Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 168: The rune with no key(1)

Chapter 168: The rune with no key(1)

The thing about forbidden runes is that they never arrive politely.

They don’t knock. They don’t wait.

They slither their way into your thoughts while you’re trying to enjoy your mediocre wine and half-rotten cheese, rewriting the air in the room until it tastes like iron and inevitability.

That was the vibe tonight.

I stared down at the Grimoire of Patterns, its ink rearranging itself slowly, almost deliberately, like it wanted to be understood—but only if I asked the right questions.

A summoning pattern.

No spirit’s name. No blood tithe or elemental glyph.

Just a circle. And within that circle—a door.

More accurately, a sketch of a door carved from obsidian, framed with symbols that didn’t belong to any school of magic I recognized. They weren’t from the high arcane tongue, or even the bastardized versions used in battlefield runes. They were older. Cruder. Desperate.

I touched the symbol at the base.

It was faintly warm.

Not good.

"Alright," I muttered, getting up from my desk. "Let’s see what secrets you’re trying to whisper to me, you smug bastard of a book."

I pulled my cloak on, grabbed a chalk pouch, and headed for the one place that would either solve the mystery—or kill me with tetanus and ghost rot.

The abandoned archive beneath the east wing.

Thirty Minutes Later – Sublevel Three

Noctis Ardentis Academy was old. Parts of it were older than nations. And buried beneath the manicured gardens and insufferably clean lecture halls were ruins from whatever school used to stand here.

The east wing had a door nobody used. It was always cold, always locked, and always whispering.

Lucky for me, I had a key.

It wasn’t a real key. Just a trick with a tuning rune and a bit of brute force mana injection. The kind of thing that got your license revoked.

The door opened with a reluctant groan.

I slipped inside, shutting it behind me.

Darkness swallowed the corridor. I lit a faint rune-light with my palm and descended the narrow stairs.

Down here, the air was thick with dust, mildew, and the scent of something long dead. Papers. Or hopes.

I passed broken shelves, half-melted candles, and statues with missing heads. At the far end of the hall, I found what I needed: a wall fresco depicting the original rune formations used by the Akaran Dynasty before the Rune Collapse.

And there it was.

That same door symbol.

Carved into the side of a decapitated saint, barely visible.

The knock never came in the way you’d expect. No thunderclap, no shadowy figure appearing behind me. Just a soft pressure in my mind, like a whisper before the wind. The Grimoire of Patterns lay open in front of me, its pages humming with dormant energy. The summoning rune etched at the base of the new pattern hadn’t activated yet. But something had changed.

No, was changing.

I stared at the rune. It was ancient, far older than anything in the Academy’s archives. This wasn’t the work of a mortal runesmith—it was something else. Something before. The lines weren’t even stable; they flickered, as if caught between realities. I’d only seen that happen once before, in an event most players had called a glitch.

But glitches don’t hum with intention.

I closed the Grimoire, locking it with a pulse of my mana. The pressure receded slightly, but it lingered. Waiting. Testing.

I didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t. Instead, I stood by the window and watched as the Academy moved through its nightly rhythms. Patrols of sentinels lit by glowing aether-lanterns. Night classes trudging back to their dormitories. Somewhere far off, a drunken yell from the faculty dorms.

Roderick. Probably winning another drinking game with the necromancy instructors.

Good man.

Morning came with a migraine. My mind still churned, parsing the half-glimpsed rune like it was a puzzle with pieces from five different boxes. I downed two cups of bitter tea, dressed, and headed out.

Class C greeted me with their usual chaos.

"Professor! Garrick tried to use his strength rune to open Mira’s lunch box again!"

"She had it warded, Leo! It shocked me!"

"That’s the point, meathead."

I stepped into the chaos and cleared my throat. Instantly, the air shifted. Seven pairs of eyes snapped to attention.

"Today," I said, "we’re doing something... unconventional."

Julien grinned. "So, a normal day."

"Silence, Smartass. We’re going rune-hunting."

Blank stares.

Mira narrowed her eyes. "You mean the Pattern again?"

"I mean beyond the Pattern." I pulled out the Grimoire and set it on the stone lectern. "We’re going to decipher the summoning glyph at its core."

Wallace raised a hand. "That’s highly illegal."

"Exactly," I said. "Which is why we’re going to the Forbidden Archives."

Leo groaned. "Why can’t we have a normal teacher? One that makes us write essays and gives us failing grades?"

"Because that wouldn’t keep you alive," I muttered.

The Forbidden Archives were hidden beneath the east wing of the Academy. Officially, they didn’t exist. Unofficially, everyone knew the door behind the third-level alchemy classroom led somewhere it shouldn’t.

The lock was sealed by runic law, requiring five specific faculty signatures to open.

I picked it with a spoon.

The kids stared at me.

"What?" I said. "The real security is the cursed librarian."

"Cursed librarian?" Felix asked, paling.

"I’m kidding," I lied.

We descended into the darkness, footsteps muffled by dust and old regret. The shelves down here groaned under the weight of forgotten knowledge. Banned grimoires, failed experiments, journals from instructors long erased from history.

And something worse: silence.

No whisper of wind. No scuttling vermin. Just... stillness.

Even Cassandra, who had rejoined us this morning without explanation, seemed unsettled. She kept to the shadows, her expression unreadable.

We reached the central vault. I pressed the Grimoire to the locked pedestal, and the summoning glyph flared to life. A second pattern bloomed outward, carving itself into the air around us like frost on glass.

"Brace yourselves," I said.

Then I touched the rune.

Reality folded.

Not shattered, not broken—just tilted, like we’d stepped into a painting before the paint dried. Colors bled wrong. Gravity pulsed like a heartbeat. The students staggered.

We weren’t in the Archives anymore.

We were in the Pattern.

Somewhere deep within it.

A circular platform stretched around us, floating over a chasm of void and starless space. Lines of glowing script looped through the air like snakes, shifting as we breathed.

Julien looked around, his voice tight. "Professor... this wasn’t in the curriculum."

"Congratulations," I said. "You’re getting extra credit."

The summoning rune blazed at our feet. But now I could see it clearly—it wasn’t a door.

It was a lock.

And something was trying to open it from the other side.

I stepped forward, the Grimoire in hand, and spoke to the Pattern.

"Who are you?"

A pause.

Then, a voice—not spoken, but carved directly into my mind.

"I am the First Pattern. The Doorwalker. The One Who Remembers."

The students backed away. Felix clutched Mira’s sleeve. Cassandra simply watched.

"Lucian Drelmont," the voice continued. "You carry the stolen script. The Grimoire made by the Unshaped."

I swallowed. "I didn’t steal anything. I inherited it."

"Inheritance does not excuse ignorance. You tamper with threads you do not understand. Threads that bind realms together."

"I’m aware. But I need answers. There’s something coming—something worse than beast tides and politics."

The voice hesitated.

"You speak of the Blood."

I blinked. "You know about the Blood Mist?"

"I know what was banished. What should not have returned."

The rune pulsed. Symbols rearranged. And then—

—a key appeared.

No bigger than my palm. Made of light. Shifting, uncertain.

"This is the key to one door. Not all. Choose carefully."

The voice faded.

We were pulled back into the Archives with a lurch.

Everyone fell. Except Cassandra.

She stared at me, then at the key floating above my hand.

"You’re not going to use that, are you?" she asked quietly.

"I don’t know," I admitted.

But we both knew I would.

Because I was already turning the key in my mind, wondering what door I wanted to open.

And what monster would answer.

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