First Class (2)
The young lady who emerged from her bath was a bit late in grasping the situation and ended up sulking, which caused a slight delay. Fortunately, we avoided being tardy.
When we finally arrived at the classroom, students who had shown up early in the morning were already engaged in a tense battle of nerves, their auras clashing fiercely.
I quietly painted the scene of the classroom in my mind using the information from my Mind's Eye. Tiered rows of luxurious desks, a massive blackboard and teacher's podium at the front.
And every single new student seated at their desks had sharp, predatory glints in their eyes as they secretly sized one another up.
After yesterday's bloody initiation at the entrance ceremony, one might have expected them to be cowed, but these were the cream of the crop from across the continent. It seemed they'd already recovered their fighting spirit.
Everyone here had grown up being called geniuses in their own territories. As if to prove it, the air inside the classroom was thick and heavy with the mana each student unconsciously radiated.
Thanks to my Mind's Eye, the invisible waves of power filling the room felt several times more vivid and clear to me than to anyone else. The mana they were emitting from all directions in an attempt to dominate one another collided chaotically in midair.
If someone had drawn a sword, perhaps those tangled clumps of mana would have been visible to the naked eye?
But as I calmly observed those dazzling flows of mana, I simply shook my head inwardly.
Even though these were students of Stella Academy, where the continent’s greatest prodigies gathered, they were ultimately just first-year freshmen. To me, their mana felt riddled with holes. Driven purely by pride, the mana they recklessly poured out was murky in purity, full of impurities, and their control was so immature that instead of condensing in one place, it leaked out everywhere.
And yet they were just letting it all spill out like that… What a truly pathetic waste of mana.
Look at our young lady, how neatly and quietly she’s—huh?
“Hmph.”
The young lady snorted as she brushed past me and entered the classroom.
Apparently displeased by the immature mana pressure pressing in from all sides, she narrowed her eyes fiercely and stomped her foot hard against the floor.
At the same time, mana rippled out from the tip of her foot like a wave.
The messy, tangled mana that had been clashing everywhere was instantly crushed and swept away without a trace by Iolet’s overwhelming power.
The students who had been locked in their battle of nerves stared at her with eyes wide in shock as her mana instantly dominated the surroundings.
“What are you looking at?”
“…!”
In that instant, the students who had been competing seemed to act on cue as they all turned their heads away or dropped their gazes to the floor.
Whether they did or not, Iolet leisurely walked to the very back seat—the one that could be considered the exclusive territory of the class’s top dog—and plopped down.
I lightly tapped my cane and followed behind her like a shadow.
“Young lady, if you make enemies in every direction from the very first day of school, you won’t be able to make any friends.”
“Hmph, who said I came to the academy to make friends? Besides, those guys were the ones who looked at me first in such an unpleasant way.”
In the original story, her social skills weren’t this completely shattered, were they? How did she end up like this…? Was it because I spoiled her too much over the past three years?
I thought I’d raised her quite strictly—throwing her off cliffs and such—but it seems her innate personality couldn’t be overcome…!
Or maybe occasionally mixing a little poison into her food for poison resistance had some negative side effect.
While I was lost in these concerns about Iolet’s social skills, the sound of steady footsteps approached us, and a man walked over.
“Quite the commotion from the very morning, Iolet Dranice.”
A low, smooth voice laced with an undeniable charisma that refused to be ignored.
I realized the voice was familiar.
To be precise, it was one of the voices I had heard constantly throughout my repeated playthroughs before falling into this world.
The main male protagonist of The Saintess and the Hero, and the Crown Prince of the Libertan Empire—Edward Libertis.
I could naturally picture Edward’s face without needing to draw my sword.
But since a male character’s face holds no particular value, I’ll skip the detailed description.
He’s just a typical handsome guy with golden hair.
Still, as the male lead of the original novel, he was popular among female fans, and the setting established him as the empire’s greatest beauty who received the love of countless women in the story.
That’s why his voice was brimming with confidence.
