“Come now, Shilto. Why not just— Ouch, what was that for?!”
Though they weren’t exactly fighting, when Bael saw a disagreement sprouting between Shilto and Kunon, he attempted to intercede. Reflexively, Shilto zapped him.
“Ah, sorry,” she apologized.
She had gotten so used to immediately zapping anyone who wasn’t working that it had become a habit. Idle chitchat was considered “not working,” so she had probably reacted purely to hearing Bael talk.
The upside, if there was one, was that while the lightning dealt considerable impact, the pain was not as intense. Shilto was making sure to moderate the power behind it. Of course, that was also the reason she kept using it so liberally.
“Anyway, you keep sorting. I’m the one talking to Kunon.”
“……”
Supervisor Shilto never let up on the reins.
Bael sadly returned to his task. Looking at his desolate form from behind, Kunon felt sorry for him. But worrying over Bael would have to wait.
“…So anyway, you were saying?” asked Shilto.
“I thought of a sorting method, and I would like to try it out.”
“Don’t you do water magic? You’re going to use that to sort paper? Or do you have some other means?”
“Oh, I can adjust the osmotic power of my water.”
Kunon could prevent his water from permeating paper by changing its viscosity. Plus, extracting water from a material it had soaked into was easy. It just left things a little bit damp. But that wasn’t likely to be an issue with ink that was already dry.
“You can do that? That’s really clever.” Shilto crossed her arms, contemplating her options. Then she said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot.”
At Shilto’s command, everyone exited the classroom temporarily. It was a fleeting moment of freedom.
Law and order had arrived when Shilto joined the sorting team. To be specific, from the moment the students arrived in the morning until it was time to go home in the evening, they were not permitted to leave the classroom. They ate their meals in the room and were only allowed to use the bathroom at designated break times. Desertion was, of course, inexcusable.
Sure, they got to go home at the end of the day, but so what? The next day and the day after—every day until the sorting was finished—they were bound to continue their hellish tidying task at the magic school they loved.
It wasn’t only Kunon who felt that way; most of the students involved shared the sentiment. Especially the two who kept trying to escape. There was nothing in that classroom but stagnation, surrender, and lightning.
But now they had a brief respite. How serene was the air of freedom! How refreshing the gusts of liberty!
And there was a chance that this release from their shackles could be permanent. It all depended on what Kunon was about to try. Whether he liked it or not, the hopes of those around him were piling high.
“Okay, I’m going to start… Oh, just in case, let me say this: There’s nothing to worry about, so please don’t try to stop me.”
Kunon’s warning was cryptic, but no one said a word. They simply urged him in silence to get a move on.
“Right. Here goes.”
Standing in the hallway, Kunon held out his hands toward the open classroom door.
The next moment, the room was filled with water. It was approximately waist-deep.
Kunon’s magical control imbued the water with enough tensile strength to prevent it from spilling out of the door. Still, the room was unmistakably underwater.
Someone whispered, “…Everything’s…totally drenched…”
The meaning behind Kunon’s warning was clear now. Even so, the sight was still rather difficult to take in.
Every single sheet of paper in that room was part of an important document—the frantically scrawled materialization of a student’s hard work.
True, there was hardly room to stand, and thus most of the documents had been trampled over already. Still, they weren’t objects that ought to be handled roughly. And now they were all submerged under several feet of water.
“I’m going to agitate it now,” said Kunon.
The water began to swell and roll like the rising and receding waves of an ocean. Stirred by the movement of the water, the sunken documents started to sway with the tides.
Then several sheets of paper rose to the surface. The other students assumed they had risen by chance, forced upward by the whims of the water. However…
“Here you go.”
Like leaves in a stream, the papers drifted on the current toward the door, where Kunon collected them before handing them to a male student.
“Huh…? Oh! This is all mine?! My meat report?!”
Essentially, Kunon had touched the pages with water. He’d then traced the letters on each paper and picked out only the documents that met the present criteria. Because the water contained his magic power, he could use his perception on whatever the water touched.
In theory, it was possible to sort through the pages one by one using only his regular magical perception. However, given the scale of the mess and the sheer quantity of papers, searching around with magic power alone would have been difficult to manage.
That was why he’d needed the water. By equipping it with a “locate specific shape only” characteristic, he’d achieved the present effect. Kunon designated the desired shape, and the water did the rest on its own.
Kunon still had to maintain control over it, of course. If his hold over the magic slipped, the room would truly be flooded.
Shilto asked, “Just those few sheets?” to which the male student responded, “My report wasn’t very long to begin with. I think I have all of it now.”
Apparently, he had already found most of his work during the more laborious sorting.
“Let me see.” Shilto reviewed the recovered documents. “The paper is…yep, just slightly damp. It doesn’t seem like the spell will cause any damage. Great idea, Kunon. Do you want to use this to sort the rest out all at once?”
Kunon’s fellow prisoners erupted in cheers of celebration.
Their jailer approved, which meant they could adopt this method. Though he was happy, however, Kunon did have one concern:
“…If the handwriting is too neat, the spell won’t be able to classify it…”
Handwriting varied. Sometimes letters looked a little misshapen or varied in size. They might appear slanted or be a bit spread out. When someone was writing sloppily or in haste, the resulting letters sometimes didn’t even resemble their basic forms.
What’s more, the same letter could look different even when written multiple times by the same person. That, too, was part of one’s individuality.
Kunon had identified just one unique letter in the test run. In doing so, he had specified a standard range to allow for a certain amount of variation. That way, even if the letter was a little squished or on the small side, the spell would recognize it as the chosen shape.
The issue at play was, of course, the uniqueness of a person’s handwriting. If there wasn’t enough idiosyncrasy in the writing, the spell wouldn’t be able to distinguish one person’s work from another’s.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Bael declared when Kunon explained his concern. “Even if the writing is neat, you can still do an approximate sorting. Plus, you should be able to separate them out by specific words rather than individual letters. Especially if you do it by content. If you were looking for our stuff, for example, you could use terms like Model 1 or Model 2. I don’t think those would show up in other people’s reports.”
Kunon was blown away. Not letters but words. That did indeed seem doable.
“Are you some kind of genius?” he asked.
“If either of us is a genius, I would say it’s you.”
Though there was only two days’ worth of sorting left at that point, the rest of the work proceeded at a dramatically increased pace.
The sea of documents was entirely cleared up that very same day.
And…
“Ah, looks like you’re done.”
…just as they were finishing up, Professor Soff appeared to check in on them, as if he had been waiting for the moment they were released from their misery.
“Sorting your personal belongings is next. You’re nearly finished; keep it up!”
And so, Soff cast them back into the pit of despair.
“I’ll be joining you, too,” said Shilto.
It seemed she would be continuing her role as supervisor.
The prisoners would have to keep up their hard labor just a little bit longer.
“Thank goodness…!”
Though some of the students’ knees buckled on the spot in despair when presented with their next trial, the task was not as much of a nightmare as the sea of documents had been.
It made sense—the amount of papers they’d had to go through had been immense. It seemed never-ending no matter how much they toiled. That was why it had taken so long—long enough to grind the hearts of all the laboring students into dust.
Only the Saint had been unaffected. She hadn’t been a prisoner at all. Reyes was the type of person who could silently carry on sorting just as instructed without being bothered. She hadn’t been zapped even once. It was enough to make one jealous—but putting that aside…