Preliminary Test
"A little more of this, please."
"Here you are."
"Thanks."
At the Academy, meals were taken in the dining hall.
The vast cafeteria could seat twenty-four hundred people at once, and under the principle that the Empire's young shoots deserved nothing less than quality food, skilled chefs worked around the clock with the finest ingredients, the kitchens never going dark, so that students always had three excellent, delicious meals a day.
Students boarding at the Academy could eat their fill of good food whenever they wanted, free to pour themselves into their studies.
"Man… that looks amazing."
Rosaria had come to the dining hall again today, her stomach growling after morning classes. She piled her tray high with the day's main event—lamb steak, heaped like a mountain—and swallowed hard.
Back at the estate, she hadn't exactly been unhappy with the food. Still, for a dyed-in-the-wool Korean, meals without kimchi and rice had grown steadily more tiresome. Meat dishes, salads, and bread had been plentiful enough, and as she got used to them she could at least force them down.
The Academy, though, was on another level entirely.
Unlike the still-struggling county, specialty ingredients arrived from every corner of the Empire, and the menu changed every single day. That alone made eating here a little more interesting. Fish tomorrow, lamb steak today, roast duck the day after.
"Alright… where should I sit…"
Tray loaded with lamb, Rosaria glanced around, hunting for a seat. A week and more into the semester, she was still eating alone. The students who shared her classes were so thoroughly terrified of her that the moment they spotted her in a hallway outside of class, they bolted. Any chance of making friends her own age had gone up in smoke.
"I mean… come on, how old am I? Hanging out with kids like these… Better off alone!"
Is this what returning students feel like…?
She rationalized it however she could, but the sudden heat prickling at her eyes was probably just her imagination.
And then—
"Oh! If it isn't Big Sis!"
"…Huh?"
Someone had spotted her and called out in a booming voice.
"What, Letten? That you?"
"Yes, ma'am! Good day to you!"
The voice belonged to none other than Letten—the same Letten who, on the first day of class, had been thrashed within an inch of his life by Rosaria. He had picked a fight with her and even challenged her to a spar, but unlike the other students, getting beaten black and blue had completely flipped his attitude. Ever since, he had served her with almost painful deference.
"Don't you hate me, though? I beat the hell out of you."
"Not at all! Before I picked a fight with you, Big Sis, I was nothing but a newborn pup! I couldn't even gauge my opponent's strength and put on airs over nothing but appearances—you taught me a valuable lesson! How could I possibly resent you for that?"
"Uh… right. Well, if you say so."
When she asked why he was so formal, his eyes lit up and he launched into an eager monologue that left Rosaria slightly overwhelmed.
"Well then! Enjoy your meal!"
"Yeah. See you around."
"Yes, Big Sis!"
"…Kid's got good manners, at least."
Letten bowed at a crisp ninety degrees both coming and going, then hurried off. Rosaria watched him go with a small, private smile.
"Anyway, time to eat—huh?"
While she'd been distracted by Letten, her steak had started to cool. She scanned for a seat so she could shovel it into her stomach before it went cold—and spotted a familiar face.
"What's he doing here?"
Far from the center of the hall, tucked into a corner seat by himself, sat Felix.
The dining hall was open not only to students but to the professors on staff as well; anyone could eat in peace.
"Been a while since I've seen that face. Might as well eat together."
Pleased at the chance to catch up with her own blood—she'd barely seen him since the new term started—Rosaria headed straight over.
"…So if I rotate the formula like this… and add the equation here…"
"Hey. What are you doing?"
"…Huh? Oppa?"
"…Have you even been sleeping?"
He'd been muttering to himself, pen flying across his notebook, when Rosaria dropped into the seat across from him and got a good look at his face. She blinked in mild shock. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and his half-lidded gaze kept drifting as if consciousness itself were slipping away—clear signs of severe sleep deprivation.
"I've been a little busy lately, so I haven't slept much. It's not that bad."
Felix waved off her concern like it was nothing.
"Busy with what?"
"They asked me to overhaul the magic circles for the midterm exams. Turns out the existing ones were all running on pure guesswork, so I've been pouring time into fixing them—and, well—yaaaawn—I've been losing sleep over it."
"Midterms? You mean that joint exam thing?"
"That's the one. The circles are for that."
"So what exactly is this joint exam?"
The phrase snagged her attention, and she pressed him for details.
"The joint exam is where students—especially the combat track, front-line battle mages, that sort—form teams and clear a dungeon. Roughly speaking… think of it like an RPG."
"…Oh? A dungeon? An RPG? Sounds fun just hearing about it. How does it work, though? You said this world has monsters, so… do they fight for real?"
"Not exactly real—but close enough to feel real?"
"…Come again?"
