Chapter 714
“Here, take Wardanaz along too. While you’re at it, give him a chance to observe.”
“What?”
At the suggestion from the other club members, Sebius frowned as if asking what nonsense they were talking about.
“You know I work alone when I do relocations.”
“Just this once. Please, just this once.”
“That’s right. He robbed the Skull Principal’s villa, so his skill is already proven. He won’t hold you back.”
Seeing the club members press the matter instead of backing down as usual, Sebius realized they really did want to recruit Wardanaz into the club.
If Lee Han saw with his own eyes how they pulled off a big score, he would feel the charm of the club.
“If he wants to do it, he can do it. Why are they making such a fuss…”
With Sebius’s personality—never stopping someone who wanted to go, never blocking someone who wanted to come—the Einroguard clubs that tried to force juniors into joining honestly looked pathetic.
Still, as a fellow club member, Sebius could not completely ignore the wishes of the others.
Remembering the dedication of those members who had always stepped forward without retreating even when things got dangerous, Sebius slowly nodded.
“…Fine. If he wants to follow, let him.”
“That worked out!”
“Lord Wardanaz, this is a really good opportunity. You’ll be able to learn a lot.”
“Should this really be called learning…?”
Listening to the upperclassmen beside him, Lee Han thought to himself as he abruptly found himself being dragged along.
Of course, he was going to go along with it anyway.
*****
“You know invisibility magic?”
“Yes, I can use it.”
“!”
Sebius, walking out into Einroguard in the evening as the dusk settled, paused and made a slightly surprised expression.
A junior who had only just become a second-year already knew invisibility magic.
As expected of someone who had robbed the Skull Principal’s villa. He really was different.
“Let’s wait here for a moment.”
Sebius stopped in front of the stairs leading down from the seventh floor to the sixth and sat on a broad flat rock nearby.
Lee Han found it odd.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be hitting some secret storehouse?”
Naturally, the reason he had come along to watch an upperclassman steal for the first time was to gather information.
Basically, the food chain at Einroguard was structured so that the lower the year, the more one became prey for upperclassmen.
Part of that came from the gap in magical ability, but the gap in information was just as large.
The upperclassmen knew all sorts of bizarre places and rules the juniors did not.
Lee Han had intended to help with Sebius’s work and pick up useful information about storehouses or workshops the upperclassmen favored.
So why were they waiting here?
“Are there more paths from the seventh ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) floor down to the sixth?”
“Quite a few. The seventh floor is so wide that there are all sorts of strange shortcuts and side paths. They say there’s even a route that leads to the Skull Principal’s room.”
“Is that really true?”
“How would I know? I’ve never seen it… Hold on. Someone’s coming.”
Sebius straightened up as he watched a White Tiger Tower student walking toward them from far away.
“Invisibility magic.”
“Yes.”
The two of them quickly cast invisibility magic. Sebius realized that Lee Han’s invisibility spell was much faster and different from the usual kind, and found it strange.
“Where did he learn that?”
Normally, the invisibility magic most often used by Einroguard students was the third-circle spell <Low-Grade Invisibility>.
It was a type of magic that spread a thin thermo-optical camouflage around the caster, and among the many forms of invisibility magic, it was one of the easiest to learn and cast, which was why it was so widely used.
But the spell that the junior had just used was not <Low-Grade Invisibility>. The incantation was different, and so was the structure. It was enough to make Sebius wonder where he had learned it.
“Damn it. Focus.”
Even with the easiest kind of theft, letting down one’s guard was unacceptable. Carelessness was a thief’s most dangerous enemy.
“Prepared illusion, emerge.”
As Sebius pulled out a scroll, tore it, and muttered in a low voice, an illusion began springing up from the foot of the stairs below.
Amazingly enough, it was one of the Skull Principal’s Death Knights.
“You thief, stop right there!”
“U-ugh… Aaaagh!”
The White Tiger Tower student walking toward them saw the Death Knight, screamed in terror, and fell over.
