Chapter 23: A Good Professor

The armory was sweltering, the roaring fireplaces casting long, flickering shadows across the racks of medieval weaponry.

Blair sat on her small wooden stool in the corner, a heavy broadsword resting across her lap. She rubbed the polish paste into the steel with frantic, jerky movements. Her heart was still hammering against her ribs, the adrenaline from her near-death experience in the woods refusing to fade.

Every time she blinked, she saw them. The sickly, ashen gray skin. The long, disjointed limbs. The massive, gaping maws filled with needle-like teeth where their eyes should have been.

They were eating something, Blair thought, a wave of nausea washing over her. What if they got Heather? What if that’s why she hasn’t come back?

She needed answers. She needed to know if she was losing her mind, or if there was an explanation for what she had just witnessed.

Blair paused her polishing. She slowly looked over her shoulder.

Professor Feron was seated at his desk in the center of the room. He was immersed in grading a stack of parchment essays, his silver pen scratching rhythmically against the paper. He looked unbothered, a picture of dark, composed elegance.

Blair swallowed the dry lump in her throat. She knew he wasn’t going to like this, but the panic clawing at her chest wouldn’t let her stay silent.

"Professor?" Blair asked, her voice echoing slightly in the cavernous room.

The scratching of the pen didn’t stop. Jack didn’t look up. "You are here to polish steel, Miss Willows, not to converse."

"I know, I’m sorry," Blair pressed on, her fingers gripping the polishing rag tightly. "I just... I have a question. About the Great Spatial Rift."

Jack sighed, but he kept writing.

"When the rift opened between the human world and the beast world, it merged our two dimensions," Blair stated. "But mathematically speaking, if the fabric of space-time was unstable enough to tear once... couldn’t it tear again? Are humans and beastmen the only things in this world?"

Jack slowly turned a page of parchment. "Your attempt to disguise your absurd ghost stories as an academic inquiry is insulting to my intelligence. Focus on your punishment."

Blair’s frustration flared, temporarily overriding her finely tuned survival instincts.

"You teach history," Blair blurted out, her voice trembling but surprisingly loud. "A good professor wouldn’t shut down an eager student’s thirst for knowledge."

The second the words left her mouth, Blair wanted to grab them and literally shove them back down her throat.

The armory went dead silent.

The scratching of the pen stopped instantly. Blair watched in sheer horror as Jack’s gloved hand tightened around the barrel of the pen. He squeezed it so hard his knuckles pressed tightly against the black leather, and for a terrifying second, Blair thought the metal was going to snap in half.

I just insulted him, Blair’s brain shrieked. I’m going to die.

"I-I’m sorry," Blair frantically backpedaled, her eyes wide with terror as she shrank back on her stool. "I was totally out of line! I didn’t mean it like that, please forget I said anything—"

"Theoretical dimensional instability," Jack interrupted, his voice dropping into a quiet, smooth drawl.

Blair froze.

Jack slowly set the pen down on the desk. He laced his fingers together and raised his head, locking his piercing, blood-red eyes onto hers. His ego, massive and unyielding, simply would not allow him to let the accusation of being a "bad professor" stand.

"The Great Spatial Rift was a singular, catastrophic cosmic event," Jack lectured. "However, there are ancient, archaic texts within the Beast World archives that discuss the theoretical existence of the ’Void’—the empty space between dimensions. These texts hypothesize that if the barrier thinned enough, entities from the Void could theoretically slip through."

Blair held her breath, clinging to every word. "Entities?"

"Demons. Eldritch horrors. Creatures of darkness," Jack listed dryly, clearly unimpressed by the subject matter. "They are described as mindless parasites that consume the life force of organized dimensions. However, there is zero empirical evidence to support their existence. It is purely mythological fiction, concocted centuries ago to scare misbehaving beast-pups into staying in their beds."

"But," Blair countered softly, her grip on the broadsword tightening, "until we arrived here, humans thought beastmen were just mythological fiction, too. We wrote fairy tales about you."

The heavy silence returned to the armory, but this time, the tension felt different.

Jack stared at her. His red eyes narrowed slightly, processing her argument. For a long, intense moment, the brilliant, arrogant professor had no retort.

Seeing that she had actually stumped him, Blair let out a quiet breath. She offered him a small, genuine smile.

"Thank you for telling me, Professor," Blair said softly. "I appreciate the lesson."

Jack’s jaw ticked. He abruptly looked away, picking his pen back up. "Do not flatter yourself, Miss Willows. Now, return to your polishing before I double your workload."

"Yes, Professor," Blair said quickly.

She turned back to her corner, picking up her rag. But the small victory had emboldened her. Her curiosity, fueled by the terrifying things she had seen in the woods, pushed her to take one final, but very necessary risk.

"But... hypothetically," Blair asked over her shoulder, her voice small, "what if creatures from other worlds were here right now?"

Jack stopped writing. He slowly turned his head, his red eyes locking onto hers with a look of freezing apathy.

"Then perhaps the human race would finally go extinct," Jack deadpans, his voice devoid of emotion, "and I wouldn’t have to deal with your annoying questions anymore."

Blair snapped her jaw shut instantly.

She turned back to the broadsword, her face burning. She didn’t say another word for the rest of the night. But as she furiously scrubbed the steel, her mind continued to spiral into a dark, terrifying abyss.

Jack didn’t believe her. No one would believe her. And if those eyeless monsters had gotten Heather, Blair was on her own.