The Pier
Iris, the hero, clasped her trembling hands and flung herself onto the bed.
“I passed the written exam!”
Beaming with pure joy, she rolled across the mattress, phone clutched tight. On the screen glowed the message from Sirius Academy confirming her success.
She had studied far less than most, so the written portion had been a constant source of worry. Years of alleyway survival had eroded much of her previous life’s knowledge. Math, history, science—almost none of it remained. She had been forced to relearn everything from scratch. Of course, once she started studying, fragments would surface with a quiet Ah, so that’s what that was, but still.
The moment the acceptance notice arrived, Iris opened her phone and fired off a message to someone special.
Those messages raced through undersea cables laid across the ocean floor until they reached their destination.
Hm? Who’s this?
Seo-hyun was packing after finishing his own exam when the notification arrived. The instant he saw Iris’s name, he replied.
I switched off my phone and sank into thought for a moment.
Daddy-Long-Legs, huh...
In a way, it wasn’t far off. For nearly three years I had helped her without ever revealing my identity.
Once I’m at the academy, I’ll finally get to meet Iris in person, won’t I?
After I had taken her in when she was on the brink of death, I had done everything I could to give her as much experience as possible. Back when I still lived in the mansion I would carve out time to send her the textbooks and supplies she needed. After the monster raid, the free hours I could devote to her only increased, and I even taught her learning methods tailored specifically to her. Thanks to that, Iris had almost completely recovered from the aftermath of the incident in Sector US-TK-07 and had drilled systematic combat techniques into her body that suited her perfectly.
I wasn’t joking—she could already hold her own against A-class heroes to a respectable degree. If she ever cut loose the way she had when she raised that pillar of light, ignoring the consequences and letting her body run wild, she could probably wipe a city off the map. Her growth rate was so overwhelming that I finally understood why the goddess had declared only a hero could stand against the Demon King.
Give her another ten years and she would be thrashing most S-class heroes without breaking a sweat.
That was why I had urged her to enter the academy.
By the time I turn seventeen I’ll be heading there myself, and after that I won’t have the spare time to keep tutoring her.
If Iris enrolled, she would receive guidance from seasoned instructors, and I would be right there beside her, able to watch over her directly.
Lucky that Sirius Academy doesn’t belong to any single nation.
The academy conducted classes primarily in English, yet it claimed no national affiliation—something closer to the Vatican. In fact, it maintained an independent military force strong enough to take on a small country by itself. The World Government still refused to recognize it as a sovereign state, of course.
“Mmm~ Maybe I should start prepping for the practical too?”
As an aside, I had also cleared the written exam’s minimum cutoff. They usually cut at the top ten percent, but this round must have been brutal; anyone scoring 65.7 or higher—effectively 66 and above—was waved through. I wouldn’t know my exact score until every test was finished, but the pass/fail notice had arrived by text a few hours earlier. Expected or not, it still felt good.
“No time to celebrate. I’m not exactly swimming in free hours.”
The practical was a week away, yet preparation had to begin now. I also needed to get ready to travel to the testing site Sirius Academy had designated.
The practical is held overseas, after all.
With the finest candidates from every nation converging, the academy had built its practical exam grounds not in any one country but in the middle of the Pacific. They had remodeled an entire island into a facility capable of housing tens of thousands at once, stocked it with all manner of monsters, and spared no effort to attract only the absolute best talent.
Which meant I had to board a ship arriving today and set out for the exam site immediately.
“Yekaterina... you’ve been drinking again?”
“Nnngh~? What is it, what’s going on...”
“Haa. Just drink this.”
I tossed a bottle of pear juice at Yekaterina, who seemed to have grown even lazier since the Seoul raid, then began packing the essentials.
“...I can’t even get drunk, so what’s the point of pear juice...”
“No matter how I look at it, your daily routine is going to fall apart the second I’m gone. I can’t just leave you like that.”
