When I emerged from Nadia’s temporary office, which had looked like a paper grave,
I thought I would finally be reunited with my dormitory bed.
After confirming the outline of the forces entangled with the forged seal,
my stomach had gone cold, and even standing was a struggle.
But my flimsy hope of getting off work was brutally shattered at the end of the Student Support Office corridor
by the silver-haired prodigy of the Department of Magic who was waiting for me.
It was Erka Bertia.
As if she couldn’t care less about my exhausted complexion, she grabbed my sleeve and dragged me straight toward the central plaza.
“I’m not academy equipment for public use, Erka.”
In the middle of the central plaza, beside a half-installed magic lamp support, I muttered irritably.
The fatigue running down my spine covered my whole body like sticky mud.
After spending all of yesterday buried under Nadia’s piles of documents, the strength had gone out of my legs,
and the joints in my knees made unpleasant grinding sounds every time I moved.
“That’s why I’m personally bringing you around. It would be troublesome if equipment ran off on its own.”
Erka brushed aside my protest and looked over the magic lamp parts scattered around with cold eyes.
Her firm attitude left me speechless.
It almost sounded like it made sense, but it absolutely didn’t.
Still, with my feeble body, I had no strength to escape her iron grip.
The plaza was bustling with preparations for the coming festival.
The sounds of hammering and the excited laughter of students sprang up everywhere.
The place where we stopped was the area where the Department of Magic was conducting connection tests for the decorative magic lamps to be installed in the central plaza.
There, I saw a familiar face.
It was Seria Molt.
Like an ordinary student of the Department of Magic, she was diligently calibrating the large glass-tube-shaped magic lamps one by one.
But her shoulders were tightly hunched,
and a faint cold sweat had formed on her forehead.
With Erka, who was notorious for being exacting, watching with hawk-like eyes, it was only natural for her to be nervous.
“Continue the rehearsal calibration. We’re only checking the mana line connections and phase changes.”
At Erka’s dry instruction, Seria gave a small nod and raised her wand.
The gentle mana flowing from the tip of her wand seeped into the glass tube of the first magic lamp.
A soft light spread out, illuminating the plaza floor.
The second and third went smoothly as well.
I tried to stand there like part of the background, saying as little as possible.
Since I knew nothing about magic anyway, I just wanted to breathe quietly and leave.
But the moment Seria’s mana touched the fourth magic lamp,
my stomach clenched hard, and a wave of nausea surged up as if my insides were turning over.
It was not the omen of a massive explosion that pricked at my skin like needles.
But my throat suddenly closed up, and my fingertips trembled.
It was a bizarre sense of wrongness, as if an unpleasant hole that should not exist had opened in midair.
I reflexively looked at that magic lamp.
Normally, the light Seria injected should have filled the glass tube brightly,
but the cluster of light could not spread outward and was being grotesquely sucked inward.
As if a starving beast were devouring the mana, the color at its center was growing murky and dying.
“H-Huh…… Why is the light doing that?”
Flustered, Seria tightened her grip on her wand.
As the light diminished, she instinctively tried to brighten the magic lamp by raising the output.
The mana gathered at the tip of her wand grew stronger, just as it was about to surge into the glass tube.
“I don’t think you should make it any brighter.”
My mouth moved on its own.
The fear that if she forced any more mana into that thing, that disgusting hole would burst was what moved my tongue.
Startled by my urgent voice, Seria froze in place.
In the moment she hesitated, Erka, who had been standing beside her, reacted like lightning.
“Seria! Cut off the mana injection! Now!”
At the same time as Erka’s sharp cry, she reached out herself and knocked aside the tip of Seria’s wand.
The flow of mana was forcibly severed, and the light faded.
Immediately after, a chillingly faint “tick” pierced through the noise of the plaza.
The magic lamp did not shatter to pieces.
But along the surface of the thick inner glass tube, a crack as thin and sharp as a human hair had split open with a snap.
Seria stared back and forth between the cracked glass tube and her wand, her face rigid.
Perhaps cold sweat was running down her spine, because her complexion had gone deathly pale.
