Ch 64: Realization
Lucien sat in his office, his back pressed against the chair, right leg crossed over the left, flipping through Bianca's records. His attendant Connor had retrieved all of her files from the academy, and Lucien had since instructed him to dig deeper, to bring back details that the academy's records simply did not cover. The documents Connor had initially returned painted only the surface of the girl's life, detailing her student’s life mostly: her rank, her grades, her tenure as vice president, and little else. So Connor had been dismissed once more to gather something more substantial.
Lucien rapidly flipped through the pages before setting the summarized booklet down onto the desk. He had not gained much from it beyond the fact that the girl had performed admirably across all subjects, carried out her vice presidential duties with diligence, and had rarely skipped classes save for a handful of occasions.
Bianca’s affinity was earth, and her rank sat at Master [Upper], which was, by any measure, quite remarkable. Earth affinity itself was not particularly rare, but her rank was another matter entirely. Reaching Master [Upper] placed her firmly among the top rankers of her class, and that was no small feat.
It had to be noted that the story's focus had always been on 1-S, the class where the protagonist Mark studied, and it was only natural that his class would be dense with students of exceptional potential. Yet Bianca's class, 2-S, was different from what one might expect in most novels of this kind. Unlike those stories where every class outside the protagonist's was little more than a collection of mediocre students waiting to be humiliated in inter-class duels, Bianca's class held a respectable number of genuinely talented individuals.
A few, Bianca included, were truly exceptional. They were outnumbered by the talent concentrated in 1-S, certainly, but the gap was nowhere near the humiliating chasm one might find in other stories. This world, Lucien had come to understand, did not follow that particular cliché. If an inter-class duel were to happen in the future, it would be a genuinely tight contest rather than a foregone conclusion.
Lucien picked the record book back up and slid it into the desk drawer, closing it shut. He had already received two knocks from notable figures of the academy today, and given the way this type of world seemed to operate, a third felt less like a possibility and more like something that would happen. Even though the world was real, he was increasingly certain of that, as it still appeared to follow certain narratives of fantasy stories, at least to some degree. He had yet to fully confirm his theory, but nonetheless he was sure that the story would not divert too much from the clichés that other stories followed.
With the drawer closed, Lucien leaned back in his chair and let his eyes fall shut for a moment before turning his head toward the window. The sky had begun to shift into deep shades of orange and gold, the sign of marking the day as evening as the sun was dipping toward the horizon. The day had so far passed quietly after sending Mark away.
Lucien had mostly spent the rest of time doing light exercises, keeping his body loose and his muscles engaged. After that, he had been on the verge of heading over to check on Melissa regarding which elective classes she was selecting when Connor had returned with Bianca's files. That had postponed his plans, and after spending time with the records only to find them lacking, he had sent Connor out once more for a more thorough account of the girl's life and household circumstances. And so the afternoon had slipped away without much of the ceremony and he had mostly gone with the flow of the events.
Lucien felt there was a strange serenity drifting through the air as he was staring out at the bleeding sky, Lucien found himself marveling quietly at how beautiful this world was, in spite of the miasma beasts rampaging through the strongholds and whatever calamity was lurking somewhere in the future, waiting to swallow the world whole.
Lucien would need to grow stronger to keep this world peaceful. He was inching toward advancing into Sky [Upper] rank, but he had hit a bottleneck recently, and his progress had slowed to something resembling the crawl of a snail.
Deciding there was little else to be done at the moment, he was just about to open his status window and look at the shop when the door to his office was knocked again, making it three times in a single day, exactly as he had anticipated. First could be counted as coincidence, but second time meant that third was not far off.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Lucien exhaled slowly through his nose and drew his gaze away from the window, straightening in his chair until he sat properly aligned with the desk.
"Come in," he called out in an even tone. "The door is not locked, just turn the knob."
The knob turned with a slow, careful motion, and with a soft click, the door swung open. A girl stepped inside, easing the door shut behind her with the same cautious deliberateness. She did not move further into the room. Instead she remained standing with her back resting lightly against the door, her head bowed, her posture carrying the particular tension of someone who was not entirely sure why she had walked in at all.
"Is there something you need, Student Judy?" Lucien asked, studying the green-haired girl with calm, steady eyes.
Judy had her hands clasped together in front of her, fingers loosely interlocked, eyes directed downward at the floor. Then, slowly, she lifted her head, and her green eyes met Lucien's silver ones. She looked as though she had come out of some fairy tale. Her long, flowing green hair framed a face of porcelain white, flawless and unmarked, and her eyes matched her hair in their deep, vivid hue. Her figure was slender yet carried a certain regality that spoke of disciplined training.
In Lucien’s previous world, she would have appeared in a beauty magazine without a second thought. And to prove that, she was one of the academy's beauties, and would no doubt have long since been bound into some arranged marriage with a high-ranking noble, had it not been for the fact of her status as heir to a family fallen from grace, stripped down from the rank of count all the way to baron.
Suddenly, something clicked in Lucien’s mind as if he had just received an enlightenment.
The first girl, Bianca, had come from a family that had lost its nobility entirely. The second who had visited today was a commoner who had lost his family. And the third, now standing before him, came from a fallen noble house that had barely managed to cling to the lowest rank of the nobility. He paused, turning the observation over in his mind. Was he somehow drawing in the heaven's chosen today? Those who had fallen from grace, or had been born with nothing, only for the heavens to have already carved out a grand fate for them in secret, as though the suffering of their past was nothing more than the universe clearing away bad karma before drowning them in gold and glory. Lucien did not doubt it in the slightest. Mark and Judy were, quite literally, the main characters of this story. And Bianca's true identity still remained shrouded for the time being.
"I have something I wish to ask of you, Professor." Judy spoke at last, pulling Lucien out of his clichéd spiral of thoughts. "I hope you will not refuse." Her voice softened at the end, trailing off with a quiet uncertainty she clearly had not meant to let show.
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