Less than an hour later, in the Academy's library…

Straf arrives with his hands in his pockets, and in a visibly sour mood. He wordlessly walks past the lone woman sitting at the long desk by the entry, and takes a seat at one of the many empty tables. A purple vortex appears next to him, and Straf reaches in. After a moment, he pulls out a thick tome, opens it, and begins reading through it at seemingly impossible pace, page after page. He lets out a tired sigh after he reads through the entire tome in mere minutes, then throws it back in, and pulls out another.

The woman at the desk stares with her mouth slightly open, unsure what to make of it. The handsome man across the room continues rapidly flipping through the pages, before once again swapping tomes out. This continues uninterrupted for roughly thirty minutes before he stands back up, and turns to approach the desk. Startled, the woman quickly sets aside the book she was reading, and straightens out.

「Y- Yes?… Quite an early hour for a library visit…」

She asks, and remarks. Straf opens his [Portable Storage] again, then begins to pull out and stack the books he just read onto the desk.

「Yeah, I guess… I want to turn these in.」

Patpat.

He says, and gives the large stack a quick pat.

「Your name is?…」

「Straf Katastrof.」

Straf replies, and sighs as he leans onto the desk with his elbow, looking at the towering bookshelves behind him.

「They didn't capture your interest?」

The woman asks, as she marks down the books as returned. He raises a singular eyebrow at her.

「No, I don't need them anymore. I read them all, and it was a slog.」

He scoffs, and shaking his head, turns it away back to the rest of the library.

《Read them all? In your dreams, perhaps.》

The woman looks at Straf's wide back like he's a rambling madman, noting down the tomes and setting them aside.

「…Anything else?」

She says, as she takes the last one away.

「…Yeah. Do you have anything on ghosts?」

He asks, turning back to her as he leans over her desk.

「Pft. Ghosts?…」

The library woman sputters, covering her grinning mouth with her hand.

「Yeah. Ghosts, evil spirits, haunted places, whatever the fuck you call them. Got anything like that?」

Straf spreads his arms in frustration, before placing his hands back on her long desk. She pulls out a thick tome from the space underneath the desk, and flips a few pages through it.

「Hmmm… There's the Compendium of Cursed Things and Beings… Ah, but I think Professor Welz temporarily took that one for the second years' lectures…」

She says, as her finger pauses on one of the entries within the book. Her brows rise, and she apologetically shrugs her shoulders at Straf.

「Tsk… Fuckin' shit.」

He clicks his tongue in response, turning his head away in frustration.

「Don't worry, he said he only needs it for a week or so-」

「I don't have that much fucking time…」

Straf grumbles, and lets out another sigh. The woman's shoulders slump, and she remains silent, not quite sure how to respond.

「…Where's your friends?」

He asks with a nod of his head at the two empty chairs beside her.

「They're sick, and I'm the only night shift girl left that's feeling mostly fine. I told them they can just stay in bed. It's a rarity that someone stops by the library at these hours anyway.」

The woman glances at the chairs, and shrugs as she explains.

「…Can I find something else for you? The compendium is the most comprehensive work on the topic, but I'm sure there's-」

「Nah, fuck it. Forget it.」

Straf turns away, and walks out of the library with his hands in his pockets. The library girl lets out a troubled, quiet sighful groan, and returns to the book she was reading…

…

The next morning, just after sunrise, in Cycelia's room…

Blinking a few times, Cycelia opens her emerald eyes. She looks at Straf's empty bed. A strange feeling of sadness and unease fills her, as if something that was meant to be there is missing, and she took it for granted. The cold from the after-rain air leaks in through the closed window. The steady flame on the oil lamp flickers briefly in rapid pulses, and continues dutifully burning away.

Cycelia lets out a wistful sigh, clutching onto her blanket a little tighter, and wriggles herself deeper underneath it. The cold air outside the blanket makes her reluctant to get out of the bed.

「…Straf would be disappointed if I didn't go today.」

She quietly remarks to herself, and shivering, she slowly picks herself up to sitting. She slips her boots on, ties them, and peeks into her open baggage past her bed's foot end for a tome needed for today's lectures. Cycelia digs through the books within, tidying them up a little in the large traveling case. Eventually, she finds the one she was looking for, and pulls it out.

Cycelia looks at the mountain range lit by the morning sun outside, and lets out a long sigh again. She turns her gloomy eyes to the lamp's flame, and blows it out with a quick puff before standing up. She heads outside, and hesitates with her door's lock, but ultimately decides to lock it, and continues towards the stairwell.

At the bottom level, by the end of the girls' dormitory hallway, Tisha is already waiting for her. The northern princess lacks her usual smug smirk, and her somber blue eyes look at Cycelia as she approaches.

