Chapter 104
Chapter 104
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 104
Chapter Title: What Happens on That Island (1)
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Despite my question, Makina just stared up at the sky and muttered to herself.
“Even putting aside whether it’s actually possible… An unknown power that can’t be grasped, realized, or opposed. This is a first for me.”
“Makina, the fact that you tried to attack me—”
“Found Arma Cruise!”
As I reached out to grab Makina, who was hurrying ahead, a familiar voice called from afar.
It took Shirley just a couple of steps to close the distance.
“Huh, Shirley? Wait—”
“Judith senior! I caught Arma Cruise! Oh, and Makina Christie’s here too!”
No sooner had Shirley shouted at the top of her lungs than I began to sense people approaching us.
“Hold her just like that. Makina, do as you please.”
“Then I’ll head in first. Come after you’ve sorted things out.”
“Woof woof!”
“No, I still have things to say—why’d you bring Cookie?”
This was a pretty important moment right now, wasn’t it?
I got crushed like a sandwich between Cookie charging at full speed with a body slam and Shirley, who absolutely refused to let go of my arm.
Judith, who appeared next, looked at the three of us with an utterly exhausted expression, then jerked her chin toward the main Black Lily Hall building where the student council room was.
‘She’s scary…’
Even my mother couldn’t control my actions, yet Judith managed it with a single chin flick.
I grabbed Cookie’s leash, which was darting between my legs, and was more or less dragged along toward the student council room.
.
.
.
‘Can I ask why she’s so mad?’
“Hoo.”
‘Should I just stay quiet?’
“Whine—”
‘I’ll stay quiet.’
Sensing the ominous atmosphere, Cookie tucked his tail and followed behind me, glancing around nervously.
If even a beast has instincts, there was no way I, a human, could ignore it…
“Judith senior, I’ll go tell Arthur Usher and Theo to stop looking.”
“Ah, yeah. Thanks.”
I shot her a pleading look for rescue from the heavy mood, but Shirley stuck out her tongue and scampered off.
Now it was just Judith and me, walking through the maze garden path toward Black Lily Hall.
Makina, in her condition—and barefoot at that—had gone far ahead; not a single hair of hers was visible.
“Judith.”
In the end, I was the first to break the silence.
Judith let out a short sigh. Then she kept slowing her pace and reached out her hand as if asking for Cookie’s leash.
‘Sorry, Cookie.’
I quickly decided to do as Judith wanted.
Cookie scratched at my shoes a few times before starting to walk along as Judith led him.
“Judith, were you worried?”
“Worried? Yeah.”
The conversation didn’t continue.
She was so angry she wouldn’t even glance back, so the only way to meet her eyes was for me to widen my stride.
“I’m sorry for disappearing without a word. I just had this feeling I needed to hurry—”
“Your judgment was right. I’m not planning to criticize you for that.”
“……”
Judith fell silent, as if organizing her thoughts.
For several seconds after, white breaths appeared and vanished repeatedly.
“If you’d left late and found her late, Makina Christie would be dead. Barefoot with wet hair in the middle of this winter—it’s obvious just from her appearance.”
“…Your reasoning’s probably spot on. I found her collapsed with hypothermia.”
“You did well. Since she owes you now.”
Judith seemed hurt, so I was being cautious, but the talk stayed superficial.
I grabbed Judith’s arm as she walked ahead.
She pretended not to notice for a couple of steps, then slowly stopped.
“Judith.”
“You can’t objectively recognize your own condition, can you?”
It was a sharp remark.
Over the past few weeks—no, months—my bizarre cycles of awakening and semi-awakening had indeed been fueling my impulsive decisions.
“I—”
“The fact that your actions are the best choices available is the worst part. You look terribly confused and crushed by pressure.”
My mouth went dry.
Judith’s assessment was spot on.
I was always burdened by pressure, barely sleeping night after night, sometimes becoming hysterical.
The worst part was that I was somehow pushing forward anyway.
Choices too hard to abandon yet too despairing to continue kept chaining together.
Even when resting, the back of my mind was forever occupied with worries about the guardian angel, Yvonne’s presence, and the future where everyone here dies.
“Sleep deprivation, nervous tension, tendency toward self-isolation, sporadic and sudden silences. It could just be someone crossing a lonely, harsh period… but it could be something else too. Know what they call it back home?”
Judith’s homeland, Kirja, was a federal nation that had rapidly industrialized, unlike the holy kingdom of Aegis, built on magical industry.
It was so far from the Titan Duchy that cultural exchange was rare, leaving me unable to answer her question.
Judith smirked crookedly, as if she’d expected that, and said,
“They say you’ve fallen for the devil’s temptation.”
“—The devil…”
Her answer finally made me realize how accurately she’d reasoned out my situation.
Perhaps—that’s why its manifestation had accelerated? Because Judith got so close to the truth?
Everything felt half-baked.
Even as I deliberately hid the truth, I couldn’t stop us all from heading toward death.
“I know you’re caught in a very tricky and deadly trap. And that I shouldn’t interfere until you find a way out yourself. So at least be cooperative.”
