Who Would Take a Course Like This?
Who would even take something like this?
I turned my head and confirmed the seat beside me was empty.
She's clearly planning to sit here no matter what…
If her friends showed up, I'd just move again. No big deal.
"Go ahead and sit."
With that, I coolly shifted one seat over.
But she still stood there, ramrod straight, staring down at me like something about the arrangement displeased her.
"…Is this seat taken as well?"
"Well, no… Are you really going to sit there?"
"Yes."
Her answer was absolute.
Of course it was. With no owner claimed, I wasn't giving up this spot for anything.
From here, you can see the entire lecture hall at a glance.
Leaving no blind spots. Occupational hazard.
"…Suit yourself."
The blonde said as much, then dropped a neatly squared-off bag onto the desk and took the seat beside me.
I'd thought she might be angry, but the face turned toward the front was completely indifferent.
She'd be genuinely pretty if she smiled. Somehow, though, she didn't seem the type to smile easily.
Well, if sitting next to a scruffy returnee had soured her mood, my apologies.
I needed this seat or my hands would start shaking.
I kept that to myself and turned my gaze forward—then paused.
?
The stares that had been locked on me a moment ago scattered in a hurry.
People scrambled to look elsewhere the instant our eyes might meet, but my trained dynamic vision caught every last flicker of that instant.
Countless faces watching me were already burned into my mind as clearly as a photograph.
What did I even do?
Not a pleasant experience. For a second I'd thought I was watching a scene from a horror movie.
…Well.
Mature students existed, sure, but a cadet returning mid-semester was rare enough to be a curiosity.
Of course, for me, that was not a good sign.
Being the center of attention was the last thing I wanted. It violated my personal creed of living without presence.
If I keep my head down, they'll forget soon enough.
That was what I thought—until, not long after, I ran headfirst into a shocking truth.
Only after the professor walked in and the cadets took their seats did I realize just how many empty chairs surrounded me.
More precisely, surrounded us.
Every other student had clustered as close to the professor as possible, determined not to miss a single word of the lecture. The blonde and I alone sat cut off from the rest of the class.
……This was not good.
Very, extremely not good.
Now I finally understood why the cadets had been staring at me earlier.
And why the blonde had asked if I was really going to sit here.
If I hadn't taken this seat, she would have been sitting here all alone.
She'd probably been doing exactly that this whole time.
So when some unfamiliar guy suddenly plopped down next to her, of course people would turn and look. Hell, I would have too.
…Too late to change seats now.
It was impossible anyway.
As I'd said—anywhere else and the anxiety would eat me alive.
PTSD was a terrifying thing.
But then why was she so insistent on this particular seat?
I couldn't help but wonder.
Doesn't seem like she has friends… but she doesn't look bullied either.
Most cadets were nobles or children of wealthy families, so they tended to be good-looking as a rule—but the blonde stood out even among them.
Her beauty was the kind that seized your attention on contact, and her figure was flawless on top of it.
A crane among chickens, in short.
Which only made it stranger.
Flowers always attracted bugs. That was the natural order of things.
Personality, maybe.
I snuck a glance sideways. The blonde was listening to the professor's lecture with perfect posture.
That unshakable composure radiated elegance—and at the same time, a cold, haughty distance.
Either way, not the type people approached lightly.
Dig deep enough and you might find some personality flaw. Or she was just a voluntary loner—
……What am I doing?
I snapped back to myself with a jolt of hollow absurdity and rubbed at my eyes for no good reason.
Without meaning to, I'd slipped into the habit of observing people.
What they commonly called cold reading—a skill the special forces had drilled into us harder than almost anything else. It still surfaced on autopilot from time to time.
Anyway. Better not get deeply involved.
I filed the blonde under persons of interest and left it at that.
"…That concludes today's lecture. Good work, everyone."
After the general education class ended, I decided to look into major courses.
For that, I headed to the common area where you could handle academic records and various other administrative tasks.
A soft hum filled the air.
I placed my hand on a glowing crystal, and detailed academic information bloomed into view before my eyes.
In simple terms, a magic-powered intranet.
Let's see. What majors are available…
Back when I'd known nothing, I'd enrolled purely for the swordsmanship. Looking properly now, there were far more courses on offer than I'd expected.
That many professors was impressive in itself.
And with no enrollment caps, popular courses had student counts climbing into the hundreds.
Even more surprising: unpopular lectures were still listed as open. No minimum enrollment to cancel a class?
Oh-ho.
That was excellent news for me.
Fewer students means absolute grading, right?
My goal was only one thing.
