Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 118: Witness

Chapter 118: Witness

I slept with one eye open.

Not literally. That’d be exhausting. But my mana circuits hummed in passive sync all night, keyed to any shift in ambient flow. The kind of over-alert tension I used to feel during group raids with permadeath toggled on. Even in the safety of my quarters, wrapped in the illusion of calm, there was a whisper at the edge of thought: He’s still watching.

By morning, there was nothing. No new messages. No flickers of movement in shadows. The book from the library sat neatly on the shelf where I’d returned it—still blank, still silent, like it had never housed a name at all.

I decided not to push further. Not yet.

Instead, I took a breath, threw on my coat, and walked out into the storm of adolescence that was Class C.

They were already gathered in the training yard when I arrived. Garrick was doing squats with a training dummy on each shoulder. Mira sat on a bench, legs crossed, whispering something to Felix, who looked increasingly like a man being dragged toward his own funeral. Julien waved lazily with the same smirk he always wore before trying to kill me in a "friendly match."

"Morning, Professor," Mira said, her voice innocent. Too innocent. "You’re late. Should we dock your pay?"

"If you want a performance review, Trickster, I can set up a live demonstration. You stand still, I throw knives. Audience votes on precision."

"Do I at least get hazard pay?"

"Your life is the hazard. Consider yourself compensated."

They laughed. Not because it was that funny—but because I was back. Present. Grounded. The quiet tension in my mind didn’t bleed into my tone. Not yet.

We started with tactical footwork drills. Then scenario-based spell formations. I adjusted spell layering strategies for Leo, who still treated defensive casting like it was a slow, tragic art form. Wallace nearly caused an explosion trying to amplify a Light construct with unstable alchemical reagents. Business as usual.

But even as I corrected form and delivered insults with surgical precision, I kept watch.

It wasn’t just paranoia. My Grimoire of Patterns was more than just a combat tool—it tracked behavior.

And something in the group was off.

Not visibly. No sinister eyes or hidden daggers. But the mana threads in the yard felt slightly misaligned, as if something unseen had walked through them.

The spell circle Mira drew left a smear. The water charm Felix tried to cast stuttered, then snapped back. Nothing I could prove. Nothing I could confront.

But I knew.

The Phantom Duelist hadn’t left.

He was just being patient.

"Alright," I said, clapping my hands. "Who wants to try and hit me today?"

Julien’s hand shot up instantly. "Finally. I’ve been getting bored of hitting targets that don’t insult me."

"You miss most of your insults too, Smartass. Come on then. Let’s disappoint your ancestors together."

The duel started as it always did—Julien fast, flashy, looking to break my guard early with a misdirection feint.

But I wasn’t watching Julien.

I was watching the patterns around him.

And for a split-second, I saw it.

The flicker.

A shimmer of distortion right behind Julien’s shoulder. Like someone had blinked through space and forgotten to close the door.

I stepped forward and knocked Julien’s blade aside with my palm, spinning him away before he could even blink. He stumbled, confused, but I was already pivoting to the spot.

Nothing.

Just air.

But the mana?

The mana screamed.

It was the same kind of interference I remembered from PvP fields when a Phantom Duelist presence triggered. Reality refusing to settle.

But this wasn’t a game.

This was my classroom.

I ended the lesson early.

Told the students I had a meeting. Something vague and adult-sounding. They bought it—most of them, anyway. Mira raised an eyebrow but didn’t push.

I returned to my quarters, locked the door, and pulled out the blank ledger I’d written in last night.

Page one was untouched.

Page two now had a new line scrawled across it.

"Don’t look too close. You won’t like what’s under the mask."

No signature. No mana residue.

Just a sentence, written in my own handwriting.

But I hadn’t written it.

I sat back and exhaled.

Okay.

I had three possibilities.

One, I was losing my mind. Unlikely. My mental fortitude had jumped a whole rank recently, and paranoia didn’t usually come with precise temporal distortions and rogue feedback trails.

Two, someone or something was hijacking my Grimoire skill. Also unlikely. The system had internal safeguards. If someone was overriding it, they were operating way outside normal magic parameters.

Three—and this was the worst one—something was inside the Grimoire. Buried so deep in the pattern recognition layer that I didn’t even notice when it wrote over me.

A Phantom inside the code.

A watcher that could rewrite memory.

I looked at the blank page again.

And I smiled.

Because now?

Now it was personal.

And I had a pattern to crack.

I didn’t sleep. Not really.

