Chapter 15
Chapter 15
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 15
Chapter Title: The Shadow of Something (2)
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I spent another sleepless night wide awake.
My eyes felt gritty, like sand had gotten into them, after being up for nearly sixty hours straight, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I kept chasing away the sleep that threatened to overtake me, driven by an irrational conviction that something terrible would happen if I drifted off.
‘The culprit hasn’t been caught yet. Considering I was the original target….’
In fact, being alone like this could be extremely dangerous in itself.
But I couldn’t very well ask Shirley or Judith, who were girls, to let me crash in their dorm.
And it went without saying that I couldn’t go to Theodore’s dorm, a guy I’d only really spoken to for the first time despite feeling like we’d spent a long time together.
‘I don’t remember doing anything to earn that much hatred, enough to frame me for murder.’
That said, I wasn’t completely without clues.
Ever since enrollment, I’d been subjected to persistent, inexplicable harassment that had stayed at the level of mere pranks until now—but this time was different.
‘Did they suddenly cross the line? Or is this someone entirely different?’
No matter how much I racked my brain alone, I wouldn’t come up with answers.
I leaned deeply back in the chair facing the window and glared at the moonlight pouring in.
The pale, bluish moon wavered like a ghost, blending with my exhaustion.
*Tap-tap.*
At that moment, something knocked on the window.
Upperclassmen used the third-floor dorms, so the chances of it being a passerby accidentally bumping the window were slim.
Before a second acorn could tap the glass, I quickly opened the window and looked down.
“Arthur.”
I hadn’t thought he was sneaking in secretly, but the moment I called his name aloud, Arthur frowned, clearly flustered.
“I’m coming up.”
“…Through the window?”
“Step back.”
Even though this was my room, it seemed I had no say in whether to let a guest in.
I wished both Shirley and Arthur would remember that I was their senior….
Would Judith and Theodore start visiting my room like this in the future too?
As I had that thought, a *thud* sounded, and a black silhouette appeared at the windowsill, its back to the moonlight.
“The front door’s unlocked. Do they lock the Thorn Crown House dorm wing at dawn?”
“After what happened just a few hours ago, coming in through the front door would be foolish, wouldn’t it?”
I wanted to argue otherwise, but he was right.
I let out a small sigh of admiration at Arthur’s silent, cat-like movements as he climbed through the window, silently vowing not to mess with him when Judith wasn’t around unless there was a good reason.
“But you’re not stopping me.”
“Me? From coming in?”
“Yeah. You seemed to be avoiding me until morning.”
So I couldn’t fool Arthur’s eyes after all.
Instead of forcing a smile to hide my anxiety, I nodded.
“Well, yeah. I just finally became convinced you wouldn’t kill me.”
It was a serious statement on my part. Arthur neither affirmed nor denied it, simply gazing down at me in silence.
I was pretty tall myself, but since he was already looking down at me, I figured he’d probably grow close to two meters in the future.
“You thought I might kill you, Senior, until then?”
“Let’s stop probing each other. Things are a bit rough for me right now.”
Right now, I wasn’t in my right mind from the headache caused by sleep deprivation.
As someone who barely had the stamina of an ordinary person, staying awake for over four days was beyond my limit.
The reason I was clinging to consciousness so desperately was because of Shirley’s warning.
“I should’ve come tomorrow.”
“It’s fine.”
I offered Arthur the chair, then flopped down in the one opposite him.
My eyes still stung and my head throbbed, but having someone there was better for keeping my mind sharp than being completely alone.
“You’re here to ask questions, right? About how much I’ve figured out.”
“……Your vibe has changed a lot.”
“Ah…, which one’s the real me? Guess right and get a prize…. Just kidding.”
I couldn’t seem to break the habit of making jokes to feign nonchalance.
To shake off the fatigue somehow, I pressed the back of my neck against the chair’s backrest, massaging it, then spoke again.
“The reason you found me suspicious? It’s this.”
I pulled out the forged handwritten letter I’d gotten from Theodore and handed it to Arthur.
He read the contents and snorted.
“It’s crude. If it’s because my hobby is copying manuscripts—”
“The back.”
He didn’t get mad even though I cut him off.
He just checked the back as I said, his expression puzzled.
“I wanted to buy time until the bloodstain dried completely. It’s not perfect, but once the paper dries out, it shows.”
Only then did Arthur seem to grasp my point.
“It looks like the same red at first glance, but the brightness and saturation are different, right? Where the ink mixed.”
The letter’s contents were exactly as Theodore had given them to me.
But the handprint on the back, from bloody hands, was different now.
