Kestral Academy (3)

The next morning, Leonard stepped out of the dormitory and ran into Sophia, who was standing at the entrance of the academy’s main building. She rummaged in her robes, drew out something small and held it up for him to see.

“Here.”

It was a thin brass badge, glinting gold in the sunlight. It was smaller than a coin, yet the pattern engraved on its face was remarkably fine.

“Your class was decided just last night. This is the badge for it, so don’t go losing it.”

“My class?”

Leonard asked, making a show of not knowing. Sophia detached a baton-sized rod from her great staff and tapped the badge’s emblem lightly with it.

“It’s Raven.”

Ripples ran across the badge’s surface and soon settled into the vivid shape of a raven. While Leonard was still examining it, Sophia dropped to one knee, took the badge and pinned it to his collar for him.

— Click!

The moment the pin caught, the hood of his uniform darkened to black, like a raven’s feathers. Only then did Sophia smile faintly, as though satisfied, and hand him a sheet of paper.

“That’s your new timetable, starting today. I’m one of the professors teaching you, so don’t get any ideas about wandering off somewhere you shouldn’t. Well then!”

She was gone before he could say a word. That left nothing in front of the main building but upper-year students hurrying to their lecture halls, and Leonard, standing there blankly.

“Raven, is it.”

He fiddled absently with the badge.

Since long ago, mages had been likened to birds, because a bird looking down on everything from high in the sky had much in common with a mage grasping the state of a battle. Perhaps that was why organizations tied to mages, and the sayings about them too, used the names of birds so often.

Kestral Academy followed the same tradition and sorted its students into three classes: Falcon, Owl and Raven.

…Come to think of it, I was Raven that time as well.

He’d enrolled a full seven years earlier than in the original timeline, yet here he was starting his first year in the same class all over again. It gave him an oddly strange feeling.

Ah — this is no time to be standing around.

The bell for first period rang, so Leonard ran a hurried eye over the new timetable and left.

“Right, quiet, all of you.”

Amanda Ailwalker’s voice was low and clear enough to carry straight through the students’ chatter.

She’d already taught them several lessons by now, but the students still hunched their shoulders on instinct at the particular air she gave off. Yet there was one student among them who wasn’t frightened of her.

That child is…

Leonard Felix.

He alone was meeting Amanda’s eyes head-on. A genius of a kind the continent had never seen was standing in her lecture hall at this very moment, and that fact, if anything, was what made Amanda tense.

Honestly, you’d never once imagine it from the look of him.

A child that small had gone around beating monsters to death with his bare hands. She’d read it in the report, but frankly it was hard to believe.

Well, fighting is one thing — but will that talent of his hold up in alchemy as well?

After letting a moment hang, Amanda finally spoke.

“Today we’ll be learning how to handle the ingredients for the potions from the last chapter. The tools and ingredients are laid out in the cupboard, so each of you take a set and start your measuring and preparation.”

The instant she finished, the students filed out of their seats one after another and fetched the scales and mortars from the cupboard. Soon the sounds of straining to crush and cut ingredients were coming from every direction.

“As I’ve stressed since the very first day! Handle every ingredient without spoiling it, and keep the loss of usable parts to a minimum! Call to mind the preparation methods you learned in Chapter 1!”

Amanda drove every word home.

She was notorious among the students for being boundlessly strict and exacting about her subject, alchemy. But there was a reason for it, and by her lights a perfectly sound one. Alchemy was by nature a discipline that demanded delicacy, and Amanda knew all too well what fatal results an error of a grain or two of sand could bring. So naturally she had no choice but to be hard on her students.

“Felix, open the book to the first chapter.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t have you do the practical today. Watch what the other students do, and take your time comparing it against the book.”

Leonard had to be far behind in the syllabus, and a practical in his very first lesson would be too much for him. So Amanda gave him separate instructions of his own.

“Um…”

He couldn’t come up with an answer right away and hesitated for a moment. Then, as though he’d changed his mind, he shook his head slightly and said:

“Understood.”

One glance at the ingredients was enough to tell him roughly which potion the students were preparing. Making it himself would have been easier still, but Leonard had resolved to stay inside the bounds of an ordinary student as far as he possibly could.

“Haah.”

He let out a small sigh as he watched the students make one mistake after another.

Kestral Academy’s greatest problem was that its students had no self-esteem. A fundamental despair had settled in their hearts: however hard they strove, they would never succeed.

So what did people like that need?

A genius, at any rate, isn’t the answer.

Leonard had gained the power and skill he had now at the price of bone-carving pain. But in the students’ eyes, that would only look like the pretense of someone born with it, never like the product of effort.

If he wanted to get anywhere near them, he had to show himself not as an overwhelming genius but as a plodder who worked for it. He could hardly change his age at this point, but as long as he was careful with his words and conduct, the fact that he was at the third Circle could be hidden well enough. Even if he had to reveal his real ability later on, for now he needed to hide it as far as he could.

Still, sitting here just watching is far too dull.

Leonard glanced around while pretending to read the book.

“For the twilight flower I said ‘petals only.’ Who told you to use the whole thing, right down to the calyx underneath? Empty that pot and start again! And you, there!”

Professor Amanda’s reprimand came bursting out.

“The unicorn’s horn has a faint grain to it, so I believe I told you to allow for that and cut it rather than crush it?”

