Chương 54: “A Gone Retriever”

The dormitory murderer hadn't started out as such. Celestia couldn't remember the noble's name. A lesser house, middling rank, nobody worth remembering. What she did remember was the motive, because the motive was pathetically simple. Arthur was better than him. It wasn't a matter of opinion, either. Arthur's progression through the academy had been visible to anyone paying attention.

Combat classes, sparring sessions at the training buildings, even casual exercises, the commoner boy outperformed noble students who had been groomed for the sword since childhood. He adapted mid-fight in ways that left experienced duelists standing surprised. For most students, this was either admirable, a great motivator for improvement, or something they didn't care about. But for one particular noble, it had become unbearable.

The idea that a boy with no lineage and no blessed blood could stand above those born to rule… it ate at him. The noble couldn't accept it, and his inability to close the gap only made it worse. A man like that was easy to approach. According to the original story, it had happened during a late evening in Summit. The noble had been drinking, wandering the back alleys of the city alone and bitter, then a mysterious man found him there.

Celestia forgot about the specifics, and her memory offered nothing useful beyond the encounter itself. The stranger offered him power. The method was simple in concept: take the life of a pure innocent, and in exchange, receive strength. One life for a measure of power that the noble could never quickly earn on his own. He hadn't believed it at first. That much, at least, spoke to whatever scraps of rationality he still possessed. But he was also desperate, so, he tested it on animals first.

It worked with small creatures at first, strays specifically. And with each one, he felt the difference. The gap between himself and the students around him began to close, inch by inch. However, there was a problem he encountered; the gap between himself and Arthur didn't close at all. The commoner kept improving, and whatever power the noble scraped together through dead animals, Arthur matched and exceeded through what looked like sheer talent alone. And so, the noble's patience ran out.

'Pure innocent…' he remembered. Animals had worked, but if their lives yielded only a fraction of what he needed… If he wanted to rise above Arthur, then he needed something more. He turned his attention to the commoners. The first few disappearances didn't raise alarms. Students vanished from Summit Academy for all sorts of reasons. Some couldn't handle the pressure of the upcoming semester exam and quietly withdrew.

Others entered the Tower and simply never came back, a grim but accepted reality of Summit academy life. It was the students themselves who noticed first. The staff hadn't, and the fact was, this was actually the opportune time for the disappearances, as the three archmage-principals had already left the academy grounds. They were deep in the forests surrounding Summit, preparing the designated mountain area for the practical exam.

Their absence had left the academy's oversight in the hands of the regular faculty and the existing security infrastructure. However, these were defenses built to catch and detect external threats. None of it accounted for a student killing other students inside the walls. The alarm came from a group of commoner students. Three of them had a friend who stopped showing up to their shared elective. At first, they assumed she'd dropped the class.

Then they checked her dormitory room and found it untouched and her belongings were still there. This was someone who hadn't entered the tower at all, a scholar-type student. So why had she disappeared all of a sudden? After they asked around, they noticed that other students had similar stories. And so, they did their own impromptu investigation and provided the academy officials their own findings.

The staff confirmed the discrepancies; there were indeed a few commoner students who were unaccounted for, and the usual explanations didn't hold up. Their withdrawal forms hadn't been filed and neither did the adventurer guild's tower entry logs show their names. Even after sending someone to inform the principal-archmages, it would still take several days to reach them, and until then, the faculty's authority was limited.

Unless it was of a noble-birth who had disappeared, they were unable to make the decision for themselves to mobilize a proper search. What they could do, and what they did immediately, was issue warnings to the student body. The notices appeared on every board across campus by the following morning. Students were advised to travel in groups of three or more. Evening activities were to conclude before sundown. After electives and club sessions ended for the day, students were to return directly to their dormitories.

The entire campus quickly changed. Corridors that had been busy with evening foot traffic emptied after dark. Students who used to study late at the library packed up hours earlier than usual. The training buildings, which had often stayed occupied well past midnight, went quiet by early evening. Celestia read the announcement on the public notice board outside buildings.

'Right on schedule.' She turned away from the board and walked toward her dormitory. Around her, students moved in clusters of three and four, their conversations lower than usual, and their glances more of suspicion to those around them, specifically of nobles. After all, all of the victims were commoners. There was reason to suspect anyone who had an inkling of status or noble blood in them. Celestia didn't go to her room when she arrived at the dormitory.

