At that moment, everyone realized...the girl was not human.
Prologue: The Story So Far
When she’d enrolled in a magic academy in the royal capital nine years earlier, she hadn’t stood out whatsoever. The academy was a prestigious institution that attracted the finest talents from all over the kingdom. Compared to them, she was a nobody, and certainly not someone worth talking about.
The other new students were under the impression that she was an ignorant country bumpkin. “You’re from the outskirts of the western region? It can’t have been easy to come all the way here,” they said.
“I studied by myself,” she told them. “I’m lucky I passed the entrance exam!”
Her classmates were reassured that she was beneath them, so they talked to her without worrying about her opinions of them.
One day, a classmate said, “Hmm? You don’t know about the World Magic Championships?”
“The world magic what?”
Seeing her befuddled look, the classmate sighed. “It’s only the biggest tournament of magic in the western continent. Each country sends highly trained national representatives to compete. Recently, the Fairy Queen Evangeline Runeforest has been taking part too. She’s one of the Three Mystic Rulers, you know. Ever since she got involved, the tournament’s been getting more and more prestig—”
“Oooh! I don’t really get it, but that sounds super cool!”
As she loved magic more than the average student, she immediately began to pore through the records of past tournaments with wild abandon.
“Hey, Liz, check this out!” she raved one morning. “Did you know this person was the first to successfully use teleportation magic?” Day after day, she was absorbed in heavy volumes found in the academy’s library annex. “These people are all so incredible! One day, I wanna be the kind of magician who can compete at the WMC too!”
She wasn’t shy about vocalizing her fantasy.
As if you ever could, the others around her thought. To become a national representative, one had to clear the famously brutal hurdle of passing the examination to join the Royal Court Magicians’ Division, and then continuously produce outstanding results. The roa
