Enrollment Arc, Part I

by Tsutomu Sato

  There were some places using special standards such as the police force and the military, but in those cases you would be evaluated only as an officer or as a soldier, not as a magician.

  “…Anyway, may I clean the table up?”

  “Hm? Oh, yeah. I’ll help too. I can give you the rundown as we work.” She hastily rose. Maybe she was a more considerate person than she seemed.

  Though maybe Tatsuya, who had begun organizing the documents in front of him, was more impudent for still sitting down.

  Of course, the fact that feelings and results didn’t necessarily match up was just how the world worked. The speed at which they worked was the same, but for some reason, in contrast to Tatsuya steadily creating a space around his hands, he still couldn’t see a glimpse of the surface of the long desk in front of Mari.

  Tatsuya glanced up at her.

  Then he sighed a little.

  Mari gave up and stopped. “Sorry. No matter how hard I try, I’m just bad at this.”

  Tatsuya thought to himself that maybe the current state of the room was mostly her responsibility. He was adult enough not to say what he thought, however.

  “You really seem to know what you’re doing, though.”

  “With what?”

  “Filing papers. I thought you were just piling them up at random, but they’re all properly sorted and everything.”

  “…Sorry, could you not do that…?”

  Perhaps now becoming serious, Mari was glancing at him flipping through the piles of papers, about to lean herself on the desk and sit in the space he had cleared. It made her skirt hem nearly touch his arm. Her long and slender lower legs and calves were stretching from her skirt, which subtly hid her thighs. He may not have been able to see her skin through her leggings, but he could still see how they were shaped—and that was enough to be undesirable for his mental health.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  She didn’t sound sorry at all, but this, too, was something he didn’t need to point out. —If she had been doing it on purpose, it had obviously had the opposite effect, and as they say, silence is golden.

  Tatsuya silently moved his chair and got to work on the next area. He dug out a few book stands from the piles of papers and began to stand books on them. Both paper books and book stands were rare items in this day and age. Even more so if they happened to be grimoires.

  “The reason I scouted you—come to think of it, I explained most of it already, huh? Making punishments for attempted criminals more appropriate, and to repair our image toward Course 2 students.”

  “I remember, but for the image part, wouldn’t that have the opposite effect?” Finished with straightening up the books, he got to work on the terminals. “…Can I look at these?”

  His request for permission to look at the work-in-progress data on them was granted by an affirmative nod. He turned the hibernating terminals back on, then shut them down, left them in their closed states, and gathered them all into one place.

  “Why do you think so?”

  “We could never interfere in anything before now. If you were suddenly under the control of another underclassman who you thought was in the same situation, you wouldn’t think it was very funny.”

  He rose from his seat and started rummaging through a cabinet on the wall. As he piled the terminals on the empty shelf, he heard the irresponsible reply of “I guess that’s true.”

  “I think the other Course 1 students would welcome it, though. You’ve at least talked about it to your classmates, right?”

  “Well, I have, but…” After he finished lining up the terminals, he fished around in another cabinet. “I think it would cause twice as much animosity for them as it would welcoming.”

  He found what he was looking for. He stood up straight and turned his shoulders, taking off his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves.

  “Well, they’re gonna feel animosity. But they just enrolled a couple days ago. I don’t think they’ve been that poisoned by discriminatory thoughts yet.”

  “I wonder about that.” Tatsuya rummaged through the items inside the cabinet, then his hands came back out holding a CAD case. “I’ve already gotten one of those I won’t accept you declarations yesterday, after all.”

  He wrapped his exposed wrist in a grounding wristband and reached out for the big clump of CADs.

  “You carry something like that around? …Are you talking about Morisaki?”

  “It’s actually pretty handy… Do you know about him?”

  “He’s gonna be part of the committee—he’s the teachers’ recommendation.”

  “Wha—?”

  The strength drained from his hands checking the CADs’ status. He hastily grabbed it back up before it fell back down on the desk.

  “Huh, I guess even you get surprised.”

  “Well, yes!” Mari began to grin, and Tatsuya answered her with a sigh. He wished she’d stop with this weird sense of rivalry.

  “He caused an issue yesterday, so I can get them to repeal their recommendation. I actually planned to do that, but you’re not unrelated to the incident, either.”

  “I am a concerned party.”

  “Yeah. I scouted someone who claims to have been involved, so it would be hard to refuse him.”

  “Why not just not let either of us in?”

  “Do you not want to?”

  Tatsuya stopped working again at the sudden, straightforward question.

  For now, he placed the CAD in his hands inside the case, then looked up. Mari was sitting up against the desk, looking down at him. She wasn’t smiling. She was giving him a piercing, eyes-half-closed stare.

  “…In all honesty, I think it’ll be a pain.”

  “Hmph… And?”

  “It’ll be a pain, but I also don’t think I can withdraw at this point.”

  A mean-spirited, complacent smile rose to Mari’s face again. Its crookedness brought her sharp beauty 20 percent higher.

  “You have things tough, too, don’t you…?”

