Celestina sat in the carriage with the other female students.
A bunch of the girls had already been calling her “Mistress,” but lately people had started using her other nicknames. Some of the other students had started calling her “the Magic Angel” and “the Genius Mageling,” while the teachers had dubbed her “the Classroom Heretic” and “Celestina of the Rebellion.”
Like Croesus, she was too talented for her own good, and the teachers didn’t know what to do with her. But unlike Croesus, she’d been seen as useless until recently. In fact, that was part of the problem—now she was seen as a prodigy who’d learned how to use magic without her teachers’ help.
The teachers knew that some people weren’t innately suited to magic, but they’d never heard of a student who’d overcome such a shortcoming and become a mage through their own efforts. They could already hear the questions they were going to get...
“So a girl you couldn’t teach magic to went off and learned it by herself, without your help... What are you even teaching these kids? Are you saying you’re not capable of doing what a student managed to do? Hey! Are you listening?!”
That was literal, by the way. People were already starting to ask those sorts of questions.
To make matters worse, Celestina had started teaching magic to other struggling students, drawing even more attention to the teachers’ ineptitude.
It wasn’t as if the teachers were slacking off, mind you, and Celestina was tutoring her peers out of the kindness of her heart—but her volunteering was effectively tightening a noose around the necks of her teachers.
Unable to endure being compared to her at every turn, those teachers had eventually decided to effectively banish her, along with most of the academy’s other top achievers, to Isa Lante.
Of course, even if they’d allowed her to stay at the academy, it wasn’t like her instructors had anything more to teach her.
Serina sighed. “I’m so bored. When there’s nothing else to do, I can’t stop eating Yi Ling’s cookies. I’m worried they’ll make me fat...”
“Mmm? What—are you blaming me?” Yi Ling asked. “But you’re the one eating them!”
“Oh, shut up! It is your fault! For making these taste so good! Grr... I only just finished dieting too...”
“You’ve never been able to resist temptation, have you?”
While Serina and Yi Ling snacked, Celestina and Carosty stared at them.
They looked down at their chests, then back at the other girls’.
“Not too big, not too small... I bet Serina’s breasts are perfect under those clothes,” Celestina muttered, despondent.
“And Yi Ling has quite the spectacular bosom, as always,” Carosty said. “Not to mention her baby face, and her aptitude at every kind of housework... I hear she is most popular with the gentlemen.”
“Do you remember that rumor from a while ago that Zweit and I were in some kind of illicit relationship? She was the one who started it. Apparently, she’s quite the gossip...”
While Yi Ling usually came across as the gentle, spacey type, she had a surprisingly sharp mind. Going by grades, she was among the top four female students.
She’d been part of the combat training trip to the Ramaf Woods too. But since her party had included underclassmen, she’d spent most of her time gathering and the like instead of pushing herself too hard. As far as combat went, then, she’d only faced things like goblins.
“People call her ‘the Academy’s Babysitter,’” Carosty said. “And I hear she and Sir Croesus are an item.”
“I do think my brother needs a woman who’s good at taking care of people, but...”
Carosty and Celestina sagged in defeat. They were women, just like Serina and Yi Ling...but they couldn’t help but feel like there was an overwhelming gap between them in terms of their feminine qualities.
“Who knows what the future holds?” Carosty said. “I am positive good things lie ahead, for both of us!”
“The... The future, huh? Given my current size, I don’t want to get my hopes up too much...”
“We mustn’t abandon hope! Why, if we do, then the battle shall be lost then and there!”
Since when had this been a “battle”?
Neither Carosty nor Celestina had ever done housework before; they spent all their time researching magic.
They’d already been fretting about their lack of feminine appeal, but Yi Ling’s motherly warmth and curvaceous figure only made them brood over it more.
“By the way, I hear there’s a hot spring town near Isa Lante,” Serina said. “I’d love to visit.”
“Mmm... You sure?” Yi Ling replied. “That’s in Artom, you know? What if we get yelled at for going there without permission?”
“Rumor has it the water there makes your skin smooth as silk. I bet it’ll do wonders for us.”
“Huh...”
To Celestina and Carosty, it was an irresistible description. What did she just say?!
But when they were going to Isa Lante as part of their studies, they couldn’t just abandon their studies for some personal side quest. It was frustrating, even if the trip was just a pretense for their teachers to send them away, and they hesitated at the thought of shirking their obligations.
“Ngh... So there’s a hot spring nearby that could make us more beautiful, but we can’t go to it? It’s so...” Celestina groaned.
“I know. But we mustn’t trouble others simply to pursue our own vanity,” Carosty said. “We have no choice but to choke back our tears and accept it.” She looked outside the carriage. “Oh, on a separate note...”
Ulna was running frantically alongside them, most likely as training. Strangely, however, an elusive little ninja girl was overseeing her workout.
“Grr... Anzuuu! I can’t get the Swiftstep thing right!”
“Mmm... You need to do a better job of tempering your mana. Gather it in your feet. Next, use your whole body as a spring to accelerate off the ground. And when you do, make the mana in your feet go boom. It looks easy, but you have to do it at the same time as Physical Enhancement, so it’s harder than it looks.”
“You do it like this, Miss Ulna,” said Miska, a bespectacled maid with purple-tinged black hair who was running ahead of Ulna. An instant later, she disappeared—only to rematerialize several meters ahead of where she started, a satisfied smile plastered across her face.
She loved surprising and teasing people.
Anzu’s one thing, but...why are Ulna and Miska here?! Celestina thought.
Surely Miss Ulna’s grades are not sufficient for her to be part of this expedition, Carosty thought. And Miss Miska is a complete outsider...
As a guard under the employment of the Solistia ducal house, Anzu’s presence made sense. But Ulna’s grades were below average, albeit only by a little, so she shouldn’t have been able to join this trip. And Miska, for her part, was merely a student’s personal attendant, which shouldn’t have qualified her to tag along either.