Mistaken for a Suspicious Professor (2)

*

Eshenwald Academy, the Garden of Stars.

Centuries ago, this garden of learning, founded by the emperor in his own name, had embraced the fleeting youth of countless heroes.

Great thinkers, successive captains of the Imperial Knights, tower lords of the Magic Tower, even cardinals.

Children blessed with the talents of stars passed through this academy,

and here, they would often kindle their own starlight.

Of course, not everyone possessed the talent of a star, and not all of them came here with such noble intentions.

There were many who, though they could never become stars themselves, nevertheless forced their way in here just to build connections with those stars.

— ‘Eshenwald Academy alumnus.’

No wonder there was a joke that if you could fill the first line of a tombstone with that one line, the rest of the epitaph would write itself.

Eshenwald Academy was both a holy ground of learning and a place one had to pass through in order to rise in the world.

Spring had come to that garden.

Because of the smog no less severe than the capital's, the sunlight—somewhat murky for spring—shone on the lion statue in the square.

Around that lion statue, countless carriages and students crossed the roads branching off to either side.

— “Good morning, young Lord Fornea.”

— “Your name was... right! Senior Lesia, was it?”

— “The uniform suits you, Randy.”

A student greeting the son of his retainer.

A student recalling the name of an upperclassman they had only just met on opening ceremony day.

A student greeting their fiancé with a wave.

Was it because the new semester had only just begun?

Even on the early morning commute to school, interactions between students were lively.

— “You don't need to address me so formally, my lady!”

— “How could I, Cal? You're this year's third-ranked entrant.”

Among them, it was not uncommon to see noble ladies being friendly with commoners.

In this Garden of Stars, especially for students who entered the Hero Studies or Healing Studies departments, a prestigious future was guaranteed unless they had serious disqualifying faults.

Even if they were commoners now, they had a high chance of acquiring a noble title.

As a result, grades here were practically the same as status.

— “Cal, want to have lunch together today?”

— “Um... I already have plans with my childhood friend...”

Thanks to that, it was not particularly strange for nobles to approach Cal, the commoner-born swordsman.

However.

Even in a place like this, there were always those whom no one approached despite their high standing in both family and grades.

— “That blonde is...”

— “Lady Hausen?”

— “The famous...”

Charlotte Eschenwald.

Her public identity was Charlotte Hausen.

As she walked down the corridor, the students subtly gave her a wider berth.

A marquis house was the highest title a noble could realistically attain.

On top of that, Charlotte's grades were good enough that she could walk around the academy with her chest held high.

And yet, even though a week had passed since the entrance ceremony, not a single student had approached her.

There was one reason.

— “Was there really any need to humiliate Lord Russell that badly on the first day...”

On the first day of enrollment.

It was because Charlotte had thoroughly humiliated a young lord of a certain count house.

— “Miss Hausen. I am from the Count Russell house...”

— “Approaching people is a good instinct, but if your goal is to use me to shake off the misery of being a bastard, I regret to say there is nothing I can do for you. Our marquis house is a family of inspectors, so we must always remain politically neutral.”

— “...Pardon?”

— “Your tie knot was tied for you by someone before you got here. The method is quite terrible. It left marks on your uniform, and your shoes are scuffed. That means your maid is rather clumsy, doesn't it? The fact that a young lord from a count house came to the academy with such a maid means your position within the family is precarious, doesn't it? In that situation, even if you suddenly act friendly with me, it means I can't change your circumstances for you.”

It was the very next day after the entrance ceremony.

Those were the first words she had uttered during orientation.

The young lord Russell who heard those words at the time fled with his face flushed red with humiliation.

And after that incident, no student ever spoke to her again.

Which was only natural.

No matter how much power or skill one had, people would not gather around if they lacked popularity.

Moreover, since she herself had no desire to get close to people, others had even less reason to approach her.

— “She was famous in social circles for a different reason too...”

— “I heard getting engaged improved her social skills.”

— “Has it actually gotten worse instead?”

A rumor travels a thousand miles.

Charlotte had unwittingly become a celebrity.

