10. The Only Good Festival Is a Dead Festival
10. The Only Good Festival Is a Dead Festival
Kirke considered herself a genius.
She had only just entered her mid-thirties. Objectively speaking, this was correct—most mages took until their fifties just to scrape their way up to 6th Rank.
At the same time, she was the youngest professor at the Kingdom's most prestigious institution, Grandis Academy, with multiple major research successes to her name, and she had been steadily advancing her life's goal step by careful step.
That was the obvious truth.
So how had it come to this.
Ngh... my head...
If someone asked her to name the absolute low point of a life that hadn't been all that long, the answer would, without exception, be something from her childhood.
The second worst was what she was experiencing right now. And it was the fault of a certain devil-spawn she'd had the misfortune to cross paths with.
Every single day she scraped by on bean sprouts and potatoes. Her packed lunches were boiled potatoes and water. Eating out, luxuries—she couldn't even manage her dormitory maintenance fees, let alone any of that.
Of course, a Grandis Academy salary was a good five times greater than what other academies offered. Even with 98% of it cut, she could get by if she pinched every copper. She had savings, too.
But Kirke wasn't alone in this.
To be precise, she had far too many holes for the money to drain into.
I have to keep making donations to the Holy Kingdom... I need funds to secure test subjects... life-magic research costs... I need to acquire more pieces for the board, too.
Her ultimate goal was the Holy Kingdom—to emigrate there and secure a high-ranking clerical post.
She had chosen Grandis Academy as her stepping stone for that very purpose. The "Custom" supposedly granted to magic-department professors, the high salary, the prestige of the Kingdom's foremost academy—all of it had factored in.
Outwardly she played the role of the upright, kindly genius professor. Behind the scenes, she used life magic to craft an array of chess pieces.
She needed to remain at the academy for several more years, so she had been carrying out her plans at a measured pace.
And then the Holy Kingdom had openly coveted her healing-potion refinement research, so she'd invoked the Custom and handed it over to them—
A mistake. Such an enormous mistake.
And that very mistake had brought her face-to-face with a devil. She'd had spectacularly bad luck, to put it bluntly.
Wasn't this the same Custom that had been quietly tolerated for decades? And now some Finance Director who'd been in office for barely a year was going to overturn it? I've been a professor here since you first enrolled, you brat. Get a grip on reality!
...But as for saying any of that aloud—the Finance Director was, in fact, the one person with the firmest grip on reality. Because the monster known as the Chairwoman was backing him to the hilt.
Kirke was the sacrificial lamb for the abolition of the Custom. Years of carefully laid plans could all turn to foam with a single word from that devil.
Hiding her true feelings, Kirke had no choice but to cooperate with him. And she became the enemy of every magic-department professor.
On top of that, her own salary was slashed by 98%.
I don't have enough money.
As a way to restore her shattered reputation, she'd tried to have her chess pieces instigate the summoning-ritual commotion, and even that fell apart and was exposed because she didn't have enough funds.
She hadn't had the money for an artifact to conceal the mana of summoning magic... nor the money to buy magic stones for drawing the circle.
And then the devil-spawn had summoned her for another meeting and laid out a scheme that would concentrate not only the professors' hatred but the student body's upon her as well.
You absolute dog.
Kirke swore vengeance—but still, the moment he mentioned restoring a fraction of her salary, she had thrown herself at his feet. Because she was genuinely, desperately short on money.
Even for the sake of the most perfect revenge, she had to play along and pretend to obey that devil for a while. That was why she'd intended to cooperate meekly with the hair-loss-inducer dispersal plan, too.
...What in the world was that?
While she'd been researching and preparing the hair-loss inducer in her underground laboratory—
Strange memories had suddenly surged in like a tide.
Something—something that felt truly important. Something that, if she could just recall it, might drastically alter her current situation.
But no matter how hard she tried to dredge it up, she couldn't remember what those memories actually were.
No, if anything, the attempt had made her lose focus and stop the ingredient analyzer she'd been so meticulously calibrating, and... huh.
What had happened after that?
What—
"Ah, Professor Kirke. You're awake?"
"...Ngh."
"Truly impressive. I don't think I could produce even that much of a noise so blissfully at ease. After all, the entire plan has collapsed, thanks to you, Professor."
"...Wh, what?"
"So here's the thing, Professor."
"..."
