Toppling the Professor (4)
Even after Ellie left, Scathach stood there in a daze. Then, all at once, she raised two fingers into a V and held them up beside her face.
This… seems to be how it’s done.
Then she met her own eyes in the mirror hanging on the wall and felt so much shame she wanted to die.
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When I came back to my room after seeing the headmaster and Melitt, Stella — who had been studying at her desk — asked me straight out, “So, what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“Don’t play coy. You’re planning to get rid of Professor Vermi, aren’t you?”
“Get rid of him? Hear it like that and it sounds as if I’m trying to kill him.”
“...If it’s you, that would be the obvious assumption.”
“What do you take me for?”
Maybe she was like this because she’d never actually seen me do anything firsthand. Things you only hear about always grow larger in your mind, after all.
“I don’t kill people who don’t need killing. But if it’s necessary, I will.”
“...That doesn’t exactly sound like a normal thing to say, either.”
“Doesn’t it? Still, isn’t it true?”
After being reborn in this world, I had killed Doloria. Then I had killed Marquess Repeat and his men, the ones who tried to bury their black market business by killing me.
I didn’t feel guilty about it, or conflicted, or even particularly uneasy.
Of course, it wasn’t a pleasant memory, but that just meant the faces of the people I’d killed didn’t come back to haunt me in my dreams. If they did, I’d kill them again in my sleep.
“...You’re right. It is.”
She said the words lightly enough, but there was a hint of shadow in Stella’s voice.
Only that shadow wasn’t directed at me. It was turned inward, toward herself.
So she’s got some family troubles, too.
I knew the Blaze royal family had once ruled the world, and that the current imperial house had taken that place from them.
But I knew nothing about Stella’s own circumstances.
What her parents were like. What sort of place her hometown was. Whether the people in her castle were warm or cold. Whether she had siblings.
What she wanted to do after graduating from the Academy.
...Come to think of it.
I’d never asked that last question of any of the four friends, either.
Maybe the most precious thing in truly knowing a person was hearing about their dreams.
Still, there was no helping it. If I asked, the others would ask me the same thing in return, and I couldn’t answer them honestly.
I could lie, sure. But if possible, I didn’t want to lie to my friends.
“I’m not going to kill Rachel. Just drive her out.”
“Then how do you mean to do that?”
“You’re not opposed?”
“I’ve seen how Vermi treats you at your side, after all.”
“Anyway... the method.”
To have her removed from office, Rachel would have to commit something on the level of murder or embezzlement, which meant I’d have to wait for her to self-destruct. Too passive a method, so rejected for now.
The fastest way would just be to fight her myself.
Next time Rachel tried to bully me, I could challenge her to a duel and crush her. Then she’d be the one running off in shame.
That would be satisfying enough, but this time I wanted to try a different approach. It was a chance to gain some new experience, after all.
“Stella.”
“...That smile of yours has me strangely uneasy. You’ve steeled yourself, so speak. What is this method?”
I gave a bright little laugh and said, “Have you ever heard of a solidarity leave?”
“Ah... ni?”
“Put simply, when students are unhappy with the people teaching them, they all skip class at once.”
“!!”
Stella stared blankly for a moment, then leaned toward me.
“B-but would the other students really have reason to go that far?”
My friend looked both expectant and a little frightened as I waved her over to the bed.
“Not enough yet, not as things stand. Which means we have to persuade them.”
There were seventeen students in our shared magic language class, not counting Stella and me.
If I couldn’t even unite that many people, I had no business reaching for the throne.
Besides, I wasn’t forcing anyone down a path they didn’t want. Everyone already disliked Rachel; all I had to do was persuade them to choose my method instead.
“Actually, I don’t even need to persuade all seventeen.”
“What does that mean?”
Stella climbed onto the bed beside me as she asked.
“How many friend groups do you think there are in that class? Not counting us.”
“F-friend groups? Um...”
Stella rolled her eyes upward in that peculiar way people do when they’re searching their memory.
“Four...?”
“The right answer is five. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
I drew nineteen circles in the air with a thread of mana.
We’d had class on Thursday the week the term started, then again on Monday and Thursday the week after. After three sessions together, everyone had naturally found their own “place.”
“These two in the front row and this one are a group.”
“Mm, mm.”
