I Was Left To Rot Away

Lotus sighed in exasperation while seemingly unfazed by his blubbering mess and said, "It can't be helped thanks to that attack... Well, first take a seat inside or you won't even be able to stand up anymore to listen the full story."

Hearing this, Raaji was left speechless. It was true that he probably won't be left standing if he were to absorb the information now. His current state was a mess, after all. Yet, the information of the current circumstances and his standing in this situation was also crucial to him too!

Contemplating between the two choices of either talking back or listening, he finally chose the latter idea and entered the little hut obediently. There was two separate sleeping bags on opposite sides against the walls. However, Lotus only sat on one of them as Raaji turned to sit on the other. The interior of the room was bland and hardly properly furnished, but, if he had known that the guy built this on the spot, he would've retracted those thoughts immediately. Since when was it possible for a person to be able to build a small hut in just less than an hour?!

"What do you want to know first?" She spoke up in a breezy tone after making tea appear out of nowhere.

Shocked, Raaji was left contemplating which to ask about first before he finally decided, "I want to know about those guys from earlier. You mentioned that they were guardians or something?"

"That's right." Lotus answered with a soft smile, "They are guardians of your dorm."

"I've never heard of guardians before. Why doesn't the teacher or headmaster ever tell us about these?" Raaji questioned in confusion, "And just what do they do here?"

"There's two simple answers with complicated solutions here to your questions." She replied with a smirk as she sipped her cup of tea, "First, why doesn't the teacher know about this? The answer is that the fact that there are guardians guarding your dorms are all lost over each generations. Hence, it's not that the staff don't want to tell you, but not even they know about the guardians. As for what they do here, they are sworn to protect every students to pass through these dorms. So, ever generations of Scarabia students are protected by them when they enter this school to the day the graduate from this school. This doesn't just limit to the Scarabia students, but also students of Night Raven College in general."

"Eh?" Raaji looked up in surprise when he heard this, "You mean, even if we don't have a security system on campus..."

"There's always been one. Just not for those outside of the dorms." She answered bluntly with a wide smile, "Of course, this knowledge is a secret that shouldn't have been shared, but it's not like we can do anything about that now."

"Just who are these guardians?" Raaji hesitantly continued as more questions began to form in his head as his mind slowly became clearer.

"They can be almost anything to be exact." Lotus responded with a light huff, "Plant spirits, flower faes, or even beastmen, at least these are the terms this world goes by for their category. I have yet to meet with a human guardian, so I can't ascertain that. Each dorm has a guardian guarding the dorm students."

Raaji frowned, "Yet, vice-dorm leader Jamil got hurt before the competition."

"Allow me to clarify a few things." She spoke up with a stern look recalling the words of the roses and lilies, "There are limits to a guardian's capability in this school. They are bind by the rules that are set for them to follow since the founding of the school. One of the few you have to keep in mind when it comes to them are these. One, a guardian and their colleagues are not allowed to socially or physically interact with the students to maintain this secrecy and encourage students' own social growth. Two, a guardian cannot step outside of the dorms without proper and urgent purposes involving other dorms outside. Three, the students under their protection must not be harmed by them or lose their lives, especially on dorm grounds or by the guardians' influence. Only under special circumstances are any of these rules allowed to be broken. These four vows are just among the others that they sworn to follow and are the ones that answers the question you have regarding their activities and Jamil-senpai's case back in October. There is no need for you to worry so much as to whether or not they will harm you. These vows or oaths are sworn under... sworn by magic is the best way to explain it. It's something similar to a curse. As long as any of these oaths are broken by them, they will die by their own vows. That is also why they dare not to harm us, though it seems the other two were quite close to their own demise earlier today..."

"So, basically..." Raaji grumbled in thought before he continued, "you mean to say that it wasn't that they didn't choose not to help the vice-dorm leader, but that they couldn't since the vice-dormleader was away from the dorm and they can't interfere with our matters due to this learning processes?"

"You pretty much summed it up!" Lotus said with a more relaxed smile that also led Raaji to calm down from the tense atmosphere just now.

"But, we know..."

"Our current circumstances are unnatural, therefore they must make an exception." Lotus shrugged carefreely.

"Unnatural?" Raaji said in confusion.

"That hound back there is clearly one of those working under a guardian from Ignihyde dorm. Just by sensing the mana surrounding it, you can tell that the same mana can also be found in the dorms if you have been there before. That hound attacked us, so we fled across the border where your dorm's guardian dwells. Since we are students of the school, they will naturally have to step in. Just because it is a guardian's duty to protect the students and stay in the dorms, doesn't mean that the followers would do the same. When I was in the Ignihyde dorm, I saw quite a few pawprints in the shadows outside of the dorm building. Since pets are not allowed in school, then the only other idea is that those paw prints belong to the guardian. I suspect that the oath does not apply to those working under the guardian, so this one was kicked out of its pack and it wandered into the Scarabia dorm. What bad luck that it had a run-in with us!"

Despite seeing the mischievous smile on her face, Raaji was not in the same mood as she was in. After all, that thing tried to hunt them down and it was the largest hound he had ever seen!

To Lotus, everything she had said about the rules were just part of somethings she made up at first to prevent the Heartslabyul guys from investigating too much into this stuff, but who knew that the roses and lilies would later confirm everything she had made up as partly true? She wondered if it really was just a coincidence that those rules she made up were true.

"I don't get it..."

"Huh?" She looked to Raaji in confusion who was clearly dissatisfied by the entire matter.

"I don't get it! Then, how come you know about this guardian matter, but not the teachers?! I-Isn't this a little too weird?"

"Ah..." Lotus nodded with an exasperated sigh, "So, this is about me, is it? First off, you don't know about this, but these guardians are don't originate from this world."

"Huh?"

"First off, they aren't from this world. They came from a world where conflicts between race is still at large and they require absorbing mana in place of physical food and water to survive. Those types of people, regardless of race, are considered to be cultivators." Lotus explained with her eyes watching him carefully take in this information as she continues at a slow pace, "Cultivators utilize mana around them to influence their own bodies and their surroundings. They do not require a magical pen as a medium their bodies are the mediums. However, it's because of this that to get stronger, some experience great pains physically or mentally to overcome their hurdles. If they run out of mana from their bodies, they don't overblot. They die on the spot or lose their ability to manipulate mana turning them into normal beings once more and never getting the chance to be cultivators again."

Seeing him take this in, she continued, "This is a world of magicians, however. There are no cultivators in this world. Yet, the guardians here and their dormmates are refugees or explorers from another world. They were gathered to be given a role and help the future generations of magicians without causing unexpected shifts in our society. As for where I come in... I was thrown here by some bad guys from that world when I was a kid. They wanted me dead, so they thought it'd be a great idea to dump me in a world they thought was uninhabited, so I can slowly rot away."

"What?!"