Kestral Academy (2)

The next day.

“Good morning, everyone.”

“Huh? Professor?”

The students gathered in the lecture hall for first period started when the door swung open and Sophia walked in. She’d been away from her post on business for close to a week, so nobody had expected her back so suddenly.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I trust you’ve all been studying hard while I was away?”

She walked straight past the front of the blackboard and, with a bright smile, set a thick book down on the lectern.

— Thud!

The students flinched at the dull, heavy sound. It felt like a declaration of sorts, a warning that she meant to root out all the idleness and sloth that had settled over this class while she was gone.

We’re finished.

I haven’t done a single piece of the homework.

That was Sophia Flavius for you. She was beautiful and kind, and everyone liked her, but when it came to teaching she was strict without end.

“Ahem.”

Sophia steadied her voice and began.

“I know this is sudden when I’ve only just gotten back, but I have some news for you all today.”

She let a slight pause fall and glanced toward the entrance of the lecture hall.

“A new student is joining the first year.”

The moment the words were out, small, curious voices rose here and there.

“It’s the middle of April, though…”

“Who’s the kid?”

Awakening came at a different time for everyone, so a new student turning up partway through the term was perfectly ordinary. Still, most students finished their enrollment preparations in January, or in March at the latest, or else put off enrolling until the following year.

It wasn’t rare, but it wasn’t common either.

“Come in!”

A small figure stepped through the open door, and every student’s eyes went round at once.

He had a tiny frame that couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and his clothes were so oversized that they hung loose on him, because nothing fit. His cheeks were puffed out with complaint. At a glance, he was absurdly too young to be enrolling in any academy.

Oh, he’s adorable.

When he’d fought the monsters, a ghastly aura had poured off his whole body, and now look at him. He was practically a doll, wasn’t he? Sophia had been smiling fondly without realizing it, and she came back to herself with a start when she noticed that some of the students wore exactly the same expression.

“Th-then, why don’t you tell everyone a little about yourself?”

“…”

Yet the child only stared down at his own feet.

What the hell am I doing at my age, honestly.

Leonard’s face flushed red. When he pictured how he must look to these students right now, he wanted to find a mousehole and crawl into it on the spot.

“…My name is Leonard Felix, from Keld Village.”

He shut his mouth there for a moment, but he must have judged that he couldn’t let the moment slide by in silence, because he went on, biting out each word.

“I’m… nine this year…”

“Nine?!”

One of the students blurted the age back without meaning to, but the shock had hit them all so hard that not one of them paid him any attention.

The minimum condition for enrolling in an academy was reaching the first Circle. So unless his qualifications had been firmly recognized, there was no way Leonard Felix could be standing here at all.

On top of that, the average age for mana to bloom was twelve, yet Leonard had become a mage at nine. He’d gained three full years on everyone else, and that alone spoke of tremendous talent.

And a genius like that had come to Kestral Academy, not to Delonia or Everforce Academy, the prestigious institutions. The irony could hardly have been richer.

“I figured he’d be young, but even so, that’s just too…”

“Can a nine-year-old even come in as a first-year?”

— Swish.

One of the students raised a hand.

“Professor, does that mean the new student’s joining our class?”

At that, every eye in the room gathered on Sophia once again.

“Leonard Felix hasn’t been assigned to a class yet. We’ll let you know as soon as that’s decided, and until then he’ll be taking lessons with us for the time being.”

Sophia gave a small cough and spoke up.

“Leonard, sit wherever you like.”

With the matter settled, she rapped the blackboard with the flat of her palm, and the empty board began to fill densely with white letters.

“History of Magic, page 65.”

“Did you hear about the new student who just showed up?”

Inside the closed-off environment of the academy, the appearance of a capable new student was a topic more than enough to stir up the students’ interest.

So the rumor passed quickly from mouth to mouth, and by lunchtime it was hard to find a student who didn’t know the name Leonard Felix.

“Don’t even have to look. He’s bound to be all show and no substance.”

One student said it mid-lunch, spraying spit as he talked.

“From what I hear, he’s not even from a merchant family, never mind a noble house. You think a kid like that ever got a proper education? We’ll be lucky if he isn’t off crying somewhere nobody can see him, now that he’s away from his parents.”

Some of the students took the negative view.

Unlike nobles and merchants, commoners often lived with no connection to magic at all, so in practice students of common birth were, on the whole, far slower to grow and to adjust than their classmates.

“Plus, look at Professor Prospero. A man with that much talent is rotting away for nothing at a place like this, so why would that little brat be any different? Being a genius doesn’t guarantee you’ll make it.”

“I don’t know about that.”

The student sitting across from him objected.

“They’re calling him ‘a genius the continent will never see again’. If he’s really that good, I bet people would be lining up to take him in, whether he wanted it or not.”

Kestral Academy had been built for students who had trouble covering their tuition. It had far more students than the other two academies, but both its outside reputation and the standard of its students tended to be lower.

