The Smoke Screen Teaching Assistant
"Ah, the course enrollment forms are over there."
Leon pointed at the paper pile stacked on the desk. Judging by how thickly the enrollment forms were piled up, Andy's rumors had worked remarkably well.
I scanned the forms with satisfaction.
The Crown Prince, Kilian—successor to the Magic Tower Coalition.
The game's key characters were all listed in a row. But my gaze passed over the main cast without a second look.
Fortunately, I found the name I was looking for.
"What should I do, sir?"
Leon asked in a low, grave voice, his face utterly serious, as if he'd just been entrusted with some momentous mission.
"For now, get me installed as your teaching assistant."
"...S-sorry, I don't think I heard that correctly?"
Leon went stiff, as though he'd heard something deeply strange. I explained kindly.
"You haven't selected a TA yet, so a security guard will be assigned to the position shortly. All you have to do is name me."
"Y-you want me to appoint you, a general, as a teaching assistant? How could I possibly—"
"It's a smokescreen."
"A smokescreen... Understood, sir."
Leon nodded, looking vaguely nauseous.
"And keep your mouth shut. When I nod, you nod. When I shake my head, you shake yours."
"...Excuse me?"
"Was any part of that unclear?"
"N-no, sir! Understood!"
Leon snapped to attention and barked the words out. His face said he had plenty more he wanted to ask, but he didn't press further.
This was why ex-military men were so convenient. You tell them to jump, they ask how high.
"I'll handle the rest myself."
"Yes, sir! Thank you!"
At that single sentence, relief visibly spread across Leon's face. Teaching must really have been weighing on him.
"First, we'll need to rewrite the syllabus."
"I'll draft one and submit it immediately!"
Leon boomed, every inch the soldier.
I glanced over Leon's syllabus sitting at the edge of the desk. Sloppy and overwrought—it had been written with far too much straining effort.
Not that it mattered to me, but making Leon redo it would clearly take forever. Today was orientation day, so we needed to move fast.
"I'll leave the syllabus to an expert."
"An expert, you say?"
Leon tilted his head.
"There is one. A true expert, at that."
The upper floors of the Main Building were difficult to access.
But Raven would one day become the King of Assassins. He would have found a way to keep up.
"Hey, Raven."
Caw—
A crow's cry answered a moment later. True to form for such a gloomy assassin, he seemed to have been trailing me the whole time, biding his opportunity.
Not that I cared. A healthy dose of tension was good for the circulation.
Raven was an assassin of the Full Moon, and Full Moon's intelligence network was the best on the continent. With the whole continent's attention fixed on Elysium Academy, he'd surely gathered a mountain of information.
Which meant—
"Write me a syllabus."
Caw?
"Right now."
I tossed Leon's syllabus out the window. A crow outside snatched it in its beak and vanished.
Caw...
The crow's cry sounded noticeably weaker than before.
With the entrance ceremony over and orientation week underway, a curious buzz hummed through the Academy. This year's faculty was simply too dazzling for expectations not to run high over their lectures.
And yet the professor drawing the most attention was neither the Knight of Radiance nor the Twin Witches.
"Will Your Highness also be attending Professor Leon's lecture?"
At the voice beside him, the Crown Prince turned to find a flamboyantly dressed man standing there.
Kilian, the Coalition Head's only son. A meticulously calculated smile, and a face that looked smug no matter when you saw it.
"I am."
"There's certainly been a great deal of talk lately. They're calling him an unofficial Imperial Sword—"
"There is no such thing as unofficial."
"I thought as much. The Magic Tower Coalition doesn't waste money cultivating secret weapons. Why would we bother with something so unprofitable?"
"To dodge taxes?"
"Haha, hardly."
"That was a joke."
"Ah, so Your Highness has a gift for humor as well. Truly, there's no end to your talents."
"Correct."
The Crown Prince nodded flatly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The corner of Kilian's eye twitched.
The Crown Prince paid it no mind and turned away.
The lecture hall was packed to bursting. So many students had come that there weren't enough seats to go around.
Of course, there was always room for the Crown Prince.
"H-here, sit here, Your Highness!!"
"Much obliged."
The Crown Prince settled into his seat with practiced ease, and Kilian slid in beside him.
"I did some digging. He's from the front lines, apparently. Quite the up-and-coming captain, too."
"Is that so."
The Crown Prince couldn't have cared less. The only reason he'd come at all was that everyone else was talking about this lecture.
Soon the familiar faces filed into the hall. Taros, son of the Lord of Death, and even Karel, the Holy Nation's forged blade.
"Every rising star in one room. Professor Leon must be even more formidable than the rumors say."
In truth, few people believed the rumors outright. Most had likely been drawn by sheer curiosity, come to gawk at the spectacle.
Just then—
BANG! The front door of the lecture hall was flung open without ceremony.
The front door was, by unspoken rule, reserved for professors alone. The moment it swung open, everyone tensed and fixed their eyes on it.
But the figure standing in the doorway was not Leon. It was a pink-haired woman in round glasses who looked, frankly, dim.
"Evangeline! Who told you to open the front door and walk in?!"
"K-kehiiek!"
"Honestly! We're so sorry!"
A short boy hastily dragged Evangeline back out.
"Tsk. So many people raised without proper upbringing."
Kilian clicked his tongue openly at the scene.
The Crown Prince made a private resolution.
