Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 179: Bunker 17

Chapter 179: Bunker 17

I didn’t expect the door to still be intact.

It stood like a sore tooth jutting from the forest floor—tilted, metallic, half-swallowed by moss and time. Engraved above the frame, in a dead language the Grimoire translated for me, were three words:

"Seal the Echo."

None of the students could read it.

Lysaria, for once, hesitated to touch the metal.

"Is this it?" Roderick asked me. His voice was low, hoarse, like something in his throat knew better than to speak.

I nodded. "Bunker Seventeen. Military-grade research site. Supposedly decommissioned after the war."

"Supposedly?" Julien echoed.

I didn’t reply. I was too busy unlocking the runes.

It wasn’t a lock in the traditional sense—no key, no mechanism. The bunker responded to patterns. The old kind. The kind buried in the bones of the world before the gods found names.

My fingers traced them automatically, guided by memory and something darker. Something that remembered.

The Grimoire flickered with heat as I completed the seal.

And the door shivered open.

Inside was a corridor of nightmares.

Not in the blood-and-guts kind of way. That would’ve been easier.

This was worse.

This was clean.

White metal walls. Lights that hadn’t flickered in centuries. No dust. No mold.

Just... stillness.

"Power’s still on," Wallace muttered, checking a panel. "That’s not supposed to happen."

"Nothing here is," I said.

We moved in rows. I took point. Lysaria flanked me. Students behind, weapons drawn.

The deeper we went, the louder the silence became. Not just absence of sound. The compression of it. Like it was pushing back against reality.

There were no bodies. No signs of struggle.

But the walls?

They were covered in runes.

No, not runes. Carvings.

Personal ones. Desperate ones.

"They don’t have eyes, but they see."

"Don’t hum. Don’t whistle. Don’t think of music."

"It knows my name."

"It answered when I screamed into the dark."

"It screamed back."

Felix looked like he was about to pass out again.

Mira read faster and faster. "These were written by researchers, right? They were studying the Hunters?"

"No," Lysaria said quietly. "They were feeding them."

We found the first chamber sealed in seven locks.

It was a containment room. I knew this from a datamine someone had done years ago. It had never been rendered in-game—just a mention in an old dev note:

"Project: Mimir’s Mouth - Final State: Whisper Dormancy."

Inside was a circular chamber. A chair bolted to the center. Shackles still dripping with black resin. A soundless rune burned into the floor, unreadable, flickering like a broken eye.

A glass tank along the far wall had shattered. Inside it had once been a head. A severed one.

Still humming.

The echo of it still circled the room. Not sound. Memory of sound.

Leo vomited.

Cassandra... stepped closer.

And smiled.

"Found it," she whispered. "It’s been calling."

My blood turned to ice.

Before I could grab her, she placed a hand on the broken tank.

And the lights went out.

Not just in the room.

In the whole bunker.

And then we heard it.

The hum.

Low.

Wrong.

Hungry.

Julien shouted. Someone screamed. I think it was Garrick.

And from the dark hallway behind us, I saw them.

The Silence-Hunters.

Except now they had eyes.

Dozens of them.

All watching me.

What followed was chaos.

Felix screamed spells he couldn’t remember learning. Wallace threw smoke bombs that hissed but didn’t echo. Mira activated a dark ward that swallowed two Hunters whole—but more came.

I grabbed Cassandra by the wrist and dragged her back, ignoring her strange smile.

"We have to seal the bunker!" Roderick shouted.

"We can’t," I said. "Not without the key."

"What key!?"

I held up the Grimoire.

It pulsed.

"I have to finish the pattern."

"Then do it!"

I dropped to one knee and scrawled it across the floor. The new rune. The alien one. The one that wasn’t supposed to exist in this reality.

Grimoire of Patterns: Override Sequence – Seal Memory Leak.

The walls screamed.

The air bent.

The creatures rushed us.

I finished the last stroke—

And everything snapped shut.

We woke up on the forest floor.

The bunker was gone.

Not destroyed. Not buried.

Just... gone.

Vanished like it had never been there.

I sat up, aching, head pounding.

Julien groaned next to me. "Did we win?"

Mira rolled over. "Define ’win.’"

Felix muttered, "We’re alive, aren’t we?"

Lysaria sat nearby, silent, watching me.

"You rewrote a rune that doesn’t exist," she said flatly.

"I had help," I muttered.

"The Grimoire?"

"Yeah."

"You shouldn’t be able to use that."

"I know."

She stared at me a long moment. "You’re not the real Lucian Drelmont, are you?"

I didn’t answer.

She didn’t push. Just stood up.

