Hunting (1)
Hunting (1)
"Gentlemen, do you know which battlefield is the most glorious of them all?"
Jennifer, who on the very first day of class had dragged every student out to the training grounds, naturally marched us back outside when her lesson period arrived, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
It seemed the concept of a "curriculum" had no place in that woman's head.
We had definitely been issued textbooks when we entered the academy, and we still hadn't opened them. No—if she wasn't going to use the books, she shouldn't have handed them out in the first place. My bag got heavier every single morning.
Still, I knew perfectly well what sort of person this Jennifer was, so none of it really surprised me.
After all, Jennifer was a character who served as a device, a way to fit "gameplay" into "class time."
The fundamental duty of a student was to study. Obviously. But if the characters did nothing but study in a game, the game itself would become unbearably tedious. This wasn't a dating sim, and it wasn't some lore quiz game.
So the game had drastically reduced the study portions and inserted "time to fight" within the class hours.
In the process, it made the elements of conflict between characters stand out, and the character who used those conflicts most effectively was Jennifer Winterfield.
Of course, even then, if every single class period turned into the students assembling and sparring nonstop, the story would grind to a halt. So they confined that approach to the early character-introduction phase, and later on the incidents and accidents piled up thick and fast.
"Hmm."
None of the students raised a hand.
And I knew exactly whom Jennifer was going to call on.
The person Jennifer called on was—
"Leo Grace!"
There it was. Leo Grace.
He was the protagonist, and in the setting Baron Grace had been Jennifer's childhood role model. Even if it never came across as blatant favoritism, there were plenty of descriptions that suggested Jennifer felt a certain closeness toward him.
Though, of course, Leo Grace knew nothing about that kind of backstory, so he simply assumed the instructor had picked him at random.
Ah, now that I thought about it, in the original game there had been a choice path where Leo ended up sparring with Jennifer too. Maybe this was natural. Given that Jennifer and Leo had already sparred a few days earlier, nobody would think it was a mere coincidence that the "random selection" landed on Leo.
And it genuinely wasn't a coincidence.
"Ah, yes."
Leo rose from his seat with an expression that said he'd been picked in a bad way, but Jennifer showed no sign of caring.
"Where do you think the most glorious battlefield lies?"
"Ah......"
Here came the choice prompt.
Though it didn't matter which option he chose. All three choices had their own rationale, and all three were also wrong. At least, none of them fit the intent behind Jennifer's question.
"The northern front, wouldn't you say?"
True to his earnest nature, Leo thought it over carefully and finally gave that answer.
The first choice, as expected.
The others were the southern and western fronts. The south was still underdeveloped, with persistent small-scale clashes against local tribes, and the west was the coastline. Although the coast itself was safe, venture inland and you'd find the waters swarming with pirate vessels preying on trade ships bound for the New World.
All three choices were framed as reasons for the Empire to maintain public order, but the imperialist undertones of the southern-front choice, the one involving friction with the "natives," were so strong that on the game's minor gallery boards the players jokingly called it the "Imperialism Route." Not that it actually changed any ending or development.
For the record, one of the sequels did center on the friction in the Empire's south, and Leo worked hard to help the natives there, as if he'd never even considered a choice like that.
"Hoh."
Jennifer, who had done her military service in the north, spoke as though Leo's answer genuinely intrigued her.
"Then may I ask your reasoning?"
"Yes. The north borders the Riklant Autonomous State. But public order in the Autonomous State is extremely unstable, and it lacks the capacity to properly manage the vicinity of the imperial frontier. Because of that, the warlords there frequently encroach on the Empire's borders. So I believe the battlefield where soldiers keep their eyes constantly fixed on the frontier, where they guard the border to eliminate danger to the subjects of the Empire—surely that is the most glorious battlefield."
"Is that so."
Jennifer nodded as if satisfied.
"Indeed. They call themselves warlords, but in truth they're little more than mercenaries without an employer. Give them coin and they'll do anything. They wouldn't spare a speck of conscience no matter how filthy the work. Facing such men can certainly be called a glorious undertaking. However."
Jennifer looked straight at Leo.
"That glory is something you enjoy only after you return alive, or after your corpse is carried back. It is not the glory of 'the battlefield' itself. Still, it was a good answer. Sit down."
Leo returned to his seat with a visibly relieved expression.
"The battlefield is—ah, right."
Mid-explanation, Jennifer cut herself off.
Huh.
This was normally the part where she launched into her own personal conviction. I didn't recall her ever stopping like that.
Jennifer, who had paused mid-sentence, turned her eyes toward me.
"Sylvia Fangriffon. Stand up."
"......."
Why me, though?
Of course I didn't say that out loud. An instructor calling on a student wasn't that unusual. It was at least far more sensible than an emperor appointing a fourteen-year-old girl as his proxy and dispatching her to an international summit.
When I stood without a word, Jennifer gazed at me steadily and asked quietly,
"What do you think? Where do you consider the most glorious battlefield?"
"......."
