Chapter 90 Volume III – Chapter 11: Pseudo Meeting

I was nervous.

I was nervous because today we were going to see the first fruits of what we had been preparing for so long. We were going to execute the first of Aiden’s plans today and after all the preparation I couldn’t stop thinking, what if something goes wrong?

But I kept my cool and didn’t compromise myself, all that preparation wasn’t for nothing. We had secured everything, we had thought of everything. Nothing was supposed to go wrong, and it wouldn’t.

Today, something unprecedented was going to happen in this kingdom, something big.

“Is everyone here?”

I continued to scan the anxious people sitting at the table in front of me, there were certain people I was particularly observing.

“Only one parent didn’t show up, Ms. Melany.”

“One person… Okay, let’s start. We’re already past the actual time we need to start.”

“Understood.”

With that, the employee left my side and took her place behind me, and then I focused on the people in front of me again.

“Ahem.”

I coughed slightly and all eyes turned to me.

“Today, we are going to share with you the preliminary information we have gathered as part of our research and if you have any questions, I will answer them myself.”

A holographic screen appeared on the table after I simply touched my hand to the table and gently tugged it to the right.

“On the night of October 30, the missing students enter a wooded area where the academy’s camera is not present.”

The holographic screen played several boys entering the wooded area.

Justin walked at the front, a smile evident on his face. The others followed curiously behind him into the woods and disappeared after a while.

“No matter how many hours go by after they enter the forest, they don’t show up on any camera, and then there are reports of them missing.”

One of the parents, also a noble, roared at my words, rising to his feet in a huff.

“We all know that!”

His eyes were filled with rage, and at the same time, his body was trembling.

“That is not what we want to hear! If you have gathered us here, tell us what we don’t know, not what we do know!”

He was not very well known, but that didn’t change the fact that he was nervous and worried about his child. Everyone was nervous, I knew that, so I didn’t act offensively and spoke in a calming tone.

“Could you please be a little more calm? We hav-”

“You’re not the one whose child disappeared! How would you know our pain…?!”

After the man, the other parents started whispering.

“Do you have any idea how painful it is to wait all day for news about your child who has suddenly disappeared?!”

A few other nobles started shouting along with him, but there was not much I could say about it.

“Everything will be in order, calm down. I am giving you a detailed description from the beginning so that you don’t miss anything. If you allow me to continue, there are details I haven’t told you yet.”

The shouting nobleman narrowed his eyes in a mixture of anger and sadness. His body was still trembling, but at least he seemed to have decided to listen to what I had to say.

“Tch, be quick.”

So he sat down again, but the atmosphere with the other parents was seriously tense.

Yes, I agree with them. I would have been like them if Lucia had suddenly disappeared, but as I said, there’s a time for everything.

“Good. Now… let’s get to why they went into the forest in the first place.”

I slid my hand across the table again so that a photo of a certain boy appeared on the screen, Justin Malus.

“This is Justin Malus, as most of you know him. He’s the second-ranking student at the academy and he has a really big influence on the students. He even has a grouping of about seventy people and all the missing students are in that group of seventy people.”

After my words, I felt a small pressure in the room, directed specifically at me. The pressure was coming, as I guessed, from Justin Malus’s mother, Jenny Malus.

Her eyes were sharp with anger, like a tiger ready to pounce at any moment.

“We questioned each and every one of the students who hadn’t disappeared out of the seventy, but they all gave us one answer: Justin doesn’t even tell the people he takes with him what to do, we usually find out what we’re doing while we’re doing it, and that’s what happened that night. Justin just walked in and said he needed twenty people, but he didn’t tell us what to do. When he got the people he wanted, he left the building with a smile on his face.”

Whispers began to circulate around the room. In my previous account, this grouping had sounded more like a sort of club, but now it became clear that this grouping was no different from a gang.

Some of them were stunned as if it was the first time they had learned that their children were ‘gang members’ of some kind, and almost all of them glanced in Jenny Malus’ direction, but that was it.

The Malus family was really powerful, they had nothing to gain by escalating this issue now. There was even a chance that a few of them might take this opportunity to curry favor with her, but I ignored them and kept talking.

“When we look at the CCTV footage, we can see that this is indeed what happened. Justin goes into the building where his group is, gathers twenty people without saying anything, and they leave the building and walk straight into the woods.”

The CCTV footage played on the table showed exactly what I had said.

