No, I'm Telling You, He's Copying Himself (3)
It had been a fairly leisurely affair.
Having arrived at the forest's exit well ahead of everyone else, Niger and I were each busy evaluating our students.
"Group 1, a two-point deduction for using abilities other than divinity."
"Hmm, Group 9, Swordsmanship student, one-point deduction. You really shouldn't be dropping your sword out there."
We recited the scores quietly. I rattled them off while poring over my Divinity students, and Elia, working in the opposite direction, graded the Swordsmanship students.
"Group 24, as far as I can tell, both of them have failed."
"Ah, yes. I agree on that one. And Group 47 gets one bonus point."
"Understood."
Perched on a conveniently sized boulder, I watched the students through the mana stones. Flipping quickly from one projected scene to the next, I noted each group's problems as they surfaced.
No students had made it through the forest yet — Niger and I were the only two sitting in the quiet clearing. The safety personnel, we were told, had been watching divinity flare into the sky for a while now, entering the Forest of Hallucinations to retrieve the students and deposit them near the entrance.
Bellatrix had long since abandoned her fallen groupmate and struck out on her own. Lutz, just as I'd expected, was confronting his past, and the other students were facing similar spectacles of their own.
Some were met with beasts, monsters, and insects; others came face to face with members of their own families. Perhaps that was the price of the discipline they'd endured within those houses since childhood.
Watching it all, I found myself thinking.
Honestly, I'd expected something family-related to surface for Bellatrix too. In the original story, she never even entered the Forest of Hallucinations. As a matter of course, she wouldn't have enrolled in the Divinity lectures in the first place — the Magic Department simply never sent its students into the forest for practicals. If I hadn't intervened, her contact with Niger should have been nearly nonexistent.
Which was to say, judging even by everything so far, Bellatrix had been twisted furthest from the original plot of the story.
That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, of course — it simply meant that while I could guess at the other major incidents and accidents to come, her movements had become impossible to predict. And so I'd been genuinely curious what her illusion would show me. As it turned out, all that appeared were a few pathetic bugs.
Even then, she didn't seem so much afraid of them as annoyed by them.
I counted it a blessing. If there was no sorrow or pain buried in her depths, then left as she was, she would be the first to walk out of that forest. So I switched off the mana stone tracking her and moved on to evaluating the rest of the students.
"Whew... Well, the evaluations are more or less done. As long as nothing unexpected happens, the scores will hold as they are. Worst case, we just hand out bonus points depending on who reaches the exit first?"
"Agreed. I've finished the rough pass on my students as well, so a brief rest seems in order."
Most of the grading was behind us. At this rate, perfect scores would go to Bellatrix and a handful of others, while the rest of the students would wrap up their midterms with respectable marks. Satisfied with the thought, I let out a long breath.
It was thanks to Elia's help that the midterm had come off without a hitch, so I wanted to at least say thank you.
"Haah... I owe this all to you, Professor Elia. I was at a complete loss, but thanks to you it looks like the midterms will end without incident."
"Mmm... Hm, yes...? Oh—ahem. Well, I'm truly glad to hear that. And I've been giving it some careful thought, and I've concluded that you simply cannot function without me, you know~"
She must have been feeling stiff, because she'd been in the middle of a long stretch when she answered me — frozen mid-motion, arms extended overhead with a long "Hmmmm—". The pose was rather cute, honestly.
"Haha, yes. A fair point. You've done nothing but help me since the day of the entrance ceremony."
"Right? You've noticed how much help you keep receiving, haven't you? Then perhaps, just this once, you could call me noona—"
Elia beamed triumphantly, clearly about to make that embarrassing request yet again. I readied myself to refuse before the words could leave her mouth —
And then it happened.
A beam of divinity shot skyward with a long, keening whistle, blazing as gorgeously as a firework at a festival.
"Huh? Professor Niger...?"
...
Except the light didn't stop at one. In an instant, more columns surged upward from every direction at once, merging into a single mass of radiance. Even at a glance, more than a dozen beams were hammering into the sky without a moment's pause.
I was on my feet immediately. I brushed the dirt from my priest's robes, tucked the mana stone into my coat, and spoke to Elia.
"I don't know what's going on yet, but I'm going in. I'll enter through Exit 8 — Professor Elia, head for Exit 2."
