Under the lamplight, the blurred lines slowly came to life.
Main building. Laboratory wing. Connecting corridor. Sealed marking.
At a glance, it was just part of an old layout record.
A scrap of paper that had rolled around in storage and gathered dust.
But as I stared at it, oddities began to catch my eye one by one.
It didn’t match the floor plans the students used now.
The corridor lengths were subtly different, and the structure on the southeast side of the laboratory wing was somehow off.
What bothered me most was that one more line remained beside the section marked as blocked off.
It looked like a trace of something erased.
I pressed down on one corner of the paper with my fingertip.
“Here.”
Erka’s gaze followed immediately.
“The southeast side?”
“Probably.”
I spoke quietly, as if searching my memory.
“The side where the iron door was yesterday was around here.
I can’t guarantee the exact location, but the direction is right.”
Erka pointed to that section with the tip of the pen in her hand.
“On the current layout, it ends here.”
“But here, it continues.”
“Yes.”
Erka looked down at the paper for a while, then added in a very low voice.
“It doesn’t look like it was expanded.”
“Why not?”
“If it were a normal expansion, the connection point should be clearer.
This is actually the opposite.
It looks more like the trace of a connected structure that was cut off later.”
I pressed lightly between my brows.
There’s something under the laboratory wing. And not something on the level of an ordinary storage room or abandoned drainage channel.
Something that had been connected at first, then later hidden.
The moment I thought that, the sensation I’d felt in front of the iron door yesterday returned.
The cold air, and beneath it, that sinking, inexplicably unpleasant feeling.
I pointed to another part of the paper.
“What’s this?”
Erka looked where I was pointing.
It was a small notation.
Beside the sealed mark, a nearly erased symbol remained faintly.
“I can’t be sure. It’s too worn.”
“So what do you think it is?”
“It looks like a management area marking.”
I exhaled briefly.
Management area.
The moment I saw those words, my insides went cold first.
This game was always like this.
Whenever it hid something, it gave it a perfectly normal name first.
Management area.
Storage area.
Maintenance area.
They all sounded plausible enough.
But there had never been anything clean behind places with names like that.
If anything, it was the opposite.
When words like that appeared in the game, there was always either a hidden passage behind them, traces of erased records, or something covered up where people wouldn’t notice.
Erka slowly brushed her fingertips over the paper and said,
“The problem is, this isn’t the only one.”
“What isn’t?”
“The strange parts.”
Erka pointed at the paper.
“If this odd line had only remained on the laboratory wing side, we could have assumed it was a trace of the experimental facility being expanded and then blocked off later.”
Her fingertip moved toward the lower part of the main building.
“But it doesn’t end there. The same kind of line overlaps beneath the main building too.”
I looked down at the paper.
“So it’s not just a problem with the laboratory wing.”
“Yes. At the very least, it means it isn’t an isolated space.”
She was right.
There were also a few short lines across the lower part of the main building that couldn’t be explained.
They weren’t openly labeled as passages, but they weren’t random scribbles either.
They were connected.
The moment that thought came to me, the inside of my left eye stung very briefly.
I reflexively closed my eye.
“…Senior?”
The voice that surfaced wasn’t Erka’s, but Mia’s. Probably purely because of what I’d heard during the day.
The school smells a little strange.
It’s similar to what I smelled behind the main building yesterday, but spread out more thinly.
Not a single point, but a connected line.
I opened my eyes.
The lines on the paper looked darker.
It was only for an instant, but it was clear.
They didn’t look like old ink lines drawn on paper, but like something else had been layered beneath them.
As if a structure buried deeper than the paper had briefly shown through.
My head throbbed.
Erka saw my expression and narrowed her brows very slightly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“When you say that with that face, it isn’t very convincing.”
“It’s better than your personality.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
I pressed my temple once.
The headache wasn’t surging in deeply, but it didn’t seem like something I should keep staring at for long in this state.
“Anyway.”
“It’s definitely underground.”
I chose my words for a moment.
Management area.
That name snagged in my head once again.
“But I’m still not sure what’s down there.”
“It doesn’t look like a simple storage room or drainage channel.
If it were only that much, it wouldn’t explain yesterday’s reaction.”
Erka’s gaze sank.
“You mean there’s a possibility it wasn’t a device malfunction, but a reaction connected to the structure below.”
“That seems closer.”
“In other words.”
Erka spoke very quietly.
“The device exploding in the laboratory wing may not have been the cause, but the result that surfaced above.”
I leaned back against the chair and slowly exhaled.
I didn’t say it aloud, but my heart sank further.
If that was true, the problem wasn’t just one device.
It meant there was an underground space hidden somewhere inside the school from the start, and the device explosion incident might have been a trace of it brushing the surface.
Erka muttered without taking her eyes off the paper.
“Then there’s only one thing we need to confirm now.”
“What?”
“Whether we can get inside.”
I looked at her immediately.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Are you insane?”
Only then did Erka look up at me.
“This is about all the material we can confirm right now.
