"The student with the lowest score at the end—pack your bags and go home on the spot. You're expelled."
…An hour had passed since Professor Elahim's declaration.
The training hall was thick with the heat pouring off the students.
"Haaaah!"
At the center of the hall, a male student with every vein in his neck standing out raised his sword above his head. Mana wrung from the Core in his chest surged powerfully through his entire body.
He then stamped the floor hard enough to crack it and brought the blade down on the training dummy with all his might.
BOOM—!
The blade crashed into the dummy's shoulder with a heavy, splitting sound. It scattered a fierce wind in every direction and cut quite an impressive figure—yet the dummy, which had taken the full brunt of the impact, didn't so much as twitch.
A wisp of straw tumbled from between the dummy's grotesquely torn lips, and a cold mechanical voice rang out across the training hall.
[25 points.]
"…T-twenty-five points?"
The color drained from the male student's face in an instant.
Outside these walls, people had called him a genius and praised him for it. When the test had first been explained to him, he'd quietly felt confident. He'd even been planning to use this opportunity to make a firm impression of his abilities on the other students.
And yet—twenty-five points?
There was no way a full-force strike could be worth this kind of failing score. Refusing to accept reality, he stepped toward the dummy as if he meant to grab it by the collar.
"That's impossible! Do you have any idea how much mana I put into that?! For a score this pathetic to—"
"Next."
Professor Elahim, who had been standing at a slant and tapping the floor with her foot, cut him off without mercy. The male student spun toward her in a panic, his eyes pleading.
"P-Professor! Just once more! Please give me one more chance! I was nervous just now, so my mana control was a little—"
"Are you deaf? I said next. Get out."
Those predator's eyes flashed, and the male student sucked in a sharp breath before retreating in silence, like a man who'd swallowed his tongue. One chance, and one chance only. The pressure of knowing that failure meant expulsion was slowly tightening around the throats of every student still waiting in line.
And in the middle of that suffocating atmosphere, I was… doing absolutely nothing in particular.
Well, what else was I supposed to do? Honestly, I was bored.
Watching was fun for the first couple of turns, but after an hour of the exact same thing on repeat, it was mind-numbingly dull.
Besides—I can't see anything unless I draw my sword.
Heart-Sight was keeping me informed of everything around me, but still.
Imagine watching the most entertaining film in the world with only the audio and no picture. That was precisely how I felt right now.
In the game, this section had been glossed over in a few lines of text, so I'd never given it a second thought—but living through it in reality was a different matter entirely. Extraordinarily tedious.
Yet another moment where I'm reminded this place is real.
It wasn't just me, either. My young mistress had apparently found it equally boring, because she was currently lying with her head in my lap as I sat on the marble floor, making up for lost sleep.
"Mmm…"
Aiolette shifted on my lap, her dress rustling, and murmured something small between her lips.
"Noisy… Dia… throw all those idiots out…"
A dry laugh rose in my chest at the sleepy, bloodthirsty sleep-talking. The shouts and spell-blasts going off in every direction were clearly doing a number on her nap.
I set my cane gently against my side and patted her head in slow, quiet strokes so she could rest comfortably. The presence against my maid's uniform gradually settled back into a steady rhythm, sinking toward deep sleep—and then, at precisely that moment.
KRAAAAAOOM—!
A massive, bone-deep roar shook the entire training hall—on a completely different level from anything before it. A shockwave buzzed through the range of my Heart-Sight like a rough hand dragging across it.
At the same time, a collective gasp rose from the students who had been standing around in a daze, and the hall erupted into uproar.
[75 points.]
A cool voice from between the dummy's torn lips. A score that leaped far past the twenty-to-thirty-point range that had been the ceiling for the past hour.
*That flow of mana… that's Eisenberg.*
The owner of seventy-five points was none other than Lancelot Eisenberg—heir to the Eisenberg Margrave House, known as the Shield of the Empire.
