First Class (4): The Perfect Score
One hour had passed since Professor Elaheem’s declaration.
The training grounds were filled with the heat radiating from the students.
“Haaaaap!”
In the center of the training grounds, a male student with veins bulging on his neck raised his sword high above his head. Mana squeezed from the core in his heart surged powerfully through his entire body. Then, he stomped the ground hard enough to crack it as he swung his sword down toward the dummy.
Kaang—!
With a heavy rupture, the blade slammed into the dummy’s shoulder. Fierce winds scattered in every direction, showing off a rather impressive display of power, yet the dummy that took the impact head-on didn’t budge an inch.
Soon, straw spilled from between the dummy’s grotesquely torn lips, and a cold mechanical voice echoed across the training grounds.
“...T-Twenty-five points?”
The male student’s face drained of color in an instant. He was someone praised as a genius outside these walls. When he first heard the test explained, he had felt confident.
He had even planned to show off his skills to the other students. Yet only twenty-five points? There was no way a full-power strike could score at a failing level like this. Denying reality, the student stepped forward as if ready to grab the dummy by the collar.
“This can’t be! With how much mana I poured into it, to only get a score like this…!”
“Next.”
Professor Elaheem, standing crookedly and tapping the floor with her foot, cut him off without mercy.
The student whipped his head toward her, pleading desperately.
“P-Professor! Just once! Please give me one more chance! I was nervous just now and my mana control slipped a little…!”
“Are you deaf? I said next. Get lost.”
Her beast-like eyes flashed, and the student could only gasp and stagger back like a mute who had swallowed his tongue.
There was only one chance. The pressure that failure meant immediate expulsion slowly tightened around the necks of every student still waiting.
In that despairing atmosphere, I… wasn’t doing anything in particular!
Of course not. Honestly, it was boring!
Watching was fun for the first couple of times, but after an hour of the exact same thing repeating, it was unbearably dull.
Besides, I can’t see anything if I don’t draw my sword!
Thanks to my Mind’s Eye I could sense everything, but still…. No matter how interesting a movie is, how would it feel to only hear the sound without seeing the screen? That was exactly how I felt right now!
In the game this section had passed with just a few lines of text, so I never paid it any attention, but experiencing it in reality made it incredibly tedious.
This was another moment that reminded me this place was real.
It wasn’t just me—my lady seemed just as bored. She had plopped down on the marble floor and was now using my lap as a pillow, trying to catch up on lost sleep.
“Mmm…”
The young lady squirmed, the hem of her dress shifting across my knees as she mumbled.
“It’s noisy, Dia… Chase all those idiots away…”
Her fierce sleep-talking made me chuckle inwardly. The shouts and exploding spells all around must have been disturbing her sweet nap.
I set the cane I had been holding gently to the side and softly patted her head so the complaining young lady could rest comfortably. The presence above my maid uniform settled back into a steady rhythm, and just as she was about to sink into deep sleep again—
Kwaaaaaang—!
A roar on an entirely different scale shook the entire training grounds. The vibrating shockwave savagely churned through the domain of my Mind’s Eye.
At the same time, the students who had been standing in a daze all sucked in a collective breath, and a huge commotion erupted.
The cool voice flowed from between the dummy’s torn lips. It was a high score that completely surpassed the twenty-to-thirty-point range that had dominated for the past hour.
This mana flow… it’s from the Eisenbergs.
The owner of those seventy-five points was Lancelot Eisenberg, heir to the Eisenberg Margraviate—the family known as the Shield of the Empire.
He was the same man who had swung that massive shield during the entrance ceremony.
Of course, he was also a fixed character in Saint of the Hero. His archetype was the classic knight. In the original novel he appeared as a sub male lead, but since I never read the novel I wouldn’t know!
In the game, though, his insane stamina stats made him an expert at enduring, so players called him cockroach, cockroach king, and “the real cockroach is so damn cool.”
Anyway, the top students are finally starting to catch on.
Tracing the mana trajectory behind my closed eyes, I smirked inwardly.
That’s right. This test wasn’t actually a simple contest of raw destructive power.
That dummy was a special magic tool Principal Lustil had personally created using dragon scales.
Since it contained scales from the strongest race, transmitting impact all the way to its core through ordinary means was nearly impossible.
To strike the core you needed precise mana density, perfect control, and so on… but throwing away the boring academic explanation, it came down to this:
Either hit it insanely hard or with extreme accuracy to earn a high score.
Any lack of power or precision in the middle would cause the impact to scatter, preventing a high mark.
The splendid pillar of fire Professor Elaheem demonstrated was nothing but a mean-spirited trick to make students think they simply had to hit hard.
If the freshmen were as strong as Elaheem they could brute-force it, but ordinary first-years who had just enrolled couldn’t possibly possess that kind of power. ‘With a few exceptions, of course.’
Still, Elaheem really does have a terrible personality.
Well, only someone with a personality that broken would take on first-year homeroom duty.
Anyway, starting with Lancelot, the upper-rank students who had noticed the dummy’s secret gradually revealed their true strength and began racking up high scores. Every time an eighty-point mark burst forth, the training grounds shook with gasps of admiration and shock.
And finally, the voice that announced the end of the tedious wait rang across the grounds.
“Next. Iolet Dranice.”
