*Haa.*
Elahim had just finished settling the chirping freshmen, and inwardly, she let out a long sigh.
On the outside, she wore a ferocious scowl—the thick scar across her cheek twisting into something that radiated the killing intent of a battlefield. On the inside, she was burning black.
The truth was, Elahim had never had any intention of becoming a first-year homeroom teacher.
At Stellar Academy, the position of first-year homeroom teacher wasn't merely unpopular among the faculty—it was the single most avoided post of all, a poisoned chalice in every sense of the word.
First-years were still dripping with the outside world. They didn't listen worth a damn, and having been coddled and called geniuses their entire lives, their pride and stubbornness reached the heavens. In short: an absolute nightmare to manage.
As a result, the first-year homeroom post typically fell to one of two types: the most junior faculty members, who got saddled with it against their will, or the twisted sort who took perverse pleasure in grinding oversized egos into the dirt.
Elahim was obviously neither. It had never once crossed her mind that she might end up as a first-year homeroom teacher.
And so, without sparing so much as a glance at the freshmen's entrance ceremony, she had scraped together every last scrap of accumulated leave and gone on a thoroughly satisfying trip. A sweet, blissful vacation.
…Right up until she returned to find a homeroom assignment notice sitting on her lectern.
*Damn that penny-pinching headmistress.*
The cause was obvious.
The entrance ceremony script she'd written before leaving for vacation.
She'd been so dazzled by the prospect of time off that she'd dumped the whole thing on a teaching assistant and bolted. That half-hearted script had clearly rubbed the senile old woman the wrong way.
And so, in retaliation, the headmistress had seized the window of Elahim's absence and neatly offloaded this wretched first-year post onto her.
This was the Stellar Academy way. The careless do not survive.
*Damn it. I let my guard down because I was too focused on the vacation.*
She berated herself inwardly, but kept her expression carefully composed as she bore down on the fresh-faced students before her.
Leaning against the lectern, Elahim swept her gaze slowly across the tiered seats. Her eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. As that predator's stare passed over each face in turn, she couldn't help clicking her tongue inside her head.
*…This cohort is going to be particularly troublesome.*
She'd heard the rumors. This year's first-years had already earned a reputation within the academy as something extraordinary—a so-called Golden Generation, packed with monstrous talents the likes of which hadn't been seen in years.
There was Edward, the crown prince, heralded as the empire's next sun. Then the witch of the Drnaris Ducal House, who had single-handedly cut down twice as many monsters as any other student at yesterday's entrance ceremony. And a Saintess—the first to appear in a thousand years.
Managing ordinary brats was already enough to make her head throb. A room full of so-called geniuses made her temples ache before she'd even begun.
But Elahim was a War Demon who had carved her way through more battlefields than she could count.
She knew how to handle chicks that wouldn't listen.
A headache was no reason to run.
If anything, she'd find it far more satisfying to methodically break the arrogant skulls of this Golden Generation the Stellar Academy way.
Elahim rapped the lectern once—a light tap. The sound itself wasn't particularly loud, but the mana-laced shockwave it sent rippling through the classroom walls snapped every student's attention to her in an instant.
She looked down at them, cold and unhurried, and spoke.
"Pleased to meet you. My name is Elahim. I'll be managing you for the next year."
Reactions rippled through the students immediately.
Understandable.
The name Elahim was not a light one.
She had distinguished herself across countless battlefields, earning a fearsome reputation—the War Demon of the Libertian Empire. Rumor had it she'd vanished from the front lines at some point, and now here she was, standing before them as a Stellar Academy professor—their homeroom teacher, no less. Every student who recognized the name went pale with shock.
But their reactions didn't seem to register with Elahim at all. She pressed on.
"Whether you were called a genius out there or not—I don't care. This is Stellar Academy, and inside these walls, there is only one principle you need to remember."
She raised a single finger.
"Endless competition."
Those razor-edged words cut straight into the students' ears.
"The rules here are simple. Only those who survive the competition rise higher and claim every right and glory for themselves. Those who fall behind are discarded—no matter how impressive their bloodline."
Elahim's sharp gaze swept over them.
"Today, I'll make sure you understand exactly what that means. Change into training clothes and assemble in the training hall. You have five minutes."
The corner of her mouth curled into a savage smile. On that note, she turned her large frame and walked out of the classroom without a backward glance.
