The Most Boring Class in History
The class was painfully dull. I had wanted to ask Lillia what she thought about why Elena would go so far as to fake a duel challenge just to ruin my social standing, but there was no time. The next lesson was about to begin.
Lily Academy was designed with long breaks between classes, but each individual lesson carried a heavy mental toll. Even so, our conversation with Lillia had eaten up so much of that generous break time that we were now in danger of being late. When Sophie noticed me trying to steer the discussion toward a new topic, she quietly pointed out, “At this rate you’ll be a tardy student on your very first day, my lady.” Thanks to her warning I finally snapped back to reality. The three of us checked our pocket watches in unison and hurried toward the classroom where the next lecture would be held.
The academy’s main building looked impressive because of its enormous size, but from a practical standpoint it was pure hell.
“With a campus this big, wouldn’t it make sense to install moving walkways?”
“Moving… what?”
“Never mind. Forget I said anything. I was just thinking it would be convenient if there were platforms that automatically carried you between lecture halls. Since this is a school for mages, I figured they might have something like that…”
I paused in front of the classroom door to catch my breath and, without thinking, let an Earth term slip from my mouth. Before opening the door, Sophie used her handkerchief to gently dab the sweat from my face and neck. I hadn’t given her any instructions, yet she was being strict about it—reminding me that the young lady of House Letiaponk must never appear flustered in public. She made sure I composed myself and hid any trace of perspiration.
“Installation magic circles consume enormous resources and maintenance costs just to keep them running. So please stop daydreaming about silly conveniences and go inside. There, all clean.”
“Thank you, Sophie. The handkerchief—”
“I’ll take care of it. Hurry, please.”
At Sophie’s urging, I entered the classroom alongside Lillia. Just inside the doorway, the very person we had been discussing—Elena Kerru—stood fidgeting restlessly, as if waiting for someone. The moment she saw Lillia’s face, her expression brightened with obvious relief. It seemed that Lillia’s cheerfully eccentric personality, which refused to be confined by anyone’s pace, was the only comfort Elena had on her first day at the academy.
Lillia naturally walked over and greeted her.
“Miss Elena! Why didn’t you save us seats? Standing here only makes you more noticeable, you know.”
“I already saved seats. But sitting alone made me anxious, and I kept worrying about who might sit next to me…”
“Isn’t that a good thing in its own way? A commoner-born witch—the first in two hundred years of academy history. It’s only natural that people would be curious and want to test you! Whether being special is a weakness or a strength depends entirely on your own attitude, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not deciding anything. I just instinctively want to avoid it all…”
“Instinct, instinct—ah! I see. My advice may have sounded reasonable on the surface, but I prioritized logic and completely ignored the recipient’s emotions and instincts… Even someone as academically gifted as I am is apparently a hopeless fool who can’t even comfort a single friend in real life…”
“…I never said that.”
Listening to the strangely harmonious yet twisted conversation between Elena and Lillia, it was hard to believe Elena was the same unsettling person I had encountered last night. In fact, the current Elena Kerru seemed so ordinary—just a slightly gloomy, shy, and socially awkward girl—that I almost wondered if the incident in the auditorium had been nothing more than a bad dream.
Sophie must have been thinking the same thing, because she leaned close and whispered, “She’s remarkably composed after what happened.”
“I didn’t just imagine last night, right?”
“I was in that auditorium too, so I can confidently say you didn’t. Still, Lady Lillia is the truly impressive one here. She heard everything about what happened last night, yet her attitude hasn’t changed in the slightest.”
“…In that little gremlin’s head, it probably doesn’t matter whether Elena is just an exceptionally talented commoner or a mentally unstable secret-bearer, does it?”
“Witches really do all have slightly strange personalities…”
Having met Professor Machtopf earlier, I found myself agreeing with Sophie even more strongly.
“I should probably keep a close eye on you too, Sophie. You might be hiding some bizarre personality flaw—ow, ow, ow! That hurts! Don’t yank my hair inside the classroom.”
Fortunately Sophie realized that if I screamed in a place like this it would damage my dignity, so she released my hair after an appropriate amount of tugging. Class was about to start, so we moved to find suitable seats. Suddenly Elena Kerru approached me and asked in a small voice, “Were you sweating?”
