◈ Mistaken for a Masked Monster
──────
Ladies and Gentlemen
"I could beat the living hell out of every last one of you, you know."
Boom-.
A crushing weight came down on the whole lecture hall.
Not a single student could make a sound.
-That him? The one who scored E in everything and still came out top of the class?
-Has to be Viktor, right? Just looking at him, he seems like nothing.
-Are you serious... I lost to that?-One good punch and I bet he'd piss himself.
Even the ones who had been running their mouths fell silent.
Faces gone rigid. Eyes trembling.
The scene froze, like someone had hit pause.
Nobody moved.
"......"
Why?
A bead of cold sweat traced its way down someone's jaw.
'I'm going to die.'
Not a thought. It fired before thought could form, straight from somewhere deeper.
An alarm.
Instinct.
The raw fear of a living thing that doesn't want to stop living.
Breath that had come so naturally began to shake.
"Ugh, hah..."
"Hh, hhh..."
Ragged. Like something had reached inside and taken hold.
There was no mistaking it.
Something real was squeezing around their throats. Tendrils coiled around their larynxes. One more squeeze and the bones would go, every one of them knew it, somewhere beneath thought.
"Ladies and gentlemen?"
Creak, crack-.
Hard to say what it actually looked like.
But at the very least, every student in that room felt the same thing.
Standing before them was the boy they had been mocking.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
The smiling mask.
Lips carved impossibly wide across that pale white face.
Eyes curved into crescents, like all of this was perfectly delightful.
Lungs seizing, none of them could tear their gaze away.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
Pure instinct.
Look away for even a heartbeat, and something terrible would happen. That certainty sat like a stone in the gut.
"La"
"dies"
"and"
"gen"
"tle"
"men"
The world tilted.
Voices shattered, scattering like broken glass.
The world the students were looking at stayed warped and wrong for a long, long moment.
From the center of that chaos, the jester kept repeating the same word.
"everyoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryonetoeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneruneveryone everyoneeveryoneeveryoneawayeveryone everyoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryone dieeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryonewanteveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryonetodieeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryonenoeveryone everyoneeveryonerunawayeveryoneeveryoneeveryonepleaseeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryoneeveryone"
The mask smiled.
The corners climbed higher and higher, splitting wider than any mouth had a right to. Past the point where it could still be called a smile.
"......"
A blink.
When their eyelids lifted again, the mask was inches from their faces.
The jester had multiplied, one for every student in the room.
Each stood before a different person, centimeters away, staring.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
The mask's mouth fell open wide.
Deep in that bottomless dark, something writhed thick as a swarm of cockroaches, tentacles slick and squirming, clambering over one another.
They stretched across the world. Reaching. Almost touching -
"Enough. Stop there."
A voice cut through it all.
The killing intent snapped clean.
The world brightened.
"Hah, hah...!"
"Cough... hack, hh..."
Students gulped down air in ragged heaves.
The pressure at their throats was gone. A dull, throbbing ache in its place.
Except.
Even that ache was an illusion.
Everything they had seen was nothing.
Looking up, they found an ordinary lecture hall. Peaceful. Unchanged.
The students could only stare.
"......?"
The only thing that had changed was the two people at the front of the room.
The jester, standing there like nothing had happened. A sword blade resting against his neck.
Javert had her sword leveled at Viktor's throat.
"Oh dear."
"That was quite the speech. Let's end it there."
The jester smiled, mildly inconvenienced. The professor's warning came without feeling.
Flat, unreadable eyes fixed on the mask.
Cold steel at the throat below it.
"Viktor."
"Yes, Professor Javert."
The air between them was sharp enough to cut.
Even with a blade at his neck, the boy was perfectly at ease. He hadn't so much as glanced in Javert's direction.
The red-haired woman held the sword steady and cursed inwardly.
'He didn't dodge.'
From the moment Javert drew her blade to the moment it pressed against the jester's neck.
Not a single reaction from Viktor.
No dodge. No guard.
If anything, he had just stiffened and lifted his chin, as if daring her to go ahead. And he stood there completely steady, not a tremor in sight.
'That's not ordinary nerve.'
Too composed for a first-year. Too cold.
Her suspicion of the boy deepened another notch.
Of course, there was a very different story hiding underneath all that composure.
'God, that scared me. She was too fast. I didn't even see it.'
He hadn't reacted because he hadn't seen it coming.
His eyes hadn't been fast enough to follow Javert's draw.
Cold sweat under the mask. He kept still.
'Stay calm. Stay calm.'
He steadied his breath.
Keep quiet, and she'd be the one to speak first.
"My request was for an introduction. I didn't ask you to intimidate your fellow students."
"My apologies. I got a little carried away without meaning to."
"Pull back the killing intent first."
"I already have. So, Professor, would you consider lowering your sword?"
"......"
