In my last life, I used to find it almost funny — the fact that awareness, no matter how many threads of thought a mind manages to run at once, is always bound inside some kind of wall. Multi-threading a mind doesn't get you past that wall. It just lets you pace faster inside the same cell.
The implication runs wider than most people give it credit for, too. It means emotion and cognition are every bit as isolated as any other variable, reaction, or record sitting in some dusty archive. Discrete. Contained. Unable to reach past their own borders no matter how badly they want to.
I know this is common sense to some. But knowing a thing and living through it are not the same animal, no matter how closely related their names sound. And even living through it comes in degrees.
I woke with a start that morning — not from any nightmare, just the ordinary, unglamorous violence of consciousness reasserting itself over sleep — and got ready the way I always did: efficient, unremarkable, forgettable. Then I set out for the academy.
It wasn't like every other day, though.
On the road, people looked at me. Some with something like respect. Some with something closer to suspicion, carefully folded under polite expressions that didn't quite hold. Both kinds of looks reminded me of Ravian, and both left behind the same airless, suffocating feeling under my ribs.
Well.
I'd already turned the matter of Ravian's case over in my head so many times I'd worn a groove into it, and the conclusion — however little I liked it — held steady: I didn't want to play the righteous crusader. Not yet.
The reasons, in order: I didn't have enough information. I didn't have proof. And I couldn't see a path forward that didn't end with me becoming extremely useful to exactly the people I wanted to hurt. If I marched in on conviction alone, I wouldn't topple anything — I'd just hand them a weapon with my face stamped on the hilt. Worse, I'd drag the people I actually wanted to protect straight into the blast radius.
I did, technically, possess enough raw force to erase this kingdom from the map, assuming my read on its overall military strength was accurate. But raw force wasn't a solution. It was just a bigger, stupider hammer for a problem that needed a key.
Ahh. Damn it.
I passed the fountain on my way and, once again, didn't sit down at it. I thought that, walking past.
Still walking, still thinking, I reached the academy's entrance. My eyes drifted, unbidden, to the spot where Ravian used to feed the cat. And there it was — the same cat, sitting exactly there, licking its paw and rubbing its own ear against its shoulder, as if it were waiting for someone.
I watched it for a second. Maybe two. Then I crossed to the nearby stall, bought a fish, and set it down in front of the cat.
At first, it didn't touch the food. It sniffed my hand instead, cautious, testing, before finally setting its teeth lightly against my fingers. Then it rubbed itself against my leg, once, twice — and only after that ritual did it deign to eat.
Was that some kind of ritual? Or were you just looking for Ravian in me?
Either way, I'd done my part for the morning.
As I straightened up, a wagon rolled to a stop nearby — Reinhardt's. He stepped down from it, and behind him—
Shit. His brother's with him.
I decided, with the speed of a man who has made many worse decisions faster, that I hadn't seen either of them. I turned and started walking briskly toward the academy gates.
"A message from Ju—!" Valdrik's voice rang out behind me, a scroll already unrolling in his hand.
I stopped. Turned. Waved back at them with all the enthusiasm of someone flagged down by a tax collector.
Reinhardt jogged up first and lifted my bag straight off my shoulder before I could protest. "Good morning," he said.
"Goo—" I started.
"Good morning, Katsuhito-kun." Valdrik cut smoothly across me, his smile stretched thin and polite, the kind of smile that had clearly been practiced in a mirror until it looked almost natural. "This is an invitation letter. From Julian-sama." He held it out.
"By the way, can I—"
"I really do hope you'll be able to come." Valdrik said it like he already knew exactly what I'd been about to ask, and had decided to answer a question I hadn't finished voicing. "Well then. I'll take my leave. Have a good day."
And with that, he turned his wagon and left, taking his forced smile with him.
I tucked the letter into my bag and started walking with Reinhardt at my side.
A small smile found its way onto my face despite everything.
Maybe this leads somewhere,
I thought,
in this wish of mine to understand a little more of this world.
Once inside the academy gates, eyes turned toward me the way they always did now. I ignored them and walked straight for the classroom.
Nuisance.
Marcus was waving at me from across the room the moment I stepped in, grinning like he hadn't seen daylight in a week. It had, admittedly, been a while since I'd had the chance to actually talk to him.
"Where should I sit, Katsuhito?" Reinhardt asked as I settled into my seat.
