[Choice]
Five days after Griam and Jerome received Lewis’s warning.
Griam’s group’s plan to create a sense of alienation by spreading false rumors had fizzled out because of Lewis’s intervention.
It was effectively a failure.
But the children refused to admit that.
Instead, they spoke with one voice about moving on to the next plan.
“Everyone got their letters, right?”
At Griam’s question, the remaining children nodded.
“They said they will not even invite the traitors to social parties, so do not worry about them.”
At Griam’s words, the children looked around at one another and exchanged glances.
As the plan progressed, their number had grown to seventeen.
Some Skadivians who had been waiting to see how things went had joined them.
But repeated failures had led some to leave.
That was why only nine remained in the room now.
What was strange was that, despite repeated failure, the remaining nine had formed an even tighter bond.
“What matters now is carrying out the new instruction.”
Griam held the letter he had received in his hand.
“It says we should harass spirits and elves directly, but secretly enough that we are not caught.”
“Harass them? Why?”
“Because if we do, they will eventually be unable to endure it and reveal their true nature.”
No proper adult would ever make their child do such a thing.
But the children gathered there had all received the same instruction.
“They must have decided spreading rumors is not enough.”
“Right. They said those people will not reveal their hidden nature unless we provoke them directly.”
“It may be dangerous, but it cannot be helped for humanity’s sake.”
“We learned that merely spreading the truth through words is not enough.”
The children had already fallen into false beliefs while spreading lies.
The grand cause of ‘for humanity’ no longer even made them feel guilty.
Some students looked forward to it, calling it honorable work.
“But the problem is that it will not be easy not to get caught.”
The children’s faces, bright with excitement, darkened a little at Griam’s words.
“That is true. Spirits do not even come close to us anymore.”
“Tch. Cowards.”
One student from the Knight Department clicked his tongue and cursed the spirits.
Academy students already knew that spirits were sensitive to malice.
The Exchange Meeting lectures had mentioned it several times.
But the children gathered here did not want to accept that.
They had fallen into the delusion that they were righteous people doing honorable work without an ounce of malice.
“So I have thought about it. Let us target the elves first.”
“Elves? They say elves can use magic even if they are not mages. Will that be all right?”
Griam curled his lips at a friend’s question.
“I heard there is a school rule against using magic recklessly.”
Of course, the same applied to human students.
More precisely, it was a school rule that prohibited the careless use of offensive magic inside the academy.
It was similar to the school rule that Knight Department students could not casually duel with real swords.
But most of the children gathered there were Humanities Department entrants.
They could not use magic at all.
They had learned swordsmanship only at the level of general education.
“If we give them a hard time subtly and run away, what can those slowpokes do?”
At Griam’s sneer, his friends laughed along.
“Well, they are the ones who are always late.”
“When I see them standing blankly in corridors, I want to hit them.”
“Exactly. Why do they stand blankly in a corridor where people walk?”
“I do not like the flowerbeds either. Who are they that they get private flowerbeds inside the academy?”
“Right. It is unfair. We should get private studies instead.”
In an instant, Griam’s room grew noisy again.
After they talked for a while, one student asked.
“But how are we supposed to harass them?”
Elves had an image of being peaceful, slow-moving people.
But once they truly meant to harass them, other aspects hidden by that image came gradually into view.
“They are stronger than us, right?”
“Yes. I arm-wrestled an elf from an Exchange Meeting group as a joke once, and I could not beat them.”
“You mean Forein? You lost to Forein?”
“Yes. Even most Knight Department students would have trouble.”
Elves were generally slender.
But that did not mean their bodies lacked strength.
Born under the World Tree’s rich blessing, they exceeded the average human in physical ability.
“Could we not pressure them with numbers somehow?”
“Would that not make them more wary?”
“Right. If we go in a big group, we will stand out too.”
“Then what should we do?”
They were noble children, but children still not even adults.
