A Perfect Score
With my coming-of-age ceremony behind me, I began preparing to ascend to the Academy.
All the paperwork required for admission had already been sent ahead. Under normal circumstances, if I were simply starting as a first-year, I could have delayed my arrival a while longer without any consequence — but I had filed an application for early graduation by skipping grades.
Because of that, receiving approval required verification: whether the applicant possessed sufficient knowledge, and — fitting for the Knight Department — whether he had a talent for magistery, and if so, how much of it.
The theory a knight studies was, broadly speaking, the art of war, and I had long since mastered it through years of private tutoring. My command of basic liberal arts and history went without saying.
Is that everything?
Convinced my preparations were complete, I looked around the room I would be leaving empty for a long while, then opened the door. There stood Mary, quietly, watching me — or rather, cradling her belly as she did.
"Could it be... is it what I think it is?"
Reading my words, Mary smiled shyly and nodded.
"By the time you graduate from the Academy and return, Your Highness, I'll be the mother of a child."
"I'm truly happy for you, Mary."
That the young maid who had cared for me since my earliest days would now become a mother herself — it stirred a strange, new feeling in me.
"Take care of yourself on the road."
"I should be telling you to take care, Mary. I'll be off, then."
With that, I made my way down to the carriage yard within the Imperial Palace. When I arrived, my mother and father were already waiting, and behind them stood Aria and Lapis.
Benzen was nowhere to be seen; when I asked, I was told he had departed ahead. Well, of course. He'd had to travel here alongside Aria, an imperial princess, and Lapis, my fiancée — how unbearably awkward that ride must have been. And this time I, the crown prince, would be joining them as well. I could well sympathize with his plight.
"I depart with your blessing."
It was a brief farewell, but writing a reply to one's own parents on paper felt wrong somehow, so I offered my goodbyes aloud.
As the carriage rolled forward and the scenery beyond its windows slowly began to change, the truth of it finally settled over me — I was leaving the Imperial Palace, my home of so many long years.
Camping out was a common occurrence when traveling across the continent. One had to account for the horses' stamina, and the schedule shifted considerably depending on how far apart the estates along the route happened to be. By those calculations, camping tonight was a certainty.
Perhaps surprisingly, Aria and Lapis seemed well accustomed to this sort of thing, and before long they were using the provisions stocked in the carriage to put together a simple dinner.
Come to think of it...
Even granting that this was imperial territory, traveling without an escort struck me as an almost reckless complacency. Then again, with me being the sole heir to the throne, worrying about assassination was, in a sense, meaningless — anyone who succeeded would simply inherit the problem.
"Thanks for the meal."
We ate the finished supper in cozy closeness, and after that we began preparing for sleep. It was an expensive carriage, so its seats could be rearranged into a bed inside, but the space was still terribly cramped — we had no choice but to lie pressed close against one another.
Granted, we did have the help of an artifact, but with the last traces of winter still clinging to the air and the nights bitter cold, this moment of sharing body heat could almost be counted a blessing. For me, it was anything but.
......
The two of them, pressed flush against either side of me, breathing soft, even breaths. They weren't lying on their backs staring at the ceiling — they had turned onto their sides, facing me, and their chests pressed against my forearms with a nakedness that left nothing to the imagination. Worse still, with every breath I could feel the sensation of them rising and falling against me, which was agony in an entirely different sense.
Lapis surely isn't doing this on purpose... but Aria — she's doing this deliberately, isn't she.
With no graceful way to extract my arms from between them, I forced my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep.
Roughly eighteen days after that, we entered the Free Trade City.
An immense number of carriages moved along its roads, far beyond anything the capital could boast, and the streets teemed with merchants at every turn. With no tariffs and comparatively light taxes, this was, from a merchant's standpoint, nothing short of a golden paradise. The only catch was that trade convoys from not just the Empire but the two Allied Kingdoms flowed in as well, making competition ferociously cutthroat.
"We need to register for the semester, so we'll step away for a bit."
"All right. See you in a little while."
Each department had its own admissions office, so the moment we entered the Academy grounds, our party had to split up. Benzen had already given me a fair sense of the Academy's interior layout, so I found my way to the Knight Department without getting lost.
"Welcome! Is there anything I can help you with?"
"I should be registered as an early graduation applicant. I'd like that confirmed, please."
"...Ah, Prince Rohen. Yes, we were informed in advance — you are the only early graduation applicant this year. We'll prepare the examination hall and summon a proctor right away. Would you care to wait just a moment?"
At those words, I nodded and quietly took a seat. A short while later, when my name was called, I rose and followed — and there I found the proctor and several sheets of paper lying face-down upon the desk.
