The Approaching Start of School
I stuck a straw into the iced chocolate sloshing in the glass and drank. Cool, sweet chocolate stormed my mouth.
Mm. That's good.
Honestly, unless I actually needed the caffeine, it was my firm belief that very few drinks could rival iced chocolate on taste alone. An ordinary modern person, of course, could hardly afford to ignore whether one of the four essential nutrients—caffeine—was present.
While Makina and I nursed our drinks with straws caught between our lips, Ushia could only stare at her hot chocolate, which radiated heat like a volcano mid-eruption, unable to do a thing about it. The pathetic little breaths leaving her mouth didn't dare lower so much as the surface temperature.
Shooting envious glances at the two of us and our iced chocolate, she waged a staring contest with her own cup until she seemed to reach a decision. With grim resolve she lifted the hot chocolate and brought it to her lips. The drink that had been content to stay in the cup answered gravity's pull, slipped past the rim, and met Ushia's small pink tongue.
"Ah, hot!!"
The instant the scalding liquid touched her tongue, Ushia set the cup back down, stuck her tongue out, and wailed her suffering to the world.
"Aaa, the hot choco's too hooot."
Part of me wanted to tell her to just go grab some ice and dump it in. Unfortunately, hot chocolate and iced chocolate were the same portion at different temperatures, and they were still priced differently.
Hot Chocolate — 1,500 won
Iced Chocolate — 1,600 won
A hundred won at most, but a difference was still a difference. From the shop's point of view, do a child a favor today and tomorrow you'd be hounded by entitled customers who ordered hot chocolate and then brazenly demanded ice. They didn't hand that sort of thing out lightly.
Well, we're not about to chug these and leave, and that hot chocolate isn't a perpetual-motion machine. She can drink it once it cools.
Too hot was a problem, sure, but there was a particular warmth that spread through you from the inside when you drank it at just the right temperature. She might be miserable now. She'd feel better later.
In the end she seemed to give up on drinking it for the moment. Ushia tore her eyes from the cup, looked at us, and spoke.
"I heard it from my god! You two are enrolling in the Academy this time too, right?!"
"Mm. Yeah. You're not wrong."
Most people, Ushia included, just shortened it to the Academy, but the proper name was the Demon Continent Specialized School of Incarnations. This was the Great Incarnation Era. A class system very much existed, and children were no longer equal. Put kids chosen by Constellations to become Incarnations in the same school as ordinary, unchosen children, and what happens? Unlike the old invisible campus caste—looks, ability, what your parents did for a living—a caste you could actually see would be born. And so, on the principle of at least separating Incarnations from ordinary children, the Demon Continent had built the Demon Continent Specialized School of Incar— why was that name so long. The Academy.
Not that I have any intention of taking school life seriously.
I'd already done school once. I had not the slightest desire to attend diligently a second time.
"Including you two, they say every heir of the Seven Great Families is enrolling this year!!"
"What?"
Ushia's words dragged a disbelieving laugh out of me. We hadn't all met on the same day at the same hour to throw a group orgy. How were people from all Seven Great Families supposed to pile into a single grade? Even if they had, this would still be impossible. Makina and I weren't the Demon God's Incarnations because we'd been born into the Nightmare Family. We'd been adopted into the Nightmare Family because we were the Demon God's Incarnations.
Wait. You too?
Ushia was, as it happened, a child of the Akashic Record Family, and from the way Laplace hung around her, she looked to be an Incarnation on top of that.
"Don't tell me you're enrolling in the Academy this year too."
"I am, though?"
I couldn't hold back a sigh at the answer that drove the last nail in.
Fine. Better you than some stranger.
Hadn't I just resolved to coast through the Academy? Even if the heirs of every important family suddenly crammed into one year and world-shaking disasters started stacking up one after another, none of it had anything to do with me.
Does it really have nothing to do with me?
I turned my head, took one look at Makina's face, and revised the thought. As long as I could keep Makina safe, it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
"So what do you even do at the Academy?"