"Well, you can sit wherev—" My gaze snagged on the empty seat beside me. Ravian's seat.
A beat.
"You can sit here," I said, gesturing to it.
Reinhardt made a small sound of acknowledgment and sat. The way he settled into that chair — spine straight, presence heavy — was intimidating enough that the poor student sitting in front of him visibly stiffened.
I glanced around the room. No sign of Shirohana or her servant. Absent, or holed up in the council room. Hard to say.
Well. Might as well spend the moment actually talking to a friend I hadn't seen in a while.
I turned toward Marcus before I could get another word out.
"Hey, check this out — I've been working on a new way to communicate," he said, already pulling a battered notebook from his bag and flipping it open with the enthusiasm of a man unveiling a treasure map.
Ahh… this is oddly comforting, in its own way.
I looked over his cramped, hurried handwriting. From what I could tell, the theory tried to reach mana traces left behind by anyone who'd once used mana in a given spot — not to read their thoughts, nothing so precise as that, but to reconstruct the
shape
of the skill or spell that had been cast there.
"But wouldn't that need an absurd degree of control?" I asked, looking up at him. "Focusing your own inner mana just to trace someone else's residue on the outside? And the method you've written down is — no offense — pretty intuitive and vague. How exactly are you planning to teach this to anyone else? Or even to yourself?"
"Yep. That's exactly why I need your help." Marcus dropped his chin onto his hand, expression suddenly serious in a way that looked almost comically out of place on him.
"I—"
"Please. I'll do
anything
if you help me test this theory." His eyes were bright with something dangerously close to hope, and he said it before I could get so much as a syllable of refusal out.
"Errr… unn…"
I turned the thought over. Student council still needed someone genuinely good at gathering information.
"Why not," I said, my expression sliding smoothly from doubtful to warmly supportive in the space of a breath. "We're friends, after all. Though — I'm not forgetting that 'I'll do anything' part."
Marcus lit up like I'd handed him the sun, just as the instructor walked in and the room settled for class.
Partway through the lecture, my eyes drifted to a student who wasn't paying the slightest attention — scribbling furiously in her notebook instead, dark circles bruising the skin under her eyes, her expression somewhere between exhausted and genuinely lifeless.
Not my business.
The lesson itself was on magic formulas, material I'd already long since absorbed. What actually held my interest was watching how Marcus handled it. I turned my head slightly to check — he was listening with one ear while scrawling out an entirely different formula with the other hand, something structurally similar to what the teacher was demonstrating, but noticeably more refined.
Huh. Learned something new just now.
I tried modifying the formula on the board myself, if only out of curiosity.
Maybe add this here… no, that cancels out entirely… though if I approach it from this angle instead—
After a few failed attempts, I had to admit it wasn't nearly as effortless as Marcus made it look. I was good — very good — at mastering existing spellwork, and I could modify or improvise on the fly when the moment called for it. But building something genuinely new, from first principles, wasn't where my talent lived. That corner belonged to people like him.
The bell rang for break not long after. I stretched, joints popping pleasantly.
Ahh. Been a while since I've sat through a class this ordinary.
It was, in its own strange way, peaceful.
I stood, pulled my lunch bag from my satchel, and started for the door. Reinhardt rose the instant I did and fell into step beside me. Marcus, seeing the two of us leaving together, tagged along as well.
Guess peaceful, solitary lunch is off the table today.
I glanced at both their hands. Empty.
"Aren't you two going to the cafeteria to actually buy something?"
"Can't leave you alone," Reinhardt said, with the distinct expression of a man who very much wanted food and was choosing loyalty over lunch anyway.
"If I'd gone to buy something first, I wouldn't have been able to find either of you after," Marcus added with a faint smile.
I sighed. "Let's just eat at the cafeteria, then." I turned and led the way.
Both their faces brightened instantly.
On the walk over, I spotted the girl from class again — hurrying up a staircase, lunch clutched tight in both hands, movements quick and nervous.
Who's she running from?
The thought of bullying crossed my mind first, but I hadn't seen any bruises on her. Then again, bruises weren't the only shape cruelty came in. Still — was it too early to assume that? What else could explain it?
Ahh, no. Don't get pulled into another headache.
The only reason she registered at all was my agreement with the principal — that I'd also serve, unofficially, as a kind of guardian for order within these walls. Though it wasn't as if anyone would know I'd noticed her, one way or the other.
For now, I let myself focus on lunch.
