A Chance Encounter
The grueling fifth period finally came to an end.
All I wanted was to climb up a sturdy tree branch and fall fast asleep without worrying about turning into crab fodder, but the mountain of pending assignments made that impossible. The most obnoxious of the bunch was Mastery of Ranged Weapons.
The practical assignment required scoring a cumulative total of one thousand points on targets set at fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty, and two hundred meters. Even if every single shot landed dead center on the ten-point bullseye, that was still a minimum of four hundred arrows. To make matters worse, foul weather had rolled in, leaving the outdoor archery range packed with miserable students drenched to the bone, firing away late into the night.
No way am I doing it out there.
I could have asked an instructor for an armed escort for safety reasons, but the instructors were absolute sticklers about curfew. Sneaking back out afterward wouldn't be hard, but wasting precious time trekking back and forth was an unforgivable inefficiency.
When duty calls, you use the Secret Training Ground!
As the Room of Double-Sided Paper Strips proved, the upperclassmen at Gift Academy had surprisingly left behind plenty of thoughtful accommodations for their juniors. Murderous workloads. Inhumane professors. A mathematically impossible amount of remaining time. Taking pity on their overworked underclassmen, the seniors of the Magic Department had carved out a dedicated facility just for their suffering juniors.
A private Secret Training Ground, open twenty-four seven, three hundred sixty-five days a year!
Since the facility was accessible only from within the Magic Department's dedicated hall, I cut through the torrential downpour toward the building. Despite the late hour, my eyes caught sight of another first-year student standing in the corridor.
Huh? Isn't that Cassia?
Group A for the frontiers. Group B for the Empire. Group C for special cases.
While the arrogant imperial bastards and the discriminated frontier commoners were locked in constant friction, Group C was a faction that both sides treated with deep unease. Unidentified individuals. The stripped of nationality. The stateless. Quasi-humans.
It was a demographic treated worse than beastfolk, comprised entirely of people from the darkest underbellies whom society refused to recognize as human beings. In fact, had circumstances differed slightly, it was a group I might very well have ended up in myself.
Because Group C students were required to have an instructor escort them wherever they went, an instructor was stationed right beside Cassia on standby.
Tip, tap, tip, tap.
A mischievous urge suddenly bubbled up inside me. Ducking low to stay out of view of the windows, I crept beneath the sill on all fours. Once I reached the frame right beside her, I popped up with both arms flared wide to give her a proper scare!
"Rwaaaar!"
"...Idiot."
"Huh? How'd you know?"
Before I began my approach, she had definitely been sitting by the first window next to the entrance. Yet making a mockery of my elaborate sneak attack, Cassia had casually shifted over to the second window, looking down in deadpan amusement as I popped up like a fool beside empty air.
"Just did."
Now my competitive gamer spirit was ignited.
"Take this!"
"Idiot."
The moment I aimed for the second window, she slid over to the third.
"Hyah!"
"Moron."
Trying to catch her off guard, I popped up at the second window again, only to find her calmly waiting at the third.
"Come on, just fall for it once!"
"No."
I darted toward the third window, looped all the way back around to the first, and sprang up, only to find that she had already relocated back to the second. I was someone whose shell-game sleight of hand could fleece Professor Bronze clean, yet here I was, rocking a zero-percent win rate against a Group C student? It bruised my gamer pride, but it did provide some valuable intel.
Cassia's base stats rolled exceptionally high in this playthrough.
Her performance parameters varied wildly from run to run, but in this world, her specs seemed absurdly overtuned. From a player's perspective, one would simply say, "Nice RNG," and move on, but for the person living it, an excessively potent ability made everyday life a nightmare.
"You picked me up through bioelectricity, didn't you?"
"...So you're not an idiot?"
"As if the top student of Group A could ever be an idiot!"
Cassia was an electrokinetic. Rather than traditional spellcraft, she discharged lightning through something far closer to divine authority. Properly raised, Cassia scaled into a living power plant capable of supplying the electrical grid for an entire metropolis. If a party ever needed an electric-attribute powerhouse, recruiting Cassia wasn't just an option—it was practically mandatory.
"Aren't you going back to the dorms?"
"Can't."
"Why not?"
"It's dangerous."
For any normal student, 'dangerous' would refer to the Giant King Crabs swarming the grounds, but that didn't apply to her. When Cassia spoke of danger, she meant the threat she posed to everyone else.
"If I'm not careful, people die."
A walking time bomb who couldn't fully rein in her own overwhelming power. That was the core gameplay concept behind the playable character known as Cassia.
"Cadet Orknodi. Curfew is fast approaching. Prepare to return to your dormitory at once."
Seeing Cassia's watchdog instructor gearing up for a lecture, I decided to resume my journey.
"Well, see ya later~"
"...Hmph."
Cassia turned her head away with a blunt snort. She was a classmate you couldn't befriend until reaching the higher school years. Befitting a late-game powerhouse operating on an entirely different scale of strength, she came packaged with an equally prickly personality.
Well, breaking the ice is good enough for now.