“Pardon?”
“You smell nice.”
“Don’t tell me you’re about to say something like that in front of all these people—”
Before I could finish, Elena held out a white handkerchief with her gloved hand. The fabric was slightly damp. It was unmistakably the same handkerchief Sophie had used moments ago to wipe my sweat and preserve my dignity.
“I picked this up. It has the exact same scent as the one I smelled yesterday. You must have dropped it just now, right?”
“Uh… ah, thank you.”
I snatched the handkerchief from Elena’s hand as quickly as I could. She stared at me for a moment with her sparkling pink eyes, then quietly returned to her seat. I handed the handkerchief back to Sophie with a reproachful look.
“That’s not like you at all, Sophie. How could you drop it so carelessly? And the way she said she recognized my scent by smell is honestly a little creepy…”
“I put it deep inside the inner pocket of your coat. There’s no way it could have fallen out in such a short time by accident.”
“…What?”
At that moment Lillia, who had been walking beside Elena, suddenly examined Elena’s hand and declared in a voice loud enough for everyone nearby to hear, “Miss Elena, you must wear your gloves properly! For a lady at a magic academy, gloves are more important than any other article of clothing. Perhaps even more important than underwear! They were fine a moment ago—why are they half-removed now?”
“Ah, oh, you’re right.”
Elena quickly adjusted her gloves at Lillia’s pointed remark. Lillia turned back to us with a bright smile.
“It almost looks as if she just took them off and put them back on. Well, she’s still new to the academy’s etiquette, so she’ll learn in time. Remember—gloves are extremely, extremely important!”
Sophie glanced at the pair, sat down beside me, turned her gaze toward the blackboard, and muttered, “That witch is no ordinary person.”
“Which one, Sophie?”
“Both of them.”
I had to agree with her.
This class was History. The subject was taught by an elderly woman far older than Professor Machtopf—Ingrid Nerfel. To be honest, I sat down with a mixture of anticipation and dread. In the original novel, Professor Machtopf’s mathematics lessons were barely mentioned, but Professor Nerfel’s classes came up quite frequently. History is one of those subjects that receives wildly polarized reviews depending on both the teacher and the students. It can be either extremely boring or extremely fascinating. Unfortunately, the in-story evaluation of Professor Nerfel’s lessons painted them as mind-numbingly dull—so much so that the phrase “like one of Nerfel’s lectures” was used in the novel as a synonym for boredom.
Still, that was just the opinion of the characters within the world. From my perspective, it was all just lore and world-building from a fantasy setting, so I thought it might actually be interesting…
“…And thus, in the lord’s agreement concluded around the fourteenth year of the New Imperial Calendar, the grand ducal houses promised their incorporation into the Baltmark system… The history before the appearance of the Mother Dungeon… Um, what you all truly need to remember is only the history after the Mother Dungeon’s emergence. Let me emphasize that again. Where was I… Ah, yes. I was giving a general overview of history prior to the New Imperial Calendar… Well, we did skip over it, but the official curriculum guidelines state that we are only to cover the period after the Imperial Calendar. So I find myself in an internal conflict—should I follow the guidelines, or should I, as an educator, devote at least two full classes to a general explanation of continental history before the imperial dynasty’s transition, treating it as essential knowledge? Now that I say it aloud, I realize that the historical period in which I experienced similar internal conflicts may not actually differ much from the history of the imperial family itself. Haha. Interesting, isn’t it? And as for the nature of that conflict—after all, isn’t conflict itself the driving force behind history? So then, does human internal conflict also drive history? Well, that sort of thing…”
“This could be interesting material, you know? The emergence of the Great Mother Dungeon and the subsequent establishment of the Baltmark imperial system is one of the most fascinating parts of our human history. It was the era when the first Demon King and the first witches appeared—there are so many exciting episodes from that time.”
Sophie whispered. I nodded, paying far more attention to her whisper than to the professor’s lecture.
“But it’s seriously, disgustingly boring.”
I nodded at that too. To anyone watching from outside, it probably looked like I was nodding along with the professor’s words. By that point, however, her voice had already stopped registering in my ears entirely.