Secret Passage
“Uh… is this really the place?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“…I just don’t get why this dorm gets such high praise…”
I shot Julia a look that said I couldn’t relate in the slightest.
“What do you mean? With that gorgeous building right in front of us?”
“No… it’s just the design. It’s kind of…”
If the Virgo Palace had been built in fourteenth-century Gothic style, the Scorpio Palace was pure modernism—the kind you saw everywhere these days. Of course, “modernism” was a generous word. Put bluntly, it was just a bunch of rectangular cubes stuck together.
“That building right in the center is Alpha Star Antares. Next to it is Beta Star Acrab. The one over there is Delta Star Dschubba. They just used the star names straight, so they’re easy to remember, right?”
“…I never took astronomy.”
I grabbed Julia’s hand and pulled her inside.
“W-wait a second! Shouldn’t we think this over a little more?!”
“Once you see the inside, you’ll change your mind.”
There was a reason I’d deliberately chosen Scorpio Palace over every other dorm.
Among the twelve dormitories, Scorpio Palace boasted by far the most advanced technology.
Woooom—
The doors slid open, revealing the interior of Scorpio Palace.
I’d expected something no better than a cramped boarding house, but the space inside was surprisingly vast. Gravity fields warped throughout the lobby, sending objects floating and drifting of their own accord.
“This is…”
“Hmm? Don’t recognize the face… a first-year?”
“Wh-who… kyaaah…!”
Julia spun toward the voice, then jumped so hard she dropped her map.
The man sitting at the lobby counter was, astonishingly, not a man at all.
“Th-the hat is talking…!”
“A hat, you say… addressing a stranger like that…”
The figure stood, revealing the black suit that had been hidden beneath the counter. He removed the fedora he’d been wearing and approached us at a leisurely pace.
“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Arlo Lee, housemaster of Antares. As you can see, I’m a transparency ability user.”
“Uh… you can’t turn the transparency off?”
“Well now… I can’t quite recall. When I received my knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, I believe I was visible like everyone else…”
“Elizabeth the Second?”
“No. The First.”
“Elizabeth the First…?”
That would make him a man of the sixteenth century.
“Anyway, have you come to join the dormitory?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Hmm… the young lady here is one thing, but you look more suited to Astraea than to us…”
Julia let out a dry laugh at Arlo’s words.
He’s not wrong… I was originally planning to go to Astraea…
“First, allow me to explain a little about Antares. Our dormitory values wisdom above all else. Therefore we only accept those who ranked within the top five hundred on the written exam. Or, exceptionally, those who have demonstrated achievements I personally deem worthy.”
“You don’t look at the practical exam?”
“Irrelevant. Practical skill will improve in time so long as it is backed by sufficient theory.”
It was a claim that flew in the face of common sense. Innate abilities were walls you were born with; barring complete incompetence, someone with a powerful ability would always crush someone with a weaker one.
Yet for some reason, Arlo’s philosophy struck me as rather appealing.
“That’s no problem. Both of us are solid on theory.”
“Hmm… confident, are we? Very well. I’ll check your scores…”
While Arlo worked the computer beside him, a faint vibration rippled through the air around me.
“Whoa…!”
“This is… Laplace!”
[Checking now.]
Laplace seized control of Sirius Academy’s CCTV network using a virus I had planted in advance.
After scanning camera after camera, Laplace finally spotted something unusual.
[I have confirmed the existence of a location identified as a secret space. Concurrently, I was able to verify Yeona entering that location.]
“What?”
[Shall I dig deeper by dismantling Sirius Academy’s facility control program?]
“How are you going to hack a closed circuit?”
[The facility control program itself is closed-circuit, but its design architecture can be reverse-engineered by examining the data of the company that built it.]
“…All right. Check it out.”
While Laplace investigated, I turned my gaze to the two people staring at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“What is it?”
“Why have you been muttering to yourself this whole time…? Is your friend always like this?”
“Ah, no. Seo-hyun, did you get hurt somewhere fighting the demons…?”
“…It’s not that.”
Anyway, what now?
Clearly our unstoppable regressor had gone and done something again…
Should I chase after her?
I couldn’t begin to guess what she was after.
[Found it.]
—Took longer than I expected?
[The manufacturer’s security level exceeded that of most IT firms, which caused the delay. My apologies.]
—It’s fine. So did you figure out what the secret passage is?
[Yes. In addition, I have obtained access privileges that will allow entry.]
—So where is it?
A demon stronghold preparing for the Demon King’s resurrection?
Or an ancient ruin where a legendary sword slept?
Countless possibilities raced through my mind as I listened to Laplace.
[It is a dormitory.]
“I knew it…! Of course it’s a dormitory—wait, huh?”
Something felt off.
Not a ruin housing a legendary sword. Not the headquarters of some vast evil force. Just… a dormitory?
