I nodded. “Agreed.”
The only question was who I should share that information with.
I had the most evidence that Roland was not involved, but elements of it still bothered me. His inability to share information still hadn’t been fully explained, and it certainly could have been because he was a Spider.
Moreover, just seeing his paperwork didn’t mean he couldn’t have been given a different assignment verbally.
And he was carrying a bunch of magical items, which I still hadn’t gotten an explanation for. If he was a Diviner, that meant he had definitely been equipped by someone in advance. I didn’t know if he had explosive items or not. I would have needed to examine everything in his bags for that.
I wasn’t sure any degree of evidence was going to make me completely secure in Roland’s loyalties.
Who, then?
Could I trust that there were few enough traitors that just excluding Kathy from the discussion and including two or more others would mean it was likely at least one person I was talking to could be trusted?
Was there any way I could determine someone’s affiliation with any degree of certainty?
Vanniv descended from the sky while I was considering — and that gave me an idea.
We marched on. Vanniv pointed out a few locations where we’d have to watch out for monsters, and in each case we sent a group ahead to wipe them out.
There weren’t any major threats in the area — we had hundreds of students going down these pathways, and most of the monsters must have been cleared out by the earlier groups or the Soaring Wings.
Later in the evening, I pulled Vyers, Sera, and Jin into a discussion.
“I think I have a method of solving our problem. There’s one major issue, though. Kathy is most likely one of the traitors.”
“Kathy?” Vyers looked incredulous. “You think they’d make a second-year… Wait, yeah, our professors really are that cruel. Okay. Maybe.”
“I can handle Kathy.” Jin patted one of the pistols on his waist.
“That’s…not exactly the kind of problem I was talking about, Jin. But good to know.” I shook my head. “It’s information that’s the issue. I need to ask a policy question on whether something is allowed, and I’m not sure I can trust the answers from the second-years. If Kathy is compromised, Jordan might be as well.”
“That seems a little extreme. We’d have to doubt every element of our assignments at that point,” Sera pointed out. “Which, I suppose, could be the purpose of this assignment. But I doubt it. They want us to be working toward being soldiers, and that’s going to require a degree of trust for the chain of command and authority figures.”
“I concur,” Vyers replied. “If Kathy is compromised, I find it less likely that Jordan would be. And in either case, I doubt that a rules issue would be something they could lie about. That seems like it’s beyond the scope of someone playing a traitor in the test.”
“Fair. It’s a wording question.”
“Why do you think Kathy is a traitor?” Sera asked.
“One of the players on the other team told me,” I explained.
“…Why would they give you an honest answer about that?” Vyers asked. “They’re probably just trying to sew discord.”
I shook my head. “I doubt it. It was after I eliminated them.”
“They probably just wanted to get back at you, then, by planting false information. Maybe save their score.” Vyers explained.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “But they told me because I was being nice.”
“…Oh. Hm.”
“You’re sure about this, Corin?” Sera sounded concerned.
“No. I’m not sure about any of this. I’m terrible at people. But, if nothing else, now we have a means for getting answers.”
Sera smirked at that. “Okay. Let’s give it a try. I’ll go get Jordan.”
She walked off, bringing Jordan over to the rest of us a few minutes later.
“What’s this about?” Jordan asked.
“I have a question. Our orders from before the test were that we could not show our paperwork to other students. Correct?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Sure.”
“Does that mean we could show them to someone else who isn’t a student? Say, a professor?”
Jordan nodded. “Good question. Yeah, if you find one of the professors at the encampment, you could show them your orders.”
“And other non-students?” I asked.
“I guess, but I don’t see any reason that other people would be out here.”
I turned toward Sera.
She’d already picked up on the idea, of course. “Vanniv, I summon you.”
Vanniv appeared by her side. “Twice? You must have missed me terribly.”
Jordan turned to Vanniv, then back to us. “I’m not…hmm… Yeah, you know what? Breaking the spirit of the rules a little bit, but I think you’d get away with it.”
“That’s all I needed to know.” I reached into my pouch and retrieved my paperwork. “Vanniv, do me a favor and read this out loud.”
A few minutes later, Vanniv had read the paperwork of Sera, Vyers, myself, and even Jordan out loud.
Everyone had little secondary assignments, but aside from mine, none mentioned the Spiders in the group. The others were pretty mundane. Sera was tasked with making a contract with a monster living in the woods, for example.
And none of them had any orders to sabotage the group.
“Shall we continue this with everyone else?” Sera asked.
“Let’s.” Vyers replied.
“Don’t forget that this doesn’t prove anything,” I pointed out. “We may very well discover that no one has written instructions to betray the group. They could have been given their orders verbally.”
“It’s still a good start. There has to be a reason they wouldn’t let us share our orders directly. We’re fortunate we had help.” Sera patted Vanniv on the arm.
“I live to serve.” Vanniv bowed. “Myself, that is.”
Sera rolled her eyes. “Truly, you’re a paragon of virtue.”
“When one considers self-preservation a virtue, I would indeed be an exemplar.”
We retrieved the others. “Be ready for anything.”
“What’s this?” Kyra asked.
“We’ve determined a fair method for learning everyone’s assignments without breaking the rules.” Sera waved to Vanniv. “He’s not a student, so we can share them with him. He reads them aloud.”
“That feels a little like cheating,” Rupert pointed out.
“No, it’s fair.” Kathy explained. “It was expected that someone would eventually think to ask for outside help. Either that, or you’d just have someone like Kyra rifle through everyone’s bags at night.”
That was the backup plan, but I was going to ask Jin, not Kyra.
“Vanniv, go ahead and read the ones we already handed you first.”
Vanniv read ours out loud again.
“Now, let’s form a line and have everyone—”
“Sera could have asked the karvensi to say anything,” Kyra protested. “And a Summoner with a karvensi would be quite capable of helping an Enchanter make a fire enchantment.”
“I am quite proficient at fire magic,” Vanniv offered.
“Not helping right now,” Sera nudged him. “Look, the rest of these people saw me summon Vanniv. I couldn’t have given him orders like that.”
“Standing orders. You could have told him last time you summoned him, when he was ‘scouting’,” Kyra pointed out.
That was…true. And Sera did have the planning abilities to have told him something like that in advance.