Some parts were bright and vivid, others had turned dark crimson or taken on a faint orange tint.
Of course. That stain was the result of two different liquids mixing.
“A high-end product that colors vividly even in small amounts and doesn’t bleed much with moisture. Moonlight Magic Workshop’s limited-edition ink, [My Scarlet]. Right?”
Instead of unbuttoning my shirt to create an unnecessarily tense atmosphere, I patted my chest.
“This is written with the same stuff.”
Only then did Arthur finally react.
He quietly folded the letter back to its original form, returned it to me, and crossed his legs as he sat.
“I don’t know if the murder happened first or the magic circle was drawn first. But when you rummaged through the holster on his chest to check it, the ink must’ve gotten on you.”
“I didn’t write this letter.”
“I know. I’ve seen the books you copy. Impressive skill. Anyway, that’s not what I’m curious about. I just want to know why you were there and what you saw.”
“Ha.”
Arthur, who’d tried to deflect for a moment, ended up chuckling dryly.
It wasn’t a pleasant laugh, of course.
With his hands neatly placed on his crossed leg, Arthur spoke without looking at me.
“Theodore has sleepwalking.”
“…Huh?”
“A severe case that developed rapidly in a short time.”
The unexpected answer chased away my drowsiness for a brief moment.
I closed the slightly open window tight and pulled my chair closer to Arthur.
“Tell me more.”
Severe sleepwalking that developed rapidly in a short time, and the recent dreams that killed people.
There might be a connection.
“The full-blown symptoms started about four days ago, but there were signs before that.”
“…….”
Theodore’s sleepwalking had begun exactly on the day I started having those strange dreams.
“Things like sitting up in his sleep or mumbling about forgetting something.”
With each detail Arthur shared, the subtle ‘strange phenomena’ happening to me and Theodore aligned more and more.
—Arma Cruise got in a bind because Theodore White happened to lose his memory. Not Theodore’s fault, though.
Shirley’s words, the four-day timeline, and the anomaly with Theodore.
Arthur’s explanation might finally clarify the strange things happening to me.
Whether he knew my thoughts or not, Arthur paused briefly before continuing.
“If he just paces around his room, it’s no big deal. But using magic in his sleep? That’s trouble.”
“For the Crown of Thorns Class, yeah.”
“Theodore’s specialty, black magic, especially affects the caster’s mind… So I thought he might cause an incident during a sleepwalking episode.”
“That’s why you followed Theodore? But the timing doesn’t match. You arrived before him.”
I was sure of it because of the evidence left on the altar.
I laid out my deductions about the situation at the time.
“When I woke up at the altar, my whole body hurt and my head was pounding so bad I didn’t notice anything else. But later, washing up in your room, I realized something.”
In my blood-soaked panic, I hadn’t noticed, but when I splashed water on myself to clean up, I felt a burning pain near my chest—right by my heart.
A bit of greasiness like a burn scar, and beneath it, a magic circle.
There was only one conclusion I could draw from that.
“You must’ve tilted the candlestick in the dark to check the magic circle on my chest and dropped some wax. You were panicked, uncharacteristically.”
“With just candle wax?”
“It was white wax made from whale oil. The worship hall uses yellow beeswax candles, so it was distinguishable.”
“That was… a sloppy mistake.”
Now that the story had progressed this far, Arthur no longer seemed hesitant.
“Theodore isn’t usually that careless, but he was pretty rattled when he got a letter with Arma Cruise’s name on it.”
“Me and Theodore hadn’t exchanged a single word before that, so yeah.”
“And even someone without a copying hobby could tell that letter was sloppily done.”
It made sense that Arthur Usher, who’d quickly skimmed the letter’s contents during Theodore’s flustered moment, would show up at the worship hall on the night of the incident.
Even if it was forged, something was clearly targeting Theodore.
“So, you confirmed the culprit’s identity and that’s why you panicked?”
“No. I didn’t even get a look at the culprit’s face. At first, I just wanted to see the face of the sloppy guy who sent the fake letter, but then I sensed mana.”
“…Theodore’s?”
“Yeah. But it’s weird. We’re under a restriction that prevents private magic use, yet at that moment, Theodore drew and activated the magic circle without any restriction interfering.”
“There’s only one possibility.”
Arthur nodded at my response.
No cadet in the Academy could ever use magic for personal reasons.
Whether lighting a match or swatting a bug in the house.
We were under strict restriction controls, with tracking spells placed throughout the Academy to block private magic use entirely.
But there was one way to bypass it.
“If the magic was used outside the Academy.”
The problem was, I hadn’t set foot outside the Academy even once since this time last year.