"Naturally, you'll be paying a commensurate price, yes? The salary raise is canceled. Additionally, your salary will now be cut to 99%."
"...Hrrk."
Ah.
Maybe she should just pass out again.
*
Oh—Kirke had collapsed again. Had I worked her too hard... no, not really. I'd barely gotten any use out of her yet.
I was about to wake her right back up, but the sight of her hair actively falling out stirred a flicker of pity, so I let it go.
'The restitution fees for the hair-loss inducer and the building repair costs can wait until later.'
If she still had money left, I'd squeeze out every last coin. If she didn't, I'd just work her off as a research slave for the equivalent value.
Besides, this would force her to focus even harder on developing the hair-loss cure for her own scalp's sake—wasn't that a win-win?
I left the unconscious Kirke in a corner and walked over to the Chairwoman.
"Chairwoman, what's the status on keeping people quiet?"
"Dean Villend and every magic-department professor have all agreed to keep their mouths shut. Frankly, they showed a rather disgraceful side of themselves in front of Student Chloe, so if they have any conscience at all, they'll stay silent."
"That won't be enough."
"Pardon?"
"If those people had a conscience in the first place, they would never have let only Student Chloe and me into that chamber. Speak with them separately and inform them that anyone who talks gets an across-the-board 50% pay cut."
"Weren't the magic-department professors already hit with pay cuts after the Custom dispute?"
"Half of that."
"Aha."
Meaning I could trust Dean Villend, more or less, but the rest of the magic professors, not in the slightest. The surest approach was to slap down a safety lock under the name of a pay cut.
The real problem, however, lay elsewhere.
"In that case... Finance Director."
"Yes, Chairwoman."
"The festival...?"
"...Hah."
Right. The problem was the festival itself.
I'd originally intended to cancel it outright, but the Chairwoman had talked me down to a compromise—hold it for just one day and cancel midway through. The hair-loss-inducer dispersal plan had been prepared to serve as the pretext.
And now Kirke had thrown it all away with her little bout of trolling.
"We still have some of the hair-loss inducer left, don't we?"
"Roughly three-quarters of it has already evaporated and been purified. And with one leak incident already having occurred..."
"If another similar accident breaks out, it'll look suspicious no matter who's watching."
I'd used student chaos and the festival as the pretext to muzzle the professors, but if another incident erupted using the same hair-loss inducer, everyone would smell a rat.
On top of that, Kirke's lab was a wreck right now, and the very person who was supposed to stage the accident—Kirke herself—was lying unconscious in poor shape.
I had no choice but to concede.
As the Chairwoman stood there fidgeting, fighting a desperate battle to keep the corners of her mouth from creeping upward—
I declared my surrender.
"Let's do it. The festival."
"F, for the full week?"
"For the full week."
"Wahoo!"
There was no time left to concoct a new plan anyway, so fine.
Even so, we could comfortably cover this year's festival with the artifact refund from the King, Hogus's compensation payment, the slashed salaries, and the rest of it.
Watching the Chairwoman bounce around like a child in delight, I couldn't help but think what an undignified display this was.
But then, outwardly she looked roughly my age, so maybe it was fine. Strictly speaking, wasn't she just acting her apparent age?
...I was trying to escape from reality with pointless thoughts, but it was useless.
"Then we don't need to tour every section on the first day! We can take our time and see everything over the course of the week!"
"Excuse me?"
"We promised yesterday to tour the festival together, didn't we? Originally we only had one day—and just the evening at that—so I'd worked out a whole course to cover the maximum ground in the shortest possible time!"
Fwip.
The Chairwoman unfolded a full map of Grandis Academy that had been tucked away in a corner of the room. The evidence of the "course" she'd mentioned was plain to see.
Across the three zones—Magic, Martial Arts, and Administration—she'd drawn out all manner of shortest routes, centered on the areas where festival booths and events were densely clustered.
The level of detail was almost frightening: obstacles that would eat up time, crowd density estimates, how long to spend in each festival zone—all of it calculated and marked out.
Eyes sparkling, the Chairwoman giggled to herself as she sketched a new route onto the map.
"With a full week, we have more than enough time! I've hardly ever attended the festival in person, but I've looked down on it from the Chairwoman's office plenty of times! What I recommend is—!!"
"Um, Chairwoman."
"At the very least, whatever else we do, we absolutely must visit the club headquarters building where the Student Council room is! The Martial Arts division's tournament is low-level but still plenty worth watching!"
