The Shadows (5) - 41

The confidant aura that I felt around her was almost as suppressing as the Empress'.

But first, before I said anything else about her, you had to understand a few things.

Like I had said before, she was the Class 3 Rank 1 student.

Now, generally speaking, there were three types of students in the top 10 of each class.

First were the powerful types, who far surpassed their peers in the combat tests. So, people like Rohan, Adelaide, and Wilhelm.

Second were the smart types, the people who scored almost perfect, or perfect scores on all their tests. The people that made up this group were people like Octavia, Class 1 Rank 10, and Class 1 Rank 6 (who are people I'll get to later).

Finally, there were the people good at both, namely Ryker, Primrose, and Elvira.

But, Marcielle didn't belong in any of these groups.

Yes, she was smart, but it was more of a cunning type of smart, one used to manipulate people and money around to her will.

And yes, she was powerful, but not due to her own strengths.

You see, she had this extremely powerful artifact, well, an artifact that was only extremely powerful in her hands.

The artifact was named the, "Golden Checkbook" and it was a 4-star artifact.

You might be thinking, just a 4-star artifact, really? And boy would you be wrong.

Well, I guess it is a really weak artifact, but due to Marcielle's background, it's power rivaled that of a 7 or 8 star artifact.

The usage of the artifact was simple, you wrote an amount of 200,000 Lams onto the checkbook, and it would increase all your stats by a sub rank.

Keep doing this, and you would be able to rival an (S) rank.

But, the backlash was that you lost all the money that you wrote onto the check, making it extremely useless to people that didn't have a lot of money.

Yet, Marcielle, coming from the wealthiest merchant family in Laramil, was able to easily spend this money, with the businesses she owned making her billions of Lams of profits each year, 200,000 was but a small number to her.

So, in all her combat exams, she literally just boosted her power up one or two ranks and then completely crushed her opponents.

It was basically a cheat, but because her family was so powerful, nobody spoke out against it, in fear of getting themselves and their family crippled, or worse, for the rest of their lives.

So now, this begged the question, 'What the heck should I teach her?'

I mean, she was born with basically useless stigmas in terms of power, and her spiritual energy was barely enough as it was, without using the artifact.

Without a substantial amount of spiritual energy, she wouldn't even be able to start the process, much less figure out her affinity.

This left me in such a dilemma that I couldn't even fathom what I would teach her.

Yes, it was hard to teach her not because she was too powerful or because she had a horrible personality, well she did, if you counted a cold character as one, but like, a quarter of the girls in this novel had this type of personality so...

Well, anyways, I kinda got off track there, I just thought about asking her if she needed me to teach her anything. I mean, the only reason I put her in my class was just to keep an eye on her, because students and teachers often talked about things other then the lessons after all, and she was probably the biggest source of outside information around me, other than the Empress, who I was too afraid to make into my information broker.

"So... what do you want to learn?"

"So you know about my condition... how did you find out?" She said, with a slight threat very visible in the underlying tone.

"As I've already told all the others, Xion gave me special privileges so I'm able to find out a lot about my students."

Again, this was a believable excuse to all the students, but not the Empress, because they didn't know how Xion worked.

"And your identity's pretty obvious anyways, I mean, who else would have enough money, and is enrolled in Class 3 in the L, to wield that artifact."

...

An uncomfortable silence spread through the training room as she pondered this.

"Alright, I think that's a believable explanation, for now."

'Sigh, this untrusting character of hers will also be hard to deal with.'

"So, again, what do you want me to teach you?"

"What can you teach, I'll decide if you give me a list."

'Like you're going shopping huh.'

"I can teach you martial arts, any of your core subject, yes, I'm in higher levels of them than you, communication skills, scheming, bullshitting through your teeth, aristocratic manners, cleanliness, cooking, studying skills, and some other things, but those are probably the most useful to you."

She thought for a while in silence.

"Before I make my decision, what core classes are you in?"

'Overly careful, like a true businesswomen.'

"I've completely tested out of Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science, yes, out of the Grade 6 versions. As for math, I'm in Class 6: LinCal."

"Got it, let me think for a little bit more."

...

"Alright, I think I've come to a decision, that is, assuming it's only for this month, right?"

"Correct."

"Then teach me bullshitting through your teeth, to be honest, I'm still a novice a lying."

So I proceeded to teach her about bullshitting.

Turns out, she had way too many tells to count.

We spent the whole hour trying to fix them, but there were still about 10 that we needed to fix.

"We'll work on those next week, but good work on getting rid of all the others ones, to be honest, for a future businesswoman, you really were, the key word here is "were", bad at lying."

"Thanks for the compliment... I guess?"

"What am I saying? I don't need a 13-year-old complimenting me."

"Well, byeeeeeeeeeee." <Akimitsu>

I kept it up, annoying her until the moment she walked out the door.

'Finally, I'm free. Now I can get ready for the lesson with the Empress tomorrow and then the surprise test that's coming up on Sunday.'

'They really are cruel, pulling a pop test on the students right after the first week of classes.'

The test would be one to test how well the students responded to unexpected situations, and was one of the first events where the demonic human spies tried to kill the protagonist.

'No use thinking about it now. What I need right now is a good night's sleep.'

So I went back to room 221, showered, and drifted off to sleep.