Looks like today isn’t going to end ordinarily either.
The moment that thought occurred to me, I stepped into the experimental building.
Mia followed right behind me.
“Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“If I tell you to get back, get back immediately.”
“Yeah.”
She answers well enough.
Whether she’ll obey is another matter.
The air inside the experimental building was even stuffier than the hallway.
It wasn’t hot, but something scratched at the back of my throat.
The smell of metal and burning was mixed together.
Just as Mia had said, it was the unpleasant kind.
Erka was standing in front of the circular table with a face that showed she didn’t care about us at all.
A thin metal frame, crystal rings, and magic stones embedded between them.
From the outside, it looked fine.
Only to my eyes, it wasn’t fine.
Black lines were spreading from the center outward.
Very diligently.
I kept it as brief as possible.
“I don’t think you should touch that right now.”
Only then did Erka turn her head.
The face I saw properly for the first time was less pretty than sharp. Her features were thin and pale, but her eyes were strangely clear.
“On what grounds?”
That came out immediately.
I moved my shoulders very slightly.
“The professor told you to stop, too.”
“That’s the professor’s judgment.”
“And the burning smell just got worse.”
As soon as I said that, Mia cut in.
“Yeah. It’s stronger than before.”
Erka’s gaze went to Mia for a moment, then returned to me.
“Neither of you are from the Magic Department, are you?”
“No.”
“And yet you’re going to interfere with my calculations because of a smell?”
Her words weren’t just cold. They were like a neatly honed blade.
I understood.
If some stranger came up to me and told me it was dangerous and to stop, I wouldn’t easily believe them either.
The problem was that her distrust might get someone hurt right now.
I pointed at the circular table with my chin.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong.
I’m saying now isn’t the time.”
The corner of Erka’s mouth twisted ever so slightly.
It was close to a sneer.
Then she reached toward the device.
“I’ll only check.”
I pressed my fingers against my brow.
At that moment, one of the black lines suddenly darkened at the end of the outer ring.
Mia’s ears shot up.
“Senior.”
“I know.”
Erka’s fingertips touched the metal frame near the auxiliary formula.
Bzzzt.
It was a very small sound.
But in moments like this, small sounds are more dangerous.
I immediately said,
“Take your hand off!”
Erka looked at me.
Half a beat too late.
In that brief gap, one of the outer rings trembled as though being dyed black.
Fine cracks spread across the surface of the small crystal embedded there.
Mia shouted almost at the same time.
“Now!”
My body moved before any explanation could.
I leaped forward and roughly pulled Erka by the wrist.
Erka lost her balance and stumbled half a step toward me.
And in the very next instant.
Crack.
One of the outer crystals burst.
It wasn’t a dazzling explosion.
Instead, something like black flame unfurled from the inside, and one of the metal rings made a sharp twisting sound.
Several thin shards flew in every direction.
“Back!”
When I shouted, Mia stepped away first.
Erka reacted immediately this time as well.
She shook off my hand and backed away, but her gaze never left the device until the very end.
Even in the middle of that, she looked at the device first.
A truly researcher-like reaction.
The metal frame atop the circular table trembled once more.
The black line grazed one ring and passed over it, but fortunately, it did not spread any further.
Instead, an acrid smell filled the room all at once.
A brief silence fell.
Only after that could I finally breathe.
Fortunately, it hadn’t blown up badly.
By the current standard, that was enough.
Erka was the first to speak.
“……Just now.”
Her voice had changed a little.
It was lower than before.
“What did you see that made you pull me away?”
I hadn’t expected thanks first.
Still, she really was consistent.
I shook out my wrist once.
Maybe because I’d yanked her away just now, my fingertips were a little numb.
“It looked like it was going to explode.”
“Is that an answer?”
“It’s the correct one.”
Erka’s eyebrow moved by the tiniest amount.
It was hard to tell whether it was irritation or interest.
Just then, hurried footsteps came from the hallway.
It was the professor.
Two assistants were following behind him.
The instant the professor saw the state of the room, his face hardened.
“Erka.”
What a truly beautiful educational scene.