We reached the cafeteria and I claimed the corner seat while Reinhardt and Marcus went to order.
"By the way, Reinhardt," I said, unwrapping my lunch, "why aren't you acting the way you used to, before you became my servant?"
"It's not a big thing," he said. "It's just — this is how I was taught to behave around a master."
"I see. Though I think it's inefficient to keep that up for long, against your own nature."
"Why's that?" Reinhardt asked. Marcus glanced my way like he already suspected where this was going.
"Well — acting takes both psychological and physical effort, especially when it's this far from how you'd normally behave, and for this long a stretch. It'll wear you down eventually, and that means you won't be operating at full capacity when it actually matters. So if you don't mind, feel free to just be yourself. It'll be better for both of us."
"Ohh…" Marcus murmured, low.
For a split second, Reinhardt's expression looked like a man who'd just realized he'd spent years' worth of savings on a book he never actually read. Then he exhaled, leaned back in his chair —
"Well. If you insist, my master." — and let the breath out slow, settling forward into an easy, unguarded slouch, like some invisible weight had finally been set down.
Ohh. He switched almost instantly.
I hadn't realized quite how much effort that act had been costing him until it wasn't there anymore.
"By the way," Marcus said around a mouthful of food, "you haven't forgotten our promise, right? About testing my new spell."
"You haven't forgotten yours either, apparently."
"Ahmm — can I ask in advance," Marcus said, a little anxious now, "what exactly you want from me in return?"
"I want you to join the student council."
"
Heheeee—!
" Marcus's chair scraped back violently as he shot to his feet, slamming both hands flat on the table, his face a mixture of delight and pure disbelief.
The entire cafeteria turned to look.
"Ah — sorry. Sorry." He sat back down, red-faced.
Well. There goes the entire point of sitting in the corner.
"Why me?" he asked, quieter now.
Reinhardt, meanwhile, hadn't so much as opened his eyes at the outburst, perfectly relaxed in his seat.
"We need someone who can gather information on a topic and act as an advisor when it's needed," I said.
"Hmmm…" Marcus fell into thought.
A pause settled over the table.
Then I sensed someone approaching fast from behind — and was mildly surprised to find it was
her
. I stayed seated, giving no sign I'd noticed. A hand landed lightly on my shoulder.
"Excuse me…" Her voice was barely above a whisper, tight with nerves.
"Yes?" I turned.
It was the girl from class — the one with the dark circles, the one who'd been hurrying up the stairs with her lunch clutched to her chest.
"Ah—!" She flinched at my response, even though she'd been the one to approach first.
"Err… um… can I apply for that position too?" she asked, painfully polite, painfully shy.
Well. That's an unexpected turn.
"Sit, for now," I said, offering her the empty seat — she genuinely didn't look steady on her feet.
Marcus's expression went openly surprised. Reinhardt cracked one eye and gave her a brief, sidelong look before settling back into his slouch.
I couldn't afford to hand her a council seat, whatever her reasons were. I didn't know her background. I didn't know her connections. I didn't know her intentions. And on top of all that, she felt like trouble waiting to happen.
Where did she even hear about this, anyway?
"So — why do you want to join the council?" I asked.
"Eh — reason?" She startled, as if the question itself had physically struck her. "Ah — I thought it could… help me, in the future," she said, in the tone of someone who'd invented the answer on the spot.
The reason's fabricated. Her situation's a mess. I don't know her background, her connections, or what she actually wants.
"How did you find out about this conversation?" I asked.
"Eh… ahh… I have a high aptitude for sensing," she said, edging closer, voice dropping to a whisper right against my ear. "I can hear almost every breath drawn within the school grounds. Voices, too, from up to about four kilometers out. Though — though normally I keep it dampened, because hearing everything at once gives me headaches. This time I pinpointed the student council president specifically, because you were watching me in class, and then again on the way to the cafeteria."
I felt a small jolt of surprise. My own range was wider than hers, technically — but I lacked her precision, and unlike her, I had to consciously activate mine. Hers seemed to run passively, all the time.
She could become a real problem if left unmonitored.
"I— I think I'm better suited for information-gathering than
him
," she said, louder now, straightening. "D-don't you think you should give the more talented option a chance, as council president?"
You don't have to point out my biases so directly.
Though — credit where due, her talent for raw information-gathering probably did outstrip Marcus's. That wasn't the point, though. I wasn't just recruiting for talent.
