3-21: The School’s Strongest Enemy (2/2)
“It seems you studied too much on your own somewhere. Forget those things first.”
“Ahaha…”
If he could do that, he wouldn’t be having such a hard time, Shinichi wryly smiled.
Although he had that part of him that resembled your typical Japanese, Shinichi still did his best.
Unfortunately, with his lack of sleep, the incomprehensible words that continued to resound in the classroom was no different from a lullaby.
After 20 minutes since the class started, Shinichi found himself with his face buried in his desk, fast asleep.
Normally, the teacher would scold a student like him, but the problem was that creature on his head.
That creature would ferociously threaten anyone who tried to wake him up, so no one could approach him.
This was her being considerate of Shinichi’s lack of sleep. Although this could also be said to be Shinichi’s fault for not being able to predict this outcome.
In the end, though, he stayed fast asleep until class ended, and mistakenly ended up believing that no one would try to wake him up even if he fell asleep.At that, he made up his mind to quickly abandon Garesto’s language studies. After attending the classes here for a few days, he decided to abandon the other classes too. Although, the reason was slightly different.
First was Garesto’s society, where the lesson for today was geography.
This time he didn’t make a mistake, but because of that his teacher and classmates actually became suspicious of him.
“How come you already know about the parts we haven’t discussed yet?”
“Huh!?”
That was actually a joke on the teacher’s part. It was a lighthearted attempt meant to break the ice for the newcomer transfer student who knew nothing about their class’s progress, but Shinichi answered the question like an honest idiot.
If the information he was privy to was something that was available in the rest of the world, it would have been fine, but the knowledge and information taught at this school wasn’t the publicly available sort.
He was somehow able to fool everyone by saying that he studied at the library, but he still couldn’t help but be concerned.
The truth is that he’s already studied Garesto’s geography and history, and has already memorized the relevant details.
Unlike with foreign languages, in history one learns the trends and the event, while in geography, one learns the position and characteristics.
Shinichi had to study history in order to find a way back home, and he also had to find out for himself just how accurate the information that has been implanted into him.
That’s why Shinichi didn’t have the slightest difficulty in remembering such things.
Of course, him originally being good in such subjects also had an influence, but either way, he was really bad at feigning ignorance about the things he already knew.
He didn’t learn about these things during lecture. He just read about them from the host computer of the school.
He could have chosen to learn about the progress and pace of the class, but he didn’t feel it was worth it to learn such needlessly specific things just so he could feign ignorance, so just like with Garesto’s language studies, he decided to just abandon Garesto’s social studies.
In fact, there were a lot of classes that he had to give up on because he’d already studied ahead.
The skills were no exception too. Even the ones that he couldn’t use, as long as they’ve already been revealed here at this school, he had a full grasp of their effects and energy consumption.
His high Skill stat actually also had an effect on his memory, though it was limited to combat-related matters.
He learned them ahead of time since he figured he’d probably end up facing them on the field eventually, but doing so had a negative effect on his lessons, and in the end, he arrived at the same conclusion as he did for the social studies.
“—And that’s the gist of it. Did you understand that, transfer student?”
“Ah, umm, actually…. Can you please speak in Japanese?”
And then the matters related to photons and energy engineering were just too sophisticated.
To a boy who was drifted away to another world after just becoming a second year middle school student, such topics were no different from meeting with aliens.
Garesto did have the non-specialist and more elementary and foundational subjects, but even those were too difficult for someone who hasn’t even studied the Law of Inertia or Ohm’s Law.
It was the most he could do to learn the mechanism behind the armaments and the exoskeletons.
“Ora, hah, ya, what’s the matter, Nakamura! This is the difference between D and C!”
“Huh? Ah, yes, yeah, I guess you’re… amazing?”
And then that one thing that he really wanted to take special care with from the start, the combat class.
A class that taught how to use skills, how to use exoskeletons (power suits), and how to fight. It was classified as physical education.
There were no desks here, so he couldn’t just sleep.
Since it was his first day using skills, he was bound to get attention; hence, he made sure to take extra care.
But it was surprisingly difficult to hide his actual abilities.
Perhaps it was because this was a 1st year class that was also Section D, but their task was really basic.
Simple Exoskeletons were distributed to everyone’s foster, but there weren’t many lessons that made use of them.
There was a training portion that followed a well-reasoned manual to raise their status, and then there was a kumite training with fellow classmates to help the students get used to the skills.
The most difficult part for him was the kumite.
His partner, whom he could easily send flying with a very light counterattack, kept attacking him.
He wasn’t physically having a hard time, but not looking like he was having a hard time was in itself a problem, thus giving him a hard time.
This was the consequence of fighting with too many strong people in Falandia.
Over there there was no reason to hold back against his opponents, though he would sometimes hold back enough not to kill them, not once has he ever considered holding back to the point that he wouldn’t knock out his partner. To make things worse, this classmate of his was really weak.
He was doing his best not to counterattack for real, but his classmate was so defenseless it was weird.
It wasn’t his first time acting ‘like he was a having hard time fighting’, but he was completely stumped by how difficult it was to play that part against such an amateur.
To give an analogy, the focus he needed was so great it was akin to passing a thread through a needle with not just one hand but by only moving his fingers a little.
Doing something like that in this kumite-like training would needlessly exhaust his mind.
A big part of the reason he transferred here was because he needed to recuperate his mind, so if he were to mentally exhaust himself like that, his whole transfer would lose meaning.
As a result, a few days later, he decided to play hooky by choosing the ‘I will watch by learning’ option.
His classmates openly denounced his actions, but he never lent an ear to them in the first place, so he just took it in stride.
The teacher at the time was Frire, and she didn’t say anything, so such actions were just disregarded.
It was in this way that Shinichi attended the classes but didn’t participate.
He never felt like studying from the start, so he took such actions early on, but at the same time, he was also really curious and enthusiastic about studying.
“Just in these subjects, in these subjects alone, I need to at least learn as much as the others! That’s why, if I fall asleep, I don’t care if you have to use electricity, wake me up!”
“Kyu, Kyuu!”
Although confused, she nodded and agreed. This was in regards to the five subjects.
In other words, national language, math, science, social studies, and English. Shinichi strongly felt like he had to study these subjects.
But don’t forget, Shinichi was drifted away as soon as he entered second year middle school.
Naturally, he has yet to master the subjects back at middle school.
Could a boy like that really jump into high school curriculum all of the sudden?
“I couldn’t understand a thing!?”
“Kyu! Kyui!”
After taking a series of lesson, the results were so bad, Shinichi went into shock.
She, who was riding on his shoulders, desperately tried to console him, but his face remained petrified.
The subjects he was originally bad at, math and English, were now even worse.
The national language he was average at, wasn’t that bad if you took away the classic literature part.
The social studies that he specialized at, the only part he was still good at was Japanese history, but everything else he’d forgotten.
The science was just like the technology lessons from Garesto. He didn’t understand a lick.
On top of that, the main subjects of this school were the Garesto related classes, so those five subjects were almost treated as extra lessons.
There wasn’t enough time for them, so the classes were rushed, making it even harder for him to understand the subjects.
The other students had studied desperately for their entrance exams, so this was more of a review for them, and they didn’t have much of a hard time keeping up, but Shinichi was desperate.
Unfortunately, such efforts were but a drop in the water.
“…Who would’ve thought that studying could be so troublesome?”
This was the moment when the boy, who never yielded to anyone at Falandia, was brought to his knees.