An Unexpected Beginning [3]

It took me two hours to clear my head.

I should have known from the start.

Nobody who gets sent to another world is transmigrated without a reason.

Everyone has a role.

And mine was to die as the villainess’s roommate.

“Haa…”

Things had just gotten a lot more complicated.

My survival plan had already fallen apart the moment my father decided to send me here. Now, it has crossed into the realm of impossibility.

Who would have thought Eldrinn was the random roommate of the villainess?

No, seriously.

Wasn’t transmigration supposed to happen because you angered some higher-dimensional being?

Or left a scathing review that cursed you into another world?

How did I, whose only crime was enjoying novels, end up in this situation?

It made no sense.

Then again, transmigration itself was irrational. Trying to force logic onto the why of it all was pointless.

Still.

I would have felt less miserable if I knew I deserved this.

Shit.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I leaned back against the couch in the living room.

The dormitory was huge. Thanks to my precious father, who had so kindly sent me to my death, I had been assigned one of the largest rooms in the West Wing.

I had asked the warden if any single-room accommodations were available. To my surprise, there were.

They were just absurdly expensive.

I almost laughed when I heard that.

Despite all the wealth my father had amassed, he could not even secure me a single room?!

As if that were not enough, the dormitory contained a total of five rooms.

The living room sat at the centre. On opposite ends were the two main bedrooms, Adelina’s on the east side and mine on the west.

Everything else was shared.

A single kitchen. A single washroom.

Which meant that if she decided to cook up something suspicious, I would not even have the option to refuse it.

It also meant that if she decided to slip something into my water, I would never know.

Either way, this place was the perfect spot to murder someone.

“Hnn…”

This was the worst.

I had been clinging to the hope that I could survive as long as I did not cross paths with Adelina. But now that I was living right next to her…

I sighed again.

This situation was steadily draining my will to do anything at all.

But.

I straightened.

‘I can’t die here.’

Even if the universe clearly wants me dead, I can’t give up this early.

If fate wanted to throw me into a blender, I should at least try to dodge the blades.

For that, I needed to think of my next plans.

First thing on the list was, obviously, my survival.

I rubbed my temples.

“Okay, Eldrinn. Breathe. You’ve read the novel. You know what’s coming.”

Right.

A campus-wide massacre.

It happens in six months.

Six months.

That was nowhere near enough time for someone like me to stop one of the most infamous villainess breakdowns in RoFan history.

But on the other end, despite my paranoia about living with her, Adelina would not make a move for the next six months.

No, she cannot make a move.

That was because she was hiding her secret thoroughly.

The demon seed.

Since her powers were constantly tainted by demonic influence, using them too freely would expose her immediately.

If she acted now, the academy would be alerted, and every plan she had to confront the Hero would collapse.

This was certainly a positive.

Since Adelina would remain inactive for the next six months, all I needed was to find a way to survive by then.

In most scenarios, the best solution would be to confront the problem at its very root.

But confronting Adelina was a death wish.

She might have lost to the Hero, but she was anything but weak.

Their duel lasted precisely two days, and even the Hero acknowledged her strength.

I was considered a genius. So were the other cadets who entered this academy.

But Adelina was a prodigy.

Despite her inferiority, she was strong enough to be on a similar pace with the Hero.

Facing her directly was not an option.

Which leads my thoughts to her family.

The Armathele Dukedom.

They were the Emperor’s shield, a lineage of escorts whose blades had protected the throne for generations. Every heir of the dukedom was trained as a knight, and nearly all of them graduated from Saira’Thyvar Academy.

Alerting them to the presence of a demon seed would normally be the logical choice. They had the authority and strength to deal with Adelina decisively

Except that, at this point in time, the Armathele Dukedom already knew of the fact that Adelina had a demon seed within her.

It was buried in side lore and barely mentioned, but the Armathele family was aware of Adelina’s condition long before the massacre.

Despite being the golden child, Adelina did not have a good relationship with her family.

The reasons were never explained in detail, but when the Duke of Armathele learned of the demon seed, he was faced with an impossible choice.

He could not accept such blasphemy.

But he could not bring himself to kill his own daughter.

So he chose exile.

Knowing of Adelina’s obsession with the Hero, the Duke fed her false information. He made her believe the Hero had enrolled in Saira’Thyvar.

With the dukedom’s long-standing influence over the academy, securing her admission was trivial.

Sending her there was his final compromise.

A month after her enrollment, a letter would arrive.

The Duke would formally sever ties with Adelina. She would no longer be recognised as part of the Armathele Dukedom.

This was how they saved themselves after the massacre.

When the Empire finally apprehended Adelina, the dukedom proved they had already abandoned her.

Since Adelina’s demonic influence had never been made public before the incident, the Empire had no way to prove that she was already corrupted when she entered the academy, or that the Armatheles had knowingly harboured a demon-tainted heir.

It was a legal grey area.

One the Empire chose not to pursue.

