Mistaken for a Black Mage
How was I supposed to explain this?
Should I tell him I knew the future?
That would mean explaining how I knew it in the first place.
What if I said I wasn’t the Serena he remembered?
…No.
That would only make me look more suspicious.
Terren already didn’t trust me. If he found out I knew the future on top of that, there was no telling what he might do.
In the worst case…
He might decide I was a variable that could change the future and try to eliminate me right here.
What do I do?
I ran through every possible excuse in my head, but nothing solid came to mind.
In the end I just stood there in silence. That was when Terren muttered under his breath.
“Because I failed to stop you people in time, the Academy suffered enormous damage…”
…Suffered?
Before I could even process the meaning of those words, Terren drew his sword.
“This time I won’t let you escape.”
The cold tip of the blade pointed straight at me.
“Black mage.”
What?
Black mage?
I blinked blankly, then belatedly looked down at the clothes I was wearing.
A black cloak.
The hood was pulled so low that my face was completely swallowed by shadow.
On top of that, my frame was already small, so the oversized cloak covered my entire body.
This place was far out on the Academy’s outskirts.
In the darkness without a single proper streetlamp, even my silver hair was hidden inside the cloak. To Terren’s eyes, I really must have looked like a suspicious black mage.
Thank god.
He still didn’t know I was Serena.
The realization almost drew a sigh of relief from me.
But only for a moment.
Shing.
Terren leveled his sword and lowered his stance.
Mana began to rise slowly along his body.
I looked down at myself with a stiff face.
The deep bruises still mottling my abdomen.
My left hand wrapped tight in a splint and bandages.
Even the injuries from a few days ago hadn’t fully healed.
Beat the Terren standing in front of me with this body?
Impossible.
Then run?
That chance was slim too.
Even in perfect condition he was far faster than me.
In a state where I couldn’t even cast magic properly, the second I turned my back he would catch me for sure.
The bigger problem was this:
Right now Terren didn’t see me as Serena. He saw a black mage.
During the sparring match we had at least been fellow Academy students.
This was different.
A black mage.
The enemy he believed had destroyed the Academy in the future.
Then…
Would he go even harder than he had in the spar?
My breath caught in my throat.
The sensation of his fist driving into my abdomen came flooding back.
The moment he grabbed my hair and forced my head up.
And then—
the feeling of my captured fingers being slowly bent.
Crack.
I could almost hear the sound again in my memory.
Without thinking I hid my splinted left hand deeper inside the cloak.
My heart started pounding hard.
It hadn’t even healed yet.
And again, here?
Worse than last time…?
I didn’t want to imagine it.
My fingertips went ice-cold.
This time it might not end with just one broken bone.
I couldn’t fight.
I couldn’t run.
Should I just surrender?
But this man wasn’t the type to let me go quietly just because I surrendered.
I had already confirmed that during the spar.
This time he might start actual torture while demanding to know where the rest of the black mages were.
No matter how hard I thought, no way out of the situation came to me.
In the end I let out a long, resigned breath.
That was the moment.
“Tweet! Tweet!”
A sharp whistle tore through the night air.
“You there! Students, what do you think you’re doing!”
A groundskeeper holding a patrol lantern came running toward us.
Terren’s gaze shifted for a second.
“I was just about to subdue a black ma—”
Now.
I spread my right hand inside the cloak.
Short-range spatial transfer magic I had never properly used even once.
The original Serena could have cast it without trouble, but the problem was that the hand I was using right now was my right one.
The magic circuit twisted roughly.
“Ngh…!”
Pain like my palm was burning spread through it.
Still, I couldn’t stop.
A faint magic circle unfolded in front of my eyes.
Crack!
“……!”
The instant Terren sensed something wrong and turned back—
I clenched my teeth and forced the mana through.
My vision warped.
And the next moment—
I vanished completely from that spot.
“A black mage, you say?”
The groundskeeper who arrived late looked around.
“……There’s no one here?”
Terren said nothing, simply staring at the empty place where I had stood.
“Haa… That was way too close.”
I slumped down behind a distant building and gulped for air.
By now Terren was probably stuck explaining himself to the groundskeeper.
Who would have thought a patrolling groundskeeper would show up at exactly that moment.
I had been lucky.
I didn’t even want to think about what would have happened if I’d been even a little later.
“Ow, ow…!”
The second the tension left me, pain surged up from my right hand.
