On the second day of the festival, the morning inspection finally came to an end.
The heat, even more intense than yesterday, filled the plaza,
but to me, that heat felt like scalding steam draining every last bit of strength from my body.
My fingertips were still trembling faintly from the aftereffects of carrying boxes yesterday,
and the soles of my feet, after going back and forth between carpet and dirt floors, had long since gone numb.
What I needed most right now was not a dazzling magic-lamp exhibition,
nor Kyle’s shining sparring match, nor Rine’s benevolent blessing.
Just somewhere with no one around, where I didn’t have to hear a single sound,
where I could sit still and breathe for exactly ten minutes.
That was all.
Avoiding the crowd, I crawled around to the back of a building,
into a secluded patch of shade where cleaning-supply closets and empty boxes were piled up.
The festival songs still reached even this far,
but at least it didn’t look like I would have to meet anyone’s eyes.
I slumped down with my back against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes.
‘Finally…….’
I drew the cool, shaded air deep into my lungs.
Just ten minutes.
This short time without Briana’s summons or Nadia’s subtle pressure felt like my only salvation.
But that salvation did not even last a full minute.
“Yurian? What are you doing here?”
My heart sank with a thud.
Even before I opened my eyes, I felt as though my vision had brightened.
When I raised my head, Kyle Lucen was looking down at me with a radiant smile that seemed ready to cast a halo at any moment.
“……Kyle. I’m just resting a little. What about you...?”
“I’m on a short break! But what are you doing all alone in a corner like this?
There’s so much good food in the plaza, and so many really fun booths.
It’s a festival, so you should enjoy it a little too!”
Kyle tried to grab my arm and pull me up.
I desperately held my ground, keeping my rear glued to the floor.
The protagonist’s goodwill was like an inescapable status ailment.
I already knew all too painfully well that the more you refused, the more concern and even more blinding smiles came back at you.
“No, I’m really fine. Being here quietly is how I enjoy myself. Really.”
“There’s no way that’s true! Come on, let’s go together.
When I saw it earlier, the Reconnaissance Department’s maze booth looked really fun.”
While I was struggling with Kyle,
I felt a cool yet gentle presence behind me.
“Kyle, please don’t drag Yurian away too forcefully.”
It was Rine.
She was dressed neatly in the white attire of a saintess,
and in one hand, she held a bottle with steam rising from it.
I looked at her as though I had met my savior,
but Rine’s gaze was carefully scanning me from head to toe.
“Yurian, your complexion is even worse than yesterday.
Are you sure you’re resting properly?
Here, drink this first, and then we’ll talk.”
The bottle Rine held out gave off an indescribably healthy smell.
It was unmistakably an upgraded version of the recovery meal I had eaten yesterday.
Just as I was about to open my mouth to refuse,
Mia suddenly popped up from atop the stack of boxes beside us.
“Senior, your smell has gotten way too limp.
Try eating this. It’ll give you strength.”
Mia, who knew where she had gotten them, shoved three meat skewers right under my nose.
The greasy scent of meat mixed with Rine’s herbal smell and turned into a bizarre stench.
Mia’s tail swayed near my calves, tickling me,
and her sharp eyes seemed to be monitoring whether I took even one bite of the skewer.
“……Guys, please. I’m really full right now, okay?”
“Meals and recovery medicine are separate things, Yurian. Now, say ah.”
Rine’s benevolent pressure drew closer.
Just then, I saw Seria running toward us from afar with a thick bundle of documents in her arms.
“Yurian! So this is where you were! Um, this is the list of auxiliary exhibition magic lamps for the Magic Department booth,
but the location you mentioned yesterday was a little ambiguous…… Could you look over this again?
If you don’t check it, I’m too anxious to turn the power on!”
Seria gasped for breath as she plopped the documents onto my lap.
Her eyes were filled with blind trust toward me.
I didn’t even know the “m” in magic theory,
so why was she asking me about this?
To make matters worse, Dylan was approaching from the other side, raising his voice.
“Hey, Yurian! About that safety line yesterday.