Mostly in a bad way.

'I can hear everything, you know.'

But she did not particularly mind.

After all, even when she had been in the imperial capital, the way people treated her had been much the same.

Who would want to get close to someone who peered even into the past, into the shameful stains they wanted hidden?

Coming to the academy had only been for the sake of listening to one person's lecture.

That was why she did not care what became of a single slice of her youth.

'The next lecture is...'

As she wandered the corridor alone, thinking about her next class,

at that moment, someone suddenly tapped Charlotte on the shoulder.

“Charlotte. Have you eaten lunch?”

“I have, Jenny.”

When she turned her head, a black-haired girl was looking at Charlotte.

Her curly hair ended short above her shoulders, and a faint weariness could be felt in her purple eyes.

Her name was Jenny Rylik.

She was Charlotte's roommate and a student in the Healing Studies department.

“What did you eat?”

“Cheese and crackers.”

At the same time, she was also the first and last friend Charlotte had made in the week since enrollment.

That was because Jenny hadn't minded Charlotte's rudeness on the first day in the dormitory.

— “How did you know I was a trainee healer on the battlefield? I used to go along sometimes because of my older brother. But your deduction that my older brother was a drug addict, or that we had a bad relationship, was wrong. To be exact, we used to, but lately my brother has been going out more often and has quit the drugs, so our relationship has improved.”

Maybe it was because her deduction had been wrong.

And so Jenny became Charlotte's only friend.

“That won't do. Meals are important, Charlotte.”

“Crackers and cheese are enough to meet my daily caloric needs.”

“Are you seriously planning to win an argument over nutrients in front of the Healing Studies department?”

“...”

Charlotte shut her mouth tightly.

Were healers always this naggy?

And her fiancé was like this too, as was her roommate.

Charlotte couldn't understand why everyone she met kept nagging her about food.

“Come on, let's go to the cafeteria together.”

“...I really hate that. School meals are just too tasteless even before you get to the nutrients.”

“Haha... well, that's true.”

Jenny's expression stiffened.

The academy's meals were infamous for being tasteless.

Which was only natural, since Eshenwald Academy's cafeteria did not employ ordinary chefs.

What went into the cafeteria kitchen were cooks drafted from the military.

What those cooks handled here were the exact military rations delivered to the Imperial Army's rear supply depots—

Dried hard bread, canned processed beans, salted pork, and vegetables fermented slightly sour for preservation.

Naturally, the taste was absolutely dreadful.

In the past, an imperial family member had protested this to the chancellor.

— “These students are the talents who will contribute to humanity's future. They are responsible not only for the Empire but for the children of other nations as well, so how we treat them is, frankly, a matter of imperial prestige. And yet the academy has more than enough budget, so why won't you change the school meals?”

To that, the chancellor replied:

— “Half the students in this garden will go to the battlefield after they graduate—whether the Demon Lands or the Labyrinth. No one there is serving us truffles. How could anyone who can't even stomach a loaf of military bread survive a place like that?”

Having said that, no one could argue about the academy's school meals any further.

“I won't be going to the battlefield, so I don't think I need to force my palate to adapt to it. Cheese and crackers are enough.”

“Still, you should at least get your nutrients in. Your fiancé is a professor, isn't he? Won't he worry?”

“...”

Charlotte flinched, her shoulders twitching.

Then she reluctantly opened her mouth.

“Then how about eating lunch outside with academy pocket money?”

Here, 'outside' did not mean outside the academy grounds.

After all, this entire fortress was academy property, so if you went out, you'd only become a monster's meal.

So the 'outside' Charlotte meant was outside the student district.

“If it's the restaurants in the commercial district, then they'd be worth eating at.”

The academy grounds were divided into many districts.

The student district where the students lived.

The military district that maintained the city's security.

The industrial district for making things.

The commercial district that existed for their convenience, and so on...

Among these, the restaurants in the commercial district were basically facilities for workers from other districts, not for students.

There was no academy rule prohibiting students from using those restaurants.

“Jenny, you have enough pocket money too, right?”