I absolutely hated being called on to give answers in front of the class.
Even back in university, when we did group projects, I would shoulder the entire slideshow myself as long as someone else handled the presentation. Even in settings where the presentation earned the highest marks, I despised it.
I mean, if you said something wrong, it was mortifying.
Of course, I did know the answer Jennifer wanted. By the third or fourth playthrough I'd started skipping event scenes, but up through the second playthrough I'd replayed the story, treating it as a sort of review, and I'd gone over the lines one by one to translate them properly.
This was a scene I'd spun back several times precisely to figure out which of the three choices was the correct one.
"...... There is no glorious battlefield."
There. That was the answer Jennifer wanted. If Headmaster Abraham Winterfield had been standing next to me, he would have blown his top on the spot.
"Hoh."
Jennifer's eyes narrowed.
A smile curved her lips as she held me in her gaze. Had the answer pleased her?
I'd chosen it with the mindset that, given a choice between being mortified over a wrong answer and being mortified over getting it right, I'd rather be mortified over getting it right.
Truthfully, I'd also half wanted to see Jennifer's reaction to a fourth possible answer here.
"Why do you think that?"
Jennifer asked again.
"Because the battlefield is hell. There can be no glorious place in hell. Even if the fact that you came back alive can be glorious."
This era was still close to an interwar period.
Specifically, a transitional era when tactics were shifting from line infantry into the modern warfare of keeping under cover and exchanging fire from a distance.
Tanks and fighter craft that looked vaguely modern had started to appear, but it was a world without smart precision weapons that struck exactly what needed striking.
You strung up barbed wire, dug trenches, built bunkers. Thousands of soldiers charged the enemy's trenches and were cut down by machine guns, reduced to meat. Overhead, howitzer and mortar shells dropped whenever you'd just about forgotten them; a direct hit and they wouldn't even find your body.
In no-man's-land between the trenches, corpses lay scattered carelessly.
Flamethrowers, poison gas, landmines, machine guns...... It was a period when weapons too devastating to face with an unprotected human body came pouring out, yet the means to strike those weapons precisely and destroy them were extremely limited.
Modern warfare on the Earth I'd lived on was hell as well, but in the sense that this amounted to near-total war, the battlefields of this world were another form of hell.
"......."
The expression on Jennifer's face thinned for a moment.
She walked a few steps closer to me and looked squarely into my eyes.
"......I see."
Then she nodded, as if she'd reached some private understanding.
"Yes, you're right. The battlefield is hell. Knight-against-knight combat, clashing sword against sword, is the stuff of old tales."
Though, that old sword-against-sword warfare had been hell in its own way too, I supposed.
"Return to your seat."
At Jennifer's order, I sat back down. I felt gazes flying at me from all around and lodging in place, but I made a point of ignoring them.
"I cannot tell you how to survive on the battlefield. Frankly, that isn't something you can learn. No matter how much I teach you my know-how, you'll never master it perfectly. Because your behavior in the field will always adapt to what suits each of you."
Jennifer spoke with a serious expression, then went on.
"And I can't know how many of you will become soldiers. But the subject I'm responsible for is, at the very least, a subject that trains soldiers. And the thing a soldier needs most of all is the survival ability to make it through any unpredictable ordeal."
That was why Jennifer had summoned us for a sparring match from the very first day. Because she always meant those words in earnest.
As someone who had personally experienced the battlefield.
"Therefore, today you will learn how to face an unpredictable ordeal."
The smile returned to Jennifer's face.
Grinning, she extended her arm to the side with her palm facing upward, like a theater director presenting the actors on the stage.
"Your sparring partners for today are the commoner class, over there."
Right on cue, the commoner class, Class C, was emerging from the building.
The reason they came out later than us was that Jennifer had suddenly swapped the class periods. Calling it a theft of their lesson time wasn't quite right; rather, she'd likely coordinated with another instructor so that the schedules of Class A and Class C overlapped.
"...... Instructor?"
"What is it?"
One of the students carefully raised a hand and addressed Jennifer, and she turned her head toward him.
"Aren't the students in that class commoners?"
"That's right. Commoners. Is there a problem?"
As if still unable to process the situation, the student studied Class C, who were heading this way with uncertain expressions, and asked,
"Commoners...... don't they lack training in a proper school of combat? Can the way commoners fight truly serve as an 'ordeal' for us?"
At those words, the sound of a few students snickering softly could be heard.
"Hoh."
Jennifer spoke as if she found this amusing.
"Is that so? Yet the weapon Princess Sylvia over there wields can hardly be said to belong to a school of combat."
"......."
At Jennifer's caustic remark, the students fell silent in an instant.
There it was.
The number of commoners who belonged to a proper school and learned the sword, the spear, or magic was vanishingly small.
Put differently, that meant many of them wielded "weapons that could be used effectively even without formal training."
The approaching students were now clearly visible.
Slung across most of their backs were rifles or hunting shotguns. More civilian models than military issue, but—
"......."
That alone was enough to shut the nobles' mouths.