Chapter 1
“As I thought, there’s definitely something suspicious….”
“Oh, come on. Not this again.”
Hans let his shoulders droop as though he was fed up. He clicked his tongue and shook his head vigorously.
“That’s an inferiority complex, you know?”
“It’s not an inferiority complex! No, just try thinking about it rationally!”
I felt so frustrated I thought I was going to lose my mind.
Without realizing it, I held up three fingers, then immediately folded one down.
“All right, suspicious point number one. That guy uses third-tier magic, which you’re not supposed to learn until fifth year, like it’s nothing—even though he’s only a first-year. Where on earth did he learn it?”
“He probably studied ahead of time before enrolling. Maybe his parents were mages or something.”
“See? It already doesn’t add up! I asked some first-year brats, and they said he doesn’t have any parents. Apparently, he was raised by an old herbalist in the countryside, without any connections or anything!”
It had taken delicious snacks and even spending money to pry that information out of them.
Even with the first-rate detection magic I had painstakingly developed, I hadn’t sensed the slightest sign that they were lying.
“Maybe there was a dusty old spellbook lying around in his grandfather’s shed. It may not be common, but it’s not unheard of, is it? You enrolled having already learned second-tier magic, too.”
“That’s possible because I’m me! Hey, do you seriously think some dusty spellbook in the corner of a mountain herbalist’s old shed is better than one-on-one tutoring from the Empire’s greatest mage?”
No matter how extraordinary one’s talent, memorizing spellbooks by rote alone wasn’t enough to use proper magic.
Magic was a far more complex and profound realm, one that could never be reached through simple memorization.
“Who knows? Maybe the old man was a retired high-ranking mage.”
Hans merely shrugged at my logical rebuttal, wearing a sly grin.
Frustration stack two. Before I knew it, I was biting my lower lip hard. Suppressing my boiling irritation, I folded down my second finger.
“Fine, then how about this? What happened during his entrance exam.”
“That again? It was already concluded to be a simple mishap.”
“He just happened to find a secret passage known only to the faculty? A passage that the meticulous Mr. Levan had hidden so thoroughly?”
It was an impregnable passage that even my detection magic MK.1 had been unable to find.
I might be able to detect it somehow now, but a first-year finding that passage was an unprecedented event in the school’s history.
“Mr. Levan explained it himself. He forgot to renew the disguise-magic wavelength before the exam. He even received disciplinary action for it.”
“That’s exactly what scapegoating is! If it really was just a simple mistake on Mr. Levan’s part, why would the internal meeting have dragged on for a whole week? And why would they investigate leaked exam papers all the way up through the upperclassmen?”
“Oh, so now you’re going the conspiracy-theory route?”
“This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s called a reasonable suspicion!”
I folded down my last finger and was about to present the decisive evidence… but then I simply shut my mouth. I was certain there was no point in saying anything to a blockhead like him.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
Hans shouted from behind me.
Without even turning around, I snapped back curtly.
“The library!”
If words wouldn’t do it, I had no choice but to show him through my actions.
I would find the perfect evidence to make that frustrating fellow’s jaw drop and force the tightly sealed mouths of the faculty open at last.
‘Just you wait, first-year… I’ll definitely find the decisive evidence that will strip away that loathsome mask of yours…!’
If you dug deep enough, something always turned up.
※※
[Evan Friesna, the Unparalleled Genius], [Evan Friesna, Saint Petrus’s Hope], and, most proudly of all, [Evan Friesna, First in the Entire School].
The glorious titles that had once made my name and my family’s shine so brilliantly vanished in the blink of an eye.
An entrance exam stained by cheating. With that damned exam, he stole the title of [Unparalleled Genius] from me. Then, in the classification exam that followed, he shattered the all-time record—though that was a scam too, of course—and even snatched away the title of [Saint Petrus’s Hope].
And just a month ago, in the midterm exams, that bastard had finally taken the title of [First in the Entire School] as well. And he did it by taking the third-year exam despite being a first-year… through a method that was utterly absurd.
[In principle, there is no school rule prohibiting first-years from taking upperclassmen exams, Evan.]
Even when I vehemently protested that it was unprecedented, the same dry, theoretical answer always came back like an echo. The teachers, who had clearly already fallen under his spell, remained unmoved.
What was even more infuriating was that even the Ministry of Magic, which had pocketed enormous donations from my family for the past several hundred years, maintained such an overtly neutral stance toward his affairs.
