I thought so too.
Strangely enough, it was helpful.
Not in a good way.
It didn’t mean she trusted me.
Far from it.
It was closer to saying she wouldn’t cut me off immediately.
Serena folded the paper in half once more.
The movement of her fingertips was excessively neat.
“I’ll take care of today’s matter.”
Of course, that was the first thing she said.
“Officially, it will end as an accident.
Faulty decoration fastenings.
Insufficient preparation by the student council.
Somewhere along those lines.”
“How very school-like.”
“Yes.”
Serena didn’t even take it as sarcasm.
She simply acknowledged it.
“But I have no intention of ending it there.”
I leaned back against the chair and looked at her.
“Unofficially.”
“Yes.”
“Starting with the student council records.”
“That’s right.”
The fact that we understood each other so well made it even more tiring.
Serena picked up the fixing pin and checked the filed surface again.
Her gaze had grown colder than before.
“I’ll be taking this pin and the documents.”
“Yes.”
“In return, you will.”
She set the fixing pin down.
“Do not tell anyone about what happened today first.”
“Are you going to make sure the knights don’t talk either?”
“I’ll stop my own people.”
That was probably half truth and half bluff.
I didn’t know whether Serena truly had every one of her knights under her thumb.
But at the very least, she was the kind of person who could make others believe she did.
I moved my chin slightly.
“Then let me ask you one thing.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why haven’t you cut me off yet?”
Serena didn’t answer right away.
She looked out the window once, then looked back at me.
“It was the same during the entrance ceremony,
and it was the same today.”
“Yes.”
“You lack explanations,
but you identify danger far too accurately.”
“Yes.”
“There are only two kinds of people like that.”
That was a little interesting.
“One is the side that planted it themselves.”
“And.”
“The other is.”
Serena spoke very quietly.
“The side I must not miss right now.”
A brief silence settled over us.
Outside the reception room, footsteps passed by.
Inside the room, it was excessively quiet, the sunlight was perfectly normal,
and only the conversation was not.
Without smiling, I answered.
“Then I’ll take it to mean I’m the latter for the time being.”
“For the time being.”
“That’s enough.”
At those words, Serena narrowed her eyes for the briefest moment.
Not because she liked them.
More likely because I had accepted them too easily.
“I’ll have to look into the student council record room key from my side.
The entry log as well.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Look into it in your own way.”
“And what is my way?”
“Whether you smell it,
sense something strange,
or see where things will collapse first.”
That was roughly right.
To be precise, only half right.
This ability wasn’t intuition.
It wasn’t a premonition, nor was it some unpleasant delusion.
The lines that led to death,
the places where accidents would happen, the boards that were about to collapse—those caught my eye first.
If the conditions matched, I could see them.
Just because I couldn’t see anything didn’t mean it was safe.
It was only that, in this moment, the place that would blow up first was marked before the others.
This school, this board, and the hidden structure that turned in this way.
When users skimmed only the main story and moved on,
I dug through cut logs and discarded data too.
I was the kind of person who grabbed even the scrap text that never made it into official guides
and tore apart every ending branch condition.
National Holy Academy Astra.
On the surface, a place of learning.
In reality, a sorting facility.
A board where, behind the scenes, they separately measured whom to raise, whom to use, and whom to discard.
Anyone who didn’t know that would see today’s incident as nothing more than a simple attempted assassination.
But I knew.
Today’s corridor accident was only the beginning.
Before this school killed people, it made lists first.
Without letting any of those thoughts show on my face, I continued the conversation.
“You understand things rather roughly.”
“Right now, more important than the exact principle
is the fact that you were actually right.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Serena fully pulled the paper and fixing pin over to her side.
“I’ll check the student council’s working records within today.
The order of placement,
the list of support personnel,
the sealing wax usage records,
and.”
She paused very briefly.
“Even the temporary item entry and removal records for the corridor.”
She was quick.
I slowly rose from my seat.
“Then I’ll be going.”
“Wait.”
There was more.
This time, Serena looked straight at me.
“If you see something like that again, don’t throw yourself in first on your own.”
I hadn’t expected that.
For a few seconds, I couldn’t respond, then barely managed to open my mouth.
“Are you worried about me?”
“I simply don’t want to lose a useful witness.”
“I’m sure.”
But she answered too quickly.
Far too immediately.
That usually meant it was about half a lie.
A presence shifted outside the door.
It meant the knight had been waiting for a while.
Serena seemed to hear it too.
She glanced toward the door once and said curtly,
“That will be all for today.”
“Yes.”
“And.”
She added one last thing.
“Act as you normally do.”
“That’s something I’m good at.”
“That is not reassuring in the slightest.”
Same here.
Serena spoke toward the door.
“Come in.”
The knight entered.
His expression still said he didn’t like me.
Well, of course the guy who had grabbed and pulled a duke’s young lady in front of him wouldn’t look normal.
I walked toward the door.
Just before I stepped out, Serena called me from behind.
