Now, I will start my high school life once again, it was nostalgia from my previous life. Seeing the scenery makes that I was enrolled in a private school, but it was filled with people who were gifted by magic by the gods, only they truly goes here to be mages.
And true to what Nikolai had said, the students were plummeted to a quarter, some of them were expelled quarantine program or simply a high school dropout. Never in my life would I see a drug business will affect even the smallest details.
The cold reality of Zenni's life began to settle in as I navigated the sprawling, ivory-veined corridors of the Academy. I had expected to dodge curious friends or hide from nosy professors, but as the minutes ticked by, I realized I was invisible.
"Plasma, is this Zenni guy a ghost or does not have any friends?" I muttered
"Eirene, he's a drug dealer, of course he had no friends, people see him as a discarded waste, or a tool for the Sisiphon alchemist guild, people saw him as a dangerous weapon than a normal person."
"Damn, his life is miserable."
I purposely walked through the central plaza where students gathered in clusters, laughing and debating magical theory. I brushed past groups wearing the same gold-trimmed uniforms, making eye contact with anyone who looked like they might recognize Zenni's face. I even lingered near the faculty lounges, waiting for a sharp-eyed teacher to scold me for my tardiness.
Nothing.
Not a single head turned. No one called out his name. When I purposefully stood in the path of a group of senior scholars, they simply stepped around me as if I were a piece of furniture. Even the staff members, clutching their enchanted ledgers, looked right through me.
Zenni wasn't just a struggling student, he was a ghost. He was the boy who sat in the back of the class, the one who never spoke, the one whose name was likely forgotten the moment the register was closed. It was a heartbreaking realization, the poor boy had been cooking poison in a sewer just to pay tuition to a school that didn't even know he existed.
"Oh my, I felt bad from the drug dealer, I hope he's alright." I said to Plasma
"Better yet Eirene, you locked him in a dumpster, chances are he is dead or made it out alive."
As I wandered every bit into the campus, I stumbled a alleyway leading to their quarters, it was quiet, like dead quiet. People like me are immediate reaction to danger.
The air in the secluded alleyway turned cold as the two students, their ivory uniforms disheveled and eyes bloodshot, pinned me against the cold stone wall. For a second, I hoped for a connection, a name, a shared memory but the frantic, twitching smiles on their faces told a darker story.
"Hey, Zenni, care to have any spare Lotus Dust? I have cash. Don't hold out on us."
The taller one hissed, his breath smelling of sour wine and decay. To these scholars, Zenni wasn't a classmate or a friend. He was a walking pharmacy. He was the only bridge between their prestigious education and the gutter.
"Sorry, I don't have any, but can you tell me where my classroom is?" I replied, keeping my voice low and trembling to match Zenni's persona.
The reaction was instantaneous. The "is that so?" was followed by a sharp, heavy punch to my stomach.
"Aughh…" I lend out a fake pain to imitate Zenni.
To a normal student, it would have been winded, to an S-rank bounty unter, it felt like a fly landing on my ribs. I doubled over anyway, playing the part. The other roared, his face contorting in withdrawal-fueled rage
"It's been weeks since you left, Zenni! And you come back empty-handed? We've been starving for that Dust. Such audacity to show your face on campus. You should be ashamed of yourself!"
One of them began to chant, his hand glowing with a pale green light. He imbued his fist with a wind magic, a low-level offensive spell, and drove it into my shoulder. The force was meant to shatter bone, and I allowed myself to be thrown to the ground to maintain the facade.
But as I lay there in the dirt, watching them prepare to kick a defenseless boy, the irony of their words struck me. They were the ones who should be ashamed, junkies in ivory robes, preying on the very boy they forced to cook their poison.
My patience snapped.
I didn't need my power. I didn't even need magic. I used a fraction of my base strength, moving faster than their drug-addled eyes could track. As the first bully lunged, I pivoted on the ground and swept his legs out from under him with a crack of bone against stone.
The second one, the wind-user, gasped as I rose like a phantom. I caught his wrist mid-swing. With a slight squeeze, I felt his energy flicker and die under the pressure of my grip. I leaned in close, my green eye flashing beneath the hood.
