“Great Deus Crowned Above, your light falls over the earth, and your deeds will never rot away. Your faithful followers beg of you here—grant us your blessing!
—With respect from Ebosger Academy.”
That was Ebosger Academy’s custom every year when it came time to form teams: pray to a god.
Word was, the god could glimpse the future. So the academy let the god decide how the team assignments for group tasks were made.
Plainly speaking, it made no damn sense.
Seven people to a team. The so-called divine assignment was completely random. Last year, for one, a dwarf and an elf got thrown into the same group. Everybody knew those two races were sworn enemies. Their blood feud went back more than a thousand years—elves had once enslaved dwarves, dwarves rose up, and the two sides hacked at each other for centuries until both were left bleeding and broken, forced to lie low and recover.
Enemies met face-to-face. What happened after was obvious enough without saying it out loud.
And that was hardly the only case.
A few years back, the princess of Yadu and the imperial crown princess of Aorweisa got assigned to the same team. Their two nations already scraped against each other like blades. That one incident was enough to spark another war. Cases like that were too many to count.
The white-haired, blue-eyed girl let out a soft sigh.
She was striking to look at, the kind of beauty that caught in the throat—long curled lashes, features fine as if carved with care. But she wore a plain brown work uniform, and in the noisy crush around her, she didn’t stand out at all.
Then again, calling it a crowd of people wasn’t quite right.
Ebosger didn’t look down on demi-humans. It also had aid plans for remote towns and tuition reductions. Whatever race you were, if you passed the entrance exam, you could study here.
The blue-eyed girl lowered her gaze. In her hand was a piece of white bread handed out next door by Luliteya Academy.
Luliteya Academy—under the direct wing of the church, backed by papal recommendation, devoted to the God of Light Luliteya, the one said to be softest toward believers. Monthly stipends. Job placement after graduation.
And most important of all—
You could choose your own team.
On this continent, no matter which academy you went to, you could only graduate if your team’s win rate over three years reached 75.31%.
The whole team’s win rate.
And during those three years, every competition counted. Big ones like inter-academy leagues and matches against military schools. Small ones like the summer shaved-ice creativity contest. Every last one needed teamwork.
Good teammates meant steady credits and a clear road ahead.
Randomly assigned teammates meant trouble. Too many unknowns. Too many ways for a life to get wrecked.
The girl ate the white bread slowly, unhurried.
Her wrist was slender, almost fragile. Blue-violet veins showed faintly beneath the skin, like flowers blooming in silence.
“I really want to go to Luliteya Academy…”
The sigh slipped from her lips, heavy with old weariness, the kind that didn’t belong on a young face.
The voices around her crashed together in a mess of noise.
No one noticed that one quiet line.
The girl wolfed down the bread in a few quick bites, then rose on tiptoe and strained to see the golden letters beneath the god statue in the distance.
That, they said, was the team list granted by the god Deyus.
Then a foul stench rolled over.
Her brows knotted hard. She flicked a spell over herself, sealing off the smell at once.
Crocodile folk from the swamp had just passed by her side.
The girl muttered, eyes dead.
“No offense to any race, but when the academy takes students, could they at least ask for basic hygiene? I’m half-merfolk. If this keeps up, these smells are going to kill me before graduation—”
She shut her eyes.
When she opened them again, her blue eyes had gone deep and dark, like a starless night. Water slipped through her fingers, tame and clingy, winding around her hand like a little water snake.
“The Grand Prince’s team list is out!”
“Gods above—under Lord Deyus’s gaze, which poor bastard got put in the same squad as him?”
“As long as it’s not me…”
Lyrel Norvia snapped out of that dangerous state. Hearing the Godbird folk talking not far away, she fell silent and thought.
She had no steady source of money. In her first year at Ebosger Academy, she had spent all her time studying while scraping by with work.
So she did not know many of her classmates. At best, she could barely match names to faces.
Even so, one name still rang like thunder.
Shute Remiaz.
A royal with no right to inherit the throne, yet spoiled to the bone. His mother was a famous socialite, and he himself was an elegant, arrogant madman.
Probably the kind who loved trouble for the sheer joy of it.
In the cracks between shifts, while Lyrel Norvia ran herself ragged just to live, she would often hear some fresh, explosive scandal about His Highness Shute.
One day he was organizing an independence march for the elves.