Birds chirping outside the window. I stretched pleasantly.
“Mmm… slept well.”
Wait. I was pretty sure I’d planned to investigate the manor last night. Why was I sleeping in my room?
I pulled up the status window and checked the date.
[Days until the banquet begins … 8]
A full day had passed, at least.
I tried to trace my memory. Last night I heard someone crying in the corridor and went to the kid’s room.
But the kid’s fever was so high, I think I was trying to carry him to the annex…
Did he get better and I came back on my own?
My head was foggy. Between suffering through yesterday’s penalty and it being around two in the morning, I must have been so exhausted that I can’t even remember it.
When I was active as an agent, a single all-nighter was nothing. It seems my stamina has dropped since coming here.
And my hair’s gone white on top of everything else. Clicking my tongue in irritation, I got up and checked the clock.
5:59 AM. If I got ready and headed to the study, the timing would be just right.
Tonight I really want to get a proper look around the manor. Just in case, I should pack some self-defense items in advance…
Oh!
Right — today I had a lunch appointment with the “man.”
I’d have to leave the manor as soon as class ended. I should arrive early before the appointed time and check the town’s shops for anything that could serve as a weapon. That way I could knock out the tutorial quest [Find a Weapon] at the same time.
In good spirits, I stepped into the study — and sure enough, just like yesterday, the kid had his face buried behind a book, hiding completely.
“Good morning, young master.”
I greeted him and grabbed the top of the book’s spine, pulling it down. The child’s eyes went wide in surprise as I pressed my hand to his forehead.
“What are you doing all of a sudden—”
“Still warm.”
His body might be a little weak.
It made sense. An eleven-year-old had been keeping up this manic routine of finishing his studies at midnight every night and then sitting through another lesson again at six-thirty in the morning — of course something was going to give.
This wasn’t the time to be sitting him down for class. He needed some sleep.
I looked around the study. Conveniently, there was a long sofa along one wall.
“Alright — let’s get some sleep, young master.”
“What?”
I slipped my hands under his armpits and lifted him clean off the seat. Ignoring his kicking legs, I carried him over to the sofa.
“Let go! Aren’t we having class? This is dereliction of duty!”
“You’re the one who said not to have class, young master.”
“That meant get out of here fast! I’m telling the butler everything. Butler! Howard!”
“Go ahead, tell him. Tell him every last bit.”
True to the household that had drawn up such a packed schedule, the butler had also handed me a full breakdown of the lesson plans I was to cover, laid out neatly in a chart.
At first I’d been stressed wondering how I was ever going to get through all of it…
But thinking about it — did I really need to carry out my duties as a tutor faithfully? In a week, the horror show where everyone dies was starting anyway.
If they fired me before then for being an unfit teacher, for dereliction of duty, and threw me out of the manor — that would be the best possible outcome.
Though I doubt I’ll actually get fired.
The system seemed dead set on making me participate in the game no matter what. As long as I didn’t cross a certain line, it seemed like I could act however I wanted.
“Sleep for now, and tattle all you like later.”
“Who do you think you are, sticking your nose in my business!”
“I’m your teacher, you little—”
“Ha!”
Even as the kid shouted at the top of his lungs, not a single reaction came from the butler standing guard right at the door. Maybe the system was blocking out any sounds that might cause a problem.
The squirming kid finally settled down and gave in after I firmly laid him down on the sofa and draped my jacket over him like a blanket.
“…You’re really so weird…”
“Young master, I can see you nodding off. Go ahead and sleep.”
Of course an eleven-year-old who had to be up before dawn wasn’t going to be fine. He was practically delirious already.
“From now on, sleep during this hour. You only get fevers at night because you won’t sleep.”
The child’s eyes went wide.
“Yesterday — do you remember?”
“Hm? The fever?”
“…Never mind that. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know.”
Was it a dream…? He murmured something vague and went quiet again. I sat down at his bedside and stroked his hair gently.
The child’s eyes began to slowly close.
He’s being more cooperative than I expected today. I thought he’d resist as much as he did yesterday.
“Last night… why did you……”
“I heard a strange — …I came to check if you were sleeping okay.”
I didn’t want to frighten a child by saying I’d heard strange crying sounds. I deflected vaguely.
“What on earth for……”
The kid grumbled a little, then soon fell into a steady, quiet breath.
I quietly got up and opened the study door. The butler standing guard outside turned to me with his usual benevolent smile.
“Ah, the teacher. Is something the matter?”
He had four eyes. I forced my body still before the flinch could show.
“The young master isn’t feeling well at all. If you’d just let him rest in his room today—”
“Teacher.”
The butler cut me off with a single word and smiled mechanically.
“Is there something the matter?”
“What I’m saying is that the young master is ill—”
“If there is nothing the matter, please continue the lesson.”
