Prologue – Textbook-based studying(?)
Helarion Academy, a place where the greatest talents of the empire gather.
Professor Slague of the academy’s magic department was a veteran with over 50 years of experience teaching Spellogy. Since he was going to be promoted to headmaster next year, this would be his last year teaching Spellogy.
To him, Spellogy 101 class was one of the classes he looked forward to. The questions from 14 year-old boys and girls who just took their first steps into magic were always new and unexpected.
Now that there was only 5 minutes to the end of Spellogy 101 for this semester, a girl at the front seats raised her hand.
“Professor! Who gave you the deepest impression among the students you taught until now?”
“Hmm… let’s see…….”
The answer was already decided. He only pretended to think about it.
The kid that had the most impact; the kid that brought shock and fear upon all professors at the academy! 99 out of 100 professors would pick this specific student when asked to pick one.
“Well, of course it’s our proudest student of the academy, Abel.”
Like that, Professor Slague fell into his memories remembering back to the class 45 years ago.
“Did you do your homework that I gave you yesterday?”
Of course, this was an absolutely, utterly impossible question. He only gave it out to tell them the difficulty of spellogy, and in order to get a one-up on them.
It was a super question that all the professors in the academy would have to wrack their brains together for 3 entire days in order to solve it. Just solving it would bring an M-shaped and a circular balding just from overdriving the brain. Difficulty-wise, it would be hell difficulty! However, ‘common sense’ didn’t work on Abel.
“Yes!”
Whoa?
At first, he thought he had heard wrong. However, after he took away the notes he used to solve it on, the answer was correct. This was unbelievable. Saying that the demon Bellioque sealed in Cereborn mountain would be much more believable instead.
This guy, did he steal the answer from somewhere?
“How did you solve this?”
“I used implicit differentiation and got the answer in 10 minutes.”
“Wh, what function?”
“Something like that. It’s not like you’ll understand even if I explain, so just consider it a formula that I’ve invented.”
That’s it, he must have copied the answer from somewhere. He might have thought that bringing up a strange methodology have fooled him, but Professor Slague wasn’t such an easy one.
“Good! Then why don’t you try solving this! Just so you know, the record time in solving this was 3 hours and 5 minutes, done by our First Duke of the empire, Duke Tardema.”
Professor Slague started wrigin a question on the chalkboard with an evil expression. Even if he knew the question, he wouldn’t be able to solve it by just memorizing. He switched the polar coordinates!
But as though to laugh at him, Abel opened his mouth in less than 20 seconds after he started writing.
“Hmm… I think the Laplace formula should work here, but the calculations are a little complex, so I’ll be using this for a bit.”
Abel took out a strange object from his pocket and started tapping on it.
“What is that?”
“It’s a Casio scientific calculator. It just helps in doing calculations.”
An artifact that helps in spellcasting? That was unheard of in his 32 years of life.
In around 10 seconds after he started tapping on this ‘calculator’, Abel started writing the answer on the chalkboard.
“……!”
‘Freak!’
That was his first impression of Abel.
However, what left the deepest impression of him was the final part of Abel’s graduation speech on the 783rd Academy Graduation Ceremony. Unless he was hit with some memory erasing magic, he wouldn’t be able to forget it for his entire life.
The secrets to him maintaining his top seat was…….
“You just need study mainly your textbooks..”