Part-Time Job
Part-Time Job
There was a saying that life was an endless series of hardships.
A structure where crossing one mountain only revealed another waiting ahead.
In my case, the contours of those mountains resembled the Weierstrass function—continuous at every point, yet simultaneously non-differentiable at every point.
Put simply, nothing ever went smoothly.
The immediate problem was tuition.
I had already known, but Professor Herlein's golem laboratory consumed so much money that I couldn't bring myself to ask for help. To scrape together the equivalent of two million won, one of the graduate students in her lab would have had to starve.
─I'm sorry I can't do more. But I'll put in a word with the servants, so you can stay at my mansion until you move into the dorms.
More than anything, the things I had already received from Herlein were far from trivial. I didn't want to incur any further financial debt.
Given the circumstances, I had to work again. It seemed my life had no intention of getting easier anytime soon.
I wasn't terribly pleased that a thousand-year-old academy showered its incoming students with such shabby scholarships, but what could I do? When was the treasury of a nation constantly at war ever sound?
Winning a war left you screwed, and losing one left you even more screwed. The fact that this country had endured for a thousand years at all was probably a miracle.
There was one more reason Tillet Academy's scholarship system was so stingy.
Fundamentally, most incoming students were materially affluent nobles. The Academy, it seemed, figured there was no reason to reduce tuition for anyone except the one or two truly exceptional talents.
However it had happened, I hadn't been pushed to the point of being utterly unable to earn the academy tuition. Professor Herlein herself, who had been a commoner right up until her enrollment, had said she paid her tuition by working her ass off for two months.
Since I only had to pay half that, a single full-time arbeit would be more than enough to cover it.
"Then, since you’ve been at the academy longer, do you know of any decent work?"
Lorwell, who had been listening to my story, still seemed uncomfortable with me treating him as my senior. That was because, up until our first meeting, Lorwell had mistaken me for a senior who had already graduated from the academy. He had kept calling me "Assistant" ever since.
But what about now? Lorwell's cohort was one year above mine.
Thinking about it, I had been a graduate student, and now I had been switched to an undergraduate. I wondered how many cases existed in the world like mine, of someone regressing in educational attainment.
Lorwell answered my question.
"If you go to the Central Market, there ought to be a few decent table-waiting jobs. More to the point, you really don’t have to call me ‘senior’...."
"You really don't need to use formal speech with me."
Of course, the fact that the capital was overflowing with part-time work was obvious the moment you stepped outside. I had sought out Lorwell purely to broaden my options.
Though still lacking in skill, Lorwell was a fire magic user, and he was also a currently enrolled student at Tillet Academy.
Those two conditions alone made him a pass.
As an assistant to replace Haspelt, I intended to select every fire magic user at the academy, including Lorwell. A plan to leverage so-called collective intelligence.
Why not? I had realized there was no need to receive help from only one person. If I grew close to Lorwell, I might later get recommended some good fire magic texts during an exchange, or perhaps latch onto a connection with a famous noble.
Of course, life was give and take. If you received something, you had to give something in return.
I wouldn't ever be a person who only took. My plan was to establish reasonably fair business relationships wherever possible and then, when the time came, quietly vanish from this world.
"Th-then... ‘junior’?"
"I told you, you don't need to use honorifics."
"Ahem. If you want a job with good hourly pay, you should check out 3rd Street. A friend of mine worked there too. I heard there are loads of counter jobs that academy students can do comfortably at a good rate."
"Oh.... Thank you."
Good. Everything was going according to plan. With this, it was as good as having built a rapport with a second-year upperclassman.
After conveying my thanks repeatedly, I headed for 3rd Street.
Since 3rd Street was a place packed with restaurants, my stomach would start growling the moment I walked around.
Perhaps because it was admissions season, the restaurant district was in the full swing of peak season despite the cold snap. So many customers were coming and going that everywhere I looked, the places seemed short-staffed.
After comparing and analyzing several options, I entered the restaurant that seemed to offer the highest hourly wage. I showed my academy acceptance letter and told the owner I wanted to work, and the master greeted me with intense enthusiasm.
"Perfect timing. I'd been without a cashier, actually. You're an academy student, so you must be good at math, right?"
"In my younger days, my nickname was the Human Calculator, Master."
Well, I used to ride a skateboard made of an abacus, you see.
"Ho-ho, what an amusing young Gold-Eye lady has walked in! Wonderful, start working right here!"
For the moment, the contract was for one month, full-time.
Even though it was irregular employment, my body and mind felt at ease. Maybe it was because the hourly wage was generous.
In this world, managing a counter wasn't a job just anyone could do. Because of an inadequate education system, most commoners lacked the capability to manage a register.
Yet the so-called "learned" nobles were swimming in money, so they typically took no interest in such inefficient tasks.
