The Three Rival Schools
"You're a first-year too, right? Nice to meet you."
A boy in a green plaid uniform greeted Simon with a cheerful grin.
"I'm Benz, Summoning major from Aland."
The three great necromancer academies. At the very top stood Kizen, the greatest necromancer school in history and the most prestigious of the prestigious—but below it, there were three public academies that were widely considered a step behind: Aland, Sierra, and Moiran. After Kizen held its first-year entrance exams, those three schools would study the contents of Kizen's test, take the measure of current trends, and then scramble to announce their own admissions. They tended to be overshadowed by Kizen's glow, but they were elite institutions in their own right, attended by nobles from considerable families.
'An Aland student. First time seeing one.'
Since they had greeted him first, Simon rose from his seat as well.
"I'm Simon. I'm hoping to major in Summoning too."
"Hoping to?"
Benz glanced back at the two friends standing behind him, and then all three of them burst out laughing. Pfft!
"Ah~ sorry," Benz said, snickering. "The word 'hoping' just sounded funny to me."
"So you're not an actual major like us?"
"If you were a major, you'd say major. What's this 'hoping' business?"
Kizen let students choose their majors starting in second year, but Aland assigned them the moment they enrolled. Picking a fight over nothing but a difference in curriculum. Simon felt less angry than mildly amused.
'Pier.'
[Yes.]
'Is this what it's like when students from different schools meet? All this jockeying for position?'
[Those three are simply idiots.]
Just then, Benz stepped up to Simon.
"You're here for the paper presentations too, right? Looking forward to it, *applicant*!"
He held out his hand. Ignoring an offered handshake would have been strange, so Simon took it.
Squeeze.
He felt Benz clamp down with all his strength.
'Honestly.'
Simon smirked. It was too childish to bother answering in kind, so he simply stood there. Benz's hand was trembling as he strained with everything he had.
Simon turned his head slightly to glance at the other two students, who by now were looking him up and down.
"…Hm, the Kizen uniform is pretty, I guess."
"I heard the girls' uniform is even better."
"But it's way too pitch-black and suit-like. So tacky. No school-fashion flair at all."
Meanwhile, a uniform-review panel was in session on their end too.
Simon looked over the Aland uniforms as well. Aside from the green color scheme, the accent details and logo placement felt like they had borrowed heavily from Kizen. The checkered trousers and skirts seemed like a bit much at first glance, but the longer he looked, the more he thought they weren't bad.
Simon smiled.
"Your uniforms look nice too."
"!"
The two of them flinched, faces flushing scarlet.
"Wow! Did you see that? He's doing the whole 'turn it around on us' thing!"
"That's exactly how they slap that 'Kizen knockoff' label on us!"
'?'
Simon had offered a perfectly sincere compliment, but the Aland students were radiating an inferiority complex from the start.
"Ghhk!"
Benz, meanwhile, was still gritting and straining away at the handshake. This time, Simon gave his hand a light squeeze in return.
Crack.
"AAAGH!"
Benz let out a short scream and dropped to one knee. The other Aland students recoiled in horror, jabbing their fingers at Simon as if ready to hurl curses.
"Let go of Benz!"
"Oh."
Simon released his grip, and Benz glared up at him with tears brimming in his eyes.
"You! How dare you touch my hand—!"
"Here we go again," came a third voice from behind. "The 'starts a power handshake, gets crushed instead' routine. Doesn't that ever get old?"
"Ohohoho!"
The students who swept in eviscerating the Aland delegation wore red uniforms. Scarlet jackets in formal regimental style, each bearing six gold buttons, with long collars that half-covered the mouth. More formal dress than school uniform, it made them look slightly less mobile. As they appeared, the Aland students ground their teeth.
"The trash of Sierra……!"
"Yes, yes, next up, the grasshopper costumes."
Relations between the two schools were clearly venomous.
Simon quietly stepped back as they traded bizarre nicknames and insults.
"Look at them shaking. I'd say the shock of losing the 'Si-Al Match' still hasn't worn off."
The Sierra students cackled among themselves. Benz's brow twitched.
"All that smugness over a measly five points? If you hadn't bribed the judges at the 'Al-Si Match' in the first place—!"
