“Y-you got it wrong again!”
“Vigorous and strong Morning Charge. Isn’t that right?”
“I-I told you, it’s Firm and Stalwart Morning Charge! How many times do I have to say it!”
Rezé shouted.
But I was the one who wanted to scream.
It was the name of Count Yulietz’s counter-charge operation that had stopped the Schultz Kingdom’s assault in Imperial Year 89.
As if it wasn’t enough that he’d given different operation names for morning, noon, and evening, he’d even come up with completely different names for each day of the week.
“Then… second day at lunch is… Moderately Vigorous?”
“F-fierce and strong!!”
…What the hell is that even supposed to be, you dumbass.
How do you even manage to make operation names this lame and confusing?
It was enough to make you doubt he’d really been a general.
“I-I’ll explain again. S-second day morning is Firm and Stalwart, lunch is…”
Was she doing this because she wanted to help, or because she wanted to live?
She taught us with burning enthusiasm.
Lectures, summary notes, previous exam questions, even original problems she wrote herself.
Our teacher bunny played her part perfectly. And when a week had passed like that—
Fwsshh—.
“M-my dear students… I’m counting on you to win…”
Thud.
Three hours before the exam, Rezé finally collapsed.
She had passed out with her tongue lolling out, and I poked her cheek and whispered.
Don’t die.
You’ve still got an exam to take.
“Keke, is this all you’ve got?”
The power of Teacher Bunny was incredible.
The exam sheet that should have been full of things I didn’t know had mostly turned into questions I did know.
It was so trivial I almost wanted to die of boredom.
Ah, of course there were a few subjects I’d always been confident in.
Ethics, foreign languages, and—
“Hoho… Z-Zero, you even solved the question I put in so nobody would get it right.”
Simon, the teacher in charge of Demon Archaeology, was sweating bullets.
For someone like me with an S-rank [Translation] skill, deciphering demon magic circles was child’s play.
Even if they were created by ancient Demons.
“Keke, I just happened to know that one. Guess I got lucky.”
“That was a top-tier demon summoning circle that only just finished being analyzed and hasn’t been published yet… which would mean that, as long as you had enough souls and reagents, you could summon a top-tier Demon…”
Simon kept muttering to himself.
Hmm. So that was a question I wasn’t supposed to solve?
Well, it wasn’t really a problem. Simon was the epitome of a cowardly character.
“I wish I could, but it’s not that easy.”
“U-uh? Y-you didn’t… actually try it, did you?”
“Keke…”
“…?”
“Kekekekekeke!”
“I-I didn’t hear a thing! Nothing at all!”
Simon fled the room like he was running for his life.
I had no idea why he was running. I was just an ordinary(?) student who liked Demons.
‘Even if something happens, Caron and Dwener will probably cover for me.’
I stretched under the sunlight. Our class had been split up to prevent cheating.
When I glanced over at Luna and Rezé’s class, a student and an instructor were arguing.
Cheating, maybe? Either way, it looked like it would be a while before those two came out.
‘I should be able to get an average of over eighty.’
Considering my midterms had averaged thirty, that was a huge jump.
If I scored full marks on the practical, I’d even have a shot at placing near the top.
And if I solved the incident that was about to blow up, I’d earn bonus points and be within reach of the top overall rank.
I was thinking I should at least buy Rezé a carrot candy when someone came into view.
‘Teron?’
From the looks of it, Daike was stuck in the same class as Luna and Rezé.
‘Once, Teron had commanded a powerful faction known as the Teron Faction.’
Now, the number of kids following him had dwindled.
‘Just like in the game, he was a really pitiful character.’
A boy flailing desperately for his father’s approval.
The sad part was that Alex and the rest of the protagonist party had stats that were just too high.
In every kind of subculture, it was basic formula to show off how outstanding the protagonist was and hype them up.
Teron was the character who took the full brunt of that.
You could say he was half-forced into the villain role for the protagonist’s sake.
‘By now, he should have already made his contract with a Demon.’
