April's Investigation (2)
While Orknodi was busy attending lectures and making a name for herself across the grounds, April—the Foundation spy undercover at the academy—received a brand-new directive.
Tail Orknodi and complete every blank on the following fifty-question survey.
A mission sent from an entirely different line than the last.
April realized it immediately.
Her previous orders had been to verify the true nature of Room 111.1 in the freshman girls' dormitory and report on any hazards. That had been an assignment to scout out the dangers threatening Orknodi's surroundings.
Tail Orknodi.
This, however, was an assignment to treat Orknodi herself as a potential danger and investigate her accordingly.
Orknodi... Is an invisible war being waged in the Foundation's upper echelons over this child?
Swept up in the sordid squabbles of adults, the girl seemed utterly pitiful.
"Woof! You're as fast as ever, April!"
"I am average."
"Woof! Happy hasn't even finished half of hers yet!"
"I am average."
"Grrr. April, you're so mean!"
April had already finished all her assigned work before her fellow cleaning maid, Happy, was even halfway through hers. She didn't spare so much as a glance for Happy's tragic fate—a dog beastman who shed so much from her own body that no matter how much she swept with a broom, she was trapped in an endless cycle of sweeping up her own fur. Back when April was an ignorant rookie, she had tried helping Happy sweep, only to find herself trapped in an unending war against dog hair.
At this point, assigning her to cleaning is such a colossal failure it's almost impressive. Isn't this practically harassment from the Head Maid?
Her pity for her coworker ended there.
Slipping into a vacant room out of sight, she quickly scanned the questionnaire. It was a fifty-question survey regarding Orknodi. Filling out a few of the blanks was trivial.
Q13: What are Orknodi's favorite foods?
A: 1st Priority: Poison candy. 2nd Priority: Any food she is eating for the first time. 3rd Priority: Pebbles smaller than her fist.
Q14: What foods does Orknodi dislike?
A: Any unpalatable health food she has previously tasted.
What could they possibly want with this kind of information? Did they intend to lace her favorite food with poison and send it as a gift? The thought only deepened her pity.
Others might see her as a lucky child chosen by the Foundation to enter the world's premier educational institution, but the reality was far grimmer: a poor, tragic girl caught in an adult factional war, forced to wonder if every treat she loved was secretly poisoned. Unless she had undergone rigorous poison-resistance training, the day would surely come when she coughed up blood and died.
I mustn't get overly attached. In the end, she's merely one of the Foundation's scholarship students.
The Foundation's true objective was nowhere near as naive as its public persona of discovering talented children without the means to attend the academy and helping them flourish. Behind closed doors lay an immensely sinister agenda: using talented children as weapons to intimidate the academy's professors, exploiting their strength, wisdom, and authority.
Pitying the child wouldn't change anything, and meddling carelessly would only prompt the Foundation to dispatch an operative. And after that? Snip, slice. She would vanish without a whisper, and next semester's roster would simply gain one more reserve scholarship student to take her place.
Even Jona Waihiemhai—a graduate of Gift Academy and a legendary figure within the Foundation renowned for his monstrous skill—had acted out of premature sympathy in the past, and as a result, he was still stuck raising reserve scholarship students in a position termed "Head Butler" but pronounced "field operative." A mere low-level spy like herself wouldn't be granted such a generous second chance; bad luck meant summary execution, and the best-case scenario was a reassignment. Reassignment to some remote survey post in the uncharted wastelands, no doubt—a place with a zero-percent survival rate, where one left only as a corpse.
Though slightly better off than Foundation spies, the scholarship students shared a similar plight.
That's why most scholarship students enroll in the Lower Class, concealing their affiliation and quietly focusing on their studies.
If their identities were exposed, the academy itself would take steps to weed them out or apply pressure to purge the Foundation's influence.
Compared to them, Orknodi—who had brazenly revealed her identity from the entrance ceremony onward—was entirely different from ordinary scholarship students. Her expressions of emotion were clear and vivid. Her personality didn't appear fabricated at all. She did whatever she felt like doing, and she chased whatever crossed her mind.
Above all, what the Foundation demanded from its scholarship students was grades. Outstanding performance. To become students whose talent and accomplishments were so overwhelming that they could never be discarded, even if exposed. In that regard, Orknodi was a flawless, hundred-point prodigy in the eyes of the Foundation.
The fact that Jona is the one assigned to her is what works against her.
Some scholarship students sold out their peers to save their own skins. Others, aware of each other's secret identities, promised to cooperate only to stab each other in the back for Points or course credits. Thus, for a scholarship student, anonymity was always the safest shield.
Cooperation.
Teamwork.
Those were things sought only by the weak, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the fate of the weak was either to betray or be betrayed. To those weaklings, their handlers, and their superiors, Jona was an unbearable thorn in their side. His presence highlighted their own failures, and the fact that he was a bona fide graduate of Gift Academy made him all the more unnerving.
Scratch, scratch.
