Chapter 2: The Magic Exam
Chapter 2: The Magic Exam
I was six years old now! Round of applause!
Not much had changed about me, except that I’d gotten a bit taller—I was as plain as ever. Well, as long as I was healthy!
I felt like everything had changed since I met Lou...yet I also felt like nothing had changed at all.
First, the things that had changed:
1) My brother had started to spoil me rotten.
His personality did a total one-eighty after that one day. For the past three years, he’d started teaching me martial arts himself despite being busy. He let me sit on his lap during snack time, he read to me before bed, and he gave me goodnight kisses on the cheek. Now that he was thirteen, he’d grown from a child into a gorgeous young man. Getting a kiss from a pretty boy excited me so much I couldn’t sleep! Just kidding, I did sleep. Zzz...
Maybe he stopped trying to be the perfect son after the thing with Lou? Maybe he loosened up after being able to cry a lot? It was a good thing either way. He was enrolled in the aforementioned magic academy, but the heroine and other main characters weren’t there yet, so there was nothing in particular to worry about! Play well and study well!
2) My father had also started to spoil me rotten.
Our single father watched my and my brother’s interactions with a smile and spent his little free time with his children. His face had lost its touch of grief, perhaps because he had recovered from the shock of our mother’s death.
When we were at home, he usually let me sit on his lap, and when we went out, he would either carry me or hold my hand. I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately trying to parent me using a lot of praise or if it was just because of my age, but he got excessively happy when I improved in magic or martial arts.
3) Lou had gotten a bit bigger.
He was puppy-sized before, but now he was about the size of a Shiba Inu—and his ego had inflated to match. He was supposed to have only needed to absorb my magic, but he always ate the quality fruits papa bought and the good dishes the cooks made before we could get to them. What a gluttonous beast... For some reason, he didn’t feel heavy when he got on my head or shoulder, though. He’d completely become a part of the household.
Meanwhile, the things that hadn’t changed were:
1) My magic was way overpowered, just like in the book.
Any magic words I brought over from my past life, such as “pain, pain, go away,” worked as long as they had a clear intention. Just the other day, a cold wave hit our estate, so I did the Japanese fortune-telling custom of flipping my shoes to see if they would land upright for sunny weather or upside down for rain. With Lou’s help, I got my shoes to land upright, and a sunny spot immediately appeared in the sky. I got the sense I shouldn’t say “cross my heart and hope to die.” If I broke that kind of promise, I could only imagine...
Apart from that, I came up with a lot of new magic based on my memories from my past life. In this world, magic was divided into just the four main categories of water, fire, earth, and air, and people never considered otherwise. However, I was able to casually combine fire and air based on a hair dryer, picture vaccines and antibiotics to heal wounds, and even reference a certain robot cat’s pocket from my past life to make magic that could manipulate space. As long as I had a clear image in mind, I could make all sorts of new magic. From there, I would have Lou train me to add and subtract things from the magic, judge whether it was useful, and put on the finishing touches. If we decided a certain type of magic suited me personally, we would think of ways to develop it.
“You’re really fun, Sere. I never get bored with you around, and I can get stronger too—not to mention how tasty your magic is. It’s nothing but good having you around. Sere, my shoulders are stiff, so do that massage magic thing!”
“The one combining supersonic waves and heat?”
“Yes, yes, heal your teacher.”
“But teacher, all you did today was eat and sleep...”
If I continued to grow at this rate, I would gain the power to rival the heroine without question. Then I’d be blamed for plunging the kingdom into chaos, and they’d do everything they could to get rid of me...
2) I’d ended up making a contract with Lou like in the book.
Although the book had called him my “servant,” Lou and my father were saying Lou and I shared a “contract.” I guess the difference was that the former is forced and the latter is consensual? Maybe it would change if my relationship with Lou soured? I wouldn’t know for another ten years.
In the end, although my relationship with my family and Lou had changed—along with my goals in life—nothing had happened that deviated significantly from the book. I was still on track to become the villainess.
So, that was my situation when it came time for my magic exam.
Ever since I’d set my sights on going to knight school, my family was focused not only on my magic and martial arts training, but also on thinking about how I could get Magicless on my magic exam. If the exam established that I had magic, they would force me to go to the magic academy.
“You still want to go to knight school, yes?”
“I do. I may not have accomplished a lot over the past three years other than gaining some stamina, but I still want to go to knight school.”
In the end, it was decided that I couldn’t risk letting strangers into the house and having them find out our secret, so we didn’t hire any outside instructors. I was mainly trained by my brother, and my father as well on his days off. I couldn’t even handle the assignments they gave me, so it ended up being too early to hire an instructor anyway.