Duke Zeppelin’s order that a hunting dog should be disciplined by its owner.
In the game, Teron was forced to carry out that command, and Daike was trampled for half a day.
In front of everyone.
Afterwards, as he looked at the badly injured Daike, Teron succumbed to the Demon’s temptation and formed a contract…
Wait.
‘The story might have changed.’
In the game, when Teron started punishing Daike, the protagonist Alex stood up to Duke Zeppelin.
The result was a foregone conclusion: defeat. With his back under the duke’s heel, Alex could do nothing but watch Daike be trampled.
But this time, things had gone differently.
Luna, who had been marked as “missing” in the original, had been there to rage.
Then there was me, Rezé, Alex, Raymon, Yuridia, and Victoria, making up an anti-Zeppelin alliance.
We all got beaten to a pulp, of course, but we did manage to stop Teron from punishing Daike.
That was more than enough to shake Teron’s heart. You could almost hear him think, ‘Oh my? You’re the first person who’s ever stood up for me!’
They were all characters far too good to just kill off.
People weighed down by tragic pasts and painful presents.
‘This is what a hidden piece should be like.’
A happy ending where everyone gets to be happy. I wondered what kind of hidden piece this would lead to.
Smiling, I walked up to Teron.
“How did your exam go?”
“Better than yours, that’s for sure.”
“Keke, you really shouldn’t think I’m the same as before.”
I was the guy on track for an eighty-point average, mind you!
I thought Teron would laugh, sling an arm around my shoulder, and ask if that even counted as a score.
But what I got instead was—
“This time, I won’t lose to you. I’ll make you regret not taking my hand.”
A chill reply.
I could tell instinctively that it wasn’t just bravado.
‘Did he make a contract with a Demon?’
If so, there was no going back.
In this world, contracting with a Demon was a serious crime. If you were of noble blood, it was punished even more harshly.
And Teron was the son of a high noble.
‘His punishment would be that much heavier.’
Even after all that fuss, I still couldn’t change the future. What a damned game.
For the record, after the finals Teron gets hauled off to an imperial prison and never appears again.
And his hunting dog, Daike—
‘Meets his death.’
In a pretty shocking way, at that.
That was the fate waiting for those two, and the end of our eventful first semester.
“Ugh! What’s with this demand for a retest?”
“They’ve been up for days; they’re not thinking straight.”
“I just want to sleep. Homeroom’ll be over quickly, right?”
“They’re going to announce what the practical exam is… so it might take a while?”
Just then, students poured out in a rush and swept between us.
Sadly, it seemed our connection ended there.
‘Should I have done something more?’
Maybe the right answer had been to dodge all of Duke Zeppelin’s attacks.
If I hadn’t ended up stuck in bed, I might have had time to talk to a despondent Teron.
Well, it was far too late now.
“Hey! Big sis is here! Did you do well on the exam?”
“Keke, better than before. Judging from your face, you did pretty well yourself.”
“A lot of it came straight from the practice book Rezé made. My friend really is amazing, you know?”
“H-hehe… i-it was nothing, really.”
Rezé twisted her body shyly.
Then, as if something had just occurred to her, she looked at me and asked.
“S-so, what did you put for Lunchtime Charge?”
Now that she mentioned it, that question had been there. The one I always got mixed up.
Obviously, I got it right. I’m not an idiot.
“Moderately vigorous?”
“Y-you got it wrooong!”
Rezé fell into despair.
After the exam, during homeroom, Caron opened his mouth on the podium.
“The final practical exam will be… a headband battle.”
Some kids wondered aloud what that even meant, while others sighed that we were in big trouble.
Regardless, Caron continued.
“The testing ground is a forest in the north.”
“There are no magical beasts, but there are plenty of wild animals.”
“But those aren’t what you need to be most wary of in a forest.”
‘People.’
“At the start, each person will be given one headband.”
“You must always have at least one headband. If you are ever left without one, you are immediately disqualified.”
“Each headband is worth one point. When the exam ends, the more headbands you have, the higher your ranking will be.”
