Ch. 31

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"If you mean the person who came with you, he headed up to the recovery room, you know?"

At the words of a priest standing nearby, I started making my way up to the recovery room, rolling an arm that, thanks to divine healing, no longer bore a single wound.

Since he'd been the one questioning, from the very start, why Jane hadn't come, I had long since noticed that what he wanted lay not in treating me but in meeting her.

That was why I hadn't particularly refused a favor I would normally have turned down without a second thought.

'Hmm, should I go take a look?'

I was curious about his intentions in trying to get close to Aria, but I also had a feeling I needed to learn a little more about him.

It was true that the brief conversation we'd had on the mountain had been a great comfort to me, and it wasn't as if his claim that he'd only managed to survive because I killed the fishmen was hard to accept.

But if it were simply that and nothing more, then this sense of unease, which I couldn't easily put into words, wouldn't have been wrapping itself around my entire body.

Was it because of this unease?

His claim that he'd nearly died back then because he'd had no sword and his body had been in bad shape somehow felt false to me.

That was probably the reason.

The reason I'd come to suspect him the way I did now.

Benjamin had talked as if trying to convince me of his own existence, spitting out only the kind of things I would want to hear.

On top of that, I knew from my experience before the regression that Silver Ring could plant students inside the academy, so my worry could only grow.

After all, he, who might be stronger than me, could be Silver Ring.

Anyway, besides this, there were a few other strange points, and the first was the way he'd moved during the sparring match.

It had looked as though his body couldn't keep up with his swordsmanship.

His movements had looked just like those of people whose physical abilities had been forcibly sealed by something.

"If not that... then maybe he regressed too, like me..."

But this wasn't something I could find out right away, so I decided to take my time and confirm it slowly.

Another point of doubt was his relationship with Luna Delsia.

For generations, the Delsia family had, for some reason, been extremely averse to showing their power to others.

So much so that even as the continent was being covered in blood by the demons, they had stayed holed up in their own territory with their power hidden.

In other words, theirs was not the kind of family that would throw a punch over something as trivial as a student sparring match.

Yet for some reason, she'd been greatly shaken upon seeing Benjamin and, unlike before the regression, had shown her power.

A shockwave so great that I doubted it had really been produced by a fist.

The cause of her showing her power was clearly Benjamin.

After all, the only thing that had changed from my previous life to the point of drawing a reaction from her was his existence, and nothing else.

What mattered here was that the look in her eyes when she looked at him had in no way been a favorable one, and a being who could anger even the wooden, stone-faced Delsia family could not possibly be a mere student of the academy.

Could all of this really be a simple coincidence?

I had to find out, and that was why I'd suggested that we be friends.

If he was trying to cover up the truth, all I had to do was keep him close and find it out.

And now, I thought, an opportunity to figure him out had come sooner than I'd expected.

"The Hammered family went looking for someone your age who's also a commoner, specifically to knock you out of top rank. And in the end, they found one."

"That would be... Aden, wouldn't it?"

At the voices coming from inside the recovery room, I concealed my presence even further.

"That's right. The proof is that his guardian is connected to the Hammered family. You can confirm that yourself later, if you'd like."

'Was there some other reason he'd ended up receiving the Hammered family's sponsorship?'

"That guy doesn't even realize he's being used politically; he seems to be working hard just to earn a scholarship. Honestly, thinking about it, he's the most pitiful one in all this. He's being used over something as petty as academy tuition money, isn't he?"

But the Hammered family had never once demanded anything of me.

Something felt off, but since knowing even my sponsor meant that he'd looked into my background, I had to hear more.

After all, there might be some truth hidden that I didn't know about.

"...How exactly do you know all of this?"

At her question, he continued, pulling something out from inside his clothes.

"You're not really asking about my surface-level status, are you?"

"Where do you think oversees and supervises absolutely everything at this academy?"

"Everything I've told you was confirmed under direct orders from the Tower Master. It's not like I ended up in the Magic Department for no reason at all. Well, if your eyes are working properly, you probably already know exactly whose token that is, even without me having to say it."

I couldn't help being deeply shocked by the words that followed.

When I glanced inside, Jane was holding a token with the Tower Master's name written on it.

With this, it was confirmed that he belonged to the Tower, and moreover that he held considerable authority within it.

After all, not just anyone could carry around the Tower Master's token.

I didn't know why such a person was handling a sword, but since she had even gone through the process of verifying the token herself, this was certainly a fact.

Then why had the Tower Master sent someone in secret?

"What exactly does the Tower want? Why would it approach me so suddenly, going so far as to reveal your true identity like this?"

Perhaps she was wondering the same thing, because she asked, and he began to speak without hesitation.

"Do you really think the match between you and Aden happened for absolutely no reason at all?"

"What we want is just one thing: a balance that doesn't tip too far toward either side. Which is why the Tower agreed to the Duke's request, and that's how I ended up here. So I've been watching this whole time, and while I hoped you'd win, you lost instead. Which means, in the end, everything went exactly the way the Hammered family wanted."

