Chapter 4
There is something called the ‘buddy’ system at this school.
It is a system in which an honor student from the same dormitory provides roughly two weeks of intensive tutoring to an underachiever who cannot keep up with regular classes or to a transfer student.
Thanks to its extraordinary benefits—including scholarship bonus points based on how much the buddy’s grades improve, as well as the legal right to skip classes covering material they already know—it was coveted by any honor student who was at all serious about studying.
Of course, I had never applied for it even once.
“You didn’t do your homework again this time, I see. It’s all right. Let’s work through it together.”
The freshman opened Rene’s textbook, which lay haphazardly on the desk, then began taking a bundle of writing implements out of his bag.
‘What on earth is he planning?’
I glared at him with eyes full of suspicion. I was gripping my wand inside my uniform, ready to react at any moment, yet more than five minutes had passed since we had been left alone together, and he still showed no sign of revealing his true colors.
‘Could he be enjoying this situation? Enjoying the sight of me fretting over his every move, not knowing what to do?’
A psycho like him was more than capable of that. He was the lunatic who had cast a ‘third- to fourth-tier soul-forcing transfer’ on me as casually as if it were a game—something no one in history had ever managed to develop.
The fact that he hadn’t reported such a monumental discovery to the academic world was chillingly characteristic of him, too. I gripped the wand inside my uniform even tighter and desperately tried to calm my uneasily pounding heart.
“All right, then, the first problem….”
“Hey.”
I abruptly drew my wand and thrust it against the back of his neck. He instinctively leaned his head back, one eyebrow twitching as though he were uncomfortable.
“What the hell are you up to, you bastard?”
It was that look of his, as though he were looking down on anyone in front of him. But this time, I didn’t back down. When I pressed the tip of my wand firmly against his Adam’s apple, an unexpectedly human groan escaped him.
“What was your motive for doing this? Was it money? My father’s connections? Or did you, by any chance, simply intend to humiliate me?”
“Rene? What are you talking about….”
“Don’t call me by that stupid name!”
Smack-!
Almost reflexively, I slapped him across the cheek. Even I was startled by the tremendous crack that came from my hand. His head snapped to the side, and his eyes widened in disbelief.
“What do you think you’re doing….”
“Answer my question first!”
I jabbed the wand even deeper. His face twisted in pain, and the sensation of his bobbing Adam’s apple traveled vividly through my fingertips. He bit down on his lower lip as though suppressing the pain, then turned his head and glared straight at me.
“Calm down, Rene. I’ll explain everything, so put the wand down first.”
“This bastard still….”
I had clearly warned him. I told him never to call me by that name again.
“……Don’t get any funny ideas.”
Still, there was no need to press someone who was willing to confess.
Violence was a barbaric means used only by vulgar lowlifes, and a foolish act that diminished both the other person’s dignity and one’s own.
When I drew the wand back slightly, he let out a small sigh and rubbed the area around his neck where it had been pressed. A moment later, his silver eyes turned to me again, and his tightly sealed lips slowly opened.
“I’m sorry.”
The first thing to come out was, surprisingly, an apology. That psycho bastard actually knew how to apologize.
“Go on.”
His informal speech still irritated me, but an apology was an apology. I graciously accepted it and nodded.
He nodded as well and continued speaking.
“Corpus Immotus.”
“Huh?”
At that moment, my body suddenly grew as heavy as a boulder. A horrible sensation swept over me, as though my entire body were hardening.
‘Without a wand?!’
I was aghast. But I could no longer say anything. With my neck muscles completely paralyzed, I couldn’t even breathe properly.
“Phew.”
He let out a deep sigh, then snatched the wand from my limp hand. He abruptly sprang to his feet and roughly seized my stiff cheek.
“What exactly is going on here?”
His silver eyes, filled with confusion and doubt, glared into my face. He spent a moment thinking hard with a hardened expression, then released the hand that had been gripping my cheek.
“Is it a bug?”
Muttering something incomprehensible, he backed away.