"Simply put, it's something like virtual reality. They build a testing ground inside the Academy shaped like a dungeon, then use magic stones to construct creatures that look and feel almost like real monsters, and students fight those."
Combat-track students at the Academy generally faced two paths after graduation: enlist as Imperial soldiers and march to war, or become mercenaries and delve into dungeons hunting treasure. As a result, the Academy thoroughly taught monster ecology, labyrinth response, combat against monsters, and how to coordinate as a team inside a maze. The joint exam was tailor-made for grading all of it at once—teamwork, combat skill, labyrinth survival, the works.
"Sounds like a blast."
"The problem is they asked me to help with the magic circles that drive those monsters… The behavior patterns were fixed and obvious, so students were getting tips from seniors who'd already taken the exam and clearing it way too easily. That's what caused the mess."
Because the tests used golem-like constructs shaped from magic stones rather than live monsters, the patterns repeated, and the labyrinth layouts had their own regularities. These days, advice from well-connected seniors and even secretly circulated dungeon-clear guides floated around, making it nearly impossible to measure a student's true ability. The Academy had been tearing its hair out over it.
That was when Felix—already showing genius for reinterpreting magic circles and inventing new spells—proved his worth, and they came to him for help almost immediately.
"So basically the answer key's circulating, and you're making the problems harder?"
"Exactly. But the magic formulas they had set up were basically spaghetti code… Rewriting everything from scratch is fun, but I'm running out of time."
"Yeesh… Sounds rough. I have absolutely no idea what any of that means."
And so Felix was happily developing magic circles even as exhaustion chased him out of sleep. Rosaria, a complete outsider to magic, could only guess that it must be hard and leave it at that.
Then—
Poof!
"Ah, Ariel. There you are."
"Mom! Food!"
"Alright, alright. I'll cut you some."
"Hehe!"
Out of empty air, the wind spirit Ariel popped into existence on Rosaria's shoulder and immediately begged for food. Rosaria sliced the mountain of meat she'd brought into bite-sized pieces and passed them over.
Ariel had an uncanny knack for appearing with a poof! at every meal without being called, then cheerfully demolishing Rosaria's food.
"Yummy! Yummy!"
"Is it good?"
"Yeah! More! Mom!"
"Go on, eat as much as you want."
"…The more I think about it, the weirder it is."
"Hm?"
Felix watched Rosaria steadily carving meat for the endlessly demanding Ariel and murmured to himself.
"Ariel, I mean. She's a spirit—how does she eat? What happens to the food she swallows? Why does a spirit need meals in the first place? The more I think about it, the more I want to know."
"……Ariel's off-limits. If you're going to experiment, go play with Tene."
His muttering sped up, eyes starting to gleam, and Rosaria shut him down by bringing up Tene.
"Aww, come ooon… Do you have any idea how rare spirits are?"
"Dragons are rarer."
"I can work with Tene whenever I feel like it…"
"Treating an actual dragon like that—you're probably the only person in the world who would."
"By that logic, a dragon who puts on a maid uniform and cleans because she wants to come to school is also one of a kind. Only Tene."
"That's… yeah, I've got nothing."
"So yeah. She doesn't say it out loud, but I think she's enjoying being a girl."
"Well… she's less a girl and more a dragon, right? That's the enviable part."
"What about you, Oppa? How's the woman's body treating you?"
"Hmm… not much to say…? Looking in the mirror is fun, but that's about it. Honestly, there's a lot more that's inconvenient."
"That so… I was kind of hoping I might get to meet Oppa's boyfriend someday."
"…Are you insane? I'm not gay. Why would I date a guy?"
Rosaria recoiled in genuine horror at Felix's words, her face crumpling. Male mind or not, the mere thought of going out with a man made her stomach turn.
"The mind ends up following the body eventually, you know."
"By that logic, what about you?"
"I'm only interested in magic right now."
"Sure, sure. Anyway—I like women."
"Of course you do~ Not that you had a single girlfriend back when you were a guy either."
"You wanna die?"
Even after so long apart, the two of them fell right back into their usual back-and-forth without missing a beat.
"Hey, Oppa. You haven't used that since you got to the Academy, have you?"
"Ah… this? Yeah."
Felix pointed at the gun hanging across Rosaria's back.
"Even for spars and whatever, using this would be way too overwhelming. Master Gordon can barely block the non-lethal rounds."
"Hmm… Still, I'd like to get some data on it."
The magic tool Felix had crafted for Rosaria was extraordinarily powerful—so powerful, in fact, that she was extremely reluctant to use it casually.
"…Oppa. Do you have class this afternoon?"
"Afternoon? Free period today. Why?"
"I just had a good idea."
At that, Felix thought for a moment, then smiled and closed the notebook he'd been scribbling in.