From his seat in the lakeside terrace café, Allekant Académie’s student council president Shuuma Sakon was staring absentmindedly, his chin resting on his hands, at the face of the girl in front of him, who was busy chewing on a piece of pancake.
“…? Don’t you want some, Shuuma?” Perhaps having noticed him watching her, she glanced up and offered him a fork.
“I’m fine.”
“Really?”
The girl, with her fluffy curled hair, her cute glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, and her small stature and slender body, was Fevroniya Ignatovich. She might not have looked it, but she was Allekant’s top-ranked fighter, the Witch of Foundational Principles, Apeiron.
In terms of overall fighting level, Allekant was said to be the weakest of Asterisk’s six schools. There were multiple reasons for that, but the most obvious was the negative effect of acute factionalism. Students in practical classes were all but surrounded by various factions, and in most cases, the will of their faction took precedence over their own wishes. Similarly, it was the faction heads who decided who would participate in official ranked battles, or even whether someone could participate in the first place.
What’s more, even performing well in the Festa was rarely enough to earn a positive appraisal, seeing as most individuals in positions of power at Allekant valued developing new technologies and weapons more than the growth or performance of the students themselves.
Given those circumstances, it was all but impossible to motivate the students in practical classes, and Allekant was famous for its students’ short terms of enrollment. The most common pattern was to quickly try one’s luck three times at the Festa, then graduate as soon as possible. There were those students who went on to the university, but they were a clear minority. And so, Allekant was regarded poorly by Festa enthusiasts and bookmakers alike. They even had a saying: There’s nothing more unreliable than the official rankings at Allekant. Even Shuuma, the student council president himself, considered the unofficial rankings on the fansites Hexa Pantheon and Odhroerir to be much more reliable.
But even at Allekant, with its unique pecking order, the position of number one occupied a special place.
As the representative of the whole school, it symbolized their maximum strength. Neither concerns for maintaining the balance of power nor the customary bartering between factions held sway over this position. Only someone who had truly demonstrated themselves as Allekant’s strongest could take on the mantle of number one.
And the face of that school, Allekant’s absolute toughest Strega, was at this moment chewing on a large pancake with an utterly impassive look on her face. She might have been the school’s most powerful, but no matter how you looked at her, she seemed more like a small, defenseless animal.
Why must she act up and be so selfish on today of all days…?
Yes, his position might have been merely symbolic without any real authority, but Shuuma was still the student council president. By rights, he shouldn’t have been lazing around in a place like this on the day of the championship match of the Lindvolus, not with the contest about to start at any moment.
However, circumstances outside of his control had forced the matter.
Fevroniya was a treasured prodigy of the Methuselah faction, which dedicated itself to working on the basic theories of meteoric engineering and the natural laws of mana. At Allekant, students who took part in practical classes occupied a lower status than those in the research classes. Despite belonging to the former group, however, Fevroniya had earned herself a privileged status within Methuselah on account of her extremely rare abilities.
That being said, she showed exemplary dedication, seldom asserted her individuality, and quietly engaged in the research tasks assigned to her without complaint—except for once a month, when she would make some selfish demand and refuse to compromise.
For instance, she might make incomprehensible requests like I wanna go eat some côtelette d’anillo ozomal truffle osztol frito marron chantilly! or I wanna go play Nine Men’s Morris at an altitude of thirty thousand meters! Sometimes, she even made trivial requests like I wanna read my book or I just wanna take a nap. In any case, if she couldn’t fulfill her monthly whim, she would become extremely irritable—a prospect that Methuselah sought to avoid at all costs.
Well, Shuuma could understand why. When Fevroniya got grouchy, there was no telling what she might do. He understood that personally, to a painful extent. After all, it was his sister Chitose, the former student council president and now a popular commentator for the Festa, who had scouted Fevroniya for Allekant. Shuuma had known the girl for years.
This time, her request was a rather low-level one: I wanna eat pancakes in a café with a view of the lake. The problem, however, was the addendum: With Shuuma.
Of course, he wasn’t obligated to respond to Methuselah’s request. Mere figurehead or not, he was the student council president, and that title did come with a certain degree of official power. However, it was also true that he wanted to maintain good relations with each of the school’s factions.
Shuuma may have been somewhat mediocre as a researcher and as student council president, but he took pride in his ability to negotiate with each of the varying factions and find a middle ground between their oftentimes conflicting interests.
For some time now, power dynamics at Allekant had been centered around the opposition between the Ferrovius and Pygmalion factions on the one hand and Tenorio on the other. But now, the tides were turning. Tenorio had lost its representative Hilda Jane Rowlands, and Ferrovius, the largest of all of Allekant’s factions, had become disunited ever since its former head Camilla Pareto stepped down. Pygmalion may have achieved some commendable results in the Lindvolus, but it was simply too small to hold much sway over the school as a whole. And so Methuselah, which had always managed to preserve its own standing, simply couldn’t be neglected.
Which was why Shuuma now found himself staring across at Fevroniya as she took another bite from her serving of pancakes.
“…You’ve got cream on your face, Fevroniya,” he said.
“Where?”
“On your right cheek… Ah, I’ll get it. Don’t move.”
As he reached out with a handkerchief, Fevroniya narrowed her eyes like a happy cat.
She wasn’t one to show a lot of emotion, but it was clear she held a special affection for Chitose. Maybe that was why she seemed to let her guard down around Shuuma, too… It seemed logical, at least. He wasn’t entirely sure.