Shhhk-.
Javert withdrew the blade and returned it to its sheath without fuss.
"I understand why you were angry. But that is also the weight that comes with being top of the class."
"I didn't think it through. I'll be more careful from now on."
"Please. It wouldn't do you any favors either, Viktor."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"I owe you an apology as well. Whatever the justification, I drew steel on a student..."
Javert bowed her head, crisp and correct.
Even in the middle of all this, she found her own fault and apologized for it. This much could have easily been glossed over in the moment. That was just how she was. Rigid about the rules she set for herself.
"I'm fine, Professor."
"I'll be more careful next time as well."
After a proper bow, she wrapped up the class.
Javert turned to face the students, still sitting there in a daze.
"Today's schedule is concluded. From tomorrow, your academy life begins in earnest. Come prepared with a firm mind."
The kids came back to themselves slowly.
None of them could make sense of what had happened. What had been done to them. What those hallucinations had been.
"......?"
But it didn't matter.
Even amid all that confusion, the schedule simply came to a close.
***
First day done.
On the path back to the dormitory.
[Viktor! My most loyal knight!]
"Ah... yes, Your Highness."
Squirm, squirm-.
Carmilla peeked her little head out from the uniform pocket she'd been tucked away in this whole time.
Too silver for any ordinary bat, with a softer, rounder build to match.
She shook her head and asked.
[Was that all right? Back in the lecture hall?]
"Which part? The part where I provoked the students, or the standoff with Professor Javert?"
[Both! Wasn't that drawing far too much attention?]
"Everything is going exactly according to plan."
[Well, that's a relief, but...]
The princess squirmed in the pocket.
[Mm... at the very least, that professor has manners. Not many superiors bow their heads to apologize to someone below them. She looks cold on the surface, but she seems like a person of real character. I feel better knowing that.]
"My thoughts exactly."
As long as she didn't cross certain lines, Javert really was an excellent educator.
Capable, reliable, formidable, and unflinching about the line between duty and personal feeling.
Of course, the moment anything connected to cultists entered the picture, she would flip into something else entirely. A killing machine with no off switch.
'I just need to use that well.'
He had realized it earlier.
Javert wasn't a threat. She was a card that had just landed in his hand.
With only a little risk, she was a card that could outperform even the Evil God set.
That was something to plan around carefully.
[Never mind that, I'm more worried about those students!]
"The Class E students?"
[Yes. The way they were looking at Viktor was not ordinary. Even after being frightened once, some of them only seemed to grow more hostile.]
"From their perspective, it's hard to accept. They all think their own rankings should be higher."
[Ridiculous. You are someone who endured the God-Slaying Bow and a staking with nothing but your bare body, who stood against five elite assassins. Frogs in a well, every one of them, unable to see the value of a gemstone right in front of them.]
"Just hearing you say that is more than enough. Thank you."
[In my judgment, it won't be long before you come to blows with them...]
"Oh, that part, you don't need to worry about."
[Hm?]
"They're already waiting right over there."
The path to the tram stop.
Seven students stood blocking the way.
Every one of them was a higher-ranked student from Class E.
"Hey. Top of the class."
The tone alone. The expression. Nothing friendly about any of it.
No surprise there.
Viktor stayed where he was and answered, deliberately more relaxed than before.
"Oh...? My classmates. What's going on?"
"Ha, look at this guy act like he doesn't know."
Hollow laughter. The bigger ones closed in on either side.
"Big talk earlier, wasn't it. 'Beat the hell out of all of you.'"
"So why the rush to leave, huh? Scared?"
"We've still got unfinished business."
"That hallucination thing earlier, whatever it was..."
"None of that this time. Damn E-grade nobody, acting like you own the place..."
A rough way for this to go.
Then again, he had seen it coming from the start. The way they had been glaring at him in the lecture hall made it obvious.
'Decisive, at least.'
He smiled.
"So?"
"What?"
"So, what do you want? Why'd you come looking for me?"
Looked like they were here for a fight. No point dancing around it.
"Should I just flatten all of you right here?"
"You, you little-!"
Might as well.
He had decided to establish the pecking order, so he might as well teach them to stay down properly. People learn faster when you put them in their place.
"Since we're doing this, how about a wager? Be a shame for it to end at nothing."
"What kind of psycho..."
The delinquents looked thrown off, uncertain.
Viktor spread his hand wide and flicked his fingers forward, a lazy come-on-in gesture.
From the front pocket, the princess squirmed.
[I'm going to take a little nap.]
[Don't be too rough with them.]
[They're human lives. Have some pity.]
No disrespect, Your Highness.
Humans, when you hit them, tend to get harder. That is just the species.
Beat them right to the edge of wetting themselves. Nothing more.
"Whoever loses does whatever the winner says for the next year."
You're all already done for.
Every last one of you is going to be my errand boy.