I looked at the professor, who, despite everything that had happened, was still hovering in front of the blackboard like a sack of barley left on consignment. How could a professor be so utterly oblivious to the freezing tension in the room? Well, based on what I looked up earlier, he comes from a commoner background.
After checking the professors’ careers through my roommate, I became even more certain. Not a single one of them was above the 5th-circle. They seemed to be mostly composed of people with weak backing. Perhaps even the professor himself had been overwhelmed by the presence of those three. Those b*stards… How dare they?
…Even so, after diligently attending the class, I headed back to the fourth floor to hunt those little punks who had disappeared, leaving behind my roommate, who pleaded with me not to go past the third floor.
After asking around, I eventually found the laboratory belonging to those three little punks from earlier. Standing in front of the most antique-looking door on the fourth floor, I witnessed the crowd before me part like the Red Sea.
“Oh my, if it isn’t moneybags.”
“…What? Moneybags?”
“Because you’re Gold, Silver, and Bronze. You’re moneybags!”
Their names really did make them sound like some useless trio of extras.
Perhaps they realized I was thinking that. Gold, the leader of the three, curled up the corner of his mouth and sneered. “Ha, what a boring joke.”
“…”
“Why are you here?”
“I came because I have something I’m curious about.”
“What are you curious about?”
“Well, when you experimented on me earlier, you checked my mana!”
Yes, it had been extremely unpleasant.
“…How did you… No.”
How could I not have noticed? They had provoked me so blatantly.
I blinked as I looked at them. “I saw what was in Sir Bronze’s pocket earlier! You were using quite a valuable item, weren’t you?”
“…”
“Ha! What’s wrong with measuring the amount of mana a test subject possesses?”
Wow, so that’s how you’re going to play it?
“We usually call that ‘rude.’”
When I smiled sweetly, Bronze looked at me and gave me a remarkably shameless grin.
“Being rude to someone like you?”
“You know, you’re truly perfect 1st-circle. Stupidly so, that is.”
The three of them kept laughing loudly and mocking me. But Bronze, the one who had been on the receiving end of my retaliation, still had a somewhat uneasy expression.
“I see.” I smiled brightly at them. “Well, I suppose that can happen.”
No, it absolutely doesn’t.
But after seeing their strange behavior and the tool they used to measure mana capacity, I had gotten a clue. Furthermore, despite everyone making such a fuss about the fourth floor, no one paid the slightest attention to us.
Wow, the pieces of the puzzle are roughly falling into place.
Yep, I now understand very, very well how this situation is unfolding. All that remained was to play with those tails for a while before grabbing the body.
* * *
Through my roommate, I heard all sorts of things about Gold, Silver, and Bronze.
“Gold, Silver, and Bronze were all originally 1st-circle mages.”
“They were 1st-circle?”
They looked down on the 1st-circle mages so much, yet they themselves had actually been 1st-circle mages. But my roommate’s next words carried a rather suspicious implication.
“They kept getting stronger until they became stronger than the professors.”
“Ah…”
“Well, I suppose that can happen.”
I nodded vaguely, but in reality, ordinary mages couldn’t grow that easily. That’s precisely why archmages are so revered.
“The noble lord sponsoring the three of them claimed they were rare mages with ‘growth potential.’”
Ah, here comes that sense of deja vu again.
I raised the corners of my mouth. “There’s something I’m curious about. Did their sudden growth happen after they started conducting experiments under the guise of using ‘test subjects’?”
“Huh?” My roommate’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”
Well, it was obvious. I slowly began piecing the clues together.
“Actually, they told the other students that if they want to grow like them, they should flatter them.” My roommate hesitated before continuing.
“Oh…”
“They took all the research achievements too. I don’t know if they were destroyed, but after taking them, they completely wiped their hands clean.”
Wow, so those b*stards even took my precious ‘time travel’ research results. Before I catch the mastermind, I’ll definitely have to beat up the tails first.
As I was seriously thinking this to myself, my roommate whispered in a small, worried voice. “But Bella, you should be careful, too. Everyone is afraid of them.”
“…”
“Because no one knows how strong they’ll become, or how far they’ll go.”
“Ah…”
Now I finally understood. That was why no one could report them to the tower master, even when they ran wild like wild horses. They were mages who had already surpassed the 3rd-circle and were potentially reaching the 4th or 5th circle, or ever higher. They weren’t just currently strong, but bound to become even stronger in the future. Nobody wanted to get on the bad side of people like that, so everyone simply bowed low.
Just then, my roommate spoke self-deprecatingly. “Honestly, if I cater to them…”
“Yeah.”
“I wondered if I could become a little stronger too…”
I recalled the time when I lived like a ‘female lead in a regret novel.’ Did I have such a pained expression back then too? And so, for some reason, I wanted to say something serious to this roommate of mine. “You can become strong enough, too. Maybe not in the way those people do it, though.”
“Do you think so?”
Effort does not necessarily guarantee success. However, people who work hard while walking the proper path ultimately make it safely to the finish line of the race called life. Today, I did not bother telling her that obvious truth. But the time would come when I would let her know that she, too, could grow.
* * *
Meanwhile, at the same time, Gold, Silver, and Bronze were looking at one another in their laboratory.
“What on earth is that Bella girl? Did you do a background check?”
“Yeah, she’s just an ordinary 1st-circle mage from a commoner background.”
They were in the middle of completing the grand experimental task the noble sponsoring them had assigned. It was an operation carried out while deceiving the entire Magic Tower of Desert, which was why they were bullying other mages like thugs. But there was a problem. Bella was far more tenacious than they had expected!
“Why isn’t she leaving?”
“This new student is way too stubborn…”
But there was something more important. They recalled Bella’s strange behavior during class.
“No matter how much I think about it, it’s strange. She really is 1st-circle, right?”
“Yeah. She is.”
“Then how on earth did she do that?”
Silver spoke casually. “Maybe she wore protective gear without us knowing.”
“…That, that could be possible. But what that damn woman said to me…!” Bronze vigorously ruffled his bronze-colored hair. “Could she be a spy who entered the magic tower while hiding her true power?”
“Ah, no way.”
“Sounds like you’re imagining things too much.” Silver spoke as though it were nothing important. “Even if that’s the case, she won’t last long. Starting tomorrow, we’ll harass her even more and drive her out.”
But Bronze, who had properly suffered at Bella’s hands during the ‘test subject class,’ felt differently. “But, no matter how much I think about it, she’s suspicious. Back then when I bul… I mean, during the experiment class.”
“Ah, shut up. We just received word from Count Melandorf!”
At those words, Bronze, the weakest of the three, immediately clamped his mouth shut.
Gold went out onto the balcony of the magic tower dormitory and talked to himself for quite some time. Then he returned with a broad grin on his face.
“What did he say?”
“So? About what?”
“This time…”
“Yeah.”
“He said if we successfully pulled off this job he requested…” Gold muttered with an expression of unprecedented emotion. “He promised to hire us as mages for the Kalinos family!”
The Kalinos family…!
No matter how hideous their personalities were, resembling back-alley thugs, the trio was fundamentally mages. Respecting Duchess Giselle Kalinos, who became an archmage by carrying on her family’s lineage, was a basic requirement for all mages!
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