Except for a few, they had not even debuted in high society.
For such children, the instruction to secretly harass others was surprisingly hard to put into action.
But the letter Griam received laid out a concrete method for beginning.
As though it had anticipated this exact situation.
“I have a good idea.”
When Griam opened his mouth, all the children looked at him.
Under their gaze, Griam fell into the illusion that he had become someone great.
The thrill wrapping around him made his breathing grow a little rough.
“Griam?”
“Ah. I mean.”
Griam, enjoying his friends’ attention, hurriedly wet his lips.
“Harassment does not necessarily mean hurting someone physically.”
Griam spoke as if the contents of the letter were his own idea.
“What is our objective? We are not harassing others just for fun. It is a sacrifice to reveal the evil nature of those other races.”
It was a ridiculous justification.
But because everyone gathered there thought the same way, no one pointed it out.
“To make their nature show, we must touch something precious to them.”
“Something precious?”
“What could be precious to an elf? Their private flowerbed.”
“Ah!”
The children exclaimed and nodded.
If they ruined a flowerbed, elves who cherished plants would be deeply upset and suffer.
There was almost no danger of being caught either.
Guards hardly patrolled flowerbeds.
“The elf dormitory wardens do come out to look around sometimes, but we only need to be careful then.”
“Even if we are caught, we can say we were only looking around?”
“Exactly.”
It did not matter even if they were caught directly ruining a flowerbed.
They had not harmed a person.
No one would give noble children like them a severe punishment for damaging a bit of academy property.
That was what they thought.
“It is even good if we get caught.”
“Why?”
“If an angry elf comes running at us, we can use that as an excuse to make a bigger disturbance.”
The children did not yet understand what it meant for an elf to become angry.
That was why they could talk about such an absurdly bold plan.
“Fine. I agree.”
“Me too. It has been bothering me lately that elves keep coming late because they take care of their flowerbeds.”
“If they love forests that much, they should just live in the forest like animals.”
“Exactly!”
Griam’s proposal stirred the children up again.
But Jerome, who stood silently in a corner with his arms crossed, still had not said a word.
“Jerome. What is wrong?”
Jerome seemed to think for a moment at Griam’s question.
But he soon sighed faintly and spoke his thoughts.
“I got a message from my family head too. But would it not be better to restrain ourselves for a while?”
“What?”
Griam stared at Jerome in disbelief.
“Are you saying you will disobey the family head and the Skadivian Noble Alliance?”
“That is not what I mean. I am saying we should act carefully.”
Jerome began to voice the thoughts he had been unable to say because of the atmosphere.
“Over the last few days, the rumors we spread were refuted in the lectures as if someone was targeting them. Is that not strange?”
“That was something we expected. The Empire is trying to exploit the harmony of the three races. They could not let the truth we spread stand, so they responded.”
“If there had been a response after a few days, I would think so too. But they refuted us within minutes, not even a day.”
Even Griam had nothing to say about that.
Their response had certainly been strangely fast.
But by Griam’s common sense, there was no way to explain it.
That was why he had only thought their luck was bad and moved on.
Jerome, however, had continued to dig into it.
“It was strange that we kept being refuted, so we changed tactics. We decided to spread rumors that were hard to refute.”
For instance, false rumors close to personal attacks.
“But from the very next day we started that plan, an enormous number of pop quizzes began pouring down on us.”
Thanks to that, the children’s attention shifted from little rumors entirely to pop quizzes.
Griam’s group, who had failed to focus on lectures while spreading rumors, received disastrous grades.
“I looked into it, and I heard that a Knight Department teaching assistant called Lewis was leading it.”
Griam’s shoulders trembled when Lewis’s name came up.
He and Jerome had received Lewis’s warning a few times as well.
Jerome nodded as though he shared Griam’s feelings.
“I think everything that has happened until now is a kind of warning. They are already watching us. If we take one more step...”
