Failing Witch:Volume2 Prologue

Prologue: Still Nowhere Close to Maleficium

Are you used to these quizzes yet? As usual, make sure you focus on the Three Aspects.

But instead of directly testing your knowledge, this time I kept in mind what kind of questions you’ll need to answer on an actual test. So pay careful attention to the phrasing of the questions.

Let’s start with the Aspect of Admiration.

ATU 0709 is Snow White and ATU 0709a is a derivative of it. Explain how ATU 0709a differs.

It’s a story about fire and ash.

The witch is the enemy.

The nine companions are the same.

The prince needs to kiss her.

(It becomes the story known as The Little Sister of Nine Brothers and the prince saves the girl after she steps on a poisoned claw and dies.)

It isn’t the apple.

Next, the Aspect of Amorality.

Witches are said to transform into a variety of different animals. These are mostly harmless animals like rabbits and dragonflies, but just one is extremely dangerous. Which of the following is it?

1. Crow

2. Cat

③. Wolf

Hint: Dangerous means this animal is a threat to human life.

Isn’t this because it got confused with the werewolf legends?

Lastly, the Aspect of Antiquity.

Crystal is an all-purpose mineral. The witch ceremony known as programming specializes a crystal for a single use by sealing your own will inside. What benefit does this provide?

Giving it a specific (role) in advance allows for (time reduction).

Increases the magic’s strength. And destructive force. No, that’s not it. Magic isn’t always an attack…

She had it right.

She’d solved the problems like normal.

Myousou Yagoro, a tutor boy with his hair dyed an unnatural blond, was impressed (while hiding this fact from the girl in front of him). See, she could do it if she tried. He had spent all night coming up with this quiz like he was solving a simple puzzle and this proved his skills as a tutor hadn’t dulled. In the world of the entrance exam, there were no geniuses blessed by some strange goddess, but daily work would pay off eventually. It was such a lovely story. He just knew he would have sweet dreams tonight.

He nodded in a gazebo build in a small park tucked into a corner of Temple School City, a chessboard of a city made from white marble and black obsidian.

There was only one problem.

“So Dorothea can actually solve the quiz questions when she puts her mind to it.”

“Oh, um, s-sorry. Eep.”

Dorothea Rockpool, the busty glasses student who had solved the problems, tearfully shrank down for some reason.

Viocia Modestlucky, the redhead girl seated on the bench next to her, laughed as if she had done nothing wrong.

Yagoro was only supposed to be the tutor for the Halloween witch Viocia who was dressed in the orange and purple colors of a pumpkin tart. Bandage zombie girl Dorothea, who more had the colors of a rare cheesecake, was only his student’s friend from prep school.

Bandages over her bare skin was apparently the plain glasses girl’s idea of casual clothing. Yagoro still wasn’t used to how this world accepted flashy Halloween costumes as normal. Reverse bunny costumes? You could find them walking around outside like it was normal as long as they wore an apron to cover up in front. And not one of the girls here found it strange.

…Now, Yagoro really didn’t want to mention Viocia’s answer sheet. If he had to sum it up in a word, he would choose “awe-inspiring”. Most likely, a five-year-old scribbling on the back of a flier with a crayon would show greater signs of intelligence. You might be able to use this for psychoanalysis.

Summon Restricted Magic School Maleficium.

More than 99.9999% of witches failed the entrance exam each year. These girls had known that and had even been presented with their own failure once already, but they still hadn’t given up on their dreams.

“Hee hee. So this is the kind of quiz you’re always giving Viocia. I’d only heard about them from her before, but – eep – they seem very useful.”

Student Dorothea smiled and clutched her graded answer sheet to her ample chest with both hands. Yagoro was just about moved to tears by this, but at the same time, he had to wonder why he never received this kind of appreciation from his actual student.

This was a learning experience for him as well.

Wearing a lemon yellow sailor uniform with the bare minimum of armor, he stated his conclusion.

“This means it’s not my fault. I had been so afraid that all my struggles this far – all those godawful results – were my failing as a teacher, but now I know it wasn’t my fault at all!! Viocia! We’ve just objectively proven that you’re an idiot!!!”

Afraid he had been hurting Viocia’s chances with inept tutoring, Yagoro had gotten Dorothea to take this quiz even though she wasn’t his student.

Although he had discovered an even more horrific truth in the end.

The (proven) ultimate idiot pouted her lips and complained.

“Ehh? You’re just going easy on Dorothea, teacher. Super easy even. I mean, none of these were calculation problems. You basically gave her a perfect score on a silver platter by giving her all memorization problems, which we both know she’s great at!”

“Mh.”

“Um. As a merchant’s daughter, being good at memorization and – eep – no good at calculations is really embarrassing.”

Viocia (quiz score: 0) was acting like she would have gotten a perfect score with calculation problems and now Dorothea was shrinking down again, but there really wasn’t much of a division between the two types of problems. There were people who tried to divide up people’s minds between ‘liberal arts types’ and ‘STEM types’ or whatever else, but you could never solve a tricky calculation problem without first memorizing all the many formulas. It all came down to memorization in the end and the only real difference was the form of the problem and the form of the answer. Did you see a blank on a list of historical dates and remember what went there, or did you see a complex equation and remember how to solve it?

So that wasn’t why Yagoro was groaning.

He was a professional tutor and he hadn’t meant to make this quiz any easier than normal.

But while Viocia hadn’t actually solved any of the problems, that was mostly because she had seen trick questions where there weren’t any and overthought everything. Which meant she had probably expected this to be a “Dorothea hard” quiz. That meant Yagoro’s next task was to help Viocia focus on the actual problem she was being asked to solve. He had to figure out some way to help this girl who could only fully concentrate on something when she was cleaning her room, found an old book, and got lost in reading it!