He saw the burst crystal and the scorched ring, then clenched his teeth.
“I told you not to touch it today.”
Erka did not make excuses.
Instead, she said very briefly,
“I’m sorry.”
The professor’s gaze immediately shifted to us.
His face said it was suspicious that both of us were here.
Correct.
We hadn’t exactly come in through normal means either.
Mia wrinkled her nose very slightly and muttered,
“The smell still hasn’t gone away.”
I immediately nudged her elbow.
If she added even that right now, one more troublesome thing would appear.
But it was already too late.
There was no way Erka would miss those words.
Her gaze went to Mia again, then soon returned to me.
Unlike at first, her face no longer looked uninterested.
While the professor ordered the assistants to seal the device, Erka slowly took one step toward me.
Seeing her up close, the area under her eyes looked just a little sunken.
“How did you know?”
“Because it looked abnormal enough even to the eyes of someone who doesn’t know anything.”
Erka stared at me for a while.
That gaze felt unpleasant.
It didn’t feel like she was looking at a person, but reading a phenomenon.
From behind us, the professor called sharply,
“You two there. Please clear the area.”
It seemed we were being kicked out.
Good.
Honestly, I didn’t want to stay any longer either.
My head was already starting to throb.
I looked at Mia.
“Let’s go.”
“Yeah.”
As we turned and walked toward the door, Erka’s voice dropped behind us again.
“Can I perhaps see you tomorrow as well?”
My steps paused for the briefest moment.
I did not look back.
“Why?”
A short answer came back.
“Because something has arisen that I need to confirm.”
Wow.
Without a single word of thanks, she immediately puts a person on the list of things to verify.
What a wonderful personality.
As I crossed the threshold, I gave a vague answer.
“If you survive the professor.”
As soon as we came out into the hallway, Mia giggled softly.
Just before the experimental building door closed, I unconsciously looked back inside.
The circular frame being sealed.
The burst crystal.
The professor suppressing his anger.
Erka standing before him.
And beside the tips of her feet, beneath the floor, a single very thin black line continued downward.
It didn’t look as if something was around us, but rather that something was buried below.
I had a feeling the next part was going to become even more exhausting.
“Let’s call it a day.”
Mia looked up at me.
“When you say that, Senior, it always feels like it won’t be the end.”
I laughed briefly.
“That’s true too.”
As I was about to go down the stairs, my left temple suddenly throbbed.
It was only for an instant, but that brief pain brushed all the way down the back of my neck.
I reflexively braced myself against the wall.
Mia immediately stopped.
“Hey.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I never look fine.”
“That’s true too, but right now you look even less fine.”
She really hits people with delicate precision.
I closed and opened my eyes a few times.
When I slowly steadied my breathing, it got a little better.
This ability stabs at people like this every so often.
A nasty sense that clearly shows me other people’s problems while making a mess of my own head.
What a truly good-natured ability.
“I’m really fine.”
“Want some water?”
“I can drink some when we get back to the dorm.”
Mia looked at me with doubtful eyes, but eventually nodded.
Fortunately, she didn’t press further.
We walked toward the dormitory in silence.
The main building at night wore an even more proper face than it did during the day.
Every window was lit, and from a distance, it looked like a perfectly pleasant school.
A National Academy that enrolled nobles, selected commoner scholarship students, and nurtured the future of the Empire.
On the surface, it was quite plausible.
Mia spoke once along the way.
“Erka.”
“Yeah.”
“Is she always like that?”
“I met her for the first time today too.”
“But she’s kind of scary.”
“Yeah.”
“In a different way from Senior Serena.”
I nodded.
That was right.
Serena was the type that was hard to approach, while Erka was the type you felt you shouldn’t approach.
Both were tiring, but in different textures.
Serena felt like she pushed others away by standing herself up straight, while Erka felt like she dug too deep into herself and dragged everything around her in with her.
The latter was scarier.
That type never lets go once something catches on.
When we got near the dormitory, Mia looked at me again.
“You’re not going out again tonight, are you?”
The question was so accurate that I laughed for a moment.
I shook my head.
“I’m not going out today.”