“And these two girls and these two boys here. They were originally separate groups, but the four of them are getting closer now. If you ask me, long term they’ll end up as two couples.”
Stella’s eyes went round. Her expression was so amusing that I laughed.
“Then the four sitting in the middle are another cluster, and the three boys in back and the three girls are each separate. So that makes five total.”
I indicated each group with a little circle, and Stella nodded with her eyes still wide.
“So, as for how to persuade each of them...”
I tapped each cluster in turn with my finger.
“Do you remember who was sitting in the center of this group?”
“...The one who was humiliated the most in class today.”
“Exactly.”
It was the boy whose test score had been the lowest.
“So if I make the offer, he’ll jump on board right away, and so will the friend beside him. As for this group and that one, the leader is obvious, so I only need to persuade him. And these...”
I pointed to the four who would later become two couples.
“I just have to win their goodwill first, then ask them to help me.”
“H-how exactly do you win their goodwill?”
Stella had become so absorbed in my explanation that her speech had slipped back into its original, more formal cadence. I didn’t bother correcting her.
“Easy. I ask the girls what flowers they like, then tell the boys. Along with a little encouragement.”
“Huh? W-what do you mean by that... Ah!?”
Understanding dawned on Stella’s face, and she turned bright red.
“If I show them that kind of favor, they’ll follow me just to return it. Then that leaves only this last group.”
I tapped the final circle in the corner.
“These ones are a little more complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their leader will probably say no first, then try to negotiate if I ask him. He thinks that’s what being grown-up looks like.”
“H-how do you know that?”
“You can tell just by looking.”
Stella blinked. I had no better explanation, so I moved on.
“Honestly, I could play along with the negotiation game, but that would take too long. So I’m going to pressure him through someone above him in the hierarchy.”
“...Hm? But you just said this one was the leader.”
“Their friend group got split by the class division. There’s someone higher than him in the overall hierarchy.”
And...
“Since I happen to know him, getting him to do me one or two favors is nothing.”
“...Who is it, exactly?”
I answered with a smile.
“Dane Edwick.”
Two days later, on Saturday, Dane was sitting neatly in front of Ellie, who had come straight to the boys’ dormitory room without a shred of hesitation.
“S-sorry there’s no tea or anything, I- I mean, sorry, h-have to?”
“It’s fine. I wasn’t expecting any.”
The Academy’s dormitories were split into boys’ and girls’ wings, but they didn’t stop students of the opposite sex from entering during the daytime.
They didn’t stop them, yes, but that was one thing to say and another to actually do as a pair of adolescent boys and girls. Sure, you could go in—then what? Unless you were lucky enough not to end up on the sharp edge of sheer embarrassment, you’d be better off dead.
And yet Ellie had strode right into the boys’ wing with complete confidence, slapped a hand onto some random student’s shoulder, and demanded, Hey, hi, where’s Dane Edwick’s room?
It would’ve been nice if he’d had a roommate for situations like this, but Dane, as the heir to a ducal house, lived alone in a single room on the second floor.
He was awkward, and honestly, jittery. If I’d known this was coming, I would’ve at least prepared something to drink. Am I an idiot?
What’s more, Ellie hadn’t gone straight to the point after coming into Dane’s room. She’d wandered around first.
“Oh, nice chair you’ve got. Hey, is that a reference book? Huh, they make stuff like this too?” She kept tossing out remarks like that.
Is this... how girls are with their friends?
Wasn’t something about this strange?
She was even more easygoing than a guy. It felt like every sense of distance in his head was being thoroughly smashed to pieces.
W-we weren’t even friends to begin with, were we?
Not that he meant, of course, “How dare a noble prince think himself fit to be friends with me, a lowly peon!” What kind of idiot would say something like that? Someone like that deserved to be punched once by Ellie and knocked back into his senses.
It was only regret speaking. Why had he been so stupid?
His head lowered before he realized it. I’m an idiot. A complete idiot.
“Hey, Dane.”
Dane, who had been wallowing in his own self-loathing, lifted his head at Ellie’s call and nearly fainted.
The reason was that his eyes had come level with a rather substantial chest, even though she was still growing.
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“Yes.”
The boy answered instantly, before he had even heard what it was.
...And later, after the excitement had cooled, he thought that if Ellie had asked him to then and there, he would certainly have sold off his own principality without a second thought.
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