"A pleasure. I am a professor of the Knight Department, from the Merem Kingdom. From this point forward, you will be examined to verify that you possess knowledge befitting an early graduation candidate. The format is entirely essay-based, and the scope covers all theoretical knowledge taught across the Knight Department's four years."
From a kingdom's standpoint, one might expect an imperial prince to be treated with open hostility — yet there was none of that to be seen. More precisely, it was simply hidden beneath that coldness. Setting aside personal sentiment and regarding me purely as a professor regards a student — I couldn't fault that mindset. Besides, within the Academy, the professorships were split evenly, five to five, between those from the Empire and those from the two kingdoms. Since any major decision required a supermajority of over seventy percent, the factions reportedly strove to set aside subjective feelings and cooperate wherever possible.
"I look forward to working with you, Professor."
Here, at least on the surface, the rank and station of the outside world held no sway. Only students and professors existed. Honestly, I had my doubts about how far that rule actually extended — but for now, respecting it was the only course open to me.
"You may begin."
I pushed aside my stray thoughts and, at the sound that marked the examination's start, turned the papers face-up.
As promised, every question was an essay prompt: a specific wartime scenario was presented, and the test asked what I would do in that position. One peculiar detail was that in every scenario, my own military strength was standardized to something entirely ordinary.
Come to think of it...
I'd heard the examinations of the Knight and Military Departments carried quite an infamous reputation. Since they were invariably essay-based, there was effectively no fixed answer. And because they were essays, a perfect score was nearly impossible by design — the professors grading the answers had to be fully persuaded by the logic written before them.
I can more or less predict it. How most students would have answered.
The simplest way to resolve a given situation with one's own knowledge is, frankly, to make the enemy stupid. If the opponent is inferior to oneself, then of course one's strategy will work. But such an approach would never earn a high mark.
Think of it as playing chess — or baduk — alone, against yourself.
You lay down the best move you can conceive, then scheme from the opposite side to break through it. The moment you find yourself unable to refute your own logic — that is the most defensible answer there is.
And so I began to write, presupposing the worst possible situation for every single prompt.
The knowledge underpinning my answers wasn't stored in my head as rote memorization but had been absorbed through genuine understanding, so completing all twenty-five questions took me exactly one hour. When I had filled every blank space on the examination to its brim, the proctor collected my papers with a look of open astonishment.
Naturally so — I had submitted far earlier than expected, yet the volume of written answers was anything but thin.
"...We will inform you of the results within two days."
With those words, I left the Knight Department behind. I wasn't yet a formal Academy student, so no dormitory had been assigned to me — nor was the proper start of the semester far off. For the time being, I decided I would take a room at a nearby inn and spend my nights to the full with the Hundred Ghosts.
Four hours after Rohen finished his examination, every professor of the Knight Department had gathered in a single room. And where their gazes all came to rest was, naturally, the examination paper Rohen had submitted.
"...This. I don't believe anyone could raise an objection were we to award it a perfect score."
The speaker was a Knight Department professor from the Empire. Yet not a single professor from either of the two kingdoms rose to dispute him. They knew all too well that the imperial professors were not saying such things merely because the boy was the Empire's prince.
Every answer on the examination presupposed the worst possible situation — and even there, pressed into the absolute worst of it, proceeded along a course that conceded no loss whatsoever. One could, if one strained, find points to criticize, but doing so would amount to nitpicking for its own sake.
The truth was that none of them — imperial or kingdom-born — had anticipated answers composed with such flawless logic. Every one of them had assumed that while Rohen might have memorized everything, he would not yet be at the stage of truly understanding it, let alone applying it in practice.
Knowledge memorized and knowledge understood are, after all, two different things entirely. But it was no exaggeration to say that Rohen had understood every piece of theory the Knight Department taught.
This was the brilliance of the natural gift for strategy he had granted himself in childhood — his versatility across every field. And to that terrifying rate of growth, the blessing of Rapid Advancement — now erased by the Initialization — had added yet another measure.
"...No objection here."
Thus, by unanimous vote, Rohen's written examination returned a perfect score.
All that remained was the question of how to verify the one thing he lacked — a talent for magistery.
Every one of them knew that Rohen was the bearer of the Dragon Tongue. But the records concerning the Dragon Tongue had been largely lost to time, and its true power was difficult to gauge. However brilliant his theoretical knowledge, however refined his swordsmanship, without a talent for magistery, admission to the Knight Department was impossible.
In the end, the final verdict would hinge on one thing alone: how the power of the Dragon Tongue would fill the void where his magistery should have been.