Moving it back is fine, but the spectators keep complaining that they’re going to trip over it!
Should we hang it a little higher,
or should we just use a fixed type instead?
Come take a look!”
Kyle’s dazzling invitation, Rine’s coercive recovery medicine,
Mia’s greasy meat-and-tail smell, Seria’s work bomb,
and even Dylan’s annoying question.
My ten minutes evaporated just like that.
This shaded corner, which should have been a peaceful resting place, had somehow deteriorated into a strange gathering spot centered around me,
a person who was odd but apparently could not simply be left alone.
I could not come to my senses amid the flood of connections crashing over me like a blanket.
Kyle patted my shoulder, Rine tried to feed me medicine,
Mia shoved meat at me, and Seria shoved documents at me.
“……Um, could everyone please stop?”
My voice was buried beneath Erka’s summons chime.
The terminal rang noisily, pointing to the next inspection site.
At that moment, Nadia appeared with elegant bearing, cutting through the noisy crowd.
She watched this bizarre scene surrounding us for a moment as if she found it interesting,
then tapped her wristwatch.
“Oh my, everyone was gathered here? What a wonderfully harmonious atmosphere.”
Nadia’s smile was as beautiful as ever,
but I knew very well the meaning hidden behind it.
She approached my side and calmly added,
“Yurian, your break is over.
The inspection assignment for the central stage has been issued.”
I lightly rested my head against the cold stone wall.
My body felt even heavier than it had ten minutes ago.
“……It never even started.”
My small grumble mixed with the great roar of the festival and the laughter of the people, scattering weakly.
I forced my heavy body upright,
leaving behind the gazes looking at me with worry or expectation,
and walked back out into the middle of the plaza.
The festival was still shining,
but to me, that light was nothing more than cruel illumination telling me I had more work to do.
With every step I took back toward the center of the plaza,
the festival heat pressed down on my entire body like a heavy blanket.
Laughter bursting out from every direction, the cheerful clink of wooden mugs toasting,
the dizzying mix of sweet sugar confections and savory roasting meat pierced the tip of my nose.
In the sky, decorative magic lamps that had been floating since midday already drifted about, scattering a soft glow,
and long lines of visitors stretched in front of each department’s booths.
No matter who looked at it, it was a peaceful, brilliant scene from the festival.
But in my eyes, this scenery was no different from a vast minefield.
I had to constantly stay on edge,
wondering whether there was an unstable structure in the direction of the laughing people’s feet,
or whether the ropes securing the booth tents had loosened and the poles might collapse.
With even my excuses to escape gone, I dragged my heavy legs and wandered aimlessly around the outskirts of the plaza.
My throat was parched.
Thanks to the nutritional meal Rine had forced down my throat, my stomach felt tightly weighed down,
and my soles had long since gone numb from alternating between dirt ground and stone paths.
‘Just once…… Please, let me sit down and breathe for a moment.’
Before someone called out to me, or before another abnormal sign stabbed into my body, I needed a place to hide perfectly.
I left the central area where the crowds had gathered
and quietly moved toward the back of the supply warehouse, completely outside the flow of visitors.
=============================================================
The worn armband marking him as a temporary transport worker for the Merchant Guild was more useful than he had expected.
With a suitably shabby outer garment and a cart for carrying luggage,
no one cast him a suspicious glance no matter where he wandered in this bustling festival venue.
His mission was extremely simple.
Subtly place the problematic items received from above at the designated locations,
recover the traces of the forged seals once their role was complete,
and, for any equipment where an unexpected abnormality occurred, switch it back with a normal item and erase the evidence.
There was no need to know anything about the grand plan behind it.
All he had to do was cleanly finish the aftermath work on-site.
And yet everything was going strangely awry.
The equipment he had secretly marked kept leaving its proper place or disappearing entirely.
The magic lamps he had tampered with to contain the risk of explosion had somehow been powered down and moved to a safe location,
and the safety line at the public sparring arena, which he had intended to make people tangle and trip over, had been pushed far back.