Black ink filled the questionnaire bit by bit. That was as much information as April could fill in from memory. The rest required shadowing Orknodi in person to gather intel.
"Chirp-chirp? Wipe the windows! Wipe the windows!"
"I already did."
"Peep-squawk? Mop the floor! Mop the floor!"
"I already did."
"Chirp-chirp? Wipe the windows! Wipe the windows!"
"I said I already did, you little bastard."
After wrapping up her war of words with Dummer—the birdbrain maid assigned to the afternoon shift—April fell in behind Orknodi right as the girl's scheduled lectures wrapped up.
Once official class activities concluded, students were granted free time. It was the perfect opportunity to learn what Orknodi thought about and spent her time doing.
This path leads to the Student Council Building. Freshmen haven't even received an orientation for that area yet; where on earth did she gather that intel so quickly?
While most Upper Class freshmen dragged their exhausted bodies like groaning zombies toward the infirmary or the lounge—with only a few relentless zealots heading to the next lecture hall or training ground—Orknodi's afternoon itinerary consisted of club hunting.
"Whoa. We have someone that tiny at our school?"
"Never seen her before. Is she a freshman?"
Overwhelmed by their own coursework, upperclassmen failed to recognize the top student of the cohort beneath them.
"Isn't this around the time the second-year Production Department lecture, Metalworking Even a Brainless Underachiever Can Handle, lets out?"
"Or maybe she's an upperclassman coming back from the third-year Administration Department's Territorial Geopolitics course."
"A third-year at that height? Are you out of your mind?"
"True. Unless she's a first-year..."
"First-years don't even know where the Student Council Building is yet. How could she have gotten in here?"
"Good point. Must be a second-year, then."
The students wandering the halls came to a unanimous conclusion: She must be a pitiful child stuck taking remedial courses for brainless underachievers!
"Excuse me, little girl. Wouldn't you like to join the West Union club with big sister? It's filled with nothing but kind, wonderful folks from the West. Your hair texture looks just like someone from the Western territories, so I had to ask—you're from the West, right?"
"Don't listen to that nonsense. Come with big brother to the Board Games Club instead. The older guys here will play with you all day long. We've got plenty of fun games, you know? Heheheh."
Annoyance flashed in Orknodi's eyes. She seemed to instantly grasp their true intentions.
What if she murders them out of anger?
Foundation children had boiling points vastly different from ordinary people. Most harbored at least one psychopathic trait that could snap without warning at any given second.
Just as April was contemplating whether to put some distance between them, Orknodi delivered an entirely unexpected reaction.
"I don't want to! No! Stop it!"
Doors along the club corridor burst open all at once as curious heads poked out.
"What's going on?"
"It's a child. Did they try something on her?"
"Are there actually scumbags kidnapping kids in broad daylight just to fill their club roster quotas?"
"Total trash."
"Isn't that straight-up a crime?"
"The guy even looks like a pervert."
"I heard him earlier. He went 'heheheh' like a creep."
"Ugh, gross."
"Disgusting."
"Go die in a ditch, losers."
"What department are those two from?"
Buried beneath an avalanche of insults and public disgust in mere seconds, the two upperclassmen's eyes welled with tears.
"I-It's a misunderstanding! We were just kindly asking if she'd like to join our club! We haven't even locked her in the clubroom and told her she can't leave until she inks her fingerprint yet!"
"Y-Yeah, me too! Sure, I thought about coaxing a naive kid into signing, but I hadn't actually done anything yet! Hey, kiddo, help us out and say something...!"
"Huh? Where'd she go?"
"She ran off and left us to take the fall?!"
While the glares directed at the two abandoned students grew frostier by the second, Orknodi capitalized on the uproar, slipping seamlessly through the Student Council Building without breaking stride. First a masterclass in rabble-rousing to divert attention, followed by casual, confident strides as if she knew exactly where everything was.
Did Lord Jona find a loophole around the gag order that prohibits leaking academy information?
Upon entering the indoor courtyard garden of the Student Council Building, Orknodi spotted something and her eyes lit up.
"Heheh. Found it."
...Adorable.
Even as April's heart briefly melted, the young girl produced a cup filled with nutrient cultivation fluid taken from a culture room beside the garden.
Cultivation fluid?
April couldn't conceal her bewilderment.
Is she drinking cultivation fluid because she thinks it will make her grow taller—aiming for that 230 centimeters she's always blabbering about?
Unless she was literally a vegetable, drinking plant growth serum wouldn't do a thing for a human's height. Still, it provided useful material for her report.
Q33: What is the goal Orknodi has recently been obsessed with, and what efforts is she making to achieve it?
A: She is striving to reach 230 centimeters in height, seemingly under the belief that ingesting plant growth cultivation fluid will cause her to grow taller.
I should procure an ingredient analysis sheet for that culture fluid to check whether it contains compounds harmful to human health.
She truly is a handful.
Now April could see why Lord Jona took such doting care of her.