Instead, she turned down the adjacent hallway toward Anna's makeshift lab. The door was already ajar. Inside, Anna was hunched over a worktable cluttered with glass vials, ceramic bowls, and an open notebook covered in her handwriting. Several jars of dried herbs lined the shelf behind her. Sir Ozymandias was asleep in a small bed that Anna had apparently made for him. It was a shallow wooden crate lined with folded towels and a cut piece of quilted fabric.

The pug lay curled on his side, his wrinkled face squished against the padding, his stubby legs twitching in whatever dream a pug could have. His fur looked clean. Brushed, even. Celestia paused in the doorway and observed the scene for a moment. Since Anna had taken over Sir Ozy's daily care, the two had become something of an inseparable pair. Anna gave the pug proper baths, took him on walks around the dormitory grounds, and prepared his meals.

Sir Ozy, for his part, had stopped howling in retaliation every time Anna came near him. He still regarded her with the dignified suspicion of an emperor tolerating a particularly useful attendant, but the tolerance had grown warmer. Anna was, by his apparent judgment, a well-intentioned servant. There was, however, one aspect of Anna's care that Celestia found entertaining. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Anna had taken one look at Sir Ozymandias's face and concluded, with absolute certainty, that the pug had suffered a terrible injury at some point in his life. His flattened snout, his bulging eyes that seemed to look in two directions at once, the folds of skin bunched around his nose... all of it, in Anna's professional assessment, pointed to some sort of ailment or a chronic wound. She had made it a mission to fix him. Celestia had considered correcting her and explaining that Sir Ozy simply looked like that.

That Sir Ozymandias's face was and body was the unnatural result of selective breeding across generations of dogs. But where was the fun with that? If Anna wanted to spend her evenings trying to cure a pug of being a pug, Celestia was not going to be the one to stop her. The girl's research kept her occupied, her skills were improving, and Sir Ozy was being well cared for. Besides, the potion experiments were harmless.

Anna tested each formula on small lab rats first, documented the results, and only applied anything to Sir Ozy after ensuring that they were completely safe. Celestia knocked twice on the open door. Anna's head snapped up from her notebook, a streak of dried green paste on her cheek.

"M-my lady! I didn't hear you come in. How long have you been standing there?" This was how Anna had referred to Celestia now, after one-such incident two weeks ago when Celestia had snapped at Anna due to being too casual with her…

"Long enough." Celestia's fan tapped once against her palm.

"We're eating." Anna blinked, then scrambled to clean up. She immediately wiped her hands on a cloth and moved to Sir Ozy's bed. The pug cracked one eye open as Anna scooped him up with both hands, cradling him against her chest for a moment before carefully placing him into his cage-carrier. Sir Ozy let out a single, resigned snort and settled onto the carrier's cushioned bottom without protest. Anna latched the carrier door and looped the handle over her arm.

"Ready, my lady!" They walked through the dormitory corridor toward the dining area. Anna walked beside Celestia, though a half-pace behind. The cage-carrier swung gently at Anna's side, and Sir Ozy's flat face was visible through the metal bars, his eyes half-closed.

"I've been making a lot of progress," Anna said, unable to contain herself for more than a few seconds of silence. Celestia glanced sideways at her.

"I'it's all thanks to your help," Anna added quickly.

"The materials from your suppliers are much higher quality than what I'm used to using." She paused, looking at any sign of reaction from Celestia.

"You can explain while we eat," Celestia said. Anna nodded, beaming that she could thoroughly explain her research. Celestia took her usual seat at the corner of the nearest table. Anna set Sir Ozy's carrier on the bench beside her and went to the counter to collect both their meals. She returned with three trays, placing Celestia's in front of her before sitting down across the table. Sir Ozy pressed his face against the carrier bars, his flat snout flaring at the smell of food.

Anna gave Ozzy food and talked while they ate. She moved from her potion research to her upcoming herbology assignment, then to a rumor she'd heard about a rare plant specimen that had been brought back from the Tower's World floors, and then to the gossip amongst the students relating to the recent incidents. Celestia ate while letting Anna's talk. She offered no responses beyond the occasional glance or slight nod, and Anna didn't seem to need more than that.

