Hoping to Get Closer (1)
The first day of 'Communication with Spirits' class wrapped up in less than an hour.
That was only natural—most Academy courses spent their opening session doing little more than sketching out the semester's syllabus before calling it a day.
Granted, the occasional maniac like Harold liked to dive straight into live drills on day one, but that was precisely because Harold was, truly, an exception among exceptions.
All the professor in charge of Communication with Spirits had accomplished today was seat assignment, a brief overview of what the course would cover…
…and the selection of the 'partner student' you'd be paired with for the entire semester. That was it.
"If you don't see anyone you know, don't you worry~. As for the partners you'll be spending the semester with, I've already handpicked the students I believe will get along splendidly~."
Hold on a second. Don't tell me this is going where I think it's going….
Just as with every cliché that inevitably crops up in events like this, my uneasy premonition turned out to be dead on.
By the time I came to my senses, my partner had somehow become Agnes, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Accompanied by Professor Half-Pooling chirping away like this:
"Agnes and Lilith have almost identical mana reserves~. And your grades are so similar, you'll make a wonderful pair~. Ahaha~."
When she'd cheerfully matched me up with Agnes out of nowhere, wearing that guileless expression, I very nearly raised an objection on the spot.
But if I'd pushed back against a pairing the professor had already decided by her own criteria and demanded a reassignment, the atmosphere would have inevitably turned icy.
And honestly speaking, there wasn't a single other person in that class I knew, so I didn't even have an alternative partner to swap in.
If anything, the psychological distance was smaller with Agnes—a character I'd grown familiar with through the game—so in the end she actually fell on the better side of my options.
If we hadn't gone out of our way to needle each other before class started, this might not have been bad at all….
Looking back now, I wondered if I'd just been provoking her for no reason.
Except—she was the one who picked the fight first, wasn't she? All I did was fire back.
Frankly, even at its absolute worst, my share of the blame was maybe ten percent. The other ninety belonged entirely to Agnes.
This is something I only pieced together later through guesswork, but apparently my pairing with Agnes had been decided from the moment of course registration.
There were thirty students in Communication with Spirits in total.
Setting aside me, who was linked to Sally in a somewhat special arrangement, fourteen students had already contracted lower-tier spirits, and the remaining fifteen had failed to contract—an even thirty-person lecture.
Only near the end of that first day did I fully grasp the course's structure: the students who had already contracted spirits would be mentoring those who hadn't.
I never had a reason to take this class in my past life, so I had no idea….
The protagonist had such solid baseline charm stats that there'd been no need to grind spirit affinity separately. The fact that Agnes was in this class was news to me today, too.
Her fan club, of course, would have swept through every last one of these presumed affection-point events, but I had never once looked at Agnes as a woman.
One hundred forty-five centimeters with an A-cup was, whatever way you sliced it, nowhere near my type. My tastes in my past life ran firmly toward healthy, athletic beauties—Nathalie's build, exactly.
…Well, whether she was my type or not hardly mattered at this point.
Now that we'd been saddled with each other as class partners, I was fated to run into Agnes once a week whether I liked it or not.
And with the two of us having just spent a conversation scraping each other raw, there was obviously no way the class would proceed properly in this state. First order of business: repair the relationship.
One thing is certain—I have to get along with her somehow, for the future's sake. …What a nuisance this has become.
…Fine. For now, my only real option was to run the play the way I had in my past life—working her hobbies and interests.
Never did I imagine I'd end up in a position resembling the protagonist's, courting a heroine myself, but sitting around despairing and doing nothing wasn't in my nature either.
"Well, since it's come to this, let's make the most of the semester, Miss Blaze. We can't spend an entire term at each other's throats, can we?"
"…Hmph. Do whatever you want."
How exactly I was supposed to get close to that little firecracker over a whole semester, the present me had absolutely no idea.
A week had slipped by since the second semester at the Academy began.
Under normal circumstances, the start of a term was the most leisurely stretch of the year for the average student—but for me, it promised to be a fairly packed schedule running in exactly the opposite direction.
If I wanted to lay the groundwork for the Hunting Festival—the flagship event of the second semester—I had to start moving, and moving briskly, starting now.
It was time to reach out to other departments to assemble my festival party and to secure, piece by piece, the supplies I'd need for it.
For the record, Academy Hunting Festival parties tend to have strong department preferences when it comes to teammates—and the Magic Department proudly boasted the worst popularity rating of them all.
And no wonder. Of the five combat departments, the Magic Department was the only one that couldn't hunt solo.
Swordsmanship, Spearmanship, Martial Arts, Archery.
Those four departments, unlike mine, were all capable of solo hunting in the term-end evaluation. Consequently, students with real skill often skipped party formation altogether and entered the festival alone.