As the paralysis spell’s thirty-second duration drew to a close, he turned back toward me with eyes gone cold and aimed his wand.
“Mentis Nihil.”
‘That lunatic….’
At the same time, my consciousness plunged headfirst into a pitch-black abyss.
※※
“Gasp….”
My eyes flew open. What came into view was the familiar scene of a double room. I reflexively reached out and felt over my entire body. Beneath my hands was the ridiculously loose, cheap uniform. Everything was the same. Even my dazzlingly bright golden hair was still there; nothing had changed since before I was hit by the knockout spell.
‘W-what in the world just happened….’
So many things had happened in that brief span. When I touched my forehead, my fingertips came away damp with cold sweat. I roughly wiped away the sweat with the back of my hand and replayed everything that had just happened with that psycho.
‘That bastard cast a third-tier paralysis spell without a wand….’
Naturally, that was no ordinary feat. A wand didn’t merely amplify mana; it also gathered and condensed scattered mana into one place.
I, too, could cast basic second-tier spells with my bare hands, but anything more advanced was utterly out of the question.
‘And a knockout spell….’
It had been a horrible sensation, as though I were falling endlessly into a pitch-black abyss. It was an unpleasant experience I never wanted to go through again.
But setting my personal feelings aside for a moment, let’s analyze the situation objectively. The most important thing right now wasn’t the trivial fact that he had used a ‘mere’ fourth-tier knockout spell.
Without realizing it, I gnawed on my thumbnail. Clutching the blanket, I glared at the old clock, which had not yet reached eleven.
‘Why… why do I remember everything?’
The infamous knockout spell of the Dark Arts department, [Mentis Nihil]. Its greatest characteristic was that the person struck by it forgot every memory from the thirty minutes before being hit.
In other words, after being rendered helpless by a paralysis spell and then immediately struck by a knockout spell, I should not have remembered being hit by the knockout spell—or even the fact that I had been alone with the freshman.
‘Why?’
I remembered everything as vividly as though it had happened right before my eyes. The fact that he had cast a paralysis spell without a wand, the way he had gripped my cheek with all his strength, and even the fact that he had whispered the knockout spell while glaring at me with those cold eyes.
By everything I understood, it was an inexplicable phenomenon utterly impossible to explain.
As I stared blankly at the clock, the creak of an old wooden door opening struck my ears. My head turned sharply on its own. Along with the sound of unhesitating footsteps, the freshman carrying a paper bag strode toward the bed.
“Are you awake?”
He asked with a sunny smile, looking at me as I could only stare blankly up at him like someone out of his mind, too stunned even to be surprised.
“Rene, you fainted again. That accursed mana seizure.”
He walked over to the desk as naturally as if nothing were amiss and set the paper bag down in the exact spot where I had been hit by the paralysis spell a moment ago. Taking out a bottle of water and a sandwich, he handed me the water and whispered gently,
“Are you feeling okay?”
I glared at him without saying a word.
At that very moment, my brilliant mind, which had been reviewing everything that had happened, finally arrived at a conclusion.
‘Could it be that he doesn’t know I haven’t lost my memory?’
In a way, it was only natural. Even if that guy was insane, he couldn’t possibly be so shameless as to do something like that and then act so brazenly.
‘Could he even be unaware that I remember being Evan?’
On top of that, he was still calling me ‘Rene.’ Perhaps he firmly believed that I had forgotten not only the brief memory from a moment ago, but also the fact that I had ever been ‘myself.’
If so, the memory I still possessed was the only weapon capable of shattering his detestable mask into pieces. It was the one hidden card in my hand that could send the solid reputation he had painstakingly built crashing into the abyss in an instant.
“Ah, yeah… I’m fine now.”
Yes, for the sake of deceiving him completely, I had to willingly play the role of ‘Rene’ for now.
I roughly kicked off the blanket and rose from the bed. Approaching him carefully, I accepted the bottle of water.
“Sorry, I’m always imposing on you.”