Instead, academy currency kept them tied down in place of the school rules.

Academy currency.

Commonly known as pocket money.

Because Eshenwald Academy was essentially a military cadet school, outside currency could not be brought in.

Instead, every transaction made within was done exclusively in academy currency.

That currency, paid once a month to cover both appearance upkeep and living expenses, was also calculated according to grades.

That too was part of the training to adapt to the battlefield.

“You had high entrance scores too, so you can't have already run out of pocket money.”

Charlotte recalled her roommate's grades and the amount of pocket money she herself had received right after enrollment.

Unless she had been up to no good somewhere, there was no way that pocket money would already be gone...

“U-um...”

“Jenny?”

“W-well...”

Jenny quietly averted her gaze.

“I spent it all yesterday...”

“Where?”

“I thought with four of a kind, I could at least go all-in... but I never expected a straight flush to show up of all things...”

“...”

Charlotte narrowed her eyes and glared at Jenny.

“Can a priest really do that?”

“Listen. Among the gods, there is a god of play too. I merely lived a wholesome life of faith.”

“I believe there is also a goddess of temperance.”

“...”

Jenny shut her mouth tightly.

“Did you use up your appearance upkeep money too?”

“...So I decided to work at the infirmary starting tomorrow evening.”

“I see.”

Charlotte let out a sigh.

Then she took a silver coin from her pocket and tossed it to Jenny.

“Huh! This much?! Does the Hero Studies department get that much pocket money?”

“Partly, yes, but I can get by on living expenses alone. This is the leftover appearance upkeep money.”

“Miss Charlotte, weren't you from a marquis house? That must cost an outrageous amount in appearance upkeep.”

“I didn't need a carriage for commuting, so I didn't ride one, and I didn't bring any maids with me.”

In the first place, there were no maids who wanted to follow her.

“You... are really a marquis lady, right?”

Charlotte barely managed to hold back her urge to say that she wasn't.

Instead, she only replied like this:

“For all that this is the academy, you're the first commoner I've ever seen who can speak to a marquis lady so casually.”

“Ah.”

Jenny shrugged.

She carefully tucked the silver coin Charlotte had given her into her pocket, then brushed back her curly black hair.

“Come to think of it, one of your required courses is the Dark Arts Defense lecture, right?”

“Yes. It's this afternoon after lunch.”

It was, by coincidence, their next schedule.

A lecture they could finally attend only a week after enrolling in the academy.

“I heard it's a new course the military set up. How important must it be for them to make it a required class? Normally, it would have to be something like Monster Studies or Demon Studies to be compulsory.”

“Who knows.”

The military's circumstances were of no interest to Charlotte.

“Then let's eat lunch and go together.”

“You too, Jenny?”

“Yeah. It's not required for healers, but among healers it was actually a pretty competitive lecture.”

“Are healers trying to fight dark mages?”

“Not really. A few years ago, a person named Shun Isa used black magic to make something called a vaccine, remember? And I heard two new vaccines are coming out this year too. So more and more aspiring healers have become interested in black magic.”

“I see.”

Charlotte found herself feeling a little displeased.

It was because she was worried the students would become too numerous and make the lecture chaotic.

“Come to think of it, other fiancés sneak off to the dorms to meet the ones they want to see and get caught, but Charlotte's fiancé hasn't shown his face once for a whole week, has he?”

“My fiancé is strict about rules in many ways.”

“Still, if he's a professor, there should be a way to come see you.”

“If anything, being a professor is precisely why he'd be careful how he conducts himself.”

Charlotte recalled the conversation she'd had with Julian before the entrance ceremony.

— “Just so you know, within the academy, I will treat you as a student before I treat you as my fiancée. Naturally, there will be no special treatment when it comes to grades either.”

— “I understand.”

That was just like Julian.

“Then let's hurry up and eat first. I doubt he'd be willing to excuse us being late just because he's my fiancé.”

“Your fiancé is stricter than I expected.”

“If anything, he may be even stricter because he's my fiancé.”