Next time, I'll enter through the front door.
Just then, the front door opened again.
"What kind of prank is—!"
The students mid-way through their outrage fell silent.
Because a blond man with a frost-sharp expression had stepped inside.
Professor Leon of the rumors.
That distinctive military edge in the air silenced the students in an instant.
Interesting.
The Crown Prince's eyes gleamed as he watched Leon.
The hall was so crowded that some students were left standing for lack of chairs—a situation that would fluster any ordinary professor. But Leon didn't spare the students so much as a glance, as though they had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Yes. That's what a professor ought to be.
Admirable self-esteem, really.
Then Leon spoke in a voice stripped of all inflection.
"This class will proceed with a selected group of students only."
The voice was so flat it sounded like someone reading off a script.
A selected group, hm.
The Crown Prince curled his lips in satisfaction.
Elysium Academy's charter declared that all humans were equal before education. The Crown Prince thought otherwise.
In this world, there were those chosen, and there was everyone else. To turn away from that plain fact was nothing but hypocrisy.
The opportunity to be taught belonged first to the chosen. That was only proper.
I don't know about his skill, but his values are to my taste.
The Crown Prince waited in good cheer for his name to be called. It never once occurred to him that it might not be.
But the first name out of Leon's mouth was not the Crown Prince's.
"Vivienne."
...Vivienne?
At the familiar name, the Crown Prince's indifferent expression cracked.
The Crown Prince did not bother remembering other people's names. There was simply no need.
There was exactly one reason he remembered Vivienne's.
The Shame of the Imperial Family.
Vivienne was an imperial princess born the same year as the Crown Prince. Aside from sharing a birth year, the two were opposites in every conceivable way.
Vivienne was timid, talentless, dim-witted, lazy, and fat. She was, in short, a disgrace to the sacred imperial bloodline.
And she had been called? Before him?
No—naturally, the protagonist is always called last.
He told himself that and moved on, but honestly, the mood wouldn't lift. The mere idea of being lumped in with Vivienne was distasteful.
The Crown Prince resolved that even if his name was called, he would refuse. He had not the slightest intention of being grouped with her.
"Rosa."
At Leon's next call, a girl stood up—and her outfit was flagrantly out of regulation.
The last button of her uniform was fastened somewhere up near her chest, leaving her midriff fully exposed, and emblazoned across that bare stomach was a strange tattoo. Her ears bristled with ornate piercings, and a long stick dangled from her lips.
The real problem was the cloth draped around her neck.
Pure white overlaid with gold trim—that was the cape worn as proof of a saintess candidate.
"Ah, the Holy Nation's little headache, Rosa. One of their saintess candidates, I hear—though they say she runs away from home and disappears at every opportunity."
Kilian looked her over and clicked his tongue.
The Crown Prince didn't bother listening. He was occupied with more pressing concerns—when his name would be called, and how exactly he would refuse.
"And Luna."
"Kekeke. So you've recognized my true worth."
At the next call, a small-framed girl rose, trailing a sinister chuckle behind her.
Black mages were shunned even within the Academy, famous for clinging together in tight little packs. Yet not a single black mage stood anywhere near this girl.
That alone told you exactly how she was treated among her peers.
"Andy and Evangeline. That is all."
The moment Evangeline's name was called, the Crown Prince understood.
No—not just him. Everyone in the lecture hall caught on at once.
"The F-tier class."
And not just any F-tier class—a hand-picked assembly of the most carefully curated failures available.
The students scattered from the hall in a hurry, as though worried someone might catch them lingering.
The Crown Prince exited through the front door, magnificently alone.
"With candidates like the Crown Prince and Kilian available, why did you choose them?"
Leon asked, utterly bewildered.
I surveyed the faces left behind in the lecture hall.
A girl whose outfit showed more skin than it covered, with a saintess candidate's cape knotted around her neck. A gloomy girl rejected even by the black mages. An imperial princess known as the Shame of the Imperial Family. And then, just... Evangeline.
F-tier failures, plain and simple.
Their entrance exam scores could, in fact, be lined up in a perfect row counting backward from last place.
Among the students who had flooded into the lecture hall were key characters like the Crown Prince, Kilian, and Karel. If I'd wanted, I could have coaxed any of them into taking the class too.
But I had zero intention of doing so.
What if one of them ended up making eye contact with Evangeline?
Those men were all male lead candidates. Left alone with Evangeline, romance was guaranteed to bloom, and that would be a disaster.
That was precisely why I'd filled this class with girls only. It was the only way to prevent the tragedy of Evangeline falling in love.
Besides, Elysium Academy calculated grades on a strict curve—relative evaluation. Tangled up with those heavyweights, Evangeline would never pull a passing grade.
If she wasn't to be expelled, the class had to be built around students at her level.
In other words, I needed failures.
That said, calling them ordinary failures would be doing them a disservice.
These were failures who had distinguished themselves in the game without a single support buff—failures who, at the very least, could still be sorted for recycling.
Having weighed every possible variable, I could confidently call them my hand-picked, premium-grade, elite organic, recycled failures.
"What's with this pig? She reeks. Get lost."
"I-I'm terribly sorry..."
"Kekeke, no need for such harsh words. It makes you look weak."
"And who the hell are you? You get lost too."
Watching the failures jab at each other like they'd already sized one another up, I nodded in satisfaction.