"Well, I thi—"
"I think she has a point," Marcus cut in before I could finish. "Honestly, if this were about processing information, I'd have argued. But when it comes to
gathering
it — she's right. I don't have anything close to what she's got."
Tch.
"There's only one position open," I said. "Do you really think I'm going to hand it to someone I know nothing about? Give me one reason to trust you."
Her face fell. She looked down at her hands.
A beat of silence stretched between us.
"Though—" Marcus started.
"
Cassian Valemont
," she whispered, suddenly, right into my ear, cutting Marcus off before he'd gotten another word out.
This woman—
"So you're saying you want a fair competition, then?" I said aloud, smoothly, burying what she'd actually said under something safer.
Noted — I need to start habitually laying down sound barriers whenever I'm doing something I don't want overheard.
I sent the next part straight into her mind instead, bypassing sound entirely.
Meet me behind the student council building after this.
"So…" Marcus said slowly, visibly wondering if he'd just been quietly written out of the conversation.
"Of course you're still participating," I told him.
I'm not letting go of talent like his.
"Ah, before that — can we finally run our experiment?"
"When do you want to do it?"
"Tomorrow, after class. I need to revise a few parts of the process first."
Now that's what you'd call good timing.
Break ended not long after, and we filed back toward class. She didn't join us — didn't even swing by to collect her bag the way the rest of us naturally did.
Once I'd retrieved my own bag from the classroom, I started for the student council building. Reinhardt tried to follow, as expected, but I sent him back to his next class — mathematics, a subject he was genuinely terrible at. On the way, I laid a concealment over myself.
She was waiting exactly where I'd told her, behind the building. I swept the surrounding area once, checking for any other presence.
Then I struck — a clean line for her throat, close enough that, had I meant it, it would have gone straight through. I stopped a hair's breadth from contact.
"Ya," I said, dropping the concealment right behind her.
"Ah—!" She screamed and collapsed straight to the ground, startled half out of her skin. The sound never left the small pocket of silence I'd already sealed around us.
Not faking, then.
"Ah, sorry, sorry — just wanted to play a little prank," I said, offering her a hand up.
"By the way," I added, tone sliding cold the second she was back on her feet, "what exactly is it about 'Cassian Valemont'?"
She drew her hand back slowly, clasping it with the other. Her lips parted, then closed, then parted again — the motion of someone bracing to say something that had teeth.
"My name… is Evelyn Valemont," she said, eyes fixed on the ground, shadow swallowing whatever expression sat there, voice fraying at the edges. "I'm the daughter of Cassian Valemont."
My eyes went wide.
What happened on the day her father was arrested, I would only piece together much later — in fragments, secondhand, some of it never confirmed at all. But let me lay it out here as though I'd stood there myself, because in a way, I had.
On the day her father was arrested, Evelyn had been tailing him — not for any dramatic reason, only because he'd promised to bring her a set of shades he'd picked out himself, to replace the ones ruined when he'd spilled tea across her sketchbook. She'd wanted to see whether he'd actually follow through himself, or simply hand the errand off to a servant like he always did.
She'd sensed him well before she saw him: her father interrogating a servant about the finer points of color and shade, both of them equally lost on the subject, an argument that would have been comic if she hadn't been half-annoyed, half-fond, listening from a distance she was careful to keep.
"Sir — a butler from the Draeven household has arrived with documents," a guard reported, before the man was waved through the office door.
The moment the door opened, a shape moved at the speed of collapsing shadow. It swept past the guard, took
something
from the desk in passing, and was on the windowsill before anyone had finished registering movement — holding up a seal for her father to see, grinning, before flipping backward out of the window entirely.
Her father shot to his feet, stunned, and looked down to find the "butler" already toying with the knights below — luring them, playing with them, like the entire chase was a game he'd already won.
Even from where she sat, Evelyn felt something wrong about that presence. Off. Not quite a butler's shape at all.
"Catch him!" her father shouted, already moving to go down himself.
She sat frozen through the sudden chaos, confusion curdling into irritation. By the time her father reached the ground, the butler was well past the gate, seal held high, weaving effortlessly between guards.
"Get the horses ready," her father snapped, fury sharpening every word.
The butler, meanwhile, loitered just out of reach — almost as if waiting for him to catch up.
Horses readied, her father mounted and drew his sword. "You think you can run from this?" he called, spurring forward.
The butler simply picked a new direction and ran.