I could sense the assurance that came from knowing no one living in the empire could possibly fail to recognize his voice. Truly befitting the dignity of the man called the empire’s greatest beauty.
But unfortunately, his opponent was a monster of social ineptitude born from the Dranice family and raised by me—Iolet Dranice.
“Who the hell are you! Do you know me?”
“……?”
Edward’s bewilderment at receiving such a cold response from a woman for the first time was palpable.
That’s right. Our young lady, despite being the daughter of a duke, doesn’t even know the face of her own country’s crown prince!
Before meeting me, she had rarely attended social gatherings or parties because she was wary of her family’s scrutiny. After meeting me, we stuck together so much that the number of times she met other people could be counted on one hand.
Thus was born the hikikomori of the Dranice family, the monster of catastrophic social skills—Iolet Dranice!
As expected of our young lady. She remains completely unmoved by mere handsome men.
In the brief silence while Edward was stunned into speechlessness, the group of followers who had been watching from behind him couldn’t hold back any longer and exploded with a furious reaction.
“H-how insolent! Do you have any idea who this person is to speak such nonsense?! This is His Highness Edward Libertis, the little sun of the Libertan Empire!”
At the noble youth’s shout that seemed to shake the entire classroom, Iolet’s expression grew even fiercer. The young man who had stepped forward trembled with unsteady breath, as if facing a savage beast that might pounce at any moment.
At this rate, the young lady is going to cause another incident… Should I step in?
Just as I was thinking that—
Creak—
The front door of the classroom, which had been wrapped in such tense atmosphere, burst open.
All eyes reflexively turned toward the doorway.
“Everyone’s full of energy from the very first day.”
A heavy, unyielding voice that sliced through the air like a blade echoed throughout the classroom.
The sharp atmosphere and commotion that had filled the room vanished without a trace, crushed by that single sentence.
The overwhelming pressure carried in that voice sent a chill down everyone’s spines, and the students’ heads turned toward the front door as if pulled by magnets.
Even with my eyes closed, I felt the shape of the mana that had arrived at the doorway and clicked my tongue inwardly.
The mana burned as if it would incinerate everything around it at any moment.
Its density was on a completely different level from the messy mana the students had been leaking earlier.
Under that mana’s pressure, every student—even Iolet—showed signs of heightened tension.
I didn’t even need to look through my Mind's Eye; I could naturally and accurately visualize the owner of that voice.
Like Edward, this was one of the characters I had encountered multiple times across my repeated playthroughs.
In The Saintess and the Hero, the homeroom teacher assigned to first-years is completely random.
The difficulty of that playthrough is determined by which character becomes the homeroom teacher, and the owner of this mana was undoubtedly one of the characters who raised the game’s difficulty to the highest level.
‘She doesn’t usually appear as a first-year homeroom teacher…’
A towering height that could easily look down on most adult men. A wild ponytail of flame-red hair tied high. Between the highly revealing leather outfit that barely contained her explosive bust, white scars from the battlefield would cover her entire body like grotesque patterns.
Even the thick scar crossing her cheek, worn like a medal, left such a strong impression that anyone who saw her would instinctively shrink back.
Having seized complete control of the classroom’s atmosphere with her mere presence, she leisurely scanned her surroundings. The sensation of her predator-like gaze sweeping across the room pricked at the skin.
“……Tsk.”
Tap. Tap.
With an unhesitating stride, she walked to the front of the podium and stopped. Then, standing at an angle, she looked down at the students and spat out,
“Stop wasting your energy and sit down. Class is about to begin.”
She continued toward the podium.
“There’s no need to bare your teeth at each other already. You’ll be beating each other senseless plenty from now on anyway.”
After confirming that the room had fallen completely silent, she twisted the thick scar on her cheek into a grin. The wild aura radiating from between her rugged leather clothes weighed heavily on the students’ necks.
But rather than that aura, I was more interested in something else I sensed through my Mind's Eye.
No, with a size like that, it was impossible not to have my gaze (even if I couldn’t see) drawn to them!