He was the one who had swung that enormous shield at the entrance ceremony.
He was also, of course, a fixed character in *Saintess & Hero*. The classic knight type, you might say. Apparently he'd appeared as a secondary male lead in the original novel, but I never read the novel, so I wouldn't know.
What I did know was his in-game performance: absurd HP stats and a specialty in outlasting everything thrown at him. Players had taken to calling him things like Cockroach, Roach King, and *god the Roach King is actually kind of cool*.
*At this point, the top-tier students are starting to figure it out.*
Tracing the arc of Lancelot's mana through the back of my closed eyes, I smiled faintly to myself.
Right. Because this test was not, in fact, a simple measure of how powerful and destructive your attack was.
That dummy had been custom-built by Rustil herself, using actual dragon scales.
With scales from a dragon—the strongest species in existence—woven into it, transmitting a shock all the way to the dummy's core through ordinary means was next to impossible.
To actually strike the core, you needed to concentrate your mana in a specific way, control it in a specific way, and so on and so forth—but to skip the tedious, pedantic explanation and put it simply:
You either hit it with overwhelming force, or you hit it with extraordinary precision.
If your strength fell even slightly short, or your technique lacked the necessary refinement, the impact would scatter and the score would suffer for it.
The spectacular pillar of fire Professor Elahim had demonstrated as an example was nothing more than a mean-spirited sleight of hand—designed to make the students assume that hitting hard was all it took.
If the first-years were as strong as Elahim, brute force would work just fine. But there was no way ordinary first-years fresh out of enrollment had that kind of power.
*With a few exceptions, of course.*
Still, Elahim really does have a rotten personality.
Then again, you'd have to be a personality disaster to volunteer for first-year homeroom duty.
Anyway—starting with Lancelot, the top-tier students who had cracked the dummy's secret began revealing their true abilities one by one, racking up high scores. Every time an eighty-something score rang out in succession, the training hall rippled with gasps and awe.
And at last, the voice that signaled the end of my tedious wait echoed through the hall.
"Next. Aiolette Drnaris."
Finally. Our turn.
"Come now, my lady. Time to get up."
I gently shook the shoulder of my young mistress, who had been sleeping soundly with her head in my lap. Amid the surrounding cheers that were doing their best to disturb her rest, my voice reached her ear—soft but clear.
"Mmwuh…?"
Aiolette blinked, her face still hazy with sleep. A sound slipped from between her red lips—slightly slurred, almost dopey—entirely unlike her usual composed self.
"It's your turn, my lady. Go take care of it quickly."
"Ah… my turn…?"
Aiolette rubbed her drowsy eyes and pushed herself up from my lap with a sluggish shuffle. She gave the faint creases in her skirt a perfunctory shake, then set off toward the dummy at the center of the hall with her eyes still half-closed. There wasn't a trace of the tension gripping everyone else—just a languid, unhurried stride.
At that moment, the soft rustle of fabric announced a familiar mana signature drawing up beside me.
It was Edward Libertis, Crown Prince of the Libertian Empire.
He glanced back and forth between Aiolette walking unguardedly toward the dummy and me still sitting at ease on the marble floor, then spoke with an air of exasperated disbelief.
"Aren't you two the least bit worried?"
"Didn't you score sixty-five?"
"…This test only requires avoiding the lowest score. There was no need to exert myself unnecessarily."
"Even so, sixty-five is a bit…"
"……"
A flicker of embarrassment drifted through the air from his direction.
But no matter how you framed it as a test where you just needed to clear the expulsion line—sixty-five points, with the Crown Prince's name attached, while the top students were detonating scores in the eighties one after another, was honestly a little rough.
Does the man have no pride? If not, he could always just sit it out like me.
I also privately wondered why he was suddenly acting so familiar, but since I was a perfectly mannered maid, I kept that thought exactly where it belonged.
