Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 456: How To Spot Secret Agents (Step 1: Ask Nicely) [II]

Ray and Alexia were asked to gather a cadre of Cadets from the list Juliana gave them on their way out.

And so, around twenty teenagers were currently standing at attention in the clearing by the base of the Ebony Castle.

Juliana was whispering while I followed behind, her murmurs only audible to me as we walked down the line of candidates.

“All these people are in our batch’s top ranks. They possess useful abilities, solid combat experience, and have taken on enough missions to show they can follow orders,” she explained.

I kept nodding along. It was impressive how quickly she dug up their backgrounds. But this wasn’t exactly the first time I had seen her show off her freakishly good memory.

She claimed it wasn’t photographic.

Which, honestly, sounded like something someone with a photographic memory would say.

According to her, she had this place in her mind — a memory palace, she called it — where she’d carefully organize every face, name, and fact she wanted to remember.

Think of it like a massive imaginary library, set in a place you knew exceptionally well. It could be anything. A carnival you went to with your father once, a park you liked playing in when you were little. Anything.

Then you’d simply drop whatever piece of information you wanted to save into a specific corner of that familiar space.

When you needed to remember it later, you’d just take a stroll through your own head, find the place where you kept it, and pick it up.

So instead of staring at a page and taking a mental snapshot like someone with a photographic memory would do, Juliana had remembered everything about every single Cadet in our batch long ago by putting them in her imaginary palace.

She had already tied them all to a specific spot.

Let’s say, if she needed to remember a girl named Vera who had an explosive-arrow ability, she wouldn’t try to recall what her face looked like.

She would take a mental walk along the fixed path of her library, find the specific shelf she had set on fire, and pull out the facts stored there.

That was because the more absurd or violent the image, the easier it was to find.

As such, for Juliana, every person in our batch was just a piece of weird furniture burning, drowning, or floating in the hallways of her mind.

The routes were important. Each one was fixed in her imagination.

Also, there was a logic in the order of placement.

Items were usually placed in chronological or categorical order along a route. If Vera was the 14th person she had met in the batch, Vera would be at the 14th station (the burning shelf) along Juliana’s walk.

Or, for a more mundane example, just assume she wanted to remember buying carrots on her grocery trip. So she would just place a giant, talking carrot somewhere in her memory palace.

There were far more intricate rules to it that I’m forgetting, I’m sure. I know now that it’s called the method of loci. But back then, it never ceased to amaze me.

All that, however, still did not change the fact that what she was going to do was stupid.

We came to stand in the middle of the crowd. Every eye was on us, some on edge and others just confused.

Juliana’s cold gaze swept over the gathered faces as she slowly, and I mean very slowly, started raising both her arms above her head. “Everyone, I want you all to lift your hands like this.”

Puzzled and hesitant, there was a collective rustle of fabric as everyone did what they were told, mirroring my Shadow by raising both their hands into the air.

“You too, Young Master,” she said, unblinking and serious.

I ground my teeth, looked at all the Cadets staring at us with varying degrees of bewildered expressions, and slowly joined them in looking like an idiot.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

This was so stupid. No one would fall for this.

“Great,” the white-haired girl right beside me told us. “Now, I want anyone who’s working as Lady Thalia’s spy to drop their right hand.”

I groaned internally— but immediately flinched as, near the very back of the group, a lanky boy drew my attention. His right hand didn’t drop, but it definitely, very visibly flinched.

The boy tried acting like nothing had happened, and I would admit he had a good poker face. But nearly every single soul in this clearing had caught the reaction.

The crowd’s focus shifted onto him. The silence was thick enough to choke on.

For some reason, the boy still tried pretending everything was normal even when he was sweating bullets under the intense scrutiny of twenty elite Cadets.

“What!?” He finally shouted. “I didn’t drop my hand! I’m loyal to Lord Samael! I’m one of his maggots!”