Graduate from the Academy in one piece.
And what that required was credits—not rankings.
I had no intention of climbing into public office or making a name for myself.
So there was zero reason to pick a mainstream major.
Those would all be curved grading for sure.
Why shoulder the risk of flunking in a pit of gifted monsters?
I just needed to graduate without incident.
Right. Low enrollment it is.
I sorted the list by student count and scrolled all the way to the bottom.
And there it was.
A lecture with exactly one enrolled student.
At this point, they basically opened the course just for that one person.
…But the joy of discovery lasted only a moment.
I saw the course title and my eyes went wide.
Muriel had told me that if I wanted to change majors, I should go find the department head for the relevant subject. So I went straight there.
Even on the way, the course title kept circling through my head.
Understanding Natural Phenomena
Who would take something like this?
—I almost muttered it out loud, then flinched as I remembered that I was the one taking it.
There's a reason it only has one student…
At a glance, the title might sound fairly interesting.
But that was only because I was from Earth.
Break the course name into pieces and you got "natural," "phenomena," "understanding."
Start with nature: in this world, nature was something only elves got excited about.
Unlike twenty-first-century Earth, there was no environmental destruction to worry about, so interest in the natural world was naturally minimal.
Phenomena?
Here, a phenomenon wasn't something to observe and analyze—it was a result to reproduce and apply.
Before anyone even thought How do I start a fire?, the average person in this world just shouted Fireball!
Alright, that was a slight exaggeration. Of course people here used flint and the like when they needed a flame.
The point was they didn't bother thinking deeply about the phenomenon itself.
So naturally, there was no need for "understanding" either.
Could you even explain mana or aura with logic?
Bottom line: to the people of this world, this subject held zero appeal.
To me, of course, it was endlessly appealing. No—it was perfect.
It's just science.
I might have been a science student who'd given up on math, but I still had the basic scientific knowledge.
And the laws of nature applied the same way in this world.
There just happened to be things that broke those laws—and those things were the mainstream, sure, but…
At the very least, I was confident I wouldn't fail.
Thinking that, I knocked on the door.
Knock knock.
No response. Once more.
Knock knock.
Nobody home?
I'd already checked the schedule.
At this hour, she should definitely be in the lab…
Ah.
Maybe she was so buried in research she couldn't hear a thing?
The popular image of a mad scientist flashed through my mind.
In a world drowning in aura and mana, a contrarian eccentric researching science—it suited the picture perfectly.
No choice, then.
The door slid open. The moment I stepped inside, I immediately regretted it.
Ugh, what is that smell.
A sour stench hit my nose so hard I clamped a hand over it.
Not chemical reagents like formalin or ethanol—more like a stale, rancid funk.
Exactly like my old studio apartment……
You've got to be kidding me.
The interior I surveyed was so filthy I felt bad comparing it to my apartment.
What?
A research lab?
Please.
This wasn't a lab. This was a garbage dump.
Unidentifiable documents and greasy-fingered books that belonged on the desk were scattered across the floor, while the desk itself held more half-finished drinks and leftover food than anything else.
What is that? Maggots? Please tell me no.
The Empire's premier talent incubator had a den like this in it?
I stood frozen in horror, unable to take another step—when a voice drifted over.
"Whooo is it~?"
A languid, drawn-out voice from the side room. An actual person lived here—not livestock!
And it was a woman's voice, at that.
"Um…"
Before I could even answer, the face of a woman tipped back in her chair came into view from the adjoining room.
I only realized she was a woman just then.
Her white, curly hair stuck out in every direction like a mane, and for a second I'd thought some kind of animal was in there.
"What's the maatter~?"
"Ah, well, I—"
"Waaah!"
Crash!
I'd thought the chair looked unstable—and sure enough, it tipped clean over, dumping her flat on the floor.
"Owies…"
I approached as she groped across the cluttered floor and picked up the round-framed glasses that had landed nearby, holding them out for her.
!
And as I went to hand them over, I caught a glimpse through the gap in her disheveled collar of two soft, rounded hills.
This woman wasn't wearing a single thing under her lab coat.
"Ah, thanks~ Heehee."
Before the glasses went on, her face had clearly been pretty—but the moment she put them on, her eyes shrank to the size of beans. The prescription must have been astronomical. She looked like she couldn't keep her eyes open without them.
You could fairly call those glasses a seal on her appearance.
"So, what brings you here~?"
"…I'd like to enroll in the Understanding Natural Phenomena course—"
I didn't even finish the sentence.
"Kyaaah~!"
The madwoman suddenly threw her arms around me.