To Be a Power in the Shadows! (LN) - Volume 5 - Chapter 5.3

Part 3

“This is about where I heard it from, right…?”

I arrive in a cramped area filled with doors. This is where the private study rooms are.

People are mostly done with class, so the majority of the rooms are empty. However, one of the doors is locked shut, and I can hear noises coming from within.

“Hrah!”

I rip out the lock, doorknob and all, then charge in for a dynamic entrance.

“Wh-what is this thing?!”

Inside, I find a student. He’s clutching at his neck and wailing.

I think I’ve seen him before.

“Oh, hey, if it isn’t my classmate, uh…Suzuki, right?”

Oh yeah, now I remember. This guy is as forgettable as I am. I actually really respect how much of a complete nobody he is, and I’ve used his behavior as a reference on more than one occasion.

According to my internal background character list, he’s a member of a Hope branch family and a distant relative of Christina’s.

“H-hey, Kagenou, you gotta help me out here! This collar won’t come off!!”

“Wait, what?”

Sure enough, there’s a gaudy-looking collar fixed around Suzuki’s neck. C’mon, man, background characters aren’t supposed to wear stuff like that.

“Ick. That’s not a good look on you.”

“It showed up all on its own! I can’t get it off, and it keeps making this weird noise!”

I can hear a quiet beep, beep, beep coming from it.

There’s a timer on the collar, and right after I look at it, it hits zero.

A protracted buzzer noise goes off.

“Oh.”

“Oh…”

With that, Suzuki’s head goes flying.

Blood goes spraying across the room, and I quickly protect myself with slime so I don’t get splattered.

Suzuki’s head rolls across the floor. I look down and find that it’s scowling back at me.

“…Y’know, I did kinda feel like it was about to explode.”

Guess I shoulda said something earlier.

RIP.

“Now, let’s see what this little doohickey’s deal is.”

I scoop up Suzuki’s collar. It’s still just as ugly, but now it’s blackened and charred, too. The timer is frozen at zero.

“Hmm…”

I pour some magic into it to check it out.

Between that and my knowledge from my past life, I’m able to come up with an incredibly detailed working hypothesis. To sum it up…

“It’s one of those bomb collar things that explodes when the timer hits zero!”

Then I continue expanding on my theory.

“Aha, I get it. Most timer doohickeys go down as time elapses, but it looks like these ones are a little different. The hand goes up and down in response to magic, and it feels like when you touch it, it starts sucking out your magic. So, in summation…the collar steadily drains its wearer’s magic, and once their magic hits zero, it explodes!”

Suzuki had been pretty torn up about having one of the smallest magic pools in class. He must’ve been training here in the study room, and he had the misfortune of getting wrapped up in this whole situation right when he’d already used most of his magic up.

I grin. “…One truth prevails.”

The questions are, who stuck the collar on him and when?

“Now, if someone had one of these things stuck on ’em, you’d think they would realize it. You’d have to be pretty dang stupid not to notice that you’ve got a—”

A nasty premonition strikes me, and I reach up and touch my neck.

There’s a collar on it.

When the heck did that get there?

“…Clearly, they must’ve used some sort of incredibly sophisticated method that no normal person could ever hope to notice.”

The only possibility that springs to mind is that the collars showed up at the same time the white fog did.

I make myself a slime mirror and take a closer look at my collar. Sure enough, it’s the same kind as the one Suzuki had. However, my remaining magic counter is hitting the 9,999 cap and bugging out. I can feel it slowly draining my magic, but it’s basically a drop in the bucket and doesn’t even come close to overtaking my natural regen rate.

“Interesting…”

I’m pretty sure I could get it off if I put my mind to it, but let’s not be ridiculous here. Bomb collar events don’t just happen every day, and I wouldn’t miss this one for the world.

For starters, I decide to temporarily sever my internal magic circuits in order to adjust my latent mana stores.

“Suzuki didn’t have much in the way of mana, so…yeah, this should do it.”

I fiddle with my reserves until my timer gets to about six hundred. Looks like this thing sucks out about one point of mana every ten seconds, which means I’ve got an hour and forty minutes left to live.

If you wanna know why I’m intentionally matching my reserves to Suzuki’s, the answer is obvious…

“…Sometimes, an eminence in shadow’s gotta take a dead student, steal his identity, and head in undercover. Heh-heh-heh. This is gonna kick ass.”

Suzuki was a total nobody, so it’ll throw people for a loop when he starts dropping profound-sounding lines about the situation we’re in. That’ll make it clear that there’s more to him than meets the eye, and when we finally corner the culprit, he’ll reveal his true form!

I’m getting pumped already.

“I’ve got the slime makeup techniques I cribbed off Nu and the slime plastic surgery I cribbed off Epsilon, so…that should about do the trick.”

I take another look at my mirror, and the person staring back is unmistakably Suzuki. After I steal his student ID and other belongings, just to be on the safe side, my preparations are complete.

“All right, let’s do this!”

When I leave the study room, I do so with a newfound skip in my step.