Fragments of data tangled inside my head.
The trace of the forged seal Nadia had shown me at the rear gate.
That grotesquely twisted pattern and the curve of the seal stamped into that box now seemed to overlap in a strange way.
Nadia seemed to grasp the situation at once,
but without so much as a change in complexion, she smiled and said,
“What a precious item.
The Academy will be deeply grateful for the Marquis’s thoughtfulness.
Yurian, let us receive this precious item ourselves and carry it to the inspection room.
Wouldn’t it be considerate to allow the Marquis’s attendants to enjoy the festival?”
“Ah, pardon? Me?”
I looked at Nadia in bewilderment.
She wanted me to carry this heavy box?
My arms and legs were in no state to properly endure even a wooden training sword.
But Nadia’s eyes had already given the order.
I had never had the right to refuse in the first place.
With a sigh, I took the box from the Marquis’s attendant.
The moment the box moved from the attendant’s hands into my arms,
a heavy weight slammed down below my elbows.
“Urgh……”
The box was far heavier than I had expected.
My feeble arm muscles screamed, and my knees bent inward in an unsightly way.
Staggering with the box in my arms, unable to keep my balance, I looked to anyone watching like the very picture of a ridiculous dropout.
Low snickers came from around me,
but I didn’t even have the leisure to care.
As I struggled desperately not to drop the box,
my body naturally pulled it tight against my chest, and my upper body leaned backward.
In the process, the bottom of the box tilted up into the air.
Nadia did not miss that moment.
Pretending to brush past my side, she examined every detail of the seal on the bottom of the box in that brief instant.
Her pupils trembled ever so slightly, then quickly settled into calm.
A forged intermediate seal type.
It was the moment the route of the contaminated supplies discovered at the rear gate finally revealed its true form.
The attendants tried to approach, saying they would carry the box instead,
but Nadia gracefully waved them back.
“No, it’s all right.
Yurian may look a little clumsy, but he has a sure sense of responsibility.
We will move it safely.”
I staggered out of the VIP seating area as if I were practically crawling.
In the distance, Nadia exchanged her final greetings with the Marquis and walked toward me.
The moment we escaped that suffocating atmosphere of the VIP seats, I set the box down on the carpet and collapsed where I stood.
My breath had risen all the way to my throat, and my fingertips were trembling as if in spasms.
Nadia looked down at me where I sat on the floor,
and whispered in an extremely low, secretive voice.
“Well done, Yurian.
As expected, it was a good idea to use you as a porter.
Thanks to you, I saw clear evidence.”
I looked up at her, gasping with shaky breaths.
Drops of sweat trickled down around my eyes.
“……I really almost dropped it, you know.”
“But in the end, it was perfect.
The way that seal was processed—there’s no doubt it belongs to a forged intermediate seal type.
An attendant of the Marquis’s house personally brought in forged supplies.
We’ve learned something interesting.”
As if nothing had happened, Nadia turned her smiling face back toward the central plaza.
To her, this whole situation might only be one move on an intricately arranged chessboard,
but to me, who had been forced to throw my entire body into carrying a box just for that one statement, it was nothing more than a threat to my survival.
I barely supported my trembling legs and got up.
The box was still weighing heavily down on me,
and from my terminal came Briana’s cold notification telling me to head to the next inspection area.
The festival was growing more splendid by the moment,
but the contaminated traces hidden beneath that splendor were gradually tightening around my throat.
An ominous premonition, as heavy as this box, weighed down on my shoulders.
My work shift wasn’t even halfway over yet.
I followed behind Nadia and stepped once more into the middle of the noisy plaza.
Instead of perfume, the smell of greasy food began brushing against the tip of my nose again.
I checked my terminal one last time.
[Current Time: 14:15]
[Remaining Work Hours: 7 hours 45 minutes]
“……Just kill me already.”
My low cry of despair was buried beneath the cheers of the festival and reached no one.
Nadia was still walking ahead with elegant steps,
and I followed behind her with a staggering gait.
The moment we left the splendid VIP seating area of the central plaza,
the texture of the air changed completely.
The refined scent of perfume and the restrained atmosphere were nowhere to be found,
and instead, a stimulating feast assaulted my nose without mercy.
It was the food stall district.
The sound of sizzling oil filled the air, and smoke rising from every direction blanketed the plaza.
The savory smell of meat skewers grilling to a golden brown, the nutty aroma of freshly fried food,
the sharp sting of exotic spices, and even the sweet scent of freshly baked bread.
Dozens of smells mingled together and surged toward me like a massive wave.
Mia, standing beside me, was not looking well.
Her ears, which would normally have been perked upright, drooped limply,
and she kept wrinkling her nose with a pained expression.
“Hoo…… Senior, this place is too much.
The smells…… the smells are fighting each other.”
Mia’s voice had less energy than usual.
To the beastfolk’s excessively sensitive sense of smell, this district was probably less a festival venue
and more like a massive dumping ground of information.
Every time she inhaled the air mixed with spices and oily smoke,
Mia kept coughing dryly and shaking her head.
“My nose…… my nose feels like it’s going numb.
I can’t distinguish anything.”
Watching her, I inwardly cheered.
If Mia’s nose was out of order,
then that ghostlike tracking ability that had been strangling me had been temporarily lost.
