13. A Brief Story From The Past (2)

Several months had passed since she enrolled at the academy without incident.

"U-um, hi, Elline?"

A girl approached cautiously with her friends and spoke to her.

*Again...*

A conversation she'd grown used to by now—she'd lost count of how many times it had happened.

"What."

"…I don't understand this problem. Could you help me?"

The girl held out her work timidly, and Elline glanced over at it.

She stared for a moment, then scribbled a few marks without a word and turned back to her own book.

"The formula at the top is wrong."

"Oh… I see. Thank you!"

The girl expressed her gratitude and lingered, watching Elline, but she had already returned to her reading.

Many students had tried to strike up conversations with Elline this way, and the result was always the same.

Indifference.

In the end, the girl gave a half-dejected smile and spoke up hesitantly.

"I'll… be going, then?"

"Okay."

Elline answered without looking up.

Having never made a friend in her life, she couldn't help treating even those who approached her with goodwill as though they weren't there.

Just like this girl, many students had come to her at the start of the semester hoping to get close, but Elline had ignored every outstretched hand.

She had no need for friends.

Or perhaps, having never made any since childhood, she had simply grown to not value their existence at all.

One by one, those reaching hands disappeared, until no one gathered around her anymore.

A frightening person.

That was the image Elline had acquired.

She didn't mind.

No—she had no time to mind.

"Miss Elline, this is an official document sent down from the Mage Tower. Would you take a look?"

"Yes."

"You did exceptionally well on the exam. The Headmistress has called you in for a meeting."

"Understood."

Proving the standing of her family.

Showing the world what House Pailless was.

That was the entirety of her life.

Her father, her grandfather, and her brothers—all of her blood—had been the same.

She thought it only natural that she should be, too.

The path was already set.

Walking was her only solace.

In quiet places, she could hear the beating of her own heart, and if she closed her eyes and stayed still, she felt as though she had merged with nature itself.

She loved breathing in the scent of earth, feeling the soft wind, and sensing the sunlight on her skin—the simple proof that she was alive.

*…*

She always spent her weekends walking alone, and on the days she didn't, she studied.

That was Elline's routine. That was her life.

Time passed without incident.

Summer arrived—blazing heat and the relentless shriek of cicadas.

And then something happened.

"The trolls have escaped!"

Beneath the scorching sun, someone's sudden cry sent the academy spiraling into chaos.

The trolls—mid-rank monsters kept for practical training—had somehow broken free of their enclosures, whether through negligence or something else, and were rampaging through the grounds.

They were less dangerous than trolls encountered in the wild, but monsters were monsters, and the academy issued an emergency evacuation order and cancelled all classes.

Elline had been in the middle of a lecture when the urgent command came; she set down the old tome she'd been reading and joined the evacuation.

"Follow your assigned instructor to your designated shelter!"

The academy's directives rang out in sharp, coordinated succession.

The alarm—a sound she had never heard before—mingled with the commotion of students and the heavy footfalls of safety personnel echoing through the corridors.

The academy shelter.

A place she had only heard mentioned in passing during the campus orientation in her first week.

*That place was built during a great war long ago…*

Not long after Irasion Academy was first established, a massive civil war had broken out across the empire, and the second Headmistress of that era had installed shelters throughout the academy to protect the students.

Of course, she had been told that after that time, the shelters had almost never been used again—kept now only as a memorial to that period—but no one could have known they would be needed again like this.

*…*

It wasn't particularly important to Elline.

She was already mentally rearranging her schedule, revising her plans as she walked.

The academy had more than enough capability to resolve this quickly.

"Students, this way!"

She stopped.

Before her was a rust-eaten staircase leading downward, and the smell of old iron weathered by years hit the tip of her nose.

*Thump.*

It wasn't the same place—she knew that—and yet the smell and the structure were so uncannily alike that her skin prickled.

*Thump. Thump.*

Narrow, dark, damp. The kind of place she hated most.

A memory from the past.

*Go inside. Think about what you did wrong.*

Her father's stern voice—not here, not present—echoed through her mind like a reverberation in a hollow chamber, and her heart began to race.

The instructor leading the group grew flustered at Elline's sudden halt and urged her to move, but her feet would not lift.