The Armathele Dukedom’s influence was too vast, and its military strength was too essential to the Zenith Empire. Losing them would have been catastrophic.

So the investigation quietly ended.

Because of that, alerting the dukedom now would be meaningless.

“Tch…”

And that still wasn’t the end of it.

Even if I alerted the Corps about Adelina’s demonic influence, it would be pretty useless to me.

In the best-case scenario, they would dismiss me entirely.

In the worst-case scenario, they would believe me and decide to act.

And if the Corps managed to handle her somehow, I’d still become her first target.

And I was trying not to die here.

Six months from now or tomorrow, it would not matter. There was no guarantee she would not advance her plans early or silence anyone who posed a risk.

She’s a cunning woman.

She’ll do anything to get what she wants.

Her target was the Hero, and she would burn down anything that stood between them.

I cannot risk my life alerting the Corps.

Which is why…

There was only one possible solution to this predicament.

‘Escaping in six months.’

No matter how I looked at it, escaping the academy was my only way out of this mess.

If I cannot confront her directly or find people to deal with her, then—

Survival meant to get the heck out of this place.

But there was still a problem.

Escaping Saira’Thyvar was close to impossible.

The academy did not accept just anyone. The cadets here were cherry-picked from thousands, and once admitted, they were branded with a biometric identifier known as the Arcseal.

The Arcseal was bestowed during the Identification Ceremony, where the academy’s core artefact synchronised directly with a cadet’s magic.

Just thinking about it made me grimace.

This wasn’t some cheap ink stamp you could scrub off with hot water and the tears of regret.

It was a magical tracker bound to the user’s magic.

Once the mark synchronised, leaving the academy grounds without authorisation would trigger alarms across the entire campus.

It was like trying to sneak out of a prison with a siren stitched into your bloodstream.

Unless I wanted to be hunted down by battalions, dragged back in chains, and executed on the spot, attempting to flee after the ceremony would just mean an even earlier death before the massacre

Right.

Execution.

Because the academy’s rules were very clear:

『 Desertion is punishable by death. 』

Saira’Thyvar’s cadets weren’t students but investments.

The Empire poured absurd amounts of resources into conditioning our magic, refining our combat instincts, and filling our heads with classified intel that civilians had no business knowing.

Even first-years learned information that could destabilise border defences if leaked.

To the Empire, a cadet wasn’t a person.

They were a resource, a future weapon and a walking compilation of state secrets.

Letting one escape was not just losing a trainee, but meant allowing a trained military asset to vanish into the wild, where foreign or rival nations could snatch them up with ease.

Worse, if even one cadet escaped, others might be influenced to follow.

A mass desertion of elite trainees would cripple the military, as it undermines command authority and shatter the illusion that loyalty was non-negotiable.

So, of course, the punishment was death.

Not because it was fair but because it was effective.

And the Arcseal existed to prevent any of this from happening in the first place.

I slumped back into the couch, burying my face into the cushion.

Not only was I living with a future mass murderer, but I was also legally locked inside the very facility she’d eventually wipe off the map.

“Haaah… This is insane.”

The more I thought about it, the more screwed I was.

But I can’t just give up.

Think. I told myself. What could help me in this scenario?

Logically, if leaving was impossible…

Then I needed a workaround.

The only reason the Corps would know I had fled was because of the Arcseal.

The Warden had mentioned that the ceremony had to be completed within five hours of entering the academy. Once branded, your time here was sealed.

I had briefly considered leaving before the Identification Ceremony.

Unfortunately, the Empire was not stupid.

They probably envisioned a scenario where some idiots like me would try to slip out before the mark was branded onto us.

So they created a delightful little protocol to prevent that exact thing from happening.

A protocol called Provisional Custody.

New cadets weren’t allowed to set foot anywhere near the outer gates until they were officially marked.

The moment we entered the campus, our names were logged into the system, and until the ceremony was completed, every exit was guarded, sealed, or monitored with enough security enchantments to make a vault blush.

If a cadet tried to leave during that window, it was treated not as desertion but as attempted infiltration.

Which was somehow worse.

“Great,” I muttered into the cushion. “So I can’t leave before the ceremony, and I can’t leave after.”

Truly, I wasn’t sure who was trying to screw my life the most.

First, my father.

Then the villainess.

And now the Empire.

I rolled onto my back and stared up at the chandelier.

The light blurred my vision.

Five hours after stepping onto campus, I’d be shackled to this place for the next three years.

Five hours.

That was nothing.

It wasn’t enough time to escape a fortress, outrun guards, and cross the surrounding magic fields without getting vaporised by the defensive barriers.

I was not a protagonist.

And I definitely don’t have plot armour thick enough to survive being turned into magical confetti.

So escaping before the ceremony was impossible.

“What can I possibly do…”

If I cannot reject the Identification Ceremony, or legally leave afterward, then…

—!

My fingers froze mid-thought.

Wait.

Wait.

I slowly lifted my head off the couch.

A sharp, but dangerous idea surfaced in my mind.

I straightened as it fully formed.