Prologue
"Instructor Irie! Please, just take a look at my movement for a moment!"
"I-Instructor! Don't listen to that shameless girl—teach me first!"
Hands reached for me from every direction, tenacious and unrelenting. The crowd of faces clinging to my sleeves, refusing to let go no matter what, was, frankly, staggering to behold.
Among them were prodigies counted among the finest the Academy had to offer. Genius mages admitted on special recommendation. Even the granddaughter of the sitting Tower Master, a walking bundle of talent in her own right.
These were the mages who bent the very laws of the world—men and women whose pride was as legendary as their power. And right now, every last one of them was hanging off me, a mere training instructor without a single drop of mana, pleading for my attention.
"Aren't you all supposed to be practicing magic? Why are you swarming me like this...?"
"Everyone. Hands off."
A single voice swept the room clean. The low, frost-edged tone rang through the classroom, and the rowdy students scrambled back to a safe distance in the space of a breath.
And there she stood—a girl with silver hair, tinged with blue, spilling loose past her shoulders. The empire's pride, a genius of chantless casting. The imperial princess hailed as the Star of the Empire. Eleanor.
"Who gave any of you permission to lay hands on my instructor?"
The pressure of her was suffocating. Noble daughters or not, however high they flew, before the princess's presence they went pale to the lips and could only fall silent.
Having flattened every ounce of defiance around her, Eleanor at last turned her head my way.
"Instructor."
"...Yes?"
"Tonight. Come to my room."
"...?!"
At the princess's bombshell, every jaw in the classroom dropped at once.
The princess, summoning a male instructor—to her own chambers, at night, no less? It was unthinkable. It simply did not happen.
Her voice as she gave the order had been perfectly level. But look closely, and the ears peeking through that silver curtain of hair were burning scarlet, half a beat from bursting.
"I-It's not what it looks like! I only wanted instruction on that movement from yesterday!"
With that flustered cry, Eleanor spun on her heel and vanished, the words barely out of her mouth. And yet for all her ramrod-straight back, her footsteps had the unmistakable urgency of a retreat.
Unbelievable. Just—unbelievable.
Since when had I become your personal instructor? I was Academy staff, in case anyone had forgotten. And besides—that was never like you at all.
Barely a few months had passed since the day we first met, back when you'd looked straight through me as a mana-less barbarian. So what on earth had gotten into you?
To explain a situation this deranged—one I still couldn't make heads or tails of—I would have to wind the clock back a little.
Yes. Three hundred years, if you can believe it. Back to that shitty day when I, then nothing more than a sidekick hired to keep the mages alive, cut the Demon King's head from his shoulders....