How to Survive as the Academy Student Council President

"An unexpected outcome?"
At Kiriel’s question, Isley slowly nodded.
"Yes. Quite interesting."
"What is it, what is it!"
Eyes sparkling, Kiriel sprang up from her seat and shouted to Isley.
It seemed Kiriel thought the “unexpected outcome” he mentioned referred to herself.
I held back a laugh at the sight.
When Kiriel hurried him for an answer, Isley elaborated.
"Someone unexpected achieved a considerable result. Judging by their usual grades, this is a remarkable improvement. Worthy of praise."
"!"
At Isley’s words, a bright smile blossomed on Kiriel’s face.
Convinced he meant her, Kiriel looked down at me and grinned.
Heheh—looking down like that was pretty irritating.
It was a dream that would soon be broken anyway, so let her be mistaken all she wanted.
"Ahem. Then, Professor Isley, may I hear my score?"
Striking a pose for no reason, Kiriel asked to be told her score.
Isley adjusted his glasses as he looked at her.
"May I announce it here?"
"Yes, yep!"
Brimming with expectation, Kiriel listened as Isley revealed her score.
"Seventeen points. That’s five points higher than last time. Congratulations. Keep at it."
"Uh, y-yes… thank you."
Kiriel’s expression went blank.
Scratching her cheek for a moment, she asked Isley:
"But, Professor, for how you put it, that doesn’t sound like such a big jump."
"Naturally. The ‘unexpected outcome’ I mentioned was referring to Mr. Loen."
Kiriel’s face instantly soured like she’d bitten into dung.
Isley turned his gaze to me and offered congratulations.
"Congratulations, Mr. Loen. You must have studied Spirit Studies quite hard. I thought you were busy with the Territorial War."
"Thank you, Professor."
I returned the thanks calmly.
"How many points… what did Loen get?"
Zoning out for a moment, Kiriel then asked about my score.
Isley sought my consent.
"May I reveal it, Mr. Loen?"
"Yes, I don’t mind."
When I nodded, Isley announced my test score.
"Eighty points. Aside from material we haven’t covered yet, you answered most of it correctly. Quite the proficiency."
Eighty points. A somewhat ambiguous score. Honestly, if I wanted, I could have gotten a hundred.
Most of the problems were things I already knew; and even if I didn’t, I could have used the System Encyclopedia to get them all right.
But suddenly scoring a perfect hundred would only draw needless suspicion.
Of course… given Loen’s usual grades, eighty was an eye-popping leap, but this much was the bare minimum to secure an A in Spirit Studies, so I moderated it.
Once my score was out, Kiriel slammed her desk and shouted at me.
"That’s impossible! What trick did you pull? The whole academy knows you’re bad at studying!"
"That’s a bit harsh. I studied hard. That’s all."
"Hey! As if studying hard makes that happen!"
Other students sent me looks of agreement at her outcry.
I watched their reactions and nodded inwardly.
'…They’re not wrong.'
A guy who always scraped the bottom suddenly leaping into the upper-middle ranks—hard to believe.
So what.
Folding my arms, I spoke in a lofty tone.
"It works for me. I wasn’t unable to study—I just didn’t."
"Yeah right. Professor, didn’t Loen cheat?"
Kiriel’s accusation.
Isley adjusted his glasses again and answered in a composed voice.
"My mana permeates this lecture hall. So long as the spirits are watching, cheating is impossible. And such speculation is extremely discourteous to Mr. Loen, Miss Kiriel."
"U… ugh."
Realizing she was out of line, Kiriel flinched and lowered her head.
After calming her, Isley turned back to me with more praise.
"Come to think of it, I’ve heard you’ve also done well recently in Intermediate Introduction to Magic Theory. It seems this isn’t mere coincidence or trickery. In any case, a truly surprising result. I hope you maintain such performance going forward, Mr. Loen."
***
"This makes no sense! Right? It doesn’t!"
Voltimir Territory. A café in the Alvheim District.

Amid lush greenery, three girls sat together, sipping tea and chatting.
Kiriel thumped the wooden table with a bang-bang, venting her frustration.
For that Loen, who’d been on roughly her level, to get a score like that—even if it was just a pop quiz—was nonsense.
