48 . School Reopens (5)
There’s a famous line men say right before they die.
“It’s not like I’m going to die.”
That’s right.
That was exactly what I absentmindedly blurted out right before engraving a subspace pocket—an inventory—into my soul.
To put it simply, I didn’t die like that line suggests.
But…
It only hurt enough to make me wish I had.
“Gghhh…”
[‘Subspace’ has been successfully engraved onto your soul.]
When Eltman removed his hand from my back, a strange gray magic circle swirled and vanished, and an odd sensation bloomed in my chest.
[Subspace Lv. 1]
- Rank: Transcendent
- Description: You can use the fourth dimension.
▼ Special Effects
- Subspace Invocation You can store items up to a maximum capacity of 120kg and 12m³ in volume.
- Keyword Registration: By registering specific actions or words, you can invoke your subspace more easily and quickly.
At last, I had obtained an inventory.
Just thinking about how much more comfortable and convenient my life would be from now on was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
…Or maybe those tears were because my chest still felt like an elephant was crushing it.
“Gghk…”
“It must hurt badly, but it’ll ease soon. I can let you miss class tomorrow, but if you fall behind in the early part of the semester, you’re the only one who’ll suffer for it. Are you still fine with that?”
Nod nod nod nod.
Still sprawled facedown on the bed, I nodded furiously.
Pain was pain, but if the principal himself was offering to let me skip class, no student in the world would refuse.
When I forced myself to get up, Eltman reached out as though to support me. But since he’d obviously be exhausted from engraving a subspace into someone else, I had no intention of burdening the principal any further and politely declined.
“Student Baek Yuseol.”
“…Yes.”
As I painfully lowered myself onto the edge of the bed, Eltman wiped the cold sweat from his face with a handkerchief and said,
“If you had been an ordinary student, you would have died.”
I knew.
This wasn’t physical pain. It was pain striking directly at the soul.
No matter how high your endurance was or how many mana shields you wrapped around yourself, an ordinary mage would have either died or ended up mentally broken.
“It was pain that even a decent 7th Class mage would struggle to endure. I know exactly what kind of pain it is, because I engraved the same thing into myself when I had only just reached 8th Class in my youth. And yet you…”
Eltman narrowed his eyes.
“The aftereffects look severe, but your mental strength is exceptional—enough that you could get up on your own.”
“…Well, I guess.”
I was wondering how to explain it when he spoke first.
“I know. You are not an ordinary student.”
He fixed me with a quiet gaze.
“In fact, you’re probably more special than any of us.”
“Pardon? I-I don’t think that’s true…”
No matter what, there was no way I could surpass a 9th Class mage.
Even if I devoted my whole life to it—even if my lifespan stretched for a thousand years—I would never catch up to that level.
That was the realm of true geniuses, a realm mediocrities could never reach even if they lived forever.
“That’s not what I mean. In this world, neither 9th Class mages, nor sages who have awakened truth, nor alchemists who have refined immortality, nor even the Twelve Divine Moons are special. They all merely mesh together within the Cogs of Fate.”
The Cogs of Fate?
I had never heard those words before in my life.
They weren’t even in the Jikbakguri Glasses, so I might have assumed Eltman Eltwin had simply coined the phrase on the spot here and now, but…
‘No, this feels a little different.’
The strange alienness I felt from those words kept making my chest feel clogged and heavy.
“You are different. You can walk a path separate from ours.”
What exactly did a 9th Class mage mean by a “different path”?
By my standards, Eltman Eltwin was an extraordinarily special person.
In one of the episodes from the original game, he was powerful enough to clash head-on with the Dark Magic King, who could truly be called the unrivaled strongest in the setting.
And yet someone like him was telling me I was “special”…
Was I really supposed to take that as a good thing?
“Baek Yuseol. There’s one thing I want to ask.”
“Go ahead.”
Gone was his usual light, easy demeanor. Meeting my eyes with a heavy, settled gaze, he carefully parted his lips.
“If, by any chance, the world were to end…”
But then he closed his mouth and shook his head.
