Entrance Ceremony (2)
"Salutatorian — Lizzie Lyn Auguste."
At the familiar name suddenly ringing in my ears, the haze I'd been floating in snapped away in an instant.
Lizzie Lyn Auguste.
I hadn't been sure at our first meeting, my memory of her hazy at best, but by now she'd left enough of an impression that I could recall her without the slightest doubt.
She was the eldest daughter of the Auguste family — the older sister of Caraham, the mid-boss of the game's third act.
…Hold on. How did she even get in?!
As far as I knew, Lizzie had only a questionable aptitude for magic at best. She'd sat for the Academy's Magic Department entrance exam last year, and as far as I could recall, she'd failed outright without managing anything resembling a decent score. Which was why I'd assumed I'd never run into her at the Academy again — and even if I did, the last place I'd ever have expected it was here.
I had no idea what angle she was playing, but seeing her strutting through the Academy's gates threw me off balance for a moment. And the fact that she'd enrolled not in the Magic Department but in Pharmacy threw me off even more.
Should I count this as an asset, then?
Placing second in the Pharmacy Department was no small feat, which meant she was a capable woman in her own right — the Academy's overall strength, I supposed, had grown by one. Of course, Pharmacy was a non-combat department, so unless she was on the level of Lara, the department's valedictorian, the difference probably wouldn't be felt much.
The reality was so absurd that a stray thought actually crossed my mind — could this be some impossible coincidence, a stranger who happened to share her name? But a voice carrying over from somewhere nearby promptly crushed that last sliver of possibility.
"Sis! It really is you! You've raised the honor of House Auguste in my stead—!"
"You're embarrassing me, so quit shouting and stand there and wait quietly…!"
Even from a distance, the Auguste siblings' voices came through loud and clear, and at last I had no choice but to admit it: my actions during the imperial palace attack had altered the pool of students entering Luminor Academy.
At least in Ethan's case the change had been unmistakably for the better, so I decided it was best to think of Lizzie's situation as something similar.
I was staring blankly up at the stage, lost in that thought, when a young noblewoman with sky-blue hair began to climb the steps. I followed Lizzie's path with my eyes, still dazed — and for the briefest instant, I had the strange sensation that our gazes had met.
—Wink.
"……?"
…Did that girl just wink at me?
Nah, no way. She must've been exchanging greetings with someone else nearby, that's all.
After all, I was wearing entirely different clothes than I had that day, and on the day I'd met Lizzie I'd been wearing a mask that covered everything around my eyes. However familiar we might have been — we'd even exchanged words — for Lizzie to recognize me at a glance was next to impossible.
So I turned my attention elsewhere, and before long, the valedictorian and salutatorian of the Theology Department were called as well, and I heard names I knew among them.
It was only when the Theology Department's valedictorian — the fake saintess, Serista — took the stage that I could finally be certain: the story was, at least for its remaining segments, proceeding exactly as it should.
Thank goodness. Looks like she's taking Serista as the real saintess, the way she's supposed to.
One of the single most important factors in determining the prologue's difficulty was whether Serista was elevated to true sainthood or not. Trust her as the genuine saintess, and the difficulty dropped; expose her as a fraud and have her expelled, and it spiked.
The logic behind the easier route was simple. Having been saved from the brink of expulsion by the protagonist, a grateful Serista would latch onto him as his personal heal-bot and trail after him faithfully through every leg of the journey. On top of that, from this event onward, Serista essentially became a freebie attached to the protagonist — she didn't even count against the party's maximum member limit.
Naturally, adding a heal-bot capable of area-wide healing and area-wide buffs to the roster sent the game's clear difficulty plummeting.
Given that she spared Serista… maybe the Hero really is playing this thing seriously.
I might need to revise my assessment of the Gehwa-whatever guy rattling around in my head a little. I'd been willing to write off Silena's recruitment as luck, but trusting Serista instead of expelling her was one of the classic blunders first-run players made all the time.
Contrary to every player's expectation that expelling the fake saintess would trigger an event to find the real one, dumping Serista only condemned you to a lonely playthrough with no saintess and no healer. And by the time that decision usually came around, the actual saintess — Lilith — had long since been put through every kind of training Ethan could devise and forfeited her sainthood entirely.
Since Lilith was off the table no matter what, taking Serista along was the unambiguously superior choice. A healer with better stats than hers barely appeared until the late game, and even Awakened Serista was, judged purely on paper, a genuinely strong character.
If the protagonist really is a possessed player grinding this game for real, then maybe I should have a proper conversation with him at some point.
As I mulled that over, gazing up at the stage, the address from Princess Seraphin — the valedictorian of the entire incoming class — began, and I sat quietly through her speech, waiting out the rest of the entrance ceremony.
