A low, heavy voice pressed against my eardrums.
It felt as if my stomach had hardened into stone.
With my back pressed flat against the wall, I clenched my trembling hands as tightly as I could.
The temporary passage marker on my chest seemed to be growing cold.
What was I supposed to say here?
If I said, “No, I was just trying to sleep here for a bit,” would this man say, “Ah, I see. Rest well,” and back off?
There was no way.
The man’s eyes were already filled with the conviction that I was a fatal variable interfering with his work.
I swallowed dryly.
My throat was so parched that even if I tried to scream, only a metallic rasp would come out.
The man’s gaze paused briefly on the marker pinned to my collar.
The permit issued by the Student Support Office, allowing entry into any restricted area.
Right now, that marker felt like a brand tightening around my life.
The man twisted the corner of his lips strangely and let out a sneer.
And just as he was about to take another step toward me, I saw it.
The tip of his foot was subtly aimed at the box of spare magic lamps lying by my feet.
“……Ah.”
Before that short gasp could even slip from my mouth—
The man kicked the box with a movement so natural, yet clearly filled with force.
Crash!
A sharp shattering sound broke the silence and tore the cool air behind the warehouse to pieces.
The decorative magic lamps inside the box spilled onto the floor and shattered miserably.
Among them, there must have been the contaminated equipment he had been trying to sneak in.
But at this moment, something far more terrible than the identity of the broken equipment was happening.
“Over here! Help! This student is smashing all the equipment!”
The man suddenly screamed and flung himself backward.
The cold hostility with which he had been glaring at me as if he wanted to kill me vanished, and with the face of a frightened, honest worker, he shouted toward the outside of the warehouse.
I froze.
A cold line of sweat ran down my spine.
My mind flashed white.
Instead of subduing me by force, this man had chosen to attack my most vulnerable point.
My reputation as a troublemaker, and my academic record, already filthy beyond repair.
“What’s going on!”
“Who broke the equipment?”
The members of the merchants’ guild and the student council assistants who had been enjoying the festival not far away rushed over in an instant.
The cheerful music of the festival sounded like screams.
People looked back and forth between the shattered glass scattered across the floor and me standing blankly in front of it.
“T-this student suddenly appeared…… said he was going to inspect the warehouse, then kicked the box! I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen……!”
The man crawled on the floor, pleading his innocence.
His acting was perfect.
A pitiful worker who had been victimized by a student’s tyranny while trying to protect the festival supplies.
At that sight, the gazes of the people who had gathered turned cold in an instant.
“Huh? Isn’t that Yurian Valter?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He’s been poking around everywhere since the festival preparations started, and now he’s finally caused trouble.”
The murmuring voices surged over me like a wave.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out.
My stomach twisted, and bile seemed about to rise.
I wanted to say, “I didn’t touch it,” but the fragments scattered at my feet pointed to me like unmistakable evidence.
Just then, familiar footsteps cut through the commotion.
The crowd parted to the left and right, and Briana Iris appeared.
As always, she was dressed in a neat uniform and holding a businesslike terminal.
“Yurian Valter. Explain the situation.”
Briana’s voice was calm, and because of that, it instantly stilled the surrounding uproar.
The man lying on the floor, as if he had been waiting for this, began to complain again with screams mixed in.
“This student suddenly appeared and destroyed all the spare equipment……!”
Before the man could even finish speaking, Briana’s gaze turned to me.
The moment our eyes met, I felt my breath catch in my throat.
She observed my pale face and trembling fingertips for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the fragments scattered across the floor.
Everyone held their breath, expecting Briana to punish me or lash out at me at once.
But Briana opened her mouth in an extremely dry voice.
“Student Yurian Valter is currently a special field inspection assistant affiliated with the Student Support Office.
His presence in this area is a legitimate extension of his duties.”
At her words, the murmuring stopped dead.
The face of the man lying on the floor also stiffened in an instant.
Instead of interrogating me, Briana took a step toward the man.
“And Student Yurian has never once intentionally damaged an object.
All of his damage records occurred immediately after an accident, during the process of discovering an unidentified hazardous factor.
In other words, if he broke something, statistically speaking, the probability that there was a problem with that object converges on 98%.”
I stared blankly at Briana.
My horrific accident records, once they passed through her mouth, had suddenly transformed into hazardous-material detection data.
“Wait a moment. Yurian doesn’t open magic lamps himself.”
Ceria, who had arrived late, stepped in front of me and backed me up.
“Yurian…… whenever he sees something strange, he always calls me or Senior Erka. He’s the kind of person who can’t even touch things because he’s afraid they’ll explode if he does. There’s no way Yurian would open a box himself and smash it.”
“Right. That weakling doesn’t even have the strength to lift that box. To kick it and break it like that, you’d need to put quite a bit of force into it. Look at his legs. They’re shaking so badly he looks like he’s about to collapse even now.”
Dylan, who had appeared at some point, snorted with his arms crossed and added his own support.
I thought to myself.
‘Is that a defense, or an insult?’
I couldn’t tell whether it was praise or abuse, but Dylan’s voice was strangely persuasive.
In fact, right now, my legs were so weak that I could barely stand without leaning against the wall.