The route of the Reconnaissance Department’s maze had been corrected to a normal path before it could add to the confusion,
and even the wedge-shaped stakes he had driven in around the Divinity Department’s treatment booth had been subtly shifted.
At first, he had suspected outstanding students like Nadia Lowell of the Student Council or Erka Vertia of the Magic Department.
They seemed like the sort who might notice minute phase changes or omissions in the records.
But after observing the scene from a distance,
he found that they were too busy attending to their respective booths and honored guests to move rashly.
Instead, there was always one uninvited guest loitering near the places where the variables he had painstakingly installed had been neutralized.
A pale, hollow complexion, and a feeble gait as though he might collapse at any moment.
Yurian Balter.
At first, he had thought he was merely a lucky fool.
He looked as if he did not even have the strength to lift a box, and the way he stumbled over his own feet at every turn made him look exactly like a bottom-ranked dropout.
But when a coincidence repeated itself three or four times, it was no longer a coincidence.
He did not dismantle equipment himself like some hero,
but every time he clumsily fell, coughed, or sank to the ground, the other students around him moved and resolved the situation.
Only then did he recall the anonymous instruction note he carried in his clothes.
[Beware the sickly male student among the inspectors.]
It was not simple exaggeration.
That feeble male student was truly a fatal variable in this plan.
He bit his lip and drew out a magic lamp with a small X marked on it from inside his clothes.
Before the lighting ceremony, he had to secretly mix this defective magic lamp into the reserve box.
He looked around and hurried his steps toward the back of the supply warehouse, where there were few people.
The rear wall of the warehouse was cool and quiet, untouched by the festival heat.
=========================================================
When I curled up between the stacked empty wooden boxes and the covered tents,
a sense of relief finally washed over me, as if I had been cut off from the world.
I slumped onto the cold dirt floor and buried my face in my knees.
The cold sweat running down my spine cooled in the chilly air, bringing on a slight shiver, but this was better.
Here, where neither Kyle’s dazzling smile nor Erka’s sharp questions could reach me, I wanted to close my eyes for just five minutes.
But even that modest wish was shattered by the faint sound of footsteps scraping the ground.
Someone was approaching the back of the warehouse.
They were not the footsteps of a student enjoying the festival.
It was a cautious presence, moving stealthily while wary of its surroundings.
I instinctively froze and cast my gaze through the gap between the boxes.
A man wearing a temporary Merchant Guild armband was approaching while glancing around.
In his hand, he held a small magic lamp.
An object with a small red X marked on its bottom.
The moment I saw it, my danger sense stabbed sharply.
With careful hands, the man opened the lid of a box of normal reserve items placed in the corner of the warehouse,
and was trying to slip the magic lamp marked with an X inside.
My breath caught. Alarm bells rang in my head.
Not for even a single second did I have any heroic thought that I had to stop that man here.
My entire body was ruled only by the primal fear that if I was discovered, it would be the end.
‘I didn’t see it. I didn’t see anything.’
I chanted inwardly and held my breath.
I was a pebble rolling on the ground.
I was an empty box.
I did not exist here.
It was just as I was quietly trying to move my body backward.
The strength went out of my legs, stiffened by tension,
and the toe of my shoe ever so slightly touched an empty metal part lying on the ground.
Ting.
In the quiet space behind the warehouse, that small, dull metallic sound rang out as clearly as thunder.
The man’s hand stopped.
Still holding the lid of the open box, he slowly turned his head toward the pile of boxes where I was hiding.
I bit my lip hard.
The strength had gone out of my legs, so I could not even run away immediately.
Through the gap between the boxes, my eyes met the man’s cold, sunken gaze perfectly.
He did not panic.
Instead, he quietly closed the box lid he had been holding and began moving toward me without a sound.
My path of retreat was blocked.
With my back pressed flat against the cold wall, I clenched my trembling hands as if I were shaking like an aspen.
The man’s shadow fell darkly over me as he looked down.
He opened his mouth in a numb voice, yet one filled with unmistakable hostility.
“You’re the student patrolling the plaza, aren’t you?”