"Nothing more pathetic than someone who can't accept a loss and keeps dredging up scandals no one believes. And get the tournament's name right. It's the Si-Al Match."
"It's the Al-Si Match!"
Si-Al or Al-Si, Simon couldn't have cared less. He was trying to slip away while the two schools were at each other's throats when—
"Calm down, everyone. Why are we fighting each other?"
This time, a boy and girl in blue uniforms were approaching. They were Moiran students. Their uniform design was completely unlike the other schools'—a blue base with lavish ornamentation, belts at the waist, epaulets on the shoulders.
"Don't forget. Our true goal is the common enemy: the takedown of Kizen."
At those words, the gazes of the other two schools turned toward Simon as well.
"Let's be honest—it's the Witch of Death and Kizen headquarters that are actually impressive. The school itself has been drowning in bubble rumors, hasn't it? If we crush them at this conference, that reputation will take a scratch or two."
The students from the other schools eagerly chimed in.
"That's right, Kizen is absurdly overrated!"
"We're all necromancers, but they look down on people over uniform colors."
"They unilaterally canceled the exchange matches too, just because they had some BMAT or whatever going on."
"Yeah, and that exam totally killed the buzz around the Si-Al Match."
"It's the Al-Si Match!"
"Real talk, that whole story about your Saintess getting ambushed was a lie, wasn't it?"
"Did you actually see the Saintess?"
Murmur, murmur, murmur, murmur!
Simon's head was starting to ache.
"……Could you please speak one at a time."
Simon said this as he looked over the students of the three schools.
"Do you really need to wear yourselves out tearing each other down? Shouldn't it be enough to be satisfied with your own schools?"
"O-Of course!"
"We love our school! We just hate you Kizen people looking down on it!"
They were soon trading boasts—that they were proud to attend Aland, that Moiran had the best post-graduation employment rate, and so on.
"Then—"
Simon spoke up.
"Even if you got the chance to transfer to Kizen, you'd all stay at your current schools, right?"
"……"
"……"
In an instant, a heavy silence pressed down on them all. An awkward breeze swept through the students.
"W-Well, that's…!"
"That's exactly why we hate Kizen! Because it's always like this!"
Whether out of embarrassment at that awkward silence, they all flushed belatedly and started shouting over one another.
But not a single one of them insisted they would stay at their alma mater if the chance to transfer to Kizen ever came.
[KAHAHAHAHA!]
Pier erupted into roaring laughter inside Simon's head.
[That hit the spot! Well played, boy!!]
'No, I was just……'
"My, my~"
Right at that moment—
"What fascinating conversation you're all having?"
Click, click.
Serne was walking toward them, her lustrous ivory hair streaming behind her. Simon had never been so glad to see her.
"……"
Her mere entrance shut every mouth in the room.
An aura that flowed from her as naturally as breathing. A suffocating, soaring dignity. Could there exist a single person capable of looking down on her—no, of even regarding her as an equal?
Whether they knew Serne or not was beside the point. Every student felt the weight of her presence.
"Oh my, why did you all go quiet? Go on—keep badmouthing Kizen."
She advanced with an enchanting smile toward the Aland students at the front, then tilted Benz's chin up with her index finger—the very boy who had shaken Simon's hand.
"Now then. Speak."
"G-G-Guh……!"
As those devouring eyes drew near, tears began pooling rapidly in Benz's eyes.
"I'm sor—"
Sharak.
At that moment, a white feather drifted down onto the nape of his neck.
"KIZEN IS THE WORST!"
Benz bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"We begged your school for exchange matches over and over, and you just flat-out ignored us! It was an official agreement between schools, and you canceled it unilaterally every single time! What, are you that much better than us?"
"Yes! Good, exactly like that!"
Serne moved on to the next student.
"Grown-ups take one look at our uniforms and ask if we're from Kizen. Say you go to a necromancer school, and Kizen's name comes up first, every time. It's crushing our self-esteem. I'm sick of it."
"Wonderful! If there's something on your mind, be honest about it!"
"For starters, your kids have no manners. Fine, they're elites, we get it—so why do they keep smirking at our uniforms as they walk past?"