Jerome’s gaze drifted to the academy badge on Griam’s chest.
“We will have to seriously prepare for punishment too.”
The mood stiffened at the word punishment.
Until then, the children had carried out their families’ orders only while imagining the rewards they would receive in the future.
It was not as though they lacked all awareness that they should not cause problems at the academy.
But so what if they caused a little problem?
They would be scolded a little and that would be all.
That was the full extent of how the children understood their situation.
But when Jerome took a grave tone and mentioned punishment, they began to feel afraid.
“What do you mean by punishment?”
“Anything. Since we have already received a warning, suspension or expulsion could...”
“That will not happen!”
Griam shouted, cutting Jerome off.
“Of course, we could receive that kind of punishment if we cause a very serious incident. But this is only a quarrel between children.”
Griam deliberately played down the importance of what they intended to do.
Even while he himself believed he was doing something significant.
The children, young and inflated with self-importance, passed over the contradiction without a thought.
“Jerome, what you are worried about will not happen. Punishment? At worst, we will write letters of reflection.”
“......”
“Or are you scared? Jerome, the promising student of the Knight Department? Are you going to pull out now?”
Jerome did not answer Griam’s provocation for some time.
But he soon sighed and shook his head.
“I did not say I would pull out. I only said we should be careful. If we lie low for a few days, will the surveillance not disappear?”
“There is no time. The Exchange Meeting will end soon and the regular term will begin. By then, it will be too late.”
Even Griam did not know what would be too late or why.
It was only written that way in the letter.
But the other children had received letters with similar contents.
So they nodded and looked at Jerome with pressing eyes.
After all, Jerome was the strongest among them, a friend who was almost their enforcer.
It would be troublesome if he left.
“...Fine. Nothing will happen if we stay within the line.”
Thinking his father would not have made him do something wrong, Jerome nodded slowly.
***
“Do we really have to go this far?”
“You are a problem because you are not elf-like enough. Show some elf sensibility.”
Hidden around the corner of a building, I soothed the grumbling Elaine.
“You cherish your flowerbed too. How much more must other elves cherish theirs?”
“That is true, but are there really children who would try to ruin a flowerbed?”
Elaine’s question was more fundamental.
She was not asking whether such children existed, but what in the world they would gain by doing something like that.
Of course, I had no intention of telling her about the instructions Griam’s group had received from their families.
I did not want Elaine entangled in matters that deeply.
“Humans are that kind of race. Some people satisfy their hearts with good deeds, while others gain pleasure from evil acts.”
“My elves have people like that too, though?”
“But compared by proportion, their number is extremely small compared to humans.”
I remembered seeing somewhere that the rate of school violence was around 1.1 percent.
Of course, that statistic could not quantify all human crime.
But in an elf educational facility, a similar thing happened perhaps once every few decades.
With bitterness lingering in my mouth, I continued watching the flowerbed.
“Are you going to watch personally every day like this?”
“No.”
I had too much to do to watch every day.
The Exchange Meeting was not over yet.
Griam’s group could split up and act in several places.
I was only waiting today because we had received information that this was the first day the children had gathered to plot something.
“They could go to other flowerbeds to do bad things.”
“I asked the dormitory wardens to watch the other places.”
I was not waiting without any thought.
Among the children who walked with Griam, there was one who particularly displayed inferiority toward a certain elf.
We were waiting here because that elf’s private flowerbed was here.
“Hmm... I still do not understand. Acting with such resentment when they have no particular connection to one another.”
Elaine might have a human-like personality, but she was an elf.
As an elf born from a World Tree bud with a strong sense of kinship, it was hard for her to understand human behavior.
“Still, you will understand humans better than any other elf.”
“That is true. It feels a little wrong to say it, but our people can be frustrating.”
“Then study humans hard and experience them.”
The very moment I said that—
“Ah, they are here.”
I had hoped otherwise, but just as expected.
Three human students approached the flowerbed, looking around them.