Wrapping Up the First Semester (1)
Not long after I turned down Seraphin's and Rees's proposals, two incidents—one large, one small—stirred up the academy in turn.
The first was the Hero rescuing Silena from the delinquent students of the Swordsmanship Department, which brought her and the Hero one step closer.
That event didn't deviate much from the original story, so I just confirmed it in passing and moved on. It went without saying that Gehmajoshigi-gwat's chivalrous exploits would be on every girl's lips, and that would be the extent of it.
For someone like me, who had cleared Luminor Academy twenty-four times, the moment Silena was recruited, that rescue was simply an event that had to be completed.
If I want a proper Silena route, the rescue is non-negotiable. Bringing her in and then skipping it would basically be abandoning her.
Rescuing her raised Silena's affection for the Hero considerably, while failing to do so meant she carried an injury penalty all the way to the ending.
From that angle, the Hero's move looked like a genuine step toward clearing the game properly, and I quietly revised my opinion of him upward.
Though I still hadn't spoken to him face to face even once.
At any rate, he was maintaining a polite, distant relationship with Ethan without any pointless friction, which meant—thankfully—he apparently hadn't yet realized that Ethan was the villain of the original story.
His entire physique had changed to a degree that could only be called a transformation; it made sense that he couldn't imagine the story flowing exactly as it had before.
The Hero and Silena's romance was one thing, but what actually surprised me more was the second incident.
It generated less buzz than the main storyline the Hero was driving, but for me, it was a fairly unexpected event happening sooner than I'd anticipated.
Luke, Seraphin's bodyguard, throwing off her men's clothing and switching positions to become her exclusive personal maid—that was the event that struck me as the more surprising of the two.
As you might have guessed from the phrase "throwing off her men's clothing," Luke was this game's one and only crossdressing heroine.
Games of this genre always tucked in one such heroine to collide with the protagonist in all sorts of situations—it was part of their peculiar charm.
Being a supporting heroine, she was of course romanceable. The easiest route was to enter the Magic Department and share a two-person dorm room with her.
Sharing a room meant that no matter how careful Luke was, situations would inevitably arise where the protagonist discovered she was a woman, and from there the story became one of him keeping her secret while building friendship and affection.
So normally, only the protagonist and Seraphin knew she was a woman for the entire game—and in several routes, the fact wasn't even revealed until the ending.
That was why Luke openly declaring herself a woman and attending the academy in a female uniform was a sight even I, with twenty-four clears under my belt, had never seen before.
And she didn't stop there—she added lace to her uniform and a head-dress to her hair, making a point of advertising her status as an exclusive maid.
Seeing her show up to class dressed so eerily like me, a cautious thought crept in: could I be the cause of this?
Seraphin left the exclusive maid position open hoping to fill it with me, and when I refused, she ended up filling it with Luke instead.
After all, managing Seraphin's body—including that long, flowing hair of hers—required an exclusive maid, and that was a job Luke couldn't perform while disguised as a man attending the academy.
But rashly appointing some other academy student would have been hard to trust, and hiring a maid from outside was only possible starting next semester.
From Seraphin's position, transferring Luke into the exclusive maid role was probably the best available option.
Wait a moment. If that's the case, then the reason the position was empty in the first place was because she intended to put me there from the very beginning...
Frankly, that was the most likely possibility.
This was the first time Seraphin had ever enrolled without her exclusive maid, and she had a personality that kept anyone she considered capable as close to her side as possible.
Ordinarily she would have brought one of her palace maids along to the academy, so leaving the position vacant strongly suggested she'd acted with me in mind from the start.
Of course, even if I hadn't been Ethan's exclusive maid, I probably would have refused Seraphin's offer anyway.
Because, well—how was I, a man in my past life, supposed to take on the duties of a woman's exclusive maid?
Fastening her uniform and brushing her hair would have been fine, but dressing and bathing her was, no matter how I turned it over in my head, far too much for me to handle.
This wasn't a question of whether I'd feel desire or not—I simply meant that my conscience wouldn't be able to bear it. Even now, whenever I stepped into the bathhouse with Isabel, the guilt was no joke.
And as for Rees's offer of a personal secretary position that same day... that refusal came closer to plain distrust of her.
The moment I accepted the post, I had a feeling she'd seize the opportunity and work me to the bone without a moment's rest.
No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't convince myself that the current Rees bore me no ill will—and above all, the offer itself was suspicious.
This was a woman skilled enough at gathering and handling people that she'd already built her own faction among the Pharmacy Department freshmen. And she wanted to hire me? While competing against an imperial princess, no less?