“Really?”
“My head feels like it’s going to split.”
Mia’s expression eased a little.
“Then that’s fine.”
“Why are you the one relieved?”
“Because you’re always getting involved in weird places, Senior.”
I was at a loss for words.
I tried to refute it, then stopped.
I knew it too.
That lately, I’d been walking far too diligently into the center of incidents.
I said I’d live quietly, and not even a few days later, I got entangled with a duke’s daughter, received a strange note, and even witnessed a runaway incident in the experimental building.
At this point, it seemed I’d left my talent for living quietly in my past life.
I parted ways with Mia in front of my room.
“Go in.”
“Yeah. You sleep too, Senior.”
“I’ll try.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That hurts.”
“It doesn’t.”
Correct.
I closed the door and leaned my back against it.
The room was quiet.
But the quieter it was, the clearer the scene I had seen earlier became.
The circular frame.
The burst crystal.
The black line leading down beneath Erka’s feet.
The fact that it wasn’t spreading sideways but continuing downward meant it might not be a problem with only the device placed on top.
Of course, it might not be.
I might just be oversensitive.
But that hopeful interpretation didn’t sit well.
I sat down on the bed and rubbed my face.
There is something beneath the school.
Or there is something connected beneath the school.
Even thinking only that much was already exhausting enough.
If I dug any deeper, sleep would be out of the question.
So I tried to stop, but the problem is that the human mind tends to do more when told to stop.
Erka had seen where I was looking earlier.
She hadn’t said much, but that type is faster at seeing than listening.
When I looked at the device, when I moved, what Mia had smelled, how the professor reacted. She had probably stored all of it in her head.
Great.
It’s great because it’s the complete opposite of my taste.
------
In the end, I didn’t sleep properly.
Even when I closed my eyes, the black lines came to mind, and just when I thought I had barely fallen asleep, the sound of the circular frame exploding echoed in my ears again. Then I woke once around dawn, fell into a shallow sleep again, and opened my eyes before the wake-up bell.
My condition was excellent.
Exhausted enough to feel like I might die, but still on the side of not being dead yet.
Truly human.
The morning class half flew by.
It wasn’t that the lecture content didn’t enter my head.
Strangely, that sort of thing still all went in.
When the morning classes ended and I came out into the hallway, someone blocked my path.
I had expected it.
Still, actually running into her didn’t feel particularly pleasant.
It was Erka.
Today, she looked even more composed than yesterday.
And by composed, I don’t mean that in a good way.
People tend to look calmer after organizing all their dangerous thoughts.
In her hand was a thin notebook.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
That was her first sentence.
I stopped walking.
“Were you afraid I’d run away?”
“I thought you would.”
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t answer properly when I asked you yesterday.”
She spoke like a very rational person, but the conclusion was obsessive.
I swept my eyes around once.
It wasn’t as if there were no people in the hallway, but this stretch was relatively quiet.
Which made it even more tiring.
I half-turned my body toward the wall.
“I’m busy.”
“I’ll keep it short.”
“Usually, the people who say that talk the longest.”
Erka’s eyes moved very slightly.
It wasn’t a smile, but something similar.
“Yesterday.”
She went straight to the point.
“You said the burning smell was getting stronger.”
“Yeah.”
“That was what the beastkin said first.”
“We both smelled it.”
“Before that, you were already looking at the device.”
So she saw that much too.
I clicked my tongue inwardly.
Erka tapped the corner of her notebook with a finger and continued.
“Even before I touched the auxiliary formula, your gaze was already on the outer ring.
As if you knew what I was going to touch.”
“I was probably just watching because I was nervous.”
“The gaze of someone who’s simply nervous doesn’t move like that.”
I asked as indifferently as I could.
“Then how does it move?”
“They look here and there.”
Erka looked me straight in the face.
“But you didn’t do that yesterday.”
For a very brief moment, the air in the corridor grew stifling.
This type really was exhausting.
They didn’t just look at the incident before their eyes; they interpreted people’s reactions along with it. And with needless accuracy, too.
The more words you exchanged with them, the more disadvantageous it became.
