The Preparatory Class Auditor

Sigelica's body clock was more accurate than the academy's clock tower.

At the first hint of dawn, she sprang out of bed, washed up, changed into her uniform, and glanced at the little mound on the bed opposite hers.

The mound lay motionless, accompanied only by slow, steady breathing.

Sigelica walked over and poked the lump with a finger.

"Yaya, get up. It's our first day of classes. We can't be late."

The creature beneath the blanket squirmed and uttered a muffled word.

"Steamed buns..."

Sigelica's temple twitched.

She clenched her molars and patiently tried again.

"Class starts at seven thirty. It's Professor Moning's class. If you're one minute late, you have to write a three-hundred-word explanation."

"Ribs..."

A contented smack of lips came from under the blanket.

Sigelica gave up trying to communicate.

She turned, picked up the "Temporary KPI Evaluation Form for Dania's Time at School" from the desk, and cleared her throat.

"Student Dania, I will now read out your morning tasks."

There was no response from beneath the covers.

"Seven o'clock: get up on time. Your KPI performance rating is directly linked to the ratio of meat to eggs in today's lunch."

Still no movement.

Sigelica's expression darkened, and she read on.

"Seven fifteen: breakfast in the cafeteria. If you're late, the sweet and sour ribs will be replaced with boiled cabbage."

The blanket went flying.

Dania sat on the bed, her pink hair sticking up in every direction. Her eyes were barely open, but her face was full of alertness.

Dania: (•ิ_•ิ)?

"Cabbage?"

"That's right. Boiled, with no oil or salt."

Sigelica folded the paper covered in Zhou Yu's chicken scratch and tucked it back into her pocket.

"You have ten minutes before the cabbage is served."

Ten minutes later, two figures appeared on the tree-lined path to the classroom building.

Dania wore a brand-new schoolbag on her back and held a cup of warm, sweet soy milk in one hand, sipping it little by little. Her other hand held tight to Sigelica's sleeve.

"Xixi, what's class?"

"You sit in a room and listen to the teacher talk a lot. You can't sleep or eat."

"Then... why do we have to go to class?"

"Because those are the rules."

"Did Zhou Yu make the rules?"

"...No."

Sigelica felt her blood pressure slowly rising.

"Then can I skip it?"

"No. If you skip class, they'll dock your cafeteria subsidy."

"I'll go."

Dania answered so quickly that even the wind couldn't catch up.

Quite a few people were already seated in the preparatory class's classroom.

Sigelica led Dania to the second-to-last row by the window. No sooner had they sat down than a girl beside them turned around, one foot planted on her chair. She had flashy blond streaks in her hair and an amused smile on her lips.

"New here? You've got some nerve, sitting in the back row for Moning's class."

Sigelica recognized her. Linnai was a notorious problem student at the academy, always first in combat and always near the bottom in theory.

"Hello." Sigelica gave her a polite nod, not wanting to invite more trouble.

Linnai's gaze fell on Dania, growing more scrutinizing.

"Hey, newbie, what's your name?"

Dania was struggling to suck up the last mouthful of soy milk, her cheeks puffed out. At the question, she looked up and stared at Linnai blankly.

Linnai was taken aback by her vacant expression, and the show of force she'd prepared got stuck in her throat.

She cleared her throat and put on the tone of a big sister in charge.

"I'm Linnai. From now on, I've got your back in this classroom, got it?"

Dania blinked, unzipped her schoolbag, and took out something wrapped in wax paper. She carefully held it out.

"Hello, I'm Dania."

She pushed the thing in her hand a little closer.

"This... I'll share half with you."

Linnai looked down.

It was a roasted sweet potato broken in half, still giving off wisps of steam. Caramel-colored syrup seeped from the break, filling the air with a sweet aroma.

Linnai: Σ(°Д°;

"You're buying people off with roasted sweet potatoes on the first day of school?"

"I'm not buying you off." Dania tilted her head, her expression exceedingly earnest.

"Zhou Yu said you should share good food with people who smile at you."

"Who smiled at you?!"