The unfairness of educational opportunity was lamentable, but for me right now, it was a favorable condition. Especially during the morning hours when table turnover was relatively low, I could sit at the counter and pass the time comfortably.
"Young lady, good work! Let's eat dinner, rest a bit, and then get back to it."
This was... labor...?
What on earth had I been doing up until now....
The place where I had begun working was a tavern, so more people came in at night than during the day. It was an opportunity for the mental fortitude I'd forged over thirteen total years of all-nighters—ten years in that other world and three in this one—to prove its worth.
"Young lady, don't you ever get tired? It's your first day, so don't push yourself too hard."
"This much is fine."
At most, the job involved watching the counter and then serving the additional orders that came in from the tables.
Just as I was working without noticing the time passing, a bomb arrived.
Kwaaaang—!!
"Master! One liter of ale over here, and a plate of guacamole loaded with tomatoes and green chili peppers, please!"
How had she found out and come all the way here?
Seated at a table near the counter, Frey looked up at me with a heavily flushed face and giggled.
"Hey! Long time no see! You're working here?"
"Yeah, starting today. What are you doing here, though?"
"Tavern, hic. Tour!"
"A kid shouldn't be guzzling this much alcohol already."
"I'm an adult—!!"
At Frey's nonsensical drunken rambling, a few people seated nearby glanced at us. I bowed my head to them, then clamped Frey's mouth shut.
"Mmph—!! Mm-mmph! Mmph!!"
"Be quiet. Got it?"
Nod nod.
"Puha, I thought I was gonna suffocate and die. Anyway, why aren't you with the Professor and wandering around a place like this?"
"Because I have the freedom to."
"Hic, whatever."
Frey chugged the draft beer that had been served in a glass. Half of it vanished in an instant.
"Congrats on getting in, ya punk."
**
Frey scarfed down two bowls of guacamole in an instant, ordered an additional 500 milliliters of beer, and then shuffled off, declaring she had to hit the next bar. Her staggering figure was utterly unsettling.
It was astonishing that all of that fit into that little body. Did she have a gluttonous spirit living in her stomach or something?
Three female students sat down at the table Frey had vacated.
One of them was a person I recognized from a previous encounter.
A girl with short red hair and crimson eyes.
Her name was....
"Lady Rote, what would you like to order?"
"You two order what you want. I'm fine with anything."
Approaching with the menu, I checked off what the two girls in front of me were discussing by quantity.
"Oh, it's that Gold-Eye."
"Are you working a part-time job here?"
Unsurprisingly, the three students, including Rote, recognized me instantly. I gave them a light nod of greeting, then went back to my work.
While waiting for her table's order, Rote pulled a few sheets of paper from the pocket she was carrying and scanned them. A glimpse showed they were crammed with formulas and the like.
Just as I was admiring her, thinking she was already previewing the material, the other girl next to her, who had been watching this with disapproval, sighed and spoke up.
"That's already in the past. How long are you going to keep staring at it?"
What Rote was looking at was problem 50 from Basic Magic Theory—the question that had tormented countless examinees on the academy's written exam. To be precise, it was a reconstruction of that problem.
The author of the question was a certain witch living in the Fire Magic Research Lab.
It had been a problem expecting examinees to use scroll output utilizing magic stones at a level she herself had only just become capable of employing, but to be blunt, it wasn't something you could solve in time using the orthodox approach.
Seeing that brought back the old days and gave me what felt like PTSD.
I'd barely gotten that one right too, by brute-forcing it. If anyone asked how I solved it, I'd just answer that I guessed.
Since there were other tables to attend to, I couldn't catch the entire conversation. Even so, from the snippets I overheard, I could tell that this girl named Rote was someone dead serious about fire magic.
"If you substitute this formula here into the conversion unit, wouldn't it work?"
"Algebraically speaking, no. There are four equations but seven unknowns. Instead of that, I was thinking if we cut off this part and opened up two other routes, a range might emerge."
I hadn't seen it firsthand, but if Haspelt had just been a freshman, she probably would have gone around acting just like that.
"Speaking of which, did you hear that story?"
"What story?"
"Someone scored full marks on the written exam for the first time in a thousand years. From what I hear, they still placed only second overall in the entrance rankings."
"...A perfect written score and they're only second? Lady Rote is third?"
"It's true! They say she absolutely bombed the practical. First place got 90 points in every subject, so their total is 450. But that person got perfect written marks, and their practical was at a level where they barely avoided a failing grade, so their total came out around 440."
"Where did you pick up that rumor? That doesn't even make se—."
The thread of the conversation snapped off right there.
The next instant, all three female students' gazes turned toward me in unison. At that moment, I was bustling about carrying two beers in each hand, so my reaction to their stares was a beat late.
Our eyes met.
It seemed they had an additional order.