Then the student hurled all the baggage off to the side to lighten the body, gripping only a single sword.
“Tch. How did you find out? If it’s come to this, I won’t just let myself get taken! Come! Sword, transform and block the enemy!”
The White Tiger Tower student’s sword rippled like liquid metal, then turned into a wave and lashed out at the Death Knight.
At that moment, the Death Knight illusion vanished. The White Tiger Tower student’s eyes widened.
“What the… Which bastard pulled a prank like this… That Skull Principal bastard, just wait until I graduate! I’m going to hunt him down and raid him!”
Apparently thinking the Skull Principal had set a trap just to torment the students, the White Tiger Tower student ground out curses in fury.
Then the student gathered up the thrown baggage and trudged off again.
“!”
When they released the invisibility magic, there was now a book in Sebius’s hand.
Lee Han was startled.
In that brief moment, Sebius had approached the White Tiger Tower student’s baggage and taken only the target book.
“That’s incredible!”
“It’s basic. Relocation doesn’t need flashy magic. You just need to be able to read the other person’s actions.”
Sebius knew very well that when White Tiger Tower students entered combat, they threw their baggage to the side.
As long as he made the student think one of the Skull Principal’s underlings had appeared, the baggage would be tossed aside. Taking the book from there was easy.
“No wonder he’s an upperclassman.”
Lee Han looked at Sebius with more respect than before.
He had thought Sebius was just a greedy wizard who duplicated gold by selling books through the Library Club and retrieving them through the Teleportation Club, but…
“Let’s move. There are still a few more books to recover.”
“Hmm. No, I guess he really is a greedy wizard who duplicates gold.”
Following after Sebius, Lee Han asked a question out of curiosity.
“But Upperclassman. You said the most important thing is theft that doesn’t get noticed, right?”
“That’s right. Not getting noticed is the most important thing.”
“But if books keep disappearing, won’t that feel suspicious?”
The saying that a long tail gets stepped on existed for a reason.
If, among all their belongings, only the books kept disappearing, then no matter how dull someone was, suspicion would inevitably turn toward the Library Club.
“Or is it settled through force?”
Lee Han thought of Ileg, the spectacled bear beastkin upperclassman.
With that kind of combat power, suspicion or complaints would certainly not matter much.
Didn’t the Skull Principal live just fine despite attracting all manner of suspicion and resentment?
“They won’t notice.”
“What?”
“They won’t notice. These bastards have no interest in books at all.”
Sebius was always curt and indifferent, but now, unusually, open hostility covered the face.
“The people who get books from the Library Club fall into two groups. One group takes them and reads them diligently. Those people are fine. But then there are the ones who take them and just use them as pillows or alchemy cauldron stands. It’s usually the White Tiger Tower bastards that do that…”
“I’d better make sure Gainando never meets the Library Club members.”
“…Those kinds of people don’t deserve to have books. I’m recovering them from those people. That’s why no one notices. Even if they realize it later, they’ll just think they lost them somewhere.”
“!”
Lee Han stared at Sebius in surprise.
He had thought Sebius was just an upperclassman obsessed with gold coins, but there had actually been a reason for it.
“So he steals books back from people who take them and don’t read them. This is definitely something worth doing… No, it’s still strange, but it’s a kind of strangeness that makes sense.”
Someone whose madness made sense was always a little easier to feel close to than someone who was simply mad.
Lee Han was just relieved that the upperclassman in front of him was not merely insane.
“What if the Library Club made rules? That people had to cherish the books they took and read them diligently.”
“And you think they’d follow those?”
“Wouldn’t they if the books were cursed?”
“……”
Sebius looked at the junior in utter shock.
At first Sebius had thought it was a joke, but Lee Han’s face was very serious.
“Isn’t this one insane?”
Sebius had forgotten because the junior was always so polite and quiet, but the junior in front of Sebius was someone every club wanted to drag away.