  “And you’re pretty twisted, too.”

  Unfortunately, Tatsuya had to admit that she had him there.

  “…This is the disciplinary committee headquarters, right?”

  That was the first thing out of Mayumi’s mouth when she came down the stairs.

  “How’s that for a greeting?”

  “I mean, what happened, Mari? No matter how much Rin warns you, no matter how much Ah-chan pleads with you, you’ve never tried to clean up before!”

  “I will firmly oppose such baseless slander, Mayumi! It wasn’t that I never tried to; it’s that I never actually cleaned it!”

  “For a girl, that seems even more troubling.” Mayumi gave her a narrow-eyed, slanted glare, and Mari immediately turned her face away.

  “It doesn’t really matter… But yes, that’s how it is.”

  After setting eyes on Tatsuya, who was peering into the maintenance hatch of a fixed terminal, Mayumi nodded, convinced.

  “So he’s making himself useful right away, then.”

  “Well, that should do it,” he answered with his back still to them. He shut the hatch and turned around. “Chairwoman, my inspection is finished. I swapped out a few damaged-looking parts, so you shouldn’t have any further issues.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Mari nodded, relaxed, but it somehow looked like there was a bit of sweat forming around her temple.

  A cold sweat.

  “I see… Since he called you Chairwoman, you must have successfully recruited him,” said Mayumi in a carefree voice, bursting with understanding and acceptance. She put on her own malicious smile.

  Tatsuya answered without looking at her. “I don’t really think I had any right to refuse in the first place…”

  Mayumi didn’t seem to appreciate the attitude. She put one hand on her hip, then stuck her other index finger out at him, puffed out a cheek, and glared at him with sulking eyes. As far as he could tell, the whole thing was a huge act. She argued, “Tatsuya
, I’m like your big sister here. Don’t you think you should treat me a little more nicely?”

  …Tatsuya immediately wanted to tell her that he had no big sister. He got the feeling saying so would only make his situation worse, so he refrained. She was so stereotypical in everything she did that it wasn’t creative at all.

  Tatsuya secretly thought to himself that she should be the one treating him a little more respectfully.

  He had gotten this impression drifting through the air this whole time…but now, for some reason, it was something he didn’t feel like ignoring.

  “President, this is just to make sure, but there’s something I want to know.”

  “Hm? What is it?”

  “We never met each other before the day of the entrance ceremony, right?” Tatsuya asked, filled with an intent of Aren’t you acting overfamiliar with me? Mayumi’s eyes widened.

  However, they rapidly returned to their former size, and as they narrowed further, her smile, which could only be described as “wicked,” covered her alluring face.

  Tatsuya realized he had just made an extremely poor decision.

  He remembered when Mari made the same sort of smile. I see—birds of a feather really do flock together, he thought, trying to escape reality.

  “I see, I see how it is… Heh-heh-heh-heh…”

  The word impish described her smile to a tee.

  “Tatsuya, you think you actually met me before that, do you? That our meeting on the day of the entrance ceremony was fate!”

  “No, umm, President?”

  What on earth was she so excited about?

  “Maybe we met each other far in the past. Two people, pulled apart by fate, once again brought together by it!”

  If she really was enraptured by this idea, it would just make her a very dangerous person. But the part where she was making sure he could tell she was putting on a conscious act made her even worse.

  “…Unfortunately, though, that was definitely our first meeting.”

  “…I thought as much.”

  “Mm! Did you feel like it was destiny? Did you?”

  She made fists in front of her chest and started moving toward him, looking up at his face. She was excited. Oh, how sly she was. And it suited her so well… She was truly wicked.

  “…I’m sorry. Why are you having so much fun?” He answered her question with another, but still didn’t receive an answer.

  She only continued to look at him, filled with hopefulness. She’s a sadist, noted Tatsuya to himself.

  Anyway, he probably needed to answer her. Tatsuya sighed, almost as if breathing out smoke, and answered after a moment. “…If this is fate, then it’s not destiny—it’s doom, for sure.”

  His answer made Mayumi’s face cloud over and she turned away. A lonely murmur of “Oh…” reached Tatsuya’s ears. Her form, seen from behind, radiated sorrow.

  Tatsuya was aware he had said something pretty brutal. He had said it because he’d judged Mayumi to be entirely fooling around. But if even a little bit of how she was acting was real, he decided he needed to apologize.

  However. His sense of guilt didn’t last very long—whether fortunately or unfortunately. In this case, him not knowing immediately what to do had borne fruit.

  “…Damn.”

  Something leaked from her mouth as if she had been outlasted, her shoulders drooping in dejection.

  This time it was Tatsuya’s turn to widen his eyes. It was very faint, but it was certainly not a classy thing to say—did she just swear?

  “Umm, President?”

  “Yes, what is it?” When she turned back around, her face had the classy smile that had charmed all of the new male students.

  “…I feel like I’m beginning to understand you better.”

  In front of the exhausted Tatsuya, Mayumi had removed her false mask and showed him her true face.

