Suspicion Bites Its Own Tail (1)
Birds were singing. Since it was still early spring, a faint chill drifted through the air around me.
Amid the peaceful atmosphere, I quietly opened my eyes. Night had slipped away at some point, and bright sunlight was streaming in through the window.
Ah. A familiar ceiling.
It had only been a little over two weeks since I first faced it, but the room had already taken on a certain comfortable familiarity. My robe sat neatly folded on the desk, and the Rosario hung quietly around my neck. Not a trace of blood on my hands, my face, or my clothes — which meant Niger had cleaned things up on his own, tidy as ever.
In that strangely tranquil morning, I wondered for a moment whether I'd merely been dreaming.
Maybe Professor Prodi was at home asleep in his bed right now, and maybe I had just lazed around dozing until I woke up like this.
Even though I knew perfectly well that wasn't the case.
I rose from the bed and looked down at the desk. Just as I'd expected, a note Niger had left for me lay waiting there.
— I have dealt with Professor Prodi and his gang at the brothel. My work is finished; now see to yours.
His note carried a serenity so complete it was as if yesterday's scenes had been nothing worth mentioning at all.
Ah, honestly… my life.
I really have lost it. I've gone completely insane.
All I had to do was sweetly say, 'Go commit your murders, whatever.' Instead, I just had to insist on investigating it myself. What in God's name was wrong with me…
"Professor Niger, good morning! What brings you in so early today?"
I had just tapped lightly on the door of my private research office at the Academy and stepped inside when I found Elia waiting there.
"Ah, good morning. I happened to wake a little earlier than usual."
My frozen expression on the day of the entrance ceremony must have worried her, because she had taken to dropping by every morning with a greeting like this.
"Hee~ No wonder, then. I've been itching to come in early myself today. Maybe I'm synced up with you, Professor Niger."
"Hm. That may well be."
Perhaps because her small kindnesses had touched me, I actually accepted her joke with a reply — when ordinarily a curt 'I see.' would have ended it.
"Oh…? I didn't expect you to play along. Look at you, accepting my jokes now. Ahem! Anyway — it seems whatever's been troubling you worked itself out."
"Ah, well… is it that obvious?"
"It is! You look so much brighter today. Until yesterday you had these deep dark circles — you were honestly a bit vampiric. Ahaha~"
Elia laughed awkwardly and tossed out the joke, her face splitting into a mischievous, teasing grin. I found myself staring at that face, hard, for no good reason.
But then, how could I not? I could feel how much it meant just to have a single person in this world worried about me — someone left behind after falling into it alone.
"My, if you keep staring like that, I might get a little embarrassed."
"Thanks to you, Professor Elia. I feel I've found some strength."
"…Eh?"
"Why the surprise?"
That reaction was… something like the one she'd had when I first spoke to her. No, surely not…
"W-well, it's just… that's the first time you've ever called me by my name…"
"…I apologize. I shall go learn better manners from Elohim."
Are you serious, Niger.
Three years without so much as greeting her first, without calling her name even once? What kind of life have you been living up until now?
After exchanging farewells with Elia, I left the research office right on time. I walked down the quiet corridor toward the lecture hall, my footsteps echoing off the walls.
Today was the day of my first lecture.
Foundational Sacred Studies.
If I were being blunt, the Foundational Sacred Studies course I'd been assigned was essentially a free ride. It wasn't even a required subject, just an elective, and it only met on Mondays and Fridays.
Counting the first Monday as a wash thanks to the entrance ceremony, and the three days of the incident as time spent holed up in my private research office —
that made today, Friday, the true first lecture of Foundational Sacred Studies.
"Good morning, my brothers and sisters."
I opened the lecture hall door and spoke as I walked in. My footsteps never paused, carrying me straight up to the podium, and the murmuring students fell into silence in response.
"I am Niger Caritas, instructor of Foundational Sacred Studies."
Standing at the front of the room behind the lectern, I faced forward as I said it. More students had packed the seats than I'd expected, and I continued, utterly indifferent to all those eyes upon me.
"Then, let us begin our first lecture."
With those words, I stretched out my hand and spread divinity through the hall. With a soft crystalline shimmer, motes of light scattered between the students in an instant, and gasps of admiration rippled through the room.
"Whoa… it's beautiful."
"I heard using divinity that broadly drains you in no time, though…"
The students voiced whatever thoughts came to them, and I answered as I walked slowly across the stage.
"That is correct. Divinity on this scale will wear anyone out quickly. All the more so for those of you who have never properly wielded it before."
I brought my foot down lightly. The lectern thrummed with a dull boom, and the motes of light dispersed.
