Otaku Witch

At the entrance of the workshop, Dorothy was sizing up the dozen or so "warships" parked in the plaza.

Yeah, let’s just call them warships for now. Strictly speaking, from a professional quality inspector’s point of view, these would all count as pretty subpar knockoffs, but since they’re the interns’ very first works, there’s no need to be too harsh.

At the very least, everyone’s "warships" look pretty nicely polished on the outside, don’t they?

The homebody witch looked at these cool-looking warship exteriors and nodded in satisfaction.

They really are all young people—everyone is face-conscious. Never mind performance for the moment, at least get the warship’s appearance perfectly restored first. Coolness is justice.

Dorothy really appreciated that. After all, she’s the same way. The performance of her White Dragon Warship was far from what she’d hoped for, but that didn’t stop her from deliberately spending extra time to give the White Dragon Warship a transmigration mode into a mechanical Great Dragon, all for the sake of looking cool.

"Looks like there are actually quite a few talents in this batch of interns."

After circling the warships a few times to inspect them, she showed a satisfied smile.

Right at that moment, the interns who had just finished breakfast began arriving at the plaza in twos and threes. The moment they saw the homebody witch, who had been waiting there for a while, every one of them unconsciously tensed up.

Very soon, all the interns had gathered. These eight or nine hundred people were divided into a dozen or so small teams. They each stood around the warship their group had built and silently waited for the evaluation that was about to begin.

The tense, heavy atmosphere in the air was practically visible to the naked eye.

"Alright, everyone relax. You’re allowed to breathe right now, no need to hold it in. I’ll tell you some good news first: I’ve already looked over all of your works just now. Congratulations, you’ve all passed the assessment."

Dorothy clapped her hands to draw everyone’s attention, then gave them a gentle smile as she spoke.

This wasn’t some comforting white lie—the homebody witch never lies. The interns’ level really had exceeded her expectations a bit.

Originally, in her mind, as long as the newbies could roughly put together the warship’s appearance and make it fly without falling apart in midair, that would already count as a win. But in reality, every team had far surpassed that bare-minimum passing line, and several of them even gave her some pleasant little surprises.

Thinking about it, that was only natural. After all, everyone here had already successfully gotten an internship referral from the Witch Academy as outstanding graduates. They’d already been screened once by the Academy; they were all Elites with real skills, not a single true deadweight among them.

And this assessment was an open-book exam with the design drawings provided directly. No R&D required—they just had to follow the blueprint step by step to construct and assemble. The main thing being tested was their hands-on ability and their fundamental grasp of Nine Systems Magic. Difficulty-wise, this really...

Alright, fine, it actually was still pretty hard—at least a bit tougher than Spider Teacher’s entrance exam back then. But this was a group assessment, and with everyone putting their heads together, the difficulty naturally dropped a lot.

"More people means more Strength" is not a lie.

All in all, the homebody witch felt like she’d struck gold. Her workshop was seriously short on workers; she’d been itching to drag the Japanese Witches over, and even the Moon Rabbits, to fill up the production line.

But unfortunately, the Japanese Witches were a bunch of Illiterates who’d never gone to school. That group of folks who look like they time-traveled from ancient times didn’t know shit about warships. And while the Moon Rabbits were a technologically advanced race and knew warships, they didn’t understand Witch Magic, which was just as useless.

Right now, the workshop was barely hanging on thanks to workers temporarily loaned from other workshops. And at this critical juncture, nearly a thousand outstanding interns suddenly dropped into her lap—this really solved Dorothy’s urgent crisis.

Originally she’d thought that as long as they weren’t absolute trash, she would just accept them all and slowly train them. But now it looked like every single one of them had a bright future ahead.

Nice. Dorothy liked "bright future ahead" the most.

Plus, what surprised her was that after a whole week of overtime grind and bitter training, she’d assumed this batch of interns would have at least a few dozen, maybe a hundred, who’d be scared off and quit. But looking around now, she realized the number of people present was exactly the same as a week ago—not a single one missing.

"Tsk, are young people nowadays all this hardcore? Do they all have some kind of innate workhorse holy body or something, to be this good at eating bitterness and enduring hardship?"

The homebody witch scratched her head, a little confused.

Compared to her puzzlement though, once the interns heard her announce that everyone had passed, they all let out a sigh of relief, then started cheering and jumping around.

"Yay, I knew we could do it."

"Oh my god, we passed, everyone passed!"

"Long live, milady, we Love you!"

"Uu, that scared me to death. I thought I was going to get kicked out."

"We finally made it through. Seriously, if it weren’t for the cafeteria food being too good to give up, I would’ve run away ages ago. This last week has been inhuman."

"Dead tired, +1. I only got through this on cafeteria food. Every time I wanted to quit, I just went to the cafeteria once and got healed by the deliciousness."

"Can’t part with the food, +1. I’d rather work without a salary, as long as it’s room and board included forever."

"I’d even pay to work here, just for that food."

.....

The interns hugged each other, high-fived, and cheered, though their conversation topics were drifting more and more off track.