***
The central training hall of Stellar Academy.
Students who had changed out of their uniforms into clothes suited for movement lined up in rows across the wide marble floor. From the way they were all gasping for breath, they'd clearly sprinted with everything they had to make the five-minute cutoff.
I, of course, was still in my maid's uniform. My young mistress had come in the dress she'd been wearing as well.
Given that we'd been told to come to the training hall, I had a rough idea of what was coming—but I saw no particular reason to change.
At the center of the training hall stood a single scarecrow, roughly human-sized, alone in the middle of the wide open space. As the students' gazes converged on it, Professor Elahim—who had arrived ahead of them—spoke.
"Looks like everyone's here."
She gave the freshmen a leisurely once-over, then draped an arm over the scarecrow beside her and continued.
"Now. This is no ordinary scarecrow. It's a training magic item crafted by the headmistress herself. Its function is simple: it receives whatever attacks you throw at it and converts them into a score."
With that explanation done, Professor Elahim stepped away from the scarecrow and moved forward.
"Seeing is believing. I'll demonstrate."
She fell quiet and began drawing up her mana.
In that instant, the temperature in the training hall climbed sharply—so sharply it felt as though the air around her had flash-boiled.
The air against my skin went from warm to stinging.
Then, at the tip of her fingers, a fist-sized ball of flame blinked into existence with a soft *pop*.
It was a technique I knew well. Three years ago, on the day I first met my young mistress, one of the three gutter rats in that back alley had used it—a fire-attribute 1st Circle spell. A Fireball.
The shape was no different from what that alley thug had thrown. But the density of mana packed inside it was in an entirely different league.
A chill ran from the hand gripping my staff all the way up my spine. I didn't need to draw my sword and confirm it with my eyes. Through Heart-Sight, every sense sharpened to its limit, and they were all screaming the same warning: *getting hit by that would be genuinely dangerous.*
In the darkness before me, I could read it clearly—the tangled masses of mana colliding and repelling each other with violent intensity, building toward an explosive release, all of it accompanied by a faint, piercing hum at the edge of my hearing.
Amid the cool heat pressing in as though it meant to scorch the skin from my bones, the wild churning of that rampant mana projected itself directly into my mind, vivid as a brand, cutting straight through my closed eyelids.
*Kwooom—!*
Elahim flicked her fingers lightly. The fist-sized fireball left her fingertips and streaked through the air toward the scarecrow.
The moment it made contact—
*Fwhooooom—!*
A massive pillar of fire erupted as though a bomb had detonated, swallowing the scarecrow whole and roaring upward toward the ceiling.
The column of flame surged as if it meant to punch straight through the roof, blasting waves of searing heat in every direction.
Students in the front row screamed and stumbled back a step as the heat threatened to sear their faces.
Slowly, the pillar of fire consuming the training hall in red began to die down.
When the scarecrow finally emerged through the acrid smoke, a collective sound of dry swallows ran through the students.
The floor around the scarecrow had been scorched completely black, still trailing wisps of smoke—but the scarecrow itself stood exactly as it had before, without so much as a scorch mark on it.
Having taken that monstrous blaze head-on and come out spotless, the scarecrow's defensive capability drew involuntary sounds of awe from the students.
That was when it happened.
*Kzzzt.*
In the silence that had settled over the training hall, the scarecrow's face began to move in an unsettling way. Its mouth split open with a slow tearing sound, scattering rough bits of straw, and then it emitted a mechanical voice that sounded as though it had been altered by magic.
[One hundred points.]
Professor Elahim turned back around, the scar on her cheek creasing into a grin as she looked down at the students.
"Get a good look? That's how it works—you attack, the scarecrow scores you. As you can see, it's built to take a beating, so don't worry about breaking it. Hit it with everything you've got."
Elahim tapped the blackened training hall floor with her foot as she continued.
"I'll call names in order. Step forward and attack when called. You get one shot—no holding back, no playing it safe. Pour everything you have into it."
She tilted her head as if it were nothing. But the voice that followed dropped the temperature in the training hall to somewhere well below freezing.
"However."
Her fierce gaze drifted unhurriedly across the students' faces.
"It wouldn't be any fun without consequences."
She seemed to find genuine amusement in watching the students' faces drain of color in real time—a note of undisguised pleasure crept into her voice despite herself.
"The student with the lowest score when all is said and done—pack your things and go home. You're expelled."