Chapter 471
Then his eyes moved elsewhere, catching another figure running lightly toward the main gate with a sling bag nearly slipping off his shoulder, hurrying like someone afraid of being late even though the clock still showed that time was on his side.
And amidst all of that, amidst the small movements that formed the pulse of the morning in front of the boys' dormitory of the Star Academy, Theo allowed himself to simply become an observer with no obligations, no hidden agenda, no mission that had to be completed before the sun climbed too high in the sky.
The silence he had built since earlier, the silence he filled with repeated inhales and exhales, the silence he used to enjoy all the small things that usually went unnoticed, lasted for dozens of seconds without him realizing it.
Dozens of seconds in which there was nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, nothing to plan for the next step.
Dozens of seconds in which he simply stood in the same place, in the same position, with his gaze continuously moving without ever truly settling on a single point.
Dozens of seconds in which the world around him continued to move in its own rhythm, never caring that there was a Great Writer stealing time just to enjoy his existence as part of the same morning, as part of the same pulse, as part of something greater than mere missions, surveillance, and the notes he had to write.
And within those dozens of seconds, within the silence he never asked to end, something began to form within his awareness, something he did not invite yet arrived on its own like fog creeping in without permission.
The murmur did not come from parted lips, but from the deepest space where unspoken thoughts usually reside, a statement that emerged just like that, without a long process of thinking, without being triggered by any particular event that caught his attention.
That the daily life of Ilux, the main character of all the events he recorded page after page in the small yellow notebook, the center of all the chaos that had occurred in the past few days, the target of the surveillance mission that brought him here since dawn, turned out to be almost no different from that of a male student at the Star Academy.
"His mental condition continues to deteriorate."
Within the awareness that still faithfully accompanied his unmoving steps, Theo began arranging the fragments of facts he had gathered over two full days of trailing Ilux's shadow.
Not facts born from assumptions or prejudice, but facts he had picked directly from every movement, from every heavy footstep, from every empty gaze he observed from a distance never more than a few meters.
That for today, with all the calculations he had made since dawn crept through the gaps of Ilux's bedroom curtains, the possibility was that the girl would not attend class at the Star Academy.
Not a sudden decision, nor an escape born from momentary weakness, but an accumulation of everything that had happened over the past two days—an accumulation of food stains clinging to her clothes and not entirely gone even after washing, an accumulation of firecrackers exploding around her body just as her feet were about to leave the gate, an accumulation of a katana that nearly split the child's face before she stopped herself at the final second.
All of it, everything he recorded in that small yellow notebook, everything he witnessed with eyes that never blinked, pointed toward a single conclusion that no longer needed to be questioned.
Then silence crept in once more in a way that had become familiar, a silence that did not need to be filled because the absence of sound sometimes spoke louder than thousands of carefully arranged words.
Theo allowed himself to sink into that silence, letting his body become a statue with no desire whatsoever to move, let alone speak.
His eyes, which had been fixed on the corridor stretching before him, slowly lost focus, no longer capturing the small details of students passing by in front of the dormitory, no longer observing how the morning light kept shifting and leaving shorter shadows on the pavement.
He simply stood there, with hands hanging motionless at his sides, with breathing slowing to the point it was almost imperceptible, with awareness drifting between where he stood and another place he could not point to.
Six seconds passed in that state, six seconds in which nothing happened outside yet everything happened within, six seconds in which Theo allowed all the information he had about Ilux to settle at the bottom of his consciousness before lifting it again to be viewed from a different angle.
And on the sixth second, precisely when the gentle morning breeze began to blow carrying the dry scent of leaves warmed by the sun, that voice within his heart emerged in a way he had never planned.
That it had been two full days since he had monitored Ilux's movements—from the moment she left for class with heavy steps and clothes still bearing stubborn stains, to the moment she returned to sleep on her bed with an exhausted body and drool trailing from the corner of her mouth, dampening a pillow that was no longer white.
Two days in which he witnessed how Ilux tried to avoid crowds by choosing longer routes to class, two days in which he noted how she chose to eat alone in the quietest corner of the cafeteria even though the food still ended up on her head anyway, two days in which he saw how she walked home at an increasingly faster pace each day as if her feet could no longer wait to escape from the place where hatred always awaited.
And within those two days, within every second he spent trailing a shadow that never stopped moving, Theo found something that made the weight in his chest feel heavier than before.
Ilux's mental condition, which from the beginning had already stood on the edge between forced patience and anger ready to explode at any moment, gradually revealed cracks that could no longer be concealed by silence or by quick steps that left everything behind.
The young man's psychology, which should have been the final fortress protecting him from all the hatred chasing him, turned out to be no stronger than thin glass shaken daily by an unending earthquake.
And Ilux's behavior, which once might have left room for hope that someday everything would change, now with each passing day became more withdrawn, pulling himself deeper into an ever-narrowing circle, building walls that no longer left even the smallest gap for anyone to enter.
More concerning—that was the word that surfaced in Theo's awareness when he tried to summarize what he had witnessed over the past two days, a word too gentle to describe the severity of the damage hidden behind a constantly lowered face and a perpetually hunched back.
And more tragic—that was the next word that emerged without restraint, a word he had never expected to use to describe the main character of the game he had been playing all this time, the protagonist who should have stood at the center of a grand narrative, yet now had become nothing more than a shadow steadily shrinking before a hatred that never grew tired of pursuing him.
To be continued…