"Yes, sir. Be careful, just in case."
"Of course. You be careful as well, Professor Elia."
"I'm the swordsmanship professor — nothing out here is going to hurt me. You're the one who needs to be truly careful. And if it's an emergency, call for me."
"...Yes."
I nodded at her warning and started toward the exit. I stole one last glance at her retreating back as she raced ahead of me, then stepped into the forest.
I'm sorry to say this, but —
I am a serial killer.
It had been a perfectly manageable exam, all things considered. Walk through the forest, that was the whole of it — an illusion popping out now and then to obstruct you, nothing more.
Whether by luck or by chance, the illusions spun from the imagination of my randomly assigned groupmate had turned out to be nothing but beasts. And since I didn't particularly fear anything, I'd simply wrapped myself in a barrier and pressed on whenever the more repulsive ones — the insects — appeared.
There had been one problem, though, if I had to name it: my groupmate, mid-fight with one of the beasts, had tripped over a jutting rock and knocked themselves out cold. Once a student had fainted, they counted as eliminated — even after I cast a recovery spell on them, the light on their mana stone had gone dark. So I left them where they lay.
The safety personnel would come collect them soon enough. My only task was to reach the exit.
And so I walked on alone. The insects that crossed my path posed no real threat — I simply layered on that reflective barrier I'd used before and kept moving. At this rate, I would be the first out of the Forest of Hallucinations.
That's what I thought.
That's what I thought, right up until I was trampling through the dirt, ignoring the screams and shouts echoing around me.
Then a figure came toward me from directly ahead. Walking straight for me, in fact, footsteps clicking crisply against the earth with every stride.
There he was. Professor Niger, immaculate in his priest's robes, closing the distance with a gentle, kindly smile.
"Professor...? Why on earth are you coming into the forest now?"
"...Lady Bellatrix."
The professor didn't answer my question. He simply kept walking, hands folded together over hands that held nothing at all, smiling all the while.
That smile looked even more artificial than usual — and before I knew it, I had taken a step backward.
Something felt deeply, deeply wrong.
"Professor...?"
"The weather is lovely and the scenery is beautiful. So today, as every day, you need only continue diligently deploying your barriers, my lady."
Divinity began streaming off the professor as he spoke it. That pious-looking, faintly unnatural body took another step toward me.
Oh, damn it all. This was an illusion.
The power flowing off him resembled divinity, but something about it was subtly wrong. And then there was that insane suggestion he'd made during the midterm — coming up to me and proposing we train together. Granted, the professor really is unhinged enough to attempt something like that, but still. This is common sense we're talking about.
No — more to the point — what exactly am I supposed to do if this is my fear manifest?
I stumbled backward in horror, away from those words and that approaching figure. So this was what a fear-inducing illusion looked like. Everything before — the mere creepy-crawlies — must have been sheer good fortune.
"It is all for your sake, my lady. You might call it a professor's favoritism."
"S-stay back...!"
"Haha, no need to worry. We have all the time in the world."
Because that smile was genuinely, truly terrifying.
Lately something like familiarity had blinded me to it, but the truth was I had always recoiled from this man's lectures. And this situation was the result.
"Now then, shall we begin today's lesson as well—"
While he was still mid-sentence, I slapped a reinforcement spell over my body and bolted in the opposite direction. If he caught me, elimination was a certainty. I couldn't use magic, and no amount of divinity was going to let me hold my own against that lunatic of a professor.
"Haha, conditioning your body at the same time? A most commendable attitude."
"That's not what this is, so stop following me...!"
The professor — no, the professor's illusion — began chasing me down, laughing a light "haha" as though this were the merest amusement.
Don't come near me.
I am genuinely terrified, so don't come near me.
I ran with everything I had. The students I passed glanced at me with puzzled expressions — but the real trouble was how their faces froze, one by one, as they caught sight of what followed behind me.
And every time I dared a look back, familiar figures had multiplied.
The professor was copying himself.
I could see them — the 'professors,' all wearing that maddening smile, chattering away diligently about barriers, about recovery spells. The bewildered Swordsmanship students, caught off guard, blurred together in my mind with the Divinity students who, like me, had broken into a terror-stricken flight.
It was honestly terrifying.