Her father gave chase with a full contingent of soldiers, but the man on foot somehow outpaced horses running on enhanced legs, weaving through the streets for what felt like an eternity.
"Running like a rat," her father spat as he rode.
The butler shifted direction again, deeper into the city.
"Don't let him get away!" her father roared.
"Hah — catch me if you've got the guts!" the butler called back over his shoulder, darting across rooftops, house to house, before finally ducking into the husk of a ruined building.
And then his presence vanished. Completely. Instantly.
"
Wa—?
" The sound slipped out of her before she could stop it. She had never felt a presence disappear like that — not fade, not move out of range, simply
stop existing
within her senses, all at once.
"Wait — surround the ruin first," her father commanded. "Ten of you, with me."
"As the lord commands," the guard captain barked.
Then, faint and fleeting, another presence bloomed near her father and vanished again just as quickly — and in that instant, a single coin found its way into his coat pocket.
Almost at once, she felt a second presence rising from the same area, one that carried an unsettling echo of the "butler's" signature. And then more — many more, converging fast: Draeven, Viremont, Draeven's men, and a wave of knights, all closing in at once.
Everyone arrived together. Accusations flew. Misunderstandings unraveled into something worse — old history dragged into the light, tempers and grudges she'd never known existed suddenly on full display, and everything that followed happened too fast for her to properly track.
As her father was placed under arrest, all Evelyn could manage was
how. When. Why.
She hadn't understood any of it. She'd only been waiting on a pair of shades that afternoon. She had no idea how any of it had led here.
Suffocating under the weight of it, she noticed one presence still lingering at the scene long after the others had dispersed. Before she could focus on it, another presence entered her range without warning — and a spike of pain lanced through her skull, sharp as a needle, savage enough that her control over her own senses simply broke. For a long while afterward, she couldn't pin down a single location at all.
In the aftermath, much of her family's property was seized. She and her mother became, almost overnight, an embarrassment the noble world was eager to distance itself from. Her mother threw herself into salvaging what remained, working herself past exhaustion just to keep the family from collapsing entirely.
Evelyn spent the first several days in a kind of daze. But watching her mother refuse to stop moving forward, she made a decision of her own: she would work just as hard, at the academy, in whatever way she could.
That resolve met the same wall the moment she walked through the academy gates. The stares of contempt only sharpened — nobles had begun sorting themselves into "white" houses and "black" ones, and enforcing that line meant treating her family as something lesser, something to be stepped around. Commoners who'd once had to pay her father's inflated fees carried an anger that was, if anything, even more real.
One of them found her one afternoon while she was sketching, trying to lose herself in something that wasn't her own life for a few minutes.
"My brother's dead because of your father," the girl said, on her knees, gripping Evelyn's collar with trembling hands, tears streaking down her face. "If he hadn't taken so much money from us, we would've had enough left to treat him when it mattered."
Evelyn hadn't been able to say a single word. She'd only stared, until the girl finally met her eyes and something in her expression collapsed.
"Ah… blaming you won't change anything," she said, hollow, releasing her grip and walking away without looking back.
Evelyn looked down at her half-finished sketch and tore it apart.
Who was she even supposed to blame?
She couldn't justify her father's actions even to herself — so how could she possibly defend him to anyone else?
And then, in the quiet after, she felt it: a presence identical to the one from that day. It took her days of careful, obsessive tracking to place it. When she finally did, the name that surfaced was the academy's own student council president.
Katsuhito Kurogane.
So. She's the aftermath I'd already half-expected, one way or another.
The real question now was simpler and far more pressing:
what kind of threat does she actually pose to me — or to the people around me?
"And?" I asked, voice level, eyes locked on hers, giving her nothing but flat indifference in return for her grief. "Are you here for revenge? Or is this blackmail?"
Her fists clenched. Her jaw tightened.
"I— I want to ask," she said, frustration cracking through the quiet, "why. Why did you do it? Why my father?"
"What do you think a person does when they're attacked?"
"So— so you're saying it was self-defense?" Her grip tightened further, hands drawn up toward her chest.
"Eliminating a threat before it can eliminate you," I said, holding her gaze, "is one form of defense. Yes."
Something in my eyes must have shown through, because she stepped back almost involuntarily — the reflex of someone realizing, too late, exactly what kind of posture she was standing in front of.
