A silver-haired boy passes by the corner of our table. Benjamine’s eyes are absolutely sparkling as she excitedly calls out his name. Nikeh, watching her, rolls her eyes as she remarks on Benjamine’s behavior.
“You talking about Satanás again? You really like him, don’t you?”
If we’re talking about who Benjamine likes, it’s this boy Naru. It seems like it was love at first sight for her, as if when they first locked gazes with each other she instantly felt the tremors of fate (or so Nikeh told me).
“Satanás, huh...”
Benjamine’s crush, the silver-haired boy. That boy’s name is Naru Satanás.
He’s the other commoner in my class.
He’s the first one to find out his magic type in class later that day.
“Up until now I’ve taught you standard offensive and defensive magic, but starting today I’ll be having you learn combat magic according to your elemental affinity, or magic type.”
The instant the teacher said that, everyone in the classroom broke out in whispered conversation.
“He said magic type—he means the six types of blood, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
We had all thought this was to be a normal theory lesson and not a practical one, so the sudden shift threw us off balance.
“Within the general field of magic exist six schools. Right now I am going to pass out the ‘Tricks and Tips of the Six Colors,’ so open your books to the section I tell you to.”
The teacher used levitation magic to float dozens of textbooks all at once, each one flying to a different desk. The magic made the books’ pages flap in the air like butterfly wings, and the one that came to me shut itself with a snap before slowly coming down to rest on my desk.
I look at the textbook that’s come to rest right in front of me. There was a picture of a rainbow bridge on its cover. But in front of the bridge was drawn the Devil, or some other creepy creature, and so the book simply looked creepy. I think they could have put in a little more effort to make this book more approachable. I don’t really want to touch that cover.
Having said that, I still have to get on with my studies, so I quickly open the book to the designated section. I saw that the title of the section was “The Six Blood Types.”
“These are the six blood types. I’m sure everyone has heard of them before. The ‘bloods’ refer to magical power. Our magic is in our blood; it’s blood itself. You know that, right? As long as we are alive, as long as we have blood flowing through our veins, there will never come a time when we can no longer use magic. In the textbook, it talks about the six different types: Fire, Wind, Water, Ice, Earth, and Lightning. Each and every one of you belong to one of these six types of magic.”
Our teacher stretched out his hand and from his fingertips I could see sparks of electricity flashing.
“My magic type is Lightning. As such, the only form of combat magic I can use is lightning magic.”
To summarize what the teacher said, “magic types” were essentially the basis upon which our fighting styles were decided. The combat magics that we had learned up until now had been things like paralyzing an opponent, materializing swords and sending them flying towards our opponents, or materializing defensive barriers—all rather tame spells. To be perfectly honest, if you studied, you were able to do the spells. They weren’t difficult.
But with these “magic types,” there were spells that could only be used by those who belonged to that class. If you didn’t have blood in that class, you wouldn’t be able to use that form of magic, no matter how hard you worked. If I was a Lightning type and I tried to learn Water combat magic, as long as I still had Lightning-type blood, I’d never be able to use Water combat magic. It would have been futile to try to learn it.
That’s what magic types basically were, but I was still rather surprised that less than half a year after starting school here we’d start learning this type of magic. With all the other spells we had to learn, I had figured we had another year before we started learning type-specific magic, but here we were.
“I don’t think any of you know your elemental affinity yet.”
Light is still flashing from our teacher’s fingertips.
Yes, we still don’t know our own magic types. Our parents and other adults know how to determine one’s elemental affinity, but there’s a rule against teaching children that spell. Apparently their reasoning is that it’s dangerous for children to know their type without knowing how to properly use that type of magic.
If I had continued studying normally at a village schoolhouse, I wouldn’t know my magic type until I turned eighteen years old. For people who took on jobs that didn’t place much importance on one’s magic type, there wasn’t much reason to know, after all. There wasn’t any particular inconvenience that came with not knowing, and there was no point in possessing a weapon that one had no use for. Standard combat spells were thought to be enough.
But people like us, the students who came to this school, were different. Not only was the absolute maximum power of magic necessary to succeed, we also had the motivation to learn it. The aristocrats and those who would become sorcerers placed even more importance on learning elemental magics. After all, they would be the ones fighting the demons.
I just want to become a receptionist lady, but still.
“Professor, would it not be correct to say that Water and Ice are identical types?”
Lady Maris is once again wearing a rather classy dress today. She does have a serious and hard-working personality, so if the whole Rockmann situation wasn’t a thing, I’d actually quite like her. But she makes a point of singling me out, just because I sit next to Rockmann, and is always digging at me and making me out to be an idiot, so I really can’t deal with her.
If I liked him it would be a different story, but to have all that done to me despite the fact I don’t even like him is quite irritating.
“They may seem to be similar, but they are not the same. To put it simply, the main difference is whether they are able to instantly manifest as solid or not.”
That’s how the professor answered Miss Maris’s question. It would seem that they are, in fact, different things.
“Alright then, starting now, we are going to check everybody’s magic type, one by one.”
And upon hearing that, the entire classroom broke out into conversation again. But unlike before, this time it sounded like there were a few who were excited about the prospect.
Yeah, I’m one of those who is actually a little excited about this. I mean, my magic type is, like, something that I could legitimately call an uncharted territory.
“First... Satanás, come up front.”
“Me, sir?”
“If I always called on someone sitting at the end of the front row, they’d constantly be called on, no?”
The commoner boy named Satanás, with some hesitation, stood up from his seat.
The professor’s right. The front row students, usually the ones on the right side, are often called upon. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call those seats the least popular places in the entire classroom. I had usually sat somewhere in the middle of the classroom back in my days at the village schoolhouse, and with every seating chart change I had successfully managed to avoid sitting in those seats.
But sometimes the teacher had felt like saying things like “Hmmm, today let’s start from the center,” so I was never able to let my guard down.