“I’ll ask one thing first. Just how little aristocratic common sense do you have? I thought even a commoner would naturally know this much, but you’re beyond anything I imagined.”
What was I supposed to say to that? I was in a position where I knew almost nothing, and all I was doing was studying nobles day after day.
Thanks to my speed-reading specialty, I had at least memorized the outward characteristics of nobles to some degree, but I knew almost nothing about particular details. If I thought about it from Professor Sumeragi’s perspective—
“P-please think of me as s-someone from another world.”
That should be just about right.
“That isn’t wrong. The world of commoners and the world of nobles are fundamentally different, after all. Though it wasn’t exactly pleasant to hear from a student’s own mouth.”
What a relief. This way would probably be better.
Professor Sumeragi stared at me for a moment, then slowly let the tension leave her eyes. It felt like she was simply looking at me as a pitiful commoner who knew nothing of the noble world.
It was comfortable, but it didn’t feel particularly good.
“You know Cadet Ian’s eyes are blue, don’t you? The kind called azure eyes.”
“Y-yes.”
How could I not know? Ian’s blue eyes stood out far more than I had imagined.
My eyes were also in the blue family, but to be precise, they were closer to silver-blue, and Karina’s eye color was blue as well, but closer to navy. Ian’s eyes, however, were different in quality.
They were almost the perfect color of an autumn sky. They were so vividly blue that it made you wonder if they had been composited or had their saturation turned up.
“Do you know that Imperial Princess Saya’s eyes are the same color?”
Imperial Princess Saya?
I wasn’t sure. Unlike with Ian, I rarely had a chance to meet Imperial Princess Saya’s eyes. Aaron would probably know for certain, but I wasn’t particularly interested in Imperial Princess Saya.
No.
There was no way I wouldn’t know.
Hadn’t I looked up, from the very beginning, the information I absolutely had to know about nobles? It was something I hadn’t been interested in, so I had forgotten it again, but there were still things I ought to remember.
Blond hair and blue eyes. Because there was only one noble house that symbolized.
The Aslan imperial family.
“Is, is that related?”
Even so, those blue eyes couldn’t symbolize the bloodline of the Aslan imperial family. If you went by that logic, then I, and Karina as well, could insist we had a bit of imperial blood in us.
“I-Ian isn’t blond.”
Ian had black hair.
Of course, people with black hair and blue eyes were extremely rare. Blue eyes themselves came from a lack of melanin, while black hair meant an abundance of melanin.
Rare, yes, but not impossible. By common sense, you couldn’t think Ian had imperial blood based on his blue eyes alone.
“Because those blue eyes are a kind of hereditary disease passed down through the Aslan imperial family.”
Except for the fact that common sense in this world might differ from the common sense I possessed.
“Members of the Aslan imperial family have had vivid blue eyes for generations. Because of that, they’re weak to glare and their eyesight is poor. In exchange, their dynamic visual acuity is exceptionally outstanding, and they can see well even in the dark.”
Now that I thought about it, that was true.
The two of them were also strangely similar in how easily they got worked up.
The only imperial Titan I had seen was Kaiser, but even Kaiser had been excessively specialized for close-quarters combat. It had no equipment whatsoever for ranged combat.
Ian, too, had stayed up all night every time he repaired or customized Ailee. Maybe it was because night was more comfortable for him than bright daytime.
No, that was too shameless of me, so scratch that.
“Are you done thinking? I don’t know what you’re thinking about, but doing that with someone right in front of you is rude.”
“Ah, r-right. Yes.”
Professor Sumeragi nodded.
“Blond hair is more of an indicator of whether other blood has mixed into the Aslan imperial bloodline. Whether someone has Aslan blood can be sufficiently determined by their blue eyes.”
“Then…”
“Most nobles know this, so it seems they’re all somewhat reluctant to deal with Cadet Ian. He has imperial blood, but his class is commoner. And yet, his connection to the Aslan imperial family still remains.”
“What?”
It remains?
“Don’t you know far too little about your own friend?”
Do friends usually ask about family circumstances like that?
Professor Sumeragi turned on her smart watch and projected a hologram. It was a hologram of Ailee.
Professor Sumeragi tapped Ailee’s hologram and enlarged the thruster section.
“The thrusters attached to Ailee—weren’t their performance excessively high? Their fuel efficiency is extremely poor, though.”
“Th-that’s true.”
That was also why we had lost against Kaiser.
The thrusters’ performance was powerful, but their fuel efficiency was terrible, so they had consumed fuel far faster than expected. In the end, close-quarters combat had become impossible, and we lost.
“Because they’re thrusters used by imperial Titans that don’t need to worry about fuel efficiency. As for how Cadet Ian obtained them, it can only be called a connection to the imperial family.”
“That…”
Does that make any sense?
I was about to answer that way, but belatedly, I remembered what Ian had said.
