“Hey, Leonie?”
“…”
“I said hey, Leonie!”
“…”
“If you don’t answer me, I’m gonna call you ‘honey’!”
“I’m listening. What do you want?”
It had been about one week since we started at the Hero Institute. While my results in the practical entrance exam had been less than stellar, my combined marks including the written exam were good enough to allow me to enroll in the Institute. I’d finally gotten to the starting line as the daughter of a hero—but there were already plenty of dark clouds overhead.
One of which was her—Ruchika.
She, Nor, and I were all sitting in a row together in the lecture hall of our next class. Nor was an old friend of mine who was practically family, so I felt no discomfort being around her. But Ruchika was different. I had only just met her, yet for some reason, she had come to be a fixture of our group. It would be fine if that was the extent of it, but…
“Come on, be my mate!”
“No. Go pester someone else.”
“But I only want you!”
“Ah, ah-ha-ha-ha…”
As I tried to dismiss Ruchika’s straightforwardness as best I could, Nor chuckled with a slightly exasperated, awkward smile.
“You’re so popular, Leonie!”
“Don’t you get in on this, too, Nor. And, Ruchika, please quit it with the distasteful jokes.”
“I’m not joking. I’m super serious!”
“That’s even worse. First and foremost, we’re both women, aren’t we?”
“Huh? What’s the problem with that?”
“…Nothing, but…”
And do you have to look so shocked about that?
“…Oh, can humans not take mates of the same sex?”
“Given the population decrease after the Great Human-Demon War, the kingdom refuses to officially recognize marital relationships that cannot produce children.”
“That’s weird. Demons can have children between two members of the same sex, and I think it’d be all right even if my partner was a human. So what do you think? You wanna try doing it the demon way?”
“Unfortunately, I intend to follow the standards of human culture.”
“Aw, okay. I guess it is more fun to try to win you over if you’re a little stubborn anyway.”
“…Sigh…”
Ruchika had kept on making attempts to court me in this manner from the moment we enrolled. She was nice girl with a carefree personality, so I had no problem with counting her among my friends. But it was clear Ruchika was seriously hoping for something more than that, and I was having trouble responding to it. It was one thing to see her as a friend, but I didn’t think I could ever see her in that way.
I wanted to put a bit of distance between us, but our situation wouldn’t allow it. That was because of our results on the entrance examination. The Institute had lumped us together and was treating us as problem students.
“Quiet, everyone. It’s time for class to begin.”
A female teacher got up in front of the blackboard and addressed us in an intelligent-sounding voice.
“Oh, it’s Danita’s mom.”
“Please call me Professor Aliza, C-100. And please refrain from chatting while class is in session.”
Professor Aliza had called Ruchika by her student code. I only learned of this after enrolling in the Institute, but it was custom here for superiors to call their subordinates by numbers. The C in Ruchika’s student code indicated her year, and the three-digit number indicated her ranking based on her grades at the time of admission. I was C-088, Nor was C-005, and Danita was C-001. To be honest, I found the whole system rather unpleasant.
“Yes, ma’am.”
As Ruchika gave a perfunctory reply, Professor Aliza glared at her as if she were some kind of disagreeable insect before opening her textbook.
“Today, I will introduce the concept of Gifts.”
As Professor Aliza began her lecture, her expression remained stiff. Ruchika appeared to have already earned some kind of special ire from her.
In all likelihood, this was because Ruchika had defeated her daughter, Danita, in their mock battle. Up until then, Danita had been undefeated among her peers, so the fight against Ruchika was the girl’s first loss. To make matters worse, this had happened at a highly public venue: the Hero Institute entrance examination. Perhaps it was a matter of course that Danita’s mother would resent Ruchika for this, but it reflected quite poorly on Professor Aliza that she seemed unable to keep those private feelings out of her public life.
“In the past, only a handful of prodigies were able to acquire special powers known as Gifts through their own talent and good fortune. The counterpart to these Gifts was magic, a scholarly skill that any person could obtain to some degree. While magic is more versatile, Gifts are more specialized and powerful.”
As I listened to her matter-of-fact, fast-paced lecture, I occasionally felt the professor shoot me the same harsh gaze she’d given Ruchika.
“Individuals who acquire these Gifts and complete the prescribed curriculum at the Institute are authorized with a hero title and graced with various benefits from the kingdom. And the progenitor of all such heroes—the Almighty Hero, Lainie Baez—happens to be C-088’s mother.”
It seemed that, in addition to Ruchika, I, too, had been deemed an academic underperformer, and the school administration planned to manage the two of us together as problem students. They had even assigned us to the same room in our dormitory. And since Ruchika wasn’t very knowledgeable about how things worked in the human world, I had been ordered to watch over her. This was what I’d meant earlier when I said our current situation didn’t allow me to put much distance between us.