Hmm, I should change out that mask. I suppose I was wearing the same thing whilst meeting up with the mercenaries I hired to finish people off. Although why think that it must be a worker doing all this? That’s stupid.

Is it like some dumb trap to fool me into putting my guard down, or are they confident that no one could fool their silly little necklace system? Whatever, if I just put my head down, follow the crowd, and go along with the plan, I can’t get noticed.

The speech continued, and he began making silly little promises, like that he would find me and put me to justice or that they wouldn’t let anything like this happen again.

Eventually, the speech ended, and I noticed that he didn’t say anything about Marfont, the headmaster should know that he died last night, actually, that should be where he got the knowledge about me consistently wearing a black mask from, the wizards should have already integrated the guy I hired. Then he’s ignoring a dead student again, what did he not learn his lesson? Or would it lose him too much face to tell the students that another idiot died after delivering a nice speech about capturing me and putting me to justice in the name of the god of knowledge?

In the end, it doesn’t matter, if the headmaster doesn’t attempt something serious, like scanning through every person’s mind in the academy, he probably won’t be able to find me. But then, no noble would agree to have their mind scanned by some random wizard, what if they pry for more than just who they are.

At this point, the only other ways I can get caught is through a mana signature test, or some surprise inspection of my dorm, which will stumble upon Ustos. But I’m planning to learn artificing, to create a magic item that can trick the mana signature test and I also doubt that they can just randomly search dorms without warning.

As everyone started leaving, I was snapped out of my thoughts by Keswick, “Poor girl, I hope they catch whoever did this.”.

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“No, don’t talk like that, of course they are going to catch him!”, I say.

“Yeah, you're right, they’ll probably just use mind magic or something and find the killer in no time.”.

“But why suspect only the staff? Why not students?”.

“Don’t know, although, I did hear that the soul-bound necklaces do more than just check if the wearer is alive, I hear it also scans the wearer's mind and checks if they are up to something bad.”.

“Where did you hear this?”.

“Oh, I heard it from Seaton, she’s from a parallel class. Apparently, a while back, there was a student who tried to poison one of their classmates but they were caught before they even put the poison in their classmate's food. After this people suspected that the soul-bound necklaces held some sort of mind reader that checks if you have killing intent.”.

“Oh makes sense, so the wizards of the academy didn’t detect anything from the students and moved on to other people that could access the interior of the academy.”. No, that doesn’t make sense, how can necklaces turn brain impulses into thought and then scan those thoughts for killing intent, even if it could do all that, the freeloader in my dorm should have already thought of many ways to try to kill me, but no one came for him.

Nevertheless, there is some other way that the wizards here made sure that the student didn’t cause anything and it likely didn’t include me in those scans.

We both left the main building, I wanted to go back to my dorm, but apparently Keswick wanted to hang out. So now I’m stuck walking around with her. Fortunately, I’ve gotten good at talking to her, I know a lot about Ustosis and Keswick's former friendship, with a lot of useless details that I had to waste time shoving into my brain.

Fortunately, I find an excuse and depart early from our useless get-together, which would have probably taken the whole day away from me.

I return to my dorm and think about what I should do. Well, I suppose I should buy a new mask and throw the black one I currently have away.

With a plan in mind, I set out. My great self goes past the doorman, who seems perpetually tired, I take out my current mask and throw it into some random alley.

I go up to a random stall and grab a blank gray mask with some engravings. It costs 6 bronze, but to me, money really isn’t a problem anymore. With that done I put it into my special ring and start returning to the academy.