"We’ll talk later. For now... we get out of this cursed forest."

But as I stood, I noticed something in my coat pocket.

A stone. Small. Smooth.

Marked with the symbol from the bunker’s door.

"Seal the Echo."

But now, something else was carved beneath it.

"One escaped."

The walk back to the Academy was quiet.

Not the strained kind of silence you get after a near-death experience—no sobs, no shouted panic, no scattered adrenaline.

This was heavier.

Denser.

The kind of silence that follows you home. Lurks behind doors. Whispers when the lights go out.

Everyone felt it.

Even Julien, who usually couldn’t shut up, just trudged ahead with his sword dragging behind him. Mira’s eyes were sunken. Garrick looked over his shoulder every few minutes. Felix kept twitching every time a twig cracked.

Cassandra hadn’t said a word.

She still clutched the stone.

I should’ve taken it from her. I should’ve burned it.

But a part of me—the Grimoire, maybe—whispered, let it play out.

So I did.

By the time we reached the outer gates of Noctis Ardentis, the sun was beginning to rise. The towers loomed like spires from a dream I didn’t want to remember.

Instructor Vaughn peeled off first. He said nothing, just gave me a look that said: Next time, you explain it to the Headmaster.

The others drifted off toward their dorms. Leo and Felix practically crawled.

I stayed. I needed to speak with him.

Augustus Evercrest waited in the observatory.

Of course he did.

I’d never seen the man sleep. Rumors said he couldn’t. That after the War of Seven Thrones, Evercrest’s body no longer needed rest—only reflection.

When I arrived, he was standing with his back to me, staring through the crystal dome at the mountains. His silver cloak fluttered as if there were wind, but the chamber was still.

"You went to Bunker Seventeen," he said.

I didn’t ask how he knew.

"Yes," I replied.

"You weren’t authorized."

"I wasn’t planning to come back."

He turned slowly. His face was older than I remembered from the game. Not in wrinkles—those were few. But in weight. As if his soul had aged beyond his flesh.

"Did you open it?"

"I sealed it again," I said. "But not before something slipped out."

Evercrest said nothing. Just watched me. And in that gaze, I felt the pressure of decades, of wars, of decisions made in silence.

"You rewrote a Pattern," he said at last.

"I didn’t have a choice."

"There’s always a choice, Lucian."

That stopped me. Because in my head, I heard Allen’s voice, not Lucian’s.

You always have a choice. Even if it kills you.

He approached. Slow, deliberate.

"Do you know what the Echo is?" Evercrest asked.

"More than I should. Less than I need."

He nodded, like that answer satisfied him.

"The Bunker was built to isolate sound that thinks. A fragment of pre-Silence consciousness. The researchers tried to study it. Then to contain it. Then to cut a deal."

"And they lost."

"Yes."

His eyes sharpened. "And now you’ve brought it back."

I swallowed. "Only a piece."

"Sometimes, that’s enough."

I reached into my coat and held out the stone Cassandra had picked up.

"I think it’s still tethered to this."

He didn’t take it.

Instead, he said, "Keep it."

"What?"

"You opened it. You closed it. You’re part of its Pattern now. The Echo dreams through you. If we take the stone from you, it will just find another way back."

I looked down at it. It was warm. Faintly pulsing.

A heartbeat.

A hum.

A name half-spoken in static.

"Then what do we do?" I asked.

Evercrest turned back to the window.

"You teach your class," he said. "You act normal. You wait."

"Wait for what?"

He didn’t respond. But I saw his reflection.

His lips moved.

And just before I turned to leave, I heard him say:

"Wait for it to wake."

Outside the observatory, Lysaria was waiting.

She leaned against the railing, arms crossed. Her expression unreadable.

"You know what that was," I said.

"I have suspicions."

"You think I’m possessed?"

She tilted her head. "Possessed? No. Infected? Maybe."

"And you’re still here?"

She stepped close. "Don’t flatter yourself. If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve done it in the forest."

Charming.

She added, "But... something about you changed. Not just recently. From the start."

I didn’t reply.

"Who are you really, Lucian?"

I met her gaze. "Someone trying not to die."

Later, I returned to my quarters. The stone sat on my desk, humming faintly. I placed a rune barrier around it—not to contain it, but to keep me from staring too long.

Because when I did...

I saw a dream.

A world of white halls and empty rooms. A voice humming in silence. A chair bolted to the floor. A scream echoing backward.

And at the center—

A child.

Eyes closed.

Mouth open.

Humming.

I woke in sweat.

The stone was gone.

And carved on my wall in perfect script was a message:

"She’s awake now."