There Is No Hidden Villain in This Novel Chapter 58

Ding dong ding dong.

The exam papers begin to be distributed.

From now on, no one should open their mouths. Everyone knows this fact. Their palms are damp with tension, but the sound of the paper turning is crisp. Every page is dry and parched. The grayish paper made from recycled material seems pale, but it is followed by a yellowish paper that has a warmth far from paleness. It is an OMR card. A set with a sign pen engraved with a spell. It calculates the score by matching the test-taker and the correct answers one-to-one.

Cassis de Millang recalled his memories from his current life and raised his pencil lead over the exam paper.

‘A pace of 30 seconds per question…’

In his third year of high school, his teacher gave many students helpful tips for the college entrance exam. Among them was the advice to eat less than usual to avoid post-meal drowsiness and take the exam in a slightly hungry state, but he had called Jung Ian over separately and said this: I’m begging you, please eat a hearty meal before you go. He still hasn’t forgotten that memory. So, he ate two pieces of a sandwich before coming.

The magic department’s exam combines calculation and memorization. The interval between quickly scanning the passages, underlining key words and concepts, solving the problem, and moving on to the next was as natural and fast as flowing water. If you want to get a good grade, study. His elegant and lofty posture seemed to be reciting a sound argument.

However, some humans want to be hippos. Humans who wouldn’t care if they could just get good grades, even if it meant rolling around in muddy water…

There were those who planned to drop the magic exam and cheat on all the questions. There were also those who intended to steal a glance only at the parts they couldn’t solve.

It didn’t matter what desires they harbored.

The important thing was the fact that magic had been cast by someone during class.

“…”

Ryuseong, who was calculating formulas with his pencil held tightly, thought, So it finally begins.

He was used to it. It wasn’t common for first-year students to do this already, but starting around the second year, the great cheating operation was something that naturally occurred.

—The Great Cheating Operation.

In fact, one could even say cheating is a tradition at Arae-a. If you asked what kind of tradition this is, he would have nothing to say, but Ryuseong knew for what dog-like reasons the professors had implicitly legalized this sort of thing. For starters, it was because the first principal was quite the character.

The first principal is said to have thought it was absurd from the start that the test to nurture promising prospects to become hunters was not a practical one. His point was, if you determine success or failure based on how well someone writes letters on a piece of paper, when do you determine whether they can survive against the Black Fog?

So, in the first generation, they went through an even more incredible curriculum, but…

‘…That was crossing the line.’

As the concept of human rights came to the fore with the changing times, the harsh discipline of the first generation also weakened.

‘This won’t do! We must follow the dying wish of our first principal…!’

‘No matter how you put it, wouldn’t it be problematic to drop a child off a cliff?’

So, from the 20th century, Arae-a Academy decided to accept only adults. This was because the academy had created a field that was excessively harsh to expose to adolescents.

A failing grade means expulsion. Acceleration of the competitive structure. Public disclosure of grades. It’s okay to do anything to achieve your goal… The cut-off age of twenty was decided upon by a consensus that it was inappropriate for adolescents to experience such a sadistic flow.

Of course, it’s not like adults endure harsh environments well either, so it’s a situation overflowing not only with expellees but also with voluntary dropouts…

‘In the first place, no one cares because Arae-a doesn’t want many graduates.’

If I put it like this, it sounds like a school full of personality-trash, but surprisingly, it’s not.

The professors want the cadets to survive. That is all they wish for. Arae-a wants people who can survive, more than people who are fair and moral.

‘Because we are living in a world where one can become a hero just by returning alive…’

The Black Fog and monsters are occupying human lands, and the named ones are mimicking humans, aiming for our vital spots at every moment. In recent times, thanks to the hunters successfully blocking the emergence of the Black Fog, the illusion of a prosperous era has occupied people’s minds, but the veteran hunters knew. ‘Those damn bastards are just biding their time.’ Their instincts were telling them. ‘A big one is coming…’

So, if you’re going to have the profession of a hunter, you can’t break down over something like this.

That profession is harsher and more cruel.

That’s what the professors were saying.

‘…I think they’re right.’

Ryuseong noticed his knuckles had turned white without him realizing and relaxed his fist.

‘Because it means that a hunter who can’t even endure this much can die at any moment.’

The reason Arae-a’s professors put the cadets through the wringer was not because they wanted them to be expelled.

It was simply because they wanted them to survive until the end.

‘Although I don’t know what that has to do with cheating.’

Well, it is funny to make them sit still and write neatly when testing their qualifications to become hunters. Ryuseong, who let out a quiet snort, swished the end of his ballpoint pen to form a hemispherical energy barrier around himself. From now on, no one would be able to peek at his exam paper.

