I had high hopes for Randall as an instructor, but already this does not seem like a healthy learning environment.

Is one student missing because Hinata already completed her assignment?

Battle Royale?

That's the opposite of what Noah's trying to learn!

I wonder how the assignments are given, I mean there's math behind this that I'm not gonna do, but if everyone is great at discovering and terrible at hiding it could lead to a massive student cull.
But, in short *if* the targets form a chain, it is possible for:
B reports A
C reports B
D reports C
...
N reports M

At the end of the day only M survives...
I presume Randall thought about the task more than I did so, whatever, it just came to me how it values self protection over discovery. It should be more like a hunt than like a FFA brawl.

It reminds me to the magiball training Garth was rewarding defense over offense simply because they are very expensive assets of the empire. In the bunker day they were rewarded from non-detection as well. This setup "should" emphasize hiding/survival over discovery.

Relax, if Felix is still alive, then they don't kill kids left and right.

I feel like ive seen this setup before, and its a good one. Keep your code secret, figure out the code of your target. Violence doesn't necessarily have to apply...yet

@Cellphone
Did you really expect the learning environment under Randall to be healthy? I mean, considering that this "magic education" here is taking place in the same empire that, until just recently, committed magic-user purges and that, at this very moment, has got explosive collars attached to all of their magic students, and also that is basically educating them to become living weapons? Randall is probably as healthy an instructor as these kids are ever going to get as long as they are subjects of the empire...

That is NOT what Darwin meant by "survival of the fittest", this follows Spencer's abuse of Darwin that gave us social Darwinism in our world. And social Darwinism leads to such great outcomes as racism, eugenics, and genocide -.-

At least Veda tried to improve everyone and make some kind of team.
Making a battle royale doesn't make good soldiers, it makes good Rambos who could or could not follow orders.

oh god. now I imagine Randall sounding like the Macho Man

@Cellphone

He's still a Justopean teacher; it's pretty clear at this point that the constant competitiveness is an ingrained facet of Justopea culture.

It's extremely ironic that the healthiest teaching practices so far were observed by Veda, despite her blatant amorality.

@Cellphone

I partially disagree, simply based on his statement in the third panel. He can't deviate much from how the Empire operates, so how I see it is he's just working with what he's got.

So when he says the code must be protected at all costs, does he mean the letter or just that no one else can learn it?

If the latter, I would memorize that as soon as possible and destroy that letter. Then your only threat is someone with a magic ability that could coerce it out of you.

Or maybe you then create a fake copy to trick anyone else into trying to grab it. Man I wish I had fun assignments like this back in school, why is it the other classes that always get to do the fun work.

Well, Noah has a track record of learning vital survival skills when it's his only option. So in a way, this is a good sign.

As for the teacher, he might not have been the one to choose this curriculum. We really don't know a lot about how they run things here.

I love this kind of class activity.

This will force our asocial hero into, wait for it... socializing!

Seems easy enough to guard your code, just destroy the paper.... although magic will probably complicate matters

Remind me a lot of HuntexHunter exam where people had to steal someone else badge while keeping their own.