Several days had already passed since arriving at the Imperial Capital.
Nothing much had happened in the meantime.
We'd come to the capital with plenty of time to spare before the entrance ceremony, so there wasn't much to do anyway.
Since we were here, I'd wandered around to various places, and seeing in person the locations I'd only known from the game was strangely moving in its own way.
At first, my young mistress had trailed after me with a look of mild indifference—but at some point, she became the one dragging us around the capital more eagerly than I was.
Aiolette was, at heart, a homebody who'd never really ventured beyond the Drnaris domain, so the Imperial Capital must have felt genuinely novel after so long.
You might wonder: surely someone of the Drnaris name could visit the capital whenever she pleased?
You still need someone to go with. What was Aiolette supposed to do here alone, with not a single friend to her name?
She had no one close to her except me.
Watching her dart around the capital with barely contained excitement, I felt a quiet pang of something—and so I threw myself into the sightseeing just as earnestly.
Time slipped by quickly after that, and before long, the day of Stellar Academy's entrance ceremony had arrived.
The academy's great hall was packed with an enormous crowd.
Regardless of birth or background, the continent's most celebrated prodigies had gathered here on talent alone—and you could feel it in your bones. The hall hummed with a strangely dense concentration of mana and restless energy.
Yet within that charged atmosphere, there was one spot that remained conspicuously, icily cold.
The seats around me and my young mistress.
Everyone else had clustered into their respective groups, chatting quietly to ease their nerves. But within a radius of several meters around us, not so much as a single soul dared to linger.
The seats nearby sat empty, as though an invisible barrier had been erected.
I hadn't drawn my sword, but the sharp stares needling in from every direction made the situation perfectly clear.
More to the point, my hearing was sharp enough that I caught every word.
"…Hey, hey, look at that."
"What is it… ugh, that's a Drnaris."
"A Drnaris enrolled this year?"
"Wow… this cohort is something else. But was there a Drnaris our age?"
"You know, the one with the awful temper—"
Oh dear. Our young mistress's reputation had apparently spread all the way to the Imperial Capital.
The squabbles she'd gotten into during the succession struggle back home had been blown out of proportion and carried here on the wind of rumor.
As a result, she had unceremoniously become the most avoided person among the incoming students before the ceremony had even begun.
I stole a sidelong glance at her.
She could hardly have missed the stares and whispers—yet she sat there with her chin tilted up in deliberate hauteur, arms folded, radiating an aura that said, *How dare these insignificant creatures look at me?* The effect was a vicious cycle: the colder she looked, the faster people edged away.
That's my young mistress. The sheer audacity to socially exile the entire world all by herself. I never stop being impressed.
Aiolette, for her part, seemed far less bothered by the stares than by the encroaching boredom.
She had been slumped against the back of her chair with her chin propped in her hand, and at last she could bear it no longer.
"Dia. How much longer do we have to wait?"
"My lady… how are you ever going to manage with so little patience?"
"We've been sitting here for a whole hour already!"
"There you go again, getting worked up. I've told you time and again—composure at all times. You should always be moving with the mindset that an attack could come at any moment."
"Ha! An attack? Who in their right mind would dare attack Stellar Academy in the middle of the Imperial Capital… wait. Didn't we have almost this exact conversation not long ago?"
Our young mistress still had no real grasp of how the world worked. An attack at the entrance ceremony was practically a law of nature.
At that moment.
*Rumble, rumble, rumble—!*
The ceiling of the vast hall began to shake violently.
"An earthquake—is it an earthquake?!"
"Shouldn't we evacuate?"
"Whatever it is, let's just get out!!"
In an instant, the hall filled with screams and chaos as the new students dissolved into panic.
My heightened senses caught it—mana gathering at the ceiling above.
I quietly drew my sword from its scabbard.
[Trait ⟨Sword Saint⟩ activates.]
[⟨World's Trial⟩ is nullified.]
I looked up calmly. Ominous magical energy churned and swirled across the ceiling.
*Boom—!*
Then it tore open—and what emerged was a massive magic circle large enough to swallow the entire hall.
Through the gaps in that circle, accompanied by grotesque shrieks, a torrent of wild and vicious magical beasts began to pour down.
"Scream—!"
"M-monsters!"
"Run!!"
The entrance ceremony collapsed into pandemonium in seconds.
"What is that?!"