"And that is precisely why none of you need to handle divinity to this extent. I ask only that you become capable enough to save a life in an emergency."
At the sight, the students began murmuring all over again, and whispers threaded through the noise.
"I asked an upperclassman, and they said the assignments are easy and he grades really generously."
"Seriously? I only signed up because a foundational elective sounded like a breeze. What a relief…"
…Oh no.
I had no idea what the original Niger was like, but I had zero intention of handing out easy grades.
I turned it over carefully in my mind. Variables were already creeping in, little by little. I myself — the possessor — was the largest variable of all, so I couldn't very well assume the story would flow along in stable, orderly fashion.
Which meant… what if I raised promising talents within my own classroom?
This was a world I had written. People who lived by my hand and would die by it, too.
There were figures I didn't truly know — like Professor Prodi, or like Niger himself — but at the very least, I wanted to keep the ones I did know from dying.
Which is to say: let them lounge comfortably today, and from next week onward, work them like dogs. Practicum would be a given, and I intended to bury them in assignments.
"…And so, for today, it will be enough simply to feel the divinity around you. Every living thing upon this land, blessed as it is by Elohim, carries divinity within it, however faint."
With those words, I let the divinity bloom once more.
The radiance spreading through the entire lecture hall flowed down the steps of the aisles and gathered into shimmering pools across the floor. Time and again, students leaned forward, marveling at the sight.
And there, among them, I caught Bellatrix's face glaring holes into me — yet I kept my composure. The current had skewed a little further off course, but by now a deviation of this scale was nothing at all.
According to my original setting, she was firmly one of the good ones, and I had my own plans for her besides.
After everything that had happened last night, my heart lay perfectly still, unmoved by anything so small as this.
Time passed, and the lecture came to an end.
Around the time my class wrapped up, a small commotion stirred through the Academy — though I paid it no particular mind.
Because that commotion was the news that a professor who should have reported for work had vanished. No messages, no trace of him at home; apparently both the staff and the students were growing worried.
"Professor Niger… have you heard? They're saying Professor Prodi has disappeared."
Professor Elia approached me wearing a face full of concern as she said it.
What did I answer to that, again?
I believe I hid my expression and simply nodded along. He'll be back soon, surely — something must have come up.
Not that he would ever come back.
And so I returned home, and I sat down and wrote a note at once.
I wanted to hear Niger's explanation.
Why hadn't he told me the truth about Professor Prodi? And if he wasn't going to tell me the truth, couldn't he at least have said something about that brothel?
Were the people he killed, then, all of them wicked?
There was so much I wanted to ask. So I scrawled it all down in a rush, then let a sleep spell wash over my own body. And because I'd cast it weakly, it wasn't long before an answer came back to me.
— I cannot say what you will think of this, but I merely clean away the things that are not human. Professor Prodi belonged to that category.
Part of me wanted to ask why he couldn't have told me that truth from the start — but when I read his answer, I found I could only fall silent.
— Without proof, was I to trust nothing but the word of a murderer like myself? And in the end, did you not believe me only after witnessing it with your own eyes? That Professor Prodi was an evil man.
He had a point, because I truly hadn't trusted Niger. If he'd shown me evidence, I still probably couldn't have brought myself to believe him — he's a murderer, after all.
My head understood. I could accept the fact that he killed criminals, the sort of people who were hardly better than the rot of society itself.
Honestly speaking, I was the kind of person who believed that even if I could never kill anyone myself, criminals who committed truly vile crimes deserved to be dealt with.
And yet, even while thinking that, I couldn't shake the private conviction that a man who killed without hesitation was a dangerous one. That, too, was a difficult thing for a modern soul to swallow.
Still, I offered him an apology.
I wrote that I was sorry — sorry that a mere tenant had judged him so carelessly, and sorrier still that I hadn't trusted him. My conscience did ache, it's true. But there was also the simple unease of it: I had no idea where his actions might swing next.
— It is quite all right. Were I in your place, I would not have trusted a murderer either.
I let out a long sigh after reading his reply.
If only he weren't a murderer, I'd have thought him a perfectly decent man. How was I supposed to feel about someone who wrote such reasonable, level-headed letters — and then, apparently, went around turning people he didn't like into hamburger patties?
Turning his reply over in my mind, one question came blossoming up inside me.
No — honestly, it had been blooming ever since the moment I crushed Professor Prodi's hand.
I had felt a murderous intent that wasn't mine. Assimilated into that thick, heavy emotion, I had crushed a stranger's hand to paste. Yet Niger said that act hadn't been his.
I raised my hand halfway, hesitated for a moment — and then, in the end, wrote the note.
— Then tell me, Niger. What exactly are you hiding?