The moment I saw those words posted on the bulletin board, I turned right around and ran.
My heart pounded as if it were about to leap out of my mouth.
Cold sweat streamed down my back, and every time I swallowed, my throat felt rough, as though I had swallowed sand.
“The Terrifying Designer.”
That wasn’t a nickname. It was a death sentence.
People’s interest never lasts long by nature.
No matter how sensational a rumor is, it wears down with time, and no matter how flashy a nickname is, if it stops being passed from mouth to mouth, dust soon settles on it.
So there was only one thing I had to do now.
Nothing.
Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t stand out.
All I had to do was stay quiet and still.
Then someday, I would be forgotten.
I decided to hole up in a corner of my dorm room for the time being and simply wait for this storm to pass.
I would definitely be forgotten.
If I did nothing, if I said nothing, people’s interest would quickly cool.
After all, Academy rumors were volatile by nature.
I thought that if I lived like I was dead for just a few days, I could go back to being the ordinary trash-tier extra, Yurian Valter.
But I was completely wrong.
The first day was bearable enough.
I did hear my name a few times from the hallway, but if I shut the door and pulled the blanket over my head, I could pretend I hadn’t heard.
By the second day, things had gotten a little strange.
I heard footsteps come to my dorm room door and then turn back, and in the hallway, whispers passed back and forth in deliberately lowered voices.
“They say he still hasn’t come out.”
“As expected, isn’t he thinking about something?”
“Is he calculating his next move?”
……No.
I’m just too scared to go outside.
On the third day, not going to the dining hall had the opposite effect.
For some reason, my skipping meals had turned into the bizarre interpretation that I was cutting off contact with the outside world and restructuring the board.
On the morning of the fourth day.
I cautiously peered through the crack in the door to check the hallway, only to hear the conversation of two passing students and shut the door again.
“As expected, the real deal doesn’t show himself carelessly.”
“They call him the Terrifying Designer, and even his atmosphere is different.”
In that moment, I realized it.
I had been completely wrong.
If a person stays quiet, they are forgotten.
That was a rule that only applied to ordinary people.
Famous people sometimes became even more famous the more they hid themselves.
If they spoke sparingly, it seemed as though there was deep meaning behind it, and if they did not show themselves, it seemed as though they were plotting some enormous scheme.
And unfortunately, the current me had been placed in that absurd category.
Silence became affirmation.
Absence became mystique.
Even while I was nowhere to be seen, the rumors grew legs of their own, independent of my will, and ran through every corner of the Academy.
The nickname “the Terrifying Designer” gained more and more flesh.
At first, I was only the hidden helper behind the festival incident.
Then I became the strategist who had controlled the Student Council’s movements from behind the scenes,
and a few days later, rumors even began to circulate that I was a cold-blooded man who had used the entire Academy festival as bait to lure out monsters.
……No, why am I gradually turning into a villain?
Curled up on my dorm bed, I clutched my head.
I had clearly thought that if I did nothing, it would all die down.
But while I was doing nothing, the rumors were working very diligently.
And a few days later, I was able to discover one of the culprits who had been diligently feeding and raising those rumors.
It began at the Swordsmanship Department’s training hall.
I was dragging my unsteady legs past the training hall for a supplementary lesson.
Through the open doorway, Dylan’s voice boomed like thunder.
“Hey, do you guys think that was luck? Are you saying that because you really don’t know?”
With a sweat-soaked wooden sword slung over his shoulder, Dylan was surrounded by his classmates and passionately holding forth.
Normally, I would have dismissed it as mere bluster, but the situation was different now.
“That bastard Yurian, sure, his body is lighter than a sheet of paper. But I’m telling you, that’s all an act. He’s deliberately draining all the strength from his body. That way, he can dodge an opponent’s attacks with the absolute minimum movement.
Look at when he sparred with Serena last time. Even when Serena attacked him seriously, he dodged her attack ‘lightly.’ Is there anyone among us who can do that besides Kyle?”
No.
It was not light at all.
Back then, I really thought I was going to die.
“Then are you saying Yurian read Serena-level sword strikes?”
“It wasn’t just reading them. He made his body react first. He didn’t think and dodge; he moved as if he had never been in that trajectory to begin with.”
As Dylan spoke, he rubbed his forearm as if even he had gotten goosebumps.
“That’s the kind of evasion true masters use.”
Pressed against the wall, I clamped a hand over my mouth.
Dylan, I’m begging you, please shut up.
I only said one thing because you had pulled the line too tight and I was worried someone would trip over it while passing by, so how did that story start from a safety-line suggestion,
pass through becoming a strategist who designed everything, and arrive at the conclusion that I’m a master who can even read Serena’s sword?
‘There’s a limit to logical leaps, Dylan. What you’re doing isn’t a leap. It’s teleportation.’
