Chapter 49: Trapped
"Arghhh!" Maria roared in frustration and hurled the book across the room, pushing back the strands of hair that had fallen to obstruct her vision. She was now in her dorm room, and just as she had expected, things weren’t going to be easy. She glanced once more at the book she had thrown away.
Blank.
The pages were all blank.
"It seems he placed some rune on it," she muttered, biting her nail in frustration. She had suspected he would place some sort of protection on the book—after all, it contained future knowledge of this world. It was supposed to be their plan B, designed for a specific scenario: if a future event occurred and something happened to him, she would be able to read this book, understand everything, and recreate the plans he had already made with the others.
But instead of the distant future this contingency was prepared for, they found themselves in exactly that situation now. Something had indeed happened to him.
After his expulsion from the Academy, he was supposed to wait for her and the others at a certain place on the outskirts of Elfame—that was where they were meant to rendezvous. They had planned to use a particular relic to reconstruct his face, and with her help, he would be readmitted to the academy for future ’arcs’ (as he always called them).
But for some reason, he hadn’t gone to the meeting point. Not only that, but everyone he had bound to himself—those who were supposed to regain their hidden memories with his permission—had forcefully remembered everything all at once. She was among them, and that could only mean something had happened to him.
He wasn’t dead, though. That fact was unquestionable. After all, if he were, she would feel it. The connection she shared with him would shatter, and she herself, along with the others, would die. This was the cycle of their lives, after all—an eternal bond. They were connected to him at a soul level, which was why he had been able to make them remember... their past.
But for some reason, he always kept the future hidden from them, and this book only served to further vex her about the situation. It seemed the book bore a time rune, readable only at that specific point in the future they had agreed upon—but that wasn’t really her concern at the moment.
She simply wanted to know what had happened to him. Something unexpected must have occurred for him to deviate from a plan they had been crafting for so long. He wasn’t dead, so perhaps he had been kidnapped?
She sighed deeply, then heard her teleric ringing. Standing up, she walked toward it and glanced at the contact ID.