“Obviously, the more headbands you steal, the better off you’ll be.”
It was a relative evaluation, not an absolute one.
Since no one would know how many headbands first place had, we would have to keep fighting until the very end.
“Even the headband you start with is worth one point… so maybe running away and avoiding fights is actually the smartest plan.”
“Right. Lose it once and you’re out.”
The rule was simple: lose all your headbands and you’re out.
If you lost your only headband right after the exam started, you’d be disqualified on the spot and given a zero.
In a practical that counted for sixty percent of the grade, a zero meant you were guaranteed to end up at the bottom.
“There are so many monsters in our year. Kids are going to be dropping like flies.”
“Why did I have to be in the golden year… this is insane.”
In this exam, even a single point was precious.
In other words, just protecting your own headband gave you a high chance of landing in the middle ranks or higher.
“You may form teams. Pre-arranged teams are also permitted. However, you’ll want to calculate your scores carefully, won’t you?”
Seeing Caron’s smile, the kids realized.
Right before the exam ended, turning on your own teammates to steal all the headbands they’d collected would be a common occurrence.
‘Since they’d hunted together, each teammate would be holding quite a few headbands.’
Take down just one such person and you could snag five to ten headbands, rocketing your rank upward.
After all, most kids would finish the test with only one or two points.
In short, if you had to summarize this headband battle—
“Kill each other.”
—that would be it.
But it was still too early to be shocked.
“Ah, I nearly forgot. The exam is tomorrow.”
Chaos erupted in the classroom.
Tomorrow? That was far, far too little time to prepare.
“I-isn’t that a bit too soon?”
“We assumed a situation where you might be thrown into real combat at any moment. There have been an unusual number of incidents, and you’ve produced excellent results, so we decided to apply slightly stricter standards.”
Caron handed out praise that was supposedly hard to earn, but the students’ faces did not brighten.
Seeing their expressions, Caron just smirked.
“The detailed rules are written here. Study them and aim for a good score.”
Caron left the room. The kids who grabbed the sheets of rules started grumbling.
“Ghh… starting positions are assigned at random? If you’re unlucky, you’ll get knocked out right away.”
“We can only pray there aren’t any strong guys nearby.”
“Demon. He’s definitely a Demon.”
“Do we just guard our headbands… or risk it to go after one or two more…”
Eavesdropping on their conversation, Luna nodded.
“Hmm… this might be trickier than it sounds. What should we do? Focus on regrouping first?”
“Keke, I might stab you in the back at the end, you know?”
“As if you’d ever do that. Not that I’d mind even if you did.”
Luna smiled faintly.
Luna really had no sense of how scary the world could be.
‘Not that that was a bad feeling.’
I wasn’t the only one in high spirits. Rezé looked particularly cheerful too.
Had the headband battle scared her so much she’d gone crazy?
“H-hehe! I-if I just hide, I’m already mid-rank, right?”
The camouflaged boxes Rezé made were so well-crafted that even Caron had trouble finding them.
From her point of view, she could secure her headband just by hiding in a box and walk away with a solid middle rank on a single point. Of course she was happy.
“I-I’ll make some for you too. Or maybe just one big one? W-we can snack inside and the exam will be over in no time.”
Just imagining it was enough to make Rezé beam.
But it didn’t take long for that smile to vanish.
“Denied.”
“Keke, rejected.”
“W-why!”
“My goal this time is for either you or this guy to take the top spot.”
“H-huh?”
“I took first place on the midterms thanks to your help, right? So it’s only fair that I help you this time.”
That was our Luna. They said one well-raised daughter was worth ten sons.
I really had raised her well(?).
“All right, then. Our goal is to steal everyone’s headband!”
“Keke, what a grand ambition. But just this once, I’ll praise you for it.”
And just like that, we were united in purpose.
“W-why i-i-i-is this happening!!”
Except for one rabbit.
–TL Notes–
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Zeto was so hopeful too!
Don’t give up yet Zero!You can still save Teron!