“Judith—yeah. Got it.”
I started to add excuses but ended up closing my mouth.
Now Judith and I were walking side by side.
We hadn’t said anything, but it seemed she’d decided the same.
Judith no longer ignored me, and Cookie, who’d had his tail tucked, was back to his curious, troublemaking self, zigzagging along.
“Now explain honestly.”
“You remember when Makina put that resonance bracelet on me before?”
I explained everything in sequence, starting from the moment I found the resonance bracelet to track Makina.
Pulling her out of the sealed well, then her admitting she’d tried to attack me but suffered a rebound—I told Judith all of it, and she responded.
“But what exactly was the rebound from? You and Makina have never even made contact.”
“Contact… we have.”
I explained to Judith about the incident at dawn that only she and I knew of.
“…Probably then.”
My head was a mess.
I’d been trapped in a horrific nightmare, and Makina’s help, however brief, had pulled me out.
Emotionally vulnerable at the time, I’d been deeply touched by that helping hand.
But in reality, that gesture wasn’t kindness—it was her holding a knife to my throat?
It was the perfect situation to turn someone into a bitter pessimist overnight.
“I don’t want to believe it.”
“Makina said it herself, right? Seems like there’s no other explanation.”
“I’m not denying it. So the guardian angel overdefended against Makina, whose power is its natural opposite.”
“She didn’t even actually harm me, yet it left her in that deathly state. Confirms it.”
We looked at each other’s faces.
Then, with lips firmly shut, we entered the main Black Lily Hall building.
***
“Hoo—”
“That’s one hell of a story.”
Late at night, in a corner of the maze garden.
Inspector Julia Anne Smith of the Aegis Academy and Detective Henry Anders were there.
Unlike the cadets who could strut openly through the garden, they were hiding, wearing magic tools to suppress their presence, in order to uncover the royal academy’s dirty secrets.
“Devil? Rebound? Death throes? I’m losing it. What the hell do those kids think school is?”
It wasn’t a story ordinary humans, let alone non-mages, could handle.
The weird part was how they’d pierced the surveillance net of Judith Taylor, the academy’s top elite, and overheard the whole thing—even with the best magic tools…
But weird stuff had piled up long before, so Inspector Julia brushed off her pants and stood.
She wanted a smoke, but lighting up here would alert the sharp-eyed staff, who’d come chasing with fire in their eyes.
“Henry. Let’s get out of here first.”
“Yes? Didn’t you want to investigate the chapel?”
“We’ve investigated enough. We need to leave this island as soon as possible.”
“Why? You’re flipping your stance like a pancake all of a sudden. That’s not like you, Inspector—”
“Don’t you get it? This is beyond what we can handle.”
Inspector Julia clutched and released the cigarette pack in her pocket, muttering anxiously.
“I thought the island itself had a gloomy, twisted vibe, but this is… Hoo, let’s launch the boat first.”
“At this hour?”
“Yeah, let’s get out ASAP.”
“Inspector— no captain will dock at Neptune Harbor in the pitch-black dead of night.”
“Shut up and follow!”
“Inspector…”
Henry was baffled by the inspector’s sudden change.
‘She’s like a different person.’
Julia, who’d instantly turned fidgety and irritable, pulled a cigarette from her pocket—not to light it, but chewed on the filter of an already dead stub.
Watching her like that sent chills up Detective Henry’s spine.
‘Outsider’s disease.’
It was just a term he’d overheard from old Neptune Harbor fishermen muttering indifferently, but it stuck hard in Henry’s mind.
Sometimes Hazard Island locals would turn violently mad or babble in terror with crazed expressions—classic lunatic behavior.
Most islanders now were young cadets from the mainland, so few remembered those tales.
“Damn! There are a thousand kids here not even weaned off mother’s milk. How can we just watch this? It’s insane…… This can’t go on.”
Detective Henry looked up at the sky, thick with clouds blotting even the moonlight.
Everything follows its natural course.
Inspector Julia Anne Smith didn’t know that.
It was when Inspector Julia, practically frothing, launched a small fishing boat without even packing that Detective Henry realized what “natural course” meant—on a pitch-black night sea without a sliver of moonlight.
-Splash!
“H-Henry, why are you…”
Henry chose a simple, sure method. He shoved the inspector ahead of him straight into the water.
Inspector Julia Anne Smith turned at the sensation, reading a sunken, religious zeal in his gleaming eyes—pure Neptune native, like pond muck—despite no light.
Julia was a strong swimmer even in harsh conditions (which got her revenge-posted to this godforsaken port with no connections), and Henry knew a little onboard mutiny like this wouldn’t kill her. But murder wasn’t his goal.
As she fell into the water from Henry’s push, Julia somehow realized she was starting to forget things about Hazard Island, one by one.
‘My investigation notes! Pen! Paper! Nothing! I came all this way without a single recordable thing…?’
With Henry’s help climbing back aboard, Julia felt oddly serene, playing a silly prank by stuffing her ice-cold hands into Henry’s collar as they headed to Neptune. The Hazard Island investigation would be remembered in his mind as just four words: “No anomalies.”