Night gave way to dawn. Light rose in the east, and the birds and beasts that had been silent all night spread their wings and took to the sky.

Ayideen City came alive once more, and Saint Perrod’s students hurried to their instructors’ classrooms with books in hand.

He pried open his heavy eyelids. A blinding ray of light shot through the window and pierced his eyes. Wincing, he raised a hand to shield them, then frowned as he came to.

The sheets beneath him were soft and white, and the blanket draped over him smelled of fresh sunshine. He sat up and stared blankly for a while before the events of last night slowly came back to him.

Witch Sherry in Hera’s tower. The unfilled-in sewer shaft. The Hawk-Beaked Man and the strange stone door. The poisoning and the pursuit…

But there, his memories went blank. He must’ve passed out not long after escaping the sewer shaft.

In the end, the reason the operation had failed was that he hadn’t expected the miasma in the sewer shaft to be so poisonous. Even after taking the antidote Liya had given him, and spending only a short time down there, the miasma’s poison had rapidly eaten away at his strength.

Next time he went to investigate, he’d have to bring a better antidote.

He checked his body and found that the lingering poison from the pale green miasma seemed to be gone. Aside from little Carlisle, he was bursting with energy—so much so that he felt like he could punch the Crystal Giant he’d failed to defeat last night into pieces.

“You’re awake?”

The woman sitting at the desk beside him, her head bent over some writing, glanced his way.

Neat stacks of documents covered her desk. She wasn’t wearing the academy’s standard uniform, but a black coat that looked something like a trench coat.

“Who are you?”

Though he’d been at the academy for only a day, he recognized the woman before him. She was an academy instructor.

“Just call me Anjie.” The woman pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

Carlisle nodded, then looked around.

Gray walls. A dark red cabinet. A strange medicinal smell hung in the air. A stretcher for carrying patients had been left in the corner, with a clock ticking away above it.

“Where am I?”

As far as he remembered, he should’ve been lying in the woods outside the sewer shaft, not in a bed this soft. There was only one explanation: someone had found him while he was unconscious.

As for the possibility that Sherry had rescued him, that was absolutely out of the question.

Still, what puzzled him most was where Sherry had gone.

Had someone found and rescued them both, or had she escaped on her own first?

After thinking it over, he was more inclined to believe the former.

The ring on his finger was still there, and Sherry’s things were still inside it. If she’d abandoned him and run off alone, then with her greed, there was no way she’d have left her ring behind.

Besides, he’d given her a good smack on the butt not long ago. That petty little troublemaker wouldn’t just have taken back her ring—she’d have stripped him, down to his underwear.

When it came to Witch Sherry, he always assumed the worst of her.

“This is the academy infirmary.” A sly smile crossed Anjie’s face, as if she’d just remembered something. “You were poisoned and passed out last night.”

“Poisoned?”

Just as he’d expected, an academy instructor had found him and rescued him.

Poison usually left some traces behind in the body. The only reason he was clear of it now was probably that the instructor had purged the remaining poison.

He was a Knight of the Round Table, secretly disguised as a student while investigating the truth behind Instructor Roman’s death. Not many instructors knew about it. Aside from Principal Harrison and a few senior instructors, no one at Saint Perrod would recognize him.

So in Instructor Anjie’s eyes, he was just an ordinary academy student.

“Young people need to learn some restraint. And you need to see people for who they really are. Otherwise, you might not be so lucky next time.”

“What do you mean?”

Anjie’s words left him baffled. What was this about restraint and seeing people for who they really were? He’d only been poisoned in the sewer shaft last night, and had passed out the moment he got out. He hadn’t done anything that called for restraint.

Could she mean… Sherry?

He thought back to that charming yet infuriating figure, and his fists clenched again.

He’d brought Sherry with him when he left the sewer shaft. He didn’t know whether she’d been poisoned by the miasma, but judging from what Instructor Anjie had said, he could guess that Sherry had done something terrible to him after he passed out.

“That girl you were with wasn’t up to any good. She drugged you and knocked you out. If I hadn’t gotten there in time, you might’ve lost a few organs—and the ring on your hand, too.” Anjie covered her mouth, looking rather pleased at his misfortune.

Before becoming an instructor, she’d been a physician who could cast healing spells. She’d seen all kinds of strange patients. And cases where someone, unable to bear the loneliness, tried to sneak off for a tryst, got drugged, and ended up losing valuable organs and a ring were hardly rare.

Men really couldn’t keep their lower halves under control.

The student before her had suffered just such a fate. When another instructor brought him to her unconscious, she hadn’t known why he’d been poisoned and passed out. Then, not long afterward, a rumor spread through the academy.

【Someone was shamelessly having sex in the little woods by the lake last night! The guy passed out and was taken to the infirmary by an instructor!】

In that moment, it was as if the clouds had parted and the truth stood clear before her. She understood everything!

“She… drugged me?” Carlisle still didn’t understand what Anjie meant.

The Knights of the Round Table usually fought against grotesque beings. They’d rarely encountered the sort of thing Anjie was talking about, so they knew nothing about its secrets.

“Huh? You still haven’t figured it out?” Anjie looked at him in surprise, as if he were an idiot. “Didn’t you go after that girl because you wanted to **? She was after your money.”

“Everyone at the academy’s talking about it. They don’t know the truth, though. They think you ran out of strength in the middle of **, and that the girl wore you out until you passed out. And apparently there were eyewitnesses, too.”

Anjie idly toyed with her long, slender nails as she said something that short-circuited Carlisle’s brain.

What **? What eyewitnesses? What had Sherry done to him while he was unconscious?!

“Th-then where is that girl now?” Carlisle stared at her, stunned.

He wanted to find Sherry and get a proper explanation out of her. What had she done? And what was this about eyewitnesses?!

A wicked Witch who loved to tease people deserved to be disciplined again and again until she finally learned to behave!

“Her? The instructor probably scared her off last night. After all, when the instructor found you, you were alone. You should be grateful. If they’d arrived any later, you might’ve lost some of those organs inside you.”

She ran?

Hearing what had happened to Sherry, Carlisle’s breath caught.

But then he saw the ring on his hand and gave a cold laugh.

As long as he still had her ring, she’d come back for it.