The Freshman Is Too Strong, Part 2
Just as Cain was about to clash with the second-year boy.
At the same time, on a different path within Bern Academy’s grounds.
Only about a hundred meters from the dining hall, Edwin—the head of the Student Council and the Empire’s First Prince—and his secretary were talking about two freshmen.
Those two, naturally, were Cain and Lia, who had become public enemies to the second- and third-years the moment the entrance ceremony ended.
Remembering the faces of the two he had seen in the Student Council office a few hours earlier, Edwin let out a light smile.
“Rowen. Don’t you think this year’s freshman representatives are rather bold?”
Bold, indeed. In less than half a day after the entrance ceremony, they had made no fewer than several hundred enemies.
It was a gift for stirring up such a vast host of foes with nothing but a few words—a new kind of talent, one even the imperial palace, where all the very best were gathered, had never quite seen before.
And so Edwin found Cain and Lia strangely interesting.
“I’m not sure. To me, they looked less bold than insolent.”
His secretary, Rowen, answered in her usual flat tone. At her cynical, matter-of-fact assessment of the freshmen, Edwin, the Student Council president, lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile.
“Insolent, hmm? That’s not wrong. A freshman who’s only just entered the academy calling their seniors—those sky-high upperclassmen—corrupt forces and talking about purging them? That is certainly insolent. Presumptuous, too.”
“Would this be what they call biting the hand that feeds you?”
“Rowen, what does that mean?”
Edwin suddenly asked, his face serious. But Rowen ignored him and tipped her chin toward him.
“As soon as you became Student Council president, one of the first things you pushed through was purging the corrupt factions, wasn’t it? Surely you haven’t forgotten that already.”
“What, that was a year ago already. You’ve still remembered it?”
“You appointed me as your secretary using that very agenda as bait. How could I possibly forget?”
“Ah, yes, that’s right.”
At Edwin’s absent-minded murmur, Rowen’s eyebrow twitched ever so slightly.
Unaware of that tiny shift, Edwin looked out at the clusters of flowers blooming along the path.
“Rowen, what do you think?”
“I think the flowers are rather pretty. They remind me of myself.”
Rowen replied with a sour look. Edwin snorted.
“No, not the flowers. I mean this year’s freshman representatives.”
“They have the same flaw as you did last year, in that they don’t know their place yet still insist on purging corruption with all their might. I think they’re quite insolent.”
“That is deeply disrespectful toward the Crown Prince. Rowen, kneel right there and kiss the back of my foot.”
Rowen walked up to Edwin with an expressionless face, grabbed him by the collar, and leaned in as if to kiss him. Edwin pressed a finger to her forehead and pushed her away.
“My foot isn’t attached above my neck, Rowen.”
“Ah, is that so? I saw something that looked as filthy as a foot right in front of me, and acted without thinking.”
Edwin straightened his school uniform collar and steered the conversation back on course.
“Anyway, enough joking. What do you really think? The freshmen are pushing for this grand purge of corruption. Do you think, this time, we might actually manage what we couldn’t before because of the wall of reality?”
“No. It will be impossible.”
“Really? Why?”
“Setting aside the fact that it’s become an unspoken custom to cook up fake budget reports for each club or organization and extort huge subsidies from the academy… the freshmen said they’d hand over their Student Council posts to anyone who could defeat them in a duel. The Reinhardt family may be renowned swordmasters, but they made that declaration in front of the entire entrance ceremony, where the strongest of the second- and third-years had gathered. In that case, the time the freshmen will be able to hold onto their Student Council positions is—”
Rowen stopped speaking. As if mentally calculating something, she paused, then slowly continued.
“Probably, at most, three days. And purging the corrupt factions in three days is absolutely impossible.”
“What if it were a week, not three days?”
“Even if it were a week, or a month, the result would be the same. There are more than a hundred clubs and organizations at Bern Academy all told. Even if you inspected one place a day, it would still take at least a hundred days.”
“So what you’re saying is, it might be possible in a hundred days?”
“Yes. I suppose, in theory, it might be possible….”
Trailing off, Rowen glanced sideways at Edwin.
He wore an odd expression.
“Rowen.”
“Yes, President.”
“Those freshmen who came in this time. What was their family again?”
“The top student was from the Count Elleves family, and the runner-up was from the Baron Reinhardt family.”
“A wealthy young lady from one of the Empire’s most powerful houses and a young lord from a famed swordmaster family. Not exactly a common pairing….”
Only the Crown Prince standing before her, and the Emperor himself, could likely address the heiress of the great Count Elleves family and the third son of the Reinhardt family—one of the continent’s most distinguished swordmaster houses—as a young lady and a young lord.
