“I’m no good with cleaning, organization, or rooms full of men!”
“Neither am I! But you know, we have to do this!”
Inside the classroom, the situation was already dire. It was bad enough that a single peek made one want to flee.
The room was overflowing with books and documents. It was chaos—a sea of papers in disarray.
When Kunon and his team had been developing the Spell Vault, their lab had grown pretty wild, but this—this room was on an entirely different level. It had to be at least twice as bad.
“This was inevitable, remember? All the books and documents from Building Eleven were bundled together during collection.”
Indeed, every single text and scrap of paper that had been inside the building when it collapsed were currently amassed in a single room in Building 9.
Now they had to sort through it all—manually, one item at a time—and collect what belonged to each of them.
The books would be relatively easy. Even though there were a lot of them, the total amount clearly paled in comparison to the real problem: the documents.
To make matters worse, their work hadn’t even been consolidated yet. Every last memo and scribbled note from Kunon’s team—and there were a lot—was in this room, and they had to find them.
That meant separating them out from everyone else’s papers, too.
In other words, the situation was a total nightmare.
Starting that day and continuing for who knew how long, every waking hour would need to be devoted to boring, unpleasant, unfulfilling menial labor.
Kunon hated cleaning at the best of times. Just imagining himself tidying up this mess made him feel physically ill.
“Ugh, nooo…I don’t wanna…”
“Hey! Seriously? Don’t cry.”
It had been a long time since Kunon genuinely felt like shedding tears. In fact, he really did cry a little. After all, he knew there would be no escape from the trials and tribulations ahead.
“Aha… This is interesting.”
“So somebody was researching that…”
“Hey, has anybody found my meat report yet?”
Bound by responsibility and physically unable to escape, Kunon had joined in on the organizing.
The students formerly based in Building 11 were diving headlong into the sea of documents. Combing through the shocking amount of paper to recover only their own work was no easy task. And yet all they could do was carry on.
While they sifted through the mess, they inevitably ended up looking at other people’s documents. There was no helping it; they had to check them to figure out whose work it was.
Once they skimmed over a document, their interest was piqued. And once their interest was piqued, they couldn’t help reading it through.
At the start, they had all balked at the idea of reading other students’ private research results. But that sentiment faded pretty quickly.
Despite their relative lack of experience, they were all sorcerers. When it came to magic research and experiments, sorcerers were hard-pressed to curb their curiosity.
“Hmm. Fire attribute experiments are interesting, too.”
Even if the type of magic involved was not their own.
“There’s this much variation in soils and fertilizers…?”
Even if the subject matter was quite literally outside of their field, plenty of topics could grab a sorcerer’s attention.
“Hey. You know you shouldn’t be looking that closely.”
Even though Bael kept telling them off, the students found themselves thoroughly engrossed in other people’s reports the moment they let their guards down.
Kunon was no exception. He was getting very little sorting done.
Incidentally, students who had no documents in the sea of papers weren’t allowed to participate in the sorting, since it involved looking at other people’s hard work. The only exception was Bael, who was given special permission to help because he was involved in some of their projects.
His hands would also pause mid-categorization every so often, but they didn’t come to a full stop like Kunon’s did.
“This is really interesting. It’s about the principles of levitation, and look—”
“I said, knock it off. That’s somebody’s unpublished work. Normally that information would be off-limits to anyone uninvolved—like you.”
Bael had noticed something Kunon had not: There was a girl standing in their vicinity, boring holes into Kunon with her serious stare.
The report he was holding probably belonged to her, and she seemed pretty interested in Kunon’s impression of her work.
“I don’t think we need to worry about it at this point. See?” Kunon gestured around the room.
“Huh? Where’s the report on Model 7?”
“There’s a bunch about Model 9 over here.”
“I want to read from the beginning… Oh, the notes are interesting, too. Where in the world did they get the idea for this…?”
The other students had completely abandoned sorting and were simply hunting around for the documents they wanted to read. It was like they were letting themselves get swept into the sea of paper. Bael found the words they were exchanging rather familiar.
“Lots of people are reading our reports, too,” said Kunon.
There was a veritable mountain of documents in the room. It was the work of approximately ten people, accumulated over the course of several years. The more serious a student was, the more work they produced.
Nonetheless, the amount of writing concerning the Spell Vault was notably vast. Enough so that the students were bound to catch sight of some of it even if they weren’t trying to. And of course, they were going to end up reading it in detail—they were sorcerers.
“That’s not really okay, either…” Bael’s voice had grown faint.
If the others were truly that deep into their reports, then Kunon’s claim was probably correct.
There was only one student taking the sorting seriously—Reyes Saint-Lance.
And yet given the current situation, she appeared startlingly uninterested by comparison. She was so immersed in the task of silently categorizing documents that it made her look positively unenthusiastic about magic.
“Everyone, listen up! There’s no point in trying to keep our stuff confidential anymore, is there?!” Donning his faction representative face, Bael addressed the room. “Let’s finish sorting through everything first, then take our time reading! We’ll be here forever if we carry on like this! So let’s say that everyone except me is allowed to read whichever reports they want after everything has been separated! Does that sound okay to everybody?!”
Bael was certainly right; at their current rate, the sea of papers would take an eternity to sift through.
It was evening. Sorting had begun early that morning, and most of the day was already gone.
Progress had been minimal, practically nonexistent.
Some particularly negligent members of the group—like Kunon—just tossed papers aside after reading them. The only things they saw were the research topics and subjects that interested them. Not that Kunon could actually see, of course.
“I also think we should call for backup. If we don’t have somebody here to keep us on track, things will just drag on and on. Kunon—we haven’t submitted our report yet, right? You’ll be headed for Second Level next year unless we pick up the pace.”
Oh. Right.
Kunon had yet to check how many credits he had earned for the Medicine Boxes or the shi-shilla medicine. There was a chance that he wouldn’t have enough credits to advance if he didn’t submit the Spell Vault report.
“Call for backup…? Don’t tell me you mean…?”
Someone to keep the sorting process on track. Those words brought one name to mind.
“What choice do we have? When push comes to shove, I’m kind of a slob, too, so it’s not like I can be in charge.”
“…So you’re calling on her…?” Kunon heaved a sigh. “I don’t want to clean… I wish we could just blow all this away with wind magic…”
“You need the credits, remember?”
Kunon’s sorrows were ignored, and the next day, she showed up.
“Come on—let’s get to cleaning. Snap to it, everyone. Just so you know, it’s not like I have a bunch of spare time on my hands. I’ll be expecting appropriate compensation, so be prepared.”
Shilto Lockson, the Harmony Faction representative, had joined the group. She drove them hard with relentless direction and pressure.
The students of Building 11 faced off against a sea of documents, and now they meant business.
Three days had passed since the sorting work began, and there was still no end in sight.
With Shilto at the helm, however, progress was being made. One could even say the work was going well. Particularly because Shilto kept zapping everyone.
Her nickname—“Lightning Bolt”—wasn’t just for show. Lightning magic, which was difficult both to use and to control, was Shilto’s specialty, and she hurled it without hesitation at anyone who slacked off.
On top of that, she was the one working the hardest despite having nothing to do with the situation. And she did so with joy, her love for keeping things neat and tidy on full display. This made it impossible for the other students to object.
At first, the sorting efforts were frequently held up by people dragging their feet, taking long breaks, and getting lost in reading the documents.
Seeing how little attention anyone paid to verbal warnings, supervisor Shilto quickly stopped bothering with such things. Instead, she switched to using force. Anyone whose hands slowed even a little got zapped.