The Misfit of Arcane Academy: Awakening Her Hidden Potential - Linear Density 3 — Fire Sleeping Within the Ashes

The machine that measures a person's core spectrum outputs numerical values based on waveforms printed on paper. 　Higher numbers meant excellence. Lower numbers—— "…Line density, three." 　The venue fell silent. 　At Griffin Academy's entrance ceremony, the order of core spectrum measurements followed the student roster. When Lilia Grayvend's name was called, the students who had already completed their measurements were whispering among themselves about their respective scores. Sixty, seventy-two, eighty-five——fragments of such numbers drifted through the air. That's why the measurement officer's announcement of "three" froze the atmosphere in an instant. 　Lilia's expression didn't change. 　Her spine remained straight, her gaze forward. Only her right hand slowly clenched into a fist. Her nails dug into the back of her hand. 　Murmurs began. 　Whispers and stifled laughter seeped out from the back of the venue. The measurement officer, flustered, tapped the machine's panel and prompted another measurement. "Just to be sure, would you mind measuring again?" 　Lilia extended her arm. 　The officer's fingertips applied catalyst powder to her wrist and fixed her arm to the waveform reader's base. The machine hummed quietly, and after a moment, a paper printed with the same number emerged. Three. 　The measurement officer's brow furrowed. He was about to check once more when—— "Would you like to try again? The result won't change even on a third attempt." 　Her voice was quiet. Emotionless. A tone that simply stated facts without inflection. 　The measurement officer opened his mouth, then closed it. Instead, he murmured, "…Next person." 　Until she left the venue, Lilia never looked back once. When she stepped into the corridor, alone in a space where cold stone walls trapped the chill, she finally released the tension in her right hand. Four crescent marks from her nails remained on the back of her hand. 　——Well, she'd known about this already. 　That's what she told herself. 　The admission requirement for Griffin Academy was a core spectrum line density of forty or higher as a guideline. Lilia's line density was three. She'd known the numerical value on paper beforehand. It was the same number measured during the core spectrum registration system at age six, unchanged by today's equipment. 　The fact that she'd still been accepted was due to an exception clause in the special student system——or so she'd heard. The admission letter included the phrase "special enrollment for research purposes," and Lilia still didn't fully understand what that meant. --- 　Class assignments were announced during a brief homeroom after the measurements. 　Hawk Wing. Azure Scale. Iron Root. And Ash Seed. 　Four class tiers divided in descending order——that was how Griffin Academy was structured. The Ash Seed class, which gathered the bottom twenty students by aptitude rating, was officially called "adaptive education for diverse aptitudes," but the actual meaning had already been explained to Lilia by upperclassmen before enrollment. 　A dumping ground for failures, they'd called it. 　Walking down the corridor, Lilia unfolded the distributed map. 　Fourth floor, north wing of the main building. The Ash Seed classroom was the farthest location in the entire academy. （…North wing, north wing）　She climbed the stairs. First floor, second floor, third floor. She reached the fourth floor. She turned right down the corridor. 　After walking for about ten minutes, Lilia stopped. （…Wait）　She looked around. Through the corridor's windows, she could see the courtyard. The courtyard was on the south side of the main building. Which meant where she was standing now was——the south wing. 　She'd gone the wrong way. 　She checked the map again. North wing, north wing. She confirmed the directional arrow. If the top of the map was north, then her current position was…… 　She tried to rotate the map in her head and failed. Lilia was slightly poor at spatial awareness. She'd learned to read maps correctly two years later than children her age. That was catching up with her now. 　She walked from one end of the fourth floor to the other, went down to the third floor and back up, tried a different staircase, and walked the same corridor three times over before Lilia completely lost track of where she was. 　Then she found a door at the end of the corridor. 　Comparing it to the map's position——this had to be it. "Got it." 　She pulled the handle without hesitation. 　The door opened with a heavy creak, and something fell. Then another sound. And another. 　Mops had toppled. A bucket rolled. Cleaning rags fell from a shelf. The dimly lit space was crammed with cleaning supplies, and they all cascaded like dominoes, spilling out into the corridor. 　It was a storage room. 　Lilia froze. 　Footsteps approached from down the corridor. A slender female instructor turned the corner, took in the scattered buckets, mops, and Lilia all at once, and stopped. "…What are you doing?" 　Lilia thought for a second. "Practical training preparation." 　Three seconds of silence followed. "…Clean it up." 　The instructor said nothing more and left. Lilia straightened the mops, returned the buckets, put the rags back on the shelf, and checked the map once more. North wing——the top of the map was actually south. It wasn't that the direction was reversed; she'd simply mistaken the "N" on the arrow for something else. An embarrassing mistake. But as long as she didn't tell anyone, it didn't matter. 　She finally reached the correct north wing nearly an hour after the entrance ceremony. 　When she opened the door, light poured in. 　The fourth-floor north wing classroom was indeed the farthest location in the main building. But the windows were wide, offering a clear view of the Olde Hillside. Beyond the hill, the roofs of Forsena City stretched out, and beyond that, blue sky continued. The small path of ash cherry trees on the north slope of the hills was bare with winter, but the stone-paved school route was still visible as a thin line. 　