If anything, today is—”
“That’s exactly why we can’t.”
When I cut her off, Erka’s mouth stopped for a moment.
I looked at the lines on the paper again.
The inside of my left eye throbbed once more.
Go down there now? Without preparation, without knowing the route, and while we were being watched?
That wasn’t investigation. It was suicide.
“You might have been discovered the moment you took the documents out.”
I spoke in a low voice.
“If we move now, the chances of being caught go up. And
if we get caught without confirming anything, it’s over.”
“If we stay still, it may become too late.”
“I know.”
“And you’re still saying we should stop?”
“Yeah.”
After answering briefly, I actually became more certain.
This wasn’t stopping because I was scared.
There are moments when you have to stop in order to survive.
This was exactly one of them.
Erka was silent for a while.
Her gaze dropped back to the paper, then returned to my face.
She was clearly dissatisfied.
But there was also a hint that she couldn’t completely ignore what I’d said.
That was enough.
“Then.”
Erka finally opened her mouth.
“We’ll stop here for today.”
Her words backed down, but her expression didn’t.
It was the face of someone ready to run back to the laboratory wing at any moment.
“In exchange.”
“Of course there’s a condition.”
“Don’t move alone.”
I swallowed a hollow laugh.
“Can I say that right back to you?”
“I’ll decide after assessing the situation.”
She really was consistently exhausting.
I let out a small sigh.
“If I find anything else, I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll look for more records too.”
“If you find them, show me first.”
“I can’t guarantee that.”
“I figured.”
It was less trust than a temporary alliance.
We didn’t like each other, and we didn’t fully trust each other, but leaving the other alone felt uneasy.
For now, that much was enough.
A brief silence settled inside the reading room.
The light of the magic lamp trembled ever so slightly.
Then, from the corridor, faint footsteps brushed past.
We both raised our heads at the same time.
It was a very short sound.
Ambiguous enough that it could have been someone passing by, or just the building creaking.
But it felt strangely unpleasant.
Erka stood up first.
I followed half a beat later.
Erka approached the door, placed her hand on the handle, and paused for a moment.
“That’s earlier than usual.”
“What is?”
“The night patrol.”
At those words, my insides sank once more.
It could be a coincidence.
But on a night like this, “coincidence” was the word I trusted least.
Erka opened the door just a crack.
The corridor was quiet.
In the distance, a lamp hung on the wall, and beneath it, a shadow stretched long.
Through the gap, I looked toward the end of the corridor.
A gray uniform.
Far away, I saw a figure’s back as it brushed past the corner of the stairs.
It was a color similar to the men who had been in front of the iron door yesterday.
Erka must have seen it too, because she didn’t open the door any further and spoke softly.
“Do you think they saw us?”
I exhaled briefly.
“It’s scarier if they’re pretending they didn’t.”
Erka closed the door without a word.
The sound of the latch catching seemed unusually loud.
Now I knew for certain.
The school was hiding something, and we had noticed.
The problem didn’t end there. There was no way the school side wouldn’t know what we had seen.
Really, what a pleasant night.
Erka was the first to gather the papers.
Her fingers were quick, but her temperament was unchanged.
She stacked them neatly, fixed the order, and even straightened the corners again.
She seemed like the kind of person who would align the edges first even if the world were ending.
“Those documents.”
I spoke quietly.
Erka answered without even raising her head.
“I’m taking them.”
“You say that like it’s obvious.”
Erka placed the papers into a thin leather case and tied it shut with a cord. Then she looked back at me.
“You can at least remember it, can’t you?”
“What?”
“The structure we just saw.”
I nearly laughed for a moment.
“What do you take me for?”
“You seemed to have a good memory.”
“Of course I can’t memorize it.”
Erka looked at me for a moment, then said,
“I thought so.”
“Why ask if you knew?”
“In case a miracle had occurred.”
“With your personality, you believe in things like that?”
“No. That’s why I asked.”
I swallowed a hollow laugh.
“You’re really good at pissing people off.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
What a truly pleasant conversation.
I closed my eyes and traced the lines on the paper once more in my head.
Main building. Laboratory wing. Connecting corridor. Sealed section on the southeast side. A line that seemed to be layered toward the underground. Lower lines that didn’t match the current structure.
It wasn’t perfect, but I had a rough memory of it.
“I remember it.”
“Then that’s enough.”
After that, neither of us spoke.
I walked toward the door first.
Erka tucked the case against herself and followed.
“Let’s go.”
“Yes.”
We were even more careful when opening the door.
The corridor was quieter than before.
A school corridor emptied of people was usually silent.
But right now, that silence didn’t feel empty. It felt closer to someone holding their breath.
I looked toward the end of the corridor once.
There was no one in the direction where the gray uniform had disappeared earlier.
Instead, one lamp on the wall was lit.
Had that been lit when we came in?
My memory was vague.
Erka must have seen the lamp too, because she spoke in a very low voice.
“They usually don’t keep that light on at this hour.”
“Are you sure?”
“This corridor has little use at night.”