“What do you mean, Serephione! You’ve already mastered the foundational skills. You can run twenty laps around our estate’s perimeter, throw a knife right into the neck of a straw doll, and then run ten more laps. Not even most kids my age can do that.”
“But brother, didn’t you tell me anyone could do that?”
“I thought if anyone could do it, it was you!” He smiled and patted my head.
Something’s a little off with that logic... I guess my brother won’t always just dote on me.
Come to think of it, wasn’t that assignment more like an assassination simulation than martial arts training?
The weapon he had given me was a shuriken specially made by him, and my training outfit was basically a ninja costume—apparently, it took inspiration from the clothing of other kingdoms. It fit my body well, it was easy to move around in, it was easy to carry, and it hid my figure so people couldn’t tell if I was a boy or girl. He had happily presented it to me, saying that I could make all sorts of modifications to it and charm it with defensive magic.
I was becoming a little ninja. Just what sort of person was my brother raising me to be?
“I see... But Serephi, your magic is powerful. After the exam, they’ll notify the kingdom, and they’ll decide to enroll you into the magic academy whether you like it or not. What should we do?”
“If I really want to go to knight school, couldn’t they make an exception, even if I have magic?”
“It’s not technically against the law, but it wouldn’t be possible in practice. The kingdom wants to keep its magic users under control by putting them in the magic academy.”
“Are they keeping you under control too, brother?”
“I guess. But don’t worry; eventually I’ll end up on the side that does the controlling, like our father, just you watch.”
Wow...he’s so cool!
“What if we say I’m sickly? Like, I have magic, but I’m too weak to attend school? I don’t really show my face in public much to begin with, so it should be okay.”
“But Serephione, that would mean you can’t go to knight school either.”
“We’d say I got better by the time of the knight school entrance exams.”
“They would probably dispatch healers if they found out a magic-using lady was sick. That’s just how powerful the influence of magic users is on the kingdom.”
As we were discussing potential solutions, Lou looked up from the cookies he had been happily munching on.
“What’s the procedure for the magic exam?” he asked.
“When I did it seven years ago, they put a stone tablet in our hands, and if we had magic, a score would float up into the air.”
“Couldn’t we just do something to the tablet?” suggested Lou.
“Lou, the exam area is empty and not very large, and examinees are surrounded by three magicians. It wouldn’t be easy to cheat...”
“And magic doesn’t work inside the building.”
He was right. Other people must have tried to cheat in the past—people who really wanted to test as Advanced and go to the magic academy, the complete opposite of me. If it was observed by magicians from the government, that meant I would have to do the exam while being stared at by scary older men... I didn’t see a way out.
But I absolutely didn’t want to go to magic school, no matter what I had to do!
I took a shuriken from my ankle. “Should we take them out?”
“Hm? Yeah, I’ll help. Anything for my precious Serephione.” My brother smiled brightly and pulled a magical knife that shone blue out from somewhere or other. I taught him useful magic that I invented if he ever said he needed it. He had a good sense for it, so he got the hang of it quickly.
“Calm down, you two,” father chided us.
“Don’t worry, father,” I reassured him. “We’ll just blunt the blade and lace it with a sleeping drug.”
“A sleeping drug? Serephione, where did you find nener grass?”
“I found a bunch of it growing in a crack in the cliff behind our estate.”
“That’s my Serephione, prepared for anything!”
“You two... You can’t lay a hand on the testers! It’ll only give them a bad impression!”
“Couldn’t we just do something to the stone? I can take care of it,” Lou chimed in.
“Lou?”
“I suppose Lou could get away with doing something to that stone.”
“That’s true. Since he’s a holy beast, he may know a way to make Serephi get a score of 0, even in an environment where magic is unusable. He’s the one who would like Serephi to be a knight in the first place too.”
That wasn’t actually the case, though...
“It’s okay! I got this!”
He puffed out his chest, cookie crumbs all over his face. All we could do in response was make bemused faces.
In the end, we couldn’t think of any other solution, so when the day came, we had no choice but to rely on Lou. The gluttonous fluffball showed no sign of nervousness, snoozing away in my bed with his belly up until the afternoon.
It was no wonder that I felt a tinge of anxiety...
◇ ◇ ◇
My father, Lou, and I visited the magic research center in the heart of the royal capital. It was actually our first time appearing in the capital as a family, since I hadn’t had any interest in going there and I wanted to avoid unnecessary contact.
We got out of our carriage at the gate to the research center. I held my father’s hand, set Lou on top of my head, and made my way down the path to the attached building.