Knowing that well, Rowen said nothing and waited for Edwin to continue.
Snap, went his fingers.
“Rowen, where are those two right now?”
“It’s the entrance ceremony today, so they may have already left, but I’ll contact them.”
To summon Cain and Lia to the Student Council office, Rowen took a communication artifact from her pocket.
That was when a booming voice suddenly rang out, carrying all the way to the academy path where the Student Council president and his secretary stood.
—Hey, there’s a fight in the dining hall!
—What? Who’s fighting who?
Was that a quarrel? Edwin had briefly turned his gaze toward the direction the voice had come from, but quickly lost interest and looked back at Rowen.
The students at Bern Academy were the sort who were desperate to prove themselves, and they were also in the throes of youthful blood. Small and large fights between students of roughly equal standing happened several times a day.
So in these frequent, low-priority student scuffles, the Student Council president did not intervene personally. That was the job of the disciplinary committee under the Student Council.
And so Edwin had also meant to show little interest and get back to his business, but—
—You know, that freshman who made a scene at the entrance ceremony? The one with black hair and red eyes! Him, and Allen!
“……We found them.”
Rowen put the communication artifact back into her pocket. Edwin and Rowen met each other’s eyes and nodded.
“Let’s go.”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The student dining hall. The time was still around one in the afternoon.
In the dining hall—the only place in Bern Academy where first-, second-, and third-years gathered together—Cain stood facing off against a second-year boy, a single chopstick held in his right hand.
The second-year boy, whose face was especially unpleasant to look at, was named Allen. His overall ranking was forty-eighth among the second-years—though that ranking excluded the third-years, who were the strongest fighters. That did not mean he was someone to take lightly.
After all, simply surviving until second year at Bern Academy, where only talent worthy of the Empire could gain admission, already put him in the top one percent among his peers.
And ranking forty-eighth among the eight hundred geniuses gathered within that top one percent meant Allen had more than enough skill to menace a supposedly clueless freshman representative without hesitation.
And in fact, to Allen, Cain—who was trying to face him with nothing but a chopstick—looked ridiculous. Cain had not yet experienced Bern Academy’s endless competition curriculum, so Allen simply thought his behavior was the reckless posturing of a pup.
That was why he had planned to teach the boy a lesson, snatch the badge symbolizing his position as a Student Council member, and maybe, while he was at it, try his luck with the girl standing beside him.
“This should be enough to deal with a senior.”
“……What the fuck did you just say?”
“Ah, honestly, even a chopstick is more than I ought to use. Unfortunately, among the swords I currently have, I don’t have anything shorter than a chopstick. So I’ll handle you with this instead. I’ll even let you take the initiative, so come on in at your convenience.”
Because the insolent freshman didn’t know his place and dared provoke a second-year like this.
Allen decided he would snap the bastard freshman representative’s waist in half.
“……You fucking piece of shit!”
Allen drew up the mana within his body and kicked off the floor. The muscle in his thick legs rippled, and his body shot forward at an unbelievable speed.
A rapid charge like a shell in flight. Trusting the sturdiness of his body, further reinforced by mana, Allen assumed Cain would fail to dodge his surprise attack and collapse on the spot.
But—
“Whoa.”
Cain avoided the ambush by moving half a step to the side. Allen tore through empty air, upending every table and chair in the dining hall before smashing into a marble wall.
──Thud, crash!
Fragments of marble burst free where Allen had struck and scattered in all directions. Only after the fact did Allen realize he had not smashed Cain but the wall, and he dragged himself upright, shaking stone chips from his hair.
“You little shit, you dodged that?”
“I was going to let you off since you looked like you were about to shove a chopstick up my nostril, but I guess you didn’t appreciate it?”
“……Huh?”
At Cain’s words, as he tapped the bridge of his nose, Allen imagined it without meaning to: the chopstick Cain held jammed into his own nostril as he came flying in like a cannonball.
He didn’t know for sure, but it probably wouldn’t be a very pleasant sight. Maybe he’d end up with three nostrils. The thought sent a shiver down his spine, and Allen took a wary step backward.
Then he flinched, realizing only belatedly that he had been pressured by nothing more than a freshman, and ground his teeth.
“Bullshit. You just got lucky and dodged it.”
“Hmm, luck, was it….”
Cain looked Allen up and down. It was a minor gesture, but Allen—overlapping it with Cain’s earlier comment about shoving a chopstick up someone’s nostril—couldn’t help but imagine something dangerous.
……No way, that bastard?
He had the terrifying thought that the insolent freshman representative was now sizing up which part of his body to stab with a chopstick.
