Good. It worked.
I didn’t explain further and simply pushed my hand in a little more.
Erka loosened her grip on the door.
Her eyes changed from those of someone who had just woken up to those of a person calculating something.
“Where did you get this?”
“West side of the main building.”
“What?”
“The storeroom.”
“Why are you only now—”
Erka got halfway through her objection, then looked again at the soot on the edge of the paper and the metal fragment.
Then, instead of cursing, she let out a short sigh.
“…Come in first.”
Erka went into the room, snatched up an outer coat and threw it on, then picked up a small bundle of tools from the table.
Nice.
As expected, people are scariest when it comes to their actual line of work.
Erka came out and closed the door behind her.
“Did anyone see you?”
“Not yet, I think.”
“Not yet?”
“We might get caught on the way.”
“Haa.”
She pressed her temple once, then glared at me.
“Next time, call me in advance.”
“If I’d known that, I’d be a god.”
“People in your world must have it nice.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was an insult.”
We headed back through the laundry passage behind the dormitory.
On the way, Erka lightly rubbed the scrap of paper with her fingertips.
Just from that, her face grew even colder.
“It wasn’t simply burned.”
“What wasn’t?”
“There’s a bit of inhibitor mixed into the sealing wax resin.”
“You can tell that by smell?”
“Not by smell. You can tell by looking at the ash.”
Nice.
Mia would’ve been offended if she’d heard that.
“They burned it to avoid leaving traces.”
“Then this wasn’t a mistake.”
“No. There’s no way traces would remain otherwise.”
When we passed through the connecting door to the main building and went around toward the western staircase, Mia was hiding near the stairs, just as promised.
The moment she saw I’d returned, her face relaxed first, then turned subtle again when she saw Erka behind me.
Good.
Her expression is way too honest.
“You’re back.”
“I am.”
“You’re late.”
“I was faster than expected.”
“Good.”
Mia’s gaze moved to Erka.
“The smelly person came again.”
“Why do you think I came?”
Erka answered first.
“Because there’s a high chance no one but me can open an annoying lock like this.”
The tip of Mia’s ear twitched once.
That probably meant she didn’t like it.
“I smelled it first.”
“That’s something to congratulate you for.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you so proud?”
“Because it’s true.”
Nice.
Neither of them gave an inch.
The air immediately grew tense.
I swallowed a sigh between them.
“You’re both right, so be quiet.”
“Senior telling me to be quiet makes me feel even worse.”
“I’m of the same opinion.”
Great.
What a perfect team.
My stomach’s already burning before we’ve even started.
We returned to the western storeroom.
Without even touching the door, Erka examined the lock first.
The position of the keyhole, the gap at the bottom of the door, the hinges, the thickness of the door.
Then she clicked her tongue very quietly.
“This isn’t an ordinary storeroom lock.”
“What’s different?”
“There’s one outer lock, and one more inhibitor ring on the inside.”
“You mean there are two doors?”
“Not exactly. It means turning the outside key once isn’t enough to open it.”
“On a door used by student council aides?”
“That’s what makes it even more suspicious.”
Erka placed the metal fragment on her palm and held it up to the light.
“This looks like part of the teeth from a spare key.
It broke while they were messing with the inner lock.”
“Then…?”
“Then it means something happened inside too.”
She scraped up a bit of the black powder beneath the door with her finger, smelled it, and immediately frowned.
“That’s right.”
“What is?”
“Sealing wax resin. Inhibitor. Burned cloth powder.”
“They burned it to hide something.”
“Yes.”
Her answer was so plain that it actually made me feel worse.
In matters like this, ending it with a single “yes” is the most unpleasant thing of all.
Erka took two thin metal pieces from her tool bundle.
“You do know opening this right now is insane, right?”
“I know that.”
“Good. I’ll explain anyway.
If I pick this completely, there’s a high chance it’ll make noise.
And then people will come.”
“How much time?”
“A few minutes at most.”
“That’s enough.”
“You mean we’re only checking the essentials.”
Erka glanced at me and twisted the corner of her mouth very slightly.
“You only talk fast at times like this.”
Nice.
I’ll admit that one.
I looked at Mia.
“If anyone comes, tell us immediately.”
“Yeah.”
Erka inserted the tools into the lock.