The formal replies to every one of my perfectly legitimate objections were always the same. Letters with the exact same formulaic contents, beginning with [Dear Mr. Evan Friesna.] and ending with the dry sentence, [We were unable to find sufficient grounds for the allegations you raised.]
“Silentium Aperi.”
The faint magical ward around the doorknob scattered like mist. I carefully grasped the knob and surveyed my surroundings. It was dusk, with the orange sunset deepening overhead. The only thing in sight was the herb garden, whose plants had by now grown to thigh height.
From around the corner beyond the herb garden, I could faintly hear students practicing baseball, but that was the only sign of human presence. I sensed nothing else.
‘Right, don’t chicken out… This is all for the sake of justice.’
I took one deep breath and finally turned the doorknob. With a clunk, the firmly locked door opened. As I stepped into the dormitory, a familiar corridor appeared, laid out almost exactly like the third-year dormitory. The faint smell of old wood, as though it might creak at any moment, brushed my nose.
‘Room 307… Room 307.’
As expected, the dormitory was steeped in silence so deep that even a breath sounded loud. It must have been dinnertime for the first-years.
I crossed the corridor and climbed the stairs without hesitation. The detection magic I had activated just in case didn’t react to anything. I took the stairs two at a time until I reached the third floor.
“Hmm.”
There was nothing particularly special about his room. It was an ordinary door with the number [307] written on an old wooden nameplate.
Click-
As expected, the doorknob I turned was locked. I swept my gaze across the empty corridor once more, then pulled my wand from inside my robes and aimed it at the locked doorknob.
“Silentium Aperi.”
At the same time as the incantation, there was a click, and the door opened without a sound.
As I’d suspected, he hadn’t installed any noisy double or triple locks on his dorm room.
I opened the door without hesitation and quickly slipped inside. The layout was identical to my own room, but what greeted me was a quiet space with almost no sign of anyone living there. I tucked my wand away and carefully stepped farther inside.
‘Not a single new piece of furniture.’
It was a truly bare room. An old desk, a creaking dining table, two cheap chairs, and a bed covered with a single thin blanket—the standard furnishings supplied by the school. That was all there was.
If not for the textbooks piled haphazardly on the desk and the cheap snacks strewn messily across the dining table, I could have believed it was an empty room. I picked up a lemon candy rolling across the table, popped it into my mouth, and looked around the room. As expected, the desk piled with textbooks drew my attention first.
‘The notebook will be the first thing to check.’
The reason I had broken into his room was simple. I was convinced that even a first-year like him must have left a clue somewhere.
Whether it was a notebook containing evidence of cheating, secret letters exchanged with someone he had bribed, or a forbidden black-magic item, I didn’t care. Chewing the candy, I approached the desk. I began meticulously searching through the scattered textbooks, page by page.
‘……Nothing unusual?’
I went through every textbook on the desk, but there was no evidence of the kind I had expected. There wasn’t even a suspicious notebook in sight.
The spotless textbooks, without a single word of notes in them, were a little unsettling, but it wasn’t entirely unreasonable to think he had organized everything separately in a notebook. And if he really was as poor as the rumors claimed, he would probably be planning to sell the old textbooks secondhand for whatever small change he could get.
Thoroughly disappointed, I shoved the textbooks roughly back onto the desk and turned away without a second thought. After sweeping my gaze around the room once more, I shifted my attention to the neatly made bed.
‘Right, if you’re hiding something, it would be near the bed.’
I used to hide embarrassing letters meant for my mother or sister under my pillow, too. The most precious secrets—the ones you least wanted anyone to discover—were usually hidden in the place closest to you.
As long as he was human, he must have at least one secret he wanted to hide.
I approached the bed and flung the blanket aside without hesitation. With a swish, the pure-white sheet was revealed. Expecting to find something hidden, I pressed down firmly all over the mattress.
‘……It’s not here.’
All I felt beneath my fingertips was something soft. Just in case, I searched every inch of the inside of the pillowcase as well, but it was irritatingly soft and empty.
In my disappointment, I crumpled the blanket up and threw it onto the floor, then hurriedly picked it back up when I realized what I had done. I let out a deep sigh and was about to put the blanket back in order when…….
“Huh?”
Something strange suddenly caught my eye.
I placed the blanket in my hands on the bed with a soft thump, then climbed onto the mattress in a daze. Tilting my head, I brought my face right up to the mattress.
“What… is this?”
It was… yes, it was unmistakably hair. And not just any hair—it was golden hair, starkly different from the first-year’s jet-black hair.
