The Aftermath
"Have you arrived?"
A man with ash-grey hair and a deep, authoritative voice glared down with narrowed eyes at his daughter—the one lagging dreadfully behind his promising sons.
"...Yes, Father."
Answering him, her head bowed as she trembled in fear, was the illegitimate daughter of the count's house. Though borne from another woman's womb, she was undeniably of the count's own blood. Yet Sylvia dared not raise her head. Shrinking before that single, frosty greeting, she could hardly string words together. With no telling what rebuke might fall from his lips, she had to maintain the utmost courtly posture despite her aching, battered body.
Any outsider witnessing the scene would surely mistake them not for father and daughter, but for master and servant—bound strictly by subjugation. The count sat in his chair with overbearing authority, his disdainful glare pinned squarely on the crown of Sylvia's lowered head. When he finally parted his lips, his tone was even more coercive than usual.
"Word has already reached my ears. I am told you failed to handle the matter properly."
Sylvia had not yet been granted permission to speak, so she held her silence. Until the count finished his piece, she had to remain frozen in place without shifting an inch.
"Unlike you. Explain what happened."
Only when ordered to answer did she finally have leave to speak. Readjusting her rigid posture, she straightened her spine and took great care to adopt a deferential, demure tone so as not to displease him. That was the etiquette drilled into the count’s illegitimate daughter—the only demeanor she was permitted to maintain. Yet even with permission granted, a beat of hesitation hung in the air; she simply had no idea what words to offer first.
"I... I am deeply sorry. If you would only grant me another chance so that such a thing never happens again..."
"Are you asking me for a second chance, Sylvia?"
Sylvia flinched at the biting wrath laced in the count’s voice. To fail the duty entrusted to her meant facing an equivalent punishment. Having incurred his displeasure for the first time, she could not suppress her mounting panic.
"I-I will prove myself this time! Please, grant me an opportunity to redeem myself!"
To avoid being cast out, she had spent her life catering to his every whim, executing each task assigned to her with desperate diligence. Entering the Academy to elevate the prestige of House Coutelli had been an order given in the exact same vein. But compared to his two legitimate sons, Sylvia’s magical aptitude was noticeably lacking, prompting the count to click his tongue and abandon all high expectations.
The Coutelli family was the textbook epitome of authoritarian aristocracy; anyone who outlived their usefulness was ruthlessly discarded. Even his own flesh and blood were no exception. Several children had already been cast aside, leaving only the two legitimate heirs and a handful of retainers behind.
After everything I endured to survive... I cannot be cast out...!
Sylvia had fought tooth and nail to earn the count's favor, carrying out every order like a machine just to cling to survival. Once an aristocrat was excommunicated from their house, they fell to commoner status, stripped forever of the life they once knew. Worse, branded with the shame of having been cast out, they were treated with even greater contempt than ordinary commoners. To Sylvia, excommunication was synonymous with death. They became lower than ruined nobles, fodder for idle gossip among both commoners and aristocrats, surrounded on all sides by enemies with all backing gone. The fate of those excommunicated almost invariably ended in death. Even if their bodies survived, their minds shattered under the weight of it all.
Thus, begging for a chance to redeem herself was her desperate final struggle to stave off the executioner's blade of excommunication. And then, a faint glimmer of hope broke through for Sylvia. For the first time, the count offered a sliver of leniency.
"Very well. A mistake can happen once. See that you handle it properly this time."
"Y-Yes, Father...!"
"However, I will not tolerate a second failure."
Yet that slight concession came with a sheer cliff behind her back. There was no retreat left. For Sylvia, no option remained other than subduing Junon.
An office was a place where work had a habit of piling up whenever one stepped inside. Having been assigned offices in the past, he inwardly knew all too well that being given a desk meant: I'm dumping everything on you. Yet every time he looked at the relationship between the academy's policies and the towering stack of documents waiting for his review, his brow furrowed in disgust.
"To think the vice-principal and the professors governed the Academy like this."
Brushing back his hair, Professor Muniherr leaned his throbbing head against the chair and stared at the hopeless mountain of paperwork. Thanks to the evidence Ophelia had provided, they had succeeded in ousting the figurehead vice-principal. But now that he saw how these men had actually been handling academy affairs, only sighs spilled from his lips.