"Exactly! I'm from Kizen myself and even I admit it!"
Watching Serne use her feathers to force the students into stringing together gossip about Kizen, Simon smiled bitterly.
'……Whose side are you even on?'
Of course, Serne had her own agenda.
'Simon! Are you listening? This is how awful Kizen is!'
Serne wasn't scheming anything—she was, in the purest sense, making them badmouth Kizen. No way would Serne, locked in competition with Lorraine and Simon, pass up an opportunity like this. She genuinely delighted in hearing insults about Kizen.
However—
'Why are you doing this to us?!'
The students from the other schools were living through hell.
There was a world of difference between gossiping of your own free will and being forced to do it in front of everyone.
'What's going to happen to us?'
'We're not really being barred from transferring… are we?'
The truth was, they all knew it. The ultimate career path for students of the three great necromancer academies was a transfer into Kizen.
"Come on—hurry up."
And there was that madwoman in the Kizen uniform, eyes blazing, making them curse her own alma mater. Worse, the students couldn't even refuse her command.
"Dig deeper! I want more scathing gossip!"
The situation had completely flipped. The students rolled their eyes around, silently begging for help, but—
"……"
"……"
Despite the commotion, not one of the adults passing by paid them any attention. With all this ruckus, it was uncanny how they were treated as if they simply didn't exist. Only now did a shiver run through the students.
This space already belonged to Serne.
"Next!"
Serne swept past Aland and Sierra and landed on Moiran.
"I've been looking forward to Moiran—always being compared to Kizen. So, what do you think of Kizen?"
She spoke in a honeyed voice, rose up on her tiptoes, and pressed a feather to the nape of the Moiran boy's neck.
"……"
It was the very student who had first shouted for the takedown of Kizen. He let out a small sigh—then plucked the feather from his neck and dropped it to the floor.
"!"
For the first time, Serne's face registered surprise.
"I don't need one of those to say what I choose to say."
He brushed past Serne and fixed his gaze on Simon.
"I love Moiran, my school, in my kingdom. Even if the chance to transfer to Kizen came, I would remain at the school that chose me. And—"
His eyes blazing, he continued.
"I have no intention of taking back what I said about Kizen being hopelessly overhyped. At this conference, I intend to show everyone the difference."
'Ooooh!'
Several students looked at him with admiration.
Simon was no exception. It was far more appealing than petty sniping and backroom snide remarks—to step forward like this and openly declare a fair fight.
Simon smiled.
"Good. I'll give it my best at this conference too—"
"I don't like you."
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
With the sound of countless feathers driving into flesh, he collapsed to his knees before Serne. She pouted, lips jutting in a sulk.
"Why are you speaking against my will?"
A voice cold enough to sink through the floor dripped from her twisted lips.
"Every human except the precious few I have acknowledged is a doll who obeys me without question."
Serne extended her foot. His head stretched forward until his face hovered above her shoe, as if he meant to lick it. His shoulders trembled, whether from resistance or something else.
"That's enough, Serne."
Simon said.
"!"
Serne Aindark, whom no one else could have stopped, had her expression flip at a single word from Simon—then broke into a radiant smile, like spring snow melting away.
"Heehee, it was a joke! Just a joke~"
She winked playfully and clapped her hands, and only then did the students come back to their senses. She scampered over in a skipping gait and glued herself to Simon's side.
"So? Are you starting to hate Kizen a little now?"
"……You just forced them to say all that."
"Oh, you wound me! I simply stoked the emotions that were already there so they could be honest. I didn't make a single thing up."
Afraid she'd cause another scene, Simon hurriedly led Serne away. Kajan, who had been leaning against a pillar watching the whole affair unfold, let out a long sigh and fell in beside them.
"Knew it. Stay away from students from other schools. That's a warning."
"Heehee."
As the three of them walked off, the students—who still wore dazed expressions—breathed sighs of relief.
"……So Kizen has monsters like that attending, huh."
"T-They really are a different class."
"But who was that girl?"
"Her hair was red, wasn't it?"
"Wasn't it black?"
"Were we sure she was a girl to begin with? Wasn't that a guy?"
They had already forgotten Serne's face entirely.