“Student Valter.”
I stopped walking.
“Yes.”
“There’s no need to go out of your way to leave behind the fact that you came into this room today either.”
For a very brief moment, I looked back at her.
So now she was thinking of erasing it from the records entirely.
“If that’s more convenient for you.”
“This isn’t a matter of my convenience.”
Serena said,
“We still don’t know who is watching what.”
That was quite accurate.
Without asking any more, I stepped outside.
The hallway was much quieter than before.
The corridor had already been cleaned up thoroughly.
There were no broken frames, no spilled sealing wax, no scattered ledgers.
A place where a person had almost been crushed to death returned to looking as though nothing had happened in less than half a shichen.
That was what schools were originally like.
A school on the outside, a sorting facility on the inside.
It had been the same in the original work.
It was just that users had a hard time seeing it in the early stages.
Their eyes went first to the laboratory building, the student council, noble houses, and sanctuary foreshadowing.
I headed toward the stairs.
When I had gone down about two floors,
a familiar presence suddenly attached itself beside me.
“Senior.”
It was Mia.
At this timing, it couldn’t be anything good.
“Why do you always pop out of nowhere?”
“I’ve been waiting since earlier.”
“Why?”
Mia wrinkled her nose a little.
“There’s a bad smell stuck to you, Senior.”
“What smell?”
“The smell of somewhere closed off.”
She smelled that just from my going in and out of one reception room?
I glanced sidelong at Mia.
“That’s a bit vague.”
“It’s not vague.”
Mia tugged very lightly at my sleeve.
“Senior. The west side of the main building is like that too.”
My steps stopped.
“The west side?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when?”
“A little from earlier. But it got stronger just now.”
Mia raised her head.
“Not a human smell. A pressed-down smell.”
Serena had said she would look at the record room,
and Mia said there was a pressed-down smell coming from the west side of the main building.
The two overlapped far too neatly.
“Can you smell it now?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
Mia didn’t answer right away.
Instead, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me along.
After turning down the hallway twice and descending toward the west staircase of the main building,
the air changed a little.
There was less foot traffic.
The walls were older too, and there were fewer windows.
Even though it was daytime, it was dim.
Places like this always had something unlucky hiding in them.
Mia stopped in front of a storage room beneath the stairs.
“Here.”
The door was locked.
On the outside, it looked like an ordinary cleaning supply storage room.
But when I got close, I smelled it too.
Very faintly.
The scent of sealing wax resin.
The smell of dry cloth heated and cooled.
And beneath that, the smell of paper burned to conceal it.
It was the same kind of trace.
I tried the doorknob.
It was locked.
What was strange wasn’t the lock, but the area around it.
A tiny amount of black powder had spilled out through the gap under the door.
As if someone had burned something inside and swept it away.
“This isn’t a storage room.”
When I said that quietly, Mia immediately nodded.
“Yeah. People come and go.
But they don’t stay long.”
The moment she finished speaking, footsteps sounded from the other side of the corridor.
We both pulled back at the same time.
The instant we slipped into the shadow of the stairs,
two kids wearing student council assistant bands stopped in front of the storage room.
One took out a small key,
and the other was carrying a box.
The box looked like an ordinary document box,
but the lower part of its side was slightly scorched.
They were trying not to make it obvious, but it always showed in places like that.
The door opened.
It was dark inside, so I couldn’t see well.
But as the box went in, the edge of a paper briefly showed through the lid.
It was a student form.
It was too brief to see the words.
But I did see the color of the seal.
Red.
Not the ink-black used for ordinary student council official documents.
At that moment, my mind sped up once more.
A red seal.
A student form.
A west-side storage room.
Traces of burning.
This combination wasn’t official administration.
A user who had only pushed through the original main story would probably dismiss it as “hidden student council corruption.”
But I didn’t stop at that level.
In the data from the latter part of the academy arc,
there was a classification system that stamped student documents separately from ordinary official documents.
Assignment, reassignment, hold, disposal.
It barely surfaced in the early stages.
Only around the middle did it begin to be felt through things like “someone disappeared.”
In other words, that wasn’t a simple document.
There was a high possibility it was a list used when moving or erasing people.
The door closed again.
The key turned.
The two student council assistants walked away as if nothing had happened.
Even after their footsteps grew distant, Mia remained silent for a while.
I didn’t come out immediately either.
The air within the shadow of the stairs was a little damp.
A slow nausea rose in the back of my throat.
So it wasn’t just a smell anymore.
I slowly walked toward the storage room.
When I ran my finger under the doorknob,
a little black powder came away.
Below it, on the floor, lay a tiny scrap of paper.
I picked it up.
It was a half-burned fragment.
The edges had curled in, and most of the letters were gone.
But one line remained.
…dent Assignment List
Student.
Assignment list.
My fingertips stopped for the briefest moment.
Good.
Finally, the smell had reached paper.
This was no longer “something is strange inside the school.”
