"Elise?"
"Ah, Ethan?"
After rushing through the hunting field for some time, Elise slowed when she stumbled across a familiar face standing between the trees. Ethan seemed equally surprised to find her, although that surprise quickly turned into a smile as he approached.
"I didn’t expect to run into you this early." Ethan glanced around before looking back at her. "Are you hunting alone?"
"Mhm. Why?"
"Well, I was thinking..." Ethan cleared his throat. "Since we happened to find each other anyway, why don’t we stick together for the rest of the test? It would be safer than wandering around alone."
"Together?"
"Yeah. We can split the hunts sixty-forty." Ethan smiled, clearly pleased with the arrangement he had come up with. "You can take sixty percent of the kills, and I’ll take forty. If we run into anything dangerous, I’ll handle it and make sure nothing gets close enough to hurt you."
"Is that so?"
Elise tilted her head.
Before Ethan could say anything else, something crashed through the brush behind him.
He immediately spun around.
A large magical beast charged into the clearing, snapping branches as it barreled directly toward them. Ethan raised his hands and hurriedly began circulating his mana, but before he could even finish preparing his first spell, Elise casually lifted one hand past his shoulder.
"Fulmen."
Lightning flashed.
Crackle——!
The magical beast didn’t even make it halfway across the clearing.
A bolt tore through its body with a crack, stopping it in the middle of its charge before sending it crashing into the ground. Smoke rose from the hole burned through its chest as its momentum carried it another few meters across the dirt, eventually leaving it motionless between the two students.
Ethan remained frozen with his hands still raised.
Elise lowered hers.
"...Anyway, what were you saying?"
"...."
"Sixty-forty, was it?"
"...Yeah."
Elise looked at him for several seconds before smiling sweetly.
"No, thank you."
She walked past him and approached the fallen beast, checking her identification seal as the points registered.
Her expression remained as pleasant as ever, but there was a slight irritation beneath it that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.
"Everyone seems to take me for a fool lately."
"...."
Elise slipped the seal away and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
Between Ilya constantly treating her however he pleased, Solveig somehow getting far too comfortable around him, and Solenne suddenly becoming suspiciously friendly with him as well, Elise was beginning to wonder what sort of impression she had been giving people lately.
Perhaps they had forgotten.
Elise Margaux de Beaumont wasn’t merely the girl most of the male students considered the prettiest in the Magic Department, nor was she someone who needed another student following her around to keep magical beasts away.
She looked back at Ethan.
"Which House are you from again, Ethan?"
"Ah?" Ethan seemed caught off guard by the question. "House Velland."
"Velland..." Elise repeated, tapping a finger against her cheek as though searching her memory. "A viscounty, right?"
"Y-Yeah."
"I see."
Elise smiled.
"I’m from House Beaumont. The Duchy of Beaumont has produced some of the finest wizards in the Empire for generations, and magic has been the foundation of my family for longer than either of us has been alive."
She clasped her hands behind her back, speaking with a pleasant expression on her face.
"I started learning magic before I was even old enough to understand why everyone around me kept calling it difficult."
"...."
Perhaps people really had forgotten.
Elise was the daughter of House Beaumont, one of the most prestigious magical families in the Empire.
Her appearance and popularity might have been what made her famous among the students, but neither of those things was the reason the Beaumont name held weight throughout the Empire.
"So, I appreciate the offer, Ethan, but I think I’ll be fine on my own."
Then she turned and continued deeper into the hunting field, leaving Ethan standing beside the corpse without another word.
Her steps seemed just a little lighter than before, apparently satisfied after finally reminding someone that there was more to Elise Margaux de Beaumont than being pretty.
For once, there was no Ilya around for her to embarrass herself in front of.
* * *
"Hmm... Aren’t there too many twenty-five-point beasts compared to the lower ones?"
Solveig crouched beside the remains of another magical beast and checked her identification seal, watching the number increase before looking back toward the path she had taken.
She had been inside the hunting field for less than an hour, yet she had already encountered three Elite Beasts, while the supposedly more common Lesser and Common Beasts had appeared far less frequently than she expected.
That didn’t make sense.
If the professors wanted the point values to reflect difficulty alone, then weaker beasts should have been far more numerous.
A twenty-five-point beast was worth more than eight times as much as a Common Beast, yet the difference in how frequently she encountered them wasn’t remotely large enough to justify that gap.
Solveig pulled a small notebook from her pocket.
"First Rabbit Mammoth after four minutes, another Common Beast seven minutes later... Then an Elite after three minutes, another after eleven, and another one just now."
She tapped the end of her pencil against the page.
The obvious strategy was to hunt the strongest beasts you could reliably defeat, but that assumed every encounter happened naturally.
If students were actively searching for the twenty-five-point targets, then travel time, mana expenditure, injuries, and recovery all became part of the calculation.
Solveig drew a small line beneath her notes.
"Twenty-five points sounds attractive, but if one takes fifteen minutes to find and another ten to kill..."
She glanced toward the forest.
"Then five three-point beasts in the same amount of time still wouldn’t be enough."
Solveig frowned.
"No. That’s not it either."
Points per minute wasn’t enough.
Mana mattered.
A student who accumulated a hundred points in the first hour and exhausted most of their mana might spend the remaining two hours accomplishing almost nothing.
Meanwhile, someone who deliberately hunted weaker creatures could maintain a lower rate without ever needing a long recovery period, and depending on how the beasts were distributed, that could overtake the more aggressive strategy toward the end.
There was also competition.
Solveig had already found two carcasses she hadn’t killed herself, which meant other students were moving through this section and reducing the number of available targets.
The longer the exercise continued, the worse the obvious hunting routes would become, especially if everyone naturally moved toward areas where stronger beasts had been sighted.
She closed her eyes briefly and reconstructed the route she had taken since entering.
"Everyone searches outward."
The students had been scattered across the field, and the natural response after arriving alone was to pick a direction and keep moving.
If enough people did that, the accessible areas between their starting positions would be cleared first, while locations that were inconvenient to reach would receive considerably less attention.
Solveig opened her eyes.
"So don’t follow the paths."
She slipped the notebook back into her pocket and turned away from the direction she had originally been traveling.
Instead of continuing through the relatively open forest, she headed toward a steep section of terrain she had deliberately avoided earlier.
It would slow her down.
But that was why she chose it.
If she found fewer beasts there, she would lose several minutes and adjust accordingly.
If she found more, then she would have confirmed that the easiest routes were already becoming inefficient, and she could spend the remaining time targeting areas other students were less likely to bother searching.
Solveig smiled.
"Let’s test it."
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter