38. Heart-Stealing Constitution (3)
Based on the information he had dragged out of Cabaren, Eltman Eltwin was erasing the Black Mages from Stella one by one.
Quietly.
Without anyone knowing.
That was the only way. If the others noticed their comrades were dying off, the worst possible outcome would be for them to flee before he could catch them.
Still, once more and more companions began to vanish, alarm spread among the Black Mages who had infiltrated Stella. Some of them lay low and held their breath, while others fled outright, unable to tell whose identity had been exposed.
“Hey, did you hear? That groundskeeper in the eastern garden suddenly quit.”
“Huh? Really? He seemed like such a nice guy.”
“The woman who managed supplies for the Ninth Star Tower disappeared too.”
“Why is everyone suddenly quitting…?”
“You don’t think it’s because of the Black Mages, do you?”
Once it was revealed that Black Mages had infiltrated Stella, controversy broke out in every direction.
Parents had entrusted their precious children to the school, only for Stella to fail even at keeping out Black Mages, resulting in actual damage.
News outlets ran sensational headlines like ［Is Stella’s Security Collapsing Like This?］, and a great many parents lodged formal complaints.
Most of those parents were nobles or people with strong social influence, so Stella nearly staggered under the weight of it—
but about a week later, Eltman Eltwin presented the heads of the Black Mages and made an announcement.
‘I have personally purged the vermin who infiltrated the school.’
He surely had not killed every last one of them, but once Eltman—the man once known as the greatest hunter of Black Mages—moved personally, the parents’ dissatisfaction slowly began to subside.
…And one of the people who had contributed to creating that atmosphere was Anella, who was now in a state of high alert herself.
—Anella. How are things on your end? I hear Eltman Eltwin has somehow discerned our people’s identities and is purging them all.
“Khmm. I’m alright.”
Squatting in the innermost stall of the first-floor women’s restroom in the dormitory, Anella spoke to the shadow writhing before her eyes.
—If it feels dangerous, return at once. Eltman… that vicious bastard will not let you die quietly. He’ll torture you and torture you until you start begging to be killed instead.
“N-no! I’m fine! If I get scared over something like this, then what kind of operative would I be!”
—I like the confidence. So then, how far along is the mission?
“Uh…”
What was the mission again?
The instant the question came, her mind went blank. She had gone so long without thinking about it at all that her brain locked up.
—Well, if things had been going well, Baek Yuseol wouldn’t be appearing in the papers like this. Have you made a plan to eliminate him quietly?
“Th-that is…”
She remembered.
Her original orders had been to monitor Young Master Ma Yuseong and assassinate Baek Yuseol.
But once the young master returned to the main house, the only mission left to her was Baek Yuseol’s assassination.
And yet, humiliating as it was to admit, she had failed to overcome even a first-year academy student and had surrendered.
She had even had her identity exposed and all of her abilities sealed, so the mission had, in truth, failed long ago.
Ordinarily, she should have withdrawn at this point.
But Anella did not want to.
She wanted to remain here a little longer…
and find a way to become human again.
Her heart had already made up its mind to stay by Baek Yuseol’s side, but she could not betray the organization so recklessly.
They would simply dispatch another capable assassin, and if someone stronger than she was targeted Baek Yuseol…
then she truly would not be able to stop it.
“Yes. Please trust in my abilities. I can break his mind completely.”
—Good. I will trust you. If you return after successfully completing the mission, I will consider promoting you. Hasn’t it already been over twenty years since you became a Black Mage? It’s about time you started living a proper life.
“……Yes.”
—Then we’ll end the connection here.
Sluuurk.
As the shadow seeped into the floor, Anella leaned back against the wall and let out a long breath.
“Fuuuuuh…”
Had there ever been a time in all her forty years of life when she had borne such a heavy burden on her heart?
Then again, she had lived her whole life without thinking much of anything, so of course there hadn’t.
At best, she only had until the end of summer break to stay in Stella.
Before she had to return, she needed to extract as much information from Baek Yuseol as possible, so she had to stay sharp and keep moving.
Creak.
Having steeled herself, Anella opened the stall door and stepped outside.
At the sink stood a girl.
“Hm-hm-hmm~”
The girl hummed to herself while washing her hands. She had shoulder-length bobbed hair and a small frame.
And the moment Anella recognized her face, her own expression stiffened slightly.
‘F-Flame…?’
What a strange thing this was.
I’m clearly forty years old, and yet whenever I stand in front of that little runt—who’s much younger than I am—I shrink for some reason and even my words stop coming out properly.
It felt like being a mouse standing in front of a cat.
Anella tried to walk past Flame as casually as possible, but Flame abruptly spoke to her.
“Aren’t you going to wash your hands? After using the bathroom.”
“Huh? Oh, uh… y-yeah, I should wash them…”
She hadn’t actually used the bathroom, but with no other choice, Anella brought her hands to the sink.
“You were in there for a really long time. Constipated?”
“Wha— I’m not constipated!”
“You’re reacting pretty sensitively. If you’re not, then you’re not.”
“…Whatever.”
“Then what were you doing in there so long?”
Inside the stall, she had set up a ‘Shadow Boundary,’ so there was no way the conversation could have leaked outside. If it had been a high-level mage, maybe—but Flame was only 4-Class now, so there was no chance she had overheard anything.
So there was no reason to panic.
And yet for some reason, even lying felt terrifying.
“…A-actually, I am constipated…”
“Try taking some probiotics.”
“…I am.”
Anella cried rivers inside.
As if it weren’t humiliating enough to be disguised as a high school girl with twin tails, now she was standing here scared of an actual high school student and blurting out nonsense like this.
‘Maybe I should just die…’
She was seriously considering it when Flame suddenly said,
“You—why are you so scared?”
“…Huh?”
“Is someone going to eat you?”
“N-no? I’m not scared at all?”
Come to think of it, there really wasn’t any reason to be scared. No matter how infamous Stella was, in the end Flame was just an ordinary seventeen-year-old student, wasn’t she?
“Mm. Don’t worry. I was going to eat you, but I’ll let it go for now.”
“…Huh?”
A chill crawled down Anella’s spine.
When she slowly turned her stiff neck to look at Flame, Flame was still gazing into the mirror as she spoke.
“Maybe I’m tired lately. My skin’s a mess. I’m not breaking out, am I?”
“U-um…”
“Oh, right. That Ahjussi isn’t here right now.”
“Right…?”
After the interschool tournament ended, Baek Yuseol had left for the Cradle of the Celestial Spirit Tree together with Kkotseorin.
Since the Elf King had personally invited him into their carriage, it had caused quite a stir, and there was currently no one in Stella who didn’t know about it.
“So I got asked to do something.”
“Asked… to do something?”
Click.
Flame shut off the faucet and finally looked Anella straight in the eye.
This matter had been tied to the event from the original romance-fantasy story, ［Black Corrosion］, so it was extremely important.
In the original work, Professor Meizen Tiren would become corrupted by black magic, causing enormous harm to many people.
But in reality, Baek Yuseol had already dealt with Meizen Tiren, so now there was no way to know who would end up being the culprit behind the Black Corrosion.
Originally Baek Yuseol had meant to investigate it himself, but because of the issue with Kkotseorin, he had not been able to.
So instead, he had asked Flame to investigate it personally.
And…
because it was the first time Baek Yuseol—who always solved everything himself—had ever asked her for something, Flame intended to take it quite seriously.
“While that Ahjussi’s gone, you’re going to be my bread shuttle for a while.”
“…What?”
Perhaps because the words were so utterly shocking, Anella could not even answer properly and just stood there with a blank expression.
Most students returned to their hometowns during break.
But Eizel Morf did not.
More precisely, she could not.
Because she had no hometown to return to.
So Eizel enrolled in summer classes full-time.
Of course, this made her an unusual case. There were quite a lot of students besides Eizel who had not gone home, but if they already had enough credits, why go out of their way to suffer more?
But Eizel listened.
The reason was simple.
Because she could study more.
More precisely…
because she could study for free.
Stella’s summer term did not charge tuition, and for someone as short on money as Eizel, that made it a perfect opportunity.
If the world was offering to teach you for free without taking any money, how could anyone turn that down?
‘They’ve all got to be idiots.’
But naturally, when luck decided to go bad, it really went bad.
“The professor from Hyperconnectivity Education is suddenly unavailable, so the lecture has been cancelled.”
“…What?”
And of all things, it was the professor for one of her registered subjects who had vanished without warning.
Hyperconnectivity Education was famously unpopular, so fewer than twenty students had enrolled. No one even bothered trying to find a substitute lecturer, and the class simply ceased to exist.
“My class…”
Still, that was fine!
She had packed her schedule with enough courses to burn through the entire summer vacation, so she still had plenty of lectures left to attend.
“The instructor for Hazron Logic Education is absent, so the class has been cancelled.”
“Advanced Mathematics Level 3 has also been cancelled due to the professor’s personal circumstances…”
“As for Introductory Design Theory…”
But then—
every class Eizel was taking began getting cancelled one after another.
Most of them had the same reason.
‘The professor disappeared.’
It wasn’t as if they were trying to put together some midsummer ghost special, so why were professors disappearing in droves?
Of course, not every class vanished completely. The lectures with large numbers of registered students were fortunately taken over by substitute instructors, and Eizel clung to those classes to somehow continue her studies.
Still, not being able to take lessons from the professors she wanted was deeply dissatisfying, and sometimes the subject itself changed altogether, which she liked even less.
She had intended to spend the entire summer break burning herself out on classes, and yet holes were now opening up all over her timetable.
“Huaaah…”
“You’re insanely hardcore, you know that? The ones who study well always seem to live the stingiest lives.”
At lunchtime,
Eizel’s friend Marilen emerged.
Marilen had stayed in the dorm rather than going home.
Since she had had no need to take classes, she usually holed herself up in the dorm instead of coming to school. Around lunchtime she would crawl out once in a while like this, and each time she saw Eizel looking half-dead, she clicked her tongue.
“Studying means building up one’s assets of knowledge. It all becomes flesh and bone in the end, so you mustn’t grow lazy.”
“You seriously sound like my mom… Are all top-ranking students like you?”
“…Hm. I wonder?”
Eizel was both a genius and a hard worker.
That was something everyone around her acknowledged.
But what about the other top students?
Hong Biyeon hardly ever studied where people could see her, so no one really knew.
Hae Wonryang and Flame were often spotted in the library, but they were nowhere near as relentless as Eizel.
Ma Yuseong and Baek Yuseol… were always out fooling around somewhere. And yet their grades were always top-tier, which apparently earned them the envy of many students.
“No matter how I think about it, you’re the harshest one of all.”
“What does it matter? I still can’t get first place.”
“…Weren’t you third in the year this time?”
“I was.”
“You’re so annoying… If you ever get stabbed someday, just know I’ll be the prime suspect.”
Trading jokes back and forth, Eizel thought of the other students in Class S.
Now that she thought about it, there really weren’t any students properly studying during summer break.
Baek Yuseol had even accepted an invitation from the Elf King and gone off to the Cradle of the Celestial Spirit Tree because it was summer break. Right now he was probably enjoying a banquet in a white castle.
‘No matter how I think about it, that’s weird…’
Baek Yuseol was smart even without studying.
Because he was a regressor.
Normally, she could dismiss things with a simple “well, he’s a regressor, so what can you do?” but this incident was a little different.
‘The Soul Orb shone pure white…’
The tens of thousands of spectators who had witnessed it probably hadn’t understood what it meant.
But Eizel knew quite a lot about Soul Orbs, and the sight had covered her whole body in goosebumps.
For a Soul Orb to shine that pure white meant Baek Yuseol possessed a ‘noble soul,’ like the heavenly angels or divine spirits.
‘A noble soul…’
At first glance it sounded like an easy phrase.
But in order to possess a noble soul, the conditions attached to it were unbelievably strict.
Humans, nonhuman races, and all intelligent beings alike violated most of those conditions from the moment they were born.
You could commit no sins.
You could harm no living creature of any kind.
You could not be stained by anything filthy.
You could not even entertain a single impure thought.
To put it a bit extremely, even ignoring a piece of trash lying on the street, or indulging in a lewd fantasy while thinking of the opposite sex, was said to corrupt the soul.
No, that was absurd.
As long as one was capable of thought, how could anyone possibly avoid violating all of those conditions?
And so intelligent life could not be noble.
That was normal.
…Or at least, it was supposed to be.
Until Baek Yuseol shattered common sense once again.
‘What’s the reason?’
Baek Yuseol had not lived an ordinary life.
He must have turned back time hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times, killing countless lives and committing countless sins along the way.
And yet if his soul was still noble…
then there had to be a reason.
‘Hmm…’
Eizel was the sort who loved inquiry, and once her curiosity was piqued, she had the kind of personality that would dig into it all the way to the end.
After lunch ended,
“I’m going to become an earthworm again~!”
“Right… do your best at wriggling.”
“Mm! Good luck to you too!”
After sending Marilen—who looked delighted at the prospect of a nap—back to the dorm, Eizel headed once more for the library.
That hour had originally been reserved for Hyperconnectivity Studies, but since the class had been cancelled, she figured she might as well spend the gap flipping through some books.
“Let’s see… noble soul, noble soul…”
She distinctly remembered that the library had papers and research materials on the purest and most beautiful souls.
‘Ah, found it.’
And just as expected, she discovered a thick book titled ［The Most Noble Souls in History］ and reached out for it.
But from the opposite side, a white wrist shot out and grasped the very same book.
Eizel checked who it was.
A girl with silver hair tinged red, falling all the way to her waist, and eyes sparkling vividly as if rubies had been embedded in them—
Hong Biyeon.
Of all people, she had grabbed the exact same book.
“What’s this? You read this too?”
“…Forget it. You read it.”
As if she had been caught doing something she absolutely should not have been caught doing, Hong Biyeon abruptly withdrew her hand and turned to leave, but Eizel stopped her.
“No. We can just read it together.”
“…What?”
“If I borrow this, I’m not returning it for a whole week… and you won’t regret that? You’ll be dying of curiosity.”
Why else would that princess have gone looking for a book like this?
Wasn’t it obvious?
Most likely, for the exact same reason as Eizel.
And Hong Biyeon was quite intelligent as well, so if the two of them put their heads together and reasoned through it, they might actually be able to produce a fairly convincing answer.
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