Even as I lay on the couch in my quarters, arms folded behind my head and eyes closed, my thoughts were flicking through mana sequences, replaying distorted echoes in the training yard, and tracing every line from the Grimoire of Patterns. Every breath felt like a loaded question.

That line—Don’t look too close. You won’t like what’s under the mask. It wasn’t just a threat. It was bait.

And I’d taken it.

The Grimoire had always been just a skill—a tool, a lens to study patterns in spellwork and combat, helping me dissect behavior, optimize counters, replicate magic. But now it felt like something had piggybacked its way inside, using it as a window. Maybe more.

I had to test it.

I sat up, summoned the Grimoire in its active state. A transparent overlay flickered into view across my vision, glyphs orbiting like lazy constellations. No combat pattern loaded—just the default library state. A blank slate.

"New entry," I muttered. "Subject: Caspian Arvell."

The Grimoire paused.

For the first time since I’d acquired the skill, it hesitated.

That was all the confirmation I needed.

It wasn’t just watching. It was listening too.

"Override," I said. "Manual input. Caspian Arvell."

A beat. Then:

[Subject not found. Reference erased.]

Not missing.

Erased.

Which meant whatever was hiding in the Grimoire didn’t just want me to forget Caspian—it wanted to make it so no one could remember him. Not even me. Not even this system.

But systems had logs. Systems had cracks.

And I knew how to exploit both.

I stood up and crossed the room to the rune-etched chalkboard near my desk. It had been cluttered with diagrams and spell layering for Class C drills, but I wiped it clean. Drew three circles. A triangle between them. Layered sigils into the edges. I wasn’t casting anything—just visualizing data clusters like I used to when cracking resource locks back in the Sword of Radiance raid forums.

The trick wasn’t brute force.

It was knowing what to ask.

"Query," I said softly. "Associated pattern to: Phantom Duelist."

The board didn’t glow. But the Grimoire shimmered at the edge of my vision.

And then something clicked.

Not an answer—but a name.

Not Caspian.

Not a real name.

Just a whisper.

[WITNESS]

I blinked. "That’s it? That’s all you’re giving me?"

No reply.

Figures.

Still, it was more than I had a few hours ago.

I dismissed the Grimoire’s active layer and started to pace, mentally running through everything I remembered from Sword of Radiance. The Phantom Duelist hadn’t been a major character. Barely even a side encounter. A few eerie rumors. An optional mini-boss in a dungeon that most players skipped. You had to do a weird side chain involving erased NPCs, forgotten books, and lost duels to even trigger it.

And now it was in my room.

Or at least watching.

Could it have followed me into this world? Or was it native to this version of it? A deeper lore character that the devs never fleshed out but had left hooks for?

I didn’t know.

But I was going to find out.

The next morning, I headed to the Academy’s restricted archives.

Not the fancy marble-floor section students used. The real archives—the ones that required a faculty sigil, a mana oath, and no sense of self-preservation. Most instructors didn’t bother. Too much red tape. Too many glyph traps.

Lucky for me, I liked complicated things.

I held my sigil up to the gate. It buzzed once, scanning my elemental affinity. Then the rune in the center flared gray—the color of my mana.

Accepted.

The doors opened with a slow hiss.

Inside was dim. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made your ears ache. Bookshelves loomed like monuments, and the air tasted like dust, ink, and latent regret.

I moved quickly, passing the theoretical history section and heading toward the combat incident logs. These weren’t public records—they were hand-scribed entries from past instructors and faculty, sometimes spanning centuries. If the Phantom Duelist had ever appeared before, this was where I’d find it.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

But then I saw it.

Tucked between two aged volumes, where the shelf was warped slightly, was a thin black book.

No title on the spine.

Just a symbol burned into the cover.

A mask.

I reached for it slowly.

The moment my fingers touched the leather, the air shifted.

Not dramatically. No wind, no magic pulse. Just... weight.

As if something was standing right behind me.

I didn’t turn.

Instead, I opened the book.

Inside, every page was empty.

Except one.

And on that page was a single sentence:

"You’ve seen the first pattern. Now survive the second."

No author. No ink trail. No mana residue.

Just those words, and the faint outline of a dueling circle etched beneath them.

My breath caught.

I closed the book and tucked it into my coat.

As I left the archive, I didn’t look back.

Because I didn’t need to.

I knew, without seeing, that the Phantom Duelist had followed me here.

And that the next move was mine.

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