Indeed, becoming Greg Sass's personal mentor had not been Alice's choice.
She was merely a young scholar with no connections who had only recently secured a teaching position.
Adele Kent had used her authority as the year's chief professor to force Greg Sass, then a first-year student but already notorious, onto Alice, who had no room to refuse, under the pretext of "helping a new professor gain mentoring experience and work with different types of students."
Faced with Adele's question in front of everyone, Alice grew even paler.
Her lips moved several times before she answered in a voice barely louder than a mosquito's hum, "Y-yes, Professor Adele... Greg... he still hasn't returned to class..."
Aside from fear, a careful listener might have detected something else in her voice: an exceedingly faint trace of... relief, one even she had not fully recognized.
Yes, relief.
Greg Sass's disappearance had, in a sense, been a release for her.
She had absolutely no idea how to guide a student so ill-tempered and arrogant, whose magical talent was mediocre but who bullied others with the backing of his family.
Their time together had been less about mentoring than about her unilaterally enduring his unreasonable behavior and veiled bullying.
Worse still, because of Greg's poor academic performance and repeated violations of school rules, the Academic Committee had rejected funding applications for several of her research projects, time and again citing that "a mentor's foremost duty is to ensure that the student under their supervision meets academic standards and behaves appropriately."
So when Greg vanished for days on end, she had made a token effort to search for him and report his absence, but deep down, she had not been entirely free of the thought, Perhaps this is for the best.
Adele seemed not to notice