  In other words, her wicked smile.

  “Let’s stop with the jokes, shall we? Tatsuya doesn’t seem to take well to it.” Mayumi, without a modicum of guilt, declared everything had been a joke.

  “It’s not gonna go like how it did with Hattori, Mayumi. Doesn’t seem like your charms work on him,” said Mari teasingly, just when it counted.

  Mayumi couldn’t let that one pass. She made a testy face and responded, “Please, don’t say anything so scandalous. It makes me sound like I’m toying with any underclassman I can get my hands on.”

  Regretting having asked a careless question, Tatsuya began trying to put things back together. If these two poisoned him any further, it would be his own faults on display this time. “Umm, well. What I wanted to ask was—”

  “Mayumi having a different attitude toward you is a sign she approves of you, Tatsuya. She probably felt that the two of you have something in common. This girl feigns innocence all the time. She can’t show her true colors except to people she approves of.” Mari’s expression suddenly became serious, and Tatsuya felt a sense of imbalance in it.

  “Don’t trust anything Mari says, Tatsuya! But I guess it’s true that I approve of you. You don’t really feel like a stranger. Maybe I’m actually the one who felt like it was destiny.”

  You couldn’t hate that face, so mischievous she might have stuck out her tongue. It threw off his pace even more.

  Seems I don’t have much of a chance of winning against these two head-on, he thought.

  Mayumi had come downstairs to tell them that she’d be closing up the student council room for the day. And she had used the opportunity to see how Tatsuya was doing, but that ending up being the main purpose of her coming down here probably wasn’t his imagination.

  They had been busy with all sorts of things right after the entrance ceremony, and they’d reached a place where they could pause.

  “Okay, then I’ll see you up there!” Mayumi waved her hand and went back up to the student council room.

  Starting tomorrow, things would get noisy because of the contest every club would participate in once to recruit new club members. Since the disciplinary committee would start having more to do because of it, even Tatsuya and Mari had just been talking about calling it quits for the day.

  Modern information systems didn’t require the time to start up and shut down like they used to. You just switched it off—and then you could leave it lying on the floor for months without anything happening to it. Even if you forgot to hit the switch, it would automatically go into hibernation. He had already completely and thoroughly organized them, so now all he had to do was set up their security features.

  But just then, with perfect timing—or maybe bad timing—two male students entered the disciplinary committee headquarters.

  “G’morning!”

  “Good morning!”

  The brisk, assertive voices rang throughout the room.

  “Whoa, big sis, you were here?”

  Where am I and what time period is this? thought Tatsuya.

  The short-haired guy, who wasn’t very tall but had an awfully rugged build—the sort a headband would make sense on—had called someone Ane-san as though they were very accustomed to doing so.

  They must be talking about Watanabe… He looked at the person in question, and she looked subtly embarrassed. He felt an out-of-place relief at the fact that she had normal sensitivities, slight though they may have been.

  “Chairwoman, we have completed our patrols for the day! No arrests were made!”

  The other one had a relatively normal appearance and a relatively normal way of speaking, but his posture was excessively proper.

  His report, delivered while standing at attention, gave him the air of a soldier, or police officer, or perhaps a kid who hadn’t grown out of his energetic phase.

  “…Could you have cleaned up the room, big sis?”

  The first guy looked around the completely changed state of the room in suspicion and began to walk toward the dumbfounded Tatsuya. He didn’t look that heavy, but strangely, the term lumbering would have
fit his gait.

  As soon as he saw Mari nonchalantly stand in his way—

  “Ow!”

  Whap!

  There was a satisfying noise, and the guy was crouching on the floor holding his head.

  In Mari’s hand was a firmly rolled-up notebook that she had taken out at some point.

  Where on earth had she gotten it from?

  “Don’t call me ‘big sis’! How many times must I tell you before you understand?! Is your head just a decoration, Koutarou?!” shouted Mari angrily at the male student, now cradling his head, completely ignorant of Tatsuya’s questions.

  “Please, stop hitting me like that, Bi—er, Chairwoman. By the way, who is he? A new recruit?” grumbled the male student named Koutarou without seeming like he was in very much pain. He hastily changed the title he was using when she jabbed the notebook in his face with lightning speed.

  Mari’s shoulders drooped before the face of Koutarou stiffened in nervousness, and she sighed. “Yes, he’s a new recruit. Tatsuya Shiba, from 1-E. He’s here as the student council’s nominee.”

  “Huh… You’re a crestless?” Koutarou looked in fascination at Tatsuya’s blazer and then took a good look at his figure.

  “Tatsumi, that expression borders on prohibited terms! I think you should call him a Course 2 student in this case!” Though Koutarou seemed to be appraising Tatsuya, the other male student didn’t try to caution his attitude itself.

  “You know, he’ll pull the rug out from under you if you underestimate him. This is just between us, but Hattori just came back from getting the rug pulled out from under him.” But Mari told them the truth with a grin, like she was teasing them, and their expression immediately grew more serious.