Magical Girl with Demonic Time Magic-Chapter 61: Studying a Little

"Hey Ayane, do you need anything?" Setsuna asks, seeing that I can’t stop looking at her. After our training session yesterday, we had several duels, and I lost all of them after winning the first one.

So it was a tough night, even though I dreamed about Setsuna again. We almost kissed, but the dream ended before that. It’s strange to have had that dream again, even though Hexael wasn’t in it it was just me and Setsuna, but I decided to let it go.

And now we’re at school, but I’m worried about the routine tests that are coming up. They don’t affect your grade, but they can still cause problems if you get bad scores.

"W-Well, I need help studying, and I wanted to start a small study group. I invited Hinata, since you two are already friends, so I thought the three of us could study together," I say nervously.

There’s no way I can forget that Setsuna is a genius. Maybe she won’t want to study with me, after all, why would she want to study when her grades are perfect, and she always gets everything right?

"I’ll help you guys," she responds positively, which gives me a huge sense of relief. Having her help will make sure I don’t have any problems with my grades.

"Thank you, thank you so much!!" I say to her, who saved me from this problem.

"Ayane, please be quiet or leave the classroom," the teacher says to me, and I immediately shut up, but I make a pouty face at Setsuna, who cracks a smile.

"..." We follow the class in silence until the free period, when we can do more things besides the teacher’s assignment.

"Setsuna and Hinata, let’s go to the library?" I call the two. Hinata seems like she’s going to reject the idea, but Setsuna confirms it, so she looks uncertain and just agrees hesitantly.

I’m glad the two have worked things out. Setsuna had said some nasty things to her, but they seem to have made amends.

The three of us leave the classroom, moving away from the sounds of conversation as we pass by some other students who are also leaving.

"It’s great that the teacher left this class open," I say to them enthusiastically. If we weren’t free now, I’d have to pull an all-nighter studying after training with Setsuna.

Even though the amount of sleep I need has decreased, I still need to sleep, and I already spend too much time awake. Normally, I sleep a maximum of 1 to 4 hours per day.

"Yeah, it’s awesome," Hinata just agrees as we arrive at the library after walking a bit.

We enter and look for a spot, and I’m already thinking about what books we’ll need, but Setsuna silently grabs 3 books and puts them on the table.

"Setsuna, why did you get those books?" I question.

"I believe you want to study for the routine test that tends to happen at least once a month, and if it’s that one, the topics that come up are usually the basic subject matter we’ve studied that month."

"And what we’ve studied is the content of these 3 books, so everything we need is in these three books," she says, while I’m embarrassed at how slow I am. Without her here, I would have picked up 7 or more books until I found what I needed.

"That’s impressive!" I say to her as the three of us sit at the table and each take a book. She reduced all the studying to a single book for each of us.

"It’s not really that impressive, it’s just a matter of knowing where to look," she says as I look at Hinata, who’s picking up her phone.

"Aren’t you going to study?" I ask.

"I am...I’m just texting some friends to come here too, so it’s less boring," Hinata says, typing a message, the sound of the message high in the quiet environment.

"Hey, give that back!" She says when Setsuna takes the phone from her hands.

"[Hey girls, I’m just taking a little break and I’ll be there soon, I’m not busy, if I get caught I’ll just say I wasn’t feeling well and leave]" Setsuna reads the messages on Hinata’s phone.

"You know, Hinata, if you don’t want to study, you don’t have to lie. No one’s forcing you to stay here, but I ask that you don’t tell lies."

"B-But it was just a little white lie and..." Hinata tries to justify herself, but Setsuna cuts her off.

"Little lies can quickly turn into big lies. I understand that studying can seem boring, but I believe your grades are poor, so it would be better to take advantage of the opportunity." Setsuna gives her a stern lecture, and I agree with her.

"...Tsk, my bad, give me my phone back," Hinata says grumpily, while Setsuna hands the device back to her. Hinata just types a brief message and puts her phone away.

"I’m listening, what are we doing?" Hinata says a bit sarcastically.