Aiolette's voice rang out, sharp with shock.
But I had no time to spare for her right now.
"My lady, I'll be right back!"
"Hey! Where are you going?!"
I concentrated mana into my legs and detonated it.
*Crash—!*
The marble floor of the hall cratered violently beneath me, the explosion of force ringing out like a cannon shot.
The hem of my maid's uniform snapped and billowed.
In an instant, my body surged forward at a speed that left human vision hopelessly behind.
Literally folding the ground to run.
Ground-Fold Dash—the only movement technique available to a swordsman like me.
A fierce shockwave tore through the air in my wake, raging like a storm along the path I'd carved. Students who happened to be standing nearby lost their footing entirely, tumbling like fallen leaves in the brutal pressure wave.
Impossibly fast, nearly beyond my own control—but it didn't matter.
[Trait ⟨Heart-Sight⟩ activates.]
Sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell—every sense shattered through its limits and expanded without end.
Simultaneously, a precise map of the entire hall began to render itself in my mind in real time, as though I were looking down on it from above.
The trajectories of the falling beasts, the ragged breathing of the students, the currents of mana wrapping around everything—all of it resolved into lines and points, etched directly into my awareness.
The trait ⟨Heart-Sight⟩.
The first Hidden Piece I had claimed after realizing I was living inside the world of *Saintess & Hero*.
Its effect was simple.
An expansion of my detection range.
In the game, it had amounted to little more than a slightly wider minimap—hardly a remarkable trait. But for me, here and now, it was nothing short of the finest ability I could have asked for.
Thanks to Heart-Sight, even without drawing my sword, every sense except sight sharpened to an extreme degree, allowing me to move freely—and when Sword Saint activated, it proved invaluable in more ways than I could count.
The one drawback, unlike Sword Saint, was that it didn't actually restore my sight. I still couldn't read text or read expressions.
Not being able to see my young mistress's adorable face was, honestly, a significant loss.
In stories, people with Heart-Sight always seem to see just fine…
Regardless, I threaded the explosive momentum of Ground-Fold Dash through the precise awareness of Heart-Sight and cut across the hall.
Several beasts detected me mid-run and lunged.
"Too slow."
*Shk!*
The shortest possible path. Not a single wasted motion.
The creatures that had thrown themselves into my way didn't even register what had hit them before their heads parted from their bodies and scattered in all directions.
Each swing of my sword was light, almost casual—and each one cleanly severed a beast's neck.
Cutting through one after another, I finally locked onto the largest concentration of mana in the center of the hall.
A creature of overwhelming size, tall enough to nearly brush the high ceiling of the great hall.
While the other prodigies wore themselves down wrestling with the smaller beasts, this one had crawled through the dimensional rift—the named monster at the heart of this attack. Titan.
*Crash—!*
The moment I reached Titan's feet, I drove off the floor with another powerful stomp. With a ground-shaking boom, my body launched upward, defying gravity.
I shot vertically through dozens of meters of open air, and before long I had reached a height perfectly level with Titan's face.
Our eyes met.
"Hello there. Mind if I borrow your shoulder for a moment?"
I landed on Titan's shoulder and looked out over the battlefield below.
Titan glanced down at me with an expression that could only be described as baffled, then promptly ignored me.
Which was fine. This giant wasn't going to move—not until the very end. A deterrent, more than anything. In the game, it had stood motionless from start to finish, earning itself the nickname "the folding screen."
For my purposes, it was simply the best vantage point in the room to observe the chaos below.
The reason I'd rushed to Titan in the first place was to see who was fighting down there.
This entrance ceremony attack was one of the mandatory events in *Saintess & Hero*—the opening act of the academy arc, a tutorial battle of sorts.
Players were meant to learn the game's combat mechanics and systems by fighting through the monsters here. But from a veteran's perspective, that kind of system orientation was entirely beside the point.
What actually mattered was this: scattered throughout this mayhem, the key characters who would become entangled with the protagonist were making their first appearances.
As I'd mentioned before, *Saintess & Hero* was a game that prided itself on extreme freedom.
Because of that, aside from a handful of essential characters—the Saintess Lumina, my young mistress, and a few others—the lineup of major NPCs for each year was randomized completely with every playthrough.
And the stage where those randomly selected characters first revealed their talents was precisely this entrance ceremony attack.
"Now then… let's see. Did this cohort get a decent draw?"