Chapter 41
“Ms. Jacqueline Carol?”
“You must be Name. Call me Jackie. What brings you here?”
“Ms. Jackie, I don't have an EMR (Etheric Mark Recognition) pen. Could I borrow one?”
“I happen to have one. Give it back after the test.”
I hadn't known there would be a test on my very first day of school.
Fortunately, I was able to easily borrow an EMR pen from Ms. Jackie, the homeroom teacher of Second-Year Class A.
Out of mild curiosity, I asked why they used E instead of M, and she said that the English-speaking world called mana ether, which was why they used the term ‘etheric.’
I wish they would standardize the terminology a little, but just like the units, they always decide these things however they please.
“You can do it, Name...!”
Seori whispered from far away.
Her voice couldn't reach me, but I could tell exactly what she meant just by looking at the shape of her mouth.
I answered her encouragement with a bright smile of my own.
Even though it was an important test, there was no need to separate the desks from the students sitting beside them.
The test papers themselves had a special coating etched into them, so their contents couldn't be made out unless viewed head-on.
The same went for anything written with an EMR pen.
Even Seori, who had been chattering away during recess, had her eyes closed in prayer; the aptitude assessment weighed heavily on the children.
Sihoo beside me, Hyejeong in front of me, and even Yuna behind me.
Not a single one of them made a sound, and only the quiet hiss of their breathing filled the classroom.
Twenty-five questions in thirty minutes definitely didn't leave an abundance of time.
Especially since they were young children who cared about what others thought, they must be sensitive to their rankings as well.
“The test will run from 1:10 to 1:40. Do not turn over your test paper until the broadcast gives you instructions. When it reaches 1:40, there will be another announcement signaling the end, so keep your hands on top of your heads then, too. Understood?”
Ms. Jackie delivered a number of warnings.
“EMR cards can't be corrected, so if you mark an answer incorrectly, just raise your hand quietly and I'll come over and change it for you.”
Five minutes remained until the test began.
“Since this is only an aptitude assessment, I hope you won't get too nervous. Some questions may cover things you haven't learned at school, and even if you see many questions you don't know, it absolutely doesn't mean you're incapable, so have confidence.”
A few children quietly nodded.
It was only natural for a homeroom teacher to say reassuring things, but from the children's perspective, this was a test they couldn't help worrying about.
This was how vicious the academy system was.
It not only ranked every student in the school using material they hadn't been taught, but even moved students who fell short of expectations to entirely different classes.
Even the Kaizen Academy would have to concede a point to Sephiron when it came to operating this way.
The children, already hardened and accustomed to this pressure after a full year, stared at the second hand with determined eyes.
Would even the snot-nosed first-years I'd seen today eventually turn into children like those in our class?
[*Cough, cough. Ahem. The 2051 Sephiron Academy First Aptitude Assessment will now begin.]
Rustle.
Excluding the cover on page one, the test paper consisted of three pages, pages two through four.
A very old memory suddenly surfaced. I thought the CSAT science test paper had looked exactly like this.
It had been decades since the CSAT was abolished in this world and replaced by KGSAT, a standardized graduation exam for university admission... but anyway, that was how it looked.
I picked up my pen and slowly skimmed through the questions from number one.
[1. Find the pattern and write the appropriate runic word in the blank.]
A truly simple multiplication problem.
All I had to do was find the corresponding runic word and enter it as the answer.
Since 17 times 7 was 119, the answer was number 4, ‘Jignite Resenka.’
What else had I expected from a second-year elementary-school question?
I moved on to the other questions.
[6. <Figure 1> and <Figure 2> are the combined-casting forms of the first-circle ‘Light’ spell. If the amount of mana required to cast ‘Light’ is 10, which of the following correctly pairs the amount of mana required for each casting?]
The answer was number 1, 20–35.
[15. The following is a magic circle in which the runes from ‘Null’ to ‘Exylon’ have been placed incorrectly. What is the minimum number of correction expansions required to cast an arbitrary spell from it?]
It was four times, so number 5.
[Short Answer 1. Write the appropriate angles in the blanks.]
45 degrees, 15 degrees, and 225 degrees.
‘Haa... haa...’
Before I knew it, I had reached the final question this way.
The time was currently 1:23.
In fact, I had much more time left than expected and could have taken things slowly, but there was a reason I was hurrying.
‘The bathroom...’
I'd drunk far too much potion during lunch of all times...
Come to think of it, I'd only gone to the bathroom once that morning, too.
Thanks to that, my current weight was probably nearing 19 kilograms rather than being in the 18-kilogram range.
If body fluids accounted for 70 percent of our weight, I estimated that mine had increased by 1.88 percent above that.
Why was my metabolism so fast...? Resenting my young body, I looked over the final question.