"Chairwoman."
"And the highlight, without a doubt, is the magic fireworks event on the festival's final day—"
"Chairwoman, I apologize for interrupting while you're so excited, but—"
"Ah, I should hear the Finance Director's opinion, too! Where would you like to go first?"
"I can't go."
"...Pardon?"
"It seems going with you, Chairwoman, will be difficult."
Click.
The pen slipped from the Chairwoman's dazed hand. Her eyes wavered violently.
Then she clenched her fists tight and bit her lip.
"...Who is it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Who are you... going with instead?"
She looked up at me as she said it—and, well.
Her eyes were rather murderous. Sure, if she thought I'd broken a promise, that reaction might be warranted... except my body had started trembling with sheer, involuntary terror before my mind could even catch up.
So this was an 8th Rank's killing intent. Honestly, that part didn't matter at all.
What mattered was that the Chairwoman still hadn't grasped reality.
"I'm not going with anyone. You, Chairwoman, can't attend the festival at all."
"Huh? What do you mean...?"
"Under our original plan, the festival was supposed to be halted on Day 2, wasn't it?"
"That's... right?"
"So we didn't pay much attention to the Day 3 schedules, or the document approvals for them."
"...Ah."
"Now we have to go back and review and re-approve every single one of those."
The festival was supposed to end midway through, so we'd glossed over or rubber-stamped all the Day 2 onward paperwork. But now that wasn't the case anymore.
We were badly behind schedule, but we still had to re-examine everything for irregularities and somehow reverse the truly insane items.
And we were now just one day away from the festival.
Day 2 might be manageable, but from now until the morning of Day 3—that was only three days.
"What are you spacing out for?"
"Uh."
"Let's get to work. We won't have a moment's rest for the next three days straight."
Three days? I'd be lucky if I even found time to sleep between now and the festival's end.
Sure, I could secretly dump work on other departments just like the Chairwoman had done yesterday, but even factoring that in, the workload was still murderous. The festival's scale was simply too enormous.
The plan had collapsed, so the festival would proceed normally—and the irony was that this very outcome had eliminated our time to enjoy it.
While the Chairwoman stood there frozen, mouth agape—
I bent over the mountain of paperwork first and started hunting for the festival-related reports.
'I finally spoke with Cassandra, so now I need to meet the protagonist, too.'
But instead of meeting anyone, I wasn't going to leave this office until the festival ended.
Truly, the only good festival is a dead festival.
More overtime it is...
*
"Come this way! The Flame Magic Enthusiasts Club is putting on a performance with fire magic! Injuries from explosions are not our responsibility!"
"Festival special discount! Chicken skewers, one copper apiece!"
"Let's go that way this time!"
"Martial Arts tournament betting pool! Who'll take the championship—Risha Claudia or Kaern Deste?"
"Huh? Isn't that 6th Rank girl basically guaranteed to win?"
"I heard she's not even entering this time. Hasn't registered yet, apparently."
"Really?"
Noisy, bustling, boisterous.
Countless students, visitors, and merchants raised their voices. Every street of Grandis Academy—an institution that boasted the scale of a small city—was packed with people.
Booths, specially constructed stalls, magic performance stages, tournament arenas, even exhibitions of personally crafted inventions and papers.
The Grandis Academy festival was a place of enjoyment, a place of encounter and exchange, and simultaneously a place of academic presentation.
And there, in the midst of that clamorous festival—
Rus Spero sat blankly on a bench.
"..."
A festival. An event she'd never properly enjoyed before, having devoted herself entirely to training.
Even so, if she cast her mind back, she had enjoyed it exactly once. In her third year, with graduation looming the next year, she'd toured it together with Adam.
A short span of time—yet an unforgettable memory, and at the same time, now just recalling it brought nothing but pain.
'...I knew all along.'
But what tormented Rus right now wasn't the memory of that day. It was connected to Adam in the end, but to be precise, it was something he had said.
The claim that the academy had identified and restrained the professors' summoning ritual in advance.
Those words, which she'd heard a month ago, were utterly different from the "previous cycle" that Rus knew.
'The academy was clearly unaware of the summoning ritual then. The Chairwoman even issued a direct apology.'
Just what had changed this time to alter the future so drastically? Rus couldn't begin to fathom it.
And alongside that question came a wave of disillusionment.
'In the end... nothing I did accomplished a single worthwhile thing.'