I clicked my tongue briefly.
We walked slowly toward the stairs.
We tried to keep our footsteps as quiet as possible, but old buildings didn’t cooperate with things like this.
With every step, the floorboards gave a faint sound.
Just as we were nearly down the stairs, a faint voice came from the corridor below.
We both stopped at the same time.
“…Starting tomorrow, the southeast side—”
The words after that were hard to hear.
I looked down through the gap in the stair railing.
At the far corner of the corridor, where the light barely reached, two gray uniforms were exchanging a few brief words.
Erka tugged very lightly on my sleeve.
It meant stop looking and move.
We silenced our footsteps even more and turned toward the opposite staircase.
Fortunately, we didn’t run into anyone on the way down. The problem came after that.
Getting out of the reading room area was easy enough, but there would be a moment when our routes split. A moment when one of us would be alone. Accidents tended to happen there.
In front of the main building exit, Erka stopped.
“We part here.”
“Yeah.”
“Will you be all right going back to the dormitory alone?”
“Am I a child?”
I looked outside the main building once.
Beyond the window, it was completely night.
“You be careful too.”
When I said that, Erka looked at me for a moment.
Her expression barely changed, but it wasn’t a face of complete disregard.
“You too.”
She said only that, then disappeared down the corridor on the other side.
The night air was colder than I’d expected.
It seemed sitting in the reading room for so long had drained all the warmth from my body.
I pulled the collar of my coat up a little higher and walked toward the dormitory.
Even as I walked, the lines of the blueprint kept overlapping in my head.
The corridors, the sealed-off section, the lower lines leading underground.
The smell Mia said she’d taken on, the extinguishing sensation I’d felt in front of the iron door, the damaged records Erka had pointed out.
Each one, on its own, was ambiguous.
But when ambiguous things piled up in the same direction, it became hard to call it coincidence.
The problem was what to do from here.
The school side already seemed to have noticed something, and the gray uniforms were moving too.
So, for now, there was only one correct answer.
Endure. Watch, remember, and create the next opportunity.
That was right. It was right, and yet I didn’t feel at ease at all.
When people see something strange and simply turn away, it bothers them even more.
That feeling of unease was something that only grew bigger when you didn’t see it through to the end.
It was when I reached the front of the dormitory building.
Someone was standing in the shadow beneath the stairs.
I stopped walking.
A small frame. A low shadow. And ears that were visible before anything else, even in the darkness.
It was Mia.
Great.
Of all days, the first person I ran into had to be the most sensitive one.
“What are you doing?”
When I asked in a low voice, Mia slowly lifted her head.
Her expression wasn’t very good.
She didn’t look angry, or sulky, just unbearably uncomfortable.
“I was waiting.”
“Why?”
“Because it didn’t seem like you were coming.”
I went down to the bottom of the stairs and stood in front of Mia.
As I drew closer, the tip of Mia’s nose moved ever so slightly.
Once. Twice.
And then her face immediately stiffened even more.
“Senior.”
“What?”
“Did you go below?”
I couldn’t answer right away.
Strictly speaking, I hadn’t gone below.
I hadn’t even gone near it. I had only looked at the blueprints. And yet the question struck strangely close to the mark.
Mia stepped one pace closer, her face saying she already knew.
“The smell is on you.”
My insides sank once more.
“What smell?”
“The same one.”
Mia spoke very quietly.
“The one I smelled in front of the iron door yesterday.”
I let out a short breath.
Great.
“It’s not just a little.”
“It’s gotten stronger.”
That was quite direct.
I looked at Mia’s face for a moment.
It was the expression of someone saying exactly what she felt—dislike, irritation, and danger.
Mia lightly caught the end of my sleeve.
“Senior.”
“What?”
“Tonight.”
She paused briefly, choosing her words, then spoke softly.
“The school is too quiet.”
I looked at Mia without saying anything.
She was right about that too.
It was quiet. More than necessary.
There were fewer students talking, the supervisors’ footsteps were distant, and only the sound of the wind seemed needlessly loud.
It didn’t feel like a place with many people in it.
It felt like a place holding its breath.
On days like this, it was usually one of two things.
Either nothing happened, or something was just about to explode.
And in my experience, the latter was far more likely.
I pressed my temple once.
The headache was starting to rise again, very faintly.
Seeing that hand, Mia asked in an even smaller voice,
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“You’re not in good shape.”
“You know that too?”
“I do.”
She answered so easily I almost let out a hollow laugh.
I swallowed a sigh.
There was no point saying I was fine now.
“Let’s go inside first.”
When I said that, Mia didn’t immediately nod.
Instead, she swept her gaze once over the darkness behind the dormitory, then looked back at me.
“Senior.”
“What now?”
“Someone moved first.”
I closed my mouth.
They knew we had noticed, and they had already started moving.
“Looks that way.”
Mia didn’t ask anything more.
Instead, the hand holding my sleeve tightened just a little.
I turned my steps toward the dormitory door.
Mia quietly followed.