[Short Answer 5. Record all magic circles of second-circle level or below that satisfy the following conditions.]
Thank goodness.
Truly, thank goodness.
Because the final question was about drawing a magic circle.
It gave no fewer than three conditions, but thanks to that, there were only two magic circles I had to draw.
There were many ways to draw magic circles quickly, but the method I used most often was recording them using symmetry.
I grouped the shared regions, established axes of symmetry, and appropriately combined a symmetry matrix with a rotation transformation matrix to complete a beautiful magic circle extending in eight directions.
Then, by making the correction records that matched Conditions 2 and 3, I could draw the magic circle in the shortest possible time.
Done!
“Teacher!”
“Just keep your hand raised quietly. It'll only be a moment.”
“It's not that... I need to use the bathroom...!”
Even as I doggedly kept my right hand raised, I gripped my skirt with all my strength with the other.
The children, who had been concentrating solely on the test until then, cast sidelong glances in my direction.
How could the urge hit so suddenly after only ten minutes?
It was embarrassing with everyone watching.
Ms. Jackie knelt beside me and whispered.
“If you're going to the bathroom, you'll have to go with another teacher to prevent cheating. Is that okay? Can you hold it a little longer?”
“I'm going to submit it just like this, so can I go right away?”
“Huh? Oh, yes, you can... You can go...”
“Excuse me...”
Damn potion.
I really needed to go home and look into forms of this stuff other than a liquid.
Rattle, rattle.
Why won't the classroom door open again?!
* * *
“Name, are you okay...?”
“Why?”
“You left without finishing the test...”
“What do you mean, Seori? Name didn't finish the test?”
Since there were no sixth-period classes on the first day of school, we headed straight home as soon as the test ended.
All the children in class had stared at me with pity, so I was embarrassed and dashed out of school with Seori.
Jihye, who looked utterly crestfallen after finding the test far too difficult, opened her eyes wide when she heard the news.
“So you just went to the bathroom? If you'd waited a little, you could have come back in and finished it.”
Exactly.
I hadn't been like this before, so had I gotten nervous without realizing it?
But at that moment, it had truly been an emergency I couldn't hold in any longer.
“Still, you'll be fine since you answered everything and turned it in.”
“That's a relief! Like Jihye said, the test was hard, so if you just make good guesses in a row, you can make up for it on the next test.”
“Huh? No, I didn't guess. I solved them all.”
Even so, it was an elementary-school test.
“You finished it all in fifteen minutes? We barely had enough time!”
“Are you being serious?”
“Then what's the answer to question 15? The one about correction expansions?”
“The answer was number 5, wasn't it? Four times.”
“What was the answer to multiple-choice question 20?”
“Number 2.”
“Seori, is that right?”
“I couldn't solve it, so I don't know either. Oh, then what about written-response question 5? Did you draw that magic circle?”
“It was a simple wave-composition problem, so I'll just show you directly.”
In truth, displaying it in three dimensions in midair was much easier for me than recording it on the test paper.
“Condition 1 says the amplitude is 2 meters, so assuming a rough 1:10 scale, let's say it's 20 centimeters here.”
Using three axes of symmetry as a foundation, I completed the outer perimeter of the magic circle.
“For Condition 2, since it makes contact at a 135-degree angle, you can use a rotation transformation matrix of 180 minus 45 degrees, or, at an elementary-school level, decompose each term into a one-to-one horizontal-to-vertical ratio.”
But the reason written-response question 5 was tricky was the third condition.
“Condition 3 unusually introduced a mana-loss condition during the composition process. In that case, assume the loss rate from each wave source from the outset and make the correction records to obtain the proper value.”
I finished the record and stopped at the stage where I injected mana, so the magic circle would be easier to see.
The characteristic low hum of wave magic rang in our ears.
Since I hadn't activated it, it would disappear quickly after ten seconds.
“Wow, holy crap, that's freaking awesome...”
Seori let out an exclamation of admiration.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
Jihye merely stared blankly and clapped, offering a dry reaction.
Come to think of it, it did seem like an extremely tricky problem for the elementary-school curriculum.
There were ways to solve it, but clearly it would be impossible to shorten the recording time this drastically.
Since I relied too heavily on highly technical skills, I found myself wondering how I could explain it more simply from here.
“What was the answer to number 1, by the way...?”
“Number 4, ‘Jignite Resenka.’”
“Phew, what a relief... I learned that in the first semester and had momentarily forgotten...”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Sob... I might get thirty points on this test, right...?”
Tears welled up in Jihye's eyes.
The number twenty multiple-choice question and written-response question five weren't what mattered in her mind.
She had been facing a nightmare from question one.
“It'll be okay.”
Seori tried her best to comfort her, but she didn't look all that at ease herself.
“Name, was this test maybe easy...? Please answer honestly...”