Tailing
And so, the aptitude-evaluation study group was born.
The members, predictably enough, were three students with Chloe as their leader. Eva and I had accepted Chloe's request long before she even finished asking.
Marin?
If you put your mind to it, sweet-talking her was hardly even a chore.
"Marin, this is non-negotiable."
"This one, I notice it has no force behind it."
"It's a majority vote. Two of us have already agreed to participate, so you're joining too."
"Understood."
And with a bald-faced lie, Chloe roped her in.
She didn't so much as blink as she strong-armed Marin into the study group. Marin drained the last of her coffee, then calmly announced her participation.
"Th-that actually worked?"
Eva, who had been watching the whole exchange, couldn't hide her bewilderment. She stared at Marin, who had swallowed an obvious fib without so much as a hiccup, wearing the expression of someone witnessing a law of nature break down in real time.
She's pretending to be fooled on purpose.
I answered Eva's muttering only in my head.
At her core, Marin hated drawing conversations out. Even when the talk was pleasant, she couldn't muster any sympathy for it, and if it ever turned into an argument, there'd be no salvaging it. So when someone pushed a flimsy excuse on her like this, she'd go along with just about anything short of an outrageous demand.
It all traced back to her grandfather — the one precious family she'd had.
Don't quarrel; do your best to accommodate others — that was the lesson he'd left her, and she still lived by it.
Chloe probably just took her for a simple child, though.
"Great, everyone's in favor, so let's get started right away."
Anyway, with all three of us in agreement, Chloe immediately began rummaging through the bag she'd brought along. From inside, crammed full of books and stationery, she pulled out a stack of papers and pens and handed them around.
"Everyone, write your name and sign here."
"A-a study group membership roster? We have to fill out paperwork for this too?"
"It's a form we submit to the Academy. It's purely for show, so don't worry about it too much."
"I had a feeling."
Seeing that confirmed my prediction had been right on the money.
There was no actual penalty for signing the thing, so I scrawled my name carelessly and passed the paper to the next person.
"Thank you, everyone! Next, let's ease in with a little writing exercise."
With our signed roster tucked away, she handed each of us a bundle of papers fastened with a metal spine.
Blank fields for a name and score sat at the top, and below them stretched a list of multiple-choice questions.
"Oh, these are past exam questions."
"Huh? What? You know these questions?"
"Not exactly. I just had a hunch it'd be something like this."
Where I came from, grinding past exam papers was a way of life. Whether or not these exact questions showed up on the test was beside the point — there was simply no better way to brush up on what we'd already learned.
"First, I'll run you through a quick test to gauge where you all stand. I'll give you fifteen minutes."
"Two questions a minute. That's tighter than I expected."
"They're all ones you can breeze through if you've been paying attention in class."
I skimmed over the sheet, checking the question types. Just as she'd said — simple stuff with answers falling right out, assuming you hadn't dozed through the lectures. The scope was short too, only up through the middle of chapter two from last week.
Honestly, I could do this one with my eyes closed.
"Target score is sixty. Let's all push hard and hit the bar."
"Uuu... c-can I really do this?"
Eva chattered her teeth together, trembling with anxiety.
Being scored — having your worth laid bare as a number for others to judge. In the past, she'd been heralded as a prodigy brimming with the talent of a Grand Magus, all expectations heaped upon her small shoulders. Then she'd failed to produce results, and the resentment of her entire house had come crashing down. evaluations like this were, without question, one of the things she hated most in the world.
"Just do what you always do, no need to be nervous. I'll work through it right beside you."
"Fighting."
"L-let's try. We have to try."
Still, with Chloe and Marin cheering her on from either side, Eva reluctantly picked up her pen.
"Alright then — begin!"
Setting a timer on her phone, Chloe declared the test underway and pressed Start. The moment she shouted, we all bent over our papers, reading questions and circling answers.
This one, and that one too — straight out of the setting encyclopedia.
I checked off answers without a single hitch.
Multiple choice, four questions per section. Half of them were barely more than yes-or-no prompts. Five of the questions were absurdly harder than the rest, granted, but even answering carelessly, there was no way I'd scrape a score pathetic enough for anyone to laugh at.
Everyone should clear the target score with ease—
"Uuuugh, this is hard."
...That'll be a long road.
Eva's eyes spun in dizzy confusion. Her pen hovered over the sheet, paralyzed, unable to decide where the correct answers were supposed to go.
This idiot definitely goofed off during lecture.
Eva was a mage — a genius among geniuses, one of the quick-minded ones. The kind of student who learned one thing and grasped ten. Even rattled by nerves, there was no way she genuinely couldn't solve this.