A place where people ate, slept, rested, and studied?
“You sure you didn’t mess up? There’s no way a dorm would be hidden in a place like—”
“…Your friend really doesn’t seem all right. Perhaps we should take her to the hospital…”
“W-wait a second! She’s not normally like this—why does she keep talking to herself…?”
“In cases like this, a bit of shock therapy to snap her back to her senses…”
“H-hey…! I’m not crazy, so put that hammer down! Are all sixteenth-century people this impatient?!”
After calming Arlo—who had pulled a medical(?) hammer from a drawer—I took Julia’s hand.
“Wh-what?”
“Something’s come up all of a sudden. Would it be all right if we looked around the other dorms first and came back later?”
“I’ve never seen anyone who said that actually come back…”
“Haha…”
“Well, if you yourselves don’t want it, there’s nothing to be done… Though frankly, finding a dormitory better than ours will prove difficult. Ah, I’m not trying to force you into ours, of course. Everything is your own choice. I simply hope you make a wise one. Once you’ve chosen a dormitory, you’ll be living there for an entire semester whether you like it or not.”
“Thank you for the advice.”
“Then off you go.”
“Julia. Let’s go.”
“H-huh? Where are we going?!”
The moment we stepped out of Scorpio Palace, Julia’s bewildered gaze locked onto me.
“What’s going on all of a sudden? Are you trying to switch dorms? Don’t tell me you’re heading for Astraea…”
“It’s not that. There’s just somewhere I need to check real quick.”
A hidden thirteenth dormitory that didn’t appear on any map?
No way I was sitting this one out.
“Uh… is this the right place?”
[Correct.]
“She says it is.”
“No, Seo-hyun… who have you been talking to this whole time? Since when could you do necromancy?”
“…”
I ignored Julia and surveyed our surroundings.
What stood before us was a log cabin that looked completely out of place at Sirius Academy.
But knowing the thing in front of me was nothing more than an illusion, I stepped forward without a second thought.
At the same moment, the fence surrounding the cabin dissolved into smoke and vanished.
“Y-you just walked through the fence?”
Only after confirming that the log cabin she was looking at was anything but normal did Julia hurriedly follow me in.
“By the way, if this is the secret passage, how do we open the door?”
Using the control tools Laplace had already hacked into the system, I could force the secret passage open.
Since I had no idea how it was supposed to open normally, I planned to forcibly trigger the command and get inside.
Then, on a sudden whim, I felt like messing with Julia.
“Ahem… well… if you shout ‘Open sesame’ really loud right here, the door opens…”
“…?”
“There’s a magic-engineering device built into the facility. It’s designed so that if you speak with a ‘strong will’ and a ‘loud voice,’ the door opens automatically.”
“For real…?”
“Of course! Unfortunately, though, the system reads the mana in the user’s voice, so as a mana-insensitive person I can’t activate it myself…”
“Th-that’s…”
“Really is a shame… so could you shout it for me instead?”
Open sesame.
What kind of seventeen-year-old shouted something that childish?
“I-isn’t there another way? Even if we just asked the professors…”
“Sadly, this is the only way. If you go asking the professors you might even get demerits—for being a passive student who can’t forge her own path.”
“Th-then maybe we just don’t go in…”
“But I paid tens of millions of won for this information.”
“W-what kind of information costs tens of millions…!”
Julia seemed to wrestle with a deep internal conflict, then slowly nodded.
“I’ll do it… but just this once…”
“Really? Great! Then when I count to three, shout ‘Open sesame’ as loud as you can! Got it?”
“Yeah. Got it…”
“Counting now!”
I swallowed the laughter threatening to burst out and started counting.
“One, two, three!”
“Open sesame…!”
Julia squeezed her eyes shut and shouted—but nothing happened.
“H-huh? Why…”
“Ah… looks like your voice was just a little too quiet. We’ll have to try one more time.”
“W-wha…?!”
Julia’s face said the sky was falling, but hell had already begun.
“All right, from the top! One, two, three!”
“O-open sesame!”
“Too quiet! Again! One-two-three!”
“O-open sesame—!!”
“One more ought to do it! Last time—one, two, three!”
“Open se-same—!!!!!!”
I timed it perfectly and entered the activation code for the secret passage.
The moment the code registered, the log cabin scattered like dust and vanished, revealing a massive tunnel leading underground.
“That’s my Julia! I knew you could do it!”
“…I’m so embarrassed I could die, so please don’t talk to me.”
Julia covered her flaming face with both hands.
She must have been mortified beyond words.
I took her hand and pulled her toward the entrance of the secret space.
“Come on! Let’s go in! Time to see what this dorm is like!”
“…We’re not going to have to do that every time we come here, right?”
“Hmm? Of course we will, don’t you think?”
Watching Julia panic, I allowed myself a small smile.