“If I’d…… raised it just now, it would have exploded, right?”
Seria asked in a trembling voice.
With her arms crossed, Erka looked down coldly at the cracked glass tube and answered.
“It would have exploded a little. Enough for the fragments to pierce your eye.”
Beside them, I swallowed dryly and muttered in a hoarse voice.
“Even exploding a little is still exploding……”
The strength left my legs, and I nearly sank down on the spot.
Once again, I had narrowly brushed past the threshold of death by a hair’s breadth.
If I had opened my mouth even a little later, Seria’s face would have been covered in blood, and the festival preparation site would have turned into a living hell.
Seria took a long while to steady her ragged breathing, then cautiously turned her head to look at me.
In her eyes, the kind of blind trust I wanted to avoid most was beginning to bloom.
“You…… You say you’re scared, but it feels like you always notice things first.”
“No. I’m just scared of everything. I only freaked out because I was afraid that glass might break.”
I immediately waved my hands and strongly denied it.
I had to destroy this heroic misunderstanding somehow.
But after hearing my explanation, Seria instead nodded as if she understood.
“Then maybe that’s what helps. What you’re afraid of often turns out to be the right answer for us.”
No, don’t interpret my cowardice as some kind of ability.
Inwardly, I despaired miserably and pressed a hand to my forehead.
It was driving me insane how my cowardly flailing to escape
kept being packaged as remarkable insight even by ordinary students at this academy.
Just then, Erka’s hand stopped as she was carefully dismantling the inside of the cracked glass tube.
Using tweezers, she carefully scraped something out from the split.
“Come here, Yurian.”
Erka’s voice turned as cold as ice.
I forced my heavy feet to move and approached her side.
Inside the small glass vial Erka held out was fine violet powder.
It was highly concentrated mana stone powder exactly like what I had seen at the bottom of the double-layered box that had been smashed at the rear gate inspection site yesterday.
“The magic lamps are contaminated with the same type as well.”
Erka whispered lowly.
At her words, my breath caught in my throat.
The counterfeits that had been smuggled in without passing through the main gate were already secretly being mixed into the festival’s most dazzling decorations.
The splendid heat of the central plaza instantly turned cold, like the chill of a morgue, and tightened around my throat.
My steps as I crossed it had already departed from the realm of normal walking.
Rather than placing my feet on the ground, it was closer to my two legs forcibly propping up
my body as it simply fell forward, dragging me along.
The plaza was still noisy with festival preparations.
The lively shouts of students carrying huge banners,
the cheerful hammering as booth frames were erected,
and even the sweet smell of snacks wafting from somewhere.
It was a dazzlingly peaceful and excited atmosphere,
but my vision was already flickering blurrily, like that of someone delirious with fever.
My head was a complete mess with memories of the magic lamp calibration site I had left behind with Erka and Seria.
‘So in the end, they’ve installed all those bomb-like mana stones inside the plaza’s magic lamps.’
I swallowed dryly and let out a hollow laugh.
The shells of the countless magic lamps being installed to illuminate the festival were perfectly ordinary objects.
They were flawless on paper, and beautiful to look at.
But the culprits had slipped those horrific contaminated mana stones they had smuggled in through the rear gate
inside those safe shells under the pretext of using them as power sources.
My breath clogged in my throat.
When I thought that somewhere in this vast plaza, those time bombs were still hidden
beneath pretty wrapping, my stomach twisted coldly.
“I’m just…… in charge of inspecting supplies, aren’t I?”
My throat was dry, and a hoarse voice leaked out.
I was just a nameless extra who should have been breathing dust in a corner of a warehouse and counting boxes.
I could not understand why on earth I was doing this here.
I had rolled through the mud of the rear gate inspection site, nearly suffocated under piles of documents in Nadia’s ink-scented records room,
and experienced the terror of a magic lamp on the verge of exploding under Erka’s cool gaze.
My frail body had already far exceeded its limits and was screaming.
My joints creaked, and every breath made the inside of my chest hurt as if it were tearing apart.
I staggered toward the western side of the plaza.
