“I won’t stand for it.”
“Are you still on about that…?”
It was early in the morning on the day of First High’s entrance ceremony, but still two hours before it began.
The new students’ hearts were all pounding with excitement over their new lives and the landscapes of their futures, but certainly few were as elated as these two.
In front of the auditorium, which would be the location of the entrance ceremony, a male and a female student, both clad in brand-new uniforms, were bickering.
Both were new students, yet their uniforms were slightly—but distinctly—different. It was not just the fact that the female uniform had a skirt and the male one had slacks. The emblem of First High, a design consisting of eight flower petals, was on the female student’s chest. It wasn’t on the male student’s blazer.
“How could they make my brother an alternate? You had the top grades on the entrance exam! You should be the one representing the new students, not me!”
“Leaving aside the question of where you got my entrance exam grades from…this is Magic High School, so they obviously need to prioritize practical magic ability over the written test. You’re well aware of my practical abilities, aren’t you? I may have only reached Course 2, but I’m surprised I even got this far.”
The female student was lashing out in harsh tones, and her male companion was currently trying to pacify her. Purely guessing from the female student calling him her brother, they might have been siblings—he the older, and she the younger. It wasn’t impossible that they were closely related.
However, if they were brother and sister…
…then they were not very alike.
The younger sister was a cute girl who naturally drew stares. Ten out of ten people, even a hundred out of a hundred, wouldn’t deny that she was lovely. The older brother, on the other hand, aside from his straightened back and sharp eyes, looked altogether average, without any features that stood out.
“Why can’t you have more ambition than that? Nobody can beat you when it comes to studies and martial arts! I mean, even with magic, you’re—”
The sister firmly berated the brother’s weak-spirited statement, but…
“Miyuki!”
…he called her name in an even harsher tone of voice, causing Miyuki to catch her breath and close her mouth.
“We’ve been over this before. There’s no point in talking about it.”
“…I apologize.”
“Miyuki…” He rested his hand on her bowed head. As he slowly caressed her glossy, smooth, long hair, the young man considered (rather pathetically) how to get her in a better mood. “…I am grateful you feel that way. You’re always saving me by getting angry on my behalf,” he said.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. All you do is scold me…”
“I’m not lying! It’s just that I feel about you the same way you feel about me.”
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
“Oh, my… The same way…?”
…What? For some reason, the girl’s cheeks flushed red.
He got the sense that there was some sort of disconnect he really shouldn’t be ignoring. Nevertheless, he decided to shelve his doubts in order to resolve the problem at hand.
“Even if you refused to make the address, they would never choose me instead. You would lose face for sure if you were to refuse them at the last moment. And you actually know that, don’t you? You’re a smart kid, after all.”
“That’s—”
“Also, Miyuki… I’m looking forward to it. I’m proud to have you as my sister. Go out there and show your useless brother everything you have.”
“You are not a useless brother, or anything of the sort! …But I understand. I apologize for my self-indulgence.”
“There’s nothing to apologize about, and I don’t think it was self-indulgent at all.”
“I’ll be going, then. Make sure you watch.”
“Yeah, you should go. I’ll be looking forward to the main event.”
The young woman bowed to excuse herself and disappeared into the auditorium. After seeing her off, the young man sighed to himself in relief.
So…what am I supposed to do now? He had accompanied the unwilling student representative to school for the rehearsal, but now he was at a loss, worrying about what to do for the two hours until the entrance ceremony began.
✦ ✦ ✦
The campus had three parts: a main building, a practicum building, and a laboratory building.
There was an auditorium/gymnasium whose inner layout was mechanically alterable. There were libraries on the third floor and the second basement floor. There were two smaller gymnasiums. There was a preparation building used for changing rooms, showers, storage, and club rooms. The dining hall / cafeteria / vending machine area was in another building, and there were various other structures both large and small filling First High’s plot of land—it looked more like a suburban college campus than a high school.
The young man, in search of somewhere to sit while he waited for the entrance ceremony to begin, walked down a road of soft coat pavement made to resemble bricks as he looked back and forth.
The students used ID cards to gain access to the school’s facilities, but those wouldn’t be distributed to them until the ceremony ended. Even the public-facing café for visitors was closed today, perhaps to avoid the chaos.
After five minutes of walking around comparing what he saw to the map of the premises displayed on his portable terminal, he found a courtyard. It was behind the trees lining the path, which were positioned far enough apart not to obstruct the view.
Vaguely grateful it wasn’t raining today, he sat down on a bench for three, then opened his portable terminal and accessed one of his favorite book websites.
This courtyard appeared to be a shortcut leading from the preparation building to the auditorium.
Perhaps they were being made to manage the ceremony—already-enrolled students (to him, upperclassmen) passed in front of him, leaving a little bit of space between them. On each of the students’ left breasts was the eight-petaled emblem.
Their innocent malice scattered behind them as they walked away.
—Hey, isn’t that kid a Weed?
—Here this early? …Pretty enthusiastic for a sub.
—He’s just a spare, anyway.
A conversation he didn’t want to hear drifted to his ears.
Weed was the term used to refer to Course 2 students.
Students with the eight petals on the left breasts of their green blazers were called Blooms from the emblem’s design, and the students who didn’t have them were called Weeds—since they wouldn’t bloom into flowers.
This school had two hundred freshmen. Out of them, one hundred would be enrolled as students belonging to Course 2.
First High, an educational institution attached to the National Magic University, was a statutory body created to foster magic technicians. It was obligated to show a certain level of results in exchange for government funds. This school’s quota—the number of students it was to supply to the National Magic University, an institution for advanced magical training—was at least one hundred.
Unfortunately, magic education was prone to accidents. Magic failures, whether in exercises or experiments, were directly correlated with accidents that were anything but minor. The students were aware of such dangers—they had staked their own futures on their magical talent and possibilities in striving to become magicians.
They had a rare talent, and when rare talents are highly valued by society, few can abandon them. That was all the more true when it came to emotionally immature young men and women. The only visions of their future left to them were the spectacular ones. That wasn’t itself necessarily a bad thing, but the truth was that more than a few children would be hurt as a result of those ingrained values.
Thankfully, the accumulation of magical understanding had all but eliminated accidents resulting in death or physical handicaps.
But psychological factors could easily spoil magical talent. A significant number of students withdrew from school every year after trauma from an accident left them unable to use magic.
And the ones to make up for those losses were the Course 2 students.
They were permitted to register as students, attend classes, and make use of facilities and resources, but they had no access to the most important thing—individual magic practice with an instructor.
They studied unaided and produced results solely on their own merits. If they couldn’t do that, they would only qualify themselves to graduate as general education students. Without being granted the right to graduate from a magic high school, they wouldn’t be able to advance to the National Magic University.
Currently, the critical shortage of those who could teach magic forced them to prioritize those with talent. The Course 2 students were only allowed to enroll in the first place under the premise that they would not be taught.
It was officially prohibited to call Course 2 students Weeds. But it had established itself among even the Course 2 students themselves as a semipublic derogatory term. Even they thought of themselves as no more than spare parts.
That went for this young man as well. So there was no need to remind him of that fact by purposely speaking poorly of him within earshot. He had been fully aware of that much when he enrolled.
I really didn’t ask for your opinion, he thought, directing his attention to the book data he’d downloaded to his information terminal.