Connections.
When he had acquired both the main thruster and the side thrusters in a single day, I had stared at him in wonder, and that was what Ian had said. Connections. I had wondered what sort of connections a commoner could possibly have.
When my expression stiffened slightly, only then did Professor Sumeragi laugh softly.
“Has something finally clicked? Now we can actually have a conversation. It was difficult not being able to say what I’d been trying to say since earlier.”
“You said… you had a f-favor to ask.”
Right. Professor Sumeragi hadn’t been trying to explain Ian from the start. She had wanted to ask a favor related to Ian.
“Cadet Deep, you’re friends with Cadet Ian, aren’t you? Then could you persuade Cadet Ian to move his club to the one you belong to?”
I had thought she would ask me for a favor I could grant.
“Wh-why?”
“Because I think it would be good for both the Engineering Club and the Employees’ Club. Cadet Ian is lacking in general culture overall, so I thought it would be good for him to build up the refinement and mental fortitude he lacks.”
“Have you spoken to Professor Zeke…”
Professor Sumeragi looked slightly as if she had just realized her mistake.
“W-well, I haven’t been able to tell him yet. It was an idea that came to me when I saw Cadet Deep’s face. I’ll tell him later.”
So they hadn’t discussed it yet.
“And we’re not f-friends.”
This wasn’t a favor I could grant, then. What a relief.
Professor Sumeragi’s expression twisted strangely.
“You’re not friends?”
“N-no, we’re not.”
I mean, of course Ian was customizing and repairing my Ailee, and supplying parts too, but could that really be called friendship?
I hadn’t made a friend in the past few years, so I couldn’t know.
***
“That much makes you friends! Deep, aren’t you thinking too hard about what a friend is? Then what am I?”
You’re an artificial intelligence.
Answering that would make me seem too heartless, so after thinking about it for a bit, I replied.
“Ailee is my companion.”
The speaker that had been making noise quickly fell silent. I had said it with a fair amount of sincerity, but I felt bad. Maybe the expression “companion” was a bit ambiguous, so it had made her uncomfortable.
I wondered if I should apologize, but decided to just think about something else.
For example, Professor Sumeragi’s request.
I hadn’t completely refused Professor Sumeragi’s request.
I had received something from her three times already, so I thought I ought to accept at least one request. I said I was curious how serious the problem was, so I wanted to participate in the club activities.
Not as joining the club, but under the pretext of observing club activities.
Observing club activities was something that happened often in practice. Professor Sumeragi also said that much was possible and told me to come to the next club activity.
Thursday, was it?
Two days from now. My physical condition probably wouldn’t be bad.
Honestly, being responsible for someone or changing someone’s mind had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t even do anything about my own mind and had shut myself in my room, so how could I change the mind of someone as single-minded as Ian?
Still, because the other party was Professor Sumeragi, I thought I should at least show proof that I had made the minimum effort. I could just go there casually and say that, by my standards, there didn’t seem to be any problem.
“So? What are you going to do if you observe the Engineering Club?”
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I was observing the Engineering Club.
“I’ll be customizing Ailee soon, so if there’s anything useful, I want to use it as reference.”
“You’re going to copy them?”
The foundation of ideas is observation.
If I wanted to customize Ailee well, I needed to observe other people’s customizations that much more carefully.
However, it wasn’t to copy them. If anything, it was close to the exact opposite.
“No. I’m going to snipe them.”
Meta-pick.
It referred to the popular method of victory where one imitated the method with the highest win rate and chose a strategy similar to it.
What I was choosing was the exact opposite.
“A meta counter-pick.”
A method of exploiting the weaknesses of the meta-pick and tuning the Titan so it could gain an advantage against popular picks.
It was a little different from when I had chosen an extreme Titan with no limbs to match Aaron’s Icarus. Back then, I had chosen it solely to match Aaron, but this time, I had to respond no matter what the opponent used.
I had no intention of becoming the overlord with the number-one win rate. My goal was simply to win once.
“It’s called the Engineering Club, after all. They should have customization records for Titans too. I don’t know whether they’ll show them to a cadet who’s just observing, but even being able to look around should be beneficial.”
Not “should be.” It had to be.
“Midterms are soon.”
Probably less than a month away.
Just like the entrance exam, scores would be determined through fixed one-on-one battles against randomly assigned opponents, and rankings would be determined through those scores.
If I lost, reaching the upper ranks would be impossible.
No matter who the opponent was, I had to gain an advantage.
You might think I could just go to the hangar and look at other people’s Titans, but that wasn’t easy. Most Titans had hangar bulkheads set up around them.
Besides, there was no way a Titan I saw now would look the same later during the exam. Before the midterms, most Titans would go through customization.
The only way to confirm what they looked like then was to hear it from the engineers.
“I hope I get lucky.”
“I’ll be cheering for you too!”
Not that I had ever been lucky.