"Ahem, ahem! My score is hardly the point. I'll grant that Lady Drnaris possesses more mana than any of us—that much I acknowledge. Her level is frankly difficult to believe for a fellow first-year. However…"
Sixty-five points clicked his tongue and watched Aiolette arrive before the dummy.
"You've noticed it too, I'm sure, but that dummy is no ordinary object. Raw mana alone simply cannot produce a high score."
He continued in a tone that was, to his credit, genuinely serious.
"No matter how powerful a spell you deploy, the moment it meets that dummy's mana resistance, the mana scatters in every direction. The real key is how compressed and precisely controlled your technique is—and do you honestly think that kind of fine control is possible when you've just been woken from a nap?"
Hmm… he does talk a lot. At first I'd assumed he'd come over to make some petty jab or provocation because Aiolette had dismissed him back in the classroom, but apparently he just wanted to explain things.
Insufferable.
That said, he wasn't wrong.
He just wasn't accounting for who he was talking about.
"Is that so? I wonder if you might be underestimating my young mistress."
"What do you mean by—"
The moment sixty-five points asked in puzzlement.
KRRRRMMM!
A deep, heavy vibration rolled up through the soles of my feet, as though the vast marble floor of the training hall was about to sink straight into the earth.
It was nothing like the ear-splitting explosions Lancelot and the other prodigies had set off.
It was a strange, unsettling pulse—the kind that resonates in your chest, the sort you'd expect when something of immense mass presses down upon the earth.
Simultaneously, the density of mana compression radiating from the center of the hall was so extreme it felt as though space itself was warping.
And simultaneously, my Heart-Sight screamed a frantic warning.
I left sixty-five points gaping behind me and quietly drew my sword.
Beside me, I felt Edward flinch.
*Relax. I didn't draw it because of you.*
*I need to see our young mistress's finest moment with my own two eyes.*
[Trait ⟨Sword Saint⟩ activates.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ is nullified.]
Shhring.
The sharp blade hidden within the cane's sheath slid free in one smooth motion.
In that instant, the suffocating darkness that had seemed eternal lifted like a lie, and the world pressed itself into my vision with crystalline clarity. The first thing my eyes found—eyes that had reclaimed their full light—was the back of my young mistress, standing at the center of the training hall, one finger extended with unhurried elegance.
And at the precise center of the dummy her fingertip pointed toward, a single small black arrow was buried deep.
Compared to the flashy, hall-shaking attacks the other students had unleashed, it looked laughably small and plain. But my eyes saw it clearly—the utterly absurd density of mana compressed into that one tiny arrow.
The arrow did not stop after embedding itself in the dummy's chest. It began boring relentlessly inward. The sight of that savagely compressed mana drilling toward the dummy's core like a bit through stone stole the breath from every person in the hall.
*Pop—!*
Instead of a thunderous explosion, a clean, decisive burst—like air escaping a seal—and the black mana detonated completely from within the dummy.
Dark currents that had been coiled tight in every crack and seam rose from the dummy like heat shimmer, drifting upward in slow, lazy wisps.
Not a single person in the training hall dared to breathe.
Then, shattering the silence, the mechanical voice burst from between the dummy's torn lips.
[98 points.]
Ninety-eight points.
The highest score recorded by anyone other than Professor Elahim.
As the training hall teetered on the edge of absolute pandemonium, Aiolette glanced at her score with all the interest of someone noticing a pebble on the road, and gave a small, indifferent sniff.
*Our young mistress is magnificent.*
*She just solved it with sheer mana volume. Ha! Whoever raised her certainly did a fine job.*
At that moment, a voice beside me thoroughly ruined the moment.
"Th-that was extraordinary! That overwhelming mana capacity…! Did you see it? The density of the refined mana in that black arrow! That dummy has a property that absorbs mana, you see, so if the mana's grain is rough or the refinement is insufficient, it just strikes the surface and disperses without a trace, because of the way the structure—"
*Someone please take him away.*