Chapter 25 – Midterms (6)

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Translated by Jinmu

Read only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net

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Abel and her teammates arrived by the pool looking startled.

The eyes staring ahead shook violently. No one was able to speak first.

The place that had once been a forest had turned into a barren field where trees had been swept away in disorder, and Leon and his teammates were sprawled across the ground looking utterly drained.

What in the world had happened here? No, what kind of thing would even have had to happen for things to end up like this?

That tiny female student whose face Abel had only barely come to know when she had stopped by Wolf Class before had run to them asking for rescue, yet the situation already seemed over, and there was no sign of any demonic beast.

“If you came to help, then hurry up and help already!”

As she stood there blankly staring at the devastation, Speed Weapon shouted irritably. At once Abel came back to herself and headed toward the pool.

Her teammates followed after her without a word. Approaching Speed Weapon, who was lying on his back in the mud, Abel finally spoke.

“What in the world happened here?!”

Instead of answering, Speed Weapon gestured with his eyes toward the pool. At that, the teammates standing beside her turned their gazes, and all of them flinched in shock at once. One of them spoke in a trembling voice.

“Wh-what is that?”

A scaled corpse with its head cut off. Only the part below the shoulders floated on the surface of the pool, but even that was enough to tell what it was. The cold corpse of a demonoid.

In front of the corpse, Rachel was supporting Kang Geom-ma with an arm over her shoulder as he barely caught his breath, coughing up blood. In that instant Abel’s head rang.

At first glance, Kang Geom-ma showed no obvious external wounds, but he could not steady his breathing, and each time he exhaled he spat up phlegm mixed with blood. His eyes were just about to go cloudy as though he were hovering on the verge of death.

Seeing that something was very wrong, Abel shouted at one of the girls in her team. She was just as unable to understand the situation as anyone else, but a human life came first.

“Use a healing-type blessing right now!”

At the agitated tone so unlike her usual self, the teammate with light green hair jolted in shock, then thrust out her staff and manifested a blessing.

Something fluorescent and cotton-candy-like began wrapping around Kang Geom-ma like a blanket. As it did, light slowly returned to the black eyes that had been losing focus.

Rachel, tears and snot running down her face, hugged Kang Geom-ma and rubbed his face into her ample chest. Soon after, Leon and Speed Weapon also slowly pushed themselves upright.

Abel furrowed her brow as she looked back and forth between Kang Geom-ma and Rachel. It was childish to be thinking about something like this now, but some unfamiliar emotion swelling inside made her insides itch.

‘Did she really need to cling to him that closely?’

Letting out a deep sigh, Abel pressed a finger to her temple. She had no idea how she was supposed to understand or accept all this.

Casting off the stray thought in an instant, Abel turned her gaze toward Leon. Looking now, even if he was not in as bad a state as Kang Geom-ma, Leon did not look very good either.

Still, perhaps because they had somehow treated him quickly, the torn skin visible beneath his ripped sleeve was closing up and new flesh was growing in. Abel spoke to Leon in a cool tone.

“What is that?”

“Can’t you tell by looking? It’s a demonoid. A demonoid.”

Speed Weapon intercepted the question in an instant and shrugged. His face had grown gaunt in what felt like no time at all, but he looked like he had quite a lot he wanted to say.

“Who asked because they couldn’t tell it was a demonoid’s corpse?”

“Well, even if I told you, you probably wouldn’t believe it.”

As if his mouth had been itching to talk, his lips moved as fast as a sparrow’s beak.

Behind him, Leon scratched his cheek with an awkward expression while wearing a flawless smile.

His teammate Kang Geom-ma was hovering at death’s door, yet as the team leader Leon still seemed to be doing his utmost only to maintain dignity and refinement. Just looking at him made Abel’s insides burn.

Certainly, judging by the wound carved into Leon’s side, he too seemed to have nearly walked the road to the underworld several times in a very short span. Even so, that did not make the anger that had flared up in her die down easily.