“You little fucking bastard….”
That absolutely could not happen. Win or lose, if that bastard ended up sticking a chopstick into some part of his body, the humiliation would be beyond disgraceful.
Allen prepared to surge forward again like a shell. But there was one difference this time: he lowered his stance, bending his body to reduce his profile.
It was an obvious setup, meant to increase speed by shrinking the surface area and to make it impossible for a chopstick to be driven in.
Cain, who could read every bit of it as clearly as if it were written on an open palm, changed his mind. He decided he wouldn’t stab Allen with the chopstick after all, but would knock him out by striking his neck with it instead.
“Die, you son of a bitch—!”
Allen charged again. No—he leapt. A lightning-fast rush, incomparably quicker than before. But Cain dodged leisurely. Then, not stopping there, he reached toward the back of Allen’s neck as it cut through the air and swung the chopstick down.
──Smack!
“……Ghk!”
The impact was so heavy it was hard to believe it had come from nothing more than a chopstick. Allen’s body buckled.
The speed with which Allen had been hurled forward and Cain’s strike combined, and a massive vertical crack split the marble wall Allen slammed into.
“F-Fu….”
Allen, sprawled on the floor, trembled as he lifted his head.
One side of his blurred vision, still hazy from the sheer number of shocks he had suffered in such a short time, caught sight of Cain quietly examining the chopstick, bent at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Lady Lia. Am I supposed to reimburse for this bent chopstick?”
“Yeah, the school rules say any equipment a student damages outside class time has to be reimbursed out of the student’s own pocket. They said they’d assign penalty points on top of that, too.”
“Ah, I see. Then, Lady Lia, could you stand surety for me? I didn’t bring my wallet.”
“Ah! I can do anything else, but not surety, Cain! My father said that no matter how close you are, you should never stand surety for someone!”
Allen watched Cain and Lia chatting about absurd nonsense like surety and reimbursement, not even sparing a glance for the man lying face-down and covered in marble dust and grit.
……Th-this fucking…
With that final thought—that the mad bastard man and woman were truly a perfect pair—he lost consciousness.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
In the end, I agreed not to ask Lia to stand surety, but instead to borrow money from her to pay for the badly bent chopstick. Then I turned my head and looked at the group the second-year boy had brought with him.
I’d figured that since their apparent leader had gone down, his underlings might rush in to avenge him.
But maybe they misunderstood my look, because each of them startled and stumbled backward before leaving the fallen boy where he was and fleeing at top speed, glancing over their shoulders all the while.
“What a bunch of disloyal cowards.”
I muttered that under my breath and fiddled with the chopstick. If I could somehow bend it back to its original shape, maybe I wouldn’t get penalized.
That was the kind of stupid thought I had while applying a bit of force—
──Clap, clap, clap.
Startled by the sound of applause from behind me, I applied the force wrong, and the chopstick snapped cleanly in two.
“……Ah.”
What kind of bastard applauds in a dining hall? I whirled around to snap at whoever it was and flinched in surprise. There were two people clapping. One was a handsome blond man, and the other was a black-haired woman with an expressionless face.
And both of them were faces I had seen in the Student Council office earlier that morning.
Come to think of it, the man was Edwin von Edward, the novel’s original male lead—the Empire’s First Prince and Student Council president—and the woman was his secretary, Rowen Argentine.
“Hmm, that was an excellent duel. Don’t you think so, Rowen?”
“Yes. More than a duel, though, it looked like bullfighting—the kind they’re famous for in the western provinces.”
Rowen’s bullfighting was similar to modern bullfighting. You wave a red cloth around to excite the bull, lure it into charging, and then toy with it. But this wasn’t the modern world, so the process was a little different. Specifically….
“So, what do you think now? Still maintaining that it would last at most three days?”
“……Well, judging by how he toyed with Allen, he does have at least a minimal level of skill. But still, I doubt he’ll last more than a week.”
“How cold-hearted.”
That wasn’t the important thing. Why were the Student Council president and his secretary here? Were they perhaps out for a late lunch?
No, that couldn’t be it. The Student Council president had special meals provided separately, so there was no need for him to come to the dining hall.
Confused, I met Lia’s eyes and then bowed my head first. Lia followed and bowed her head too.
“H-hello, President.”
“Thank you. But, President, what brings you to the student dining hall…?”
I asked carefully, hiding the broken chopstick behind my back.
Edwin, the Student Council president, looked back and forth between Lia and me.
“Cain Reinhardt, Lia von Elleves.”
Then he winked one eye.
“Shall we go somewhere quiet and talk for a bit?”