There was one hundred percent something up her sleeve. An offer that fishy was obviously not something you accepted.
Fortunately, my excuse of staying loyal to Ethan, whom I'd worked alongside for so long, landed better with the two of them than I'd expected.
I managed to decline both proposals without embarrassing either Seraphin or Rees.
So in the end, my refusal led to Luke shedding her disguise and becoming Seraphin's exclusive maid—but that hardly made it my fault.
All I did was honor my loyalty to Ethan. A servant being devoted to one master isn't exactly something you deserve to be cursed for.
If you have complaints, take them up with your own master, Luke. Not that you ever could, of course.
And so, amid incidents large and small, the remainder of Luminor Academy's first semester began drifting by in a blur.
Before I knew it, only the final event of the semester remained: the exhibition duels of the end-of-term evaluation.
『Lilith has reached Level 10!』
『Lilith can now use "Mana Infusion"!』
One by one, Luminor Academy's first-semester classes held their closing lectures, and the time to wrap up the first semester was steadily drawing near.
As with any academy game, the most important thing within a semester was, without question, the final evaluation event.
Truthfully, for an actual student attending the academy, the midterm exams mattered just as much as the final evaluation—but the midterms simply weren't an event interesting enough to be given much weight in the game.
Gathering in an exam hall to grind through test papers like we'd been thrown back into grade school, or shooting magic at targets on the training field—who on earth would find that fun enough to play?
Anyway, to properly close out the semester, this final evaluation event had to be handled well, and thankfully my preparations were coming along reasonably nicely.
The biggest change was that my level had risen from 9 to 10.
Dueling the Swordsmanship Department students three times a day in Harold's class to farm experience, my level had at some point climbed naturally to 10 mid-sparring session.
Thanks to that, the Mana Infusion skill—automatically learned at level 10—was now in my hands as well.
It was a support spell that reinforced a weapon by infusing it with mana, which meant my dagger attacks had gained a measure of reliability.
You might ask what a mage cares about her dagger attacks being more reliable—but for seizing the high ground in the exhibition duels, whether an attack was magic or melee didn't particularly matter.
Using every tool at your disposal to somehow beat your opponent and claim victory. That was the exhibition duel event, which accounted for the largest share of the Magic Department's first-semester final evaluation.
For the record, this wasn't exclusive to the Magic Department, either.
Every department that studied combat-related subjects closed out the first semester with exhibition duels in exactly this fashion.
The Swordsmanship Department, with Ethan among them, along with the Spear, Archery, and Martial Arts Departments—all of them concluded their first-semester instruction with this format.
Course completion rates still mattered, of course, so a single duel didn't determine the entire semester's grade—but it undeniably carried the largest weight.
An academy was, at its core, an institution for cultivating talent with combat ability, and evaluating students by how strong they were in actual battle was, in a way, both the most obvious and the fairest method there was.
At the very least, a straight ranking of combat power was a far more reliable yardstick than exam grades half the students couldn't make sense of.
Anyway, in preparation for this end-of-term duel event, I had spent the entire semester suffering through every hardship imaginable while focusing on raising my Luck stat—and the result was that I'd dragged it from a pitiful 2 at enrollment up to something actually usable.
2 points of Luck from the Understanding of Mana Flow I'd gained from Rees.
2 more from completing the accuracy-specialized lecture at semester's end. Two of those, so 4.
And finally, the 1 point that came along with my level-up.
Looking at a Luck stat that had climbed from 2 to 9—more than quadrupled—a feeling of genuine accomplishment welled up in me.
Bringing Luck this far as Lilith was, frankly, nothing short of a miracle.
Thankfully, a value of 9 translated to an actual hit rate of roughly twenty percent. At that level, Triple Casting could push me to somewhere near fifty percent.
That was enough to win cleanly, even if I couldn't claim overwhelming superiority over my opponent.
"Really, I did put in the work."
Still, if I could just get through this semester, things would be more or less manageable from the next one on.
So long as no opponent stronger than me got matched against me in the end-of-term duels, I could take a comfortable victory and close out the first semester.
The exhibition duels only matched students within the same department. And considering Luminor Academy's matching system, which allowed top performers from the semester to designate their own opponents for the final evaluation—there was absolutely no chance I'd end up facing anyone stronger than me.
...That, at least, was what I believed at the time.
It never occurred to me that in the exhibition duels crowning the end of the first semester, there would be a madwoman above me who, given the choice of any easy opponent, would go out of her way to pick me.