"I— I can make your involvement in my father's case public," she said, voice unsteady but her chin lifting slightly, a strange, crooked smile forming. "I don't know
why
you're hiding it. But I can tell you don't want it known."
I felt my own mouth curve into a smile at that.
"Heee. Good preparation on your part," I said. "But you understand that plan falls apart the moment I kill you before you get the chance to use it?"
"It— it'll go public automatically. If my consciousness ever goes out," she said, something like triumph flickering across her face.
I let out a slow breath.
"Yup. It was me. I worked with the knights to see justice done."
Not exactly a lie, either.
"Ah— I see," she said, some of the tension bleeding out of her shoulders. "You were a victim of my father's crimes too, then."
"And why did you want into the student council?"
"To— to earn back some standing. For my family."
Something clicked into place in my head.
She's useful. I need someone to share the spotlight with anyway.
"And why would the council take someone whose public image is this far underwater?"
"W-wasn't your own reputation just as low, when you started?" she shot back.
"So you're planning to climb the same way I did?"
"I'll manage it somehow. I— I want to help my mother, too."
"How, exactly?"
"That…" She faltered.
"When I started," I said, "I already had a plan for how I'd turn my reputation around."
I had absolutely nothing of the sort.
"Do you?"
She had no answer. She just stood there.
I sighed. "Well then — do your best against Marcus." I turned and started walking away.
She doesn't have Marcus's mind for this. But she has enough sense to know she can't win that particular fight.
She stood rooted for a moment, clearly turning something over. I stopped a few paces on.
"Though," I said, "there's another position I've been looking to fill."
She turned back toward me, hope creeping visibly into her expression.
"Don't mistake this for charity," I added. "There's a condition attached."
"Wha— what is it?"
"You announce, publicly, that you were the one who helped me pin down the culprit's location. And you sign a contract agreeing you won't reveal the truth to anyone, under any circumstances, unless both of us agree to it."
"W-why?"
"I can't just add you to the roster without justification. And I'd rather not have talent like yours sitting on the opposite side of the council from me."
Also not exactly a lie.
"So. Do we have a deal or not?"
She hesitated, thinking it through.
Better she not think too hard about the alternatives.
"So — yes, or no?"
"Ah— yes," she said, resolve suddenly firming in her voice. "I'll join."
"Good." I produced a sheet of paper and burned the terms into it with mana, then pressed my thumb, cut and bleeding, against the seal.
I'd just started to hand it over for her to read and confirm when a hand shot in and snatched it clean out of the air.
"
Ara.
Something interesting happening without me?"
Shirohana. What is she doing here?
She fixed me with a look sharp enough to draw a shiver up my spine. Again.
She scanned the terms, unhurried.
"Ohhh. Not bad, not bad at all." Then, without warning, the paper crumpled to ash in her grip. "Though I really can't forgive you trying to arrange this without so much as consulting me first."
That smile of hers returned — the furious, pleasant kind.
Evelyn had gone completely rigid beside me, frozen equally by Shirohana's sudden arrival and the sheer pressure radiating off her. I wasn't doing much better, still trying to process the last five seconds.
Shirohana stepped forward and began tracing a formula into the air with both hands. A sphere of light bloomed from the motion, hanging between us.
That's — 'keiyaku no mamoribito.'
—
How does she even know that spell?
"Blood. Both of you. Into the sphere." The pressure behind her expression left no room for argument.
I went first. Evelyn followed a heartbeat later. We each scored a fingertip and let the blood fall in — the sphere swelled to engulf all three of us, then collapsed into a single pinprick of light before winking out entirely.
"Well then." Shirohana lifted her fan to cover her mouth, eyes still fixed on me. "The contract's sealed. I'll take my leave." She vanished in a scatter of falling petals.
Once she was gone, Evelyn and I just looked at each other, both equally lost. I smiled first, mostly to smooth over the awkward silence and make the whole thing look intentional. She caught the cue and smiled back.
"Well then. Looking forward to working with you," I said, offering a hand.
"Ah— m-me too," she said, reaching out in kind.
Our hands drew close — and never touched. No matter how much force either of us put behind it, something invisible kept them a hair's breadth apart. And yet, somehow, we both kept smiling through it, without either of us quite understanding why.
Contract, huh.
I let out a slow, bewildered breath.
What exactly were the terms again?
The rest of that day went to plastering posters across the academy grounds, calling everyone to the hall the next morning for an announcement.
Ah — almost forgot to do this part.
