34. Summer Vacation (2)
Anyone visiting Stella Academy for the first time could not help but be overwhelmed by its sheer grandeur.
There had even been estimates saying it was, on average, larger than three royal castles from a decent-sized nation put together.
“Woooow…”
That was no exception even for a dark mage.
“Anella di Polanche. It says here that you’re enrolled at Hanaleya School of Magic in the Kingdom of Severun. Is that correct?”
“Ah, y-yes!”
When the Stella staff member asked, Anella hurriedly answered.
In order to infiltrate Stella today, she had come with the old name she had once discarded, along with a forged surname and identity.
She could not afford to make a mistake.
“Good. Do your best during the summer session. Although Miss Anella is technically an exchange student, during the seasonal term you’ll hold the same status as the enrolled students, so there’s no need to be too frightened.”
“Yes…”
With the staff member’s advice ringing in her ears, Anella was finally able to enter Stella carrying a travel bag that felt nearly as heavy as her own body.
‘To think it’d be this easy to infiltrate the place.’
No matter how perfect the forged-identity agency they had contracted with was—good enough to fool even Stella—she had never thought she would really manage to get in.
Of course, the price for that was having all her dark mana sealed away, but her true ability remained intact, so there was nothing to worry about.
“Hoooo…”
From Stella’s toll gate to the place where the main building’s front entrance stood, it was impossible to get there on foot.
Well, if someone insisted on walking, they could.
But they would suffer for half a day.
Boarding the campus shuttle bus, Anella took in the many buildings, gardens, and artistic sculptures scattered all over the academy grounds.
There was truly nothing this place lacked.
It had everything, from shopping areas to restaurants to entertainment, to the point that there was no real need to go outside at all.
They said Stella Academy had roughly three thousand students in its core Department of Magical Combat alone, and if one included the students of alchemy, diplomacy, law, magical research, and the rest, then at minimum more than ten thousand students made use of this place.
And yet Stella was still dazzling and abundant enough to hold all of them with room to spare.
It glittered and shone in gaudy splendor.
It was such an overwhelming world that it was hard to believe a place like this could truly exist.
‘It really makes me wonder if this is even the same Aither Continent as mine…’
The place Anella called home was little more than an abandoned building full of holes and on the verge of collapse, where they barely survived day by day by pitching a tent in the ruins.
Compared to that, this world truly felt like another heaven.
‘…If I’d been born a noble, would I have been able to come to a school like this too?’
She had forgotten the days when she was human.
No—she had forced herself to forget.
Because not a single good memory remained.
Only bitter, painful ones.
But after seeing a place like this, she could not help having thoughts like that.
If, when I was human… I had been born with a little more talent, in a better environment, then maybe I too could have lived in a place this lovely, this dreamlike.
‘Ugh, what am I even thinking again…’
She clutched the hem of her school uniform skirt.
Just because she was wearing a school uniform did not mean her emotions could really become those of a student.
By the time the bus was nearing Stella’s main front gate, she could see an enormous crowd swarming in the distance.
‘What is that?’
As Anella stared blankly at the crowd, the other exchange students riding the same bus began whispering among themselves.
“What’s all that…?”
“They probably came to meet those students who gave presentations this time.”
“Ahhh. Yeah. That must be it.”
Among the crowd were magicians, and people who seemed to be reporters too.
Apparently all of them had come to see the four students who had given such outstanding presentations at this Aslan Seminar.
It was rather strange that such a huge crowd had gathered all the way here just to meet a few students who had not even lived twenty years yet, but to Anella, it all looked petty and trivial.
Even back when she was human, human society—living at the mercy of media and whatever happened to be trending—had always been one of the mysteries she never understood.
“This is the dormitory all of you will be using for the next month.”
After getting off the bus, Anella followed the guidance and headed straight for the dormitory she had been assigned.
It was not as luxurious as the dorms Stella’s own students used, but since Anella had spent her life in a crumbling heap of trash, even this was more than enough.
“Huaaah…”
No.
More than enough? Hardly.
This soft bed.
This cloudlike blanket that gently wrapped around her skin.
Even the warm temperature-control device that reminded her of the embrace of a mother.
It was heaven.
“Hah!”