In the original story, too, she'd been dragged to the Academy against her will early in the novel by her mother, and spent her days grumbling nonstop about being forced to study, sneaking her presence away in the lecture hall to play phone games. Questions that were simple, but required memorizing actual content. If you'd let your studies slip entirely, they'd be utterly impassable.
Floundering right out of the gate — yeah, Eva's a lost cause.
In that case, maybe Marin and I should just aim to pull up the group average...
"Solis, what's the answer to this question?"
Not you too?!
No, wait — why are you asking me for answers during a test? You know what an exam is, don't you? That's called cheating.
"Hey, you. Asking other people for test answers is forbidden."
"Staring."
"And don't you dare copy off anyone else's paper either!"
"Pwuh."
At Chloe's stern warning, Marin twisted her mouth into a sulk and forced her attention back to the questions. Her pen, though, was wandering in circles just like Eva's.
"Uuuugh!"
Chloe, cold sweat pouring down like rain, checked off answers with a trembling hand.
It wasn't the difficulty of the test getting to her. It was sheer disbelief at her party members' hopeless level — a catastrophe far beyond anything she'd imagined.
Ding-ding! Ding!
The fifteen minutes were up, and Chloe collected our sheets to grade them. The results, well... one look at her shadowed expression told the whole story.
"Eva, thirty points."
"B-buh..."
Eva crumpled at the announcement and burrowed into a corner, quivering. I'm u-u-useless, the world would be better off if I just died — she muttered poison at herself under her breath like whispered prayers.
Normally Chloe would have rushed to comfort her, but the situation was worse than she'd anticipated, and she seemed at a loss for words herself. A burning house. And then came the next remark, splashing oil all over it.
"Marin, zero."
"I understood nothing."
"Even with a shred of conscience, the normal thing is to at least guess, isn't it? Why isn't there a single mark on any question?"
"Grandfather said: not knowing is not shameful. Pretending to know is more shameful. He said that."
"So you didn't even guess?"
"Right."
Marin, Marin — that is not the lesson for this moment.
It was a scene I could barely watch with my eyes open. I covered my mouth, crushed by the sheer despair of it.
Crunch!
At Marin's words, Chloe crumpled her test sheet in her fist. She was smiling, but it was not a smile. Her lip was bitten raw, veins standing out on her forehead — she looked one second away from detonating.
"Whew... next up, Solis."
Barely choking down her anger, she called my name next. Probably because my score, at least, would improve her mood.
"Ninety-seven. You missed one question. Good work."
"Y-you broke a hundred— well, ninety! You got past ninety!"
"Oh, nice one."
"This much is nothing."
That one miss was deliberate, so in effect it was a perfect score. Awkward to admit out loud, but it seemed the hours I'd sunk into that setting encyclopedia hadn't been wasted after all.
"S-sob... thank goodness. There's still hope in our group!"
"Ch-Chloe? Are you crying?"
"Solis, why is she crying?"
"When someone drowning in the pit of despair glimpses even a single ray of light called hope, this is how they all react."
I'd assumed we were three hopeless siblings, but it turned out we were sisters — and the one I'd trusted least had turned out to be the standard-bearer. For Chloe, whose future had looked pitch-black, my very existence must have been an enormous comfort.
And with that, the first day of the study group drew to a close.
...
The moment the evaluation ended, I left the café and started for home.
The noon sun beat down bright and clear, glinting off me as I walked.
"Hardly worth calling work. Chloe and the others are the ones having a rough time, honestly."
Chloe had told me I was free to head home the moment I saw I'd cleared the passing mark. The other two had tried to slip out after me, but she'd snared them with a withering "can you actually sleep after that score?" and kept them behind under the guise of supplementary lessons.
By now, Eva and Marin were probably having their souls separated from their bodies by Teacher Chloe's Spartan regimen.
Not my problem, though.
"Normally I'd want to kill the boredom the usual way — lounging at home watching Shorts, but..."
I turned around.
A deserted road, and from the alley branching off it — the faint, unmistakable stir of another presence.
"Why don't you come on out already? I know you've been tailing me this whole time."
"Oh my, you noticed?"
A woman stepped unhurriedly out of the alley's shadows.
Beautiful platinum blonde hair, half of it braided up. A breathtaking figure, so voluptuous her uniform strained at the seams. And on her face — for whatever reason, she seemed to find all of this delightful — a sly, gyaru-flavored smirk.
Ter Citrine.
Why on earth was she suddenly on my tail?