Editing Failing Witch:Volume3 Episode1 (section)

===Part 2===

“…”

Myousou Yagoro got out of bed in his stone apartment.

He ached.

All of his joints protested as he moved.

Yesterday had not been a good day. Frankly, he was amazed he was still alive.

(I’m honestly afraid to go to the cram school.)

But he couldn’t abandon his student for his own convenience. A single wasted day could do critical damage to an exam student’s chances.

He decided to count himself lucky he could even take the time to agonize over it in bed. When he was staying in the Force dormitory, he had been thrown in the detention barracks if he ever failed to get up at the set time each day.

He heard the squeaking of glass being rubbed.

Something like a fish egg was fluttering around inside a clear eye drop vial. That orb contained a naked girl. She was a Dracae familiar he had retrieved previously. He didn’t have any work for her to do, which left her in a position similar to a tropical fish, but she appeared to be rubbing her purple orb against the inside of the eye drop vial to communicate with him: Shape up.

Yagoro steeled himself and walked outside. It was still morning, but the summer sun was already blazing. The cicada cries sounded a little withered.

A giant dragon was soaring gently through the sky. Apparently Hanako had enough energy to bathe in the midsummer sun instead of resting in the shade.

“Extra, extra! We have the latest on King Michael’s bastard son!! You don’t want to miss out on this!”

“This is the same model of hat Lord Brian wore to the general council.”

“Is it true those old men on the Senate are taking vacations on the sly?”

Temple School City’s offerings were a mixed bag as usual…and some sketchy rumors were making the rounds. Seeing how misinformation ran rampant in this world of swords and sorcery made Yagoro realize the internet wasn’t to blame for that after all. The blame lay with human nature, not that tool used to spread it.

“You can only meet the right person once. Can you really dedicate your entire life to someone you met by chance? Come to us and we can make sure you are matched with your soulmate!”

Yagoro listened to all the hawking and shouting as he entered Carraway Cs Prep School.

“Good morning, teacher!”

“Yes, good morning. …But I’m not really supposed to be here, so don’t greet me quite so loudly.”

“?” Viocia tilted her head. Tacit understandings could be frightening things, but no one seemed to care about his presence anymore.

And…

“Our prep school will totally be doing the Lughnasadh practice exam soon.”

Gyaru-style instructor Schanze Dwelling was raring to go first thing in the morning.

The Mont-Blanc-looking gyaru leaned forward from her lectern to accentuate her point.

“Instead of a practical exam using your brooms, this is totally a written exam. That means you’ll totally be sitting in a desk struggling against the answer sheet in front of you.”

This exam was exclusive to this one prep school, but you couldn’t take it lightly.

After all, the midsummer was a crucial period. A big official practice exam run by Maleficium was coming up. The Lughnasadh run by Carraway Cs wasn’t just the lead-in to that; these officially-approved prep school exams could be applied to the results of your official practice exam.

That meant the results here could greatly influence the witch’s final rank of A, B, C, D, etc.

(It’s weird that this system is known outside of Maleficium. I doubt your average fortune teller could see through that barrier, so Maleficium must have intentionally left a tiny hole open to let them through.)

“How does this kind of information get out?” asked Viocia with a thoughtful look.

Yagoro’s eyebrows rose, but…

“They’re targeting all the subjects I’m worst at… Th-this must be the conspiracy of a secret society!!”

“Never mind. The idiot’s still an idiot. Maybe I’m the real idiot for thinking otherwise even for a moment.”

That aside, it was a written exam.

Whether that meant fill-in-the-blank or solving calculations, the students would have to accurately remember the terms and formulas.

That meant memorization would play a big role.

While memorization sounded simple enough, there were actually several ways to organize one’s memory.

There was the repetition method where you reviewed flash cards over and over.

There was the redundancy method where you write the material by hand and spoke it aloud to stimulate multiple senses.

But it went beyond just those two. Witches used witchy methods to cram all that information into their heads. Alchemic potions, witch’s brews, and self-hypnosis to name a few. Some students would even rely on destructive methods like summoning a demon from a magic circle to receive its wisdom, or cutting their arm with a razor whenever they made a mistake on a problem set or quiz. So as unexciting as a written exam might sound, you could never let your guard down.

“Ugh. I can’t do the thing where you swallow a scrap of paper with the material written on it. There’s so much to learn my stomach would burst. Oh! B-but if I write each term on a bite-sized pancake with chocolate sauce, then I can eat it all. And donuts! And cupcakes too! That way teacher will have to praise me for eating all that stuff!! It’s the perfect idea!! I must be a genius!!!”

“You’d end up overeating just before the exam and wind up in the clinic, so don’t even think about it, Viocia. '''+1 point: the initial idea that eating scraps of paper will help you learn is completely baseless.'''”

Yagoro sighed in exasperation, but Viocia’s idea summed up the situation well.

The idea that “I need to do this to help me study” was a dangerously tempting one for the girls preparing for their exams.

Yes.

There was no one single correct study method even for the witches who could fly loops through sky aboard a Formula Broom.