We had ended up living together after the Seoul raid, but the time to part ways had finally come. Sirius Academy was a dormitory school, and there was no way Yekaterina could live inside it. The moment she stepped through the gates, villain-intrusion alarms would blare and hundreds of security officers would swarm her.
“So I’m asking—do you really have to go to the academy? You could just keep living with me.”
“...I need to see Julia. Honestly, the fact that I never even contacted her once has been weighing on me.”
Back then everything had been too hard. My head had been a mess, and all I wanted was to be left alone. Maybe witnessing so many deaths had given me PTSD; I simply hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. Even when I did speak, it was brief exchanges like the ones with Usa, or half-orders and purely transactional dealings with Yekaterina’s subordinates. The only real exception had been Yekaterina herself. Maybe fighting side by side against the demonkin had forged some sense of kinship, or maybe she was simply different from everyone else.
Anyway, enough of that useless digression.
Now that I had mostly climbed out of that hole, I could see how abnormal it had been to survive by the skin of my teeth and then never once reach out to the Wittelsbach family. Looking back, it almost felt as if something had been influencing me...
Either way, I could no longer put off meeting her.
“Haa. Fine.”
“Still.”
“...?”
“The year we spent together was enjoyable.”
“...”
Yekaterina stayed silent for a moment, then waved me off, telling me to just go already.
“It’s not like we’ll never see each other again. Whatever. Come visit during break. I’ll be here.”
“? Weren’t you heading to Vladivostok?”
“What would I even do there? Leviathan runs just fine with the subordinates. If you need anything, just say the word. As long as my reach extends, I can get you whatever you want.”
Having Leviathan watching my back would expand the range of things I could accomplish dramatically. It meant power to handle matters that legal channels simply could not touch.
I hoisted a backpack nearly the size of my own torso one last time and stepped out of the house.
Opening a black parasol against the sunlight, I arrived at the pier and spotted a single ship already drawing a throng of people. Instead of the usual dull gray, the vessel was painted in deep black and blue that seemed to hold the cosmos itself; its sheer grandeur was impressive on its own. Imagining dozens of ships of similar size gathering made me idly wish that someday I might own one myself.
Demonkin don’t only appear on land. A few cruisers of that size and...
Of course, that was still a distant dream.
Everyone flocking to the ship shared one trait: they were all students. Ages ranged from sixteen—those about to turn seventeen—to those nearly twenty-four. Yet every single one of them had come for the same reason.
To take the practical exam for Sirius Academy.
After the practical, interviews would be spread across seven days, so in effect the remaining exams would all be finished here. Written scores, practical results, interviews, and the additional document evaluation would be tallied to decide the final acceptances. Those who failed would return home hoping for next year; the successful would head to the academy dorms for the entrance ceremony on March 1st.
“Excuse me...”
“Ah, here for the practical exam?”
“Yes. Here’s my boarding pass.”
“Business class. Confirmed. Your seat is on the fifth deck.”
“Thank you.”
Once aboard, the bustle of the crowd hit me at once. A number of them carried black cases—personal weapons, by the look of it. Those would be the applicants for the Hero Department, the most popular faculty and therefore the one you saw most often. Competition was correspondingly fierce.
Sirius Academy enrolled four thousand students per year, yet applicants numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Korea alone had sent five thousand. Even after the document screening and written exam had already filtered the pool, the remaining numbers were staggering.
And half of them are probably aiming for the Hero Department.
Initial applicants had numbered in the millions; nine-tenths had already been culled by the written test. Plenty of gates still remained.
This year’s Hero Department competition ratio is 3,800 to 1. Even counting only those who passed the written, it’s 380 to 1. No wonder they call it the finest educational institution in the world.
Just the written-exam passers were enough to nearly fill this massive cruise ship—proof of Sirius Academy’s towering prestige.
“Well then... time to feel the sea breeze for the first time in a while.”
With that, I climbed onto the cruise ship’s deck.