A few years had passed after Hana’s latent powers awakened.
In the blink of an eye, she was already eighteen and a third-year high school student.
She had hidden her powers thoroughly since her fifteenth birthday. Not even Hazuki, her twin, had noticed something had changed.
Well, given how infrequently the two saw each other, perhaps that was only natural.
The true testimony to Hana’s diligence was that Sae and the other servants had never suspected anything, either, even though they often dropped by to visit her when they were free.
The servants employed by the Ichise family all possessed some ability as practitioners, even if it was only the bare minimum.
People with such limited powers that they couldn’t use them generally worked in the households of the practitioners as support. Since the existence of the pillars was highly classified information, the clans couldn’t employ ordinary people. As a result, even the servants had the skills to sense the energy practitioners wielded to create barriers.
Even so, Hana had successfully kept her secret from Sae and the other servants up until now.
In particular, Hana felt guilty for hiding her powers from Sae. Every time she saw her parents, infrequent though the meetings were, they criticized her. Sae watched those exchanges with an expression of anger tempered by sadness. It pained Hana to see Sae hurt for her sake, but nevertheless, she couldn’t tell Sae the truth. There was no telling where such a secret might leak from.
Plus, even if she hadn’t gained her powers, she had long stopped caring about what her parents said to her.
Thanks to Sae, she had burned that bridge long ago.
The thorny words her parents threw on every occasion were met by a wall of utter indifference.
However, she made sure to pretend she was attentively listening to her parents’ lectures. Her parents would say what they had to say and leave satisfied.
These last few years, she had become quite the actress if she did say so herself.
Maybe in the future, she would go into acting as a career. At least, that was her inside joke with Azuha. For the time being, it was their little secret.
Hana attended a specialty school called Obsidian High, which was dedicated to nurturing the next generation of practitioners.
She would have been perfectly happy to go to a normal high school, but since everyone in the Ichise family had gone to Obsidian High, she had been more or less forced to enroll.
As far as everyone around her was concerned, she couldn’t hold a candle to Hazuki, but she still had enough talent to summon a shikigami. Therefore, it was unthinkable that she would choose any other path.
Obsidian High ranked its students by their strength and talent level as practitioners, and classes were divided on rank as well. Class A was the cream of the crop. Class B had all the average students. Class C was the weakest of the cohort.
Since Hana had been playing the role of the failure all this time, she had been in Class C since she was a first-year. The class sorting had taken place during the opening ceremony.
Among the crestfallen students who had been shafted into Class C, Hana alone had celebrated her placement, mentally striking a victory pose. If there hadn’t been an audience, Hana would have roared in triumph.
Once her parents saw her class assignment, they left the ceremony immediately. They had already lost all hope in her. Their expectations for her were miniscule.
Admittedly, they had come to verify the results in person, so they might have still had a sliver of faith in her. Sure, Hana was weak compared to Hazuki, but there was a chance that she was relatively strong when pitted against the rest of their peers.
But when they found out that Hana didn’t measure up against the rest of her class, not just Hazuki, the last glimmer of hope they had been holding on to fizzled and was extinguished.
Hana was pleased her parents had renounced her.
She had fastidiously hidden her power during the exam for the express purpose of avoiding her parents’ interest, so her class assignment had gone according to plan.
It would have made her sick to see her parents change their attitudes after all this time and start fawning over her.
Hana didn’t even need them to treat her and Hazuki as equals. Had they shown her the slightest hint of affection or attention, Hana would have happily told them right away about her awakened powers and worked hard for her family’s sake.
As it was, Hana felt more warmth for strangers than for her own parents.
Her parents hadn’t yet noticed the fat fish they had let slip through their fingers out of their own arrogance.
Hana hoped they would never notice. Her life as a bottom-of-the-barrel student was extremely carefree, though there was one exception.
Even as first-years, Class A students had to take practicals: hands-on classes that took place on location and involved sealing or destroying shades that were targeting the pillars. Of course, they started out as backup for the professionals, but by their second and third years, the practicals became more and more like actual battles. Even the third-year students in Class B had to participate in the practicals.
However, no one in Class C, Hana’s class, had enough power to be useful in battle, so they were able to focus on their studies from the safety of the classroom.
They were able to stay far away from danger, and even when they were sent to the field, they only ever supported the battle from the rear.
Rear support was an important role in its own right.
Those who could fight would fight. Those who couldn’t supported the vanguard from behind the lines and handled cleanup after.
The role wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but in the school environment, where everyone was strictly divided into ranks, Class A’s and Class B’s contempt for Class C was a foregone conclusion.