Ushia had brought the subject up, and more importantly she was the Incarnation of Omniscience. I asked with every intention of squeezing a little information out of her while I had the chance. Hearing the question, Ushia stared at me, blinking slow and vacant, and then said:
"I dunno either!"
Hmm. She was the Incarnation of Omniscience—how did she not know something this basic? The Academy wasn't some secret agency whose identity couldn't be revealed. Search the internet and the information would come right up. I'd only asked to keep the conversation going, and because I didn't feel like looking it up myself.
"Mm. Right. Thanks for the answer."
While we went back and forth, the hot chocolate's volcanic heat must have died down, because Ushia picked the cup up and killed it in one shot. Makina and I had already finished, and Ushia downed hers all at once. Unexpectedly, waiting for the drink to stop being scalding had even burned through the time rather neatly.
This ought to be enough. We can head back.
The sky was the same red it had been when I first stepped out of the house, but the clock on the café wall already pointed to six.
"We should get going. The Demon God's the sort of god who just eats dinner alone if you don't come home on time."
"Mmm, has Lord Demon God ever done that?"
"Yeah. It happened."
Inside the Academy's cluttered faculty office, paperwork rose in tall stacks across the desks. The teachers reviewing the enrollment documents for the incoming class of 2224 groaned one after another and looked at each other.
"Hah. Heirs of the Seven Great Families, all converging at once. Has this ever happened before?"
Eight enrollment files lay on the desk where the teachers had gathered.
"Of course not. If there were a precedent, we would have run into it in our textbooks back when we were students."
"I suppose so..."
Even a single enrollment was, from the teachers' perspective, an unexploded bomb dropped in their laps. This time there were eleven of them. The faculty hired by the Demon Continent Specialized School of Incarnations were, of course, all excellent Incarnations chosen by Constellations themselves. That did not mean they could sit at the same table as the Incarnations of the Seven Great Families.
This was the Great Incarnation Era. Class existed, and a teacher was powerless before a student chosen by a Constellation stronger than their own. Not entirely powerless, of course. They could certainly use the system to punish a student. The question was who would actually carry that punishment out.
"The Seven Great Families are beyond standard. Even the strongest person at our school, the principal, doesn't measure up to them..."
"Still, the World Family will take the lead in stopping any wrongdoing, and the other families among the Seven aren't the type to run wild. It should be fine, don't you think?"
Yes—the reason the teachers were despairing wasn't actually that the Seven Great Families had gathered in one grade. No matter how exceptional an Incarnation was, they were still an Incarnation. They couldn't act in ways that would look bad to the Constellation who was the source of their power, and Incarnations themselves generally followed their Constellation's temperament and the concept that Constellation governed. So it wasn't that large a problem.
"The problem is that the Nightmare Family is included."
The Nightmare Family—more precisely, what kind of being was the Demon God's Incarnation? The embodiment of overwhelming force. What they wanted, they took, or they weren't satisfied. What they didn't want, they wouldn't do even if it killed them. A creature that seemed to personify a social life of absolute zero. The trouble was that the Constellation who ought to correct an Incarnation behaving that way instead egged the behavior on and took pride in it.
"Hmm. But why are there two children from the Nightmare Family this time? One child of the previous family head, and one child chosen by the Demon God?"
"No. Both of them are Incarnations of the Demon God."
"What?! Then the Authority would be split."
Normally a god kept only one person as their Incarnation. That was how an Incarnation received their Authority whole. And yet, in this generation, the Demon God had chosen two.
"Well, maybe they figured that even split, it wouldn't change the fact that they're the strongest."
"Certainly. If it's the Demon God, that would be possible."
The principal, who had been quietly watching the two teachers' conversation from a distance, suddenly cut in, looked over the faculty gathered around, and spoke.
"Since it's come to this, let's just shove every Incarnation of the Seven Great Families into one class."
At the principal's words—barging in only to drop a massive bomb—the teachers' eyes went wide.
"Whaaaat?!!"
"Heh heh. I won't be hearing objections. Don't like it? Beat me and take the principal's seat."
The only reason the Academy's principal had been able to become principal at all was that they were, quite simply, the strongest.