“Stay quiet. We will discuss your punishment again this evening.”
SLAM!
I let out a sigh of relief as the knight slammed the door shut. If we had been taken immediately, we wouldn’t even have a chance to prove our innocence.
Surprisingly, the reason we were still here was thanks to the Dean’s help.
The strong-looking woman with glasses was an inspector from the royal palace, Heini Rosales.
She intended to arrest us on charges of attempting to steal the late king’s treasure, but the Dean intervened.
She argued that there was no solid evidence that we stole anything, and simply being at the location wasn’t enough to take the students.
After back and forth exchanges, Heini Rosales decided to search the Academy for the day to confirm her suspicions.
“No way, are they seriously going to arrest us without a proper search?”
It was absurd, but it seemed the testimonies from the scene might be the reason.
Since there were four of us, we had to spend the day together in the spacious reception room. I cleared my throat to gather the attention of the others.
“Everyone come here, let’s discuss what happened yesterday.”
We definitely caught the culprit.
I remembered using the Cockatrice’s witchcraft to subdue the culprit, but…
“Who was the culprit again?”
Strangely enough, my memory was foggy, and I couldn’t recall who it was.
It wasn’t just me; Rin, Ares, and Hayun also couldn’t remember the culprit, despite recalling the situation clearly.
Even after sorting through the events one by one, nothing came to mind.
“It must be because of some magical intervention…”
“Yeah, that makes sense.”
Nodding in agreement with Rin’s insight, I took a breath and extended my index and middle fingers.
“There are two weird things about this situation.”
[Everyone’s memories of last night’s incident at the Academy are distorted.]
[We retain the memory of the incident itself, but the memory of the culprit has vanished.]
“Now that I think about it, we’ve lost our memories of the culprit, yet the situation is crystal clear.”
“Right! There were professors who saw us stealing, so it means the memory itself was altered.”
Agreeing, Hayun and Rin nodded, while Ares looked at me with a frown, as if something was bothering him.
‘What’s up with him?’
He seemed uncomfortable, but I decided to ignore it for now.
“There are several contradictions regarding the situation, which makes it easy to validate. For example, if they saw us stealing, they should’ve arrested us immediately instead of letting us sleep in the dormitory.”
“True. If they saw us stealing, arresting us should’ve been a priority.”
Hayun’s expression brightened a bit at that.
“The important question is why our memories were left intact…”
I had no clue about this part, and as I was pondering, Rin raised her hand.
“That might be due to my magic.”
“Huh?”
“Last night, I cast a spell on you to help you sleep. It actually nudged a little into memory and mind.”
I felt like Rin’s magic was scarier than I thought, but she waved her hands in bewilderment.
“B-but I’ve never failed before! I’ve used it a lot, as I said then.”
“Okay, just keep talking.”
“Ahem, so it seems my magic entangled with the memory-altering magic last night, leading to it being canceled out for us.”
“But doesn’t that sound weird? We lost the memory of the culprit, but the incident itself remained distorted?”
When I questioned her, Rin shook her head.
“That’s because…”
At that moment, the Dean entered through the door.
With an urgent expression, she rushed over to us and said, “There are no records or memories about the missing student you mentioned.”
“Excuse me?”
Not only did they erase our memories of the culprit, but it seemed they wiped the memories and records of the culprit from the entire student body of the Academy.
At this rate, we were pointing fingers at a person who didn’t even exist.
Then Rin added from the side, “That’s it! The mage must have activated their magic twice. The first time was to distort people’s memories that night. That was canceled by my magic, but the second time, erasing the culprit’s memory, hit us directly.”
If that’s the case, then the phenomenon made sense, but that still didn’t give us any answers.
Initially, it was rare for a mage to be able to use magic on the entire Academy.
As we shifted our discussion to mages, the Dean lightly prodded my side and asked.
“You really didn’t steal anything, did you?”
“Ha, well. How do you remember yesterday’s events?”
With a rather uneasy expression, the Dean began to recall her memories.
“The magical alarm rang. The building next to the large tree where you were hiding actually concealed the Academy’s underground storage. Then I came out and was told that the guards had captured you…”
“And you let us sleep in the dorm after that? If we were caught stealing, where’s the treasure we allegedly stole?”
“…Huh?”
As she began to piece the situation together, the Dean wore a look of confusion, and it instilled another dose of confidence in us.
“I was worried our memories were incorrect, but it seems that we’re right. Their memories are riddled with contradictions.”
That didn’t immediately provide a solution, though.
With all memories erased, we had no way to identify the culprit.
The heated debate about the memory-altering magic continued between the Dean and Rin, while Hayun watched the two with vacant eyes, wiggling her fingers.
Ares discreetly called me to a corner of the reception room.
“What’s up?”
Given that he hadn’t looked happy for a while, I doubted it was a pleasant topic.
‘It’s been ages since we last talked like this.’
“I heard from earlier, why didn’t you save Rin immediately?”
“…What?”
His eyes blazed with the fervor of a paladin eliminating evil, filled with determination.