At Einroguard, truly outstanding talent always carried some kind of madness.
Sebius once again raised the guard against this junior.
“…If we did that, it would turn into a fight between clubs. And Upperclassman Ileg wouldn’t allow it either.”
Ileg, the president of the Library Club, was a tolerant and generous person.
Generous enough to understand even if someone took a book out and did not read it, or damaged it.
“I’ll restore the vanished books of Einroguard’s library and place them back on the shelves.”
“But Upperclassman, those bastards used the books as firewood because they were cold!”
“Let’s forgive them. They must have done that because they don’t know the joy of books.”
But even if Ileg forgave them, Sebius had no intention of doing the same.
“Next is… this bastard again.”
“Who is it?”
“Valpatan of House Moradi. This bastard borrowed the same book and lost it three times. If Valpatan had been in the Library Club, Valpatan would’ve gotten the bookshelf sentence.”
Sebius ground the teeth as he looked at the name written on the paper.
Valpatan, who was in the same year, had long been one of the people who twisted Sebius’s insides into knots.
Being from the White Tiger Tower was already enough to make Valpatan unlikable, but then Valpatan had gone and lost the book <The History of Imperial Swordsmanship> three separate times.
When Valpatan requested a fourth copy, the Library Club members had almost simply banned Valpatan from entry, and only Ileg’s mediation had barely gotten the request accepted.
“……”
At the name of a familiar upperclassman, Lee Han carefully controlled the expression and looked away.
“Even so, surely after getting it a fourth time, wouldn’t the person read it?”
“I heard recently that the person’s using it as a pillow. Let’s go.”
“Hmm. That sounds like the fault of the other upperclassmen too.”
Sebius came down to the sixth floor.
Unlike the seventh floor, which felt like a completely different region, the sixth floor looked like the main school building Lee Han originally knew.
The endlessly stretched corridors and windows. The classroom doors and the magic lamps hanging from the ceiling.
“Don’t let your guard down.”
As a rule, the higher the floor of an Einroguard building, the more dangerous it became.
Lee Han steeled himself not to be surprised even if a monster suddenly jumped out from a nearby door or window.
“This way.”
Sebius opened a window, then leaped straight out. Lee Han was startled, but astonishingly enough, stairs began forming in midair.
“Sixth floor. Midair stairs.”
Walking along those stairs, Sebius stopped in front of another window and pulled out a wand. Then Sebius began chanting a spell to open the locked window.
“Reveal the hidden secret…”
While attempting the spell, Sebius clicked the tongue.
“Is there a problem?”
“Looks like the White Tiger Tower bastards tightened the defenses in the meantime. I can’t undo it.”
“I’ll try.”
“Forget it. Pull back. Looks like they put something pretty expensive on it—”
BANG!
“I opened it. Do we go in?”
“…Yes.”
Sebius looked at the junior with a gaze mixed with shock, suspicion, confusion, and several other things, but like a professional relocator, Sebius did not waste time asking pointless questions.
That could be asked later.
Click.
“This is one of the storehouses the White Tiger Tower bastards use.”
A number of suits of armor and swords came into view. Every single one of them was a magic artifact.
Of course, they were not enchantments so neat that one could call them masterpieces. A few of the weapons and pieces of armor quite clearly looked like failures.
“Don’t touch anything else. Find the book first.”
“Yes.”
Lee Han was impressed by Sebius’s patience. To see this and still not take anything else.
Sebius retrieved <The History of Imperial Swordsmanship>. As expected, it was being used in a corner as a whetstone stand.
“I’m seriously going to kill them…”
“Upperclassman. Who’s next?”
At the junior’s question, Sebius answered in a less curt manner than before.
After all, it was impossible to deny that Lee Han had been helpful this time.
“Professor Verdus.”
“What?”
“I said Professor Verdus. If you’re scared, you don’t have to come. You’ve already done enough—”
“No. I definitely want to go.”
“…?”