But Dylan’s confident voice was already being accepted as truth by the surrounding students.
Their eyes held a mixture of fear and awe.
Feeling my stomach twist painfully, I hurriedly left.
The place I arrived at as if fleeing was near the Magic Department’s archives in the library.
I thought it would be quiet there, but this time, Seria’s calm voice caught me by the ankle.
She was analyzing the remains of the magic lamps collected during the festival with a teaching assistant from the Magic Department.
“……In terms of the spell formula’s logical structure, there were no visible flaws.
But if we compare that with the parts Mr. Yurian pointed out, the story changes.
He did not touch the magic lamp directly or infuse it with mana.
And yet he accurately pointed his finger at the spot where the phase would shift.
As if he already knew where it would explode.”
Seria’s voice was filled with scholarly wonder.
“The probability is too low to call it simple intuition.
Perhaps he is reading the flow of mana too subtle for us to see, or even the causality itself before the incident occurs.
Otherwise, there’s no way he could have singled out the exact problematic object among that vast number of magic lamps.”
No, Seria.
It’s just because I saw the scene where that magic lamp exploded dozens of times in the game and had it memorized.
It’s not anything grand like causality.
I screamed inwardly, but the atmosphere in the archives had already confirmed me as “an insightful observer who sees through invisible truths.”
The despair did not end there.
In the first-floor lobby of the Reconnaissance Department building, Rowen had spread out a large map and was engaged in a serious discussion with his seniors.
Several points had been marked on the map in red ink.
“Look. These are the points where Yurian stopped during the festival, or where he suggested others adjust their routes.
At first, they seemed disorderly.
But if you connect these points with lines and compare them with the monsters’ entry routes, a perfect encirclement is formed.”
Rowen’s finger traced across the map.
His eyes gleamed with a passion close to madness.
“He never ran even once.
He never directly cut down a monster, either.
But every place he was present was a critical bottleneck.
The times he deliberately fell or lingered while gasping for breath ultimately served as an exquisite timing adjustment that allowed our unit members to reach the defensive line on time.
This is a design that would be impossible for anyone but a monster who had the entire map in his head and was calculating variables in real time.”
“Couldn’t that just be a coincidence?”
Someone cautiously objected.
As if he had been waiting for those words, Rowen nodded.
“Of course, it could be.”
It was an unexpectedly compliant answer.
“If it happened once.”
Rowen lightly tapped the bottleneck sections drawn on the unfolded map with his fingertips.
“But if the same thing repeats twice, three times, four times…… can we truly call that coincidence?”
The surroundings fell silent.
Rowen paused to catch his breath, then continued in a low voice.
“It was similar during the mock test. Every time Yurian stopped, we avoided a trap, and every time he muttered, a barrier was undone. Thanks to that, we were able to enter without any trouble.”
I nearly collapsed on the spot.
I had simply sunk down because my legs gave out.
Of course, what he said wasn’t entirely wrong.
But I had simply sunk down because my legs gave out.
I stopped because I was out of breath.
And how exactly do the maze and the mock test connect to a delaying operation at a tactical bottleneck?
But the geometric lines drawn on Rowen’s map were packaging me so elaborately that even I nearly thought, “Huh, was that actually true?”
The last place I visited, the Divine Department’s infirmary, had outright transformed into a sanctuary for me.
Amelia was instructing other freshmen to organize supplies while wiping down the chair reserved for me.
“You must always keep the chair empty so Mr. Yurian can sit down right away when he comes. Understood?
He always pushes his body to the limit to resolve incidents, so we never know when or where he might collapse. Just look at the festival.
When he discovered that suspicious person behind the tent, he broke the bottle to send a signal even though he knew he might get hurt. You must never forget that noble spirit of sacrifice.”
Amelia’s eyes were filled with tears of reverence.
A noble spirit of sacrifice?
I had only dropped the bottle because the recovery food Rine gave me tasted so awful that my hand trembled.
The fragmented praises pouring out from each department flowed along the corridors and gathered into one.
By now, no one at the Academy simply called me “Yurian Valter” anymore.
A designer who pretended to be weak to break down his opponent’s guard.
A man who changed the flow of the battlefield with a single fall.
An invisible hand that read every escape route in advance and set traps.
I buried my face in my dorm bed and screamed.
I had done nothing, yet precisely because I had done nothing, the rumors had been elevated into an inviolable sacred domain.
The future unfolding before my eyes was more horrific than any bad ending in the original work.
‘Please…… please just leave me as trash…….’
My stomach clenched again as if being twisted.
The cold sweat running down my back showed no sign of stopping.
I was no longer simply a student under observation.
I had become a monster whom everyone at the Academy watched in fear, even when I did not move, wondering what enormous conspiracy I might be designing.