I hurriedly lifted it to check.
“……What the hell is this.”
From the palm all the way to the fingertips it was swollen bright red.
When I tried moving my fingers even a little, a needle-like pain stabbed through the skin from the inside.
“Ngh…”
I bit my lip and clutched my wrist.
All because I had forced spatial transfer magic through an unfamiliar right hand.
Mana that should have flowed naturally through the circuit in my left hand had been dragged the opposite way by force; of course it wasn’t going to be fine.
Left hand in a splint.
Right hand swollen like a balloon.
Bruises still left on my abdomen.
I looked down at the mess I was for a moment and let out a hollow laugh.
“If this keeps up, am I actually going to end up breaking something for real…?”
The relief of having barely escaped didn’t last long.
I had saved my life by running from Terren, but I hadn’t confirmed a single thing about the magic pollution.
And there was one more line that kept bothering me.
Because I failed to stop you people in time, the Academy suffered enormous damage.
Suffered.
He had definitely said it that way.
I looked down at my red, swollen right hand and slowly narrowed my eyes.
Apparently…
the future Terren knew was far more of a disaster than the original novel I had read.
And if I thought back to the things he had said during the spar, Serena had played a pretty major role in that ruined future.
The problem was what came next.
If the future I knew and the future Terren knew kept overlapping, what would happen?
Every time I moved to stop an incident, Terren might already be there ahead of me.
Then the same thing as tonight would happen again.
I would try to stop the incident.
Terren would see me as a black mage or an enemy.
And I would run again.
“……This is a problem.”
The more I thought about it, the more my head hurt.
In the end I returned to the dorm without coming up with a single solution.
Click.
When I opened the door, the familiar scenery of my room came into view.
I threw off the heavy cloak and stood in front of the mirror.
There stood a silver-haired girl who looked like a complete wreck.
Her silver hair, mussed from running, was stuck to her white forehead and cheeks with sweat.
Her small lips were slightly parted from panting, and against her already pale skin only her two cheeks were flushed an unusually deep red.
Clear exhaustion showed in her vivid red eyes, yet even so the face in the mirror was absurdly beautiful.
I stared at that reflection for a long time.
At first, every time I looked at the girl in the mirror I thought of her as Serena.
Not me.
Just a character from a novel I had possessed.
Someone else’s body.
Someone else’s face.
Lately, though, it felt a little different.
The one touching the hair in the mirror was me.
The one wincing when it hurt was me.
The cheeks that flushed when I was embarrassed, the body that flinched first when I was scared—
all of it was me.
I slowly raised my right hand and pointed at the face reflected in the mirror.
“You can do this.”
I paused for a moment.
“I…”
It felt a little awkward.
I quietly looked into the red eyes in the mirror, then let out a small breath.
“No.”
Before I knew it the corner of my mouth had lifted faintly.
“Serena.”
Saying that name felt a little more natural than before.
“You can do this, Serena.”
All I had to do was resolve the incidents before Terren did.
And prove it one by one.
That I—no.
That Serena Ardel was different from the Serena of the future he knew.
I repeated the encouragement to myself over and over.
But despite the firm resolve, once I lay down on the bed sleep refused to come.
Every time I closed my eyes, the tip of the sword Terren had pointed at me tonight and the memories from the sparring ground took turns rising up.
In the end I spent the night tossing and turning under the covers.
…
And so the next day arrived.
“Young lady, you need to get up.”
Someone carefully shook my shoulder.
“Uuunh…”
My eyelids wouldn’t lift.
I was sure I hadn’t slept all night, yet the moment I actually fell asleep my body felt glued to the bed and heavy as lead.
“Just a little longer…”
“You can’t. You’ll be late for morning classes.”
“Just for today…”
“You fell asleep during class yesterday too.”
“……”
How did she know that?
I reluctantly opened one eye.
Beside the bed stood the same maid who had dressed me yesterday, looking troubled.
“What time is it…?”
“Thirty minutes until class starts.”
Sleep fled in an instant.
“Why are you only waking me now!”
“I already woke you three times!”
“……Really?”
“Yes.”
I shut my mouth for a moment.
Apparently this body really did love sleep.
I pushed my messy silver hair back and sat up on the bed.
Then immediately lay back down.
“Ah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My stomach hurts…”
After running around like that last night, of course it wouldn’t be fine.
The maid sighed.
I sighed along with her.
Today didn’t look like it was going to be easy either.