My father had a severe expression, the likes of which I’d never seen before. I figured this was probably his resting face when in public. There was a saying I remembered from my past life that men have numerous enemies outside the home. He couldn’t afford to appear vulnerable. He had on his shoulders not only the fate of our family, but that of the warm residents of our cold domain.
But a handsome man was still handsome, however frightening his expression was. His silky straight black hair was brushed back and neatly trimmed at the nape of his neck. He had a slim, lean build, and he had put on extra muscle from helping me and my brother practice martial arts. His slanted green eyes were striking. Hearts were in the eyes of all the women who watched him go by through their windows.
“Father, it’s scary how everyone is looking at me.”
When I spoke to my father, a warmth appeared in his green eyes.
“I know, but I don’t think it’s that they can see Lou. There would probably be a bigger fuss. I think it’s because I brought you. You’re precious enough to turn anyone’s head.”
Saying that, he scooped me up along with Lou and gave me a smooch on the cheek.
“Eeee!” squealed some of the women in the area.
It embarrassed me how biased his aesthetic sense was. I was as plain as plain could be! My dress, which matched the color of Lou’s eyes, was pretty though. At least his affection had caused the hyenas to retreat, so I called it a win.
A small, flat building standing on its own came into view.
“That’s the place, right, father? How many people do you think are there today?”
“All six-year-olds born in the same month as you should be meeting at once, but I told them that I had a work conflict and had them move you to the very end, so you’ll be taking your exam by yourself. Whatever miracle Lou performs, I think there should be as few people in the gallery as possible for it.”
He gave me and Lou a wink. Lou climbed up onto papa and wagged his tail.
“Leave it to me! And have a special cake ready for me tonight!”
“Understood.” My father gently smiled in response to Lou and entered the room, still holding us.
“Welcome, Count Granzeus and Lady Granzeus.”
Inside the doors, a middle-aged man in a fancy-looking black robe was there to greet us. I’d been nervous going in, but he didn’t give Lou so much as a glance. Lou was actually pretty capable!
“Hello, I’m Serephione, daughter of the Earl of Granzeus. Thank you for having me today.”
I may not have gotten out much, but I could handle greetings just fine. I had experience in the business world from my past life.
“Oh, bright as well as lovely! I expect nothing less from the young lady of the Granzeus family!”
His words stunk of flattery. Is he that afraid of the Minister of Finance? Is he concerned because the Ministry is in charge of the budget? Papa, why did you just make that sniffing sound?
“Thank you for accommodating my busy schedule. We don’t have much time. Proceed with the examination.”
He ran the negotiation at his own pace. Way to go, papa!
“Now, Count, would you step out—”
“I refuse. Am I meant to leave my precious daughter here?”
“But sir, the regulations—”
“Magic is ineffective in this building. What would I be capable of? Do I, a lone civil official, pose a problem to three magicians of the state?”
He was plenty intimidating as a civil official!
“Now that I’ve lost my wife, my daughter is my treasure. Would you be willing to take responsibility for it if she collapsed? I promise not to take one step away from this wall. Now, get on with it!”
He bent the rules for me by acting like an entitled parent. As my father was a count, our family was only in the middle of the ranks in terms of nobility, so it wasn’t his rank that they yielded to, but papa himself. It was a pitiful sight.
“R-Right this way, miss...”
Not only was the facilitator’s voice shaking, he was calling me “miss” now. We would never meet again, so I hoped he could forgive me.
I called out to Lou internally. He moved from my head to my shoulder and gave me a nod.
There was a square tablet on a small table in the center of the room. I proceeded to the table, and the magicians moved to form a triangle surrounding me.
“You may place your hands on the tablet now, miss.”
“Okay.”
I put my hands out apprehensively. Once I touched it, the tablet would detect my magic! What was Lou going to do?!
Just then, Lou hopped off my shoulder and onto the table. Then he swiped the stone tablet away with his right paw.
“Eh?!?!”
Crash!
The tablet flew away at high velocity, hit the wall, and shattered.
...He smacked it? A physical attack?!
All five of us in the room were left speechless as we tried to figure out how to react. Magician A, the oldest-looking of them, recovered first.
“M-Miss, did you touch the tablet just now?”
“No, it flew away when I tried to touch it...”
“I-I see... Please step back, miss. Bring out the spare tablet! Hurry!”
Magician B hastily brought in a new tablet and set it on the table. At that moment, Lou pushed it with his right paw again! Swipe! Even harder than before!
Smash!
Everyone fell silent.
There had been a lot of distance between me and the tablet this time, so they had no reason to suspect me.