The girl had long since figured out that this was how her ladyship listened to people. When they finished, Anna collected both trays without being asked. Outside, evening had fully come and the weak light from the moon shone over the dormitory rooftops. After dinner, Celestia and Anna went to the small library within the dormitory. It was a modest space, a medium-sized room with tall shelves lining three walls and a handful of reading tables arranged in the center.

The lighting was adequate, and the chairs were comfortable enough for extended sitting. At this hour, the library was occupied by a dozen or so students, most of them reading or quietly working through assignments. Celestia took her usual spot at a table near the back. Anna sat across from her and Sir Ozy's carrier was placed on the floor between them, and within minutes, the pug was snoring. The other students in the library didn't look up.

They had grown used to this; Celestia and Anna had been spending their evenings here for the past few weeks now, and whatever curiosity the sight of a duke's daughter and a commoner girl studying side by side had once drawn was long gone. Celestia didn't always use her time here for coursework. When she wasn't studying, she read. This world's literary scene hadn't developed fiction-wise like her previous life. Novels, as she understood them, were sparse and structurally primitive.

But there were other things worth reading. Public journals from scholars and explorers. Archived dispatches from other countries, some of them decades old, filled with political observations and cultural details that her meta-knowledge of the story had never covered. Reports on magical creature sightings along the outer territories. To Celestia, all of it read like stories anyway. Her modern mind couldn't help but process information that way.

She turned a page in the book she was reading, an account of a merchant caravan's route through the northern frontier. The author had a tendency to exaggerate the danger of every encounter, which made it more entertaining than it probably deserved to be. Time passed and the library's population thinned as students left in small groups. Eventually, a female dormitory staff member stepped through the library door.

"Lights-out is in fifteen minutes," she announced.

"Please make your way back to your rooms." The remaining students began closing their books and gathering their things. Celestia placed her bookmark and set the volume on the return shelf. Anna did the same, stacking her herbology references neatly before bending down to pick up Sir Ozy's carrier. They walked back together through the corridor. Doors were already closed on both sides, and the few students still out were walking fast, heading straight to their rooms.

Anna followed Celestia into her room to set Sir Ozy down. She placed the carrier on the floor near the foot of Celestia's bed and unlatched the door. The pug waddled out, circled once on the small cushion that had been laid out for him, and dropped onto it with a grunt. Anna straightened up and turned to Celestia.

"Good night, my lady." She smiled. Celestia gave a short nod.

"Mhm." She waved her off with a flick of her hand. Anna chuckled at that, a quiet laugh that she tried to cover with her hand. She gave a small wave and left, pulling the door shut behind her.

'Silly girl.' Celestia looked at the closed door for a moment.

'I've grown quite accustomed to her.' Anna was simply Anna. She had her many flaws and her many desires, and none of them had ever harmed Celestia. If anything, every one of them had only benefitted her. She was pleasant to be around, and the girl had grown more bold around Celestia, but still knowing her place. Celestia changed into her sleepwear, turned down the lamp, and got into bed. Sir Ozy was already asleep on his cushion, his snoring resuming almost immediately. She was asleep within minutes.

* Morning came with noise outside the window. Voices from the courtyard below, the sound of footsteps, and the distant clatter of someone moving equipment toward the training grounds. Celestia lay still for a moment. Something was off, and it took her a few seconds to identify what it was. Anna hadn't come to wake her up. It was their routine. Every early dawn, Anna would knock on Celestia's door, take Sir Ozy for his walk, and then Celestia would do her morning exercises.

After a bath and a change of clothes, Celestia would go to Anna's room to collect her for breakfast. But today, Celestia had woken up on her own. Sir Ozy was still on his cushion, undisturbed. Celestia sat up and looked at the time on her clock, one of the many expensive things she had in her room, and she regretted not having commissioned the artisan to add an alarm-system on it; because of that, she was already running late behind her usual schedule. She changed into something moderate, enough to leave her room.

After all, Anna's door was right next to hers. She knocked, "Anna." But no one answered. She knocked again, harder, her voice louder this time, "Anna." And yet, still nothing. Celestia tried turning the doorknob and realized it wasn't locked. The door swung open into Anna's room as she entered. The bed was unmade, the sheets pulled halfway off. Her desk was covered in herbology notes, some stacked, others spread across the surface with a pen resting on top of an open notebook.

A half-empty glass of water sat near the edge. And her shoes were by the door. But… Anna was not here.