Then Anella suddenly came back to her senses and hurriedly sprang up from the bed.
Was she not currently in the middle of infiltrating Stella Academy after having been given an immensely important mission?
Many dark mages had secretly crept into Stella before, yes, but those had all been forces from the Moon Shadow Church.
There had never been a case like hers.
‘Get a grip! This is a chance to move up in the world!’
The right hand of the Dark Mage King himself, Lord Blackkingdon, had trusted her with this weighty mission.
She would complete it successfully, no matter what, and earn herself a better post.
Although this was her first time ever coming to Stella, Anella was quite experienced when it came to infiltration missions themselves.
The first element of infiltration:
naturally blending in among the humans on-site.
At present, her status was that of a high school student.
Her first goal was to act more like a high school student than anyone else, get close to the students, and gather information from them.
As Anella wandered through the dormitory corridor, she spotted three female students walking toward her and darted over at once.
The way to get close to students was simple.
Use trendy slang.
Apparently teenagers felt familiarity through slang and got close quickly because of it.
‘When it comes to slang, that’s my specialty!’
Using slang with great skill, she greeted the girls.
“Hey, girls, hi-roo! Banga-banga!”
And then—
the three girls widened their eyes, looked at each other, stood there blankly for a moment, and then…
“Bwahaha! What was that?!”
“Isn’t that, like, slang from thirty years ago?”
“What are you, a little kid? Ah, you’re the same first-year exchange student as us?”
“She said banga-banga, I’m seriously dying.”
‘H-huh?’
Was that not right? What had gone wrong?
As Anella awkwardly tried to take a subtle step back, the girls grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Where are you from? You’re a first-year, right?”
“Y-yeah.”
“Look at that reaction. She’s so cute.”
“Are you really a first-year? Look at those twin braids. Oh my god. She’s like a little sister.”
“Want to go eat Evrangette Chocolate Bingsu with us? They say you can only get Evrangette at Stella.”
“E-Evran…?”
“You don’t know it? It’s trendy right now.”
What did it matter whether it was Evran or Kovran?
Still, the word trendy always got Anella’s attention, so she nodded vigorously.
“O-of course I know it! I totally love it!”
“Let’s go, let’s go.”
“We’ll buy it for you!”
And so,
by using trendy slang with tremendous skill, Anella successfully hid herself among the students.
“Your Evrangette Chocolate Bingsu is here.”
The terrace of Stella Sky Café.
This café, whose atmosphere was both unmistakably aristocratic and unmistakably student-like, even had VIP rooms.
Since they were terraces floating in midair, the place was called the Sky Terrace.
There, three girls sat together in a combination that looked wildly mismatched.
Flame, Hong Biyeon Adolevit, and Eizel Morf.
“Man, I really wanted to try this.”
Pointing at a dessert magazine with sparkling eyes, Flame gripped her fork with completely unhesitating movements, despite being seated with these two awkward girls.
By contrast, Eizel looked visibly uncomfortable and kept reading the room, while Hong Biyeon sat with one leg crossed over the other and did not even bother picking up her fork, as if she could not care less.
Scooping up the bingsu and munching away by herself, Flame glanced between the two of them.
“You’re not eating? Then I’m gonna eat it all myself.”
Eizel silently lowered her head, while Hong Biyeon replied bluntly,
“I’m not in the mood to eat something like that.”
“Man, you’re stiff.”
Flame had no choice but to put her fork down, and only then did Hong Biyeon apparently decide the mood had been set for conversation.
She turned to Eizel and asked,
“Now explain. Why do you need us?”
Eizel looked from one of them to the other, then carefully parted her lips.
“I can’t explain everything in detail right now, but… in the Library of Stars, I saw the end of the world.”
At those words, Hong Biyeon frowned, while Flame’s expression turned complicated.
Since Flame already knew the ending of this world through the original romance fantasy, she could roughly guess what scene Eizel had witnessed.
‘Did she see Ma Yuseong standing alone and fighting at the end of a world dyed over by the Reverse Side…?’
The final goal of the dark mages was to dye all of Aither World over into the Reverse Side.
In the original work, the dark mages successfully achieved that,
and in the end, the world was destroyed.