She had suspected Chloe of being connected to Kirke. A misunderstanding. Chloe had simply been carrying out a request from Adam.
She had tried to stop the summoning ritual in advance. A meaningless effort. The academy had already caught the professors and resolved the matter on its own.
Someone might say she'd only been enrolled for two months, that she still had so much ahead of her.
But Rus wanted to ask in return.
In just two months, the future she knew had already diverged this much. What would happen when even more time passed?
No—in the first place.
Wasn't her very presence, her very actions, only poisoning things further?
'If I hadn't heard the truth from Adam, I would still be suspecting Chloe even now.'
She would have tormented her endlessly, threatened her life. And perhaps, under the excuse of stopping the future Chloe, might even have killed her.
...Could she truly claim there was not a shred of selfishness in that thought? Toward Chloe, who had stood beside the fallen Adam—had she truly felt no hatred, no jealousy whatsoever?
She had agonized over this again and again for the past month. Attended only the bare minimum of lectures, brushed off Mina's worried words, and spent all her remaining time locked inside her dormitory.
She had felt ceaseless self-loathing and guilt, contempt for her own wretchedness. The emotions never improved—the more she dwelled on them, the worse they grew.
'He said he would contact me about Student Council matters.'
And as if to accelerate those negative emotions—Adam hadn't contacted her, either.
Perhaps, for reasons she couldn't fathom, a disappointed Adam had simply discarded her.
The unpredictable situation terrified her. Even after stumbling upon the miracle of regression, she resented her own powerlessness.
Perhaps—simply perhaps.
'Aren't I unnecessary?'
Unlike before, she possessed strength. She possessed wealth. But what use was any of it?
The eyes of Rus, seated on the bench, reflected only dark emotions.
What if she just killed Kirke and withdrew from the academy? Roam the continent, slaughtering every future villain.
Of course, none of them had done anything yet, so Rus would be branded a monstrous serial killer. But she didn't care.
Staying at the academy only meant being this useless and pathetic anyway.
In any case...
"Rus? It is Rus, right?"
"...Your Highness?"
A voice reached her, and Rus raised her head. Beatrice had approached without her noticing and was gazing down at her.
Rus had been about to ask to be left alone—
"Your Highness, those clothes...?"
"It's a part-time job uniform. All I do is hand out flyers, but the pay is surprisingly decent, you know."
Beatrice was dressed in a cheap receptionist's outfit. That the princess worked all manner of part-time jobs was already something of a famous rumor within the academy.
A foreign kingdom's princess who didn't shy away from menial labor. That fact, spread alongside the story that she'd done restroom cleaning and various other chores during the uninhabited-island midterm, had generated a favorable public impression.
Some clicked their tongues and called it unbecoming of royalty—but many more were drawn to the simple reality that a 5th Rank mage and princess who'd overcome her chronic illness was working odd jobs at all.
'...Right.'
This change in Beatrice was yet another thing Rus didn't know. Adam was likely involved, but that, too, was just conjecture—she didn't know the details of what had happened.
She let out a hollow laugh laced with self-flagellation.
And just as this chance encounter hardened her resolve in the worst possible way—just as Rus was about to rise from the bench—
"More importantly, Rus, have you heard? They say the Student Council President has opened a fortune-telling booth!"
"...?"
"She's famous for being a quack prophet, but she's still a 6th Rank mage, isn't she? A huge crowd gathered to have their fortunes told, but the Student Council President turned them all away, saying her first customer was already decided."
So what did Beatrice want to say?
Rus felt sorry toward someone who'd approached her first to talk, but she was in no mood for idle chat.
She directed a brief glare at Beatrice to convey as much—but Beatrice merely let out a small laugh.
"And this first customer the Student Council President named? She said it's a 'student of her own Rank.'"
"...!!"
"There's only one student like that in the entire academy, isn't there? As it happens, I have a reason to see the Student Council President myself. Do you think—considering our bond from the uninhabited island—you could take me with you?"
"..."
"Please? I'm asking nicely."
A fortune. A fortune, huh.
'It would make a fitting end.'
After a moment's hesitation, Rus finally nodded. Beatrice beamed and extended a hand toward her.
She would have her fortune told, say her goodbyes to Adam, then kill Kirke and leave.
Today would be her last day at the academy.
Rus believed that without a shred of doubt.
"Welcome, Regressor!"
"...What?"
Absolutely.
She should have been right.