Rina and Silpi, Kiriel’s aides, had no choice but to side with her this time.
"Yes. It is certainly strange."
"Totally. You can’t just jump your scores like that out of nowhere~"
When they agreed with her, Kiriel’s eyes gleamed as she spoke again.
"Right? Right? I only went up five points—there’s no way Loen suddenly gets a score like that!"
"…That doesn’t seem directly related."
"Could there be some kind of connection with Professor Isley~?"
Rina raised a suspicion.
Kiriel thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"…The professor isn’t like that."
Professor Isley, the deer.
He was a beastkin from Daesua, the purest of beastkin, closest to a primordial regression.
His conduct was upright and clean, and his ability in Spirit Studies was outstanding.
He mingled easily with students, and his lectures were fun; he was popular.
For a professor like that to cover for a guy like Loen—I couldn’t believe it.
Those deer-like eyes. No—looking into a deer’s eyes, you knew he’d never… he’d never be that kind of deer.
"But… otherwise, he couldn’t suddenly get that score."
"And with what happened in the Territorial War, and also those good results in Intermediate Magic Theory~ if you see this pop quiz as being in that same line, maybe it’s possible~?"
With a neat analysis, Rina brought up the Territorial War.
"That reminds me, did you see the paper, Lady Kiriel?"
"I did. I ripped it up right away out of spite."
A front-page photo of Loen, wearing an arrogant expression, splashed across the whole page.
I didn’t actually rip it up, but it ruined my mood so I threw it out on the spot.
"Whatever trick he used~ it’s a fact that Loen beat Chepesh, the president of Jerome Academy, in a duel~"
"That Chepesh girl—what’s her Competitive War ranking?"
"Forty-first."
"That’s really high. What about Loen’s?"
"Uh… outside the top 1,000, so I don’t know his exact rank."
Comparing the two, Kiriel shrugged.
"Does that make sense?"
"It doesn’t."
No matter how many variables there were in real combat, a student outside the top 1,000 didn’t beat someone in the 40s.
It wasn’t a kid beating an adult; it was closer to an ant defeating an elephant.
"Even a cow backing into a mouse only goes so far~ there’s a weight-class gap~"
At Rina’s words, Kiriel quietly asked Silpi what that meant.
"…What kind of analogy is that?"
"It means it doesn’t make sense to say he just got lucky."
"Rina, use simpler words from now on. The continental common tongue is hard."
"Okay, okay~"
Anyway, everything got absurd the moment Loen was involved.
If he’d been originally clever and promising, that would be one thing. But ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) a guy who crawled at the bottom suddenly having this kind of run?
It felt almost rigged.
"…He definitely used some underhanded trick."
"That’s the normal reaction."
Hypnosis or hallucinations, or maybe blackmail with some leverage.
"Right! It has to be that!"
Thump—
Kiriel slammed the innocent table again and shouted.
The fact that Loen became Student Council President in the first place was suspicious.
He must have gotten that seat through lobbying.
Extending that thought, under outside pressure, poor Professor Isley must have fallen prey to Loen’s schemes and had no choice but to react like he did today.
That Chepesh girl must have been threatened by Loen and forced to lose, too.
"Yeah, that’s it."
Having cemented her arbitrary headcanon, Kiriel quietly gnawed at her nail.
"What weird idea are you coming up with now?"
"Lady Kiriel’s always like this~"
"Rina, Silpi. Studying isn’t the problem right now."
Tap—
Though they’d gathered to study, Kiriel naturally closed her textbook.
Only she could resolve this matter. It absolutely wasn’t because she didn’t want to study.
'If this keeps up, hoping Loen gets expelled on his own is impossible…'
If Loen continued using these tricks to satisfy the grade and ranking requirements to keep the presidency, waiting for him to expel himself was out of the question.
There was also the option of impeaching him by student-wide vote, but…
'The mood’s been weird lately, too.'
After the recent Territorial War, the public opinion about Loen seemed to have shifted.
Of course, given the karma he’d piled up, it was like dripping a single drop of clean water into a bottle of black ink.
'When someone who’s usually good fails once, people curse them; but someone like Loen gets praised for doing well just once.'