“The tablet flew away... This is unheard of.”
“Do we have any more tablets?”
“Of course not! How could we have any more of such a valuable object?!”
It was valuable?! And we broke it into little splinters?! Twice, at that!
I staggered, and my father rushed over to me and picked me up in his arms.
“What do you think of this phenomenon, gentlemen?” my father asked.
It’s so cool-headed of him to make his enemies think!
“...This is beyond my understanding. All I can say for sure is that this has never happened before this young lady’s examination.”
Just looking at the broken remains of the tablets, it was clear that they couldn’t be repaired. Will we have to reimburse them? This is a problem...
“Father... The tablets... What do we do?”
Seeing tears in my eyes, my father immediately began projecting a threatening aura. Magicians A, B, and C simultaneously paled in fear.
“Sir! Your daughter is clearly not responsible for this! The second tablet in particular was well away from her. Magic does not work in this room. Some unknown power must have caused this...”
“And what would that be?” my father pressed in a low voice.
“This may be the work of a being beyond human understanding...”
You’re not wrong, Magician A!
“That must be it. Some power made both the tablet and magical power avoid me...” I muttered, looking at Lou sitting on the table. Papa squeezed me close to him.
“So be it. I will protect Serephione whether she has magic or not. We have no more business with this dangerous place. You may record Serephione as Magicless.”
“But sir, that would reflect badly on her as a noble lady!”
“I told you, I do not care. I will not let this happen again. You may do as you see fit. Agreed?”
“Y-Yes, sir...”
Seeing that the conversation was over, Lou climbed up onto my head while my father held me. My father lightly raised his right hand, and we quickly exited the magic examination room.
As soon as we were out of the room, I put up a wall of wind around us to soundproof our voices.
“Lou...I was expecting something like a never-before-seen magic trick.”
“It’s no use playing tricks on humans. Humans have plenty of replacements. We gotta break the irreplaceable tablets!”
“That may be true...but didn’t you have some more dramatic way of breaking them? I guess your options were limited since you couldn’t use magic, though.”
“That was plenty dramatic, wasn’t it? By the way, it’s not true that I couldn’t have used magic. The anti-magic effect in that room was loosened. Should I have broken the tablets with magic?”
“Huh?! The anti-magic effect was that loose?” I said, interpreting for Lou. “How did the magicians not notice? Do you think they were beginners?” I asked my father.
“No. Judging by their badges, one of them was a first-class magician, and the others were second class. They were at the top level in the kingdom.”
“Top level?! And they still couldn’t see Lou? Were you concealing yourself, Lou?”
“Hmm?”
“I mean, Enrique and Martha can see you, right? And lately, Matsuki the cook has been able to see you too... So why wouldn’t the experts be able to see you?”
My father smiled wryly. “Our household’s servants are actually all people of extraordinary talent. They have to be trained so they can protect us in an emergency, and each of them is probably well within the level of a military commander. As for Matsuki, well, he would see the dishes he’d lined up on the table floating into the air and disappearing and think he’d seen a ghost. For the past two years, he’s been hard at work studying magic so he’d finally be able to see Lou, and now his stress-related balding has gone away.”
Our gluttonous fluffball has been causing trouble out of my sight... Matsuki, I’ll buy you some seaweed on the way home!
So, not even professionals can see holy beasts. Just how OP is our household?
“The others in your household all have wavelengths similar to yours... Oh, it also helps that I lowered my guard to them.”
“Right... Father, shall we head home?”
“Yes, let’s get going.”
“I did my best, Sere, dad! Cake! Cake!”
My father grinned and signaled to Lou that he understood, then he went to call over our carriage that was waiting well away from us.
Lou and I gazed at the bright red setting sun as we stood around at the entranceway of the research center.
“Hey!”
I turned around at the sudden voice, and a boy in expensive-looking clothes with a sword at his hip was standing before me. He was clearly a member of the upper nobility. His build was slender, and his face was small; he looked to be about the same age as my brother. His curly blond hair was pushed back behind his ears, and he had handsome features, including a defined nasal bridge. There were so many beautiful people in this world, it was hard to live as an average person like me...
The boy’s clear gray eyes were...eyeing the top of my head suspiciously. Wait, the top of my head?!
Lou got down onto my shoulder and growled warily. I wasn’t certain he could see Lou, so I couldn’t make a move. I had to greet him like a normal girl passing by.
“Hello?”
“What’s that on your shoulder?”
He could see Lou. This was the first person outside our household that could see him. I’d been careless.