“From what I gathered, even if Rin hadn’t suffered, you could have saved her still.”
“True.”
I said it as if it was no big deal, which made Ares raise his voice even more.
“Then why did Rin have to endure such pain?!”
“…”
The eyes of the nearby girls shifted our way, seemingly surprised by the sudden confrontation. I was racking my brain to devise a reasonable excuse.
How could I explain that in my past life, Rin became the owner of an army that massacred everyone, and I wanted to see if awakening was triggered by proximity to death?
‘How do I put this?’
But it seemed Ares had an ability to hear my thoughts and grabbed me by the collar, snarling.
“Speak clearly, Daniel McLean. If you blabber incorrectly, you’ll die by my hand before the knights can take you!”
Ares bared his killing intent toward me. Initially, I had no clue how to explain things to an oblivious kid, but with him reacting this strongly, it was hard to stay quiet.
As I strained his grip, Ares frowned and eventually released me.
“Shut up if you don’t know anything.”
“What?”
The continent had seen the deaths of all its inhabitants.
Even I, who lived in the forest, had heard the truth of that rumor when I visited a nearby village.
It was under siege by the army and had already been subjected to a massacre.
A mother died while shielding her child. But then the dead mother revived and killed her child by ripping out their tongue.
And the child came back to life again, now running off to gouge the eyes of their friends.
Death knights laughed while hunting down people who were desperately trying to escape.
Spears had faces impaled on them, like skewered apples.
“Why didn’t you do anything while they were dying? Why did you let that happen? Because it was necessary.”
Rin was my precious childhood friend and a faded first love.
Back then, I didn’t know it, but she had written letters to her older sister and cleared up misunderstandings with her friends to protect me when I was expelled.
In my past life, she had killed both me and Eris, and that still lingered as a trauma for me, but I couldn’t blame Rin for crimes from a time that was separate from the present.
Nevertheless, I did know.
That lovely, kind girl could create some horrific scenes in the future.
My choices held the fate of the continent.
That’s why I had to experiment with Rin to see if it was true.
This wasn’t solely for my sake, but also for Rin’s.
If I could understand the reason why she became the owner of the army, and save her, it would prevent the continent’s massacre, and she could then lead a normal life as well.
If that didn’t happen…
It would be only natural to kill her.
This wasn’t a matter judged by my emotions, nor should it be.
Thus, I felt a bit scared.
I had been seeing glimpses of that certain atmosphere in her lately.
‘What if the reason Rin changed is not external influence but internal issues?’
Initially, I thought it highly likely that some external force affected Rin.
For example, curses, brainwashing, infections, etc.
That’s because Rin back then bore little resemblance to the Rin I knew, and when she attempted to kill me, she was in tears.
But last night, when she ambushed me, I sensed a similar aura as back then.
If that were the true nature that Rin was hiding?
Sadly, if that were the case, I would have no choice but to kill her then.
If that truly is her nature, it would eventually surface.
I can’t remain at her side forever, protecting her from turning dark.
Of course, this was merely a matter of probabilities.
Even if she had that instinct, she could still choose not to darken.
However, regardless of the likelihood, if there’s even a chance she could slaughter everyone on the continent, I firmly believed that she should be eliminated.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Ares asked, seeing my struggle while I had much I wanted to say. But Rin and Hayun jumped in to separate us.
“Stop! Daniel must have a reason.”
“Right, I’m fine.”
“…”
My heart ached as I watched Rin force a smile, trying to calm me down. Still, my chest hurt with guilt, but I turned my gaze away.
“Okay, fighting is fine, but it’s not the time for that.”
Once the Dean stepped in, Ares nodded in understanding, and I also silently sought ways to resolve the situation.
“If we figure out the existence of that student we can’t remember, we can resolve this.”
We just needed to uncover what had happened to the suddenly vanished student. Then the knights and inspector would also acknowledge that some magical intervention took place.
“But was the student for real?”
Hayun tilted her head with a question, and I had no definite answer. In fact, I was skeptical whether the culprit was a student.
Just then, Rin responded, “The student is real. I feel like I knew them well.”
“Really, you were friends?”
Rin was friends—a friend?
“Wait a minute…”
Just as something clicked in my mind, I quickly gazed at the Dean, but the answer had already formed inside me before she could respond.
“Damn it.”
I remembered how I had kicked away the thread leading to the solution from my past self.
That bitter emotion swirled around my tongue, when Rin suddenly widened her eyes and nodded excitedly.
“I know! They’re still here!”
“…What?”
What on earth is she talking about? At that moment, as if realizing I had come to that conclusion, Rin quietly whispered in my ear.
“I told the Dean not to discard the footage of the surveillance on me.”
“…!”
I was shocked at how she knew that, but she merely smiled brightly and said nothing more.
Anyway, setting that aside.
I approached the Dean and whispered quietly, “The surveillance footage of Rin contains the culprit.”
If they were friends with Rin, they likely hung out with her.
We had the recordings of Rin’s actions over the past few days at the Academy.