If he kept shaping public opinion like this…
Driving that man out of the academy would become impossible.
Kiriel’s eyes blazed. Silpi asked her a question.
"But Lady Kiriel, why do you hate Loen so much?"
"I don’t know, I just… hate him."
Kiriel quietly clenched her fist.
It wasn’t just his widespread infamy or his usual behavior—more than anything, that man… smelled.
Not that his body actually stank.
Hard to put into words—just a baseless aversion.
If asked what it was, she couldn’t answer. A High Elf’s intuition, perhaps.
Well, maybe it really was just a feeling.
Regardless, even aside from her intuition, Kiriel could never be friendly with Loen’s sort.
At least, that’s what Kiriel thought.
***
After finishing Spirit Studies and returning to the Student Council President’s Office—
I first went into the lab and took out the mana orb containing Bell’s Extreme Flame.
Click—
The red orb still burned hot.
Just taking it out of the storage case for a moment was enough to warm the air until my face and eyes stung.
Like facing a grill right in front of my nose.
Frowning, I returned the orb to its case.
Fortunately, there was no problem with the orb itself.
'With the equipment I have now, processing the orb will be difficult.'
My collection was impressive, but it was still mostly general-purpose apparatus.
To handle a “special substance” like Bell’s Extreme Flame, I needed appropriate gear.
'Looks like… I’ll have to visit the Underworld.'
The vast underground city that connected to Traum 9 and three-quarters—the Underworld.
Anything on the continent flowed through there, including alchemy reagents and lab equipment.
I started jotting down a shopping list for the Underworld.
First, the specialized equipment to process the Extreme Flame orb. Second—
'Combat-use magic artifacts.'
I frowned at the shattered crystal sphere—completely broken to pieces.
The [Aegis Shield] I’d lent Illeina during the Territorial War had already been repaired using alchemy’s durability restoration.
But the magic crystal sphere destroyed in the fight with Chepesh, [Vishark’s Grace], was damaged beyond repair.
'An artifact-class item, too. What a waste.'
Everyone raved about me subduing Chepesh, but they had no idea how it happened.
How could a scrub like Loen use dozens of mana chains?
It was all thanks to the artifacts.
And no matter how expensive a magic crystal sphere was, there was no way it could store that many spells at once.
'If you could cram dozens of spells into a single sphere, everyone would be a mage—why would anyone fight with a sword.'
It was the result of overworking the sphere using two basic alchemical functions—[Constraint] and [Amplification].
First, [Constraint].
By limiting the stored spell in the sphere to just Mana Chain, I maximized stability of output and amplified only its core function.
With that, I stuffed twenty mana chains into a sphere that normally could only hold five different low-tier spells.
Next, [Amplification].
A function that gave the stored spell—Mana Chain—a random additional effect.
After rolling the random amplification gacha repeatedly, I chose the extra effect that allowed temporary control over the mana chains.
Normally, aside from the initial discharge, you couldn’t control Mana Chain freely.
Using every trick in the book, I barely subdued Chepesh—but all I got for it was a bill and more debt.
With excessive Constraint and Amplification abuse, the artifact-class item shattered mid-battle.
Sure, I scattered the broken shards across the floor and managed to subdue Chepesh somehow, but I hadn’t planned on breaking it from the start.
'If I call it the tear-stained price to obtain the Cognition Acceleration Stone, it’s cheap…'
But the problem was that I lacked an immediate offensive option.
Therefore, until I finished processing the orb and Loen could properly use magic, I needed a combat artifact to cover for the missing magic sphere.
The issue was that a practical training class might occur while I was hunting for artifacts—but that couldn’t be helped.
I’d handle it on my end. I did have something to rely on.
After finishing my Underworld shopping list, I left the lab.
"Perfect timing."
"Yay! Hello!"
Outside, Ciel was receiving a visitor.
Looked like someone from the Newspaper & Broadcasting Club had come to interview me.
"An interview?"
"Yes, yes~! I’m Chloe from the Union Newspaper & Broadcasting Club. Loen, would an interview be possible?"
A club member—Chloe—with a newsboy cap on her head and a camera slung around her neck.
I accepted readily.
"Sure. I’ll gladly answer—within what I can disclose."