That expression wasn’t relief at having survived.
It was the opposite.
It was the face people made when something even bigger had arrived.
The one who appeared at the end of the corridor was a middle-aged man.
He wore a dark overcoat over his professor’s robes, and two more faculty staff were with him.
His steps were quick, but his face was strangely calm.
The fallen school crest plaque.
The broken iron stand.
The staff member pinned against the wall.
The two knights.
Serena.
When a scene has unfolded like this, people usually look at two things first.
The injured person, and the broken object.
But not that man.
The first place his gaze went was the half-burned scrap of paper in Serena’s hand.
Only for a very brief moment.
But I saw it.
Great.
“What is going on here?”
the man asked as he approached.
His voice was calm.
So calm it grated on me even more.
Serena looked at him.
“Before you ask, I will ask first.”
Her voice was refined.
It had sunk even lower than before.
“This staff member was just carrying a paper with a suspension-ring loosening formula written on it, hidden among the documents guiding my route.
And immediately afterward, the decoration hanging over the place I was about to pass through fell.”
The middle-aged man’s eyes wavered for the briefest instant, then were wiped clean at once.
“There seems to be a misunderstanding.”
Of course.
People like that always start off the same way.
They don’t act surprised, and they don’t get angry. They try to press it down and cover it up first.
Serena looked down at the scrap in her hand, then turned her gaze toward Yulian and Mia.
“Whether it is a misunderstanding or not, we can ask those two over there.”
The corners of the middle-aged man’s mouth stiffened almost imperceptibly.
The staff member was still pinned against the wall, gasping for breath.
He had gone even paler than before.
It had been since he saw that middle-aged man.
The man glanced at the staff member.
“Things like this can also circulate as auxiliary formulas for facility repairs.
It is difficult to make a judgment after seeing only part of it.”
Serena answered immediately.
“It is not a reinforcement formula. It is a loosening formula.”
“It may look that way to a student.”
Ah.
What pretty words.
Extremely polite, but the meaning was the same.
What would you know? That was what he was saying.
Serena’s eyes narrowed by the smallest degree.
“It did not look that way. I read it.”
The air in the corridor chilled once again.
One knight held the staff member pinned to the wall even more firmly.
The other stepped half a pace forward.
Only then did the middle-aged man turn his full gaze on Serena.
“My lady. First, the academy will take custody of this staff member and the document.
Before this matter grows any larger—”
“No.”
She cut him off quickly.
Serena wasn’t the type to use many words to begin with, and at times like this, she became even shorter.
“Immediately after my route was changed, a decoration fell over my head.”
She took one step forward.
“There is a high possibility that this was not a simple facility accident.”
The middle-aged man’s expression hardened a little more.
“On the basis of that possibility alone—”
“That possibility alone is enough.”
Serena’s voice was still refined, but the texture beneath it had changed completely.
“At least for now.”
There was a reason those two knights were standing by her side.
Serena was not a cold person. She was someone who knew how to draw a line when necessary.
This time, the middle-aged man looked toward the knights.
“It is not advisable for a student’s knights to interfere in an internal administrative investigation.”
One of the knights answered at once.
“We are not interfering in the investigation.”
Then, after a beat, he added,
“We are merely protecting the young lady.”
It was brief, but enough.
The staff member’s shoulders flinched.
I watched without a word.
His escape routes were blocked, the paper was half-burned, and if he opened his mouth, he would only look even more suspicious.
Great.
Life is always like this.
Beside me, Mia tugged very lightly at my sleeve.
“Senior.”
I didn’t look at her.
“What now?”
“That person too.”
“Who?”
“The person who just came.”
My heart slowly sank.
“What about him?”
Mia wrinkled the tip of her nose ever so slightly.
“The same smell.”
Only then did I look at the middle-aged man again.
There was nothing particularly distinctive about his clothes.
Just neatly arranged professor’s robes, an overly calm expression, and an excessively smooth manner.
But now I could see it.
The end of his left sleeve.
Near his wrist.
A single faintly blurred black line.
It was so faint I might have missed it if I blinked, but once I saw it, it bothered me even more.
Unconsciously, I pressed my fingers to my temple.
I forced down the headache that was trying to rise.
If I showed it here, things would get troublesome again.
They were already troublesome enough.
Serena was still looking at the middle-aged man.
“Do not let them take this staff member away.”
She said to the knight.
“The same goes for the document fragment.”
The middle-aged man immediately cut in.
“My lady. There are procedures within the academy.”
“Exactly.”
Serena looked at him.
“That is why, all the more, I have no intention of handing it over to just anyone.”
It was extremely polite.
But in truth, it meant she did not trust him.
For the first time, the middle-aged man’s expression wavered faintly.
The staff member saw that and looked even more frightened.
At this point, the answer was obvious.
What that man was afraid of wasn’t the knights’ hands, nor was it Serena.
It was that middle-aged man.
The staff member’s lips trembled.
“I, I only… did as I was told…”
The end of his sentence was abruptly cut off.
Because the middle-aged man had turned to look at him very slowly.
Even I would shut my mouth if I saw that gaze.
He wasn’t getting angry, and he wasn’t shouting. That was what made it worse.
Serena seized that opening immediately.
“Who told you?”
The staff member opened his mouth.
“I… the vi—”
Clench.
It wasn’t that the knight’s hand had pressed down on his shoulder.
But the staff member swallowed his own words.
His face twisted like someone whose throat had been blocked.
I narrowed my eyes.
It was strange.
For someone who had shut his mouth out of fear, the reaction was too sudden.
And in the very next moment, Mia drew in a breath.
“Senior. His mouth.”
From the corner of the staff member’s mouth, something like a very thin black thread was flowing out.
It wasn’t blood.