The butler drew a pocket watch from his tailcoat pocket, checked the time, and continued.
“The young master must depart for the academy in 1 hour and 42 minutes. Please complete today’s lesson before departure. As you know, it goes up to page 168.”
“…….”
“Please, go back inside.”
The study door closed firmly behind me. I tried rattling the handle, but this time it wouldn’t budge at all — completely locked.
“…Well.”
With no choice, I went back to the sofa and sat down at the kid’s bedside, same as before.
How could anyone not care at all about a small child struggling and suffering. Even last night, while the kid was running such a terrible fever, there had been no one around to look after him.
I wanted to go complain directly to the Duke, but the Duke hadn’t shown his face once since we’d exchanged greetings yesterday morning. The Duchess had been nowhere to be found from the very start.
Whenever I asked the butler or maids about the Duke and Duchess’s whereabouts, all I got back was: ‘His Grace generally returns to the manor once a week.’
Which meant… this child had been living in complete emotional neglect.
Suddenly, an image from my own childhood surfaced.
I remembered this age being around the time I desperately wanted my parents. But my mother never came.
Even when I called to tell her I’d gotten good grades at school, even when I wept and clung to her until I was nearly fainting — she showed not the slightest interest. And the man who was supposed to be my father was as good as nonexistent.
Going to sleep alone every single day like that. Getting through every fever by myself.
It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I was finally able to give up on my family’s affection entirely.
I looked down at the kid. In his sleep, his small hand had latched tightly onto the edge of my jacket.
“You too, huh…”
Poor thing.
Every presence in this manor felt ominous — but for some reason, the kid alone stirred something like pity in me.
Maybe because he was young. Maybe because I remembered that the news of his death came from the very start of the game.
…Or maybe because he looked like an old reflection of me.
I quietly stroked the sleeping kid’s head. The child curled his shoulders in and pulled himself into a ball. Like a small creature trying to escape the cold.
I woke the kid when class time was nearly up. When I teased him about what a good sleeper he was, he flushed red, shot me a glare, and stormed out of the study without a word.
I grabbed my bag and headed down to the stables.
Following the maid’s instructions, I held out a slip of paper to the horses with [Town Entrance] written on it. The horses then chewed it up and swallowed it, and sure enough, began to gallop off down the forest path entirely on their own, without a coachman.
Some kind of magic? GPS-equipped horses?
They were fast, on top of everything else.
Since it had taken me nearly two hours running, I’d assumed the carriage would take about the same amount of time — if not longer. Unlike modern cars, horse-drawn carriages tend to move at around the same pace as a person running, or even slower.
But the time it took to reach the town was just 20 minutes.
I stepped out of the carriage in utter disbelief and looked around. I checked the pocket watch I’d been given multiple times. I had genuinely arrived at the town entrance in 20 minutes.
“What kind of logic is that?”
Something unknown had to be involved.
At a glance it seemed as though the carriage itself had some kind of effect applied to it — but in my estimation…
Spatial distortion, maybe.
Perhaps without a specific condition being met, distances stretched impossibly far when traveled on foot. Like this carriage I’d just ridden — but in reverse.
I’d arrived on foot in two hours, but someone without my trained stamina would be hard to come by. For a regular person, it would easily take at least three hours on foot. And with nothing but dark forest on both sides of the road, it would be easy to disorient someone’s sense of direction.
Since this manor was the setting of a horror game, it seemed designed to prevent easy access by ordinary means.
I fed the horses another slip of paper marked [8 hours]— meaning I planned to board again from this spot in 8 hours.
The horses snorted and shook themselves off, then turned the carriage around and disappeared somewhere.
“Hmm.”
The appointment was at noon, and it was now nine o’clock. It seemed like I’d have plenty of time to look around the town.
Even this early, the main street was fairly lively. I must have looked like a tourist poking my head into every corner — someone called out to me: “Is this your first time here?”
The couple who said they were out running errands told me they were lifelong locals who had lived in the Leveque Dukedom for over fifty years.
“So this is the heart of the Dukedom.”
“Not far behind the capital, is it? To my eyes it’s the finest in the Empire.”
“Oh, this man and his boasting.”
The village near the manor was part of the central city of the Duke’s directly governed territory. The rest of the Dukedom’s lands, outside the direct domain, were made up of earldoms.
No wonder there were so many people out this early in the morning. I realized just how naïve my plan on the first day had been — trying to get out of the Dukedom in a single day.
“Boasting, she says! When The Holy See’s own temples now number three in this territory alone.”
“Does having a Holy See affiliation make them very different from ordinary ones?”
When I asked that, not only the husband who had been proudly listing off the Dukedom’s merits, but even the wife who had been laughing and reining him in — both of their eyes went wide.