The students let out a shrill “Hiiik!” and Leonard blinked.

Good grief.

The sight of them was apparently too pitiful to just sit and watch, because in the end Leonard couldn’t hold out any longer. He opened his book and showed it to the student beside him.

“Um, have a look at this.”

“Hm?”

“The book says it’s the mint you’re supposed to grind to powder, not the cinnamon?”

The student blinked at him blankly, then flushed and shot back:

“What? I know that much already.”

Leonard had worried the advice might simply be ignored, but the student went off to fetch the ingredient again exactly as he’d said. Being scolded by the professor was more frightening, it seemed, than losing face.

“Right, that’s enough, all of you!”

The lesson was nearly over. At Professor Amanda’s word, the students set the tools in their hands down on their desks.

“I want each of you to think about what you did wrong in today’s lesson and how you ought to improve it. Bottle the potion you made and hand it in on your way out. I’ll tell you your marks next lesson. That is all!”

“Yes.”

The students set their vials on the lectern and hurried off. Leonard followed them out last of all, and the lecture hall that had been so noisy finally filled with silence.

Amanda worked the stiffness out of her shoulders, then began looking over the students’ potions one by one. She checked each one closely for color, impurities and the rest, and entered the marks in the register.

Group 1 has come on a little from last week. Group 2 is still below what I’d hoped for, and Group 3 isn’t much either… hm?

After Group 4’s, she checked the potion Group 5 had handed in and was briefly at a loss. Unlike every potion before it, its color was vivid and its clarity clean, and the sediment was about right as well. It wasn’t entirely free of clumsy touches, but for students at their level, even this much was a comfortable pass.

What is this? There was hardly anything different from usual.

Which made it all the stranger.

Amanda stared hard at the ceiling and traced back through her memory. If there was one single difference between the last lesson and today’s…

Leonard?

A student’s face came abruptly to mind, and she turned her eyes to the empty desk. As it happened, Leonard’s group was Group 5. Out of every group, that Group 5 alone had turned out a satisfactory result.

Was it just a coincidence?

“…Hah. Surely not.”

Even so, that was far too much of a leap.

Amanda looked back down at the register. Believing simply that the students had managed something out of the ordinary, she recorded an A beside the students of Group 5.

Leonard, having finished all his lessons, moved to the last lecture hall to take his supplementary lesson. His enrollment date had fallen out of step with the other students’, so the academy had arranged it specially, worried that he’d fall behind in the syllabus.

I don’t particularly need supplementary lessons, though…

He grumbled to himself in the empty corridor, where no one could hear. But at the thought that he might get to see Sophia’s face again, strength welled up in him all on its own.

“Excuse me!”

“Whoops. Hello.”

He flung the lecture-hall door open, bright and full of energy, but sadly the person waiting for him wasn’t Sophia Flavius. It was a man, giving off the musty smell of someone who lived alone.

“What is it?”

“…”

Ethan had his legs up on the desk and his chair tipped back, and he glanced at Leonard with slightly hollow eyes.

“You’re not Teacher Sophia…”

“Since when exactly did you get that friendly with Professor Flavius?”

Ethan muttered it as though he found the whole thing absurd, and nudged the chair beside him over with the tip of his foot. Leonard pushed out his lips, dragged a palm down his face and dropped heavily into it.

“Why?”

It was a vague question with everything before and after it left out, but Ethan caught its meaning at once.

“Because I’ve got the least to do of any professor here. So, half by choice and half not, I got stuck with it.”

He said it with a snicker to Leonard, whose disappointment was written plainly on his face.

“Anyway, what’s got into you?”

“Sorry?”

“I figured you’d kick off the term with a grand initiation show on day one. But you’ve been surprisingly quiet, haven’t you? Whether you meant to be or not, I couldn’t say…”

Ethan let the words trail off.

“In any case, be careful from here on. The professors already know exactly what you can do. There’s a gag order to keep their mouths shut, but in the end that’ll only be a stopgap. Somebody’s bound to leak the story about you to the outside.”

To protect Keld Village, Leonard had had to wring out every last drop of his third-Circle power. There had been no room at all to hide what he could do, so he’d already expected, to some degree, that his tier would come out.

The problem was what came after that.

“One slip and you could end up living your whole life like a stud horse.”

“You have a filthy way of putting things, you know that.”

Leonard’s face screwed up hard.

In mage society, where ability was as good as rank, Leonard’s existence carried great weight. Magical ability was strongly hereditary, so his blood held enormous value. Seen from that angle, Ethan’s “stud horse” was very apt indeed. Where else would nobles who prized their bloodlines find a prospect like this to marry into the family?

“Why go out of your way to tell me all this in the first place?”

“Prickly, aren’t you… I’m giving you advice. If anybody comes near you, always be suspicious and keep your guard up. Get yourself tied down somewhere like that and life gets exhausting.”

Was it his imagination?

For an instant, a self-mocking smile seemed to surface on Ethan’s face.

“Right. That’s enough pointless chatter. Shall we get on with the supplementary lesson?”

Ethan jerked his thumb at the mountain of paper sitting on his desk. There was enough of it to choke the breath out of anyone, and Leonard quite literally froze.

Isn’t this elder abuse?

Pouring out inwardly every curse there was, Leonard took his writing things out of his bag.