? Right now?"
"That’s way too sudden."
"Oh no, I forgot most of it."
"Please don’t do this on the first day back."
"If I bomb this, am I going to get yelled at at home...?"
The classroom instantly filled with groans and despair.
It did absolutely nothing to stop the test from happening.
The exam began soon after, and once it ended, the teacher graded everything right away, apparently fully determined to make sure every parent learned exactly how hard their children had worked over the break.
When the results were ready, he announced them in class.
"...And in first place, Shulim Hayeral."
The moment Shulim’s name was called, every eye in the room turned toward her.
One gaze in particular burned a little hotter than the rest.
"No way. How did I lose to Shulim?"
Several rows behind her, a blonde girl with twin curled ponytails clutched her test paper and glared at the back of Shulim’s head, practically grinding her teeth.
"This makes no sense. I’ve had private tutors teaching me since I was little. Everything taught at prep school, I already studied in advance before anyone else. And I reviewed during the break too. House Hayeral can’t possibly have enough money to hire tutors like that. So how did I lose to Shulim in grades?"
"This is infuriating. Completely infuriating. Something is obviously wrong here."
"I’m going to figure it out."
Fran had already been holding a grudge because of what happened that morning.
Now even the grades she was most confident in had been beaten by Shulim.
The frustration and humiliation of the two things together made her swear to herself that she would absolutely find a way to get even.
As for Shulim, she had no idea whatsoever that someone had now firmly marked her as a target. She simply sat there with the same blank, expressionless look as always.
Elsewhere in the room, because of the test results, the class had descended into noisy chaos. Plenty of students were already worrying about how they were supposed to explain their scores once they got home, and hardly anyone was listening to the teacher anymore.
That gave him a headache.
So he decided to drop a different announcement.
"All right, quiet down. I have something to tell you."
The room settled, at least for the moment.
The teacher swept his gaze across the class, then spoke slowly.
"You’ve probably already guessed it. That’s right. Starting tomorrow, you’ll officially begin magic instruction."
"What? Seriously?"
"Oh right, that starts now."
"Finally. We’re really getting magic lessons."
The whole classroom exploded in excitement.
In an instant, everyone forgot all about their test scores.
Watching the room become even louder than before, the teacher began to regret not waiting until dismissal to mention it.
Magic instruction was the single most important part of prep school.
Really, it could be said that prep school existed for that purpose above all else. The reason magic education did not begin the moment students enrolled was simple. Given their age and lack of basic knowledge, trying to throw them straight into magic right away was unrealistic.
That was why the schools began with general education first.
After all, magic was a serious academic discipline, and a complicated one at that. The theories and knowledge involved were so deep that calling them mysterious would not be an exaggeration. Asking children who could not even read yet to study magic would have been absurd.
Some might wonder why prep schools were able to teach magic to such large numbers of students in the first place.
To answer that, you had to understand where prep schools came from.
Prep schools had been created by the Adventurers’ Guild, an organization spread across the entire world. The Church of the Seven Heavens provided funding, while every race and nation contributed people and labor. That was how the system had grown into a network of public institutions that covered nearly every country.
The purpose was clear.
It was meant to produce, on the largest scale possible, a pool of fighting strength that could be mobilized at any time. That way, if the world ever faced another extinction-level threat, it would not again be crippled by a lack of soldiers or by an ordinary population with no ability to defend itself.
Ordinarily, an institution with such huge ambitions and so many different powers involved behind it would never have come into being.
But the severe shortage of lower- and mid-level fighters had once nearly destroyed the world.
During the Demon King invasion before the last one, Hymriel had suffered a devastating defeat. The entire world had come frighteningly close to total collapse. In the end, victory had only been achieved because the Six Heroes perished together with the Demon King.
The cost of that war had been almost unmatched in all of Hymriel’s history.
The order of the world had very nearly been shattered. Civilization itself had almost broken completely, to the point that even the calendar had to be reset. That was how the New Divine Calendar came to be.
The pain of that war forced the survivors to confront the greatest weakness in Hymriel.
And from that resolve, prep schools were born.
The rise of prep schools produced huge numbers of lower- and mid-level combatants, especially at the bottom end.
After all, most people in this world had only Rank D or even Rank E magical talent. Before the New Divine Calendar, such people would simply have been dismissed as untalented. Many would never even have been given the right to study magic at all.
Prep schools changed that.
They gave everyone the same structured education.
In the end, countless people who would once have had no chance to even touch magic gained access to it.
Ordinary civilians, the kind who in the past could only run in terror from a single slime or goblin and wait helplessly for adventurers to arrive, if they ever arrived at all, now gained the ability to protect themselves.
Of course, prep school education also brought its share of social problems.
But after the astonishing results it produced in the last great war, every voice raised against it vanished.
By now, prep schools had existed for nearly eight hundred years.
Over that time, they had developed a full and highly efficient educational system, one that in many cases was even more effective than the magic tutors hired by ordinary noble families.
That was why even noble children like Fran, whose families could afford private tutors and even personal magic instructors, still chose to attend prep school.