Lou was rather nervous as well. His beloved father had told him not to associate with humans other than those he’d contracted with, after all. Lou would most likely follow that rule and not hesitate to eliminate anyone who gave him a bad feeling. Lou was one of the four heavenly beasts; he didn’t care about human circumstances.
We couldn’t make a scene. I had to get this under control.
“What does it look like to you?” I stalled for time by answering his question with another question.
“...A tiger?”
“It’s not.”
“So, what is it? The aura I feel coming off it... It’s not just a normal being, is it?”
I said nothing.
“Answer me!”
Our family carriage finally entered my view. I was saved!
“This is...a very important friend of mine. I have to go now.”
I got into the carriage before the coachman could open the door. I didn’t want my father to come out because it would reveal my identity.
The carriage started moving immediately in response to my abnormal behavior and Lou’s unusually pointed aura.
“What’s wrong, Serephi?”
“Lou’s...been discovered.”
◇ ◇ ◇
The verdict of my magic exam was Magicless. Nobody questioned us about papa being in the exam room and pressuring the testers, and no one asked us about the poltergeist making the tablets fly away.
When it came down to it, our family wasn’t a ducal or marquisate family. We were mid-ranking nobility, and I was the plain daughter of that mid-ranking noble family. I wasn’t important enough to be watched closely. No nobles would bother to make a move on me, and noble society would leave me alone—as would the royal family, for that matter.
In the book, I’d been engaged to the second prince since the very beginning. The reason I, the daughter of a count, had been chosen as his fiancée in spite of the many higher-ranked ladies in my generation was probably because I swept the magic exam and got Advanced. Rumor had it that the second prince would be engaged in early summer to the daughter of a liberal marquis family.
I’d finally managed to deviate from the novel at least a bit.
1) I avoided enrolling in the magic academy.
2) I avoided getting engaged to the second prince.
It was a big success for me. It had been three years since I regained my memories; it was about time.
But that noble boy was still on my mind. Not only could he see Lou, he could sense that Lou was powerful too. He was a magic user to rival my brother.
When I told my father about how the boy looked and about our conversation, he said, “He must be related to either the Granzeus family or the royal family...”
Nobody else in our extended family was the same age as my brother, so that left the royal family. However, the royal family of Judore had a long history, and the family tree was quite large if you included the minor branches. Their genes were probably strong, given how powerful their magic was.
That said, the current royal family hadn’t contacted us, even though it would have been as simple as figuring out whose carriage Lou and I got on.
I searched my memories thoroughly, but that boy never appeared in the book; if he did, I would have known immediately. Naturally, he wasn’t the second prince either since the prince would have only been a year older than me—still a child.
A boy of around fifteen who was related to the royal family yet not a character in the book... These clues were like grasping at clouds...
In any case, I had to try to minimize contact with high-ranking nobles if I wanted to follow Lou’s rule. I was nervous about whether I could make it in this world like that, but my father actually seemed refreshed to have that clear guiding principle.
“I’d almost like to give up my position as Minister and go back to our domain.”
My brother didn’t really seem to care as long as our inner circle was secure. “Hm? I don’t really get networking. Why would you want to make it to the top of the social ladder? Status is nothing but a bother if you have your own strength, you know. Well, no matter how things turn out, the least I can do is give you and Lou a life of luxury, so feel free to take advantage of that.”
S-So manly! I’ll stick with you wherever you go, my brother!
Although I might have thought that, all students at the magic academy lived in dorms, so my brother was only able to come back to the mansion once a month according to the residence guidelines.
Whenever he was back, he would rigorously check my training progress, show me and Lou the magic he’d learned at school, and reveal our shortcomings. He must have been pounding his classmates into the dirt in class... He was merciless.
After dinner, he would sit me on his lap, read me the new books he’d brought back as gifts, present Lou with the newest snacks, and then his break would be over. I had no clue how he was doing at school. He never mentioned a single friend’s name. He was a loner! Not just that, but a loner who didn’t realize it himself...
Anyway, this all meant that I didn’t always have someone around to train me before I entered knight school.
Knight school was, at its core, based on raw skill. The entrance exams were held for eleven-year-olds, and there was both a paper test and a practical skills test. I thought I’d become pretty capable, but my skill set had become a bit lopsided. Why’d I train like an assassin?! Why’d I get so good with concealed weapons? Isn’t this going to be huge trouble? I have to be able to compete in a normal match!
My father used a short lance, but I couldn’t use a lance very well as a six-year-old because the hilt would drag on the ground. And all my brother would teach me when he came back on occasion was sneak attacks...
This meant...
“Serephiii!”
...a new character would enter my closed-off life—my grandmother! A new challenger appeared!
So, I do have an extended family, after all...