Welcome to Polaris Academy (2)
"The trial-class system?"
"Yes."
Delphina nodded and began to explain.
Polaris Academy, she said, kept a peculiar tradition known as the trial-class system. Instead of attending the classes or training of one's own faculty, a student could trade days one for one and sit in on another faculty's lessons in their place. Put simply, if I belonged to the Knight Faculty, I could skip a session and, on that very same day, choose a class offered by some other faculty.
The cost was that you missed your own faculty's material entirely, and the Academy ran no separate makeup for the hours you had skipped. Grades at Polaris were settled almost wholly by examination, and the sliver of a mark tied to one's attitude in class was vanishingly small, so a system of this kind caused hardly any trouble at all.
Listening to her, though, a question caught.
"But then... unless you're fairly confident in your grades, isn't it a system that might as well not exist?"
In practice, only a handful of top students sure of their marks could afford to use it—and even they had nothing particular to gain by doing so.
"Why set up a system like that?"
"Because every year, without fail, someone turns up who wants to use it."
Delphina answered with a shrug.
"There are always eccentrics like that, they say. Geniuses so desperate to carry as much of Polaris Academy away with them as they can—so in love with learning itself that they can't sit still."
Well. This was an academy where the geniuses of an entire continent had been sifted and sifted again. A bookworm or two of that stripe appearing every year would hardly be strange.
Or so I thought—until what Delphina said next ran dead against the expectation.
"And this year, I imagine Your Highness will be the one at the center of it."
"Me?"
"Think about it."
Delphina looked at me as she spoke.
"Even at Polaris Academy, how many instructors in the Knight Faculty do you suppose have the seniority to actually teach you?"
"...It's still Polaris, in name if nothing else. There ought to be someone."
"Anyway! Even if you don't apply yourself faithfully to Academy classes, you could pass the exams they hold three times a year without breaking a sweat. That's true, isn't it?"
"I'd have to see what's actually on them..."
"Oh, honestly, you're impossible!"
Delphina shook her head, then went on.
"Just how little do you know about Polaris Academy?"
"...Almost nothing?"
Six years had passed since I had taken possession of this body, and four of them I had spent on the battlefield. For the other two I had been too busy learning every corner of the kingdom itself to hear anything of Polaris Academy beyond its name and its history. This was not a world where I could simply look such things up, and I had come here thinking I would just do whatever they told me to do.
With nothing worth saying, I smiled a vacant, foolish smile.
"Ehehe."
Delphina stared at me blankly for a moment, then pressed a hand to her brow and took up the explanation again, a sigh threaded through her voice.
"You do know that Polaris Academy is a four-year institution of higher learning?"
"Yeah."
Even I knew that much. I gave a short nod.
"And that a student's faculty—the course of study they complete—changes according to what they learn."
"Knight Faculty, Military Faculty, Literature, Magic, Politics and Diplomacy, Cultural Anthropology, Engineering..."
I ticked them off on my fingers, the few faculties whose names I actually knew. Delphina held up two of her own.
"There are plenty of others besides those, but Your Highness only needs to enter one of two: the Knight Faculty or the Military Faculty. The Knight Faculty is nothing but martial technique and physical conditioning—work of the body—so there's no chance you would fall behind. And the Military Faculty only teaches what an officer needs. Tactical manuals, supply, that sort of thing."
"Two years of theory. Four years in the field."
"Exactly."
But I shook my head.
"Even so, I don't want the Knight Faculty or the Military Faculty."
"Why not?"
Delphina asked it while she watched me hesitate. I forced out the words I would rather have left unsaid.
"...I'm done with war."
Delphina closed her mouth. Her face said she was burning to answer, but she only shrugged, reading me.
"......Even so."
I opened my mouth again.
"Sitting still won't give me an answer either."
Delphina looked at me, a little startled.
"And... I've already braced myself for the fact that war will break out again someday."
The Demon King's army had suffered a crushing defeat, losing two of the Four Heavenly Kings, and fled beyond the Swamp of Death. How long before they opened another invasion?
Ten years? Fifteen?
Perhaps even that was too hopeful. In truth, it might not take five.
Delphina, who had been watching me in silence, reached out with both arms and drew me into a tight embrace.
Having settled on the Knight Faculty, I decided that the first class, at least, would be proper training with them.