It had been the sort of trash ending that made readers curse it out by the truckload.
But now, that was no longer just the ending of a story.
It was also Flame’s own fate.
Which made it a matter she had no choice but to take seriously.
“The end of the world, huh. There must be a reason our ancestors forbade the Library of Stars. So why did you insist on seeing it anyway?”
“Because… I wanted to save Mr. Baek Yuseol.”
“What? What do you mean, save that mister?”
“Ah, well…”
Only then did Eizel realize that Flame apparently knew nothing about Baek Yuseol’s time limit, and as she hesitated, Hong Biyeon said it plainly.
“That commoner’s going to die before long. Twenty at the absolute latest.”
“…What? That makes no sense.”
If Flame’s expectations were correct, Baek Yuseol would survive at least another ten years.
It had never happened in the original romance fantasy, but Baek Yuseol must also have experienced ‘the end of the world,’ and then turned back time because of it.
“But it’s true. You’ve heard of a Mana-Leak Constitution, haven’t you?”
“Don’t tell me… that mister has a Mana-Leak Constitution?”
“Yes. I thought you’d already know that. Unexpected.”
“I had no idea at all…”
The story was so sudden that Flame’s eyes shook in confusion.
“That can’t be right… There’s no way he dies before twenty…”
“Denying reality won’t change anything. It’s a fact.”
“But…”
Baek Yuseol was definitely alive in the future.
And it was Eizel who backed up Flame’s thoughts.
“That’s right. Mr. Baek Yuseol is definitely afflicted with a Mana-Leak Constitution, and they said he likely has no more than three years to live at best. That’s why I checked the Library of Stars too.”
But—
“I saw it in the Library of Stars. The person standing at the end of the world, probably around ten years from now… was Baek Yuseol in the end. Him alone.”
“What?”
“What did you say…?”
At Eizel’s words, both of them had no choice but to be shocked.
‘Not Ma Yuseong, but Baek Yuseol…?’
‘He survived for ten more years…?’
At that moment—
a shrill ringing noise screamed through Hong Biyeon’s head, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she endured the pain.
“Ugh…”
“A-are you all right?”
“…I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry. It’s because I talked about the Library of Stars…”
They had called it a heavenly secret.
She had even been warned never to talk about what she had experienced in the Library of Stars.
And yet just by telling even a tiny portion of it, Hong Biyeon and Flame were suffering…
‘Huh?’
But strangely enough, unlike Hong Biyeon, Flame simply blinked with a perfectly normal expression, as though she felt no pain at all.
“…Are you all right?”
“Huh? Ah… yeah. Well, I’m kind of resistant to this sort of thing.”
Flame knew exactly what Eizel was worried about, so she hurriedly covered it up.
Perhaps because she knew the original romance fantasy, even information leaking from the Library of Stars did not hurt her.
“Hoo… Anyway, getting back to the point, that doesn’t mean we can just leave him alone. The principal said the future is always fluid.”
Flame, who agreed deeply with that, nodded.
“Maybe in the future Mr. Baek Yuseol finds a way to overcome his time limit himself… or perhaps he survives until then because someone finds that method for him.”
Eizel held up two fingers.
“There are two goals. One is to find out what exactly happened at the end of the world, and how it was destroyed. The other is to find out how to save Mr. Baek Yuseol.”
Simple, but difficult.
“To begin with… when I accessed the Library of Stars with my strength alone, I could only see a truly tiny amount of information. That’s why I need your help. If we combine our strength, we should definitely be able to see more.”
She could not be sure.
Would it really make that much difference just because two more inexperienced magicians at roughly the 4-Class level were added?
But she had to do it.
“We only have this summer vacation. The day the third full moon, the Shalier Moon, rises, and the Moonlight Temple in Kalansar Gorge is filled with the greatest amount of moonlight—that day is our best chance to reach the Constellatio Project.”
They looked into each other’s eyes with heavy, sunken gazes.
Their origins were different.
Their personalities were different.
Their status was different.
Their tendencies, beliefs, magic, thoughts—everything about them was different.
But in this one place, all of them were the same.
What exactly would happen in the future?
What had Baek Yuseol seen at the end of the collapsing world?
…And why had he chosen to turn back time?
They had to find out.