Granted, hunting in a party let you take down stronger prey, so the ambitious types did band together—but in most cases, these "parties" weren't gatherings of the strong so much as simple friend groups.
Which meant that even with my excellent first-semester results, there was a very real chance no party would take me.
Of course, even if the whole Academy turned me away, I had Ethan as my safety net, so I wasn't exactly losing sleep over it.
If I can pair up with Ethan, honestly, a duo is all we'd need—but still, it's better to build something a little more legitimate if I can.
The possibility that Ethan, without giving it much thought, might not bother recruiting anyone beyond our duo was something I had to account for on my end.
The Hunting Festival weighed heaviest on the final semester grade; I couldn't afford to just coast through it. And insurance was the kind of thing you could never have too much of.
That said, as Ethan's exclusive maid, it would have been rather shameless of me to get chummy with students from other departments right in front of him, so there was little room for me to personally muscle in on the recruitment front anyway.
Besides, whenever I talked with male students from other departments, I could sometimes feel a peculiarly sharp gaze drilling into me from Ethan's direction. Presumably he didn't appreciate me slacking off on my exclusive maid duties.
I had eyes, after all, and I had no intention of doing something my young master disliked just to prepare for the festival.
But abandoning all preparation entirely wasn't in my character either.
So instead of party recruitment, I poured my time into two areas: self-improvement and securing potions.
And of the two, the potion supply was by far the more critical.
Potions are, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
Unlike the first-semester evaluation duels, where death-prevention magic had wrapped us in safety, the second-semester Hunting Festival guaranteed nothing.
Channeling enough colossal mana to lay and sustain a death-prevention ward across the entirety of the sprawling Dark Forest was flatly impossible—and besides, death-prevention magic was never a spell limited to human beings in the first place.
Unless the Theology Department fancied watching live monsters get teleported into their building, no one in their right mind would ward a forest crawling with the things.
It was these potions that would let you preserve your life should something go wrong in that treacherous woodland.
If only to treat a fatal wound the moment it happened and keep myself breathing, I needed to open negotiations with a potion supplier starting now.
And as of this moment, there was exactly one acquaintance in the Pharmacy Department who could serve as that supplier.
Lizzie Lyn Auguste.
Young lady of the Margrave Auguste family. Salutatorian of the Pharmacy Department.
How exactly she'd claimed that salutatorian seat, I honestly couldn't say.
Had she simply been gifted in the field from the start? Or, true to form for a girl who ran the Auguste Trading Company, had she employed slightly underhanded methods?
Given that she was still holding the position after a full semester had passed, raw talent seemed the likelier explanation—but even if the Auguste heiress had dirtied her hands for that rank, it wouldn't have mattered to me one bit.
What I needed was healing potions for the term-end Hunting Festival, not a friend overflowing with loyalty and moral fiber.
The real problem was how to patch things up with Lizzie after our somewhat awkward parting in the first semester.
Ever since I'd turned down her offer of a secretary position, our once or twice weekly tea times had quietly evaporated, and with the Auguste and Blackwood estates sitting far apart, even a chance summer encounter had been out of the question.
It had gotten to the point where I genuinely wondered whether walking into the Pharmacy Department building to look for her would earn me a cold dismissal—oh, you've lost interest in me now, have you?
And if I instead went crawling to the department's top student, the 'Witch Lara,' I'd undoubtedly be handed back some quest impossible for Lilith to complete. Restoring my relationship with Lizzie had become one of my mandatory assignments, like it or not.
With Agnes, fine, at least I have a strategy guide. But how on earth am I supposed to win Lizzie over….
This woman wasn't a heroine in Luminor Academy—she wasn't even alive in the main story. She only appeared posthumously.
Worse, judging from the personality I'd witnessed at the masquerade, she was a sharply assertive margrave's daughter—decidedly not the kind of woman the eternal single loser I'd been in my past life could hope to befriend.
And that was with the added handicap of having rejected her goodwill once already.
But walking into the term-end Hunting Festival without potions risked real danger thanks to the 'First Hunt event.' And recruiting a Theology Department student into the party was a far harder proposition still.
In the middle of this no-win deliberation, a thought brushed the edge of my mind, half-forming and half-dissolving.
…Now that I think of it, I feel like I'm forgetting something. Something I absolutely must not forget.
As I made my way toward the Pharmacy Department building to see Lizzie, some lingering question kept gnawing at the back of my mind.
It was only shortly afterward that I learned the question haunting me was no trick of imagination.
"Oh my, it's been a while, Lilith."
"…Princess Seraphin?"
"There's something I'd like to discuss with you, Lilith. If you have a moment, could you perhaps spare me some of your time?"
The instant I came face to face with Princess Seraphin—and behind her, her exclusive maid, Luke—the pieces clicked, and I barely managed to dredge up what it was I'd forgotten.
Ah.
That's right. Luke's dagger.