Many things create a tremendous fuss before they begin, but when they truly arrive, they happen in complete silence.
The Triwizard Tournament shared somewhat of this flavor; at least the first event, the joint exam, was like this. For the students of Sobu High, aside from the exam venue being switched to an auditorium equipped with surveillance cameras and the proctors being somewhat unfamiliar, there was no huge difference compared to ordinary exams.
If one really had to point out something special...
"Hey, do you really have to wear this hat to take the exam?" Hiratsuka looked at Asakura, who was drawing immense attention with a pointed top on his head, feeling somewhat speechless.
"Yes! I am!" Asakura said loudly.
"You bastard..."
Veins popped on Hiratsuka's forehead.
If the surrounding proctors hadn't all been teachers from other schools, she likely would have directly unleashed her iron fist of love out of past habit.
Though she wouldn't be able to hit Asakura anyway.
As a side note, to prevent cheating, the other proctors had already inspected Asakura's hat and his bandage-wrapped arm, finding nothing suspicious. Coupled with Amakusa Shino specially deleting the requirements regarding dress code from the joint exam rules earlier, those proctors could only glare at Asakura helplessly.
"Hiratsuka-sensei, you'd better watch yourself instead. The reason the school didn't dispatch you to proctor at other schools for this joint exam must be because they feared you'd lay hands on students and make Sobu High lose face," Asakura said.
"What nonsense are you spouting? Even for a joint exam, there will obviously be teachers remaining at their home school!" Hiratsuka said in exasperation, "...And you idiots over there, none of you are allowed to make an 'I see' expression!"
The boys who had suffered under Hiratsuka's iron fist lowered their heads one after another.
"I think Hiratsuka-sensei should occasionally reflect on the reason why you can't get married," Asakura continued.
"Hah?! Say that again!"
The veins throbbing on Hiratsuka's forehead became even more pronounced.
I'm truly worried about her blood pressure, the kind-hearted Asakura thought to himself.
The gazes of the teachers from other schools around them all turned in their direction.
"Tch," realizing things couldn't go on like this, Hiratsuka clicked her tongue and warned Asakura, "In short, do well on the exam, understand?!"
She then swaggered away under the watchful eyes of the teachers from other schools. That arrogant attitude of 'What are you looking at, haven't you seen a Japanese language teacher before?!' made her feel less like a teacher and more like a yakuza delinquent girl.
In terms of drawing fire away from Asakura, she was indeed quite conscientious...
Asakura sat back down in his seat and adjusted the wide brim of the hat on his head.
Things have come to this; let me show you my true power!
Sorting Hat, add stats!
[No, I do not possess that function.]
The Sorting Hat's voice echoed in Asakura's mind.
Useless trash!
[Even across all the successive Headmasters of Hogwarts, not one has ever evaluated me with such disrespect.] The Sorting Hat made a donkey-like sound.
Even so, the Sorting Hat's function of refreshing the mind and awakening the brain was still present.
And so, as the bell signaling the start of the exam rang, Asakura stopped paying attention to the Sorting Hat rapping in his head and focused his mind entirely on tackling the exam paper.
The first subject was Mathematics.
At the beginning, everything went extremely smoothly. Following the predetermined strategy, as soon as Asakura finished the initial section, he immediately applied for the next test paper. Considering the exam had a time limit, speed was likely also part of this joint exam competition.
Meanwhile, the teachers—who had initially paid considerable attention to Asakura due to his bizarre attire—watched him rapidly complete the test questions, and their expressions gradually shifted from 'a strange student playing the fool for attention' to 'How the hell is this guy actually an honor student? Are both the students and teachers of Sobu High this weird?'.
However, as the difficulty of the subsequent test papers rose abruptly, Asakura's brow furrowed slightly.
Although 'the subsequent test papers being harder than the previous ones' was within the initial calculations, the difficulty curve seemed somewhat problematic; the difficulty of just the multiple-choice and true/false questions alone was considerably higher than the big problems on the first few test papers.
Granted, even if these questions were very difficult, they were still well within Asakura's capabilities. He even felt that the top ten students of Sobu High could basically solve them, though it would just take a substantial amount of time.
Yet a certain sense of incongruity prevented him from directly starting to solve the problems.
After pondering for a brief moment, Asakura suddenly realized something, and he glanced at the author listed at the header of the paper.
He then discovered that the author of this high-difficulty paper was not a teacher from Sobu High, nor did it match the names of the few Shuchiin exam-writing teachers mentioned during his previous chat with Chika.
In that case, this high-difficulty test paper was undoubtedly from the third school in the Triwizard Tournament—namely, Toyogasaki & Tsukinomori Joint Private Academy.
Leaving Toyogasaki aside for the moment, Tsukinomori, which merged with it, was originally an aristocratic girls' academy, so having high-level teachers was perfectly normal.
However, for a test paper of such high difficulty, unless Tsukinomori intended to use brutal test papers to drag down the honor students of all three schools together and stall everyone's progress, there had to be some sort of trick inside.
Thinking up to this point, Asakura cleanly gave up on those small questions that were originally supposed to be easy scoring points and flipped straight to the final big problem.
Utilizing reaction speed far exceeding ordinary humans and the mental enhancement granted by the Sorting Hat, Asakura scanned ten lines at a glance to quickly finish reading the problem, understanding it completely in a short period.
—So that's how it is.
The big problem in the back was very difficult as well.
However, compared to the small questions in front, its difficulty was actually slightly lower.
Not only that.
"The question types are the same... Even the numbers follow a pattern if you look closely. Completing the big problem is equivalent to completing the preliminary steps of those small questions, which can save a lot of calculation verification time."
In other words, unlike Sobu High and Shuchiin, Toyogasaki's test paper had a reversed problem-solving logic: doing the big problems in the back first before turning back to do the small questions in the front would actually be much faster and smoother.
"How truly cunning..."
Honor students are always proud and arrogant. Whether it was the honor students from Sobu High or Shuchiin, when encountering this kind of test paper, they definitely wouldn't notice the issue immediately; instead, they would feel they had hit a speed bump and brute-force the questions using their academic strength. By the time they reached the back, even if they noticed minor issues, the time spent would already have been wasted.
On the contrary, someone like Asakura, who hadn't been that exceptionally top-tier in his past life, would immediately sense something was off when running into such a situation.
As for Toyogasaki, although specific questions certainly couldn't be leaked to students, Toyogasaki's teachers must have more or less hinted to their honor students how to approach their school's test papers correctly.
It seemed that although Toyogasaki acted like a complete non-presence before the Triwizard Tournament began, they hadn't completely abandoned their desire to win to contentedly remain a background board.
Thinking about it this way, the test papers for the other subjects probably contain similar tricks to varying degrees.
After getting messed with like this in mathematics, the honor students over at Shuchiin will probably catch on as well. When that happens, the subsequent subject exams won't merely be a contest of raw academic power—will it also be about finding the 'shortcuts' buried by Toyogasaki as quickly as possible?
Asakura smirked: Omoshiroi [Fascinating], let me see just how far you all can play around with the rules!