The roars of the monsters that burst out, tearing through the darkness beyond the outer wall, ripped apart the noise of the festival.
But the screams came later than expected.
The first to move near the wall was Kyle Lucen.
Golden mana poured from his body, cutting through the night air and blocking the monsters’ sight.
“Don’t fall back! If we’re pushed here, the plaza will be in danger!”
Kyle’s shout was not mere encouragement.
Taking his voice as their signal flare, the students who had nearly fallen into chaos began moving according to their respective specialties.
It was not the scene of a miserable slaughter, but of an emergency response turning like a well-built machine.
The swordsmanship department students stood out the most.
The safety lines that would normally have been put up to keep spectators from approaching had now become clear defensive lines that slowed the monsters’ advance and distinguished ally from enemy.
Dylan shouted, his face flushed.
“Fall back behind the safety lines! Anyone with a sword, hold the front! Everyone else, secure the evacuation routes!”
They were the very lines I had pestered them into moving throughout the preparation period.
Thanks to the spacing Dylan had so irritably managed, the charging monsters lost speed as they were stopped by layers of safety lines and the blades of the swordsmen holding firm behind them.
I watched it all from one step back, my breath rising to my throat.
Even through the pain of my stomach tightening, my vision was strangely clear.
My legs were giving out, and I wanted to collapse at any moment, but the scene unfolding before my eyes held me upright.
Behind the swordsmanship department students, the magic department students were moving busily.
The magic lamps Erka and Seria had adjusted poured out a light far more intense than usual, illuminating the battlefield.
It was not simply a light that drove away darkness.
It was the light of survival, clearly revealing where the monsters were coming from and which direction they were heading.
Erka seemed to have already known that fear spread where light vanished.
She stood before the control panel, giving commands calmly, while Seria carefully adjusted the output values to prevent mana overload.
Thanks to them, not a single magic lamp in the festival grounds went out, serving as sentinels that held fear at bay.
“Strengthen the lighting in East Sector Three. We need to eliminate the blind spots!”
As Erka’s blue mana filled the gaps in the barrier, the flow of people moved out smoothly along the maze route Rowen had revised.
The bizarre detours Rowen had drawn on the map the day before the festival had now become the fastest evacuation routes.
A path that allowed people to flee in the most efficient way, without tangling together, toward the side where there was no threat from the monsters.
Rowen stood at the maze entrance, holding a terminal and guiding people.
“Please don’t run! The left path of the maze has been sealed off. Follow the right route and move to the western garden!”
Rowen’s voice was calm, and thanks to the trust it inspired, no one seemed to be panicking and trying to go against the flow.
I turned my head toward the treatment booth.
The area Rine and Amelia had organized in advance was already functioning perfectly as a triage station.
“Minor injuries to the rear tent! Cadet Amelia, gather the first-aid supplies first. Use divine power only when I tell you to!”
Amelia was clearly flustered, but under Rine’s firm orders, she began carrying herbal tea and bandages.
Mia sniffed the air, detecting the presence of monsters crawling out of the forest before anyone else and informing Kyle.
“Kyle, under the bushes on the left! Three more!”
Following Mia’s directions, Kyle swung his sword without hesitation.
Serena, too, converted the precise swordsmanship she had shown in the sparring arena into real combat, cutting off the small monsters trying to slip into the students.
Nadia controlled the area around the VIP seats, soothing the guests so they would not cause a commotion.
Her voice was graceful yet forceful, and thanks to it, the powerful figures visiting the academy orderly withdrew under the illusion that they were being safely protected.
Brianna recorded all of it in real time on the student support office terminal, maintaining the emergency contact system.
Standing behind all that, I thought.
‘I thought I hadn’t done anything at all.’
They were things I had forced myself to meddle in simply because I didn’t want to be expelled, didn’t want to starve to death, and wanted to avoid the miserable ending of the original story.
All those trash-tier accidents, where I had clumsily pretended to fall and changed the subject, where I had made cowardly excuses and forced things to be moved, were now coming back as the academy’s defense mechanism.
Because of the angle of the guide lights I had changed, monsters could not hide in the shadows.
Thanks to the stakes of the treatment booth that I had made them move, the injured were safely protected.
