The air in the Academy had changed. It was subtle, a shift in pressure only someone attuned to the very fabric of reality would notice. Professor Alaric's gaze was a constant, invisible weight on my back as I mopped. He no longer summoned me to his office. Instead, he observed from a distance, a predator studying prey that had inexplicably defied the laws of nature.
His new strategy was more insidious. He wasn't trying to catch me using magic; he was trying to force me to use it. He began orchestrating scenarios, little pressure cookers of chaos designed to provoke a reaction from the "ghost."
The first test came in the form of a "spontaneous" practical exam in the East Wing courtyard. He paired students for duels. His matchmaking was brutally strategic. He pitted the mousy-haired boy, whose name I'd learned was Finn, against Derek.
"Begin," Alaric said, his voice cool, his eyes scanning the periphery, looking for me.
I was there, of course, half-heartedly polishing a brass plaque commemorating some long-dead archmage.
Derek didn't hold back. Still smarting from his previous humiliations, he unleashed a whirlwind of cutting air blades. Finn raised a shaky, barely-formed earthen shield. It shattered instantly. A gash opened on Finn's arm, and he cried out, falling to his knees.
"Pathetic," Derek spat, gathering energy for a final, punishing blow.
Alaric watched, not the duel, but the surroundings. He was waiting for the ghost to intervene. He was using Finn as bait.
A hot spike of anger, sharp and unfamiliar, pierced my calm. This was no longer a game. Alaric was willing to let a student be seriously injured just to satisfy his curiosity. I couldn't let that happen. But I couldn't do anything overt. The moment I stopped time, Alaric's hidden instruments—I could sense them now, tiny crystalline nodes placed around the courtyard—would scream.
I needed a solution that was both immediate and untraceable. A solution that looked like sheer, dumb luck.
As Derek launched his final blast of wind, I didn't stop time. I reversed it. But not for the whole world. Only for one, very specific thing: the seeds in the pocket of Elara, who was watching from the sidelines, her hand over her mouth.
I targeted a single, hardy species of quick-grow ivy seed in her pouch. I rewound its temporal state by exactly three days, to the moment it had been bursting with vibrant, aggressive life, and then I fast-forwarded its growth cycle at an astronomical rate.
In the span of a single heartbeat, a thick, rope-like ivy vine erupted from Elara's pocket, not growing, but appearing in a fully mature state. It snaked through the air with impossible speed, tangling around Derek's ankle. He yelped, his aim thrown off, and the wind blast shot harmlessly into the sky, scattering clouds. The vine, its life cycle accelerated to its end in an instant, then crumbled into dust.
Derek stared at the dust on his boot, then at Elara, his face a mask of confusion. "You! You tripped me!"
Elara looked down at her pocket, from which a single, withered stem protruded. "I... I didn't..." Her eyes, wide with shock, flickered towards me for the briefest second.
Alaric was at her side in an instant. "A spontaneous botanical manifestation? Triggered by emotional distress for your friend?" He sounded skeptical, but the data from his nodes would show a massive, localized burst of life magic emanating from Elara. It was perfectly consistent with a rare, uncontrolled surge of her Life affinity.
He had his anomaly. But it was pointed squarely at the wrong person.
"I... I suppose," Elara stammered, playing along. She was smart. She understood the gift horse she was being handed.
Alaric's gaze swept over the crowd and finally landed on me. I met his eyes with a look of blank janitorial concern, then went back to polishing the plaque, buffing a spot that was already gleaming.
His trap had been sprung. But it had caught a different mouse.
The second test was more personal. A few days later, as I was taking a rare moment of peace in the library archives—a place no one but me and the dust bunnies frequented—the entire section began to shake. Books flew from the shelves. A support beam groaned and cracked, threatening to bring the ceiling down. It was a targeted, artificial earthquake, another of Alaric's "tests."
He was somewhere, watching, waiting for the ghost to save itself.
