Alec wasn't sure why his spell hadn't worked on Milo, nor why it had aggravated the emotionless monster. But it didn't matter. It was too late to do anything about it.

His body refused to move for some reason. He had already exhausted his skill energy earlier. His mind wasn't stable enough to cast a spell that would work.

But right before Milo could reach Alec with his bloody hands, the young monster fell over face-first, kissing the ground right in front of Alec's feet.

"Wha…?"

Alec looked up from Milo's corpse at the woman standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, leaning against the side of the door.

"Well, this went to shit a lot sooner than expected, but I can't say I'm surprised. I had a feeling you two wouldn't mesh very well," The woman said without a hint of worry or concern over what had just happened.

Alec felt like he had hit his head. He could not understand what was going on.

"Moira?" He asked with a trembling voice. The woman before him definitely looked exactly the same as the botanical teacher at the Academy, who had her own greenhouse with numerous plants. She looked like one of the three teachers who had agreed to help him with his monster-eating problem.

But the air around her was completely different.

The Moira he knew had a gentle, slightly airheaded, and childish persona.

The person in front of him right now looked like she would stab people if they stared at her for too long or met her eyes when she was walking down the street. She felt dangerous.

"That's me." She smiled, confirming Alec's guess.

"W-what's going on?" He asked, slowly trying to sink into the wall behind him without much success.

"You're a somewhat smart lad. I'm sure you have an idea."

"You…Were you working with Shim to experiment on kids?!" Alec asked in horror.

Moira tilted her head to the side.

"I would never work with that disgusting bastard in my entire life. But let's just say I had…an interest in his success. So, I let him be."

"'Let him be'?" Alec felt the wrath surge up within him at the implications of her statement. Moira knew what Shim had been doing. She knew the atrocities he committed. But because she was curious about the result, she did not stop him.

"Well, yeah. I sure as hell wasn't going to support him."

"You could have stopped him!" Alec shouted.

Moira tilted her head like she didn't understand.

"Why would I do that?" She asked with a voice as honest as a child's.

"What…?" Alec could feel his sense of reason crumbling. His understanding of Moira had shattered like glass and was falling away piece by piece.

"Why should I have stopped him? Can you imagine how troublesome it would've been?" She scoffed like thinking about it alone was enough to give her a headache.

"You let him kidnap and transform kids into monsters because it would be troublesome stopping him?!" Alec's voice was hoarse from the disbelief he felt. Moira spoke with such certainty and clarity that he was starting to doubt the morals and worldview he had lived with his entire life.

"Hey, it wasn't just kids." Moira shot him a pair of fingerguns.

"..."

Alec couldn't find the strength to answer. Talking any further with this wrong version of Moira would just lead to an aneurysm from his brain trying to make sense of the nonsensical.

Moira walked over to Milo and kicked his foot.

"Anyway, why did he turn so fast? Did Shim do anything special to him?"

Alec didn't want to answer. But at the same time, he wanted to know. Only by knowing could he prevent it from happening again.

"...What do you mean?"

"It usually takes anywhere from three to eleven days to transform into a monster. This guy did it in less than a day. Something has to be different with him. Find out what if you'd be so kind." Moira smiled pleasantly. It was the same smile she had when sitting in Basra's lap and joking with Alec about how Basra often let her food get cold because she was talking so much during meal times.

Alec didn't want to. He didn't want to understand what Moira was saying. He did anyway. He didn't want to do it.

He promptly let his exhaustion take the reins and fell asleep. He was pretty sure he heard Moira sigh with annoyance right before he sank into slumber.

He woke up in the same lab as before, the one where Milo turned into a monster. As he looked around, he realized that he wasn't alone.

Sitting with his back to the wall in the cell again was Milo.

'A dream?'

However, when Alec looked closer, he realized that the black horns on Milo's forehead were still there. Moira apparently hadn't killed him.

There was also a pile of books on the workbench. Alec started flipping through them before stopping as soon as he realized they were logbooks. They recorded everything Shim had done over the years.

Alec felt like puking.

He knew Shim was awful. But he thought he already had a grasp of the extent. Yet Shim managed to once again surprise him by being even worse.

Alec decided to go through with a time-proven trick to calm his mind and re-read a series of books on the studies of mating habits of insects smaller than fingernails. Naturally, he stopped time to give himself more peace.

However, he did not find the tranquility he sought. His ever-restless mind decided to continue working. It unlocked two things for him.

The writing in the books about small insects and the writing in the logbooks were similar. It wasn't just the handwriting, but the format as well.

Alec felt sick.

But he couldn't ignore the other revelation.

That type of spell that let the researcher inspect insects smaller than a fingernail in such great detail would be useful for his purposes. If he could combine it with his zoomed Scan, he might be able to get a close enough look to figure out the difference between regular beings and monsters.

It just had to be Shim's spell.

It was a good thing time was frozen. Alec would have thrown up otherwise.

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