Thanks to the evacuation route I had delayed with my complaints, there was no catastrophe of people trampling one another.
Maybe it truly hadn’t been nothing.
Kyle’s sword cut through the air once more, and Serena’s shield blocked a monster’s claws.
I was still a weakling who didn’t know how to fight, my fingertips were trembling, and my stomach was twisted as far as it could go.
But at the very least, so this pandemonium’s board would not collapse completely, I was using every bit of knowledge I had to support it from behind.
At the center of the battle were dazzling protagonists, but the stage on which those protagonists could act freely had been built atop the crude, cowardly groundwork I had laid.
The radiance of mana bursting from the front line mixed with the roars of monsters, shaking the plaza.
Thanks to the defense line led by Kyle and Serena holding firm, it did not seem like the formation would collapse immediately, but I shivered as cold sweat ran down me and my stomach twisted.
It was not simply because I was afraid.
Something was strange.
Kyle’s golden mana was bright enough to sting the eyes, and there were still people in the plaza who had not yet evacuated.
If they were monsters with a predator’s instincts, it would have been normal for them to rush toward the central plaza, the most lively and dazzling place.
But the monsters’ movements reflected in my eyes were clearly unnatural.
They were ignoring the crowds in the plaza.
As if they had made an agreement, they turned their heads along a fixed flow toward a dark passage in a corner of the academy.
The end of that path was not the central plaza, where the greatest damage had occurred in the original story.
It was near the outgoing supply route, the place I had kept pointing out throughout the preparation period as where contaminated equipment had gathered and had cleared away.
For an instant, the face of the bastard who had framed me flashed through my mind.
He had been caught.
But that did not mean every trace he had planted throughout the festival grounds had disappeared.
An unrecovered mark, a fragment of a seal hidden somewhere.
I became certain that those things were now serving as beacons, drawing monsters in amid this chaos.
“Mia! How do those things smell?”
I urgently asked Mia, who was wrinkling her nose and looking around.
Mia’s ears shot upright, and she turned her head in the direction the monsters were swarming.
“It’s strange, Senior. Underneath those things’ scent... there’s the smell of rotten stone mixed in. The smell of that fake seal. Really strong.”
Just as I thought.
The monsters had not simply found a gap in the barrier and entered.
They were being guided by a mark left somewhere inside the academy.
If we did not cut off that path, the defense line would be meaningless.
They would keep endlessly charging toward that mark, and in the end, they would squeeze through the gaps in the defense line and turn the outgoing supply route into hell.
I turned on my terminal with trembling hands.
I had no strength to fight directly.
But there was a way to cut off the path.
“Nadia! Please stop every cart heading toward the outgoing route right now! Administrative records or whatever, just stop them first. Erka! Phase echoes are concentrating near the outgoing route in Sector Seven. Look over there!”
The moment Nadia heard my voice, she seemed to grasp the situation and immediately operated her terminal, and Erka’s gaze also turned toward the end of the dark passage I pointed to.
There, an empty decorative cart scheduled to be discarded after the festival was slowly rolling along.
It was an ordinary wooden cart.
But Mia’s nose and my danger sense were both pointing to that cart at the same time.
“That cart! There’s something there!”
But the monsters’ breakthrough was faster than my shout.
A small monster that had circled around the outer edge of the defense line leapt toward me, drooling.
“......!”
There was no time to scream.
I instinctively leaned back and rolled across the ground.
My legs had given out and I had fallen in an unsightly way, but in that fleeting moment, my heel kicked hard against the wooden chock holding the cart wheel in place.
Rumble.
As the chock came loose, the empty cart standing on the slope tilted sharply to the side and overturned.
With a thunderous crash, from inside the shattered cartwheel, a fragment of a blackly contaminated seal popped out and rolled across the ground.
The moment it was exposed, a mana bullet fired from the tip of Erka’s staff smashed the seal fragment to pieces.
Boom!
As soon as the seal was destroyed, the monsters that had been swarming toward the outgoing route as if possessed all stopped in unison.
The beasts that had lost their signpost finally began milling about in place, scattering their formation.
“Yulian!”
Kyle shouted from the front and ran over.