The sparring match with Jane, which I'd brushed off with a "there she goes again" and passed over, since even in my previous life she'd been a professor who often did sudden, out-of-the-blue things.

Looking back on it now, there had been many strange points.

"I've got some circumstances going on that require me to have you two spar, and I've been thinking about how exactly to frame it for you."

"But honestly, I couldn't come up with any particular excuse. So can't you two just spar, just once?"

"Ah, I don't know! There's just, like, a reason. Just do it for me."

Her behavior, as if she were making us do it not because she herself wanted to.

If everything he said was true, it meant that it was the Hammered family, my sponsor, who had wanted the match between Jane and me.

"Under normal circumstances, I probably should have personally killed the one who might disrupt the balance. But I changed my mind. I ended up liking that guy just as much as I like you."

Watching him speak as if someone like me could be dealt with easily, I recalled the conversation we'd had just before, on the way to the Order.

'No? You should really think about this more carefully. Unlike you, I'm a Magic Department student, and in the sparring match you watched, I didn't use a single spell.'

Following those words, he had in the end said he didn't think he could win, but thinking about it, he'd said he didn't think he could win, not that he would lose.

I hadn't noticed it then, but now that I knew his true self, I could tell.

What he'd clearly meant was that he couldn't win as a Magic Department student, his current identity.

But his true skill was enough to kill me with ease, which was why he hadn't said he would lose.

In that case, rather than the possibility that he was a regressor, it seemed the more likely guess was that he'd been moving around with part of his strength restricted.

"So thinking it over, it occurred to me that if you simply don't let him steal your top rank, no one needs to die at all."

"I'll make you top rank."

Everything that had been hazy about him became clear.

From the very beginning, on the Tower Master's orders, he had been inside the academy with his existence hidden.

Since he couldn't reveal his existence, he must have turned a blind eye even as students were dying to the mermen.

If he hadn't been stronger than Jane, he would have hidden his existence to the very end, just as he had before the regression.

That meant the current situation itself had not been changed by his appearance.

It meant that these things were happening because I, and no one else, had changed from my previous life. Before the regression, since I'd attended classes diligently and shown my skill from the start of the term, everyone had known I was weaker than her, and so there had been no reason for the Hammered family to take an interest in me.

But in this life, I had merely been sunk in despair over the children's deaths and hadn't shown my skill in any class, and it seemed that, in order to gauge my skill, the Hammered family had brought about the absurdity of a first-year inter-department sparring match.

And in the course of this, in order to check the ability I'd revealed, they'd even had me spar separately through Professor Anna.

Because I'd won that match, the balance between the families was, as he'd said, in danger of breaking, and normally the right move would have been to dispose of me, who might break the balance, but he seemed to have chosen not to kill me and instead help Jane clean up the situation.

Whether this choice was the Tower Master's will or his own whim wasn't clear, but that wasn't important.

His existence, which I had thought had appeared out of nowhere.

He hadn't appeared out of nowhere.

Thinking back, when we'd first spoken, he'd said he had come to find me at my temporary lodgings.

He'd said he'd come to thank me, but he had surely been gathering information about me.

It seemed the Tower had been keeping a close eye on me from the very beginning.

After all, just being connected to the Hammered family would have been enough to make me a dangerous existence to them.

Still, even though I understood why he'd suddenly shown himself, that didn't mean my doubts about his identity had been completely resolved.

If only I could find something... even the tiniest clue more.

"I'm affiliated with the Tower, but... actually, I use a sword. And a rather special cursed sword, at that.

"And the cursed sword I used in our sparring match belonged to Obierd Tollek, the supreme commander from the war against the Northern continent.

"Why do you think I'd be using his sword?"

As if he'd heard my inner thoughts, he began talking about himself.

Obierd Tollek, the one who ended the war, the Conquering King.

He was saying that he had inherited the sword of a great war hero.

Did he know just how enormous the thing he'd just said was?

I couldn't even imagine the uproar that would follow if this fact came out to the outside world.

After all, as great a hero as Tollek had been, and as many forces as there were who revered him, there had also been rumors, on the other side, that his family had been wiped out by the Imperial family.

That was probably the reason he belonged to the Tower despite being a swordsman.

If his identity were exposed, there was no telling what kind of threat a lone individual like him might face, so the Tower Master, who had lived through the war era alongside Tollek, must have wanted to place him under his own protection.

There were still unresolved parts, such as his relationship with the Delsia family, but with this, the thing I'd worried about most, the possibility that he might be a member of Silver Ring, had been cleanly settled.

Thinking of Silver Ring, I suddenly remembered something else he'd said on the way to the Order.

"Is that so? Destruction, huh... if that were the case, I think I'd bring you into my group first."

"Because you're strong."

If he was someone trusted enough by the Tower, and by the Tower Master himself, to be given the Tower Master's token, I even started to wonder whether it might not be better to forget that he'd tried to kill me and make him my ally instead.

"For example, if I knew a natural disaster was going to strike me in the future and there was no way to avoid it, I'd build a barrier capable of blocking even that disaster."

Just as he'd said, before I knew it, he had started to look to me like an extremely useful barrier.