It was finally my lady’s turn.
“Come, my lady. Time to wake up.”
I gently shook the shoulder of the young lady who had fallen fast asleep on my lap. Amid the noisy cheers disturbing her rest, my voice reached her ear softly yet clearly.
“Ugh…?”
She blinked with a dazed face still heavy with sleep. Unlike her usual haughty self, a slightly slurred, almost silly-sounding voice slipped from her red lips.
“It’s your turn, my lady. Go finish it quickly and come back.”
“Ah… my turn…?”
Iolet rubbed her sleepy eyes and sluggishly rose from my lap. She half-heartedly brushed the tiny wrinkles from her skirt and began walking toward the dummy in the center of the grounds with her eyes still half-closed. Her steps were languid, as if the tension around her didn’t exist.
Just then, the rustle of fabric and a familiar mana presence approached my side. Its owner was the Crown Prince of the Libertan Empire, Edward Libertis.
He looked back and forth between my lady walking defenselessly toward the dummy and me still sitting leisurely on the marble floor, then spoke in a voice that sounded genuinely taken aback.
“Aren’t either of you worried?”
“Why? Isn’t it sixty-five points?”
“…This test is only about avoiding the lowest score. There’s no need to overexert yourself.”
“Still, sixty-five points is a bit…”
“……”
The prince’s flustered aura traveled through the air.
Even though the test only required passing the expulsion line of the lowest score, having the title of Crown Prince while upper-rank students kept exploding eighty-point scores made sixty-five points honestly quite embarrassing. Doesn’t the guy have any pride? If not, maybe he should just cling to someone like I do?
I also wondered inwardly why he was suddenly acting so friendly, but as a well-mannered perfect maid I kept the thought to myself.
“Ahem, ahem! M-My score isn’t what matters, is it? I also admit that Lady Dranice possesses more mana than any of us. It’s hard to believe she’s a first-year like the rest of us. However…”
Sixty-five points clicked his tongue as he watched my lady arrive in front of the dummy.
“As you must have noticed as well, that dummy is no ordinary object. You absolutely cannot achieve a high score with mana alone.”
Sixty-five points continued in a rather serious tone.
“No matter how powerful a spell you cast, once it meets the dummy’s mana resistance the energy scatters in every direction. In the end, the key is how much you compress and precisely control the technique. Is that kind of refined control even possible with a mind that just woke up from sleep?”
Hmm… why is he talking so much? At first I thought he came to childishly provoke us because my lady ignored him in the classroom earlier, but it seems he simply wanted to explain.
Explanation otaku…
Still, he wasn’t wrong.
If the opponent weren’t our lady, that is.
“I wonder? Aren’t you underestimating our lady a little too much?”
“What do you…”
It was the moment Sixty-five points asked back in confusion.
Kuuuung!
A heavy vibration that seemed to make the entire marble floor of the training grounds sink rose from my toes.
It wasn’t the ear-splitting explosions that Lancelot and the other geniuses had produced.
It was a bizarre wave that chilled the heart, like the feeling of a colossal mass crushing the earth.
At the same time came an enormous mana compression rate that made the very space at the center of the grounds seem to twist. My Mind’s Eye screamed warnings like crazy.
Leaving the shocked Sixty-five points behind, I quietly drew my sword.
I felt Edward flinch beside me.
Don’t get nervous. I didn’t draw it because of you.
I have to witness my lady’s cool moment with my own two eyes!
Sword Saint — Activated
Trial of the World — Nullified
Srrrng.
The sharp blade hidden inside the cane’s exterior slid out smoothly.
In that instant, the terrible darkness that had seemed eternal lifted like a lie, and the world embedded itself transparently into my vision. The first thing my fully restored eyes saw was the back of my lady standing elegantly in the middle of the training grounds, finger extended.
And at the exact center of the dummy her fingertip pointed toward, a single small black arrow was embedded deep.
Compared to the flashy attacks the other students had unleashed that seemed to shake the entire grounds, it looked utterly shabby and tiny, but my eyes saw it clearly.
The absurd density of mana condensed into that single tiny arrow.
The arrow, lodged in the dummy’s chest, did not stop. It began mercilessly drilling deeper inside. The sight of brutally compressed mana boring into the dummy’s core like a drill made the entire training grounds hold its breath.
Pang—!
Instead of a loud explosion, a clean rupture like escaping air rang out as black mana completely burst from within the dummy.
Black currents that had been crouched inside its gaps rose like haze.
Not a single person in the training grounds dared to breathe.
Soon, breaking the silence, the mechanical voice erupted from between the dummy’s torn lips.
Ninety-eight points.
It was the moment the highest score—excluding Professor Elaheem—was renewed.
In the calm before the storm that threatened to flip the entire training grounds upside down, Iolet, having checked her score, snorted indifferently as if she had seen nothing more than a pebble on the roadside.
Our lady is amazing!
She just solved it with pure mana volume. Wow! Whoever raised her really did a perfect job!
Then a mood-ruining voice came from the side.
“I-Incredible! Such overwhelming mana volume…! Did you see it too? The density of refined mana in that black arrow! That dummy has the property of absorbing mana, so if the flow is rough or the refinement is poor it only strikes the shell before scattering in every direction without a trace…”
Aish, can someone please take this guy away already!