(Damn. I can’t figure out if praise helps her or hurts her.)

Well, at least she showed possibility for improvement.

“C’mon, Viocia. Eep. I-if you rest your head on the desk, it’ll leave a mark on your cheek.”

“Dorothea, you’ve started acting a lot like the women who work downstairs of my room.”

Dorothea had said she was the oldest sibling of a large family, so maybe she found it calming to help out a small child. …Except Viocia was the same age as her.

Knowledge was fair, so it didn’t take special talent to make use of it. Just like viewing a piece of trick art, anyone could obtain and use it as long as something helped them change their “situation” enough to understand how to use it. It should go without saying that knowledge was not made to trick people.

It was just that ordinary people couldn’t bear the pain needed to remake themselves for the knowledge.

With enough effort, people could even become astronauts. This boy knew that to be true because he had done it himself. You just needed the courage to throw out the life you had lived and spend what time you had left suffering through the painful studying. It all came down to finding a reason within yourself to pursue that dream and sticking with it until you had achieved it.

These girls should have already gathered their resolve form the moment they decided they would truly work to get into a witch school as challenging as Maleficium.

It began when they had chosen to pick up their Formula Broom and strive to be an elite witch.

“Phew. It sure is hot today. I wish we could go to the shopping district instead of sitting around in this gazebo. I’d love a big pile of shaved ice with plenty of condensed milk and syrup. I’d even stick a long, skinny cracker in the end.”

…Or had she?

Yagoro was a little worried about that now. After these students had failed once, weren’t they supposed to be like cornered and wounded animals who couldn’t think about anything other than the entrance exam!?

“It is already mid-March. Eep.”

“At least we can look forward to the second half of March!”

I see, thought Yagoro, realizing what this was about.

He stared into the middle distance.

Was that one of the reasons (which were as numerous as the stars in the sky) why that idiot couldn’t focus on her studies?

“The summer solstice,” said Viocia impolitely loosening the big ribbon at the chest of her dress.

With a huge smile on her face.

“Not only is it one of the eight yearly witch ceremonies, but it’s also a festival. And several prep schools are joining together to have big field trip for it! An overnight one!! Yippee!!”

“Ugh. And we’re supposed to bring a swimsuit for the ablution lesson. What am I supposed to do? Eep. I-it seems wrong to need a swimsuit when we’re going deep into the woods.”

“Don’t be silly, Dorothea. During the day we’ll be swimming our hearts out and during the night we’ll be enjoying some glorious camping food in the forest! It’s perfect! I can’t wait to cleanse all the stress I’ve build up slaving away at my desk for so long!!!”

If Viocia could show that much enthusiasm all the time, her tutor would probably be under a lot less stress himself, but he knew better than to expect that. He recognized this from the other world of Earth. On the days the school was open during summer break, his little sister had excitedly braved the blazing sun to go to school just because they had a pool there.

Summer swimming events carried a power great enough to obliterate any focus on their studies.

Although he doubted Viocia could do much serious swimming in a spring hidden deep in the tranquil forest.

(Where was Carraway Cs going for their trip again? It’s so hard to keep track when my student goes to a different prep school each year.)

That said, the summer solstice trip was a Carraway Cs Prep School event which Viocia paid a fairly high tuition (which she worked part-time to afford) to attend. So as an outsider and her tutor, Yagoro had no real right to stop her.

But with that in mind, he still had something to say here.

“Viocia.”

“Huh!? I-I don’t like that dark smile, teacher. It gives me a really bad feeling… But there’s nothing to worry about. Not even Mr. Perfect Teacher can take the summer solstice trip from me!”

“You’re right, I can’t. ...By the way, Viocia, did you know students with especially bad grades aren’t allowed on this trip you’re so looking forward to and have to stay behind taking supplementary lessons? A sensible practice since an idiot who hasn’t even grasped the basics won’t get anything out of the extracurricular lessons on the trip.”

She petrified.

Viocia petrified so hard Dorothea grew seriously flustered next to her.

At least she was an idiot who knew she was an idiot.

That meant she was just barely holding onto the bare minimum of what an exam student needed.

“And speaking of the trip, do you have money set aside for that? I know you’ve been barely scraping by working for the standard tuition.”

“Eek!? Y-you mean I’ll be the only one who can’t go on the trip because I don’t have enough money? But that would give all the other girls a huge advantage over me!”

“Figure out the money issue on your own.”

He was calling himself her tutor without actually asking for any payment.

There was no way he could help her out any more on that front.

“I will help you with your studies, though. Now, if you don’t want to stay behind at the school all on your own, then get studying. The trip begins on June 20, so…oh, that’s not much time, is it, Viocia? I’d better up the pace to three parchment notebooks worth of lessons a week. The sky isn’t a realm of pure dreams – it’s just another natural phenomenon. If you study the rules it follows, you can control it!”

“Gwahhhhhhhhhhhh!! I-I can tell you set me up here, but I can’t find any way to escape!?”

“You should really be accustomed to outdoor flight by the time of the summer solstice. That means you can’t just get by on extreme acceleration. You need to expand the variety of flight patterns you can use. If you stick with plain flight, you’ll have a hard time standing out from the crowd during the exam. So before summer truly begins, you need to master your own form of witch flight and pull out ahead of your rivals!!!”

“Why are you more worked up than me when it’s my exaaaaaam!?”

Carraway Cs Prep School had dangled the perfect carrot in front of her.

Yagoro would make sure Workhorse Viocia raced down that muddy path like her life depended on it.

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