「Hey…」

Tisha listlessly greets her, and turns to walk down the hallway.

「Good morning… Where's Neela? Is she busy looking through her notes?-」

Cycelia asks, and looks over her shoulder at the stairwell behind them.

「She's not coming today.」

「Eh?」

Tisha bluntly replies, and despite her effort to hide it, her expression sours. Cycelia blinks at her, but the surprise on her face quickly fades into a sullen expression.

「I see… How is she feeling?」

Cycelia weakly nods in response. At this hour the hallway would normally be packed full of students, but as of now, it is remarkably vacant.

「…She's pretty sick. She asked me to get notes for her, and fell back asleep immediately. She had a fever, too.」

Tisha replies after a moment of silence. As they pass a student here and there, each looks at them with surprise in their eyes, as if Tisha and Cycelia were aliens, or blatant foreigners.

「I see…」

Cycelia nods again, lowering her head.

「…We need to catch the fucking bastard responsible. I can't say the same for myself, but Neela never did anything to anybody. She doesn't deserve this.」

The northern princess clenches her fist and grits her teeth in anger. She looks sideways at Cycelia with a hateful glare, but when she realizes that she's glaring at her, Tisha apologetically snaps her face away. After a few seconds, her blue eyes return back to her, much softer this time.

「How are you feeling, Lia? No headaches, no fever, no nothing?」

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「No… I was feeling a little strange when I woke up, but I'm fine now. How about you?」

Cycelia shakes her head, looking down at the ground in front of her feet. She shrugs her shoulders as she explains, locking her gaze with Tisha.

「I'm fine… More of the same. Not a big deal. If this was enough to put me into a bed, I'd never make it in the north.」

Tisha sighs as she turns her eyes away, also shrugging. Cycelia lets out a troubled sigh, and they continue along their way to the classroom…

…

Two hours later, in one of the less-traveled segments of the main Academy building…

With his deerstalker on and a pipe in his mouth, Straf is walking down the peculiarly short and narrow hallways, unlike most in the Academy of Magic. The magic lamps levitating here are scarce, sparsely dotting the junctions between the halls. Straf looks at the headmaster's hand-drawn map, stops in his tracks, and takes a moment to read it.

「Where the fuck is this place?…」

He mumbles out, holding onto his pipe's head.

「…We're nothing alike…」

An angry man's distant voice growls at Straf from the side. Straf looks at the source, only to find his shadow there, stretched onto the wall by the magic lamp levitating behind him.

「…Yeah? I figured. I'm not a bitter loser like you. Did you think throwing me tied up in the trunk for your ride down the memory lane would get me to pity you? Fat chance.」

Straf shakes his head, and continues reading the map.

「…I thought you were… Like me…」

A voice from behind him says, sounding disjointed as it fades in and out.

「Yeah, you thought wrong. I don't even know where you got that idea… Who were those people, anyway? You both seem like massive pricks. Was she your girlfriend, or something?」

Straf asks, and looks at his shadow beside him. After a few seconds of silence, he shrugs, and returns his eyes to the map.

「Seriously, where the fuck is that door? An X on a map doesn't cut it… Hey, Casper… Are you the one behind the whole mess, or not? Are you working with someone else?」

He asks again, more focused on the map than the presence, squinting at the headmaster's barely legible handwriting.

「This looks like a fucking metal band name…」

Straf grumbles under his breath, shaking his head. The presence seems to grow larger.

「…Disappear… You trash…」

Hateful voices insist from behind him. Sucking in air through his pipe, Straf feels the specific sensation of [Contextual Time Perception] activating. He quickly looks left and right, but nothing seems out of place.

《Okay, what now?-》

He looks over his shoulder, and sees a dark, blade-like shape speeding for his throat.

《Oh fu-!》

Clunk.

Straf leans back on a reflex, backflipping as time returns to normal. Something lets out a hollow wooden clunk as it impacts the ground.

《Okay, what the fuck was that?》

He thinks as his eyes dart around, crouched and partially kneeling. When he sees nothing is there, he stands back up, and moves his hand to his pipe.

「Mm?」

He utters out, as he grasps for thin air. The head of his pipe is missing, and what's left of it is a simple hollow tube sticking out of his mouth. Moreover, more than half of the peak of his hat is also missing.

「What the fuck?…」

Straf says, squinting in surprise. He looks down, and on the floor finds both his pipe's head, and the missing piece of his deerstalker's peak.

「You fuckin'!… You motherfucker! Do you have any idea how much emotional support this pipe has given me!? You fuck! I'm going to find your corpse and take a piss on it!」

Tfwap!

He shouts down the hall, throwing the rest of his deerstalker onto the ground in fury. Straf discards the map back into his [Portable Storage], and stomps forward beneath the magic lamp ahead. He looks around the junction, and picks a direction at random. This continues for a minute or so as he continues searching for the presence.