…Hello, Shirohana-san…
The thought trailed off, unfinished, somewhere between a greeting and a question I hadn't figured out how to ask yet.
The moon rose and set. Morning came again.
While waiting for Evelyn near the entrance, I caught sight of the cat again out of the corner of my eye and stepped away briefly to buy it another fish. When I returned, Evelyn was already crouched there, talking to it.
"Y-you're pretty good at this," she was saying, as the cat scratched idly at its own ear. "H-here — I'm nervous, since I have to stand in front of so many people today."
"Meow."
"Ah — you're wishing me luck. Thank you."
"How about paying her back with some fish?" I said from behind her.
"Ahh—!" She jumped, startled.
I laughed. "Sorry, sorry." I held out the package.
We sat together and fed the cat, both of us finding some small, quiet peace in watching it eat.
"
Ara.
Cute cat." Shirohana's voice, again, from directly behind us.
We both flinched in unison. Thankfully, she didn't seem particularly displeased this time.
"Well — let's get to the hall before everyone else," I said, standing.
By the time we arrived, the hall was already filling — students and teachers alike, drawn in by the posters plastered across every wall. Voices rose steadily as people speculated about the gathering.
Valerian and Vivienne had arrived as well, posters clearly having reached them too.
"What exactly is he trying to pull," Vivienne said, arms crossed, displeasure written across her face, "without even consulting me first."
"Well, well. He does seem to have thought it through," Valerian said, in the tone of a man trying to talk a storm out of forming.
"Either way, I'm calling a meeting the moment this is over," Vivienne said, smiling in a way that promised nothing pleasant.
Shirohana and I stepped onto the stage from the wings. The murmuring died instantly, every eye in the hall swinging toward us.
Didn't plan on her joining me up here. Well — too late now.
The microphone rang faintly with feedback. I cleared my throat.
"Dear students, and principal — thank you for gathering on such short notice, and my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Today, I want to speak about the conclusion of the recent serial killing case."
I let the room settle before continuing.
"As you've likely heard, it's been announced that I was the one who solved it. That's not the complete picture. This wasn't something I managed alone — it was thanks to everyone who cooperated. Isolde Vaelgrave and the knights under her. The student council. The principal of this academy. Everyone who lent their support. All of them deserve recognition."
I paused.
"But I especially want to introduce someone new to you all today — a member joining the student council, someone whose help was critical in the final stretch of pinning down the killer's location. Evelyn Valemont."
I gestured toward the curtain. Evelyn stepped out from it, hands clasped tight to her chest, visibly anxious, and crossed the stage to where I stood. I passed her the microphone.
She held it, took a breath.
"H-hello, everyone. I— it's Evelyn Valemont."
"What is a
Valemont
doing on the student council?" Celestria's voice cut cleanly through the hall, sharp and clear from somewhere in the crowd.
The murmuring surged back up instantly — dissatisfaction here, open doubt there.
Evelyn took a breath, visibly steadying herself.
"I'm aware some of you may doubt me, or feel this isn't right," she said, voice trembling but audible. "But— but I promise I'll do everything I can not to disappoint people as capable as all of you. Thank you, very much." She bowed, ending the speech there.
Celestria's expression flickered — surprise first, then something that settled, slowly, into quiet approval. She began to clap.
One by one, the rest of the hall followed, until the applause had rolled through the majority of the room.
Hope bloomed openly across Evelyn's face.
Sigh of relief.
—
Good thing I asked Celestria for that favor in advance.
Though, credit where it was due — none of it would have worked if Evelyn had opened with something combative instead of acknowledging the crowd's doubts first. Her instincts, whatever else was true about her, weren't bad.
Either way, I had my public face secured, for now.
Not perfect. But enough.
A single figure slipped quietly out through the back of the hall, having watched the entire exchange unfold from the corner.
Valdrik.
On the palace balcony, Julian stood scattering grain for the birds gathered at his feet, watching them eat.
Valdrik approached from behind and dropped to one knee, delivering a full account of everything he'd witnessed.
A pause stretched between them.
"Ohh. Not bad at all," Julian said, a faint smile crossing his face.
"Though—" he added, tossing another handful of grain toward the birds, smile never wavering, "—that's only if you can still call yourself satisfied, once you've seen what your part in this actually costs."
Valdrik said nothing. He only looked back at Julian, and for the first time that morning, something like dread crossed his face.