I wanted to pinch the bridge of my nose. Great, even the spies are adopting the masochistic branding.

Obviously, no one believed the poor fool.

The silence stretched, until he cracked under pressure. “Ah, fuck!” He cried out and tried to summon a Card.

Someone moved in to swiftly apprehend him, restraining his arms behind his back and forcing him to the ground before the Card could fully materialize.

It was a girl, tall and lithe with dark hair that contrasted with the gleaming silver of her eyes.

I recognized her. It was the girl whose match I watched, the one whose boyfriend cheated on her… uhh, what was her name?

As I was trying to remember that, Juliana lowered her hands and casually walked over to the captured spy.

“Darian Fletcher, right?” she said, kneeling right in front of his face. “Mother in the military, father not involved in life, no girlfriend or exes. I remember your innate ability was Sound Isolation. I don’t know what it evolved into after your ascension but it must be very useful for sneaking around, right?”

The boy gritted his teeth, face all but planted in the mud. It was clear he would not answer anything.

Juliana wasn’t bothered by that. She reached out and touched the side of his neck with two fingers, finding his pulse.

Then, when she spoke again, her tone dropped into a deceptively sweet, amicable melody. “I don’t want to hurt you, Darian. I know you’re a good guy. Remember this one time you smuggled some bread out of the cafeteria to feed a stray cat behind Training Hall 12? I don’t even know how a cat got into Ascent, but you looked so soft then. I thought it was sweet.”

The boy jerked violently under the grip of the dark-headed girl holding him down. “Wha—” he stammered. “How do you—”

“Shh, shh!” Juliana hushed him, her voice carrying this eerie, maternal warmth even as her fingers remained pressed to his carotid artery. “Like I said, I don’t want to hurt you. How about this, Darian? You tell me the name of one of your friends. Do that, and I’ll let you go.”

“I-I don’t have friends here,” Darian spat.

“Oh, Darian,” Juliana sighed, pitying. “You shouldn’t lie to me. I’m being so nice here.”

The lanky boy opened his mouth, seemingly wanting to say something. But all of a sudden, Juliana got her face uncomfortably close to his. He froze, eyes wide.

“How about you just look in their direction?” she suggested.

“Wha–” his pupils instinctively darted to the left for a literal fraction of a second.

And I couldn’t help but facepalm. I mean, come on, dude! How could you fall for it twice in a row!?

Beaming, Juliana looked toward the left, her eyes discarding the majority there and zeroing in on four specific individuals.

She studied them all for what must’ve been an entire minute, then pointed at a short boy with cropped blond hair standing in the center. “There he is. Another one.”

Affronted, the boy scowled and was undoubtedly about to argue.

Somehow, though, I spoke in his defense first. “What? How do you know that?”

“When Darian here was caught, everyone was looking at him. That guy—” she stood up and faced me before nodding toward the accused, “—tried looking for the exits. He thought no one would notice. We did. Also, these two share the same class schedule and friend circle. Chances are high that they are in this together. Call Alexia if you want. She can tell when someone is not being truthful, right?”

Well, yeah, but right now I needed to pick her platoon.

Besides, the way the blond boy stiffened told me everything anyway.

“Oh, well,” Darian sighed from the ground. “It’s no use, Toby. They caught us. They caught us, Toby.”

For a second, I thought Toby would still try to deflect, give some stupid excuse, or perhaps even try to fight us here.

But the boy seemed smart enough to know his options.

“Damn it, Darian!” he barked, throwing his hands up in a mix of both surrender and absolute exasperation. “You had one job! Keep your mouth shut and don’t look at me!”

“I didn’t say anything!” Darian winced, cheek still pressed firmly into the damp dirt. “They are just so good! And she knows about the cat! How does she know about the cat?!”

“Fuck your cat!”

“Hey! Hey, you won’t talk about Captain Catshew like that!”

Oh, boy. This was sad to watch. “Knock them out, someone.”