It meant that lists deciding where to place students, whom to move, and whom to erase were actually circulating.
There was one more problem.
Even after looking at that one line, I felt sick.
Because the term itself wasn’t unfamiliar.
It didn’t officially appear in the main story.
Instead, it remained in the discarded data and hidden logs.
Most people would see it as a bug or unused text and pass it over.
But that wasn’t it.
Those garbage logs had been part of the board that was actually running.
Beside me, Mia asked in a very small voice,
“Senior.”
“What?”
“This.”
She pointed at the storage room door with her chin.
“Will it open again tonight?”
I folded the burned scrap of paper in my hand and put it in my pocket.
“It will.”
“Why?”
“This school.”
I looked once more at the black powder beneath the door.
“Isn’t the kind of place that erases things once and calls it done.”
Mia closed her mouth.
I didn’t say anything more either.
Circling the same place was over now.
Next was that door.
The problem was that I couldn’t open it right now.
The hallway was quiet, but it wasn’t completely empty.
Those two student council assistants had just come and gone, and the sound of a patrol wasn’t far away.
If I forced it open now, I’d be caught before I could even see whatever was inside.
How like this school, making you choose the unluckiest option at the unluckiest moment.
I swept my gaze once more beneath the storage room door.
Beside me, Mia asked very quietly,
“You’re not opening it now?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ll get caught.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Good.”
When Mia suddenly spat out that word, I flinched.
Not “nice,” but “good.”
I glanced sideways at her.
“That’s my line.”
Mia looked at me for a moment, then raised the corners of her mouth ever so slightly.
“It suits me better.”
Hard to argue with that.
“Putting your way of speaking aside.”
“Yeah.”
“Now’s not the time to be having fun.”
“I’m not having fun.”
Mia pointed her chin at the warehouse door.
“I don’t want to. That’s why I’m more curious.”
She had a point.
I touched the folded slip of paper I’d stowed in my pocket.
A student assignment sheet.
This school wasn’t just a place that taught students.
It was a place that slotted them in where needed and erased them when they weren’t.
Anyone who’d played through to the latter half of the original knew it all.
The true horror of the Academy Part
wasn’t monsters or lab accidents, but the way they treated people like game pieces.
“Tonight, I’m going in to take a look.”
When I spoke in a low voice,
Mia’s ears perked up slightly.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Just the two of us?”
“For now.”
“For now?”
She latched onto that immediately.
“If things get tangled after we go in, we might need more people.”
“Ereuka?”
“Chances are high it’ll be her.”
Mia’s expression subtly stiffened.
“That person can’t pick up scents.”
“But she’s good with paperwork.”
“She probably can’t smell paper as well as me, though.”
“No one can beat you at that.”
As soon as those words left my mouth, the tips of Mia’s ears moved slightly.
I couldn’t tell if she liked it, was embarrassed, or both.
“Fine.”
This time, she did it on purpose.
I let out a breath like a hollow chuckle.
“You going to keep pushing that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because it suits me better.”
She was really running with that bit.
I stopped talking and looked down the stairs.
A student passed by at the end of the hallway.
The warehouse side fell quiet again.
This was all I could do for now.
Where the door key was circulating,
whether it would open again at night,
who was coming and going.
I had to check that first.
I turned around.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Let’s get food first.”
Mia’s face turned strange for a moment.
“You eat even at a time like this?”
“That’s exactly when you need to eat.”
“That’s so like a senior.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How you always make sure to eat before poking your nose into something strange.”
I couldn’t deny that.
We slipped out through the western stairway of the main building.
On the way toward the dorms,
I scanned the surroundings once more out of habit.
This wasn’t a sense that Yulian Valter’s body originally had.
It was my habit.
In this game, hidden events never triggered out in the open.
Blind spots, nighttime routes, supporting NPCs, pointlessly repetitive prop placements.
Clues always came from places like that.
The dormitory cafeteria was in the final stretch of dinner hours.
The soup was still tasteless, and the bread still stuck in your throat.
Still, it was better than not eating.
I scooped up the soup half-heartedly and swept my gaze across the cafeteria.
Rine wasn’t there.
I saw a few of the Sanctuary kids gathered,
but Rine’s face wasn’t among them.
Mia sat across from me, tearing her bread in half and eating.
She ate slowly, but her gaze kept drifting toward me.
“What?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“Tonight.”
“I’m thinking about that too.”
“No.”
Mia tilted her head slightly.
“You’re thinking of going in first again, Senior.”
She knew me too well.
“Depends on the situation.”
“That means you’re going in first.”
Mia set down her bread.
“I might go in first.”
“You can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“What about you?”
“I’m cut out for that kind of stuff.”
“That’s not a good thing.”
I set down my spoon.
“Don’t worry. I won’t go in without you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mia looked at me for a moment and muttered very quietly.
“Good.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Seriously, cut it out with that already.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s fun.”
So that was it.
After the meal, we each went our separate ways to our rooms.
There was still a little time before curfew.