Tesh moved through the corridor like a shadow incarnate, leaping from one hiding spot to the next from the very moment she left her room.
Crossing over from her room to the teacher's dormitory and then all the way to its most remote part where that enigma of a man resided would normally take an average person no longer than ten, maybe fifteen minutes – and that's already accounting for all the possible foot traffic slowing them on the way.
Because of Tesh's insistence to make use of the approach to brush off the rust from her skills, she ended up taking just a bit over an hour to even reach the teacher's dormitory, still having ways to go before actually reaching Theo's remote quarters.
And so she jumped, from shadow to shadow, from one hiding spot to the next while always making sure she would have at least three different escape paths.
She was extremely picky with the spots she used for her movements too, refusing to use anything that provided more than just two, in edge cases three, angles from which one could spot her while she hid.
All of that for just one simple goal – so that by the time she reached Theo's room, her old sneaking mastery wouldn't be a skill she once had, but an ability she was warmed up to freely wield.
And just to make things tougher for herself and thus force her body to reach even greater heights, she refused to use any of the tools during her approach, relying only on her agility, nimbleness, keen observation sense, and instincts.
Even in the teacher's dorms she refused to ignore those rules, fully aware that, when compared to the student's dormitory, this place was teeming with people capable enough to see through her tricks and techniques.
All of that, the slow approach, excess challenge, refusal to take things easy and rely on her tools – all of it was for just one singular reason.
And as she finally reached Theo's floor, mentally battered after several close calls when some of the academy professors somehow could feel something was amiss and nearly spotted her, her focus was as sharp as her moves, her step as silent as her pursed mouth.
'Now, just the very last step.'
While reaching Theo's floor was a challenge, crossing it, on the other hand, couldn't be any easier.
Just like the man in question himself, all the people exiled to live on the topmost floor simply didn't have the skill to get themselves a room in a better location. Contrary to the monsters that nearly caught her down on the ground floor, crossing this corridor felt like a literal walk in the park, with even the angle of the sun coming from the corridor's two big windows elongating the shadows as if to make things even easier for the girl.
'All I need is to approach, sneak inside and then prove I still have what it takes!' Gritting her teeth with determination, Tesh moved forth, her eyes brimming with confidence and self-assurance.
She was the academy's famed phantom thief!
A person behind the greatest shift of wealth within the student dorms ever since her enrollment!
Just how hard could crossing a several tens-of-feet-long worth of shadowy corridor be?
All of this self-assurance, all of this courage, though…
All of it suddenly vanished when Tesh crossed over half of the necessary distance, her instincts suddenly screaming out.
'Who?!'
Almost breaking her cover, Tesh slowly scanned the area with her aura sense, ready to ditch her whole plan if she could find anything to back the instinctive alert that grabbed her by her guts.
When the scan failed, she went ahead and even took a look around, searching for any signs, any clues that someone was watching… but once again, to no avail.
'Am I nervous, or what?' Shrugging the feeling off, Tesh slowly breathed out, making sure the sound of her exhale wouldn't get loud enough to alert anyone if there really was someone trying to track her.
Pushing this worry out of her mind, she continued across the corridor, her moves growing slower, more precise, more deliberate as she approached the fated doors she panickedly escaped through just a single day ago.
When she reached as close as just a few steps away from the doors, though, the remainder of Tesh's confidence suddenly went up in smoke and dissipated in the air as a recent memory flashed before her eyes.
In an instant, her throat clutched as she could somehow feel the same sickly sweet aroma, the same sensation of having some sort of liquid move down her throat all on its own…
'Don't let your fears triumph over you!' Determined to see her mission through, Tesh continued ahead, finally reaching the doors. Yet, as she reached out to place her hand down on it so that she could carefully lower her ear over it to listen for any signs of presence inside…
The memory resurfaced again, this time focused not on that accursed drug but the one administering it instead – the stone-cold expression on Theo's face, the complete lack of hesitation in his eyes, the wrath seeping from his face that threatened to burn the world to cinders…
Standing with her hand gently pressed against the door, Tesh couldn't help but gulp her saliva down, her confidence suddenly replaced with primal fear, the biological fact of her body recognizing the presence of a predator from beyond the doors and forcing her into fight-or-flight mode… Just that, against the man on the other side of the doors, fight appeared, by all means, entirely pointless, but a fool's gambit that would result in nothing more than a more painful, more certain demise.
'Should I just… give up?'
A strange thought rang in the girl's head, one rather foreign to her.
Never before did she hesitate right at the doorstep of her designated raid. Never before did she face such an existential dread when just a single door lock away from her target.
But now?
Now, with her hand at the door leading to Theo's room, Tesh found herself stuck between the rock of her desire to just go in and free herself from yesterday's fear, from the humiliation of being caught and then schooled like some sort of a peasant student… and a hard place of facing someone who openly claimed to rake her life if she ever dared to impose over his privacy.
Before she could make her choice, Tesh merely attempted to shift her position, momentarily resting but a sliver of her weight against the hand she had pressed against the doors to Theo's room…
Only to, to her own terror, see the doors silently open up, never barred by a lock to begin with.