The Butterfly That Swallowed the Fog
One week later, in a double room of the women’s dormitory at Archasis Royal Academy.
“This is a nightmare.”
Judy’s hazelnut eyes were unfocused as she lay on her side in bed.
“Pinch me, Tilia? I need to wake up from this nightmare and get back to a reality where the exams are already over.”
“Get up before I actually pinch you.”
Tilia sat on the opposite bed, looking at Judy with a faint smile.
“Come on, Judy. Hurry up and get out of bed so we can study.”
“No. This is a dream. It has to be a dream!”
When denial failed to change anything, Judy pounded the mattress and wailed.
“A retest? Does that even make sense? And of all subjects—a Rhetoric retest?!”
Tilia felt every ounce of Judy’s outrage. She gave a hollow little laugh and turned her head toward the official notice lying on the desk.
The document stated that evidence of a leaked Rhetoric exam had been discovered, and that a retest would therefore be administered.
“Gregory Myers. That bastard isn’t even worth the effort of tearing apart.”
Judy’s eyes glittered with pure resentment. She had scraped by with bare passes in every subject and had only just met the graduation requirements.
“He had to be on that list. Every single name written there is one of Gregory’s little pack. So how did that snake slip away like an eel?”
“Exactly.”
Tilia’s brow furrowed as she stared at the notice.
On the morning after the last exams finished, an emergency circular had been distributed listing the teaching assistant who had helped leak the questions and every fourth-year who had received a copy of the paper. At the end of the long roster, the disciplinary action was identical for them all.
Mass expulsion.
Tilia looked at the document with open suspicion before turning away.
“There’s no way Gregory wasn’t on that list… How did he get out of it?”
“Maybe they never found hard evidence? Or he pulled his feet out at the critical moment?”
“Or… Count Myers might have stepped in to protect him.”
“Hah.”
Judy covered her mouth and rolled her eyes. Tilia, by contrast, looked thoroughly unimpressed.
“The fact that he could even recruit a teaching assistant and get his hands on the exam papers in the first place is proof he had connections higher up. They cut off a few tails, expelled the expendable ones, and let the real players walk free, don’t you think?”
“Yeah…”
Judy narrowed her eyes and nodded slowly.
“It always seemed weird that someone like Gregory Myers even passed the Academy entrance exam. Wait—Count Myers is close friends with the headmaster, isn’t he? If that’s true, this is outright grounds for dismissal!”
“Right.”
Tilia shrugged and stood up from the bed.
“But that’s the Myers family’s problem. We have something more urgent.”
“What?”
“Studying.”
She smiled sweetly and tapped Judy’s desk.
“We promised we’d graduate together, remember?”
At those words Judy’s face crumpled in despair and she clawed at her own hair. Then, as if finally accepting the inevitable, she slumped off the bed with her shoulders sagging.
She trudged over, dropped into the chair, and fixed her roommate with the glassy stare of a dying fish.
“Tilia… if I start to doze off… slap me awake if you have to…”
“Sure. I’ll make sure to hit you.”
“I’m so tearfully grateful… You’re all I’ve got, seriously…”
Tilia laughed at her friend gritting her teeth through the thanks, then sat down herself.
Even so, the expression on her face as she pulled out the book she had shoved deep onto the shelf was not particularly bright.
Rhetoric is something I’m worried about too, if I’m honest.
She exhaled another deep sigh—one of many she had already heaved in the short time since—and opened her notebook with lifeless hands.
For a fleeting second she remembered the thing she had thrown away a few days earlier.
The Holy Water Cecilia had given her, the one that supposedly maximized concentration.
…Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown it out.
Desperate enough to clutch at straws, Tilia lifted the pen that felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.
With four hours left until the Rhetoric exam, the designated lecture hall was already thronged with students.
Unlike the previous exam, which had been split between Class A and Class B, every enrolled student was required to sit the retest in a single room.
Yet the early-morning crowd packing the hall was not there for that reason alone.
“Amy, did you study a lot?”
“I don’t know. More than last time, but… the questions are going to be different. I have no idea how this is going to go.”
Those who had narrowly failed the last exam were burning with academic fervor, treating this as their final chance.
It was a widely held theory at the Academy that studying inside the very room where the exam would be held produced better results than studying anywhere else. Among those who blindly believed the theory right up until the exam, Tilia and Judy were of course included.
“Tilia, how am I supposed to interpret this? I just can’t figure it out no matter how I look at it.”
Judy, seated beside her friend, pointed to a page in the textbook with drooping brows.
Tilia had been about to take a drink; she set the bottle down and examined the classical poem Judy indicated.