“So we continued to investigate, we asked questions of everyone who saw Justin and the students he recruited that day, and we came to one conclusion. It turns out that Justin had a grudge against one of the students and he went into the woods that night to settle the matter between him and that student, but again, from the CCTV footage and the information we got from the eyewitnesses, it seems that no one else entered the woods that night.”

I paused for a moment, took a breath, and studied the parents. Some were frowning, some were starting to shake and get angry again, and a few had their eyes back on Jenny Malus.

“That means either there was an internal conflict within the group, in which case we would have at least found their bodies, or there is a third party involved that we don’t know about.”

The atmosphere in the room continued to get tenser and tenser.

All right…

I took a deep breath and looked back at the nobles in front of me. Now, I was going to start acting the way Aiden had said.

“As a result of all these events, I’m going to reveal something here today.”

I looked into the eyes of everyone in the room.

“There is an organization inside the academy that is in control, including the governing council, the staff, the security, and even the parents of some of the students.”

“Wh- what are you saying?”

Some of the nobles suddenly shouted.

“How is such a thing possible!”

“This organization has been entrenched in the academy for as long as I have been rector, almost four years, and what happened in the previous preliminaries was their doing.”

A few of the nobles stood up in a huff and turned to me in an aggressive manner.

“We came here to find our children! You are still talking about this… Don’t be ridiculous-”

“Of course, we think they had a hand in the disappearance of these students, and that’s why we’re here in the first place.”

I saw a moment of surprise in the tense, angry expressions of the nobles, and when I confirmed who the surprised people were, I felt the urge to smile. Still, I held myself back. What Aiden had told me seemed to be true, the ones whose expressions were distorted were the ones he had specifically mentioned when he had examined the people who would be attending the meeting.

I had no idea how he was able to find them, but there were times when he was looking at the photographs and he felt as if he was trying to remember something. Who knows, maybe he used to be part of that organization, but now things had changed. Aiden was on our side now, and if he was a former member of that organization, I didn’t care. After all, there was a mana contract between us, and he knew what would happen to him if he broke it.

“Yesterday, I personally discussed this matter with the kingdom. The situation the academy is in, and the implications of this organization. We discussed everything and came to a decision. Now I will leave it to a superior official among the royal soldiers to speak.”

After my words, the door to the room opened, and a large, well-built man wearing a uniform obviously from the royal army entered and stopped in front of the table. He was in his forties, with black hair and black eyes.

At his appearance, some of the nobles turned pale, their eyes darting to different parts of the room. The rest were looking at him curiously, wondering what he was going to say.

“I am Captain Pierce of the royal army, and I am here to explain the decision that has been taken after much consultation between the royal family and the rectorate.”

The captain ran his hard, sharp eyes over the nobles. He was examining them one by one. The nobles held their breath, some of them so tense that they were sweating.

“The decision is this: This very day, the roots of this organization will be torn out of this academy and all other institutions with which the organization has ties. And in the process, we need to detain the fourteen people who are in this room for this reason.”

The doors to the room suddenly opened. The security personnel poured in through the rapidly opening doors.

The meeting room was suddenly in chaos. Some of the guards standing behind me quickly turned and ran toward the windows, and some of the nobles drew their weapons and pointed them at us, but their efforts were futile.

These were no mere guards barging in, they were royal guards.

“It is futile to try to resist, the entire academy has already been sealed off. Also royal soldiers, research teams… Almost everyone is searching the homes of people who work and have worked in this academy.”

If it wasn’t for Aiden, when would we have noticed that the organization was using wristbands for communication? No… Would we have noticed them in the first place? The wristbands looked completely indistinguishable from normal, accessory wristbands, but in fact, they were almost as functional as modern smartwatches.

“From now on, it would be best for you to cooperate without causing trouble.”

The fourteen were neutralized before they could even move properly as he continued to speak. The royal soldiers had caught them so unprepared that not a single skill or mastery was activated in the room.

Only a few of the innocent parents, convinced that their children had been kidnapped by an organization, started crying, throwing tantrums and some even fainted. So we needed the help of a few paramedics we had hired outside just in case, but apart from that we were fine.

The chaos had ended as it had begun and I had a smile on my face.

Today, we were going to lose a large part of this academy, but that was not going to stop us. On the contrary, we were going to resurrect the academy from the ashes and start anew.

That was the first phase of the plan.

We were going to free the academy from the clutches of the organization.

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