It was sticking up from beneath the mattress like a weed. As if… someone with golden hair had been hidden underneath it.
“Eeeek…!”
It felt as though my heart had dropped all the way to the floor. I staggered backward in surprise.
“Keh….”
The bed was narrow, and my body plunged straight to the floor.
“W-what?”
My butt throbbed, but I had no time to feel the pain. I reflexively got back up and put as much distance between myself and the bed as possible. My heart was pounding like mad—three times, no, ten times more violently than when I had secretly broken into the dormitory.
Cold sweat ran down my back, and my shoulders trembled faintly. Instinctive terror pressed down on my entire body, as though I had opened a forbidden spellbook.
“A c-corpse?”
For a moment, I remembered his face as he had smiled eerily and said, [It’s you again, senior.] Along with the destructive magic he had displayed during the grade-classification exam.
It was true that I had tried to uncover his secret, but I hadn’t wanted to dig up a horrifying secret like this. I had meant to expose cheating, not some kind of murder case…….
“N-no, no way. Even so, there’s no way it could be a corpse, right?”
I shook my head violently and pulled myself together. Right. No matter how crazy he was, would he really hide a corpse under his dormitory bed?
That was… yes, it had to be a wig. A wig for his perverted hobby of cross-dressing. Just like my embarrassing letters, the things you wanted to hide most secretly were kept in the place closest to you.
“Damn, you scared me.”
In any case, if it was a cross-dressing wig, it was more than enough to serve as the ‘clue’ I had been looking for. Who knew? Maybe he had put on that wig, disguised himself as a girl, and casually infiltrated the faculty office to steal the exam questions.
I forced my trembling legs to calm down and pulled out my wand. Carefully approaching the side of the bed, I pointed the tip beneath the mattress.
“Levita Tendra.”
Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any special magical defenses. The mattress floated up into the air as lightly as a feather.
The space beneath the mattress was still shrouded in darkness, making it impossible to discern its shape. Before opening the tightly sealed secret he had kept hidden, I swallowed dryly one last time. Slowly moving my hand, I pushed the mattress aside—slowly, and with the utmost care.
“Gulp….”
And finally, everything was revealed.
A naked, golden-haired little girl crouching beneath the bed.
“Hngh!!!”
I clenched my teeth and barely managed to stifle the scream trying to burst out. I squeezed my eyes shut and jerked my head away. When a muffled groan tried to escape, I covered my mouth with my hand and swallowed it back.
‘W… what do I do?’
It was really there. A corpse. Beneath his bed.
What was even more horrifying was that the corpse was naked—and the moment I moved the mattress, an icy chill seemed to seep straight into my bones. He had clearly been deliberately preserving it.
‘He really was a madman, wasn’t he?’
There was no other way to explain it. Nothing but that one word: ‘madman.’
‘What do I do now?’
This was no longer something I could handle on my own. The teachers… no, the knights needed to step in.
‘But if it’s him….’
Dinner would be over soon, and he would return. That cunning bastard would surely eliminate all the evidence and pretend he knew nothing while I went to fetch people. I had no proof, but I had a strong premonition that he would.
Because he was that kind of person… a creepy fellow who seemed to have placed everything in the palm of his hand and could see straight through it all.
“……”
If so, there was only one method left.
I swallowed hard. Gripping my wand so tightly that sweat gathered in my palm, I slowly turned my head toward the horrifying being that held the ‘only evidence.’
And then,
“Ah.”
It felt as though my breath stopped.
What met my eyes when I turned wasn’t the disheveled bed. It was the golden-haired corpse, which had somehow crept right up to my face and was staring straight through me with cold, lifeless blue eyes.
The golden-haired corpse stared at me insistently with pale blue eyes, as though she had been waiting for me for a long time. Then she slowly—very slowly—reached out and gripped my trembling shoulder. In a low, ominous voice, she whispered:
“Emergency protocol A.N.I.M. activated. Temporary administrator privileges acquired.”
In that instant, a blue spell inscription appeared over her eyes.
“Warning: System error. Forced magical-power seal caused by external interference detected. Self-defense system activated. Emergency life-support procedure initiated.”
And at the moment the cold mechanical voice rang in my ear… my consciousness abruptly cut out. Limp and powerless, like the rotten string of an old doll snapping, just like that.
The last thing I faintly felt was the strangely contradictory, faint warmth transmitted through the tips of her cold fingers.
Along with the cold sensation, my final consciousness sank deep into the darkness.