“No, never mind. This is… something I’ll ask later. You’re not exactly in any condition right now, are you?”
He gave a bitter smile after saying that, and it felt so awkward that even I—who was normally perfect at controlling my expressions thanks to the blessing of Crimson Spring March—ended up forcing an awkward smile of my own.
“I’ll hear it later, then.”
“You must be tired, so get back safely. I’ll let them know about your classes in advance, so don’t worry and get some proper rest.”
“Yeees…”
With Eltman seeing me off in concern, I dragged myself out of the principal’s office.
Click!
The moment the office door shut behind me, all the tension drained away at once, and my stiffened muscles began screaming.
“Ugh…”
It hurt.
Enough to kill me.
Clutching my heart, I staggered toward the dormitory.
Since I could now legally skip class tomorrow anyway, I fully intended to go back, collapse, and sleep like the dead…
It was pretty common at a magic academy for one or two students to leave early because they got sick or hurt. After all, magic warrior cadets constantly built real combat experience through various kinds of practical training, so getting seriously injured or falling ill wasn’t all that rare.
So if someone missed class because they got hurt, the normal reaction was just, Oh, I guess that happened.
But the news that Baek Yuseol—that talked-about boy—had missed classes for three whole days right at the start of the semester made the other students suspicious.
Which made sense. The second semester hadn’t even been going for a week yet, so proper practical training hadn’t even begun. They were still only in orientation.
“What happened to him?”
“I heard he went to the beach in summer, ate raw fish, and got food poisoning.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t eat sashimi in summer.”
“What are you talking about? I heard it was just a cold.”
Because no one actually knew what had happened to him, the rumors just kept spinning in circles, getting exaggerated and distorted, giving birth to all kinds of stories.
Baek Yuseol had already piled up so many achievements despite only being a first-year cadet that, at this point, most of the students were willing to blindly believe even a baseless rumor like:
“He got injured secretly hunting dark magic users again somewhere.”
“…He’s sick?”
Thump! Thump!
The sound of a basketball bouncing.
Screech!
The sound of shoes dragging across the floor.
Having heard the news from some guy friends while playing basketball in the indoor gymnasium in simple sportswear, Flame paused.
“What happened?”
“He’s your ex-boyfriend, isn’t he? Aren’t you curious?”
“What nonsense…”
Flame snorted and lightly tossed the basketball.
Thunk!
A clean shot. Basket.
“Ooh. As expected of Flame!”
“Bullshit. Quit making a fuss. It’s annoying.”
“Then beat me, why don’t you?”
“I’m better than you at soccer, foot volleyball, baseball, tennis, and table tennis. Don’t you think it’s okay if I let you have basketball at least?”
“…Damn it.”
After teasing her friend, Flame returned to the bench and wiped the sweat from her face with a towel. Too lazy to put it away, she roughly draped it around her neck and was guzzling an ion drink when she sensed someone approaching.
“…H-hello.”
“Hm? What, it’s Miss Eizel. You don’t like sports, do you?”
Like Flame, Eizel had her blue hair tied tightly back and was dressed in sportswear, but even though she regularly kept up with basic physical training, she wasn’t the type who liked sports, so that outfit looked oddly awkward on her.
“Well… I just thought I might roll a ball around too. To change the mood a little.”
“Yeah. You’d be good at it.”
With Eizel’s broken trait [All-Rounder], she’d become pretty skilled with just a little practice. Of course, that still wouldn’t come anywhere near Ma Yuseong, who had the [Legendary Whirlwind Shot] trait.
“You look like you’ve got a lot on your mind. I think I know why, though.”
Baek Yuseol was sick.
That fact alone would be enough to make plenty of people uneasy inside.
…And honestly, Flame too was dying from how much it kept bothering her, but she was trying her best not to think about it.
Because it felt like losing if she worried first.
“From what I’ve heard, he still drags himself out to eat when it’s mealtime. It’s not like he’s got some fatal disease.”
At lunchtime or dinner, people kept reporting sightings(?) of a wreck-looking Baek Yuseol wearing his hat low over his face and coming out to eat, so maybe it really was nothing more than him not feeling well somewhere.