The suspicious gazes of the people slowly shifted from me to the man lying on the floor.
“Senior…….”
Mia suddenly appeared from between the crowd and approached my side.
She grabbed the hem of my clothes and sniffed, then turned her head and stared fixedly at the man on the floor.
Then, wrinkling her nose, she spoke.
“From this mister’s hands…… there’s a bitter smell. The smell of mana stone powder. There’s no smell from Senior Yurian, but from this mister’s hands, the bad smell from the plaza earlier is really strong.”
At Mia’s words, the man’s complexion turned earthy in an instant.
Briana lowered the hand holding the terminal and looked down at the man coldly.
“We will need to investigate how an individual not recorded in the inventory management ledger gained access to the spare boxes, as well as the abnormal mana reaction detected from the broken magic lamps.”
Briana’s voice was still businesslike, but within it was a clear trust—no, to be precise, an administrative certainty that if Yurian had caused an accident, then there was necessarily a variable there that needed to be caught.
The man tried to retreat in panic, but Dylan and the other students had already blocked his escape route.
I sank down onto the floor.
The twisting pain in my stomach remained, but at least the tension left me at the thought that I had avoided being falsely accused and chased out.
The man no longer pleaded.
He had read Briana’s dry statement of facts, Mia’s sharp observation, and the increasingly hostile atmosphere around him.
The moment he realized his false accusation would no longer work, he threw himself forward without hesitation.
“Move!”
He roughly shoved an empty box beside him toward the crowd and plunged into the mass of people.
In an instant, the back alley of the warehouse became chaos.
People scattered with screams, and the man tried to use that gap to disappear into the bustling noise of the festival.
But the escape route he chose had been ruined from the start.
“Where do you think you’re running!”
Dylan shouted and chased after him, but in truth, it was before Dylan could even do anything.
The man first changed direction toward the Swordsmanship Department sparring grounds.
Under normal circumstances, he probably intended to blend in with the spectators and slip out through the woods behind the arena.
However, there stood the safety line I had, a few days ago, harassed Dylan into moving far back.
Thanks to the buffer zone, now much wider than before, the spectators were lined up in orderly fashion, and as a result, the sight of the man sprinting at full speed through that broad empty space was as clear as a dancer performing a solo onstage.
“There he is! Catch him!”
People’s fingers pointed at the man.
The flustered man changed direction again and this time threw himself toward the Scouting Department’s maze booth.
It was the shortcut area where I had asked Rowen for modifications.
The man aimed for the narrow gap between the outer wall of the maze and the booth, but that place had already been completely blocked by the spectators’ waiting line under Rowen’s pretext of optimizing traffic flow.
Having lost his retreat, the man panted and changed direction again, this time toward the healing booth of the Divinity Department.
He tried to slip in amid the chaos of patients and visitors mixed together, but the waiting line for treatment there was as orderly as a military formation.
There was no gap for anyone to urgently cut into.
Unable to hide in the crowd or flee into the woods, he was left completely exposed in the middle of the festival grounds.
“The smell is still there! That way!”
Mia sniffed and pinpointed the man’s location with her finger.
It was as if an invisible cord had tied itself around the man’s ankle and was dragging him back.
Sitting on the floor, I tried to calm my trembling hands and watched the scene blankly.
This was not a situation I had created because I wanted to.
I had merely moved some things around a little in order to survive.
And yet, what was unfolding before my eyes looked like an elaborate trap, like a giant net slowly tightening around the man.
“……Yurian.”
Someone watching from beside me called my name in a low voice.
I could feel the surrounding students turning to look at me one by one.
In their eyes, admiration and suspicion were strangely mixed.
“Don’t tell me, Yurian, when you told us to move the safety line during the festival preparations…… was it to block that guy’s escape route?”
One student asked, as if unable to believe it.
Then other voices poured out one after another.
“The maze route was changed too, and the space in front of the healing booth was secured…… Did you predict this entire situation and take measures in advance?”
“My goodness, did you deliberately design it so that he’d be driven that way?”
I shook my head frantically.
My throat was so dry that my voice barely came out, but I desperately denied it.
“N-no! It wasn’t like that! I just…… I just thought the traffic flow might get tangled! Please don’t misunderstand!”
But my protest was swallowed by the noise of the festival grounds.
It seemed that people had already branded me as a terrifying schemer who looked frail on the outside but calculated everything behind the scenes.
In the end, the man came to a halt at the entrance to the Swordsmanship Department, where Serena Rubenhart stood firm.
Serena did not even draw her sword.
Simply by standing there and looking down at him coldly, the man collapsed to the ground as if he had come face to face with a wall.
“It’s over.”
Dylan ran over triumphantly, twisted the man’s arm behind his back, and subdued him.
He glanced at me and raised his thumb.
“Yurian! We did it just like you said, and we really caught him! You’re amazing!”
I said it wasn’t like that.
I screamed inwardly and buried my face in my hands.
From the subdued man’s coat, Mia snatched a single sheet of paper.
It was a small instruction note, folded up all crumpled.
Mia handed it to Briana, and Briana read over its contents with an expressionless face.
I approached Briana and looked at the note.
And the moment I read that sentence, I truly wanted to faint on the spot.
[Beware of the sickly male student among the inspectors.]