‘What a bastard.’

Because she did not want to waste time on something useless, Abel frowned and immediately turned the question toward Speed Weapon instead.

“I’ve already contacted the academy. If we’re lucky, the instructors should be here within an hour.”

“…The instructors, those fucking bastards… They said they’d done a preliminary inspection of this damned island, so why the hell is a mermaid popping out and pulling this shit.”

Speed Weapon muttered irritably, his sharp eyes twisting. Abel folded her arms and asked evenly.

“Enough. What happened here? Explain it.”

“Are you ordering me around right now?”

“Why is your personality so twisted? I’m asking you, asking.”

Letting out a snort, Speed Weapon slowly curled up one corner of his mouth. As if he had been waiting for it, his lips parted.

“Let me explain.”

* * *

“So what you’re saying is that a mermaid suddenly appeared, and Kang Geom-ma fought it alone and won?”

“Well, yeah. That’s what happened.”

Speed Weapon nodded with a grin, as if satisfied with his own explanation.

Abel and her teammates listened in silence, shifting their gazes between Kang Geom-ma and the mermaid’s corpse. Her glossy blue-black hair flowed pleasantly over her shoulders.

It was a story that was impossible to believe, but under the circumstances, what Speed Weapon had said appeared to be true. There was no reason for them to lie about this.

It was a story she absolutely could not believe, and yet every piece of evidence before her gave weight to Speed Weapon’s explanation being the truth.

Still, it sounded far too much like a heroic tale to accept so easily.

A first-year academy student had single-handedly slain a demonoid that appeared without warning? The folktales and legends her grandfather had told her before bed when she was little sounded more realistic than that.

Even so, seeing how the once-lush forest had been completely destroyed, she could almost picture the ferocious battle between those two, and the thought alone sent a chill through her.

If she had only heard it, she would have scoffed and dismissed it as nonsense. But now she was seeing the aftermath with her own eyes.

Abel had grown up from birth as one of the people called a genius.

But for her, there had always been the radiant foundation of being a descendant of Aron Nibelung, the direct disciple of Balor Hoakin, the Hero of Origin. Because of that, Abel had not stopped there and had instead reached this point through literal bone-cutting effort that awakened her own talent.

Lost in thought, Abel muttered bitterly.

‘If it were him…’

If it were Kang Geom-ma, no one else.

And yet dismissing it that way left a deep ache inside her. To think the difference in skill between him and herself was this great.

By now she could no longer shake the thought that perhaps she herself had only ever been ordinary after all. Kang Geom-ma had defeated a demonoid alone before even reaching twenty.

Of course, he too now looked half-dead and his body was in rags, likely from the backlash, but still, the one dead was the demonoid, and the one alive was Kang Geom-ma.

The severe sense of dissonance made her furrow her brow, and yet inwardly she could not help admiring him. It was an extremely complicated feeling.

Abel trembled without realizing it. It was not fear, but something mixed from awe and a thrill. After letting out a deeper sigh, Abel covered her face.

Silence settled for a moment. Speed Weapon looked over Abel’s expression, which had sunk into a strange gloom, and spoke indifferently.

“You said earlier that you contacted the academy, right?”

“…Y-yeah.”

Abel nodded stiffly. Speed Weapon stroked his chin and thought for a moment, then hardened his expression and continued.

“For now, I think it’d be better not to tell the instructors too many details about what happened here.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t you say the instructors had definitely done a preliminary inspection of this island?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“Doesn’t that seem strange? No matter how big Scopuli Island is, this pool isn’t in some area that’s all that hard for cadets to find, and yet a demonoid popped out here. The story doesn’t really add up.”

Abel could not answer at all. Even without a reply, Speed Weapon kept speaking.

“This is just my guess, but…”

“Speed Weapon, you’re saying there could be a spy from the demonoid side hiding inside the academy, aren’t you?”

