Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume2 Chapter1 (section)

===Part 5===

Utagai Karuta sighed. The relief and exhaustion he felt when he left the room containing Natalena, his would-be assassin, told him just how nervous he had been. Plus, that cooking classroom had been full of younger kids. He really was out of his element when it came to public speaking.

During the short break in between classes, he glanced down at his phone and grimaced.

“Riho> Oh, no! Help me, Karuta-senpai! Today’s homework is too hard! What are the components of the fast-acting medicine used to heal eye strain which directly affects targeting performance? That’s practically alchemy, so why is it part of our home ec homework!?”

“Alice> Just so you know, she’s posting this with her phone while in the middle of changing in the locker room. Hopefully that exciting mental image will make you respond sooner.”

School wasn’t even out yet and they were already stooping to that level on social media. Regardless, he could not just give them the answer to their homework, so he would have to only tell them how they could solve it. He generally just copied the writing on the blackboard into his notes, so he only realized now how hard teaching was. You had to make it simple and easy to understand, but also make sure it stuck in people’s memories. If he could do that with ease, he felt like he could become a social media influencer or a top blogger.

That said, he had his own business to attend to.

He walked to the middle school faculty room on an invitation from that female teacher.

This was a strange place for him. He should have had no business in the middle school at all and the faculty room was a tense place for a student like him.

All the more so when all of the teachers were the theory-focused types brought in to replace the old teachers.

He was a practical type, so he used Crystal Magic entirely differently from them.

“Oh, Utagai-kun. Over here, over here.”

The teacher who had taken to him like a puppy energetically beckoned him over.

That was Sophia Firenze.

“Kiyosawa-sensei would let me have it if he saw this, so you came at the perfect time. Nicely done, Utagai-kun.”

“…”

She received that kind of treatment in the faculty room too? Karuta had to rub his fingers against his temples.

“So what did you need?”

“Not much. First order of business is this ginger pork meal.”

“Gh!?”

“Ah ha ha. I got carried away and made too much. But we can’t waste food, so let’s eat it together.”

He had already eaten too much with that cooking class immediately following lunch, yet now he had to share an oversized meal. That meant eating three lunches back to back, making for way too much. Was this teacher trying to give him a pimply face?

He accepted the chopsticks like he was looking up at a steep mountain he had to climb.

“Um, Utagai-kun, you have been helping out with my classes lately.”

“Yes.”

“So, well, I was thinking you might be having trouble keeping up with your own classes. The more you help me, the less time you have for your own studies, after all.”

He was honestly surprised by this.

His eyes even widened.

“Sensei, you actually sound like a teacher right now.”

“You really shouldn’t make fun of someone when they’re trying to be nice!”

She was exactly right, so he had to apologize.

Afterwards, he noticed something curious on her desk.

It almost looked like a kid’s meal toy, but it was too weird for that.

“Sensei, what is that?”

“That is a model. Although it’s only based on secondhand information.”

Sophia Firenze gave it a loving look while her flaxen hair swayed. It was made of a light blue material that did not appear to be plastic. It was probably clay or something similar, but he doubted it had been molded by hand. It looked more like a machine had sliced pieces away to create the extremely intricate palm-sized model sitting on her desk.

He was not sure how to describe it.

It looked like a monster with a rhino beetle’s head and thorax and lots of octopus-like tentacles below that. It looked biological but also like a bizarre missile.

Sophia Firenze readily explained what it was.

With a smile on her face.

“That is what we predict the Threat looks like.”

“…”

They really existed?

He thought his breathing had stopped, but she quickly waved her hands in front of her face.

“Oh, but we don’t actually know if this is accurate.”

“What?”

“Our focus is on theory, so we’ve don’t do any fighting ourselves. We never accompanied the Problem Solvers when they fought the Threat. Um…the headmaster of the first ship had a good relationship with those five, so information tended to spread from them to the headmaster and from him to us. Information only ever went in the one direction, though, so I don’t think the Problem Solvers knew we even existed. I hate to admit it, but we really didn’t have any information worth giving them.”

That was to be expected.

If that five had known of them, they would have been eliminated before even Grimnoah. Crystal Magicians who could not fight would have been the perfect targets for the people who wanted to obliterate that type of magic.

Sophia, who had survived without fighting, gave a weak smile toward Karuta, who had survived by fighting.

“S-so all the data this is based on came from the Problem Solvers and it’s hard to say how reliable that actually is. I mean, they were on such good terms with the old headmaster, but they still caused the First Out Incident. There is actually a really good chance everything they gave us was either entirely false or modified in some way.”

“…”

He wondered about that.

It was hard to say either way.

The odds of any malice there seemed to depend a lot on which specific member of the Problem Solvers was supplying the data. With Elicia or Yukino, he could imagine them maliciously altering the data just for kicks. But what if it was Anastasia? That hopelessly powerful strongest had been focused on preserving her position at the top by defeating any and all challengers, so he doubted she would use any trickery like that.

And he did remember one thing Anastasia had said.

“They do exist.”

“What?”

“Whatever they look like, the Threat does exist. That woman said so even though we didn’t ask.”