Something... Something's Off! (1)
In the Academy underground, a sealed-off zone long suspected of being a pagan hideout.
It had been cleared out sometime before, but word had reached them that the pagans were expanding their influence again.
Elena led an elite order of knights and shattered the final barrier along the outer wall where the pagans so often nested.
BOOM!
Dust billowed up in a thick cloud.
A groan rose from the darkness.
"...Huh? Eh? Over here??? There's a person!"
One of the knights shouted.
A man was huddled in the corner.
His clothes had been reduced to rags, and his face was covered in bruises.
He was no pagan.
Elena put away her holy artifact and carefully approached.
"Are you all right?"
The man looked up at Elena with hazy eyes.
And in that instant, his expression crumbled.
"Aaaah!! Finally—finally you've come......!"
The man clutched at the hem of Elena's robes.
His hands were trembling.
"Did Lord Cayen send you? To rescue me? I knew I could count on him!"
"What...? We... No, wait? Cayen?"
Elena's brows twitched.
"Why would that man's name come up here?"
Confusion flickered across the man's face.
"You didn't know? I'm his informant. Contact cut off about two weeks ago, so I've been tracking the pagans' movements on my own. They caught me, tortured me brutally, and I escaped when I saw my chance..."
"Clean this place up at once! This man will be taken into custody by the Holy Nation!"
Elena hastily led him away.
Temporary tent.
Elena sat the merchant across from her and folded her arms.
"Explain in detail. Exactly what did Cayen order you to do?"
The merchant swallowed dryly.
"It wasn't orders... Actually... we were the ones who asked him. There was intelligence that pagans were infiltrating the Academy underground, but our merchant guild alone couldn't handle it."
"And then?"
"Lord Cayen dug into his own pocket every month to keep our information network running. Pagan spy lists, smuggling routes, weak points in the barriers—he investigated everything himself and handed it all over."
Elena's fingertips trembled faintly.
"Lies... That man couldn't possibly..."
"It's not a lie, Saintess."
The merchant raised his voice.
"Over the past two years, who do you think is the reason the Academy has gotten through without a single major incident? Among us bottom-rung informants, everyone knows. Without the 'bastard of Kiros,' this place would have been breached several times already."
Elena couldn't say a word.
She simply returned to the dormitory in a daze.
On the road back to the knights' barracks, Elena's mind was a tangled mess.
A traitor was the one stopping the pagans?
It made no sense.
The man who'd been interrogated on charges of dark magic had actually been the shadow protecting the Academy.
No—wait.
It suddenly came to her.
The intelligence that had cut off after Cayen disappeared.
The collapsed underground barriers.
The spies whose movements had become impossible to track.
Everything lined up exactly with the moment he vanished.
Elena stopped walking.
A corner of her chest went cold.
"...It can't be... No... It can't be... Right... Surely not."
A doubt she had never once considered began to twist something loose in her mind for the first time.
Could we have been completely wrong about something?