"Pages 13, 18 and 27," Setsuna says, just that to Hinata.

"Why are you putting us on those pages?" Setsuna questions when Hinata opens the book and goes to page 13.

"But you said..."

"You didn’t ask. Those 3 pages are the ones that have nothing useful. The other 47 pages are the ones we need to read."

"..." Hinata stares at the book that has exactly 50 pages. It’s a lot of stuff to study.

"But Ayane made the right choice in inviting me. I can summarize the content in 2 sheets, but I believe you should apologize to Ayane, after all, I only read part of the messages, and I believe the rest I saw were unpleasant." Hinata cringes but nods her head.

"Okay, sorry for writing nasty things about you guys, it’s just that I... never mind, please help me then, because I need the grades too," Hinata says more containedly now.

"Pfff hahaha!" I laugh at the scene, leaving the two confused. I don’t know what Hinata wrote, but Setsuna reminds me of a strict teacher who doesn’t really understand the impact of her words.

My laughter breaks the bad mood, while Hinata just sighs and Setsuna opens the book to start.

"Okay, I’ll give a brief explanation of the context of the topic we’ve been studying. It mainly talks about the previous geographic area. As you know, the world was very different before, and it’s important to understand the mistakes of the past to avoid repeating them in the future."

"And this class, although it may seem like a boring topic, is very common on tests, so I’ll try to present it in an educational way, but without being too boring. I think we can start with the first change that..."

Setsuna begins to explain. At first, it’s hard to keep up, the explanation is a bit high-level, but soon Setsuna eases the difficulty, catching our attention with the content as we check in the book.

All the information is passed on efficiently and precisely, but in an easy-to-memorize way, keeping our attention the entire time, and in less than an hour, all the content of 50 pages was summarized.

Something that would have taken 3 to 5 hours to do was reduced to just 1 hour, counting the breaks for extra explanations or questions she answered, and with that, we finished everything very quickly.

"What the heck! Geniuses are crazy, that had 50 pages, you know?! And it was serious content, the kind they have on the school’s big tests! How did you manage to summarize it so fast?" Hinata says, shocked.

"...It’s not that hard if you memorize and cut out the useless parts," Setsuna says simply, without arrogance, just honest words about what she believes is the answer, but it’s not that easy.

Just memorizing is already difficult, and now memorizing, summarizing, and removing excess information requires a lot from regular students. She did wonders in this brief class.

"...I need to step out for a moment. I recommend renting these books and taking them home to study, after all, a single brief class like mine won’t guarantee your grades," Setsuna says, getting up and returning her book to its place.

"Thank you, Setsuna, you were a huge help," I say to her as I check some extras from the book. Thanks to her, learning was super easy. Hinata is right, the minds of geniuses are crazy to summarize so perfectly and still keep it interesting.

"Hey, Ayane, is she always like that?" Hinata asks when Setsuna leaves the room.

"What do you mean?" I ask, not understanding where she’s going with this.

"I don’t know, like, she seems almost normal now," Hinata says, something that offends me.

"She is normal!" I say, as if Setsuna wasn’t normal. I know Setsuna is different and has some issues, but she’s no different from anyone else.

"I see you haven’t seen it yet, but I don’t know, she’s kind of gloomy. I’m just saying she’s undeniably a strange girl, but who am I to judge, right? Thanks for the help," Hinata says, getting up and leaving without even returning the book to its place or taking it home to study.

"...Haaa..." I can only sigh. It was fun while it lasted, but it seems Hinata and Setsuna still have their misunderstandings because of that incident in the classroom.

I just take my book and run it through a machine along with my student ID to show I’m borrowing it, and I also return the book that was with Hinata to its proper place.

’I want to eat something, maybe a chocolate bar from the snack machine.’ I decide to get a sweet treat from the machines, then think about where the closest one is, but I remember it doesn’t have the candies I want.

"There’s one further back...I think I’ll go to that one." I don’t know where Setsuna went, but I think she’ll probably go back to the classroom when she’s done, so I decide to go to a machine to get something sweet before heading back to the classroom.