"Good grief... The more I look, the more I realize how much is utterly rotten."
Or rather, it was questionable whether unraveling this tangled web of contradictions was even possible in the first place. Though he had briefly held a professorship at Hardia in the past, he was a retired man who had devoted himself solely to scholarly research. For them to ask someone whose life was now dedicated to academia and research to take up the mantle of professorship again—did that make any sense?
And yet, looking at this mess, he could understand why they had pleaded with him so urgently. The rules they boasted as academy policy were nothing more than empty façades; gaping holes riddled the curriculum, breeding societal issues so rampant they threatened to shatter the very founding principles of the Grand Duchy's academy.
"All because corrupt bastards seized power and swung it about as they pleased."
He had not even made it through half the documents. Even though a few individuals sympathetic to the Grand Duchy, including Professor Jake, had winnowed down the pile, the problems showed no signs of diminishing. Even if he devised countermeasures, there was no silver bullet capable of slicing cleanly through the clash between entrenched academy customs and the laws of the Grand Duchy. Which left only one possible answer.
"Tear it all down and start from scratch."
A hardline approach was the only recourse. Proposing such a thing would trigger a storm of fierce backlash, even if the Emperor of the Artena Empire intervened in person. Yet unless someone stepped in to rip out the botched stitches and sew them anew, the fabric of Lebrant Academy could never be salvaged. If those crooked seams were not boldly sheared away and restitched, what little cloth remained would lose all function.
Professor Muniherr sorted the documents in order of priority and rose from his seat to report to the Grand Duke. Right at that moment...
Knock, knock.
"Excuse me, I came by because I have something to discuss with the vice-principal—"
This office had originally belonged to the vice-principal, who had either turned a blind eye to the academy's critical issues or handled them with utter incompetence. Thus, someone knocking on this door could mean only one thing.
"Pardon the intrus—huh?"
The door swung open, and the familiar face of his niece greeted Professor Muniherr's eyes.
"It has been a while, Renias."
"Uncle Muniherr, why are you here????"
The twin daughter of the friend who had once saved his life and his wife had grown up in the blink of an eye—no longer a child, but a mature young lady.
Pour.
With two cups of tea freshly brewed, the pair sat upon the sofa to catch up after their long time apart.
"You haven't changed a bit since back then. Have you been eating properly lately?"
"Sheesh! You nagged me so much about not being a picky eater that I still clean my plate, you know! And look how much taller I've gotten!"
"Pfft. And when are you going to surpass my height at that rate? When was it you declared, 'Just you wait, I'm going to grow taller than you, Uncle!'?"
"Oh, come on! I was just a kid who didn't know any better. Besides, I'm well above average height!"
"Haha. All right, all right. I'll drop it."
Renias puffed out her cheeks at Professor Muniherr, who was playfully teasing her after so long. Yet she truly had grown into a graceful young woman. Having watched over Renias since she was small, Professor Muniherr was genuinely pleased; thinking that the others ought to see her now, he took a slow sip of his tea.
"Anyway, I came here for something really important!"
They had bantered enough. In truth, Muniherr had been about to pry into why Renias had sought out the vice-principal's office in the first place.
"The vice-principal hasn't been around at all the past few days, so I couldn't visit. Do you know where he is? There's something I need to inform him about."
Unfortunately, the vice-principal Renias was looking for had already been dismissed and transferred straight to the Empire’s dungeon. Explaining that the man was an incompetent crook embezzling funds might be a bit too jarring for the still-innocent Renias.
"I will soon be taking over as vice-principal. He decided to... retire."
"Mmm... I see..."
"If you came for a consultation, you may speak to me. Though from now on, you'll have to call me 'Professor' instead of 'Uncle'."
Renias paused in thought for a moment before speaking, her expression hardening with a gravity she had never shown before.
"Did you know that... discrimination based on class rank is happening at Lebrant Academy?"
It was an issue concerning the dark underbelly of the Academy—the internal realities among the students that even Lady Ophelia had failed to uncover and report. Information that originally should have come to light much later, only after the imperial envoy finished their formal investigation, had been brought forward by a step. All because Junon had met Renias and led her to witness the dark underbelly of the Academy at the banquet hall entrance.