It looked like smoke, or perhaps ink.
“Damn it.”
As I cursed under my breath, Serena’s gaze dropped at once to the staff member’s mouth.
“Back.”
She said shortly.
The two knights almost simultaneously pulled the staff member away from the wall and laid him on the floor.
The middle-aged man tried to take a step closer as well, but Serena raised her hand first.
“Do not come closer.”
This time, it truly sounded like an order.
The man stopped.
The staff member was gasping on the floor.
The way he clawed at his own throat with his nails made him look exactly like someone burning from the inside.
Ah.
So the paper wasn’t the only insurance.
Now that’s just openly great.
Serena narrowed her brows.
“We need to bring purification personnel—”
Before she could finish, the staff member’s body convulsed violently once.
Then he went completely limp.
Silence settled over the corridor.
No one could open their mouth right away.
One of the knights put his hand near the man’s neck.
His expression immediately hardened.
“He is dead.”
Mia’s ears shot upright.
Her tail went completely stiff as well.
I let out a long breath without a word.
In broad daylight, inside the school, a decoration had fallen, and now someone had died.
Really great.
It was very different from the academy life I wanted, but the world was never good at giving me what I wanted.
Serena looked down at the staff member’s corpse, then slowly raised her head.
This time, she was looking at the middle-aged man.
“Will you call this”
she said in a low voice,
“an accident as well?”
The man could not answer.
If he were someone trying to smooth things over nicely, he should have denied it immediately by now.
But this wasn’t that.
He was calculating.
How much he could cover up.
At that moment, Serena looked toward me.
More precisely, at both me and Mia.
“You two.”
Great.
Now there was no getting out of this.
“Yes.”
When I answered, she spoke very briefly.
“Please state exactly what you saw here.”
It wasn’t a command.
Nor was it a request.
It was somewhere in between.
A very official tone.
I looked at the middle-aged man for a moment.
He still wore a calm face, but the black line at the end of his sleeve had not disappeared yet.
If I stepped back now, things might be easier.
For a very short while.
But I didn’t think that comfort would last long.
At this point, I just knew.
If I pulled my foot out now, something even bigger would come later.
I never thought life experience would be useful in a place like this.
It was truly damn awful.
I swallowed something like a sigh.
“Understood.”
And then I immediately added,
“But it would be better not to say it here.”
The middle-aged man’s eyes moved ever so slightly.
Serena did not ask why.
That was good.
She simply said to the knight,
“Seal off the corridor. Do not let anyone in.”
One knight moved at once, and the other wrapped the half-burned scrap of paper in cloth.
The middle-aged man said in a low voice,
“My lady. This is an internal academy matter.”
Serena looked at him.
“Exactly. All the more,”
she continued very slowly,
“I have no intention of leaving it to you.”
The air in the corridor froze completely.
I muttered only to myself.
I definitely wasn’t getting any sleep tonight, and it seemed I had touched something bigger than I had expected.
And in my eyes, a single black line starting beneath the middle-aged man’s feet stretched deep into the corridor.
Which meant it wasn’t going to end with that bastard alone.
What followed was long and tedious.
Who had been where, what they had seen, why they had been there, why they had moved the way they did.
I heard the same questions over and over.
I said only what I had seen.
I said I didn’t know what I hadn’t seen.
That was the safest way.
To be honest, there was a moment when I thought about digging deeper.
But it was only a moment.
The reason people always make the same mistakes is simple.
They think, surely this time it will be fine.
I don’t really believe in that kind of optimism.
There were people wearing the faces of faculty staff, people who had tampered with the route of a noble young lady accompanied by two knights, people who had created an accident in broad daylight.
In the end, all I did was say a few words.
It was strange.
I saw it.
That paper was the first thing that caught my eye.
That much.
It wasn’t a lie.
It wasn’t the whole truth either.
Serena’s expression did not break until the very end.
But now I could distinguish the thin layer of tension beneath that refined face.
I knew.
This was not a welcome change.
What I had wanted was not an event where I got strangely entangled with a beautiful young lady from a high-ranking house,
but to survive quietly, without presence.
Reality was always diligent only in the opposite direction.
By the time I returned to the dormitory, the sun had sunk quite low.
A quieter exhaustion than during the day lay over the corridor.
New students walking around with faces as if nothing had happened,
rooms closing their doors as if nothing had happened,
a school where there was no way nothing had happened.
As soon as I shut the door, I flopped down onto the bed.
Mia headed toward my desk, but today she quietly leaned against the wall below the window.
Her ears had not completely lowered yet.
“Tired?”
“Very.”
“Me too.”
It was short.
But that one sentence was strangely funny.
I rubbed my face with my hands.
The inside of my eyes kept aching.
It felt as if I were constantly rubbing at a spot someone had stabbed once with the tip of an awl.
“Senior.”
“What?”
“About today.”
“Yeah.”
Mia hesitated for a moment.
“Is this school always like this?”
It was a good question.
But wasn’t it a little unfair to ask me?
I hadn’t been enrolled for long either, and even if I had knowledge of the original work or whatever, it was just fragments I had gathered like scraping through game logs.
It wasn’t omniscient, and it wasn’t an answer sheet.
I lay down on the bed, then sat up again.
“I don’t know either.”
Did something go wrong from the moment I came in?
I had no idea how many times I’d had that thought just today.
That night was quieter than expected.
It was so quiet that it bothered me even more.
If something like that had happened during the day, rumors usually spread much faster.
You would hear people talking in the dormitory corridor,
and stories of who heard what and who saw what would swell out of proportion, but it was strangely still.
Before falling asleep, I lay there and walked through today’s corridor again and again in my head.
Because of that, I stayed awake even longer, and in the end, I didn’t even know when I fell asleep.