Her fingertips moved quickly.
She’s an annoying human being, but at times like this, she really doesn’t waste a single motion.
Click.
The door loosened by the slightest degree.
Holding her breath, Erka pulled the door only once.
The door opened.
All three of us frowned at the same time.
The inside was narrower than it had looked from outside.
Half of it was cleaning supplies.
Brooms, buckets, dry rags, washing tubs.
But the other half was the problem.
Document boxes.
A small brazier.
Tongs.
A bowl of sealing wax.
Cut cords.
Pieces of burned cloth.
I searched the nearest box first.
Event goods import records.
Assistant personnel shift schedules.
Ledger entries under the pretext of corridor maintenance.
Up to this point, it was pretending to be ordinary.
But beneath the second bundle, I found student forms.
They looked like official assignment sheets.
The problem was beside the names.
It wasn’t ink.
Assigned.
Reassigned.
On hold.
And at the bottom of the document, there were traces where only part had been burned away to erase it.
A slight nausea rose again in the back of my throat.
The garbage text that had only existed in the logs is actually rolling around here in real life.
Mia suddenly stopped in front of one shelf.
“Here.”
“Why?”
“The smell is different.”
“How?”
Mia wrinkled her nose very slightly.
“Not the smell of documents… the smell of someone staying here a long time.”
I looked toward the shelf after hearing that.
This is a storeroom.
It isn’t a place where people stay for long.
Then.
A waiting room?
Temporary isolation?
So it wasn’t just a storeroom. It doubled as a sorting waiting room too.
Meanwhile, Erka tapped a thin panel behind the shelf with her fingernail, then narrowed her eyes.
“It’s hollow.”
She carefully pushed the panel aside.
A hidden compartment appeared inside.
Within it were a small seal and a folded note.
The seal wasn’t the student council’s crest.
It was older, closer to a mark far more ancient than the ones used at the school now.
Erka unfolded the note.
It was short.
“Reconfirm before transfer.”
Ah.
Good.
Every last one of them treats people like luggage.
At that moment, Mia’s ears shot up.
“Wait.”
Erka and I raised our heads at the same time.
Someone was coming.
I immediately grabbed Erka’s arm and pulled her.
Before I could even say anything, Mia curled herself behind the pile of cleaning tools.
I pressed myself into the shadow beside the shelf next to her.
Swallowing a curse, Erka stuck so close she was practically embedded in my shoulder.
The air inside the storeroom suddenly felt even more stifling.
Footsteps approached from outside the door.
Not one person.
Two.
The sound of a key turning came.
The outer lock we had just forced open loosened first, then the inner ring sounded once more.
Clack.
When the door opened, lamplight swept long across the storeroom floor.
They weren’t student council aides.
One hunched-over scribe.
And one knight beside him.
Nice.
They even attach a knight to the odd job of burning documents.
The scribe held back a cough and came inside.
The knight stood just inside the door and swept his gaze over the storeroom.
The lamplight passed over the cleaning tool handles and the edge of the shelves as if licking them.
I kept even my breathing shallow.
The two went straight to the inner shelf.
The scribe grabbed the bottom of a box, and the knight lifted the opposite side.
The moment they raised it, it scraped against the floor.
Grrrrk.
That wasn’t the sound of a paper box.
It was a wooden box.
And a fairly heavy one at that.
The blood drained from the back of the scribe’s hands.
If this was just a room where two student council aides secretly came and went, there was no reason for that combination to show up.
The two left immediately, carrying the box.
The door closed, and the key turned twice again.
There had been patrol routes like that a few times in the original too.
If you popped out once and got caught, that route was just game over.
Reality is even more fucked up than a game.
Because there’s no save file.
When the sound of footsteps faded far away and only silence remained,
I slowly counted to ten in my head before finally moving away.
“Now.”
When I spoke very quietly, Mia nodded first.
Erka said nothing and simply steadied her breathing.
We slipped out as if crawling from the shadow of the stairs.
When we stood in front of the storeroom door again, the smell was even stronger than before.
Beneath the smell of burned paper, the scent of not-quite-dry cloth overlapped.
And the smell of metal.
As if the corner of the box had scraped the bottom of the door on its way out, a very thin mark was left on the floor.
Mia bent her knees and brought her face close to the floor.
