I Loaded the Occult Panel

Richard stared at the paragraph.

”What else did the accompanying scholar write?”

”He didn’t write much else.” Greer shook his head.

”He only noted that... a much larger battle was fought along that route centuries ago. There are more dead buried in the ground there than from the current war.”

Richard understood what the scholar hadn’t dared to state explicitly.

The road to Mons was an ancient weak point.

The veil was already thin there. This time, the expeditionary force and the pursuing army had marched through one after the other, churning up the area’s lingering aura of death.

The things buried in the soil centuries ago had been forcibly roused.

As for the ”angel” blocking the path between the two armies...

Whether it was the dead rising from underground, or something truly leaning down to offer protection...The accompanying scholar hadn’t dared to write it down, and since Richard hadn’t been there, he naturally had no way of knowing exactly what had happened.

Another battle report came from the Alliance.

”There’s a river on the Alliance’s eastern border.”

Greer drew a line on the bulletin.

”There’s a ferry crossing on the river, bracketed by a ring of fortresses on both sides.

”Over a dozen poured concrete structures. They were supposed to hold for a century or two.”

”But the enemy dragged over a few cannons.”

He turned the page, revealing an illustration.

The cannon was absurdly large. Its barrel was wide enough to fit a person inside, and it had to be towed in sections on railway flatcars.

”These are siege mortars.”

”A single shot punches straight through their concrete roofs.”

”Over a dozen fortresses were silenced one by one. The soldiers inside were buried alive under the collapsing concrete, along with their guns.”

Richard looked at the page.

Fortresses that had taken decades to build had been smashed into tombs in a matter of days.

”This should be the military’s problem. It has nothing to do with us.”

”But something went wrong.”

Greer tapped the latter half of the bulletin.

”When the sites for that ring of fortresses were chosen decades ago, there were far more dead buried beneath them than there were defenders garrisoned inside.”

Richard understood.

”As those siege mortars bombarded them, shell by shell...”

”They brought down the fortresses.” Greer nodded. ”And activated the weak point underneath at the same time.”

Richard thought of his own probatio draft.

Back then, two factions of scholars had still been arguing over ”insufficient data.”

There was no need to argue anymore.

The bulletin explicitly requested ”Reforging” seals to piece the old, artillery-shattered seals back together from the ruins.

Croft had walked over at some point without anyone noticing.

He hadn’t made a sound, quietly sipping a tea bitter enough to make a man question his life choices.

Now, he chimed in:

”Greer is talking about localized battlefield events. Let me fill in some finer details.”

He started with the barbed wire and telephone lines.

The trenches were strung with barbed wire and webbed with telephone cables.

A single front line stretched for dozens of miles, the wiring as dense as a spiderweb.

The bulletin included a firsthand account submitted by a signalman.

He wrote that he was on night duty when a voice came through his hand-cranked telephone. It was his dead squad leader.

The squad leader called him by name over the phone, asking him to report their position.

The signalman knew a thing or two. He tested the same line again, and the voice was still there.

But the words it spoke were different from the first time.

Reading this, Richard thought of the intelligence discussed at their last gathering.

The telephone network, stretching for dozens of miles, had turned into a massive, ready-made séance table.

Richard noted this detail down.

Croft added his own assessment:

”With telephone lines acting as mediums, the demand for ’Disconnection’ seals should skyrocket next.”

Then there were the searchlights.

The night-time anti-aircraft searchlights were originally meant to spot enemy airships.

But a few Hunter units discovered that when the intense beams swept across the ground, the semi-corporeal and spectral evil creatures caught in the glare would freeze in place, unable to dissipate.

The bulletin included a corresponding request:

The front lines wanted searchlights inscribed with runes—lights that could genuinely burn the evil creatures, rather than just paralyzing them.

As these pieces of intelligence were shared, the other students working quietly nearby stopped to listen.

Greer rolled the bulletin back up.

”Alright.” He clapped his hands. ”You all know what you need to know.”

”From now on, you’ll all know what we’re looking at with these request forms.”

The students nodded in agreement.

Richard looked down at the stacks of request forms neatly categorized by type: sleep-return, Sealing, Disconnection, Reforging, and so on.

Behind each stack lay a stretch of the front line and a field of the dead.

The sleep-return requests from the south represented tens of thousands of unsuppressible death wails;

The Sealing requests from the center represented the things crawling out from beneath the trenches;

The Disconnection requests represented the unnatural voices calling names from behind retreating columns;

And the Reforging requests represented the decades-old seals shattered by siege mortars.

Yet the Emergency Field Sealing Manual they were compiling consisted entirely of disposable, quick, and crude emergency seals.

Would such seals really not cause even bigger problems down the line?

Richard didn’t dwell on it. This wasn’t a problem for someone of his rank to worry about.

Another matter held more of his attention.

Catherine had indeed changed.

When it came to isolating critical components and stripping away redundancies, Richard had been the fastest at deconstructing them.