“That may be true, but…”
The thing Eizel was worried about wasn’t actually that Baek Yuseol was sick.
“Why is he sick…?”
“Huh?”
Flame had never even tried thinking that far, so it was a question that completely caught her off guard.
“Who knows? Do we need to know that much?”
“…I guess not.”
Still, the more she thought about it, the stranger it seemed.
Baek Yuseol, who looked sturdier than steel and too healthy to have ever caught a cold in his life, had suddenly been spending three days looking like a complete wreck.
What was more, Eltman Eltwin himself had personally approved Baek Yuseol’s absence, which clearly meant there was some reason behind it…
“He’s not the type to die from something that minor.”
Flame said it so bluntly it was almost refreshing.
The Baek Yuseol she knew boasted cockroach-like survival instincts—the sort that let him survive even time flowing backward and falling into dimensional cracks. She simply couldn’t imagine him wasting away and dying from some illness.
“If you’re that worried, go check on him yourself.”
“I did go see him… but he said he was fine.”
“Then he’s fine.”
Read only on MugenCodex.
Figure she’d rested enough, Flame got up from her seat and said,
“If you ask me, before long he’ll just shake it off and start walking around perfectly fine like always.”
“I guess you’re right.”
As if reassured by Flame’s words, Eizel finally smiled and nodded.
“Yeah. So stop worrying and go do what you need to do.”
And then—
Late that night.
“…Sigh.”
Flame, who couldn’t stand how much it kept bothering her, finally got up in the middle of the night and secretly made her way to the boys’ dormitory.
It wasn’t as though the school completely forbade movement between the boys’ and girls’ dorms, but if a female student got caught by the dorm supervisor coming to the boys’ dorm at this hour, it definitely wouldn’t end with just a few demerits.
This was honestly the kind of bizarre act you’d stake your life(?) on.
“What a life…”
Fortunately, Baek Yuseol lived in the S-Class dormitory, and foot traffic there was extremely low, so at this hour there was almost no chance of running into anyone else.
So all she had to do was quietly see Baek Yuseol and leave.
That was what she thought.
“…Flame?”
“Blegh!”
That assumption lasted only until she ran into Pung Harang, a first-year from S-Class, who just happened to come out because he wanted to take a walk in the middle of the night.
“Hey—damn it, you scared me. Why are you wandering around uselessly at this hour?”
“…I think that’s my line. This is the boys’ dormitory. Did you come here because you have some business?”
“Uh, yeah. Right.”
She was about to hide the fact that she had come to see Baek Yuseol because it felt embarrassing, but then the fact that she was trying to hide it suddenly felt even more embarrassing and inexplicable, so she blurted it out.
“I came to see Baek Yuseol.”
“…Did you?”
“Sigh. I heard he’s sick and wasting away. They said he didn’t even come out for meals today. I brought him some porridge, at least.”
“That… doesn’t seem necessary.”
Pung Harang pointed toward the front of Baek Yuseol’s dorm room. There were a few small boxes and bags sitting there; some students who were worried about him had already brought food and left it.
“Do you think this is the same? What matters is sincerity. And I packed this myself. There’s no way someone like Baek Yuseol would dare refuse it.”
After declaring that boldly, Flame headed for Baek Yuseol’s room and, rather than knocking energetically… knocked quietly.
“Ahjussi. Open up. Noona’s here.”
The door didn’t open.
After hesitating, Pung Harang said,
“He won’t open it. He hasn’t opened the door for anyone until now…”
But before he could even finish speaking, the door opened from inside, and a haggard-looking Baek Yuseol peeked his face out. Taking it as her chance, Flame flung the door wider open and slipped straight inside.
Click!
After Flame disappeared, silence settled over the corridor of the S-Class boys’ dormitory.
Pung Harang stared at Baek Yuseol’s room for a long while with complicated eyes, then threw on his sports jacket and started walking down the corridor.
He had wanted to enjoy a refreshing walk under the moonlight tonight, but it looked like it was going to become a rather miserable night instead.