Knight Faculty training ran three hours, and assembly was ten minutes before the scheduled start. The students who had no idea what to do with themselves at the sight of me, Delphina stepped forward and settled; we held our lines and waited out the ten minutes.
"Welcome, new students who have chosen the Knight Faculty."
And the first training session of the Knight Faculty was a little different from what I had imagined.
"I am Belle Lorei, First Instructor. From today, and for the next year, I will be guiding the cadets of the Knight Faculty."
No. Let me correct that. It was very different.
Well met, chicks!! Welcome to hell!! Marathon training starts now!! Fall behind once, and that's another sixty-nine minutes of double-time!!!
I had pictured some hulking, hairy brute roaring crude nonsense of exactly that sort.
"I look forward to working with all of you."
What actually stood before the freshmen of the Knight Faculty was a refined, handsome young man with white hair and finely drawn features.
"Holy shit. He is so fucking handsome."
"Are you insane? Keep your voice down! The Princess Knight is right beside us."
Among the girls, a few already looked halfway gone.
I wanted to tell them it was all right, not to mind me... but saying so would only have made it worse.
...No. Maybe this is actually the more natural fit.
Turned another way, it was not so hard to understand. Anyone who could pass the Knight Faculty examination at Polaris Academy had likely already built a decent body and learned a martial art or two suited to their own bent. Students who had already found their footing would be far better served by a flexible instructor—one with the give to shape training to whatever suited each of them—than by someone who treated them as raw beginners and ground them without mercy.
"Setting the preliminaries aside, shall we start by loosening up? Lightly."
The brief scatter of applause died away, and Instructor Lorei spoke, low.
"Then... for a start, let us simply run a light hundred laps of the training ground."
Cancel everything I had just said.
Taken as a whole, Polaris Academy is staggering in its scale. Fold in the main building, the dormitories, the shops raised by ordinary folk who live here for the sake of a cultured life, and the separate residential quarters, and the place comes out nearly the size of a small city-state.
Unlike the other faculties, Knight Faculty training is held on an outdoor ground, and that ground is so vast it is not easy to find anything to measure it against. By dimensions alone it is a broad rectangle, the adjoining sides roughly two hundred and three hundred meters. For an ordinary grown man, a wide circuit around the outside comes to about a kilometer.
Even students who do not belong to the Knight Faculty sometimes take a long loop around the grounds as light morning exercise, and by the standard of Polaris Academy's Knight Faculty, twenty or thirty laps would be nothing at all—a light finish, their breathing unchanged.
A hundred laps is another matter.
One hundred kilometers.
Tell a carriage to cover a hundred kilometers and you would still be looking at more than five hours on the road. Even freshmen of the Knight Faculty, who had learned the Circulation Breathing Technique and could drive their bodies to something near the level of a human weapon, could never call that distance a light run.
Sure enough, the instant they finished the hundredth lap, every freshman of the Knight Faculty sprawled across the dirt as if the ground were the floor of their own bedroom. Even Delphina, from the middle onward, threw dignity to the wind and ran while quietly clutching the collar of my clothes.
Among the new students, I was the only one who had not collapsed flat. Sorting me in with ordinary freshmen was a bit of a stretch, but I was a student all the same, and I had my years of running battlefields behind me. Pride alone would not let me drop—though the urge to sit down that very moment burned fierce enough to choke.
I was leaning against a wooden post, steadying my breath, when Instructor Belle drifted over.
"As expected of the Princess Knight. I have watched freshmen for more than five years, and Your Highness is the only one who did not go down at once."
Well, of course I hadn't gone down. What did he think he was doing, forcing active-duty training onto students who had only just arrived?
I shook my head, still dragging in air.
"Even so, isn't this too harsh for freshmen who have only just enrolled?"
"Because this is Polaris."
Instructor Lorei answered me in a single line.
"...I see."
He smiled, faint and easy, and this time turned toward the students.
"Now then, everyone!"
A breath gone a little rough threaded through his words, and yet Belle Lorei went on in a perfectly ordinary voice.
"An hour and a half of our three hours of training has now passed! We will rest for ten minutes, then form up again and continue!"
Let me correct that. Not an ordinary voice. A shameless one.
Unfortunately, not a single freshman had stamina enough left to shout at him to stop talking nonsense.