I sighed. This was getting tiresome. I couldn't just let the ceiling crush me, that would be a pathetic end. But I couldn't stop the earthquake without leaving a temporal scar.
So, I didn't.
As the beam splintered and a cascade of stone and wood began its descent towards my head, I simply... walked. I didn't run. I strolled. I moved between the frozen moments of the falling debris, a leisurely path through a chaotic rain. To any outside observer, it would have been a series of impossible, near-miss coincidences. A large stone block missed me by an inch, a falling beam twisted in the air just as I passed under it. I emerged from the cloud of dust and rubble completely unscathed, not a speck on my janitor's uniform.
I stepped out of the archive just as the rumbling stopped. Professor Alaric was there, his face pale, his instruments doubtless going wild from the spatial and kinetic anomalies of the collapsing room, but showing zero temporal manipulation.
He stared at me, standing there perfectly clean and unharmed.
"How...?" he breathed.
I blinked, looking back at the destroyed archive with what I hoped was a convincing expression of dawning horror. "I... I don't know, sir. I just... walked out. It was like... like everything was falling in slow motion. I must have gotten really, really lucky."
"Luck," he repeated, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. His scientific mind was at war with the evidence. The anomalies were real, but the source was a ghost, a phantom in the data that always slipped away, often pointing towards someone else, or explained away by sheer, impossible chance.
The final straw came a week later. He cornered Elara in an empty classroom. I knew because I was cleaning the hall outside. I could hear their voices, low and tense.
"The vine, Miss Elara," he pressed. "It was a remarkable feat. But your core mana hasn't shown that level of volatility before or since. Can you explain it?"
"I can't, Professor," Elara said, her voice steady. "I was just so scared for Finn. It just... happened."
"And your friend, Leo," Alaric continued, his voice dropping. "The null. He seems to be at the center of these strange events. Have you noticed anything... unusual about him?"
There was a pause. My hand tightened around the handle of my mop. This was it. Would she crack? Would her kindness extend to protecting a secret she only half-understood?
"Leo is... Leo," she said, and I could hear the shrug in her voice. "He's kind, and a bit clumsy, and he has no magic. He's the most un-unusual person I know. If anything, he's usually the one who needs protecting."
Her defense was perfect. Sincere, simple, and utterly dismissive.
I heard Alaric sigh in frustration. "Very well. You may go."
As Elara left the room, she caught my eye. She didn't smile. She gave a barely perceptible nod. It was an alliance, silent and unacknowledged. She was now an active participant in the conspiracy to hide the truth.
I entered the classroom to clean. Alaric was still there, staring out the window, his shoulders slumped in defeat.
"You know," I said softly, making him jump. He hadn't heard me come in. "Maybe you're trying too hard, Professor."
He turned, his eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?"
I began sweeping around his feet, the picture of a simpleton offering simple wisdom. "All these ghosts and anomalies. Maybe it's not a person. Maybe the East Wing is just... built on an old ley line or something. A place where weird stuff just happens. Sometimes, a coincidence is just a coincidence."
I delivered the line with such genuine, artless simplicity that I could see the doubt seeping into his eyes. He was a man of science, and I was offering him not a supernatural explanation, but a geological one. It was the one theory he probably hadn't considered seriously, because it was too mundane for his grand temporal ambitions.
He looked at me, the frustrating, inexplicable null, offering a frustratingly simple solution.
"Perhaps," he murmured, turning back to the window. "Perhaps you are right."
I continued sweeping, a small, private smile on my face. I hadn't beaten him with power. I had beaten him with psychology. I had weaponized his own intellect against him, leading him on a wild goose chase until he was so tangled in data and dead ends that the simplest answer became the most appealing.
The immediate threat was neutralized. Professor Alaric would likely continue his research, but his targeted hunt for me was over.
For now, the secret was safe. But as I left the classroom, I felt a new kind of tension in the air. A storm was brewing on the horizon, one not of academic curiosity, but of genuine malice. And I had a feeling that when it arrived, playing the part of a helpless janitor wouldn't be enough.