Ahead of me, I could see the preparation area for the Department of Divinity’s treatment booth, where white tents were being erected.
At the very least, it looked like a safe zone, without magic lamps or heavy materials, farthest from the danger of explosions.
‘Just a little…… Let me rest for just a little.’
The moment I reached the wooden crates piled up to support the tents,
even the last bit of strength remaining in my legs vanished as if it had been a lie.
Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, I sank down on the spot.
The feel of the cold stone floor came through my hips, but I could not even think of getting up again.
Sticky cold sweat ran down my spine, and my vision spun.
As I sat there with my eyes closed, panting,
a soft shadow fell over my head.
The faint scent of disinfectant mixed with the soothing warmth of divine power.
I knew who it was without needing to open my eyes.
“Yurian. You’ve pushed yourself to your limit again.”
A quiet, gentle voice tickled my ear.
I forced my heavy eyelids open.
Rine Arbel was kneeling, looking down at me with eyes full of concern.
I could see faint white healing mana beginning to bloom from her fingertips.
I was startled and flinched backward.
“I’m fine. There’s nothing wrong with me, so don’t leave a treatment record.”
Before I knew it, a desperate voice burst out of me.
If I received healing magic here, it was obvious my name would once again be added to the Student Support Office’s list of injured students
or to some special incident record.
I desperately refused her touch.
But as if she had expected my reaction,
Rine quietly withdrew the mana from her fingertips and smiled faintly.
By now, she was no longer fooled by this flimsy refusal of mine.
Instead, she took a small glass bottle from her arms and held it out to me.
“It’s a recovery meal.”
“……Huh?”
“I brewed it myself, so here. Drink it.”
While I sipped the recovery meal, Rine stood beside me and looked inside the tent.
I naturally followed her gaze and looked around the booth.
There was Amelia Kor.
With her sleeves rolled up, she was busily sorting large boxes of medicine.
She separated bundles of white bandages by size,
and arranged the ointments and disinfectants used for hemostasis in a row at the front of the table, where they were easiest to reach.
During the last mock training, Amelia had tended to recklessly draw upon excessive divine power even for light abrasions.
But now, she was learning to conserve her mana
and prepare physical first-aid tools first.
Watching her, I quietly felt relieved.
‘At least this side has gotten a little better.’
If they prepared the medicines that systematically, then even amid the chaos of the coming festival,
they should be able to handle the injured at least a little more safely.
But my meager sense of relief did not last even a full minute.
It happened the moment my eyes landed on one of the large iron stakes driven into the ground to support the treatment booth’s tent.
The stake was not merely a support, but a magical tool with runic characters engraved on its surface to anchor the temporary barrier around the booth.
The instant I stared at that stake, my fingertips tingled sharply.
It was not the omen of ignition that stabbed at my skin like needles.
Nor was it a dangerous bomb that might immediately explode like the contaminated mana stone hidden in the magic lamp.
But a strange, nauseating sensation twisted my stomach.
It felt as if an unpleasant hole that should not exist had opened in midair.
Something was severely distorted.
I instinctively frowned and gauged the distance between the stake and the inside of the tent.
The stake’s position was strange.
If the temporary barrier activated like this, the mana flow of the barrier would not gather in the center of the treatment booth,
but would bend outward in a deformed way.
In other words, on the day of the festival, when injured people lay here and Rine or Amelia performed healing arts,
part of the life-giving divine power they emitted would be sucked into the distorted gap of that misplaced stake and scattered into thin air.
I did not know anything about professional magical knowledge or the structure of formulas.
But my body, my wretched survival instinct, was warning me about that distorted flow.
This booth was in danger of becoming not a place that saved the injured,
but a horrible drain that dried healers’ divine power to death.
I bit my lip.
Should I just pretend not to know and move on?
But the faces of Amelia, sorting bandages inside, and Rine, who had handed me the recovery meal, remained in my mind.
In the end, I fiddled with the empty bottle in my hand and spoke as casually as if I were passing by.
“Hey, about that barrier stake.”
Rine turned back at my voice.
“This…… If you leave it beside someone who came to be treated, I think it’ll make them hurt more.”