“I somewhat expected it,” Gaius murmured, “but doing math right now really blows. Spare a thought for the underprivileged, okay?”

The boy stared down at the paper, where a question he had no idea how to handle was written on it. He was expected to find the rate of change for the draining speed of a conical container — and he had no idea how to do it. Back on Earth, he never had anything close to a formal education at childhood. Gaius had tried to make up for it once he became a successful assassin, but math had eluded him over and over.

He could only remember that it had something to do with differentiation, but that was it. Gaius had tried his hardest to learn mathematics back then, but after a year or so, he’d concluded that complex math was the antithesis of his very existence.

The boy stared at the paper bitterly, and was on the verge of giving up when Nexus began to talk in his head.

“Need help?”

Gaius was silent for a moment, and then nodded unwillingly. Fortunately, Orb didn’t revolve around the tossing of math formulae at each other for fights, or he would have died a pitiful death long ago.

“Alright, coming through! Backseat driver’s taking over!” Nexus whooped. Gaius’ hand began to move, picking up the pencil provided, turning into a blur as it wrote line after line of equations the boy didn’t want to look at. Gaius watched the hand go wild for a moment, and then turned to look at the few hundred test-takers — which included Nakama and Isabelle.

“Hey.” Nexus’ voice echoed in his head again. “Do you mind looking down at the paper? I need to see the next question.”

Gaius returned his attention to the test paper, and then began to cheat with all his might. He was not going to live it down if Nakama and Isabelle found out that he had to rely on Nexus…although he knew that they were going to find out anyway. Turning his attention back on to the paper, the boy focused on the answers Nexus was giving out, hoping that he could at least be able to decipher something.

The torture ended three hours later. After half-an-hour for a toilet break and some water, the next test began. The Phrontistery of Scientific Reasoning had four main subjects — math, culture, language and combat. The last portion was actually the most important, taking up fifty-five percent of the overall grade, but it made sense when one thought about it.

Only living students can contribute.

It was a cold philosophy, in Gaius’ opinion, but things were things. The other subjects took up fifteen percent of the grades, since these things weren’t essential to the war-torn world of Orb.

The culture test went largely the same way, except that Nexus wasn’t helping him cheat this time. That honour went to Isabelle, who was taken off-guard by the essay topic on slum culture in Orb. For someone who lived a huge part of her life in the aristocracy, this was somewhat expected.

Apparently, Nexus could only help one person at a time. It was an unfortunate restriction, but it was better than nothing. It was fortunate that Gaius had managed to reason out some informal rules and structures of slum society in the, uh, walkabouts he did in the South. And more importantly, he had a sinking feeling that Nakama’s marks in this session would be far higher than his.

Minutes turned into hours, and after three such hours, Gaius turned in his essay about the phenomena of vice lords, racketeering and gangs in slums. It was an analysis about why these three factors occurred, and why they seemed to go hand in hand. As for why he wrote this…the moment he saw the question topic, all he could think of was Flynn and his colleagues. The fact that he drew his examples entirely from the South was probably going to be a problem, though.

Shaking his head, he closed his eyes for a moment. The next topic was language, and Nakama had the foresight to take Nexus back from Isabelle. Gaius had no idea why one of the sculptures was with Isabelle in the first place, but he could ask that question later.

And well, when the third test started, Nakama indeed got Nexus to take over. The study of Earth’s languages was restricted to the aristocracy, which meant that Nakama needed a lot of help. She was largely unexposed to languages other than English, unlike Isabelle, and had little experience to draw from, unlike Gaius.

On the boy’s part, the test was actually quite simple. It was a compilation of all the languages that had been brought over, be it by the Cardinal Champions, the Constellation Heroes or even the famous otherworlders in Orb’s history. And his job was to identify as many as possible.

It was…a very easy test, insofar as Gaius recognised the languages used. Sure, he didn't understand them, but identifying them wasn't that hard so long as one didn't live an insular life on Earth. One was bound to come across foreign words sooner or later, and a curious search would reveal their origin.

English, French, German, Dutch, Latin, a whole bunch of Cyrillic-based languages, and then Chinese, with both traditional and simplified…as Gaius went down the list, he had a feeling that Orb had played host to at least a division’s worth of otherworlders. There were simply too many languages, so either the otherworlders who came were mostly multilingual, or there were really a lot of them.

In short, it was a horrible mess that Gaius found some joy in sorting out. His pencil flashed like mad, and the test-takers around him looked at him with widened eyes when the boy set down his pencil, thirty minutes after the test began. Yawning, Gaius laid his head onto the table, and took a short nap.

He didn’t really need it, but he had to unnerve some test-takers for Nakama’s sake. Gaius would be mad if Nakama lost out because of some other person wrecking the bellcurve. And for that very reason, the boy intended to take first place in the combat test. By knocking out the strongest competitors, he would have cleared the way for the others.

Gaius was ready to go all out for a peaceful school life. After all, there was but four years before the Demon God’s invasion.