It could become “the academy that raised the greatest mage on the continent”. One wrong step, though, and it would carry the disgrace of being “the worst educational institution there is, the one that ruined a genius”.

Right about now, Kestral Academy’s Dean and teaching staff were probably feeling a quiet sort of pressure.

“Honestly, I don’t know. The whole thing, start to finish, sounds like a story from another world.”

When one student muttered that, the others tilted their heads.

Now that I hear it, this is a bit…

It’s all a bit vague.

A mage’s occupation and standing depended most on individual ability, but “connections” carried just as much weight. So the students were forever studying the people around them and weighing up whether they were worth recruiting.

The attention on Leonard was part of that process. Yet even though nearly all of his personal details were already out, the students couldn’t judge his ability so easily.

Genius or not, nobody had actually seen what he could do, and the only thing properly verified was his age. No wonder the whole thing felt unreal.

What sort of fellow is he, anyway?

Once they realized there was no need to rush to judgment, pure curiosity bloomed in its place. Gain and loss aside, they wanted to see with their own eyes what kind of person this rumored new student was.

“He’s here!”

At someone’s shout, every eye turned toward the cafeteria entrance. A boy who looked far younger than any ordinary first-year was walking in, clutching the waist of trousers that kept sliding down.

He was an innocent nine-year-old child, and the sight of him made everything they’d been agonizing over a moment ago meaningless.

Wow, he looks even younger than I imagined.

A kid like this is really in the same first year as me?

The students crowded around him and gawked as if he were some rare animal, and Leonard clamped his mouth shut. What he felt first wasn’t irritation at having his way blocked. It was pity.

The great majority of Kestral Academy’s students were children of fallen noble houses or of merchant families, so they lived under the constant weight of having to restore their houses.

Amid all that pressure, Leonard Felix was the one person they could approach with an easy mind.

Poor bastards.

All a student carried away at graduation was a warped set of values that made them look at others with narrow eyes, and crude skills with nowhere to use them. So the academy’s standard sank lower, and the vicious circle went round again.

With the atmosphere like this, there’s no way anyone can properly focus on studying.

Leonard couldn’t hold back the lament inside him, and he was just about to let out a sigh when—

“What’s going on?”

“Why are you all crowded over here?”

The students who’d caught Leonard kept up their noise, so others who’d been eating their meals in peace came over out of curiosity. In the blink of an eye the cafeteria turned into bedlam, practically a marketplace.

“What are you all even looking at? Move over a bit!”

“Huh? It’s the new student, the new student!”

There was no eating lunch through a crowd like this.

Leonard clicked his tongue. While the students shoved and pulled at one another, he took his chance, ducked low, and crawled between their legs to slip out of the cafeteria unnoticed.

“Hnngh.”

Professor Mark, who had read the document through meticulously down to its last character, let out a low groan and leaned back against his chair. At that, the others seated at the same table showed their discomfort in turn.

“The contents of this report are…”

“They’re true.”

Before Professor Louis could get another word out, Ethan declared it flatly.

“Leonard Felix is no ordinary third-Circle mage. In sheer ability, he’s already on a par with a full-grown adult mage. And on top of that, I’m telling you, he made up the magic he needed on the spot and used it.”

Ethan Prospero was a playful man who liked a joke, but he wasn’t one to talk nonsense in a setting like this. Louis, who knew that perfectly well, let out a guffaw, as if the whole thing were absurd.

A child barely past nine had reached a tier on a par with the third- and fourth-years, and as if that weren’t enough, he’d fought monsters and survived? Not even Delonia or Everforce, where supposedly only geniuses gathered, had ever seen talent on this scale.

“Hrm.”

At Ethan’s firm answer, the faces of several professors twisted hideously with greed. It lasted only the briefest moment, but Sophia was sharp-eyed, and she didn’t miss it.

Filthy bastards.

Unlike the students, who came from poor circumstances, the professors had solid backing and solid wealth.

The problem was the Mages’ Association, which decided where they worked.

Anyone who fell out of the Association’s favor, for any reason at all, was kept on standby without end, on the grounds that there were no openings, and in the end drifted into Kestral Academy, far from any prestige.

It wasn’t true of all of them, but someone in this room saw Leonard Felix as a lifeline out of Kestral Academy. Sophia knew that perfectly well, and she knitted her brows.

“I summoned you all here because I judged that we needed to get our accounts straight in advance.”

The elder seated at the very head of the table had spoken.

“I am placing a gag order on what was confirmed today, ‘for the time being’. Let none of it leak, not to the students, of course, and not outside the academy either. I trust you understand the reason well enough.”

Every professor nodded. Political calculation aside, little good would come of it if word got out that Leonard was at the third Circle.

Drawing pointless attention and suffering envy and jealousy would hardly be welcome for a student who ought to be concentrating on his studies.

“…The academic affairs office will settle Leonard Felix’s class by this afternoon. The professors are to await the notification.”

— Tap!

Having finished, the elder raised the staff and struck the floor lightly with it.

“That is all!”