Lilia exhaled softly. 　Her expression relaxed, just slightly. --- 　Fay Lustan, the homeroom teacher for the Ash Seed class, appeared to be in her mid-thirties. 　She wasn't tall, her brown hair cut short, and she wore a thin magical coat over her uniform. Silver-rimmed glasses framed her eyes, which were a calm gray behind them. Her face was hard to read emotionally——or rather, it was the face of someone who only let necessary information show on her expression, Lilia thought. 　Fay laid out all the students' enrollment documents on her desk and confirmed each name one by one. When it came to Lilia's turn, Fay's eyes fell on the papers——and her eyebrows twitched for just a moment. She must have seen the line density column. That moment passed quickly, and Fay looked up at Lilia. "Grayvend. Congratulations on your enrollment." 　Her tone was exactly the same as what she'd said to the other students. No sympathy, no contempt, no curiosity. Just a voice stating facts. "Thank you." "There is no special curriculum for the Ash Seed class. You'll receive the same assignments as the other classes." 　With that, Fay moved on to the next student. 　Lilia took her seat. Looking out the window, she could still see the roofs of Forsena City beyond the hills. （Same assignments, then）　It meant no special treatment. Not coddling because she was a failure, nor giving up on her from the start. 　It was the first normal treatment Lilia had received all day. --- 　The afternoon practical training was held in the Furnace Hall. 　The Furnace Hall——a separate building used for magical practical training. The thick walls of stone and cast iron were built to withstand magical runaway, Fay explained. On the basement level, there was a runaway containment chamber surrounded by magical barriers, and all practical training was conducted under strict safety protocols. 　Today's assignment was light sphere generation using incantation arrays. 　Incantation arrays——a method of exciting the core spectrum within one's body and deploying spell formulas into space from the hands or fingertips. This was the standard magical activation method in this world. Using mineral powder as a catalyst increased output, but in basic assignments, it was done without catalysts. 　Fay demonstrated. 　With a short incantation, a white sphere of light floated above her right hand. About twenty centimeters in diameter. Stable, with no wavering or distortion. Beautiful, Lilia thought. 　The students took turns attempting it. 　Not everyone succeeded, but more than half of the Ash Seed class managed to produce small lights. Some smaller than fireflies, some flickering unstably, some disappearing immediately——but something was happening. 　It was Lilia's turn. 　She began the incantation. 　Nothing happened. 　Again. 　Nothing happened. 　She understood the mechanism——her core spectrum's line density was too low to reach the magical excitation threshold. Understanding it didn't mean she had the option not to try. Third attempt. Fourth. Fifth. 　The other students were watching. No one laughed. But no one spoke to her either. That silence was heavier on her shoulders than laughter would have been. Sympathetic silence had a strange weight to it. 　Sixth attempt. Seventh. Eighth. 　Instructor Fay stepped forward. It was a gesture to stop the exercise, Lilia sensed. Before the words came to move on to the next assignment—— "I haven't finished yet." 　She said it in a quiet voice. 　Fay stopped. 　Lilia took the stance for incantation once more. --- 　The ninth and tenth attempts produced nothing either. 　As the class neared its end, Fay deployed a training magical circle. It was a fixed-form spell structure used as teaching material, and when students touched it, it reacted and allowed them to visually confirm the state of their core spectrum. 　The magical circle was drawn on the floor in a geometric pattern. Blue-white light extended in a grid, pulsing gently. 　Suddenly, the light convulsed. 　The pulsing became violent. The grid warped. The spell structure began to lose control, and when Fay moved immediately, taking out a control catalyst to interfere with the spell, the expansion of the runaway light was too fast. It spread like ripples across the classroom floor, heading toward the wall—— 　Toward Lilia. 　There was no time to escape. 　No way to defend herself. 　Lilia reflexively thrust both hands forward. 　The spell touched her. 　Something passed through the depths of her palms. Not heat, not impact. A stranger sensation——understanding structure, as if it were flowing in. How the light's grid was assembled, where the force was concentrated, where it was beginning to collapse——all of it flowed in from her fingertips like a stream. 　The next moment, the spell vanished. 　There was no sound. No explosion. The white light simply dissolved like a sand castle touched by a wave——into fine particles, scattering, disappearing. 　The classroom went still. 　Instructor Fay was rigid. Her hand holding the catalyst hung suspended in the air. The other students didn't move either. No one said anything. 　Lilia looked at her own palms. 　They were ordinary hands. No burns, no light, no change whatsoever. Yet the sensation lingered in the depths of her palms. The wordless feeling of having destroyed something. （Did I…do that?）　She hadn't used magic, that much was certain. She hadn't used it——she'd destroyed it. What that meant, she didn't know. But something had happened. "Grayvend." 　Fay's voice cut through the silence. "Stay after class." 　That was all. --- 　After the other students had left, Lilia remained in the Furnace Hall's practical training room. 　Fay stood directly in front of her, her gaze turning toward the window for a moment before settling on Lilia. The gray eyes behind her glasses watched her quietly. "Can you expl

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Episode 1

Name: The Misfit of Arcane Academy: Awakening Her Hidden Potential
Author: Novelia

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