*

Two o'clock in the afternoon.

The lecture room where the Dark Arts Defense course was held was located deep in the eastern wing of the main building, almost in the basement.

With a ceiling twice as high as a normal lecture room, this classroom was mainly where the required courses were held.

That said, this classroom had one slightly different feature from the others.

“They used obsidian as cushioning material. At this rate, eavesdropping is practically impossible.”

Between the slightly cracked walls,

Charlotte muttered as she looked at the black powder visible through the gaps.

Obsidian.

It was a material that strongly interfered with scrying, eavesdropping magic, and the like.

Lead originally had similar functions, of course,

but since the walls couldn't all be filled with lead, it had been replaced with obsidian, which carried a similar symbolism.

“You only see things like this in the workshop of a great mage. Looks like the military takes this lecture pretty seriously.”

“Have you been to a great mage's workshop, Charlotte?”

“A few times when I was young.”

At that, Charlotte recalled her guardian.

The one-eyed old man sometimes took her and her older brother to his workshop and taught them a few spells.

It was because he found the siblings' talent interesting.

Of course, he never took them on as apprentices to the end.

Murmur murmur.

As Charlotte and Jenny sat in the front row, students soon began pouring in behind them.

“There are a lot of people.”

“I told you. It was highly competitive even in the Healing Studies department. I heard there were so many disappointed students that they increased the number of seats and held a second round of applications.”

Hearing that, Charlotte once again felt she had made the right choice in applying to the Hero Studies department.

Originally, other departments could apply for this lecture as well.

So there was no need to enter the Hero Studies department just for this.

Even so, the reason she had bothered to choose Hero Studies was that this lecture was mandatory there, meaning she could take it without competition.

“Still, isn't the front row a little too much pressure?”

“...?”

Charlotte tilted her head.

If you're going to listen anyway, wouldn't it be better to do it from the front?

Realizing what that look meant, Jenny gave an “ah” and nodded.

“Ah, right. For you, that professor wouldn't be intimidating at all.”

Just before the lecture began,

while the two of them were chatting away,

the other students in the lecture room were also talking about a similar topic.

— “Does anyone know anything about Professor Julian Nihirit?”

— “I only know he's from a baron house.”

— “How did he become a professor? Usually, a professor at Eshenwald Academy would at least be from a viscount house, no?”

The commoners' conversations were generally like that.

Those who could not take part in social gatherings knew very little about Lord Nihirit.

By contrast, students from noble families, or the top students who got along well with them, knew more.

— “I saw it myself back then. They said that guy solved Prince Edmund's succession issue. Ever since then, His Highness the Crown Prince has apparently been heavily indebted to him.”

— “As expected. So it wasn't solved with just some medicine.”

— “Maybe I should've just studied healing in advance too?”

— “Don't be ridiculous. I heard even the imperial healers couldn't solve it. It must have been possible only for Lord Nihirit.”

Some even wondered about the path that had brought him here.

— “But why a Dark Arts Defense lecture of all things? Is he good at black magic?”

— “I heard the kidnapping case that happened in the academy's upper school last time was the decisive factor.”

— “I know that. The whole faculty was replaced then. But what I want to know isn't that—it's how he became so knowledgeable about black magic.”

— “Well, I heard the Nihirit family is a family of judicial officials. And their work is often tied to black magic, right? So apparently he became an expert in black magic while helping his father with his work.”

— “Oh, now I remember. That judicial official who keeps solving unsolved cases? I heard the surname somewhere and couldn't figure out why I couldn't remember it.”

— “Come to think of it, there's someone in this lecture room who's famous for unsolved cases...”

On top of that, the stream of rumor had grown even more.

And from time to time, gazes would gather on the back of Charlotte's head.

Even while she could feel every one of those gazes, Charlotte did not spare them a glance.

All she did was, before class started,

prepare herself in advance so she could copy everything into her notebook.

Jenny whispered into Charlotte's ear.

“By the way, Charlotte.”

“Yes?”

“Between you and your fiancé, who has solved more cases?”

Charlotte set down her pen.