A dangerous interpreter.
Whoever named her had done a damn good job.
I leaned my shoulder casually and said,
“So?”
“So I’m asking. What did you see?”
“I told you, I didn’t see anything.”
“Then was it intuition?”
“That’s right.”
“I believe in intuition too.”
Erka answered immediately.
“But that’s something you believe in before you begin research.”
I swallowed a dry laugh.
“You’ve got a talent for making people tired.”
“I’d say you’re probably similar.”
Now she was even interpreting people’s personalities.
I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them.
The longer I answered, the more disadvantageous it would be.
Especially against this type.
The fewer words I used, the less there was to pick apart.
“To put it nicely, it’s instinct.”
I spoke slowly.
“To put it badly, I’m just a coward.”
Erka didn’t refute me right away.
That silence was even more irritating.
After staring at me for a while, she asked in a low voice,
“A coward went in like that yesterday?”
“If I hadn’t, it might’ve blown up even worse.”
“How did you know that?”
“I didn’t know, so I went in.”
It wasn’t as if I knew the precise future, nor had I been given the right answer.
It was just that the feeling that things would get worse if I let it pass kept pushing me from behind.
The most exhausting part was that I moved to survive, yet those movements kept flowing in a direction that saved others too.
Erka’s face turned thoughtful, as if she were chewing over my answer.
I tilted my head.
“Do you always go around questioning people like this?”
“I don’t do it to people I’m not interested in.”
“That’s a pretty scary thing to say.”
“I know.”
Her answer was so calm that I was momentarily at a loss for words.
Without averting her gaze, she continued.
“It’s true there was something wrong with the device yesterday.
The professor acknowledged it as well.
But for the outer ring to come off first with that degree of deviation is a little strange, calculation-wise.”
“I see.”
“And you saw that.”
“No.”
“You did.”
“I said I didn’t.”
“Then I must be wrong.”
She said that, but her expression hadn’t backed down at all.
That wasn’t the face of someone who would accept being wrong and let it go.
She was the type to set up a conclusion inside her head first, then compare it with what the other person said and fill in the blanks.
Truly dangerous.
In the end, I let out a sigh.
“I know what you’re trying to confirm.”
“Yes.”
“But I have no intention of being used to fill in your blanks.”
For the first time, Erka stopped without a word.
The look in her eyes changed ever so slightly.
If before it had been pure suspicion, now there was interest mixed in.
They were eyes that viewed a person like data, though they were a little less cold than before.
That made me feel even worse.
“That’s a bit unfortunate.”
Erka murmured.
“I thought I’d finally caught one.”
“Caught what?”
“An unexplainable variable.”
Great.
Now she was openly treating people as variables.
I felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me.
It was a talent in itself, making a person tire out this quickly after just a few words.
“I’m leaving.”
“Just one last thing.”
Here we go again.
I pressed my fingers to my brow.
“Make it short.”
Erka paused for a very brief moment, then asked,
“Yesterday, at the end, you looked back inside, didn’t you?”
A faint chill ran down my spine.
That was unexpected.
Erka didn’t miss that reaction.
“As expected.”
“What do you mean, as expected?”
“You had the face of someone who’d seen something.”
I said nothing.
That was the best response.
If I was unlucky, my expression would answer first. If I was lucky, silence would become a wall.
Erka didn’t press further.
Instead, she tucked her notebook under her arm and took a step back.
“Understood.”
She said that, but her face said she didn’t understand at all.
“But once I bite, I don’t let go easily.”
“You’re not a dog.”
“I’ve been told I’m similar.”
“That wasn’t a compliment, was it?”
“Of course not.”
She replied far too naturally.
What a wonderful personality.
Before turning away, Erka looked at me one last time.
“If you see something strange again next time.”
“I’m not calling you.”
“I hadn’t said anything yet.”
“Your face did.”
Erka paused for a very brief moment, then said,
“If you see something strange, call me next time.”
With that, she walked first toward the end of the corridor.
I watched her back for a while, then slowly exhaled.
It didn’t feel like it was over.
No.
With Erka, if anything, it felt closer to having just begun.