“It’s worse than before.”
“What is?”
“The smell of people.”
Those words drove in short and sharp.
I looked beneath the storeroom door again.
Black powder.
Scrape marks.
A single white thread caught beneath the doorframe.
If only paper went in and out of that room, there was no reason to bring in a knight and move something like that in the middle of the night.
“Let’s pull out.”
“If we stay here any longer, we’ll get caught.”
She was right.
We’d seen enough.
If we got greedy and were caught, our names might end up inside the box we’d just seen.
I nodded.
“Let’s go.”
The way out of the main building felt much longer than when we came in.
Until we made it down to the laundry passage behind the dormitory, none of the three of us said a word.
It was the kind of night where the moment you spoke in the hallway, it felt like someone would be listening.
Only after we crossed the connecting door and slipped into the darkness on the dormitory side did Mia let out a very small breath.
“I hate it.”
“What?”
“That place.”
“Me too.”
Only then did Erka rub the back of her hand.
She’d acted fine in front of the storeroom earlier, but now that I looked, her fingertips had stiffened just a little.
“That box. It didn’t only have paper in it.”
“I know.”
“They even had a knight with them.”
“I know that too.”
When I cut her off like that, Erka glared at me sideways.
“If you know, at least change your expression.”
“What’s the point of changing it?”
“At the very least, I’d know you were human.”
Nice.
This person just has to plant a thorn at the end of every sentence.
Mia cut in between us.
“Senior, are we done for today?”
“We have to be.”
“We’re not looking more?”
“I think something bad will happen if we look more.”
Mia pressed her lips tightly together.
Her tail lowered once, then returned to its place.
“Tomorrow.”
I spoke in a low voice.
“I need to meet Serena first tomorrow.”
Erka answered immediately.
“You think that noble young lady will believe you right away?”
“It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t.”
“Of course.”
“If she learns that there was even a knight posted at the storeroom last night, at least she’ll think about it.”
Before I knew it, the sky was beginning to brighten little by little.
Even if I went back to my room now, I wouldn’t get two hours of sleep.
Nice.
This day is fucked.
=======
When I splashed water onto my face at the communal washbasins, it didn’t wake me up so much as make my scalp freeze first.
Usually when I can’t sleep, my eyes get dry first, but today the back of my neck was stiffer.
After curling up my body all night, my entire back had gone rigid.
The soup in the dormitory cafeteria was still terrible.
It was bland, then suddenly salty, not hot, and not exactly cold either.
At this point, it was a talent.
How do they hit this kind of temperature every day?
I tore the bread apart with my hands and soaked it in the soup.
Otherwise, it would stick in my throat.
Mia was sitting across from me, and she was eating more slowly than usual.
She looked at me once, tore off some bread, then looked at me again.
Then she opened her mouth.
“Senior.”
“What?”
“When you meet Serena today.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell her about me too.”
“What about you?”
“The smell.”
“I will.”
“Don’t leave it out.”
“Why would I leave out your contribution?”
As soon as those words fell, Mia’s ears rose just a little.
She couldn’t even hide that she was pleased.
“Good.”
“You’re using that phrase again.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Yeah. Got it.”
Just then, footsteps came from the cafeteria entrance.
Two kids wearing student council aide bands passed by.
Without stopping my spoon, I only raised my eyes to look.
They weren’t the guys I’d seen last night.
I gulped down the rest of the soup in one go.
“I’m going first.”
“Me too?”
“You go to class.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Go even if you don’t want to.”
Mia pouted, but in the end, she nodded.
It seemed she’d realized I was heading to Serena.
“Come back right away when you’re done.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m curious.”
“Good.”
“You’re not making fun of me, right?”
“Half.”
Mia only then smiled faintly.
I got up from my seat, brushed off my hands, and left the dining hall.
The corridor on the student council side was crowded from morning.
Assistants ran about with documents in their arms, knights stood posted along the walls, and the students from noble houses looked as polished as ever.
As if nothing had happened.
That was what felt the worst.
Serena was not in the reception room.
Instead, just as I had expected, she was clearing people out from the small document sorting room inside the student council.
One of the knights standing at the door frowned when he saw me.
Well, of course he would.
The bastard who had grabbed and pulled the duke’s young lady right in front of him had come back again first thing in the morning.
