Oliver Horn is a new first-year student at Hogwarts Kimberly Magic Academy, a school with the design of a breathtaking castle perched upon a hill. While walking through the cherry blossoms to the opening ceremony, he encounters his classmates, and they encounter one another. The one that makes the biggest impact on all of them is a petite samurai girl with a bright smile and a complete disregard for the dress code.
The assembled classmates are greeted by a parade of magical beasts, but one of them gets pissed off when a troll is part of the parade, believing it to be a wrong, even racist practice. She butts heads with her male classmate, and it’s here where I note that she has huge brown hair and he’s a redhead, just like Ron and Hermione! Probably a coincidence.
What likely isn’t a coincidence is when someone in the crowd casts a spell that makes the brown-haired girl’s legs run even though she doesn’t want them to. She’s on a collision course with the troll, and it doesn’t look like he cares whether she’s pro- or anti-troll. Who should come between her and her sudden and unncerimonial demise but the magical samurai girl.
Here, Oliver not only shows his ability to herd cats and get the classmates to execute his plan even though none of them know each others’ names (and neither do we—we don’t even know Oliver’s yet) but also his penchant for spell customization, creating a decent facsimile of a dragon’s roar.
That roar distracts the troll, giving samurai girl the perfect opening. As she leaps into the air, she’s covered with glowing mana and her hair turns white. Her magical katana slams against the crown of the Troll’s skull, knocking him out.
Immediately after looking cool and badass as hell, the girl turns around and acts like a big goof, as her hands are still shaking from the skull impact. But her classmate is safe, and so is she thanks to Oliver and the others’ magical teamwork.
When Kimberly’s headmistress Esmeralda apparates into the auditorium with a flourish of lightning, it’s made clear that incidents like the one we just saw are relatively common, as the academy has a student attrition rate of 20%. And by “attrition” I mean death by myriad means both magical and otherwise.
Esmeralda minces no words in making her point, which is surely to sharpen these first-years and get them used to the fact that while they have extraordinary freedom, with it comes responsibility for their own lives and futures. The curt sobriety of the headmistress’ speech is followed by the samurai girl not asking Esmeralda a question, but just recommending a way to reduce headaches.
Once the classmates are magically wafted to the banquet hall, the classmates finally introduce one another. This should feel like last-second infodump—and in many ways it is—but allowing each student to introduce themselves also allows gives us an efficient Cliff Notes of who they are and where they’re from, it also allows for plenty interaction between these six different personalities.
You have the cordial aristocrat oujou-sama Michela McFarlane, complete with drill curls, the mousier animal lover Katie Aalto, the outgoing farm boy/botanist Guy Greenwood, the introverted tsundere Muggle-born Pete Reston, and Oliver, who has two older cousins at the academy. They all come off as likeable, though Guy is the closest to being grating.
Finally, there’s Hibiya Nanao, the samurai girl, who is far more far-flung than anyone else, and also didn’t have to take any test to enroll. Instead, she was discovered by a faculty member (who happens to be Michela’s dad) and received a special recommendation.
With all the intros out of the way, everyone heads off to their dorms. Oliver is roommates with Pete, and makes sure he’s tucked in before heading out on an pre-dawn stroll. He’s confronted in the garden by a “covert operative” named Teresa Carste, sent by his brother Gwyn to watch over him.
Oliver gets another taste of Hibiya Nanao’s whole fish-out-of-water deal when he finds her topless, purifying herself with water from a fountain. Oliver warns her about the nearby boys dorms, but Nanao doesn’t possess the same Western modesty as he does. What she does have are a lot of battle scars, suggesting she’s no stranger to leaping into death’s jaws.
The reason she was able to save Katie was that she also harbored a healthy, if almost unconscious trust in her peers to back her up and, incidentally, save her from getting killed by the troll. It’s a group I’m looking forward to watching as they grow closer as friends and make each other better mages.
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