Montagu was steady, and Fischer was meticulous, but neither could beat his speed.

Over the past few days, however, Catherine had steadily outpaced him.

Now, she was deconstructing seals even faster than he was.

Richard kept an eye on her and watched her work through a few seals.

To isolate the critical parts, one first had to identify the load-bearing strokes.

For this, Richard relied on [Speculation] to visualize the position of every stroke within the entire seal before deducing which ones bore the weight.

Catherine did it in reverse.

She looked for which strokes were redundant.

With a seal spread out before her, she could pick out the extraneous strokes at a single glance.

Once those were removed, whatever remained was naturally the critical foundation.

Her sensitivity to redundancy and imbalance was abnormally sharp.

Which stroke was superfluous, which one shouldn’t be there.

Which rune was heavier or lighter than the rest—she could tell at a glance, with frightening speed.

And it wasn’t just when deconstructing seals.

During classes recently, whenever the topics of imbalance, excess, or asymmetry came up, Catherine seemed to possess a sixth sense.

In their rune-dating class, the instructor had brought out a rubbing that mixed multiple historical writing systems, asking the students to identify which strokes were anachronistic additions by later generations.

The rest of the class had agonized over it character by character, comparing the text against reference charts.

Catherine took two glances and flawlessly pointed out every single extra stroke.

In collation class, two manuscripts were placed side by side so the students could determine which was older based on minute discrepancies.

This was Fischer’s forte.

But to Catherine, those minute inequities were as obvious as a tilted scale.

Fischer couldn’t compete, and neither could Montagu.

When it came to finding faults, Richard’s [Speculation] involved mapping out every individual bone;

Catherine just innately knew which bone had grown crooked.

Richard slowly started to piece it together.

This was what the Nemesis Mask had lent Catherine.

And the ability to perceive excess and imbalance was probably the most insignificant part of it all.

........................

During their routine editing session that day, Hollis brought over an unusually thick stack of seal diagrams.

It was a massive batch of old drafts that needed to be rechecked.

He handed a portion to Catherine.

”You have the best eye. You verify this pile.”

The pile was stacked high. Finishing it would take the entire afternoon.

Catherine didn’t decline. She took it and buried herself in the work.

Right at that moment, Croft walked in to call for her.

”Catherine, Professor MacFie needs to see you.”

Catherine glanced at the towering stack of drafts still in front of her and furrowed her brow.

She couldn’t exactly refuse a summons from Professor MacFie.

But Hollis had specified that this pile of drafts needed to be verified today.

She stood up to leave, giving the pile another look, clearly torn about leaving it unfinished.

Richard hadn’t been assigned many seal diagrams.

He deconstructed them quickly and was almost finished. He had been preparing to flip through the request forms once he was free.

Richard saw Catherine’s predicament and also harbored a slight desire to test her.

”Go on,” he said casually, pulling the pile of drafts over to his side.

”The professor’s summons is more important. Don’t keep him waiting.”

Catherine paused.

”There’s no need.”

”I’d just be sitting around otherwise.”

Richard was already sitting back down, spreading out the pile of drafts.

”Hurry up and go.”

Catherine looked at him for a moment, said nothing more, and turned to leave with Croft.

The work was undeniably tedious, but for him, it just meant isolating the critical components of each old seal all over again.

Besides, watching his [Speculation] progress bar slowly tick upward as he worked was genuinely addictive.

Humming a tune, he quickly finished the entire pile while the surrounding students stared at him like he was a monster.

He stacked the finished drafts together on Catherine’s desk, stood up, and poured himself a glass of water.

Originally, he had wanted to see the red-haired girl’s reaction afterward.

But after he finished for the day, both Montagu and Fischer invited him to a small study group.

Caught up in the work, he completely forgot about the matter.

But Catherine hadn’t forgotten.

During the lunch break the next day, Richard was waiting in line at the cafeteria near the department office.

His appetite was famous by now; he always ordered several portions at once.

The few undergraduates ahead of him in line kept glancing back at him, quickly looking away whenever he noticed.

He heard some whispering. It seemed they all thought he was eating so much to fuel intense mental exertion.

Halfway through the line, a hand suddenly reached over.

The hand placed a meat pie onto his tray.

Richard turned around.

It was Catherine.

She had slipped into line next to him without him noticing. Expressionless, she dropped the meat pie onto his tray and turned to leave.

”...What’s this?” Richard looked at the meat pie, a bit slow to react.

”For you,” Catherine said without looking back.

”Why?”

Catherine’s footsteps paused.

”Don’t you have a big appetite?”

”This... is to tide you over.”

Richard was left speechless.

He looked down at the lone meat pie, and then at his tray piled high with three massive portions of food.

”...Thanks?”

Catherine nodded and walked away.

Richard sat at his table, thinking as he ate.

Did a single meat pie count as repaying her debt?

Was the price of the Nemesis Mask really this cheap?