With widened eyes, both of us stepped further in and looked around only to be shocked again.

The terrace of the building right next over was also completely packed and connected with planks of wood.

Then the building behind it. And the building next to it. And another! All of them were brought together only by the bridges made of wooden planks.

A floor had been made for dancing on every terrace, a bar set up on every corner where the buffet didn’t fit, and more people than either of us could count crowded the entire place.

“Oh!” A scream resounded. From the center of the dance floor, the grad students in Black Rose spotted me and waved their hands.

“It’s the professor!”

“WOAH! PROFESSOR!”

Everyone around looked our way, all of them drunk. The hosts had hyped us right from the start. They rushed over, hopping up the wood bridge.

“Professor!”

The green-haired oldest of the grad students spread his arms wide as he saw me.

He wrapped me in an embrace before I could react.

The mood got to me and I screamed.

“Jeremy!!”

“Professor!! Let’s go! Biggest fucking party EVER!”

I screamed in his ears over the music.

“Who are all these people?”

Jeremy turned me around and pointed at the different terraces. It was extremely weird to say different terraces for a single party.

“Those guys there are some other faculty from the academy. A bunch of them are professors so meet them.”

He then moved to the other side.

“Those guys are our friends from the academy. All of them are adults so don’t worry. The drinks are all from Mundus’ so don’t worry about that either.”

Jeremy treated me with respect, it was natural to treat him the same. Truly, I once again felt how easy adults were to get along with compared to kids.

“Lastly some of them are businessmen and figures from the city that we knew. We called about 70 or 80 people.”

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There were definitely more than two hundred.

“What about the rest of them?”

“I have no fucking clue!”

“What?”

“Seriously! No idea. They just came in and we said PARTAY!”

“Holy shit.”

This might as well have been the biggest fucking party I had ever seen.

We hopped around on the terrace a couple of times before the boy dragged me straight to the dance floor.

“Wait, that guy too!” I pointed at Richard. The other grad students saw him, and with a grin, picked him up. They tossed him in their arms as they carried us over to the dance floor.

“PARTAY!!” They screamed.

“PARTAY!” I screamed back.

***

I couldn’t recommend dance to anyone who was at the age where their back hurt. But if you were planning to dance for hours on end, no back pain would ever stop you.

The party raged on as the time went from late evening to past midnight.

The food and drinks slowed down, and so did the music, but the party was still alive.

Hours of dancing, drinking, and eating had passed me by. I wondered how many people I had gotten acquainted with.

On one of the terraces of one of the buildings, I sat on a couch, a glass of wine in hand.

Around me on the couches were some of the other professors, some businessmen and officials from Glorenstein, and some of the older students.

[https://i.imgur.com/GVFjfGX.jpg]

It was a tight group barely numbering a dozen in the hundreds that had attended. What was even more shocking was that more and more people kept coming in with each hour.

Right next to me, Richard was gorging on brownies that made him laugh a lot while the rest all relaxed back.

“And then,” I leaned closer and all of them got off their backs. “All of us scared shitless, pushed each other around to check who was behind this fucking sound. The ghost of the barracks. In the end, they all made me bait.”

A few gasps rang out.

“I look around, my arms trembling. The sounds are louder than ever. Slowly, I held the curtain… and PULLED IT BACK!”

The others flinched.

“And it was our superior snoring louder and a bull! The ghost that had the entire barracks shitting bricks was sleeping like a log!”

The others laughed and slapped their thighs while some sighed in relief.

“That was good.”

“You had me scared for a moment!”

I watched as the others gulped their glasses down while I took a small of my wine, laughing to myself.

One of them reached out to the front of the table and placed a hand on the empty bottle of moonshine.

“Alright, next one?”

It was a drinking game. Whoever the bottle landed on had to tell a story.

If the story managed to make others scared, they had to chug. And if it failed, you had to chug.

The bottle spun around slowly and landed on a girl sitting on the armrest of a couch.

She seemed to be lost in thought for a moment.

“Oh, the ghost stories remind me…” The girl clapped her hands and dropped her drink as if she wouldn’t be losing at all. “You won’t believe this, but one of my roommates didn’t attend this party. She said yesterday night, she was walking out alone to an alleyway.”

We all quieted down and listened. Except Richard.

“She was about to go back home, when… she saw a hooded person… with ruby red eyes.”

“Hah!”

“What?”

Gasps rang out at those words.

My eyes widened just as much as the rest of them. It was immensely shocking.

I could feel my mind clearing up, and my vision widened. A single sentence had sobered me up from hours of drinking.

Though red eyes weren’t uncommon, for some people, they resembled a gem.

The people who were ostracized, hated, and despised by both sides of the world.

The traitors of mankind, and the ugliest sinners against the Sun God.

“That’s right… she saw…”

The child of a human and a demon.

“A demiurge in Glorenstein.”