The tips of Linnai's ears turned red, but her hand had already reached out and taken the half sweet potato.

The class bell rang just then.

The classroom door opened, and Professor Moning walked in with her lesson plan tucked under her arm. Her stern face swept across the room, and every sound was turned down to zero.

"Today we'll continue with chapter three of 'Microscopic Architecture of Resonance Magnetic Fields': sequence characterization and nonlinear perturbations."

Moning's voice never varied; every word came out at a fixed frequency.

Sigelica immediately sat up straight and opened her notebook.

Linnai reluctantly took her foot off the chair and twirled her pen, bored out of her mind.

Dania opened her eyes wide, trying to make sense of the words.

Sequence characterization... nonlinear... perturbations...

In less than five minutes, her head began to droop, little by little, pecking at nonexistent grains of rice in the air.

Dania: ( ´-ω-).｡oO

Her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and Professor Moning's voice gradually became a buzzing wash of white noise.

At the lectern, Moning pushed up her glasses. A cold glint flashed across the lenses as her gaze locked onto the pink head battling the sandman.

"You, the new student."

The temperature in the classroom dropped several degrees.

Sigelica's heart leaped into her throat. It's over. She's going to be made an example of on the first day.

She was just about to nudge Dania with her elbow when an extremely faint click came from the storage cabinet in the back row, where brooms and assorted items were kept.

Linnai's seat gave her a clear view of the side of the cabinet.

She saw something sliding out from inside through the gap between the cabinet door and the wall, a gap less than a finger wide, in a way that defied the laws of physics.

A hand.

Immediately afterward, a person in a logistics uniform squeezed out through the gap and silently crouched in the cabinet's shadow.

Linnai's mouth slowly fell open.

Crouching in the shadows, Zhou Yu gestured for her to be quiet. He then crept along the wall, keeping low and using the blind spots created by the desks, until he reached the space behind Dania's seat.

Moning was still waiting for Dania's answer. The classroom was so quiet that breathing could be heard.

A little note was silently passed from behind onto Dania's desk.

Dania's head was just about to droop all the way down when the note touched the back of her hand.

She blearily opened her eyes. A line was written on it: Don't sleep. Hold out until class ends, and you'll get an extra serving of sweet and sour ribs at cafeteria number three.

Ribs.

Dania's eyes lit up at once. The word burned away every trace of sleepiness.

She sprang upright and shouted in a ringing voice.

"Here!"

The whole class turned to look at her.

Moning looked at her, her frown deepening.

"I didn't call your name."

"Sorry, teacher!" Dania apologized immediately. She sat ramrod straight, looking unbelievably alert.

Sigelica turned to stone.

She stiffly turned her head and looked in the direction the note had come from. The aisle at the back was empty.

Sigelica: (╬☉д⊙)!

She looked back at the storage cabinet. Its door was shut tight, with no trace of anything amiss.

Linnai, sitting on her other side, was staring at the cabinet without moving her eyes, which sparkled with an unprecedented light.

Linnai: (✧∀✧)

"Did you see that?" Linnai leaned over, her voice barely above a whisper.

"See what?"

"That person who just came out of the cabinet was even more absurd than the High-Level Invisibility Resonance Technique!"

"What are you talking about?" Sigelica's expression changed several times.

"What kind of person can fit through a gap one finger wide..."

"Class is in session. Quiet!" Moning's voice came crashing down from the lectern.

Linnai shrank back, but her eyes were still shining.

At the lectern, Moning adjusted her headset and pulled up the monitoring data from the system backend.

On the screen, at that very moment, the heat-sensor and spatial readings at the back of the classroom had shown a strange fluctuation, all of it indecipherable garbled text.

Then everything returned to normal.

Moning: (﹁_﹁)?

Her fingers tapped lightly on the lectern.

As a rigorous scholar, she didn't believe in ghosts or gods.

What exactly was that 0.5-second gap in the data, and that reading of a living organism that had appeared and vanished out of nowhere?

Her fingertip rested on the string of garbled text on the screen and did not move.

The academy's security system had been running for seventeen years and had never made a mistake.

Today was the first time.