「You think you can fuck with me and then run away!? I don't even care if you're behind it or not! I'm going to find something embarrassing about you, and unearth it!」

Straf continues shouting in random directions. The presence slowly grows more distinct, more tangible. He beelines straight for it, stomping through the dark hallway with his fists clenched.

「Where are you, you little shit!?-」

Straf angrily shouts as he pops out from beyond a corner. An indistinct, shadowy silhouette is standing there, right in the center of the darkness between the lamps.

「Oh. So you can do more than hide on the walls and in dark rooms, huh?」

He scoffs, nonchalantly placing his hands in his pockets as he looks at the dark form. It can't seem to hold a solid outline, shifting and twisting like a cloud of black smoke that desperately attempts to hold a human shape against all odds. It does not appear to have hands, instead, it arms narrow down into points. Its legs are not legs, but more like dark pillar supporting it, a conical shape elevating the figure above the dark floor.

Though there is nothing to visibly indicate it, Straf feels the being turn around and face him. The presence grows stronger, but unlike previously, he can tell it's coming from right before him.

「Well? You were real fucking cocky a minute or so ago. What's the matter? Scared?-」

Straf asks with his arms spread, smugly grinning at the dark shape. He blinks, and finds it standing right in front of him. [Contextual Time Perception] activates, and the dark figure's pointy arm is speeding for Straf's face.

《Not again!-》

He thinks, and wildly jumps back. Time returns to normal as he narrowly clears the stab, and he lands a dozen or so paces away, sliding to a halt.

《…What the fuck? I barely had the time to react to that-》

Just as Straf considers the blinding speed at which the figure moved, it zaps towards him again. Its entire form seems to shift to avoid the magic lamp's light as it passes by it in one of the junctions. It closes the gap between Straf in almost an instant, once again lunging at him with its pointy arm directed at him. [Contextual Time Perception] activates again, and Straf has just enough time to take a peek at the effect icon in the corner of his vision.

《What the fuck!?》

He thinks, as he leaps out of the dark figure's blow towards the hallway leading to the Academy's foyer. A fist-sized blur appears in front of Straf, then zaps towards the figure recovering from its lumbering charge.

Crash!

It passes right through. The sound of shattering glass coming from behind the figure fills the hallway. Straf senses the figure turn its attention to him again.

「Yeah, fucking figured!」

He exclaims, and breaks into a sprint towards the foyer.

Donnnnnngggggggg… Gooooooonnnnnnnnnngggggg… Donnnnnnnnnnggggggg…

The bell tolls, signaling the end of the morning classes, and the beginning of the extended recess.

《As I thought, normal magic doesn't do shit! But even if it did, I can't risk wiping the floor with it and breaking the barrier!》

Straf slides to a halt, and sprints behind a corner. With the edge of his vision, he catches the figure to be keeping up with no issue.

《Fuck! Why couldn't it have been a living nerd with a grudge!?》

He winces in frustration as he continues running. He peeks over his shoulder, and the figure is speeding towards him, slowly gaining distance, almost within arm's reach. Straf sees the upper floor of the foyer in the distance, and tries to pick up the pace, if only by a little. He glances over his shoulder again, and the dark shape is still right behind him.

「Gaaahhh, for fuck's sake! If you're immune to magic, then at least be slower than a fucking supercar!」

Straf shouts in frustration as he runs into the foyer with the being shadowing him.

He turns around, and begins sliding to a stop. [Contextual Time Perception] activates again as the dark being attempts to drive its arm through Straf's throat.

BOOM!

Thunderous noise fills the empty entrance foyer as Straf disappears from in front of the figure above, and reappears before the stairs leading to the Cursefire below. He breaks into a sprint again, this time for the entry door proper. Though he does not dare to look, he feels the presence right behind him. He slams the door open with his shoulder and leaps out into the weak sunlight, running a few paces away from the door past the flowerbed. The presence grows weaker and more distant, though Straf can feel it still somewhere behind himself.

He looks over his shoulder. The shape is standing in the open doorway, staring at him with a face it does not have. Straf looks closer, and it appears the figure has stopped right where the sunlight begins, remaining in the faint blue artificial light of the lamps. After a few uneasy seconds, the shape slides away from the door, and merges with the background shadows behind it, seemingly disappearing.

「Whew…」

He exhales, placing one hand in his pocket, and rubbing his chin with the other.

「…Well, that's not good…」

Straf thinks out loud, then briefly pauses his chin-rubbing.

《…It almost capped out my ability.》

He places his free hand in his pocket as well, grimacing deep in thought as his mouth jumps from left to right. Straf shrugs and slowly, nonchalantly makes his way back inside…