And all the while, I turned over one question: how, exactly, was I going to get that Gehwa-joses-gigwat Volt fellow alone for a word?
Luminor Academy's possessed Hero — Gehwa-joses-gigwat Volt.
Scanning the faces of the valedictorians and salutatorians assembled for the entrance ceremony, he took stock of the incoming class at a glance.
I spent the last few days living near the Academy and making note of the new students, but there are definitely points where this diverges from the original game's story.
His possession into the body of Luminor Academy's protagonist had happened roughly three years ago, by his reckoning. The story of his past: a younger cousin visiting for the holidays had created a character to play Luminor Academy, and in his careless attempt to delete it, he'd been pulled into the game himself.
And so he had arrived in this world wearing the ridiculous, unwanted name his cousin had slapped together without a second thought — but even so, having possessed this body, Gehwa-joses-gigwat had applied himself to clearing the game with honest diligence.
He'd been enough of a Luminor Academy fanatic in his past life to have run the game through several loops, so the broad strokes of the storyline were already second nature to him. As for the finer strategy, he'd read Lil-geol-chang's guides on the Rua gallery from cover to cover and committed every detail to memory.
Trust Serista instead of expelling her. Meet Silena in the elves' forest and get her enrolled at the Academy. Clean up the prologue's dangerous elements in advance. And above all, don't sabotage any rivals' admissions on some harebrained attempt to snag an extra heroine.
He might be saddled with the absurd name of Gehwa-joses-gigwat, but for him there was exactly one goal: a safe clear.
The unknown power that had flung him into this world had left him a single condition — clear the game and reach the true ending, or never return to his own world.
…The problem was that the world he'd been dropped into was drifting, in places, off Luminor Academy's original script.
No matter how many times I compare them, a lot of things are clearly different.
The brothel madam in Silverwood Territory, where he'd stopped briefly on a monster subjugation, was no longer a pink-haired woman but one with the dull brown hair of an Airia lookalike. The Magic Department's list of successful applicants had somehow included the name of a woman presumed to be the saintess Lilith. And Lizzie — who without question should have died in the imperial palace attack — had appeared out of nowhere as the Pharmacy Department's salutatorian.
Every one of these inflection points was enough to rattle the Hero, but nothing had shocked him quite like the utterly implausible transformation of Piggy Ethan.
Who on earth would look at that guy and think "Piggy Ethan"?
At first, he'd assumed someone else had gone up to the stage in Ethan's place. The looks and bearing radiating off the young man were flatly incompatible with any mental image of Ethan, and he could find barely a trace of the Ethan he knew from his old world in him.
Even now, staring at the man standing beside him — Ethan himself, at the salutatorian's spot next to his own place as valedictorian of the Swordsmanship Department — Gehwa-joses-gigwat couldn't help fixing him with an intensive, disbelieving stare.
No matter how I look at it, it really seems to be Ethan himself, not some stand-in.
The twin swords sheathed at both hips were one thing, but the two-headed eagle of House Blackwood was embroidered throughout his sword fittings and cloak — anyone, even someone who'd never laid eyes on Ethan before, would take one look at him and think of the Blackwood family. And the black hair and black eyes unique to the Blackwood bloodline were the final, decisive proof that this was Ethan Richard Blackwood.
Confronted with a reality he simply could not swallow, the Hero spent a while mired in confusion. But once he'd worked the problem over in his head, he arrived at the most defensible conclusion available.
For starters — this Ethan character is definitely someone with something going on.
Whether he'd come from the same world as him, he couldn't say. But the Ethan standing before him was unquestionably a different man from the "Piggy Ethan" he remembered — and every altered thread of the future so far traced back to him, which made that conclusion all the more credible.
Sending Airia, who'd stolen his mother's keepsake, to Silverwood's place of exile — that had to be his doing. Recognizing the magically gifted Lilith and pulling whatever strings it took to get her enrolled — his doing as well. And given the rumors of considerable exploits during the imperial palace attack, it was highly probable he'd intervened there too, deflecting the blow that should have killed Lizzie.
I don't know what exactly this guy wants… but our broad objectives seem to line up, at least.
Judging by how he acted with foreknowledge of the future, he was either a possessor from another world like himself, or perhaps a regressor from some other future of this world, living out a new life. Of course, since the man was fundamentally cast as a villain, he couldn't carelessly go announcing his own possession — but he did need to verify his identity at least once.
Even as Princess Seraphin's address rolled on, one thought consumed Gehwa-joses-gigwat entirely: he wanted nothing more than for this entrance ceremony to end as quickly as possible.
Waiting only for a chance to speak with this Ethan Richard Blackwood beside him — just the two of them, alone.