He had definitely mentioned an illness called ‘mana seizure.’ To imitate the chronic anemia symptoms that accompanied it, I pressed a hand to my forehead and slumped into a chair.
“What are friends for?”
He smiled with nauseating innocence as he opened Rene’s textbook. Then, after watching me drink, he gave a little laugh and picked up a pencil.
“All right, we’re short on time, so let’s start the lesson right away. Hmm, the first problem is a rather tricky question about the history of the development of dark magic. The year 1238 in option 1 was the Magic Society’s….”
“Three.”
“……Huh?”
The freshman turned toward me with a foolish expression.
“What, is it wrong?”
I stared straight into his eyes as well.
He raised one eyebrow for a moment, then gave a light laugh and shook his head.
“No, that’s correct. Looks like you didn’t completely skip your homework.”
“Yeah. I just skimmed it.”
It was true that I had decided to play the role of Rene, but I had not the slightest intention of sitting beside that psycho and turning it into a quiz show. I wasn’t insane.
“So why don’t we go do some practical training today?”
Besides, I felt uneasy about being alone in the room with him like this.
Now that it was clear he could cast paralysis magic without a wand, that bastard was a time bomb that could go off at any moment.
If he noticed something suspicious and bound me again, my trump card would be gone. He would surely try to erase all my memories by any means necessary.
“Practical training….”
The freshman pondered, letting out a thoughtful hum.
“Sure. If that’s what you want, let’s do that.”
The freshman nodded readily enough. I had expected him to be reluctant to go somewhere open.
The freshman stood up first and offered me a hand. I pretended not to see it, turned my head away, and stood on my own. He awkwardly withdrew the hand he had offered, then immediately turned and led me out of the room.
“It’s much more fun practicing than reading dry books, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Same here. I can’t for the life of me understand what memorizing outdated history from a thousand years ago has to do with learning magic.”
“Tell me about it.”
He kept talking to me as we walked down the corridor, pretending we were friends. I gave him perfunctory nods and followed along behind him.
“So, what spell do you want to try first?”
We finally arrived at the training grounds. After briefly explaining our situation to the attendant, the freshman came back and smiled at me as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Firebolt.”
I recited the incantation for a suitable first-tier attack spell and stepped into the firing lane. Imagining the bright blue target in the distance as his head, I aimed my wand with all my strength.
“You just had a seizure, so don’t overdo it.”
The freshman followed behind me, pretending to be worried. There was no one more detestable than him. What a devilish bastard.
Without even turning around, I immediately recited the spell.
“Ignis!”
Along with the sensation of hot mana surging from my fingertips, a fist-sized flame shot from the tip of my wand…
Kwoooom-!
“…….”
An earsplitting roar. Scorching heat slammed into my face.
What burst from the tip of my wand was not a fist-sized firebolt. It was a massive ball of flame, practically a fireball, large enough to swallow my entire upper body.
The ball of flame flew at roughly twice the speed of an ordinary firebolt, obliterating the imaginary freshman’s head without a trace.
I gazed vacantly at the spot the flames had swept through, then slowly lowered my head and looked down at the wand in my hand.
‘……W-what?’
I hadn’t used a particularly large amount of mana. Nor had I added any pointless modifier like ‘Maximize.’
No, to be honest, even if I had poured in a great deal of mana and added something like ‘Maximize,’ I couldn’t have transformed a mere first-tier firebolt into a spell with that level of destructive power.
This was… yes, if I had to compare it to something, it felt as though the ‘vessel’ of my mana itself had fundamentally changed. Just as one one-hundredth of a human and one one-hundredth of a dragon were completely different things.
Thud-thud-
‘I’m screwed….’
No matter how you looked at it, this was not a level of mana that the ordinary underachiever Rene could possibly handle. I felt suffocating terror and watched the approaching freshman with trembling shoulders.
“……”
There, of course, stood the freshman Kairos, his cold silver eyes fixed on me, his expression utterly rigid and grave.