Word that Rosalie had gone missing spread through the academy like wildfire.

  A prophesied Hero vanishing was chaos fuel on its own, and for followers of the Holy Church, it was nothing short of a nightmare.

  But it didn’t play out the way Enid expected.

  Instead of panicking and losing all discipline, many students and even some clergy were furious that the Hero had been taken.

  Led by the most zealous believers from the Divine school, joined by students sick of lockdown life, and mixed with plenty of people from other schools who openly adored Rosalie, believers and nonbelievers alike began organizing themselves.

  They formed volunteer patrols and search teams, sweeping the campus and hunting for the Hero, and for a kidnapper who may or may not even exist.

  Deans and faculty tried to calm them down.

  They threatened demerits, even expulsion.

  None of it worked.

  The students’ “voluntary activity” didn’t slow.

  Antonio seemed to quietly allow it, with conditions.

  Students were not to act without security nearby, and any group movement had to be at least ten people.

  To Enid and several other deans, it sounded ridiculous.

  What was this going to do besides put students in danger.

  Then reality proved the deans had underestimated the students’ anger, their willingness to move, and their ability to fight.

  Over the following week, the student patrols cooperated with campus security. They caught multiple “suspicious” people lurking around campus and handed them over.

  They also stopped several attempted abductions targeting students who wandered off alone.

  The suspects insisted they were innocent, but under harsh interrogation, more than a few confessed to trying to kidnap students.

  And then something strange happened.

  Every time interrogators got close to pulling out real information, the suspect would suddenly seize in agony, start bleeding from the eyes, nose, and mouth, and die on the spot.

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  It was as if something or someone was preventing them from talking.

  Caroline took part in the interrogations.

  After examining several of the dead, she concluded they were bound by an extremely powerful curse.

  It wasn’t standard Hexcraft, not in the usual sense.

  It was closer to the demon race’s “twisted sorcery,” warped and vile in a way that didn’t behave like ordinary cursework.

  Caroline said she could try to break it.

  Twisted sorcery used a power nature similar to the “dark power” of Hexcraft, so in theory, it could be unraveled, but it would take time.

  Caroline had studied twisted sorcery before, and the Science school provided advanced tracing and analysis equipment.

  If she could identify the curse’s magical signature and compare it against the signatures of people inside the academy, she could pinpoint the caster.

  Even if the caster was an outsider, she could still track it back.

  Because the shape of a person’s magic was like a fingerprint, unique to the individual.

  Once the signature was identified, the moment that mage dared to cast again, the monitoring instruments would catch it immediately.

  Never underestimate what short-lived people can build.

  And the academy’s Science school held some of the most advanced technology and magitech in the entire empire.

  Progress had brought inventions people in earlier eras couldn’t have dreamed of, and those inventions reshaped modern life.

  Magic-signature monitors, mana reactors, recording stones, enchanted weapons, magical tools, detection arrays.

  From heavy industrial machines down to household conveniences, ordinary life, even the operation of a nation, had become inseparable from magical science.

  Caroline was already busy.

  Now she had to carve out time to study these curses too.

  Busy on top of busy.

  Enid honestly worried Caroline would work herself into the grave.

  Thanks to the volunteer patrols, most people on campus began to realize something filthy had taken root inside the academy, something hiding in the dark and threatening them.

  And those filthy things hiding in the shadows seemed to get spooked.

  The rate of disappearances dropped.

  Then, for a time, no one new went missing at all.

  Sightings of suspects also began to thin out.

  But the unsettling part remained.

  None of the missing students had been found.

  A full week had passed since Rosalie vanished.

  Search efforts grew more intense by the day, yet Rosalie and the others were still nowhere.

  The Nature school had no missing students, but Enid searched anyway.

  She tried to find Rosalie and the others herself.

  She pushed her elemental senses across the academy, sweeping every corner, every crack, every gap she could think of.

  No matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

  With the academy completely sealed, Enid believed there were only two explanations.

  One, there was a hidden chamber somewhere, something so well concealed she didn’t know it existed.

  Two, the area was covered by twisted sorcery, blocking her elemental magic from seeping in.

  At least it was a direction.

  Enid shared her suspicions with Antonio and campus security.

  After that, the academy launched a full search of every location that seemed even remotely questionable.

  And sure enough, within days they found multiple hidden places that had never been documented.

  Crypts, abandoned labs, ancient vaults.

  Some of them were places even Antonio, one of the academy’s founders, had never discovered.

  It shocked him.

  But even then, the missing students still weren’t found.

  That didn’t mean they were dead.

  The academy maintained soul marks for every student.

  As long as a mark still shone, it meant the student was alive.

  So no one stopped searching.

  They swore they would bring every missing person back, no matter where they had been hidden.