The Patient Wizard Chapter 18

Chapter 18 – Calculation (8)

Section 5 Victims

Prince Mark’s face was contorted with pain.

“What do we do?”

Alice asked.

“Ahhh!”

Faye, who had been hesitating at the doorway too frightened to come inside, belatedly screamed when she saw the prince’s corpse.

“What happened?”

Smith poked his head out from behind Faye and froze.

Tony finally emerged from his shock. He asked,

“Who did this?”

By then his voice had become hoarse from how many times he had screamed. No one answered.

“I said, who did this!”

Tony shouted in agitation. Again, he was ignored.

“We need to report this.”

At Alice’s words, people began to move.

“I’ll go call someone.”

Smith said,

“Who are you going to call?”

At Chris’s question, Smith stopped in his tracks. Alice said,

“Call Wizard David.”

“I don’t know where he lives. And there’s no way to contact him.”

The Magic Tower was extremely inhospitable. They had placed magic aspirants in dormitories, simply tossed a single spell at them, and expected them to figure things out on their own.

“You said you would report it, right? Who were you going to report to?”

“I was planning to grab any wizard I could find on the way to the lecture hall and explain the situation. Wizards must have ways to contact each other.”

Smith left, and Faye asked in a frightened voice,

“Are we going to stay here?”

Chris answered,

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t we cover the prince with a bedsheet?”

“I think it’s best not to touch anything.”

They were huddled near the door. Tony, still seated, backed away by flailing his legs.

“Go out into the hallway.”

Everyone followed Tony’s instructions. They stood in the corridor looking at the prince’s room.

After about 30 minutes, Smith returned with an unfamiliar wizard. Judging by his yellow robe, he was at the conceptual stage like David.

The conceptual wizard looked at Mark’s corpse, cursed, and then walked past the body to open the window.

Chris thought,

Why is he suddenly opening the window?

He took out a wand from within his robe and mumbled for a while. A small whirlwind stirred at the tip of the wand, and then a translucent mass formed. Soon, wings sprouted from both sides of the mass, forming the shape of a bird.

“Go.”

The bird flew out the window.

“What is that?”

Chris asked,

“I don’t know.”

Alice shook her head and Smith shrugged. The answer came from Tony.

“It’s a magical bird that wizards use to send messages. It’s called a transmission bird.”

The wizard closed the window and glared at the Lion Hall students with a stern gaze.

“All of you go down to the reception room and wait.”

They followed the order. They all went down to the reception room and kept their mouths shut.

“I’m scared.”

Faye said, hugging her shoulders. To be honest, Chris was scared too.

“What are you scared of?”

Smith asked, straightening his shoulders.

Faye made a sad face.

“There’s a murderer among us.”

“No way! That can’t be.”

“Are you saying an outsider came into Lion Hall and harmed the prince? That doesn’t make sense.”

Tony gritted his teeth.

“When I find out who it is, I’ll kill them.”

Then he glared at his team members as if he could kill them.

Faye said,

“It wasn’t me. Don’t look at me like that.”

Tony raised his voice.

“Why do you say it wasn’t you?”

“Because I’m a woman.”

“Does being a woman mean you can’t kill someone? Even a knight could be taken down if suddenly stabbed with a dagger.”

Alice said,

“There were no signs of struggle.”

Chris said,

“What does that mean?”

“It means it was done by someone familiar.”

“Someone familiar?”

“Someone he knew.”

Tony said,

“That’s right! So the culprit is among us.”

His confident statement echoed through the reception room, and the team members who had been gathered closely looked at each other with suspicious eyes and spread apart.

Smith moved to a chair next to the fireplace, and Faye and Alice moved to opposite ends of the sofa. Tony paced back and forth near the door with a flushed face.

Alice murmured,

“Why would someone kill him?”

Smith picked up on her words.

“Who would hate the prince enough to want to kill him?”

Faye said,

“It’s strange. We all got along well.”

Her words were correct. At first, the relationship between the nobles and the slaves was very poor. And the commoners caught in the middle were kept at arm’s length.

Then, after Alex, who was often the cause of conflicts, rose from apprentice to conceptual wizard, his time spent in Lion Hall noticeably decreased, and the conflicts among team members became less frequent. Moreover, as Alex looked down on the other members as losers, a bond formed among them. A bond among the losers.

Although class barriers remained, making them not quite friends, there was no one they disliked. At the very least, they didn’t hate each other.

Chris was pondering Alice’s initial question.

What was the motive?

After thinking deeply, he suddenly got up and ran to the second floor. The wizard was opening Prince Mark’s closet drawers and rummaging through them. Startled by the presence, he glared at Chris.

“What is it?”

Chris was breathing heavily from running up in a hurry. Though not to the point of panting, he pretended to be out of breath and scanned the room.

“I said, what is it?”

Chris didn’t answer and continued surveying the interior.

“Can’t you hear me?”

As the voice took on an edge, Chris made the foolish expression he often showed Jack and scratched the back of his head.

“May I use the bathroom?”

The wizard was dumbfounded.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Because you told us to wait in the reception room.”

“You’re not a five-year-old child; you should be able to make such judgments on your own.”

“Wizards are scary beings. Some kill people for talking back…”

Chris shuddered as if frightened.

