Chapter 10: A Variable in My Own Story [2]
He would have gone to sleep at that point or tried toif Maris had not knocked on his door at the eleventh hour.
She looked like someone who had not expected to be knocking on this door at the eleventh hour but had concluded that she had to. "The student," she said.
"The one with the suppressed mana signature. I found something."
He moved aside. She came in, took the chair at his desk, took the bed's edge, and pulled a folded piece of paper from her sleeve.
"I tracked his movements for four days," she said.
He followed a regular routine. His mornings are dedicated to training, and he attends classes as a second-year student, not a third-year student, as I had mistakenly thought. Afternoons are reserved for sessions, and evenings are reserved for personal time. It is during this personal time in the evening that things become intriguing.
She unfolded the paper. It is a hand-drawn map of the lower buildings of the academy.
"Every third night, he goes to the east maintenance corridor. The one under the faculty residence. It's not restricted, but it's also not a student space."
Lucas examined the map and noticed that the eastern maintenance corridor was absent from the novel, a fact that is understandable given the actual layout of the Academy.
"What does he do there?"
"I don't know. I did not follow him. The corridor has a residual mana signature that I couldn't read clearly—like the air itself is slightly corrupted."
"Void-spectrum?"
"Possibly. It's faint enough that I can't be certain."
Lucus gazed at the map for a long time. In his novel, the Cult of the Abyss had a cell operating inside the academy starting in Arc Two—approximately a full academic year away.
They had been using the academy's dungeon access points as a conduit for void-mana infusion into the campus mana grid.
A slow corruption project, designed to weaken the academy's defensive formations over time so that when the cult made its actual move, the defenses would be compromised.
But that was Arc Two. This was the fourth week of Arc One.
The cult was a year ahead of schedule, or the cult had been running this operation for longer than he had written, and Arc Two was when it became visible rather than when it started.
Both possibilities are equally poor.
"We don't confront him," Lucus said immediately.
"Not directly, not yet. We document. We track. Not only that, but we build the picture of what's being done before we act, because if we tip him off, he disappears and the operation continues under someone we don't know about."
Maris nodded, once, the decisive kind. "Agreed. But we also need a way to report this that doesn't get us dismissed as first-year students seeing things."
"The faculty don't have to believe us if we give them verifiable evidence instead of testimony."
"Which means collecting it."
"Which means," Lucus agreed, "being more careful than either of us planned to be."
He glanced at the map again. The maintenance corridor was marked in her careful handwriting. Every third night, someone who should not be able to hide their mana signature was in a space below the faculty residences.
In his novel, the academy dungeon break was not an accident.
He had written it as a dungeon break—a natural event, a rift opening from internal dungeon pressure.
However, he had never worked out the mechanics of how that rift opened with suspicious precision in the middle of a student exercise.
He had planted the mystery.
He hadn't solved it.
He understood, now, with the slow horror of a person reading an unfinished document they themselves wrote and finding a loose thread they did not remember leaving:
The dungeon break was not natural.
The dungeon break was an operation.
The cult was already inside.
"We have approximately five months," Lucus said. His voice was very calm, because calm was the only thing useful at that moment.
"Before the dungeon trial. Whatever they are building, they are building toward that. We need to understand it before the trial, or—"
"Or the trial goes the way it was going to go," Maris finished.
"Seven students," he said quietly. This is because they are real people. Not plot points. Not statistics.
"Seven students were going to die in that dungeon."
"Were going to," she said. Noticing his use of the past tense.
"Were going to," he confirmed,
___________
He lay awake for a long time that night, staring at the ceiling of his dormitory. The window was slightly open, allowing the cold, mana-crystal-scented air of Nevus City to drift inside.
He was Lucas Martin, D potential, minor wind affinity, unformed core, and unique skill unknown.
Furthermore, Lucus Martin, the author, had built this world and left it unfinished.
Likewise, they were both on the margins of a story that was larger than its narrative.
Five months from now, something he had written as a plot device would kill people unless someone stopped it.
He is neither the protagonist nor the hero, in fact, he was merely an extra, armed with a novelist's insight into a story that had surpassed its creator.
But he was here.
He was not going to die in someone else's story, as he had established on day one with considerable personal conviction.
He reached for his notebook. It was opened on a fresh page.
Written at the top: 'What the Author Knows. What the Author Does not Know. What the Author Must Find Out.'
Then he began to write.
To be Continued...
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