“Let me see. Ah, this one…”
She was calmly explaining how to distinguish irony from paradox when someone brushed past the side of her desk.
In a lecture hall packed with the rustle of turning pages and the murmur of conversation, swapping one water bottle for another was hardly difficult—especially when Tilia’s was the standard-issue bottle handed out by the Academy.
The dark-faced man finished the job in an instant and strolled out of the hall as if nothing had happened.
“So when a question asks about expressive technique, the best approach is to compare the overall theme with the specific passage that uses the technique.”
Finished with the long explanation, Tilia reached for the bottle she had set down earlier.
She twisted off the cap and tilted it; cold water slid into her mouth.
The brief pleasure of wetting her dry throat lasted only a moment.
Hmm…?
Sensing something off, Tilia tilted her head.
“What’s wrong?”
Judy looked up from the notebook she had been burying her nose in, noticing the unusual reaction.
“Does the water taste weird?”
“Yeah. There’s this sort of… fishy flavor…”
“You brought it from the dorm, right? Mine’s the same.”
Judy pouted and held up her own bottle.
“They’ve been doing plumbing work for the new library construction. Maybe that’s why? It tastes like weird metal. I brought tea to mix with it—want some?”
“Mm… No. This is still drinkable.”
“Just say the word if you need any. I brought plenty.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Tilia shrugged, recapped the bottle, and refocused on her studies.
Behind her, a woman with blazing red hair propped her chin on one hand and watched Tilia, one eyebrow twitching.
Cecilia studied Tilia’s face for a moment, then casually swept her gaze across the surrounding students.
Her sharp eyes caught a man whose expression was nothing like those of the others buried in their books.
Gregory Myers.
He had craned his thick neck to stare at Tilia, grinning with a lewd little smirk.
Cecilia regarded that ugly face for a long second before her eyes returned to Tilia, then to the tightly capped water bottle, and finally to her own nails.
The carefully maintained nails were perfectly smooth, not a single hangnail in sight.
Hmm.
Cecilia examined the red polish with mild interest.
Maybe next time I’ll try black instead of a bright color.
Squeak.
Tilia shut off the cold water pouring from the faucet and shook her head.
Clear droplets clinging to her chin fell onto the pure-white sink with bright little sounds.
What’s wrong with my body?
She watched the droplets slide and roll away, then lifted her eyes to the mirror.
A fragile-looking young woman stared back, cheeks and the skin beneath her eyes flushed red.
This is strange…
She did not feel well. Tiny noises that normally never registered now seemed deafening, and other people’s scents—ones she had never even noticed before—kept assaulting her with brutal intensity.
Unable to endure it any longer in the lecture hall, Tilia had fled to the restroom and now stared hard into the mirror.
Did I push myself too hard because of the retest?
No. She glared at her own unfocused eyes and quickly shook her head.
This was nothing like ordinary exhaustion from lack of sleep. Instead of the dulling of the senses that came with accumulated fatigue, every nerve in her body felt razor-sharp and standing on end.
If it’s not fatigue, then… a fever?
Her vision blurred as if heat were rising; she closed her eyes for a second and opened them again. Even in that brief interval her head spun as though she were standing on a rocking boat.
I should take a fever reducer.
Conscious of the sweat constantly beading on the back of her neck, Tilia shook the water from her face and started to leave the restroom.
Or rather, she tried to.
Until she saw Gregory Myers standing at the far end of the angled corridor.
What the hell.
Tilia instinctively took a step backward and narrowed her eyes.
Gregory Myers was stroking his thick lips and grinning from ear to ear, wearing the expression of a man waiting for something he very much anticipated.
Whenever he smiles like that…
Half-hidden by the wall, Tilia raked through past experience.
Something unpleasant always followed.
A deep crease formed between her brows as she quickly scanned him from head to toe.
What is it? What could it be?
He’s definitely here to pick a fight about something…
Her sharp gaze traveled past his mean face and rounded shoulders—and then dropped lower.
Ugh.
The moment she saw it, Tilia gagged and jerked her head aside.
The front of his toad-like trousers was jutting out in a sharp tent.
Disgusting bastard.
The sight alone was enough to make her want to vomit. A toad’s lust. Tilia felt a violent urge to dig out her own eyeballs and wash them as she hastily turned her back.
She no longer cared what he wanted. Getting away from that filthy spectacle was the priority.
I need to get back right now.
Yet just as she was about to slip out through another exit that led outside and avoid him completely—
…Wait.
A sudden premonition, a lightning flash of conjecture, streaked through her mind.