"Class is in session," I whispered, my voice no longer sounding like the weak Zenni.
I delivered a precise strike to his solar plexus, followed by a sweep that sent him crashing on top of his partner. They lay there, groaning and clutching their stomachs, the wind magic dissipated into nothingness.
I didn't let them go that easily. I reached down and snagged one bully by his left ear, twisting it with a slow, deliberate pressure that made the cartilage groan. With my other hand, I grabbed the wind-user by his ear, hoisting them both until they were on their tiptoes, faces contorted in a symphony of high-pitched shrieks. My strength was overkill, but I wanted them to feel the weight of every life Zenni had helped ruin.
"You drug addicts don't stand a chance, do you? Now, tell me once more, and don't make me repeat myself. Where is my classroom?"
The one on the left tried to muster a final spark of defiance, a wet laugh bubbling in his throat.
"Hahaha... Seriously? Your classroom? Did the fumes in that lab finally rot your brain, Zenni?"
I gave his ear a brutal, 180-degree twist. He let out a sound of a girl, like a teakettle reaching a boil, his knees buckling. He sobbed, the mocking bravado vanishing instantly
"Okay! Okay! It's room 1-B! You're in the first-year sector, please, just stop pulling! I think it's going to come off!"
I released them both at once. They collapsed into the dust, clutching the sides of their heads. Their ears were a violent, pulsating shade of crimson, looking more like overripe tomatoes than human anatomy. They didn't even try to stand, they just scrambled away on all fours, sobbing about Zenni as they disappeared around the corner.
As I beat the hell up of one of those bullies, I left the alleyway as I hear the drug addicts groaning in pain, I knew that my stats were higher than his, even wearing Zenni's skin, and as I stepped at the end of the alleyway, something calling through me, I expected it as one of the guards, but, it felt something wrong, something nostalgic.
A woman in a royal dress with a sunhat suddenly came to me, he wore a royal dress instead of a normal dress of a staff nor a student in the campus, because of its aggressive tone, I can tell that she is a principal of this campus, and she was not feeling my behavior.
She stood there, bathed in the afternoon light, looking like a phantom from my dreams. Her silver hair fell in a shimmering cascade all the way to her waist, and those crimson eyes, the exact shade of our mother Linera's cut through me like a blade. She looked regal, powerful, and entirely different from the healer Nikolai had described.
"Hey you, first-year," she said, her voice carrying a weight of authority that made the air itself seem to settle.
She didn't even look at me at first. She walked past me toward the two bullies I had just dismantled. With a graceful flick of her wrist, a soft, golden light erupted from her palms, a divine regeneration spell. Within seconds, the crimson, swollen ears of the thugs began to shrink, and their bruises vanished as if they had never existed.
"Elicia..." I muttered, the word slipping out before I could catch it.
My heart was hammering against my ribs. It had been months seen I saw her face.
She stopped. Her head tilted, and she turned those piercing crimson eyes toward me. There was no recognition in them, only the stern, distant coldness of a superior officer.
"First-year, don't call me that. To you, I am Principal. And you? You're going to detention."
The two bullies, now fully healed but still trembling, let out muffled, snickering laughs as they watched the Principal herself corner me. They thought they had won. They thought Zenni was finally going to be crushed by the weight of the Academy's law.
Elicia reached out and grabbed my arm. Her grip was firm, stronger than I remembered. She didn't know she was touching her own sister. She didn't know the Zenni she was dragging away was actually the sibling who had traveled across kingdoms to find her. To her, I was just another delinquent student using unauthorized violence in her corridors.
"Move, I don't tolerate students who bully their peers, regardless of the prodigy rumors I've heard about you, Zenni Roy." she commanded, pulling me toward the central spire of the Academy.
As she led me away, the bullies watched with predatory grins, but my mind was spinning. My sister wasn't just a former party member or a legend, she was the Principal of Sisiphon Magic Academy.
Elicia was hiding in plain sight, presiding over the very institution that was being rotted from the inside by Lotus Dust.