And I, sitting on the ground, avoided the protagonists’ gazes with a pale face.
Erka, Serena, Nadia, and Brianna were all staring straight at me at the same time, as if they had planned it.
I brushed the dust from the ground and muttered softly, pretending to be as nonchalant as possible.
“...This time, it really was a mistake.”
At that moment.
“This time?”
The four voices overlapped with eerie precision and struck my eardrums.
Feeling cold sweat run down my spine, I hurriedly waved my hands.
“No, that’s not what I meant... I misspoke. Really.”
It seemed it was already too late. Erka, in particular, approached with enough force to grab me by the collar and asked,
“You knew in advance that a monster would leap this way, didn’t you? Didn’t you calculate where the seal would be revealed when the cart was pushed and then roll accordingly?”
“I said no! Mia told me. She said there was something in the cart, so I moved to check it, and then a monster suddenly jumped in... I was just trying to dodge and had the bad luck to roll. Really!”
“Then, Yulian.”
Erka leaned her face right up to mine and asked once more.
Her usual indifferent expression was nowhere to be seen; her eyes were like those of a scholar doggedly digging into an error in a magic formula.
“You were certain the monsters would attack, weren’t you?”
“...No, that’s not it.”
I crawled backward and trailed off.
But this time, it was not only Erka.
Serena, standing beside her with her arms crossed, added in a cool voice.
“Yulian, you said earlier that students were gathered on the forest path behind the sparring arena and that Dylan was controlling them alone. But when we went there, there were no students, and Dylan was in the sparring arena putting away wooden swords.”
“...Huh?”
A line of cold sweat ran down my spine.
Ah, I shouldn’t have used Dylan as an excuse.
A sense of disaster clenched my stomach tight.
Then even Kyle tilted his head and delivered the finishing blow.
“That’s right, Yulian. When I went to the rear gate, Dylan wasn’t there either, and a monster appeared. Strangely enough.”
I could not tell them the truth. I had no way to explain this ability either.
Things like “danger sense” or “afterimages of the future” did not come to me like some precise magical formula.
My head would suddenly hurt as if it were splitting open, and then a horrific accident scene would flash before my eyes like lightning.
How was I supposed to explain this cursed sense that appeared and vanished as it pleased, and after using it, drained the strength from my entire body?
I had not the slightest confidence that I could convince others of a phenomenon even I did not understand.
In the end, there was only one path I could choose: to look thoroughly stupid.
“...Dylan wasn’t there? That’s strange. I definitely saw someone waving over there.
No, then what did I see earlier? Don’t tell me I saw a ghost? I have been feeling weak lately, so maybe I’m seeing things...”
Even as I spoke, I thought I sounded truly pathetic, but at the moment, this cowardly excuse was the best defense mechanism I had.
I narrowed my eyes, stared into empty space, and put on the blankest expression I could.
I did not forget to make my fingertips tremble as I acted terrified.
“A ghost? What kind of...”
Erka started to speak as if dumbfounded, but I quickly cut her off.
“It’s true! My head’s been spinning and I’ve been nauseous since earlier anyway. Maybe I caught a cold...”
The more my pathetic explanation continued, the more suspicion and bewilderment crossed Erka and Serena’s eyes.
Erka, in particular, glared at me with an expression that said, “What kind of nonsense is this?”
But because I was acting so desperate and stupid, she seemed unable to find any more words with which to press me.
The one who softened the taut air then was Kyle’s laughter.
He laughed and lightly lowered the sword in his hand.
“Whatever happened, it’s a relief it was resolved. Thanks to you, Yulian, we got through a major crisis.”
Kyle patted my shoulder and neatly wrapped up the situation.
“As expected, Yulian is lucky. Thanks to you, everyone was able to stay safe. Now let’s get up. There’s still a lot to clean up.”
At that moment, I shed tears of gratitude inside. As expected, Kyle, you truly are the protagonist of this world.
Your reckless optimism and goodwill saved my social life today.
To think the protagonist correction could crush Erka’s sharp analysis and Serena’s keen observation in one blow.
Inwardly shouting, “Long live the protagonist,” I unsteadily rose from my seat and hid behind his back.