“The higher-ups have scared the kids too much.”

The wizard clicked his tongue.

“Go ahead.”

“Should I come back here?”

“No, go to the reception room.”

As Chris turned around, the wizard shook his head.

“That one is too stupid to become a wizard even if he can sense magic.”

Chris ignored his malicious words. He slowly used the toilet and washed his hands thoroughly. Wiping his hands on his clothes, he walked down the corridor and descended the stairs. When he entered the reception room, Tony asked,

“Where did you go?”

“To the bathroom…”

Faye said,

“People are so resilient. A teammate has died, yet we feel the need to urinate and get hungry…”

Then she started to sob.

Chris said,

“The living must live on.”

Tony glared with angry eyes.

“You all never liked the prince anyway, right?”

Chris murmured,

“Why would I dislike him? He was my only precious customer.”

Tony was taken aback.

“Oh, is that so?”

“If Lion Hall was on fire and I could only save one person, I would carry the prince out.”

Smith said,

“That feels a bit hurtful.”

“You and I, we weren’t on good terms originally.”

“That was in the Baronial Estate of Xavier, but we became close in Lion Hall. Was that just my imagination?”

Smith in the Baron’s estate was rough and curt, but Smith in Lion Hall was gentle and pleasant. He was also a good conversationalist, making it enjoyable to talk with him. Chris had made a friend for the first time in his life.

“No, I like you.”

Alice chuckled,

“Sounds like a love confession.”

Faye said,

“That’s gross.”

The atmosphere lightened a bit. And then silence settled in. They sat with troubled expressions.

A little later, Juan came in carrying food ingredients. Seeing the gathered team members, he exuded a contemptuous attitude with his entire body. Tony, who would normally overlook Juan’s arrogant attitude, flared up today.

“Look at me, you dog!”

Smith approached Chris and whispered,

“It’s suspicious how Tony is getting so angry.”

“I think he’s just shocked by the prince’s death. It seems to have caused emotional instability.”

“It’s also strange how he treated us like suspects.”

“What?”

“It’s like he’s trying to pin it on us.”

If Juan were the type to take insults quietly, he wouldn’t be Juan. He got even angrier.

“A dog? You lowly bastard, you have no respect for your senior.”

He threw down the food ingredients and rushed forward. Tony also stood up with clenched fists. At this critical moment, a wind blew and pushed them apart.

Thud.

The two were blown by the wind, slammed into the wall, and fell down. Having hit hard, they couldn’t get up immediately and groaned.

Chris looked at the group of wizards who had entered the reception room. The wizard who had blown away Juan and Tony was an unfamiliar one wearing a blue robe. Judging by the robe color, he was a water wizard, but seeing that he disciplined them with wind magic, it seems he was proficient in other elemental magics as well.

To his right stood Wizard Randall. The wizard who had come to the Baron’s estate to recruit Chris, and who had cruelly burned Jack to death. Chris hadn’t seen him since entering Lion Hall, so it had been quite a while. Behind Randall, his disciple David stood with his hands clasped respectfully.

To the left of the blue robe wizard stood William. He was making a face as if he had smelled something foul. Behind him, Peter stood at attention.

They conversed without even glancing at the groaning Juan and Tony. Through their conversation, Chris learned that the blue robe wizard’s name was Thomas.

Thomas was present in his capacity as Prince Mark’s escort, Randall was there as the supervisor responsible for David, who oversaw Lion Hall, and William was there as the education director for this batch. In some way, they were all connected to the prince.

Just as people unite against an external threat even when quarreling internally, the team members gathered together. Tony also cautiously slipped in among the team members. Only Juan remained isolated like an island.

Randall scanned the Lion Hall residents. When his gaze fell on Chris, Chris gritted his teeth to avoid shuddering. He was too scared. It felt like Randall might suddenly take out his wand and throw a fireball.

I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t commit any crime.

Though he kept whispering this to himself, he couldn’t stop his body from trembling. The scene of Jack burning to death kept coming to mind.

Randall opened his mouth.

“Did you think you could kill someone and get away with it?”

Silence followed.

“If this were the backward estate you lived in, perhaps that might have been possible.”

He raised his index finger and shook it from side to side.

“But not at the Magic Tower. You can never escape.”

The sound of Tony swallowing could be heard.

“You’ll have to pay for the foolishness of underestimating the Magic Tower with your life. David, bring the prince’s body.”

“Yes.”

David backed away from his master, then turned and went up to the second floor. Shortly after, he entered the reception room with Mark floating in front of him, still seated in his chair.

Behind David followed the wizard whom Smith had brought.

Randall asked,

“Carl, did you find anything?”

Chris muttered to himself,

So that wizard’s name is Carl.

Carl answered,

“Nothing much.”

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“I searched the rooms of the victim and the suspects.”

Chris was startled.

He must have searched my room too.

While Randall was questioning Carl, the other wizards were observing the Lion Hall residents. William’s finger pointed at Chris.

“Are you hiding something?”

Chris hunched his shoulders upon being singled out by him. William was the one who had killed Henry, the second son of Count Jefferson, by suffocation. He was the wizard Chris feared second most after Randall in the Magic Tower.