For a moment, as if thinking, her gaze drifted to the blank line on the notebook on the desk.

Then the pen moved.

“So far, it's 341 wins and 32 losses.”

“Your fiancé has 341 wins?”

“No, I have 341.”

“Huh? Then shouldn't you be the one teaching?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“It's only because my fiancé is the one setting the problems, so I'm at an advantage. In reality, I'm also learning a lot of knowledge from my fiancé. Besides...”

Charlotte's gaze turned toward the blackboard.

“He'd be much better at teaching than I am. Especially when it comes to black magic.”

Jenny was impressed.

Charlotte was no small name among their peers.

Charlotte often appeared in the newspapers after instantly solving countless unsolved cases for both commoners and nobles alike.

In recognition of that, she had already earned the nickname, the ‘Shut-In Phoenix.’

Someone she acknowledged like that.

'As expected, the world is vast, and there are many geniuses.'

Jenny was already curious about this person named Julian.

However, there were always those in the world who doubted absurd genius.

Among the students, there were quite a few who doubted Julian's fame.

— “I found out last summer while interning at the April Tower that Professor Nihirit submitted two papers to the Arkhane Olympiad.”

— “Two? Come on. That's just a baseless rumor. How could someone that young submit two papers at once?”

— “Exactly. So I couldn't believe it either and looked for the papers, but no matter how hard I searched, I couldn't find a single paper written under Professor Nihirit's name.”

— “Then maybe he became a professor by some nonstandard method?”

— “But one of the high-ranking mage judges is the Great Sage, right? Would he have let that happen?”

— “Come to think of it, yeah? Then maybe he had someone ghostwrite them?”

A chaotic flood of speculation raged.

Some thought the rumors had been blown out of proportion,

while others speculated that Crown Prince Edmund had abused his authority.

Very occasionally,

there were even jokes that he might have published papers classified as high-risk level 1.

Naturally, no one truly believed it.

The imperial family would hardly let someone who had written two level-1 risk papers freely roam the streets.

Creak—

And then, once it was 2:30,

the door at the front of the lectern slowly opened.

What came in first was a woman.

The students' gazes all gathered there at once.

At least 170 centimeters tall, a slender elf woman in a black suit stepped slowly onto the lectern.

She stood there on the podium where a professor ought to stand with authority.

The students began murmuring again.

— “Huh? I thought it was a man?”

— “I heard they were an ordinary human?”

In the middle of that murmur,

the elf woman, Pericia, snapped her fingers lightly.

Swish—

Blackout curtains descended from both sides of the lecture room.

Only after the room grew a little darker did the door behind the lectern open once more.

A man stepped onto the lectern with the sound of clicking dress shoes.

“Oh my.”

Jenny covered her mouth with her hand.

“Charlotte, I didn't think you were that kind of person, but you're surprisingly into looks, huh?”

Charlotte looked at the professor standing on the lectern as if he weren't worth answering.

On the lectern, the professor—Julian—swept his gaze across the lecture room once.

His gaze lingered on Charlotte for a moment, but he gave no sign of recognizing her, not even with a look.

That was his way of saying he would treat her as a student, just as he had said beforehand.

“Good afternoon.”

After straightening his collar once, Julian opened his mouth.

“There are many students I am meeting for the first time. This semester, I will be in charge of the Dark Arts Defense lecture, Julian Nihirit.”

His low, composed voice echoed through the entire lecture room with the aid of amplification magic.

“Before we begin the first class of this lecture, I would like to ask you for one promise.”

Rustle—

A stack of papers soared into the air from the hand of the woman who had entered first.

The papers landed one sheet each in front of the students' desks.

Julian addressed the students.

“None of the content heard in this lecture room is to be taken outside the lecture room, and any misuse of it will be subject to harsher punishment. Only students who agree may sign the paper, and those who do not agree should leave the lecture room.”

His gaze, for just a moment,

rested on Charlotte and Cal, the Hero Studies students.

“In addition, Hero Studies students must sign because this is a required course.”

To everyone's surprise,

no one left.