Without looking back, I hurried toward the Secret Training Ground.
Cassia had looked away, yet she could vividly trace every step of Orknodi's departure through her senses.
"Did you take a liking to that child?"
"Not at all."
"You played along for quite some time for someone who claims otherwise."
"She's simply better company than you."
"How hurtful. Here I am, diligently executing my duties of surveillance and protection for the sake of the academy's peace, yet far from receiving gratitude for my pains, I am met with cold contempt."
The instructor feigned genial banter, but Cassia's gaze grew far chillier than it had been when facing Orknodi. If her earlier demeanor had been meant to push people away, her current chill was the razor-sharp vigilance kept against a mortal enemy.
"The students you protect are everyone else, not me. I have nothing to thank you for."
"Given that I am ensuring you do not rashly invoke your powers or do something foolish that turns your peers into electrically charred meat, one could argue I am aiding you as well, Miss Cassia."
"Even though your true intention is to take my head the moment I slip."
"I would hardly decapitate you over a first offense. I would merely knock you unconscious and sever the tendons in your limbs to ensure you cannot move recklessly and compound the damage."
"...You are scum."
"Even so, I am still far more humane than the people who ran the facility you came from. That is a fact for which you should remain perpetually grateful."
Cassia was a fusion lifeform engineered in an illicit laboratory. A human ego grafted onto an entity that was fundamentally non-human.
—If an organism proves too difficult for human hands to tame, why not simply transplant an easily manipulated ego into its core?
Life, mind, soul. Born within a nightmarish research lab that treated every aspect of humanity as disposable experimental material, Cassia was a living conduit of lightning. She had no home to return to. At best, she was an asset sold off to the academy for an astronomical sum.
For her to leave the academy meant the institution would demand a full refund of the funds paid to the research facility. The lab director would never allow her to draw breath. What awaited her would be an existence far worse than death. That was the reality of being a Group C student.
Beings with no place to go, who were forbidden from ever turning back. Beings who could survive nowhere on this earth save within the walls of the academy.
I assumed you belonged to our side of the world as well.
Under ordinary circumstances, Cassia would never have indulged such childish antics. Because interacting with others was agonizingly difficult. Dealing with students living ordinary lives. Straining every fiber of her being so she wouldn't accidentally kill them. Every single gesture, every breath she drew felt grating and terrifyingly fragile. If a stray arc of lightning slipped from her fingertips, a living human being would be reduced to ash in an instant.
—Now, choose. Will you take another's life, or will you end your own?
Higher output. Sustained discharge. The atrocities committed within that laboratory to forge her into a weapon were unspeakable.
I thought that a child raised under brutal assassination training to slaughter others would share my exact plight.
Yet Orknodi was both identical and fundamentally different. Orknodi had adults standing beside her who were willing to guarantee her identity. That single difference. That lone divergence had severed their paths, placing them into entirely different groups.
Orknodi was assigned to Group A, not Group C. She had surrounded herself with companions and blossomed into a beloved figure in the Upper Class. The rumors and reputation trailing her name were immaculate. She did not look down on the Lower Class, nor did she cower before the imperial aristocracy. She mingled freely with imperial nobles, breaking bread without hesitation, and when she perceived injustice, she possessed the resolve to stand against tyranny for the sake of her vulnerable friends.
And her combat prowess was far from ordinary.
Moments ago, as Orknodi had crept outside the window, Cassia had tracked her every movement. Every human being generated bioelectricity. Ordinary mortals could neither comprehend nor sense it. Even with rigorous discipline, most could only intuitively register it through direct physical contact or within the confines of an enclosed space.
I am different. Because half of my body is not human.
Her non-human physiology perceived it clearly: the intricate currents of bioelectricity pulsing through another person's veins. Through solid glass. Through magical force fields. Piercing clean through physical and arcane barriers alike, the faint traces of bioelectricity were visible to her naked eyes.
Evading the first three attempts had been effortless. Slipping away from Orknodi's grasp was child's play.
The fourth time, however, was different.
When Cassia had drifted toward the right-hand window, Orknodi had mirrored her step for step. When she shifted toward the left, Orknodi had pivoted instantly to pursue. Orknodi was indisputably reading her precise position. It made Cassia want to test her.
Electrical Phenomena Manipulation
Even as the instructor behind her radiated killing intent, silently commanding her to cease, Cassia manifested her power. Coalescing an electrical duplicate with her exact likeness, she left the decoy standing in place. Beyond the glass, Orknodi tilted her head in confusion before peering toward the second window.
"Hyah!"
Lacking total certainty, Orknodi poked her head out from the first window instead. The moment Cassia dispelled the technique, all that remained was empty space, Cassia standing calmly by the adjacent pane, and an instructor exerting stifling pressure demanding that the farce end there.
It wasn't bioelectricity. She was reading my mana.
Cassia reached a silent realization: this girl truly was extraordinary. Perhaps the next time their paths crossed, she might offer a proper greeting in return. After all, she found Orknodi far more pleasant than the Group C peers she spent her days with out of shared misery.