Judging by the gasp from behind, it seemed there was a guy who tried to steal a look at his paper, but it won’t work.

However, the puzzling one is Cassis de Millang.

There’s no way he couldn’t have put up an energy barrier, yet he is just sitting there solving problems, not taking any countermeasures whatsoever.

‘What is he thinking this time?’

As people live, they come to harbor various desires. They become the driving force that makes them break promises or keep them. Unfortunately, in this case, it provided the impetus to break a promise.

That is, Ryuseong hid his exam paper.

‘Ah! How resourceful of him!’

That’s not a compliment. It’s an outburst of anger at him for noticing my carefully cast magic so quickly and hiding his paper.

A, who was attempting to cheat, had intended to drop the magic exam from the very beginning.

A, who was born and bred for martial arts, hated Arae-a’s policy of making everyone take all subjects as if they were integrating liberal arts and sciences.

Why on earth does a martial artist need to know about magic?

Of course, he understood the point that knowing a lot of knowledge allows for better responses, but his brain couldn’t accept it. It demanded he build a wall against the subject, saying there was no way he could study magic as well.

He had been thinking it was a relief that there was a spell that printed different exam questions for each selected department when student information was entered, so Class 1 could take the exam all together without being divided by elective subjects. This was because he had expected that since Class 1 was the honors class, the exam papers he could steal from would be of a high level.

The problem was the students’ level.

‘I-is this what they call birds of a feather flock together?!’

Everyone was doing horribly on the exam.

‘Wha-what the hell, the answers are all different?’

For the first question alone, all the numbers were evenly distributed. It seemed like there wasn’t a single student who had picked the correct answer. Five people chose 1, five people chose 2, five people chose 3, five people chose 4, and five also… no, guys. Did you study properly? Is this really the level of Class 1?!

However, in the classes other than Class 1, they were bursting into tears without even being able to try to solve it.

The exam was just ridiculously difficult.

But this was the first exam they were taking since admission. A, who had no way of knowing the average level of difficulty, cursed Ryuseong inwardly after failing to peek at his paper, and decided to finally commit the forbidden act…

‘Sea squirt! Sea anemone! Sea cucumber!’

B was in a similar state of mind. He had a relaxed attitude, thinking he would try to cheat if he came across a problem he didn’t know while solving, but his mind went blank upon seeing the first question. He wondered if the professors were playing a prank on us.

So he used magic. As a higher-level magic, more advanced than the curriculum, was cast, the professor thought, You should have studied with that much dedication, but regardless, B, who was sharing a vision that aimed from top to bottom like an eagle’s eye, felt his head throb just like someone before him. What the hell, there wasn’t a single person solving it properly. One student was already writing a letter to the professor. Going on and on, even artificially creating tear stains…

So B, too, committed the forbidden act.

He decided to steal a look at Cassis de Millang’s exam paper.

‘S-surely he wouldn’t kill me, would he?’

Still, he didn’t copy everything. He conscientiously stole just a few, gently. Only about 30 out of the 34 questions.

‘Haha! Ha…’

C, thinking that cheating was still not right no matter what, tore at his hair and agonized before bubbling in a straight line.

D pressed a ballpoint pen into his thigh, enduring the desire to cheat. Honestly, when a question that was shitty enough to make him want to cry came up, he wanted to steal a look, but he just let the tears flow, wiped them away, and that was that.

E, when he decided he couldn’t solve it, rolled his ballpoint pen like rolling dice. I will go with the score given by the heavens.

F was the same. He was praying to the World Tree, offering a sacrifice, to let him pick the right answers.

And then, ding dong ding dong.

When the exam was over and the OMR cards were collected, the students were anxious to look at each other’s papers to at least do a preliminary grading. As those who had been silent all opened their mouths at once, a clamor like a marketplace floor boiled up. Therefore, it was natural that the cadets’ pleas flocked to Cassis de Millang, who had studied the most.

“Ca-can you show us your exam paper? Sir de Millang, please…”

At that, Cassis de Millang smiled awkwardly, unlike himself.

“Um, I don’t think it’ll be of any use.”

“Just show it to us, and we’ll just do a preliminary grading and…!”

“I only wrote wrong answers on the exam paper. I marked the correct answers only on the OMR card.”

Huh?

Suddenly, the crowns of two people’s heads began to tremble as if struck by lightning. At that sight, the remaining four began to look back and forth between them and Cassis de Millang, but…

“I made sure to check only the options that were guaranteed to be wrong, no matter what, so it might be helpful when checking for incorrect problems, perhaps…?”

Cassis de Millang just smiled brightly.