“Yurian Valter has arrived.”
Serena’s voice came from inside first.
“Let him in.”
The knight kept that displeased look on his face to the end, but stepped aside.
I went in through the door.
It was narrower than the reception room.
One desk.
Two bundles of documents.
Even the window was small.
The smell was different too.
Instead of tea or incense, the scent of ink and paper came first.
Serena was already seated.
The area beneath her eyes had sunk ever so slightly.
She had the face of someone who had spent the whole night digging through something.
Without a word, I pushed the portion of the student assignment chart and the note I had brought from the storage room toward her.
Serena first aligned the corners of the papers with her fingertips.
Then she looked at the red symbol.
She unfolded the note.
Reconfirm before transfer.
There, she stopped.
She did compose her expression first.
But this time, it took her a little longer to do it.
Good.
So it did hit.
“Where did you get this?”
“West storage room.”
“You opened it?”
“For a moment.”
“Alone?”
“No.”
Serena’s gaze rose for the briefest instant.
“Who else?”
“Mia and Erka von Lumen.”
Serena did not ask further.
Instead, she tapped the paper once with her finger.
“The red symbol is not part of the student council’s general classification.”
“I know that much.”
“How much do you know?”
“That they burn things to hide them.”
Serena nodded very slightly.
“That’s correct.”
She pulled a file from beside the desk and opened it.
Her hands moved quickly.
It seemed she had prepared it in advance.
“I also looked through the working records all night.”
She turned one page of the ledger and pushed it toward me.
“This is the ledger for items brought in and out related to the corridor incident.
At the same time last night, there is no record of any box being carried out.”
I scanned the lines with my eyes.
It was blank.
Serena laid another sheet on top as if covering it.
“And this is the assistant personnel shift roster.”
This time, the line for the same time period was blank as well.
Two names were missing entirely.
“They split it up on purpose.”
When I spoke in a low voice, Serena answered immediately.
“Yes. So that if you look at only one sheet, nothing seems strange.”
“Does the entire student council know?”
“No.”
Her answer was quick.
“At least from the records that have reached my hands right now, part of the working staff and a connection higher up are moving separately.”
“Higher up, huh.”
“I mean above the student council.”
After saying that, she closed her mouth for a very brief moment.
It seemed she had no intention of explaining any further.
I did not bother pressing her either.
Even if I did, she would not spit it out right now.
Instead, I asked something else.
“What is the Special Management Building?”
Serena’s eyes stopped for the briefest moment.
At this point, that meant there was a place where they pulled people aside for a while in the middle of the process.
In the original work, the Special Management Building served that role.
On the surface, it was a place to separate students who needed stability.
In reality, it was a place where the kids pushed off the charts were bound for a short while.
“Why do you ask that?”
“It was stamped on the box.”
Serena lowered her gaze once as if choosing her answer, then raised it again.
“Officially.”
Good.
Now she was starting with “officially” from the outset.
“It is a place where students who need stability are temporarily separated.”
“I’m sure that’s what it is officially.”
Serena simply accepted my sarcasm and let it pass.
“Yes.”
That one word only made me like it even less.
She did not deny it, nor did she try to patch things over.
She simply accepted it.
She folded the fragment of the student assignment chart again.
“From now on, don’t touch this recklessly.”
“I already did.”
“I’m telling you not to dig any further.”
Ah.
The way she shortened her words made it even more irritating.
“At least for today, move as you normally would.”
“And you?”
“I’ll start by checking access to the Special Management Building.”
“In the student council’s name?”
“In my name.”
Those words sounded fairly forceful.
Serena then looked once more at the note bearing the seal on the desk.
“And this pattern.”
“Do you know it?”
“I don’t.”
Her answer came faster than expected.
I narrowed my eyes.
“So it isn’t the student council’s.”
“It is not the current student council’s mark.”
I leaned my back against the chair, then immediately pulled away again.
I did not want to sit in this room for too long for no reason.
“If you’re going to look into the Special Management Building, I’ll look at the people.”
Serena’s hand, which had been resting on the papers, stopped.
“The people?”
“The sudden empty spots.
People who don’t show up to class, people who don’t come down to the dining hall, rooms that exist but have no one in them, things like that.”
Serena did not answer right away.