Leon, who had been listening with an unreadable expression, cut him off. Though Speed Weapon had deliberately chosen roundabout wording, Leon had grasped exactly what he meant.

Shock flashed across Speed Weapon’s face at being pinned down that precisely, but he quickly steadied his expression and replied.

“Not that I’m saying it has to be true, but we can’t rule out the possibility.”

Abel’s mind was already overflowing with all sorts of thoughts. Certainly, this area was not sealed off, nor was it some kind of hidden dungeon. It was definitely a place where cadets taking the exam could find their way.

Thinking about it, just as Speed Weapon said, if not for Kang Geom-ma, every member of Leon’s team would have screamed and died at the hands of the demonoid during their first midterm.

But the thought of ‘why?’ would not leave her. During the seven-hundred-year armistice between humanity and the demon race, there had certainly been conflicts both large and small.

Even so, there had never once been a case where the demon race went so far as to directly lay hands on cadets of Hoakin Academy. Moreover, the non-aggression treaty included a clause stating that if academy cadets were harmed, it could lead to the outbreak of war.

‘Could it be…?’

The beautiful fingers Abel held over her mouth trembled. Once she pruned away all the pointless explanations, the worst possible scenario was all that remained.

Certainly, the most likely explanation was that this single mermaid had acted on its own, but for some reason only the worst possible case kept drifting faintly through her mind.

Speed Weapon glanced over her expression. Her face had gone pale, and she looked like she was struggling to hide many different emotions.

“Abel, I get what you’re thinking, but going that far is too much. What I mean is just that it wouldn’t hurt to suspect the possibility that someone among the academy personnel is a spy for the demon race. It’s too early to jump to conclusions based on only this one incident.”

Having said that, Speed Weapon looked to gauge Leon’s thoughts. Leon gave a small nod with an unreadable expression and said:

“Then we’ll need to get our stories straight. If we assume there really is a spy inside the academy, and word gets back to them that Geom-ma killed a demonoid alone, he could become a target.”

“Well, that’s true. But after that bastard did this much for us, it’d feel wrong to keep our mouths completely shut….”

Speed Weapon scratched his head uneasily. Then Abel added:

“How about consulting my grandfather?”

“What, the Sword Emperor!?”

“It seems like the best option. Grandfather is personally close with Headmaster Media, and from the way he acted during the class assignment test, he seemed to know a certain amount about Kang Geom-ma too.”

Certainly, Sword Emperor Siegfried was not part of the academy’s internal staff, and because of his uniquely isolationist nature, he had almost no personal relationships to speak of besides Headmaster Media.

More than anything, he was one of the Seven Heroes who had defeated the Sixth Legion Commander Basmon half a century ago, the man called the strongest among humanity.

Because of that, there was no one more trustworthy than the Sword Emperor, who had more reason than anyone to stand opposed to the demon race, except perhaps Headmaster Media herself, who was one of the Seven Heroes as well. If Abel told the Sword Emperor, it would inevitably reach the headmaster’s ears too.

For academy cadets to meet the headmaster directly required a rather complicated procedure. But going through the Sword Emperor would let them bypass all of that. It felt like the best possible choice for Kang Geom-ma.

After a brief moment of thought, Speed Weapon quietly nodded in agreement.

“For now, that seems like the best option. Leon, what do you think?”

“Hm, considering everything that’s happened so far, I think that’s the best choice too. However…”

“However?”

“We’ll think about that in due time. That’s not what’s important right this second, is it?”

At the sudden question, Abel and Speed Weapon both opened their eyes wide. Then Leon smiled faintly and gestured with his chin toward Chloe, who was sleeping softly like a baby bird.

“One healer doesn’t look like it’ll be enough.”

“Ah.”

The realization came a beat late to Speed Weapon. He brushed the dirt from his clothes and pulled out his recorder. Only then did some vitality begin to return to his gaunt face.

“Then it’s time for Speed Weapon to step in.”

As he said the line he had clearly always wanted to use.

“Healing is my specialty.”