Nadia was far off, absorbed in checking other supplies,
and Erka was nowhere to be seen.
This was my chance.
Taking advantage of the moment while Mia kept sneezing and rubbing around her eyes,
I tried to hide myself very naturally among the crowd.
I softened my footsteps, erased my presence as much as possible, and stepped between the tents in a secluded corner.
If I could just slip away to the quiet rear of the dormitory, or into some corner of a storage room no one ever visited,
I felt like I could somehow coast through the remaining work hours of the day.
‘Success.’
Just one more step, and I would be able to vanish completely into the throng.
A pleasant thrill ran down my spine.
But at that moment, I felt a powerful force snatch me by the back of the neck.
“Where are you going, Senior?”
The back of my neck went cold.
When I turned around, Mia was narrowing her eyes as she gripped the hem of my clothes tightly.
Hadn’t she said her nose was numb?
“……No, there are too many people, so I was just trying to get out of the way a little.
Anyway, didn’t you say your nose wasn’t working?”
Mia wrinkled her nose once more, then grinned.
“All the other smells are so smeared together that I can’t tell, but
Senior’s ‘scent of running away’ is perfectly clear.
A pathetic smell mixed with sweat.”
My stomach tightened.
A scent of running away? There was no way such a thing actually existed.
My insignificant attempt had been thwarted so emptily that my mouth went dry.
As if declaring she would absolutely not let go of my clothes,
Mia tightened her fingers and dragged me back into the middle of the stalls.
As I was dragged along with heavy steps, the tips of my fingers grew ever so slightly hot.
It was one side of the food stall district, an area lined with large frying cauldrons.
Merchants were busily frying meat, and above them, white smoke billowed up in clouds.
It was an ordinary scene, but beyond the smoke, one magic lamp installed as auxiliary decoration caught my eye.
Its position was bad.
Hot oil smoke rising from the frying cauldrons was striking the lower part of the magic lamp head-on.
On top of that, near that magic lamp, there was a lingering scent unique to contaminated mana stones,
similar to the ones we had inspected earlier.
It wasn’t enough to explode immediately, but if the heat of the magic lamp and the flammability of the oil smoke met the unstable lingering energy of the mana stone, a small fire would be inevitable.
I tapped Mia’s arm.
“Hey, Mia. Doesn’t the smell from that stall feel ominous because it’s too delicious?”
Mia looked at me as if I were absurd.
“Ominous because it’s delicious? Senior, what are you talking about? Are you hallucinating because you’re hungry?”
“No, really. Only the smell from that stall is especially sharp on the nose…… I think something’s mixed in.
My ‘misfortune detection’ is pointing that way.”
Mia looked doubtful, but at my serious expression, she sniffed the air once more.
She craned her head toward the smoky fried food stall and took a deep breath.
Then, before long, she furrowed her brow and coughed.
“Cough! Ah…… You’re right. Under the smell of oil, there’s a rotten stone smell mixed in.
Senior, that smells like the mana stone powder from earlier!”
The moment my words ended, Mia ran toward the stall.
“Mister! Move that magic lamp to the side right now! It’s overheating!”
The stall owner seemed flustered by Mia’s sudden shout,
but perhaps trusting the beastfolk’s sharp senses, he grumbled while moving the ring of the magic lamp to a side post.
As soon as the magic lamp left the smoke-filled area, the crackling friction sound subsided.
The owner turned the magic lamp on again, then widened his eyes.
“Oh, the kid was right. The lamp’s much brighter now!
It was dim because of the smoke. Thanks!”
Where the possibility of a fire had vanished, the light now shone brightly.
Perhaps in a good mood, the owner handed Mia two large, freshly fried meat skewers.
“This is a bonus to thank you. Share them between the two of you!”
Mia swayed her tail and repeatedly thanked him.
Then she held one steaming skewer up to my mouth.
The skewer, dripping with meat juices, gave off an irresistible savory smell.
But my stomach was sending entirely different signals.
The recovery meal and supplements Rine had forcibly fed me since morning had already filled my stomach.
My stomach, so full of liquid I could hear it sloshing every time I moved,
had no room left to accept even a single piece of meat.
“I’m…… I’m fine. You eat them all.”
“Come on, Senior, you worked hard too, so try some. It’s really good.”
Mia kept holding out the skewer despite my refusal,
but I desperately shook my head.
If I chewed even one piece of meat here,
all the nutrients I had consumed today—the kind that would go down in the record—felt like they would come surging back up.
In the end, Mia held one skewer in each hand and began chewing the meat with a happy expression.
With her cheeks puffed out, she looked up at me and mumbled,
“Senior, the smell of festivals is dangerous, but it’s delicious.
Dangerous things can be helpful sometimes, huh?”
Holding back my nausea, I checked my terminal with a pale face.
The noise of the festival was still soaring high,
and I still had a very long way to go in my work hours.
“……My life is dangerous, but it doesn’t even taste good.”
My low mutter vanished, buried beneath the sounds of Mia’s cheerful meal.
Amid the greasy air and the heat of the crowd,
I was still swimming through the inescapable swamp of going to work.
The louder the festival’s cheers grew, the deeper my fatigue became,
and my fingertips were once again twitching toward the next ominous sign.
My work shift had only just passed the peak of the afternoon.